Deu_6:5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
Luk_10:27 And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.
Man is a complex being, he is made in the image of God who is a very complex being.
There are arguments about the makeup of man, Spirit, Soul and Body; body Souls and Spirit. Some say that man is a spirit that has a soul and lives in a body, others that man is a soul that has a spirit and lives in a body.
I see it that man is a soul that has a spirit and lives in a body because we only come alive spiritually when we are born again.
Joh 3:5 Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.
Joh 3:6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
We tend to forget one other thing, man has a mind of his own, a free will, and this makes life more complex. When we are born again we become one with Jesus
Gal_2:20 I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
But that mind of free will still gets in our way.
Rom 7:15 For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.
Rom 7:16 If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good.
Rom 7:17 Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
Rom 7:18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.
Rom 7:19 For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
Rom 7:20 Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.
Rom 7:21 I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me.
Rom 7:22 For I delight in the law of God after the inward man:
Rom 7:23 But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
Rom 7:24 O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
Rom 7:25 I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.
Paul talks here about our minds being subject to the law of sin, but there are many natural laws that also affect the mind. To see what the problems are we first need to see a bit of how the mind works.
The mind can be split into three components:
- The soul – what we are born with.
- The subconscious – what we learn.
- The conscious – the now thoughts.
We can compare these to a computer:
- The soul = the Bios (built in operating system) this does the natural things behind the scenes.
- The subconscious = the hard drive were all the thoughts are stored
- The conscious = the ram were all the initial workings take place.
The soul, this has five major instincts:
- 1) Self-Preservation
- 2) Acquisition for self-support
- 3) Food seeking
- 4) Reproductive
- 5) Dominance
1) Self-preservation is what keeps us alive, it warns us of danger and enables us to care for ourselves.
2) Acquisition instinct (or getting) leads us to acquire the necessities for self-support. A roof over our heads for protection from the weather, clothes for our body to protect us from variations of heat and cold.
3) Food seeking is the impulse that leads us to the satisfying of natural hunger and keeping the body alive by providing growth and energy.
4) Reproduction so that we can perpetrate our race and regenerate ourselves through our offspring. Finding a life partner to reproduce with and also become one with before God.
5) Dominance is so that we can exercise our self-assertion necessitated by our calling and responsibilities. We have dominion over the earth and we need to have dominance over our portion.
These are all natural abilities and desires that we are born with and they are also common in most other forms of life. These are what keep us breathing and doing the general functions of life.
The subconscious, One of the main jobs of the subconscious is to protect us, this it does by using the historical facts that it has stored. Unfortunately it can only look to the past and not the future and this is why we often have a hard time believing something new.
We become like our parents because that is what we have been taught, directly or indirectly.
We honour our teachers because we have learnt from them.
Often there is confusion and we have to come to our own conclusions.
The only way to come to a true conclusion is by going back to the start and reviewing all the facts with a clear mind and removing any bias that we might have.
We must remember that because our mind only works on our history, our mind (subconscious) can also deceive us.
An old computer expression was “Junk in, Junk out”.
Our subconscious can only work with the facts that it knows.
The conscious, this is where we do our thinking, with new inputs and old facts drawn from the subconscious.
The conscious only has a small operating area so it is hard to remember more than six or seven things at a time. One of the reasons that telephone numbers are broken into threes and fours is so that instead of remembering a long list of numbers we are remembering a short list of groups of numbers.
We often feel that we have new ideas but they are normally old facts that have been re-hashed by our subconscious and put forward to our conscious.
The natural laws that have an effect on us are also there to help protect us.
Below are some of them.
The law of determination is that “everything happens for a reason”. Everything happens because something else happened, this is cause and effect; all actions have consequences, good or bad. In the Garden of Eden Adam lived in perfection, he only had one decision to make, to listen to God and not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil or to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. While Adam was obedient to God everything was good, once he ate of the fruit he caused sin to enter and we are still feeling the effects.
We find today that life is made up of choices and each time we make one another choice appears and if we make the wrong decisions we keep getting taken away further from the point we want to be. This can leave us with two choices, to settle in the comfort zone that we have landed or to go back to the place where we were meant to be. Going back is never easy because first we have to admit that we have made a mistake and our subconscious never likes us to admit that we are wrong. When we confess our wrongs and turn away from them we are retaking control of our sub-conscious and are able to make the right choices to get the right effects.
The law of reverse effect is that when we are dealing with the sub-conscious mind, the greater the conscious effort, the smaller the sub-conscious result.
The primary function of the sub-conscious mind is to protect us from getting hurt, and to do so it sets rules that it has learnt through our life. When we try to break these rules the sub-conscious puts up a defence to try and stop us.
One of the reasons that we find it hard to take time for prayer to build a relationship with God is because our sub-conscious does not want us to give up control of our life which as Christians God should be in control through Jesus. If we want to make a big change to our life rather than meeting it head on we should sneak it in from the side, in other words small changes work are easier than big ones.
The law of justification is that a strong idea can change your truth. Two opposing ideas cannot be held in the mind at the same time. The mind will not allow two opposite ideas to co-exist since they would cause endless conflict. The mind gets around this problem by inventing reasons justifying why one is a special exception.
Smokers for example know that they are killing themselves but still keep smoking. Their mind invents justification to get around this conflict by defining smoking as being helpful – “it helps me to relax,” “it helps to make me think” etc. all of which are nonsense but they allow the mind to reconcile the two opposing beliefs –smoking will kill me, and I choose to smoke. Not only that, if one of our beliefs is later shown to be wrong we are more likely to defend it, and this can cause us to strengthen our beliefs on conflicting evidence.
We always try to justify our self-righteousness; we never like to be wrong.
The law of persistence and the law of reinforcement are very similar. The more you hold a belief the stronger it gets and the more that you use that idea the stronger it becomes. The more often a person hears something the more they believe it. The more times you do something one way the more you believe that that is the right way and the easier it becomes to do it that way.
Why do the people go to a church building to find God?
Because that is where they have been told that He lives, from a child onward.
These laws are not necessarily based on truth but believed to be true because they have been reinforced in our minds by the number of times that we have heard them.
The law of mental effect is that every thought creates a measurable effect in our body. If you think of a scary thought you heart rate will increase and your palms may start to sweat. If you think about relaxing in a hammock with a cold drink your blood pressure will start to gradually decrease.
When you get negative thoughts this causes us to get angry, which makes you tense, which causes you to get more angry, which brings about more negative thoughts.
When you have negative thoughts, and this includes worry, you build up stress. The more stress you have the weaker the body becomes and sickness and disease are able to take hold. Stomach problems, ulcers etc. are caused by stress. A stress weakened body allows cancers to form. In fact 80% of sickness is caused by stress.
We see that when Jesus gave people forgiveness for their sin they were also healed, confession and forgiveness remove stress.
If we keep ourselves positive and reject the negative we will have a life of health and peace.
2Co 10:3 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:
2Co 10:4 (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;)
2Co 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;
2Co 10:6 And having in a readiness to revenge all disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.