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Blind Leading the Blind

Biblical Counsel for a Change
Biblical Counsel for a ChangeSteve Gregg

In this thought-provoking analysis, Steve Gregg explores various methods of change within Christian counseling and the implications they have on personal transformation. He challenges the idea that the unconscious mind is truly unconscious and critiques popular Christian therapies and inner healing practices. By examining different psychological perspectives, Gregg highlights the need for biblical teachings and emphasizes the importance of understanding personal defilement and the role of the heart in transformation. Ultimately, he encourages individuals to seek guidance from God and resist harmful occult practices in their pursuit of change.

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Transcript

Alright, we're going to take our second session on the question of the counsel of God or Biblical Counsel for Change in our lives. And I introduced the fact yesterday that behavior therapies and mental health issues and so forth address themselves generally to two questions. And those questions are the model of man and the method of change.
And as I said yesterday,
that is the very reason why I, from the standpoint of a Biblical Christian, have objections to both psychology and psychiatry. And I say that not as one who wishes to say that nothing true has ever been discovered by a person who wears the label of a psychiatrist or psychologist. I certainly wouldn't say such a thing.
I don't even believe that I could say that nothing
true has been discovered by scientists who call themselves evolutionists. I certainly believe that evolutionary scientists and researchers who are in fields of mental health and research and so forth can discover, in some cases, things that are true. My main objection to both evolution and to psychology is that they address themselves to issues that the Bible also addresses itself to and give different answers to the same questions.
And therefore,
they are not simply supplementary or complementary disciplines to that of Biblical study and theology and Christian living. They are actually in competition with Christianity for the same territory. In the case of evolution, of course, that is a theory that is competing with Christianity as a creation story, basically.
Evolution is a creation story. And creation stories give
rise to the fundamental and foundational thoughts about life, the meaning of life, whether life has meaning, whether there are morals, whether there is authority that we must submit to. These all come from the way that we perceive a creation story.
Every culture has its own
creation story. Well, the Bible certainly has its. And all the implications of it are expanded on throughout the scripture.
Evolution gives a separate, conflicting, contradictory
even creation story. Likewise, when it comes to issues like what is wrong with man, what is the human condition, and what can be done and what is to be done to remedy it, the Bible gives answers to those questions, but so does psychology, but different answers, starting from different beginning points and reaching different conclusions as well. And when it comes to discussion of what is the model of man, what is the method of change, the Bible is not silent on these matters, nor is it even fragmentary in its discussion.
It deals
almost exclusively with these subjects. And therefore, when we consider whether there is such thing as a harmonization of Christianity and psychology, we need to understand what it is that psychology is purporting to say and do, and what it is that Christianity purports to say and do, and see whether these two can be held in common together. Now in our previous lecture, our first lecture in this series, I spoke mainly about the issue of the model of man, and particularly the diagnosis of man's problem.
Is misbehavior,
self-destructive behavior, antisocial behavior, immoral behavior, is this behavior better understood by appeal to a medical model or a moral model? Psychology generally assumes a medical model. Those who have no control over themselves and their behavior and do things that destroy themselves and others are often thought to be mentally ill. And illness, of course, is a medical thing, and therefore they cannot help themselves.
They cannot very
well be held responsible for their condition, although some psychologies do try to somehow retain a high degree of responsibility on the part of the patient. But really, it's contrary to the whole notion that they are ill. If they are ill, then they're not responsible for being ill, to a very large extent anyway.
But also, of course, it relegates the care
of such people to professionals who have training in those illnesses. And what I've suggested to you is that those very behaviors for which people see therapists, psychotherapists, are the kinds of things that have been in the human condition from time immemorial, which were problems in society and personal lives and relationships for thousands of years before there were psychologists to give new names to them or to identify them as illnesses. And they were the very things that the Bible tells us Jesus is able to remedy.
We started
out last time by reading 1 Corinthians 6, verses 9 through 11, where Paul says, And know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners shall inherit the kingdom of God? And such were some of you. Now, that means that in the church there were people who had been all of these things. There had been homosexuals, there had been drunkards.
We might call them alcoholics today. I don't, but some would.
There were idolaters.
There were people with rampant, unbridled sexual lust dominating
their lives. There were people with anger problems. Such were some of them.
But he does
not say, but you have gotten in touch with your inner child, or you've regressed back to your primal state, or you have, you know, through psychoanalysis, you've discovered what is really lurking down there in the unconscious mind, and you've gotten proper therapy and now you don't do those things anymore. He says, Such were some of you, but now you are washed, you are sanctified, but you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. Paul indicated that these changed behaviors in the body of Christ could not be credited to anything other than the power of God through the name of Jesus and the Spirit of God.
And it is my contention, and has been of most Christians
throughout history, that Jesus is enough, that the truth is enough. Jesus said the truth will make you free. But that is not the opinion of many, certainly it is not the opinion of the non-Christians in our society today, but sadly, it's not even necessarily the opinion of many Christians today.
And we'll see that not so much in this session,
but in our next one, where we talk about the attempts that have been made to integrate psychology with Christianity and the so-called Christian psychologists. But today I want to talk about the methods of change. Just as we talked about the model of man, is man sick or is he a moral being, morally responsible? Now we want to talk about the different ideas of methods of change.
And here we are going to have different opinions among different
psychotherapies. As I said, there are over 250 different psychotherapies, many of them contradicting one another in terms of their answer to those two questions. What is the model of man? What is the method of change? But there are some leading schools, some leading camps out there.
And today when you meet people who are into psychotherapy, they will
generally follow one of these major camps in large measure. They may have their own guru who has some new angle on one or the other of these things, but there are essentially four different camps, some call them forces in psychology. And I'd like to talk to you about what, according to these views, the problem is and the method of change.
And I also want
to talk about what psychiatry says, and I want to critique all of those from a biblical point of view. And I want to, of course, talk about what the Bible says is the method of change. That's what I hope to cover in this lecture.
First of all, what is the way out
of man's condition? Well, it depends on what man's condition is. And that's what we were discussing last time. And there are, we can put a finer point on it by looking at what different psychological leaders have speculated about what is the nature of man and therefore what is his hope of change.
The first force of psychology to be considered is called psychoanalysis
or the psychoanalytic viewpoint. This was originated by Sigmund Freud in the 1800s. And of course, he is probably one of the most famous names in the field of psychiatry or psychology.
Himself a medical doctor. He was, he experimented with cocaine. He was fascinated
by people's dreams and believed that people in the first seven years, especially of their lives, are registering all of their experiences and storing them in a realm of the person, which is called the unconscious realm or the subconscious realm.
Now, I'm going to challenge
the whole idea that there is such a realm, although we must admit that we use the term unconscious or subconscious all the time as though it is valid. And there is probably a sense in which we mean it, that it is valid. To say I unconsciously did such and such a thing usually means in our popular parlance that I wasn't thinking much about what I was doing.
I did this kind of unthinkingly. I think most of the time if we talk about subconsciously
I was thinking or unconsciously I did such and such a thing, we use those terms. We usually just, you could substitute the word I was doing that without thinking.
I wasn't paying
close attention to what I was doing. I did something or said something that was not really what I intended to do or say because I was just kind of distracted or wasn't thinking about it. Okay, that's how we use the term.
And I have no objection to use of the term
unconsciously or subconsciously if that's what we mean. But when Floyd came up with the theory of the unconscious mind, his theory didn't mean simply that you do things at the moment you're not thinking about them. But rather he believes that the unconscious mind was truly unconscious.
That is you are unconscious of it. That all the things that have ever
happened to you from your childhood, especially in the earliest years of childhood, the first seven years, are stored up in this reservoir of the personality which you are not aware of and cannot become aware of through ordinary means. It's not like you've just forgotten it for the moment and in a while you remember it.
It's not something temporarily forgotten,
but it'll come back to you. It's a realm of experience, of the registration of experience that is not known to you. You don't remember that it happened at all and you never will remember that it happened at all, but there are some ways that the information content of the unconscious realm leaks out and can be detected.
Freud had a variety of ways by
which he felt he detected what was in the unconscious mind. Hypnosis was one of the things he used. Cocaine was another thing that he used.
Of course, everyone's aware
of the term probably Freudian slips, the suggestion that at times you say something, you intend to say something, but a different word, a different name comes out and you kind of disclose accidentally what was really in your heart. And you might not have even known it was there, according to him. I mean, it's just your unconscious kind of spilling out a little bit.
Something
you didn't even know you thought comes out in the mistake you make in your speech. It's called a Freudian slip. And in fact, of course, I believe that we may make such mistakes in our speech as genuine mistakes.
We intend to say something and we accidentally say something
else. Freud believed that that would give it away, that that's what's really deep down inside what you unconsciously really, really believe. So hypnosis, the use of drugs, Freudian slips.
Dreams, he felt like were very clear, maybe not so clear, but a very reliable informant
to what's in the unconscious, because the dreams, he felt, spill forth out of your unconscious mind and reveal what's really there. And there are no doubt other things, free associations and probably inkblot tests and things like that, just where you kind of give various ways of letting it out, what you don't even know about yourself. Just what you make out of a situation, what slips out, what comes out when you dream, what comes out through hypnosis.
These are the things that, these are the particular ways in which what the content of the unconscious mind is revealed to the psychoanalyst. Now, according to Freud, although you are not aware of these experiences of your childhood and they are in the unconscious realm, nonetheless, they affect your behavior and your personality and who you are a great deal. Therefore, if you have bad behaviors and you don't understand why you do those things, like Paul said, I don't understand why I do the things I do.
Well, Freud would have put Paul on the couch
and said, well, what have you been dreaming about lately? Let's put you under hypnosis and we'll find out what's going on in there. We'll tell you why you do the things you do. Paul actually said, I don't understand the things I do.
I want to do one thing and I
have to do another thing. Well, that certainly is a universal human experience. Paul gives one explanation of it.
Freud, I think, would have looked for answers in a realm that Paul
never dreamed of looking for answers. And the reason Paul never dreamed of looking for answers is because nobody up to Paul's time, in fact, nobody up to Freud's time, had ever believed that there was this realm, or at least had never publicized the belief, that there was this realm called the unconscious. Now, of course, we live long enough after Freud's time that even though many modern psychologists kind of laugh at Freud and make fun of some of his ideas and he's not as popular as he used to be and he's kind of passé and other newer names have emerged to command the loyalty of the cutting edge mental health professionals and so forth, yet much of what Freud said has passed right into the vocabulary of our culture.
And we continually talk about what's going on in the unconscious mind and
unconscious so and so. We talk about repression. See, repression to Freud means that something you have experienced perhaps was so painful or something that you couldn't bear it and so it got shoved into this unconscious realm where it continues to dictate personality and behavior to you, but you're not aware of it.
You might not even remember it's there.
It's been repressed. And only through certain dreams or analysis or hypnosis or some other means like that can you find out really what it is you've repressed in there.
Now, you
may recognize there's some of these presuppositions underline some of the so-called Christian therapies even in the charismatic movement where inner healing is practiced. Now, inner healing really owes more to Carl Jung than to Sigmund Freud, but basically when Christians practice inner healing, they're usually moving on the assumption that there is an unconscious realm, hurts and wounds and so forth in there that happen to you when you're a baby or little kid and you just can't know them. And of course, Christian practitioners don't usually use hypnosis.
I mean, Christian psychologists do, but charismatic people who have a ministry
of inner healing, as they would claim, who move in more of a charismatic kind of a mode, they would not use hypnosis. They would rely upon what they would consider to be the word of knowledge, a gift of the Holy Spirit. But it's all the same.
It's the Holy Spirit allegedly
showing you things that your analyst could show you if you're on the couch and if he was skilled at it, things that you allegedly experienced and thought and did and that happened to you, but you don't remember it. And yet they're affecting your life every moment of every day. Now, are there things from our childhood that we've forgotten? Of course there are.
Very few of us can remember anything of our childhood before about three years old. Some can barely remember anything before about four years old or five, depending on their various things. I mean, we tend to forget a lot of things.
I sometimes have a hard time
remembering what I did or said yesterday. But what I did in my first two or three years are very hazy. I only have very few memories.
I'm not even sure how many of them are accurate
because some of them are based on people, my parents and others, reminding me of things that I said or did when I was little. Of course there are things that happen to us when we're little that we forget. The question then is, are they repressed in the unconscious mind? And are they causing us to be dysfunctional? Are they causing us to be, you know, tweaked in our behavior so that we don't understand why we're doing irrational things? And in fact, the answer is that something happened to us when we were little.
Of course, the most popular
manifestation of this mentality today and in recent times is that of, you know, people remembering that they were molested. They didn't remember it until they were maybe in their twenties or older in some cases. But either in therapy or through inner healing and someone's word of knowledge or simply through reading a book that tells them that virtually every little girl and boy has been molested, suddenly it comes back to, oh yeah, I was molested by my uncle, my father, my older brother, his friend or my PE coach.
And
it seems amazing to me how many people all of a sudden are remembering experiences of molestation. And this phenomenon, of course, proceeds from the basic assumption that there are, there is this repression of memories in the unconscious realm. And you can live your whole life without knowing it's there, but it's making you weird.
It's making you
do bizarre things. You know, a couple of the more famous inner healing teachers in the charismatic movement are John and Paula Sanford. And in their books, they give many examples of people that they have, as they say, helped through inner healing.
And an example, for
example, is an example, for example. One example they give is of a lady, a Christian lady, I believe, who actually committed adultery against her husband. And she was later in therapy with them or under their ministry, I guess they'd call it.
And they found out
through, I guess, a word of knowledge, that when she was in the womb, when she was in her mother's womb, that she judged her parents because they had conceived her out of wedlock. And she judged them for fornication or for adultery or something. And they believe, I mean, they have all these weird ideas.
They say that if you do something, if you judge
someone for something, it's got to happen to you. And so because she was in her prenatal state in the womb, she judged her parents for sexual immorality. She was essentially doomed, though she had no conscious memory of any of this.
It dictated to her own immoral
behavior when she got older. Now, this is the kind of stuff that fills a number of books of a certain ilk, in the charismatic movement especially. And they're based on this assumption that things, not even that happened in your first seven years, even the womb, you have had scars and wounds and things.
And they affect your moral behavior today. You don't
remember them. It takes somebody with a special tool of access to get at these repressed, unconscious things.
And that is a theory that I think is really kind of silly to tell you
the truth. The Bobgans, I mean, you shouldn't reject it just because I think it's silly. I mean, I'll give you some biblical reasons, but I would say this.
There certainly is no
biblical reason to believe such things. The Bible doesn't give us any evidence that there is a realm called the unconscious realm where we have a bunch of repressed memories. And until we can get those back and get a hold on them and analyze them, our life is going to be messed up.
It seems like if that were true, that is an important enough truth that
it certainly affects the way we live our lives. It would be important enough for God to tell us something about it, especially if the discovery of that and the correct application of that knowledge is what is necessary to get people's lives straightened out, as Freud believed. It would seem that the Bible would say something about that if it were true, unless of course the Bible misses the mark altogether.
Now, some people think the Bible does teach an
unconscious mind. And to prove this, they give various verses about the heart. And they say, you know, when the Bible talks about the heart, it's just talking about the same thing that the psychologists call the unconscious.
And they like to quote frequently from Proverbs
where it says of a certain man in Proverbs 23, 7, as he thinks in his heart, so is he. This is usually, by the way, misquoted. You usually hear people quote this.
As a man thinks
in his heart, so is he. As if this is some kind of a truism about men in general. But in fact, in the context, it says you should not trust a miser if he invites you over for a meal.
He will say, eat and drink, and act very cordial and hospitable, but his heart
is not with you. He's got other motives. If he's a miser and he's showing generosity, don't trust him.
He's got something else going on. He's got hidden motives. And it says,
for as he thinks in his heart, so is he.
Now, this is not a general statement about people
in general, although perhaps the same thing would be true of people. It is not stated of all people. It is stated of a particular situation, namely, a guy who is known to be miserly, not generous, but all of a sudden he's got this great show of hospitality and generosity to you.
Don't take it at face value. He's got some hidden motive. His actions do
not tell you where he's at.
What's in his heart is really where he's at. As he thinks
in his heart, so is he. That's what it says in that context.
I don't want to spend too
much time on that scripture, but it is continually quoted by Christians as if it teaches that there is an unconscious mind in every man dictating behavior. The fact of the matter is that that passage is saying, this man has hidden motives, and he well knows what they are. They're not in his unconscious mind.
The very reason he invited you over is because
he has a plan. He's got an agenda. He hasn't told you what it is.
He may have secret motives
to you, but they're not secret to him. And if they are, the scripture certainly doesn't give any reason for us to believe they are. It's basically saying this guy is motivated in a way that you cannot trust.
But it is not saying that he is himself unaware of his
motives and no one could know them unless someone gets him on a couch to figure out what they are. It is not talking about an unconscious realm. Nowhere in scripture can it be demonstrated or even strongly argued that the heart in scripture refers to what Freud called the unconscious mind.
And if it were so, then we would have to thank Freud,
himself an atheist, sexual pervert, and that's what he was, a sexual pervert, for finding for us this biblical truth, for being the first to come up with a full understanding of what the Bible really meant when it was saying all these things. Now let me just tell you, Freud, I said, was a sexual pervert. I know this because he believed that all people were sexual perverts.
Now it's very common for a person to believe that all people are
like himself. And certainly if he thought all people were like that, he must not have excluded himself. The fact of the matter is, many of the things that he saw in himself I have not found in myself, and I doubt if most people find in themselves.
You've probably
heard about Freud's Oedipus Complex, so named after a mythical character who, in I believe it's Greek mythology, had been separated at birth from his mother, or very early on, grew up to be a warrior king of one nation. His mother was queen of another nation, and in war, as an adult, he inadvertently killed his father, not knowing it was his father, because he didn't know who his father was. He was separated at birth, and ended up marrying his mother, the queen, after he killed his father.
Now, Freud said, and the man's name
was Oedipus, and from this Freud came up with the Oedipus Complex. I'm not saying he believed that the Oedipus Complex found its validity in that myth, he just thought that was a good illustration of what he believed was in every man. Namely, that every man really secretly wants to kill his father, every child, every boy, not man, every boy, secretly wants to kill his father and have a sex relationship with his mother.
And that every girl secretly
wants to kill her mother and have a sex relationship with her father. Now, that's hardly even clean enough to mention in those sanitized terms from this whole thing, but that is what Freud believed every person has going on inside them, every little boy, every little girl. Now, that may not tell you very much about every little boy and every little girl, but it tells you a lot about Mr. Freud, because obviously, if he believed every little boy has those thoughts, he must have had those thoughts as a little boy or else, if he hadn't, it would prove his theory wrong.
He clearly was a sexual pervert. By the way, he was
more than a pervert, he was a terribly paranoid individual, to risk using a psychological term, but he was a medical doctor himself, but he could not attend a funeral. Death freaked him out.
He'd get sick, he'd get faint at the sight of death. He was terrified of death.
He was not a balanced individual.
By the way, you'll often find this so, and I don't want
to broad brush a whole class of people that I disagree with unfairly. I will not say that all people who are into psychology and psychiatry are themselves mental cases. That would not be a fair thing to say.
I can say this, though, that I think psychiatrists, if I'm not mistaken,
are either the highest or at least on the short list of the highest statistical professionals who commit suicide. That is a fact. It is also known that many, many psychologists themselves are regularly seen a therapist.
And they don't think that's strange. They talk plainly about
it. Carl Rogers, himself one of the leaders of one of the more modern schools who's followed by many Christians in his theories, he himself saw a therapist and was not ashamed of it.
Seen a therapist, that's what they believe everyone should do. The people who practice these things often assume certain things about human nature that are based on the problems they're going through that they have not resolved. They assume everyone's like them.
Freud was
no exception. Freud was weird. He was imbalanced.
He had a great deal of resentment. In fact,
there's a story told of his life by one of the biographers. Of course, he was Jewish, and as a little boy, a couple of men who claimed to be Christians treated his father badly in his presence because he was a Jew.
And Freud was angry at his father because his father
did not resist or fight back. And he resolved in his heart that when he grew up, he'd get back at Christians. As far as we know, he's done so more effectively than any other atheist besides Charles Darwin, who was probably not an atheist, but who was certainly no Christian.
Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud arguably have done more to damage Christianity than any other two people who've ever lived because their theories, which are contrary to Christianity, have been accepted in the Christian church as true and have not only diluted but corrupted the whole understanding of scripture for many people who seek to just read the scriptures through the lens of the theories of Sigmund Freud and of Charles Darwin. The Bobgans who wrote the book Psychoheresy also wrote a couple of books called Prophets of Psychoheresy, book one and two, and several other books besides. Martin and Dieter Bobgan, in their book Prophets of Psychoheresy, book one, they made this statement, quote, The unconscious is a reservoir of drives and impulses which govern an individual beyond his conscious awareness.
Now, by the way, they don't believe this. They're defining for their
readers Freud's view for the sake of critiquing it. So this is not their own opinion.
They
say the unconscious is a reservoir of drives and impulses which govern an individual beyond his conscious awareness. It also motivates present thinking and acting. Furthermore, it is out of reach through ordinary mental activity, but the idea of the unconscious as a hidden region of the mind with powerful needs and motivational energy is not supported by Bible or science.
Neither the Bible supports it, nor is there any scientific evidence for
it. The Dictionary of Psychology from the Philosophical Library of New York says of the definition it gives of the unconscious, it says the region of the mind which is the seat of the id and of repression. And talking about repression, the same dictionary says Freud's term for the unconscious tendency to exclude from consciousness unpleasant or painful ideas.
It is a concept of major importance in psychoanalysis. However, Dr.
David Holmes in the Psychological Bulletin, Volume 81, 1974, in an article he wrote called Investigations of Repression, made this statement. He said, There is no consistent research evidence to support the hypothesis.
At present, we can only conclude that there is no evidence
that repression does exist. Now this is 1974, so you might say, well, when you're quoting scientific authorities, you ought to pick more current ones. Well, I guarantee you there hasn't been any new evidence since 1974 that had not come up between the time of Freud and the time of this writer.
The fact of the matter is that scientific evidence does not prove
that repressions exist. And of course, Freud's views, as I say, are not the most popular views today, even among psychologists, because newer, trendier views have come up in their place. But there's much of Freud's thinking that underlies even the later developments of some, and unfortunately, much of the Christian thinking.
Now what does the Bible teach? The
Bible teaches that personal defilement arises from an evil heart. But this heart is not what Freud is talking about when he talks about the unconscious realm. It's the active motivation, sometimes secret to those who look outside, and sometimes undefined, perhaps, by the person who's motivated by them, that lie behind all speech and action.
Jesus indicated that all
behavior of a moral sort proceeds from the moral center, which is the heart. And while, of course, it is possible that a person may not be fully aware of his own motivation simply because he's not introspective and doesn't think about what's motivating him, that doesn't mean that his motivations remain inscrutable and unfindable or undefinable by him. In Mark chapter 7, or I'll give you the parallel in Matthew instead.
In Matthew chapter 15, also
parallel to Mark 7, verses 18 through 20, Jesus said that those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts. Now, this is not unconscious.
Thoughts are conscious. You're aware of your thoughts.
Thoughts are conscious things, not unconscious things.
Out of the heart proceeds evil thoughts,
murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man. So a man is defiled in his behavior and speech by having a defiled heart, but his heart is nowhere in the scripture equated with what Freud meant by the unconscious.
In Proverbs 4.23, we've already quoted yesterday, it says, guard your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life. Yes, all the issues of your life do proceed out of your heart. If one could prove that the heart in scripture is equated with the unconscious mind of Freud, that would confirm Freudian psychoanalysis.
The idea that all of your
behavior proceeds out of the unconscious realm would be supported if the heart in scripture could be identified with the unconscious realm. But as I said, that is not the case. There's no place that indicates that the heart is a place of unconsciousness.
It is simply the
seat of the emotions and the will and the motivations. In Proverbs 23.7, we have the verse I mentioned earlier. 23.7, talking about the miser who invites you to eat, says, for as he thinks in his heart, so is he.
Eat and drink, he says to you, but his heart is not
with you. Obviously his heart is what he is consciously motivated by here, not an unconscious realm. In 1 Corinthians 2, by the way, we can find many, many biblical references to the heart.
We don't have the need to establish this point, but in 1 Corinthians 2, verses
10 and 11, it says that God has revealed them to us through his spirit. For the spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of a man which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God except the spirit of God.
Now, what he's saying is that there are secret things in man that no one knows
except the man himself. In his spirit, he knows, but no one else knows. Likewise, there are things about God that no one knows except his spirit, and only his spirit can reveal them.
But the assumption is that God knows everything there is to know about himself.
His spirit searches the deep things of God, and man knows what there is to know about himself. His spirit knows his deep things.
That man knows himself even as God knows himself.
Man's spirit searches the deep things of a man, though an onlooker from outside does not know what's going on in there. The man certainly does, just like God's spirit knows the deep things of God, although an onlooker without being revealed from God's spirit might not guess them.
Remember, a psychological analysis basically boils down to one person's
opinion of another person's behavior. Freud's ideas were opinions. They sprang very largely from his own inner workings of his own corrupt heart, and his antagonism toward God, toward Christianity, his sexual perversions in his heart, his terror of death.
The man was not
a normal guy. I mean, now that may be normal for sinners, but that is certainly not a norm that the Bible presents for us as Christians. Jesus is the norm.
I don't find Jesus to
have any of those problems that Freud had, and Freud I don't think is a very good role model, much less a good moral teacher as to why we do the things we do or how to fix it. Well, there's another force in psychology besides psychoanalysis, and this moves away from Freudian theory to that of B.F. Skinner and some others. It's called behaviorism.
Now, I must confess I know less about behaviorism than almost any of the other forces in psychology. I don't think that Skinnerianism is as popular as it once was. I could be wrong.
There may
be a lot of people out there who still follow Skinner. My opinion is that he's not as influential as he once was in his heyday. But behaviorism, as I understand it, it essentially just says that man's behavior is motivated by the reward-punishment principle, that people will do what they believe will bring them the greatest reward, and they will avoid doing what will bring them, they think, the greatest pain.
The idea of Pavlov's dog, which maybe you've heard the term, maybe
you know what it means, it's about a man who experimented with a dog. He'd ring a bell before he fed his dog on a regular basis. And then he found that when he would ring the bell, the dog would salivate as if it was enjoying food, even when the food was not there, that there were conditioned responses to certain stimuli.
Usually that bell meant
food and rewarded the appetite. Eventually the bell could trigger certain responses, even if the perceived reward was not there. And I don't, there's much, I'm sure, deeper than that, than I am even capable of guessing at.
I will say this, though. The essence
of behaviorism, as I understand it, is that people do the thing that rewards them the most, and that people don't do the thing that causes them the most suffering. I would have to say the Bible would not support that.
I do believe that people want to do the thing
that they think will reward them the most, but that is not always, of course, how it goes, because it's hard for them to decide which rewards they want. Many times there's two options, two courses of behavior, mutually exclusive to each other. Each has its own promised rewards and promised costs.
And a person has to make a choice, sometimes not
knowing exactly what will give the greater reward and what will not. But the Bible indicates that many times people do things that are against their better judgment, and things which actually do not bring them reward, and even punishment and pains do not necessarily turn them around. This whole study of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament is a very good example of that, for the most part, although you do find occasions in the book of Judges where when people have suffered for 20 or 40 years under an oppressor, they finally decide to get right with God.
I guess we could say punishment motivated them, but
sometimes it took a very long time for them to get smart about it. But many times you read generation after generation, people being punished and suffering under God's hand, but they don't get the message, they don't change. And it says in Proverbs 17, verse 10, a rebuke enters more readily into a wise man than a hundred stripes into a fool.
Now a hundred stripes refers to blows of a whip or of a rod, discipline. If a person is a fool, he may not learn what he's supposed to learn even after he's received a hundred stripes. For if he's a wise man, he'll learn without those punishments and without dangling rewards.
There are basically people who are by nature fools, and by nature there are those
who are wise. And the book of Proverbs, which has so much to say about such categories, says that the fool is the one who says in his heart, but it's the Psalms that says the fool says in his heart there's no God, but the Proverbs says that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The way out of being a fool is to fear God.
And therefore, right
behavior cannot be guaranteed simply by bringing punishments on wrong behavior and rewards for good behavior. Some Christians think that therefore children should not be rewarded for good behavior, or I think these are people who are trying to react against Skinnerianism. I'm not sure, I probably shouldn't quote him because I'm not 100% sure I'm representing his views, but one of the most famous Christian psychologists on the radio, whose name is a household word, I believe I've heard him say that it's wrong to get children to obey by rewards and by punishments.
I don't want to misrepresent him, so I'm not sure that he
said that, but I've heard someone say that who had a voice to the Christian public, and I remember thinking, well that seems very strange since the Bible certainly does tell us to discipline children, and that foolishness is bound up in the heart of the child, but the rod will drive it from him if he's a child. Sometimes people grow up fools and no amount of rod application can drive the foolishness out of them. It gets too late.
But in childhood
it is possible. It says, discipline your child while there is hope, and deliver his soul from hell. It is true that small children, the Bible indicates, are strongly motivated by rewards and by punishments, and therefore a wise parent will apply principles of reward and punishment according to the scripture to direct a child while his character is malleable, while he has not become set in certain sin patterns and bondages yet.
He is inclined
toward foolishness from the beginning, but hopefully the wisdom of his parents can redirect him through the infliction of punishment and the application of reward so that he can develop habits that free him from his own fallen nature to a certain extent. However, a man who has grown up without such discipline and is a fool simply will not be changed by those things. Look at the people who go back to prison again and again and again.
Do they
like it there? Maybe some of them might, but I doubt that most of them do. And they resolve that they won't get caught again, but they do. It does not reform behavior very well.
Punishment of a fool does not necessarily change him. He is not always motivated by those things. He is in bondage to sin so that even if he suffers for his sins, he may not desist from it.
And even if righteousness is rewarded, he may not choose it. Because
a fool becomes, unless he turns to God and begins to have the wisdom of the fear of God, a fool becomes set in his ways to the point that I believe the reward and punishment motivations do not really govern his behavior as much as one might think. Biblically, a person ceases to be a fool not by having a hundred stripes, but by turning to the Lord and having the fear of God as the principal motivator in his life.
You have then the humanistic third
force psychology. There is psychoanalysis, which is Sigmund Freud, the first force. There is B.F. Skinner and behaviorism, which is second force psychology.
And then you've got humanistic
psychology, which is associated with many popular leaders, perhaps some of the better known and followed today would be Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. There are others, but those are very big names in the area of humanistic psychology. And of course, this is a very, this is totally secular humanistic.
Man is the ultimate that there is, and that
man's got to find his own way. He's got to solve his own problems, but he does have problems. But what is the problem according to humanistic psychology? Well, Abraham Maslow put it this way in his book, Motivation and Personality, which was published back in 1954.
Abraham Maslow said, a healthy man is primarily motivated by his needs to develop
and actualize his fullest potentialities and capabilities. Now, this is really what is at the core of humanistic psychology, the need idea. Man is really simply a bundle of needs.
And these needs exist of a various type. There's a hierarchy of needs that man
has. Some of them are very rudimentary, physical needs for survival.
Others are more social,
emotional needs. And actually, you can often find in the books about this sort of a pyramid or a triangle. And the base of this triangle has the lowest level needs, food, shelter, housing.
These are needs that humans have, and they're motivated. They do things by
the way. You get hungry, you go out and get a job or steal food or you do something.
Your
behavior is motivated by your needs. And then at a higher level of these, higher than these basic survival needs, you've got your emotional and social needs. You need to be loved.
You
need to be affirmed. You need to have friendship. You need to feel okay about yourself and so forth.
And these needs motivate behavior too, of course. You manipulate people and so forth
to get their affirmation, their love. You're need motivated.
Now, at the highest level,
at the little point at the top of the triangle or the pyramid, is the highest need of man. And that is self-actualization. And the self-actualized man is the man who's got all his ducks in a row.
He's got all his needs met. He's fully self-sufficient within himself. And this is everyone's real essential need is to be self-actualized, to be an independent self who can benefit from every circumstance and so forth and keep himself together and so forth.
And the Bobgans have
something to say about humanistic psychology, as they do about almost everything in psychology. They say, and let me see what book this is in. This is in, I guess I didn't note what book this came from.
I think it's probably from Psychoheresy. They said, quote, humanistic psychology is based on the belief that people are born good and that society, especially parents, corrupts them. Humanistic psychologists further believe that certain needs motivate everything a person does, that a person's life plan is to fulfill those inborn unmet needs.
And when individual psychological needs are met,
then people will be personally fulfilled and socially responsible. If everyone were to reach self-actualization, all needs being met, we would have a utopian society, according to humanistic psychology. Now, the humanists believe that you're really not a bad person.
Essentially, you're a good
person, but because society deprives you of some of your needs, the need for love at an early age, the need for affirmation, the need for self-esteem, basically, this is part of the humanistic psychological array of needs, too. It's self-worth, self-esteem, self-love. It is people like Maslow who came up with this assumption that people need self-esteem.
And that's in there, as I think it's at one of the middle levels of the hierarchy of
needs. But because people do not cater to your need for self-esteem, and people do not bend over backward to make you happy all the time, and society doesn't affirm you all the time, therefore, you get kind of tweaked, and your personality gets bent out of shape, and your behavior becomes abnormal, because you've got needs that are unfulfilled. And so the basic solution is to find the fulfillment of all your needs.
Now, obviously, you can't find
fulfillment from other people all the time. You can't guarantee how they will treat you. But you can rise above this to the realm of self-actualization, where all your needs are met in a sense, internally.
And if you reach the point where you are
an individual self, an independent self, with all your needs realized and so forth, then you will be the ultimate person. And if everyone would do that, we'd have a wonderful society. Well, the whole problem with this approach to fixing our behavior, and this is, by the way, one of the most popular today, probably the most popular today.
I mean, we talk, the need theology is extremely
prominent in the thinking even of Christians today. If someone says, well, you know, this marriage, it's not meeting my needs. I need to get out of this marriage and get into another marriage, because I have needs that are not being met by this person.
And if people
consistently fail to meet my needs, I'll even call that emotional abuse. And we'll get out of here and find someone that meets my needs. A church, you know, I'll pick a church that meets my needs.
I'll pick friendships that meet my needs. What's wrong with that picture,
from a Christian point of view? It's totally self-centered. It's focused on what I need.
And so many times, what is said that I need is really
what I want, not what I need. What does the Bible teach that we need? Well, Paul said to Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter 6, having food and clothing, we will therewith be content. In other words, what we really need physically is very minimal.
And we can, because we have relationship with God,
which is our ultimate need, we can be content with very little else. That God can be all in all to us. We don't need necessarily even the affirmation of other people.
Now, I'm not saying it's not nice to be affirmed. I'm not saying we shouldn't affirm other people as their deeds call for it and so forth.
I'm not arguing that we should live a stoic, austere, unfeeling, uncompassionate lifestyle toward other people or demand that we have an austere and Trojan, Spartan, I should say, not Trojan, Spartan lifestyle of our own where we're depriving ourselves and so forth in order to show that we have few needs.
I'm simply saying that not all the things that we enjoy or would like to have or that contribute to our happiness, not all those can legitimately be called needs. A need is something without which you will not be able to function. And God is, a relationship with God is essentially the need of all human beings.
And it's not so much that God meets my needs for self-esteem. Maslow and the others have defined our needs a little differently than I would. I will not say that something like self-worth or something that could be used by those terms might be something that I benefit from through my relationship with God.
But for us to say we are a bundle of needs, we can't behave properly until our needs are all met. And therefore we need to look out for our needs. We need to choose our relationships and conduct ourselves in relationships and make our life choices and career choices and so forth according to an awareness of our needs.
This is totally the wrong focus for the Christian. The Christian is supposed to be concerned about God's will first. Even if God's will calls you to be a martyr, calls you to die, calls you to be abused.
Let me show you something in 1 Peter 2.
And by the way, Christians who have been true Christians have known that the Bible teaches this and largely held to it through most of history. But it's not a very popular message among Christians today because they've bought in so much to this need theology that comes out of humanistic psychology. It comes from Abraham Maslow and Paul Rogers and people like that.
But in talking to Christians who are having to be slaves, Peter said in 1 Peter 2, verse 18, servants be submissive to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the harsh. For this is commendable. If because of conscience toward God, one endures grief, suffering wrongfully.
For what credit is it if when you are beaten for your faults, you take it patiently? But when you do good and suffer for it, if you take it patiently, this is commendable before God. For to this you are called. Because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that you should follow his steps.
Now, these slaves in the Roman Empire did not have the luxury of even dreaming about needs such as we would define them today being their needs. To have food and clothing was all they could really expect. They couldn't expect thanks.
Jesus made that clear in Luke 17 that a slave works and he works and then he comes in for his work and works some more and he works and works until there's nothing else to do for his master.
And then he maybe will settle down just before bed and get a little food for himself. And Jesus said, do you think that servant expects to be thanked? For what it is, no.
That's his job. He's motivated by an awareness that this is what his role is. If he doesn't get thanked, is that very nice of his master to thank him? Is it very nice if someone comes and serves you all day long and you don't even thank them? No, that's not very nice.
Should he be thanked? Yes, he should. Should he require thanks? No. You see, the Bible indicates that we ought to treat others as if they were kings in a sense.
We should look out for their concerns more than our own. Defer to them more than we require them to defer to us. Give to them even things that we would like to have for ourselves even if we can't both have them.
This is laying down your life. This is taking up a cross. This is following the example of Christ.
This is what we're told to do. This includes absorbing injuries, being cheated, being verbally abused.
Now, if a person in America undergoes some of the things, even for a few months out of his life, that the average Christian throughout the world, throughout history, has had to endure as a lifestyle in terms of persecution, abuse, deprivation of rights or what they would consider rights, and all that stuff.
If a modern American Christian has to go through even a little bit of that for a short time, they begin to feel that they are being deprived of their needs for affirmation and self-worth and other stuff. We define needs generally according to what we've become accustomed to or what we want. When you hear someone say, well, I would homeschool my child, but we just need two incomes in our family.
And they always say that. We need for the wife to work. Mothers frequently say this.
I'd love to homeschool my kids, but we just need for me to work. What is the need here? Well, presumably it's financial unless it's an emotional, psycho need that she has to feel that she's a valuable contributor to society in some way other than being a mother.
Usually they're talking about finances.
Well, of course it's not true that the mother and the father need to work. It may be that they need to reduce their lifestyle drastically in order for her not to work.
But you see what she's doing is she's defining her children's needs in financial terms.
She thinks she's going to be able to do her children more good by providing more financially for their child.
If a child has needs at all from parents, it's not so much for luxuries. It's for direction, for guidance, for protection.
I mean, certainly children have more needs than adults do because children are vulnerable in ways that adults are not.
But this idea that the adults in our society are running around as if they're children, expecting everyone to provide their needs. Their spouse has to provide their needs for them.
Their church has to provide their needs for them.
Their employer now has to provide childcare because if they want to work and have children too, then their employer has to come up with things to help them meet their needs for childcare and these things. Everyone's very much aware of what their needs are these days and who ought to be providing them for them.
And all of this grows out of the basic mindset that I can't be expected to behave as a fulfilled, functioning, productive member of society unless everybody is attending to my needs.
And the Bible indicates that we're not supposed to be focusing on our needs. God takes care of that.
God looks after our needs. We need to look after only one thing. Jesus said,
Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things, food, clothing, whatever you need, all these things will be added to you.
By whom? By God. You just focus on doing what's his will, doing what's righteous in his sight, what is the best expression of your subjection to him and his kingdom, and he'll take care of the rest.
And therefore the idea of focusing on your needs is simply to get off the track of Christianity onto total human-centered, self-centered life, which is the opposite of Christianity.
He said, If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
And the Bible affirms many times that all of the needs of the righteous are met by God. In Psalm 34, 9 and 10, it says, The young lions do lack and suffer hunger, but they that seek the Lord shall not lack any good thing.
Psalm 34, 9 and 10. Psalm 84, 11 says that the Lord is a sun and a shield and no good thing will he withhold from those who walk uprightly. Philippians 4, 19 says, My God shall supply all your needs according to his riches in glory.
Matthew 6, 33, Jesus said, Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you. So we can see that everything that is needed is ours already if we are seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness. There may be many other things we would like to have, but these cannot legitimately be called needs.
If they are, God will provide them. And we can never claim that our behavior of a wrong sort is the result of unmet needs.
Unmet needs.
And this happens so many times. I know I gave this example already, but I see it only too often. Christians violate the word of God by leaving their marriages.
And essentially what their argument is, whether they use these exact words or something equivalent to it, is that my needs were not met.
My spouse was simply not meeting my needs. How could I be expected to stay in the marriage where my needs were not met? In other words, obeying God by staying in the marriage would have kept me from having all of my real needs met.
Which is another way of saying that following God does not really meet all my needs. And I am motivated to wrong behavior, or what the Bible defines as wrong behavior, by the assumption that certain needs that I have require that I behave in this way. And that is the error of humanistic psychology.
Of course, we could also get into a long rave about the issue of self-esteem and self-love, which is also part of the whole structure of the hierarchy of needs in humanistic psychology. And I'm going to save that for a later lecture, because that's a big subject that requires more focus than treatment. But that too is one of the problems with humanistic psychology, which is just, I mean, the whole church practically has bought into it as if it were in the Bible.
There's a fourth course of psychology, transpersonal psychology, which actually brings in a whole lot of New Age ideas. And there's a lot of occult practices often involved in that. Part of that would have to be what is called depth psychology.
Probably the best known of this is Carl Jung's depth psychology. Now, Carl Jung took the views of Sigmund Freud to a further extreme. Carl Jung was a younger associate of Sigmund Freud.
They were friends, co-workers.
It's like Freud was his mentor, if I'm not mistaken. But there was one basic difference between those two men of great significance in their worldview.
And that is that Sigmund Freud was an atheist and a materialist. That is, he believed that the material world, the natural world was all there is.
Whereas Carl Jung knew better.
Carl Jung came from a Protestant family, but not a really practicing Christian family. They were an occult family. He lived in a house that was haunted by poltergeists.
He claims that he would, as a child, stare at a picture on the wall, a portrait, I believe it was of his grandfather, on the wall in his house. And he'd stare at it until the man in the picture would come down out of the picture and join him there in the room. And they would then walk down the garden path conversing together.
This is very demonic stuff. In fact, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung never saw eye to eye on this matter. It is said that once Carl Jung was trying to prove to Sigmund Freud that the supernatural exists, and he says, for example, Freud, out of this bookcase, a large bang sound is going to come.
And sure enough, a loud noise of a sort of a very loud bang came out of the bookcase. Sigmund Freud fainted, but was not convinced. And basically, Carl Jung did not believe, as Freud did, that everything that motivates a person is his aggressions and sexual repressions in the unconscious.
And he believed other things were involved.
And one of the things that he did, he took the idea of the unconscious mind that Freud had invented, and he expanded it to what is usually called the collective unconscious, or the collective subconscious mind. Now, the collective unconscious transcends what is going on inside of you alone, and it takes in all of humanity.
Not only all of humanity who are alive today, but all of humanity who have ever lived. We are all interconnected psychologically.
The unconscious mind of the race, each of us has a little part of it.
And he believed that not only do we have things in our own unconscious from our own experience, but we experience things from the unconscious mind of the human race taken collectively.
And one of the things that he observed is that a very common recurring dream that most people have at some time or another is the dream that they're falling. And they're terrorizing, and sometimes they wake up and catch themselves and realize they're not falling.
But a very common dream that people have is one of falling. Carl Jung believed that this was part of the collective unconscious of the race that goes back to our evolutionary ancestry.
Back at a time when our ancestors were more monkey-like than human, and they had to sleep up in trees for fear that if they would fall out of a tree, they'd be beaten by a lion or something.
And so they had to sleep up out of the trees, and if they would fall out of a tree, which was one of their greatest fears, falling in their sleep, they would be killed by some predator.
And while we have never slept in trees ourselves or been really consciously aware of predators about, yet we share in this whole reservoir of humanity's experience, and it comes out in our dreams. We share the same terror of our subhuman ancestors.
And this may sound like weird stuff to you, but this is the esoteric, mystical, occultic view of Carl Jung. And he believed that because of this, we have help in our struggles from people who've lived before. And he believed that through a process that we call guided visualization, you could get in touch with heroes of the past.
He called them archetypes. And that if you, for example, always idolized a man like General Patton or George Washington or Thomas Edison or someone like that, although that man is dead, you could get in touch with that man.
Because that man, though he's died, he's passed into the collective unconscious of the race, and you can get in touch with him.
Now you do this through an occult practice called visualization. And you get into a certain state of mind through the guidance of a therapist, where you are beginning to picture yourself in a certain place, and you picture this person being there.
And through the process of vivid visualization and imagination, this person actually comes to life.
And you can converse with that person. And you're really conversing with that person because his consciousness is part of the whole collective unconscious that you're tapped into also. So really, what you're doing is contacting people who've lived before and gaining from that fellowship with them.
Now this is all, of course, in keeping with the general worldview that one knows of Carl Jung's background. He had dealings with ghosts all the time. In fact, in his writings he said that he learned much of what he knows from his, he called him his ghostly guru.
That's what many people call a spirit guide. It's what Christians call a demon.
He said his ghostly guru's name was Philemon, and actually guided him and taught him these things.
So here we have a really, from a Christian point of view, really scary ideas that, by the way, this guided visualization didn't originate with Carl Jung. It just got scientific respectability or psychological respectability with him.
It's been practiced by shamans and witch doctors for centuries.
It's a very common occult practice. And a demon taught it to Carl Jung. One of the scariest things about this is that it is now a very common practice in the charismatic movement.
And it didn't come from the Bible and it didn't come from God. It came from the occult. But more specifically, it came from Carl Jung.
Now most Christians who practice inner healing and guided visualization do not know much about Carl Jung. And they would deny that they got this from Carl Jung. But the fact is that this came into the charismatic through a woman named Agnes Sanford.
Almost all of the better known persons involved in inner healing today attribute their knowledge of the subject to their contact with the writings or the personal contact with Agnes Sanford. I mentioned earlier John and Paula Sanford, spelled differently than Agnes Sanford. But John and Paula Sanford were disciples under Agnes Sanford.
And they credit her as being their mentor in ministry. So do people like Francis McNutt, a former Catholic priest who is now a charismatic leader involved in that. Jimmy Carter's sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, was a well-known inner healing charismatic evangelist.
She got it from Agnes also.
Agnes Sanford is the woman who brought this practice into the charismatic movement and everybody who practices it now either got it from her or from somebody who got it from her. Now where did she get it? Agnes Sanford didn't know anything about Carl Jung either.
Interestingly enough though, she said that her own spiritual advisors in her life, the ones that she looked to for spiritual guidance were her pastor, Morton Kelsey, and her own son, Jack Sanford. She said that these were the people that gave her spiritual guidance in her life were Morton Kelsey, her pastor, who is I believe an Episcopalian psychotherapist and pastor. He's a writer.
I don't know if he practices psychotherapy. I'm sure he's involved in some area. But he writes and I believe he's a priest.
And then her own son, Jack Sanford, who has written a book not too long ago about dreams and it's sold in Christian bookstores.
Now Jack Sanford and Morton Kelsey, from whom Agnes Sanford got her own spiritual guidance, coincidentally they studied and got a degree at Carl Jung University in Switzerland. And isn't it coincidental that Agnes Sanford ended up teaching the very same things that Carl Jung did but didn't know that she did.
She didn't know about Carl Jung. She got them from Morton Kelsey and her son who got them from Carl Jung University. And obviously got them from Jung who got them from a spirit guide.
Now that means that when you meet somebody today who's practicing inner healing in the church, the technique was gotten, in most cases you'll find they got them from John and Paula Sanford. John and Paula Sanford admit they got it from Agnes Sanford. Agnes Sanford got her ideas from Morton Kelsey and Jack Sanford, her son.
Who got them from Carl Jung University. Who got them from Carl Jung. Who got them from a demon.
It's got a bad pedigree. And yet many Christians follow it because they say it works. Well a lot of occult things seem to get results.
I don't know that that is ever any justification for doing them.
I said I don't know that it is. I shouldn't be so wishful.
I know that it is not. In Leviticus chapter 19, in verse 31, God said, give no regard to mediums and familiar spirits. Do not seek after them to be defiled by them.
I am the Lord your God. In other words, seek me. Do not seek those who have familiar spirits.
Carl Jung's spirit guide was a familiar spirit. And those who are following the teachings of Carl Jung are following a familiar spirit. It says in the last days people will follow doctrines of demons.
1 Timothy 4.1 says. And certainly in the church, this doctrine insofar as it is followed is a doctrine of demons. And many depart from the faith following seducing spirits and doctrines of demons said Paul.
1 Timothy 4.1.
And so this is something to watch out for. By the way, as practiced by Christians, of course there is this little Christian slant on Carl Jung's archetypes. To the Christian, the archetype is usually Jesus.
And I have actually sat in on sessions where this was being taught in certain charismatic circles. Where someone said that, okay, here is a boy who has got mental problems and behavior problems because as a child he was abused by a drunken father. He used to come home drunk and just beat everyone in the family, including him.
And he has had these reactions and he behaved a certain way because his father was that way.
And so, here is what you do. Get this boy on a stool and guide him in a visualized journey back into his childhood.
Now picture yourself in the room where your father is coming home and he is drunk. And he picks up a baseball bat and he is coming at you. But then, picture Jesus.
Jesus comes in. He puts one arm around you. He holds up his hand to your father.
He does not let your father beat you. He protects you. You feel safe.
You feel secure.
You feel that all is well. Okay? What has just happened? Well, I mean, this is, you know, in a nutshell, it takes longer than that.
But what they actually have explained, many of them, is this. That we have just changed your past. Not just the way you think about it, your past has been changed.
You have actually gone back by visualization into the actual past, into your childhood.
You have encountered Jesus there because Jesus was there and Jesus is outside of time. They say he is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Because he is outside of time, he is not confined to what is happening right now. He can go back. He can go back there into that situation with you through this whole guided visualization process and change the past so that you did not actually get beat by your father.
Jesus protected you. Now the past has changed.
Now does that sound like anything remotely resembling Christian theology? No, but it sounds very, not remote at all, close to occult philosophy, which is what it is.
What is interesting is that when you ask people how they can justify having people believe that Jesus goes back into the past with them and changes the past, they always say, well, Jesus is outside of time. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Therefore, he can go into the past and do these things.
Change the past.
But how is it that when Roman Catholic charismatics do this, they often visualize Mary? And Mary functions very much the same way in their guided visualization that Jesus does for this young man. Is Mary also the same yesterday, today, and forever? Is she eternal? Is she timeless? And why is it that when the American Indians do the exact same thing, their archetype is a coyote? And they get the same results as the Catholics get who visualize Mary or the charismatics get who visualize Jesus.
There is a book you may be interested in reading someday. It is written by Hal Lindsey's sister-in-law. I think her name is Johanna Mickelson, if I'm not mistaken.
And it is called The Beautiful Side of Evil. It is her testimony.
She was involved, before she was saved, with a Mexican psychic healer, an old woman, an old witch, really.
And she became trained by her and became a psychic healer herself and eventually realized this was demonic and left and became a Christian.
But in her book she tells how she learned to visualize. This is how she got her spiritual insight and strength.
She would get alone and visualize. And she would be in a room. And in the room there were doors.
And one of the doors would open and in would walk and she could imagine whoever it would be.
She was to choose an archetype, a hero, whom she would seek counsel from. And even though she was not a Christian, she decided to choose Jesus Christ as her archetype.
So that she became accustomed regularly of conjuring up Jesus in this way in her mind and conversing with him and so forth.
Eventually, she realized when she actually came to the Lord that this was a demon and not Jesus. And I don't remember exactly the way in which it was revealed to her, but it became very clear to her that this was not Jesus.
This was a familiar spirit. This was a demon impersonating Jesus.
What's rather scary is how many Christian teachers still advocate the visualizing of Jesus.
And they actually tell you that you can commune with him that way. Richard Foster, who wrote the book Celebration of Discipline, which by the way, which book has some very good and commendable things in it, has a chapter there about meditation.
And in that chapter, he actually teaches that you can visualize Jesus in this way and when he comes into your visualized picture, he becomes himself.
And so you can converse with him, get words, you know, just have a two-way conversation with him just like you and I can converse right now. That it's not imaginary. It becomes really him.
Now, this is occultism. This is not Christianity. Where do we read that the apostles in their dark moments got off into the corner of their cell and visualized Jesus and had a conversation with him? We don't.
We do read that on a few occasions, Jesus appeared to them, to Stephen as he was being stoned or to Paul when he was praying in Jerusalem or again when he was in Ephesus, I believe.
There are times when they had visions of Christ, but they didn't conjure the visions of Christ. To conjure up a vision of Christ and then to pretend that that vision you've conjured in your imagination is really Jesus and that you can do this any time you want is to allow yourself the privilege that the apostles never dreamed that they had.
But any time I want to, I can just get a word from Jesus. That would be nice. We could straighten out all the theological problems in the church real quick.
Instead of studying the Bible, we could just sit down and visualize Paul and get Paul into the room and say, okay, Paul, what did you mean actually when you said that? And we can get it straight from the horse's mouth.
It'd be nice if that could be done, but the Bible does not hold out that option to us. It's a shame that so many Christian teachers do, but they do so because they're more influenced by Carl Jung than they are by Bible, at least in their thinking on this subject.
Now, these are some of the psychological solutions offered. In psychoanalysis, the solution comes through getting in touch with your repressed things from the unconscious realm. You may need a word of knowledge if you're in charismatic circles or if you just go to a therapist.
You need someone to analyze your dreams for you or to hypnotize you or to analyze these things and find out what's really wrong with you and try to give you some directions how to overcome that.
According to Skinner, you just need to be rewarded for good behavior and experience suffering for bad behavior. According to humanistic psychology, you just need to get all your needs met and everything will be well with you and you won't misbehave anymore.
And according to death psychology, you need to actually experience inner healing. But none of those things are biblical solutions.
Now, again, I mentioned as I did yesterday, the psychiatric solution.
The psychiatric solution is to define your behavior in terms of chemical deficiencies and so forth and to treat them with chemical treatments, medications.
Now, this, of course, is not for every kind of problem, but the number of problems that are diagnosed as medical this way and needing chemical treatment is a growing list. And there's much that's been added to that list.
Anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, manic episodes.
These things may not be so much what we call behavior as mood problems. And that's a whole different category than behavior, but let's just put it this way.
Moods are not amoral in many cases. Anger can be sinful anger. Depression can be sinful.
Depression is not always sinful in my opinion. If depression is truly just a feeling of inexplicable lowness and so forth. I mean, there is such a thing as rejoicing in the Lord even in the midst of a low mood.
But that doesn't always change your mood instantly. And moods, you pretty much are not going to be judged by God for your moods, but your choice, your analysis of that mood and whether you repent of the implications of that mood. See, people can get into deep depression just by thinking about how bad a deal they have.
That's not always the case. Clinical depression sometimes comes on, they call it clinical depression, without necessarily getting involved in conscious self-pity.
But a great deal of depression as experienced by people in this country is nothing else but self-pity elevated to a dominant mood.
And I believe anger and anxiety also, for which they currently give psychiatric medications, often have moral ramifications.
At least the way you understand what's happening and how you react to it is a moral choice. We'll have more to say perhaps about that in a lecture that's coming up.
But let me just say what the biblical solution is to behavior.
The biblical solution is to fight against sin. This is a spiritual warfare.
And it's not just against demons, it's against our own sinful nature. And if victory does not come immediately, we fight it some more. And we keep fighting until it happens.
There was one scripture, 1 Peter 2.11, I'd like to call your mind to. Peter says in 1 Peter 2.11, Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims to abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul. There is a war against your soul.
The flesh, the lusts of this world, we're strangers and pilgrims of this world, we need to not get caught up in them, but we sometimes tend to. And when that is so, we need to fight them. We need to wage a war against them.
The same epistle, 1 Peter 5.7.8.
He says, Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary, the devil, walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Now we're familiar with many passages in the Bible about spiritual warfare. But what we have to remember is that those passages guarantee us victory if we conduct it properly.
In James 4.7 it says, Resist the devil and he will flee from you. That's a guarantee. That doesn't mean that if you resist him today, he'll go away today.
You may have to resist him today, tomorrow, the next day, the next week, the next month. On some issues you may be fighting him for years.
I would not have known how true this is if not having had an experience of my own that was pretty illustrative of this fact.
Because in my younger years, I struggled very long with a particular sin of the flesh that was very tormenting, tormenting to my conscience. And I hated it.
Like Paul, he said, I do the things I hate.
I don't understand why I do it, but I do it anyway. And I hate it. And I never quite understood why the victory didn't come.
And I would fight it. I'd resist it. I'd rebuke the devil.
I'd recite scripture. I'd do all those things. And yet for a very long time, the struggle was not won.
It was not over, at least. It kept going on and on. This was years long.
And then at a certain point in time, it just went away. It's an incredible testimony. I never would have thought that it would.
I mean, so many years the struggle was, I never thought I could ever testify. This thing just went away. And it went away.
Maybe someone would say, well, I reached a certain age and there were changes or whatever that caused that. But I know that many people struggle with the same thing well off into the rest of their life.
And I can't point to a new thing I did the day that it went away.
It's like, oh, I finally found the technique. You do this and then it goes away. There was no change in my behavior in the time immediately before the deliverance from what I'd been doing for the years before toward that thing.
It was just continually resisting, continually fighting, continually resisting.
And some resistance has to go on for years and you simply have to live with the struggle at times. Now, the struggle is made easier by a number of things.
One is, of course, the grace of God, the grace of God, which, A, forgives when you succumb, but also which empowers you to resist, to live.
The grace, God's grace is sufficient. And that means many times when you have a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan that is tormenting you, that you say, God, take this away.
I don't like this struggle. I don't like this encounter with the enemy.
He might just say, well, my grace is sufficient for you.
My strength is made perfect in your weakness. There are times when a struggle with depression or anxiety or something, although that is not the perfect will of God for you, there may be times when you've got to fight it. You've got to be faithful in it until God says, okay, the deliverance is now.
Now it's going away.
The struggle may be for years. In the meantime, his grace is sufficient for you.
I'm not so simplistic as to say all you have to do when you're depressed is just rejoice in Jesus and the depression will go away. That's not necessarily true. There may be other factors necessary.
And it may be a spiritual attack that has to be fought, but it should not be fought through the flesh.
The weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but are mighty through God. It's the pulling down of strongholds and casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.
Paul said in 2 Corinthians 10 verses 4 and 5, essentially the victory for the Christian comes in knowing the truth and the truth will make you free, Jesus said, and in walking in the spirit because Paul said in Galatians 5, 16, walk in the spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. If you've got struggles in your behavior that are sinful, you need more to know the truth and more to walk in the spirit. This is a discipline that no one does perfectly, but which Christians should be doing increasingly.
Christians should be walking in the spirit more, more consistently as their lives progress. It's part of the, it's the normal Christian life to walk in the power of the spirit and according to the truth.
Now we don't all know all the truth and deception can keep you in bondage.
That's why we need to look to the scripture and that's why studying what the psychologists say is only counterproductive because they don't have the truth and they redefine the problem and the solution so as to not give us any help at all.
It's the truth that will set you free and therefore we seek the truth in the scriptures and when we come back to our next session, I'll show you why I think it is such a disaster to try to mix the truth of the scriptures with the alleged counterfeit truth of psychology as many Christians are seeking to do in order to help people with problems. We'll look into that tomorrow.
You

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