I turn to Philippians chapter 3 while I
talk about the Sermon on the Mount.
And I've decided to take tonight to kind
of respond a little bit to some of
the things that may be, a few things
that have been spoken to me since I've
started on the Sermon on the Mount.
And perhaps some things that I think people
are a little troubled with anyway.
And that are wise for us perhaps to
look at it.
Because I am fully aware that what Jesus
is saying here in the Sermon on the
Mount, particularly in the Beatitudes, flies right in
the face of modern psychology.
Modern psychology of course there tells us how
wonderful we are and how good we are.
And the fact that somebody would come along
and tell us that that's not true.
When you pick up the Bible, essentially the
Bible tells us we're too bad to be
true.
And essentially it tells us how hopeless we
are outside of God.
And the love of God.
And the redemptive work of Christ.
And the only thing any good about any
of us ever was initially we were just
a hunk of clay that was filled with
God in the first place.
And that's what made man anything at all.
That's what made us in his image.
And without him we're just a hunk of
clay and worthless.
But in him the value is unbelievable.
But I do know that in the sense
of psychology, a lot of people struggle.
Because I think even a lot of Christians,
somehow or another we easily get caught up
in there's a lot of psychological terms and
things that we feel about.
And that I think sometimes it's good and
I just want to deal with some things
a little tonight in the sense of the
issue of self.
And that we have been discussing so much
through the Beatitudes.
Sociologists as well, they tell us that the
age in which we're living right now, and
of course I don't know if that's how
accurate all these things are, but this one
seems pretty accurate to me, is that they
tell us that we're living in the age
of narcissism.
And essentially that in what narcissism is, it's
an age that's described as an excitement essentially
about ourselves.
And Narcissus if you're not familiar, but in
Greek theology there's a beautiful young youth there
who fell in love with his own image
so much so as he's looking there in
the water and he sees the reflection of
himself.
He literally pined away and more to emphasize
into Narcissus and he just froze and there
he was so hooked into himself and his
own self-beauty.
Interestingly enough the word Narcissus in the dictionary
is not only of course that which I
just read from Greek mythology, but it's also
interestingly enough it's known as a plant and
known for its narcotic properties and it's also
known as a hallucinatory experience with yourself.
And essentially when somebody starts to, the ultimate
hallucination I suppose is the ones that we
oftentimes have about ourselves and how great we
are and how wonderful we are and how
good we are.
But sociologists tell us that this is a
characteristic of our age.
Unlike perhaps a generation or two ago when
we came out of the war, of which
I was born after it, but those that
grew up under those that were in it,
there was a selflessness about it and the
determination there of whatever you had to do
to serve your country and life was there.
It was way beyond itself and the value
of it.
It was something there that, somewhat of there,
the ability to surrender itself and there was
a generation that understood that.
Following that we kind of went into a
little bit of the hippie generation or the
we generation and whether it was Martin Luther
and we will overcome and a lot of
the things within just the movements of the
60s and the sociological movements of people there
in the love-ins and the hippie thing
that kind of said we.
But then it's kind of changed into a
me generation.
And we live in this day of narcissism
and something that goes right along so wonderfully
well with narcissism is modern psychology and humanistic
psychology.
It caters to a narcissistic person tremendously.
It just fits right alongside it.
And I want to look tonight a little
bit and deal with the Bible and its
response to three major schools of humanistic psychology
and what the Bible has to say about
them.
Because we are certainly living in a world
where Sigmund Freud, though he died, what I
think in 1959 or something, but his effect
has been tremendous on the world I suppose.
But essentially if you're familiar with Sigmund Freud
is that his psychology, his philosophy of life
to me could be boiled down very, very
simply and has been by many into just
a very simple sort of a concept and
that is essentially that you are what you
are has been determined by your past.
And essentially what it says is that whatever
is going on with me, whatever is wrong
with me, this psychology, Freudian psychology, it offers
me and allows me the opportunity to continue
on in this narcissistic feeling, in this self
-love even because essentially no matter what it
is that is wrong with me, I can
blame all of my failures on something in
my past.
And that's essentially what Freud had so much
to say.
And just to give you some of the
terms that he really used and brought out
to the forefront of psychology that's used so
much today, but there's words like psychoneurosis, which
is defined as a functional disorder in which
the feelings of anxiety and obsessional thoughts, compulsive
acts and physical complaints, but they're without objective
evidence of disease.
In other words, a person has all these
obsessions and these difficulties and anxieties and compulsive
things, but they can't find anything physiologically wrong
with them.
And so it's psychoneurosis, it's a mental thing
that is going on within them.
Then of course there's psychosis.
And Sigmund Freud, as you are probably aware,
is the father of psychoanalysts.
But in psychosis, it's a mental disorder characterized
by symptoms as delusions or hallucinations that indicate
impaired contact with reality.
And essentially they're a person that's in some
form of psychosis, they're just, they're out of
it.
You know, they're walking around and they're carrying
on some form of life or lifestyle or
communication and they touch reality now and then,
but oftentimes they go right back out of
it.
There's paranoia, which is a mental disorder characterized
by systematized delusions ascribing hostile intentions to other
persons.
And it's often intense with some sort of
mission in life.
And a paranoid person, they go around and
somebody's after them, somebody's looking for them.
They may know who they are, they may
not know who they are, but they kind
of live under the hostility there that's after
them and we call them paranoid.
Then there's schizophrenia, which is a severe mental
disorder associated with brain abnormalities and typically evidenced
by disorganized speech and behavior and delusions and
hallucinations.
And a lot of these things are things
that were pushed very strongly by Sigmund Freud.
And interestingly enough, some of the things that
he said though were, a lot of people,
they just don't know it.
But one of his fundamental attributes of his
whole thinking, of his whole philosophy in psychology,
and these are his words, and it led
to his analysis of dreams, they led to
the discoveries of infantile sexuality in the so
-called opitus complex, which constitutes the erotic attachment
of the child for the parent of the
opposite sex together with hostile feelings towards the
other parent.
And essentially, what he believed is rooted in
the heart of every child.
And then this goes on, this is how
life starts when you come into it, is
that usually they're even in just a normal
birth, that child has a sexual obsession with
the parent of its opposite sex and it
also has a hostility or a desire to
murder the one of the same sex because
they're in competition with them.
Oedipus, he was a legendary king of the
Thebes, a son of Laius and Jocasta, and
he fulfilled a prophecy made at his birth
by unwittingly killing his father and marrying his
mother.
And this was the root of essentially where
Freud started so much of his psychology.
It started right in the fact that at
birth there were these hostilities, and if somehow
or another these hostilities are not dealt with
during life, you will carry them over to
other people.
But this is the root, essentially, of what
Freud had to say.
This is what started his whole process of
saying you are the result of what has
been all that has been done unto you,
but it started the day you were born.
And with this bizarre concept, now I'll tell
you, I have a beautiful mother, but I
never thought of marrying her, and I could
see why my dad did, but I haven't
wanted to compete with that, and I've never
wanted to kill my father.
Now there were times as a teenager, I
wouldn't mind if somebody else did it maybe,
but I grew out of that, but that
had nothing to do with the way I
was born, that had to do with my
own rebellion to him when I was a
teenager.
But there to start looking there and to
essentially, he's now saying that we are spending
so much of our life transferring all of
these feelings and emotional processes that we start
in childhood with in hostilities over to other
people.
And we need to learn how to deal
with these things, and this is what his
psychology is so much in.
And so essentially what Freud was all about,
as I already said, is that people basically
are the result of what has been.
And he simply basically had, you know, his
analysis was that how you were born and
how you were raised and how you were
loved, and if your mother loved you and
changed you regularly and your father, you know,
was there and you had food to eat
and you had a relatively good home, and
you had all of these sorts of things
around, then you could be a normal person.
But if you had all sorts of bad
things happening to you, and you had difficulties,
and you had all, whatever it is that's
happened to you, you are a product of
what has happened to you.
So whatever it is, it's now the result
of it.
It was interesting, last Sunday morning Chuck mentioned
on how that when he decided to leave
Corona and felt led to come down here,
and Kay was so upset because the ministry
in the church was going so well there,
and why would he want to leave that
to come down here to something struggling so
much, and she set up for him to
go out to lunch with a psychiatrist who
took him out and wanted to know if,
you know, if his mother loved him and
he loved his mother and if he had
a nice home and fed regularly and all
that sort of thing.
And as I sat there and thought about
it, I thought to myself, well that just
goes to show that you can be fed
well and have a good mother and a
good home and still be crazy.
But anyway, no, I'm just kidding.
But we have these ways where we blame
everything on somebody, on whatever it is that
is going on within our lives.
That's what Kay told me, by the way,
I didn't, there's none of my opinion on
this.
But essentially, one of the things that today
is so prevalent in humanistic psychology is essentially
that the result of this is that a
person never has to stop loving themself, never
has to deal with his inadequacies, essentially, because
they're all blamed on others in the circumstances
that happened in their life.
And however I grew up, it's my mother's
fault, or it's my father's fault, or it's
that person down the street that abused me,
or it's that teacher that neglected me, or
it's that person that turned me in the
wrong direction at whatever time, and all of
these other things that happen.
We have somebody to blame it on, as
time goes on.
But interestingly enough, even today's own world of
psychology, who are promoting these very same things,
are the people who are also realizing that
they're in great trouble teaching these things.
I say this because the American Psychological Association
recently did an internal study on itself to
evaluate its own effectiveness.
It was called the Maurer's Study of Emotionally
Disturbed People.
In other words, those people that have some
form of psychotic depression going on within them.
And this was done by the American Psychological
Association.
This wasn't done by some outside group trying
to analyze them.
This was them analyzing themselves.
But among the group that they studied, of
those people that went to psychotherapy, 43%
of them got well within a year.
Of people that went to clinical counseling, 49
% of them got well within a year.
Of people that went to visit a psychiatrist,
53% got well within a year.
But those people that went to nobody at
all, 63% got well within a year.
In other words, the very people that were
supposed to be administering the cure were actually
contributing to the disease.
They were prolonging it.
And they were taking people into the analysis
of themselves and of their life.
Being very narcissistic.
Let's go back and talk about you and
what has happened to you and where you
have been.
And who did these things to you?
By the way, did you turn to Philippians
3?
Did I mention that?
Okay.
We're not going there yet.
I just wanted to get ready.
But the interesting thing is that when you
do look at psychology and itself and the
roots of what it is really saying, it's
not doing a job.
I remember years ago when I was still
on staff here back in the 70s, one
day I had an appointment in my book
with a psychiatrist who came to see me.
And as he came in and sat down,
he came in and he actually wanted to
talk about a certain young girl that I
had, quote, unquote, treated.
And I thought, well, what do you mean?
I don't know what you're talking about.
I don't treat anybody here.
And he said, well, then he told me
about this certain girl and her name.
And as he talked about her, I realized,
oh, I've met her.
I know who she is.
She's been to the studies.
And we got talking about her and I
said, why?
What is it?
Why do you ask about her?
And he said, well, I'm a psychiatrist.
And he said, I have been working with
her for, I think it was close to
two years and every two weeks.
And here she has been coming in.
I've been working with her and she is
clinically schizophrenic, hopelessly schizophrenic.
And there is, I've been working with her
for so long, but a while back, just
out of, I don't even know why I
said it was one of the weirdest things
I've ever said.
He says, but I just suggested to her
one time when I'd virtually given up on
all sorts of other things to say to
her.
I said, why don't you see if you
can find God?
And then we left.
And, you know, she went on about her
business and a couple of weeks later, she
came in for appointment and we talked and
I realized she was doing much better.
She just seemed to be having a very,
very good day.
I kind of thought and wrote it down,
very clear thinking and, and one of those
just great days.
And I noted that in the report.
But then when she came to see me
the next time and we sat down and
we began to talk, I realized this girl
was normal.
There was, as I began to discuss and
began to prod and began to do, to
talk to her about certain things that had
always produced certain behavioral patterns and memories and
attitudes and problems.
They were all gone.
She was entirely transformed.
There was something about her.
And I finally asked her, I said, wait
a minute, what, what is going on with
you?
What has happened?
And she smiled and she said, well, I
did what you told me.
And he said, well, what was that?
I said, I couldn't even remember it.
She said, I found God.
He said, you did.
Where did you find her?
And he said, Calvary Chapel.
And he's down there, you know, in the,
and as he talked with her and met
with her, he realized something unbelievably profound had
happened to her.
He'd never run into anything like this so
much.
So he's so moved by it.
He came down and had to talk about
it.
He ended up telling me a story, which
was quite a long story, but essentially he
himself once wanted to serve God, actually went
to seminary and in the process of going
to seminary, went to a very liberal seminary
where they struggled so much with the Bible.
He actually shifted out of their theology department
and into their school of psychology.
Graduated from there, went on and got an
MD and then became a psychiatrist later on
because he felt he could help people better.
But then he sat there and as he
watched, he started coming to church here.
And then he, uh, he had his wife
that came with him.
There was just this precious woman's first time
she came, she received Christ.
She was just head over heels for the
Lord.
Just so thrilled.
I'll never forget one day she picked up
her Bible and she couldn't get enough of
it.
And one day she came, she asked me,
she said, I don't understand it.
Can you please tell me what the book
of job is all about?
And, uh, and I can remember him just
smiling because he knew all of this.
He knew how to pronounce the book of
Job, but he's just smiling and realized she
had more life in him than he'd ever
dreamed or forgotten he could have ever had
in himself.
But as he watched this whole thing, I'll
never forget one day he told me, he
said, you know, all these years I've been
practicing and all of these years I've been
working in psychiatry.
And he says, I've come to the realization
that all we really know how to do
it very best is diagnosed, but we don't
know how to heal.
You know that.
So I don't know how to heal, uh,
but I know who does it.
And the wonderful thing is, is that the
Bible has, you know, when we look at
our past and all the issues of our
past, the Bible has an answer about it.
And that's why I've asked you to turn
to Philippians and to find out what is
biblical psychology if there is such a term.
But when you look at the past, what
does the Bible have to say about me
and my past?
Philippians 3.13, Paul writes, he says, brethren,
I count not myself to have apprehended.
But this one thing I do, forgetting those
things which are behind and reaching forth unto
those things that are before.
Here Paul simply looked there and it's an
amazing thing there that without a huge discussion
about it, he simply looks there and he
says, something has happened within the framework and
the method of thinking within a born again
Christian that they're actually capable of forgetting the
things that are past.
Essentially the whole thrust of the New Testament
is just simply tells us that our past
has been done away with.
Our sins have been forgiven and they're forgotten.
Biblical psychology essentially, what it tells me to
do with my past is to confess it
and to bury it, to leave it behind.
And Paul is such an interesting person, when
you stop and look at him, he had
what a lot of people would call a
pretty difficult past.
We know from Paul's own testimony he was
a killer, a murderer, caused tremendous pain and
suffering in countless families.
Acts 2.24, Paul says, and I persecuted
this way unto the death, binding and delivering
unto prisons both men and women.
He said, I persecuted people to the very
death, I killed them.
And he says, and then I also delivered
men and women to prison.
In Acts 26.9 he says, I verily
thought of myself that I ought to do
many things contrary to the name of Jesus
of Nazareth.
Paul says, my life at one point I
was adamantly opposed to the name of Jesus
Christ, to living for him, to thinking about
him, to surrendering him, I could care less
who he was whatsoever.
And he says, and the result of that
in this rebellion from God, in this distaste
for God, in this rejection of God, the
things which I did in Jerusalem and the
many of the saints did I shut up
in prison, having received authority of the chief
priests.
And when they were put to death, I
gave voice against them.
And I punished them often and in every
synagogue and compelled them to blaspheme.
And being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted
them unto strained cities.
Paul said, I couldn't stop running.
I hated Christians.
I hated Christianity.
I killed them.
I imprisoned them.
I actually got people to blaspheme the name
of Christ, to turn away from him.
I was so hated.
I was so motivated.
I was so destroyed.
I was so rebellious, so far away from
God.
I wonder in one sense, Paul, he says,
I am the least of the apostles and
am not the meat to be called an
apostle because I persecuted the church of God.
Paul had essentially within his memory one that
for a lot of us, maybe we've had
difficult things and a lot of rebellions in
our life, but I wonder how many people
we would look and say I've murdered.
How many people have we thrown in prison?
How many families have we destroyed?
Paul, he had done it to countless families
and homes and marriages.
How many children's had he made orphans out
of?
A multitude of them.
And yet at the same time, here Paul,
when he came to Christ, rather than having
to go back and go through all sorts
of psychotherapy, you have to go through all
sorts of things of what would cause you
to do this?
What was going on within you?
How were you raised?
What was, what are the compelling factors in
all of this?
And Paul was somebody there that he not
only did a lot to other people, a
lot of people did things to him.
He said I, you know, more in stripes
and labors, he says more abundant in stripes,
he says above measure, in prisons, more often,
frequent, in deaths, often.
Of the Jews, five times I received forty
stripes, lest one, thrice I was beaten with
rods, once I was stoned, thrice I suffered
a shipwreck, a night and a day I've
been in the deep.
In journeys often, in perils of the waters,
perils of the robbers, perils of my own
countrymen, perils of the heathen, perils in the
city, perils in the wilderness, perils in the
sea, perils of false brethren, in weakness and
painfulness, watching often in hunger and thirst and
in fastings often cold and naked.
Here Paul was a guy, you look back
at his life and you look at what
people did to him.
You look at the abuse that he had
gone through.
I mean, he's times literally stripes thirty-nine,
you know, lest one.
There are five times beaten with rods, in
prison more time than he had a memory
of.
Couldn't even tell you, you know, the prisons
that he'd been in and how many times
he'd been in them.
And there are perils of his land, sea,
countrymen, you know, Jews, anybody, everybody.
Paul, you talk about a guy who could
be paranoid and be justified.
It could be Paul, the whole world's after
him.
But yet at the same time, here when
he came to Jesus Christ, essentially what the
Bible has to say, essentially, is that no
matter what it is that has happened to
you, no matter what you have done to
others, and I'm sure that there are many
of us, when we look back, the things
that we know that we have done, not
just consciously or desire to do, but the
things that we have actually carried out, the
pain, the struggle, the heartache, the grief that
we have brought people, the abuse, the outright
wicked things that have done in our own
hearts and lives and behavior, and they've got
to be tremendous.
And the things that have been done to
many of us, some of us maybe growing
up in homes where there was great abuse,
great, you know, painful memories, extensive things that
have happened, you know, to life, but essentially
what the Bible has to say is that
something in Jesus' past, in what he did
on the cross, in what happened with him,
it outweighs everything that is in my past.
It says there that what happens on the
cross by Jesus Christ was so awesome and
was so tremendous is that everything that I
have ever done and everything that has ever
been done to me has been entirely forgiven
at the cross, and it outweighs the past,
it overcomes the past, it transforms the past,
therefore I don't need to deal with the
past, I don't need even so much to
discuss it.
The cross of Jesus Christ is so total,
it is so awesome, it is so all
-encompassing, it is so overpowering that it covers
the sins of the entire world, and all
the sins that I've ever even done or
had done to me.
And here Paul, he looked at that, and
when he saw the cross, it was so
magnificent, it was so powerful, he could simply
look and say, forgetting those things that are
past.
And I think one of the most wonderful
things that ever happens to a Christian is
that when we're actually able to take all
of these little things that we've held on
to for all life, these hurts and pains
that people have done to us, these things
that we kind of hold on to like
some sort of a little teddy bear, but
you see this was done to me, don't
you know what has happened to me, and
this, and we remember it and we think
of it and we concentrate on it, but
the Bible has to say, I don't care
where you've been, I don't care what you've
done, you can drop that, you can forget
what you have done, and you can forget
what has been done to you.
And you mean to say, in a sense,
you can just drop it, exactly.
You can forget it, exactly.
All it takes, I believe, is one look
at Jesus.
One understanding, one moment with Jesus, when you
pick up your Bible and you look at
it all and you realize how Jesus so
often, he'd walk up and he'd find himself
there with a woman who'd had five husbands.
Can you imagine her memories?
Could you imagine the things that she had
gone through in her life?
And there the woman, the husband she now
had, the man she now had wasn't her
husband either.
But here this woman who'd be out there
getting her water at the middle of the
day, she of course wouldn't come down when
the rest of the women in the city
would be drawing their water.
And she had no friends, she had no
relationships, she had nothing meaningful, she was lonely
and rejected.
She was known for who she was and
there is, you can imagine all of it,
but imagine there with all of these hurts
and all of these rejections and all of
these difficulties, one moment and seeing truly the
face of Jesus, she was able to run
to town and say, come see the man
who told me all I ever did.
She was able to, and it says there
at the end of the chapter that many
of the men of the town believed on
Jesus because of the testimony of the woman
who said, come see the man who told
me all I ever did.
She was so free, she could actually look
at her past.
You would think if a woman came to
town, this woman of all people, and looked
at the men and said, come see the
man who told me all I ever did,
she'd say, you want to talk about that?
Hello, what are you doing?
But they saw in her obviously, it's as
if that woman, it was gone.
She was somebody else that came in and
she was so free from her past and
all that she had ever done that the
men of the town flooded out to see
if such a thing could happen to them.
And many of them believed because of the
liberty that they saw.
Can you imagine a man laying by a
pool for 38 years, 38 long years, 38
long years of watching everybody else live and
play and grow up and get married and
have families and have businesses and have friends,
productive lives.
Meantime, for 38 years you lay there, why?
What have I done?
What's been done unto me?
And yet there a moment in the face
of Jesus, it's all gone, rise, take up
your bed and walk into wholeness of life.
Oh, wait, I just can't move on.
You mean, don't you know what I've been
through?
Don't you know what I'm troubled with?
Don't you know what's gone on?
But the face in the power of Jesus,
a woman with an issue of blood, she'd
spent everything she'd had in some 12 years
victimized by this because of it.
She couldn't go to temple, couldn't go to
worship, had to stay away from people, declare
herself unclean.
Everything she had, all of her wealth was
gone, long since spent on doctors.
Now there she is in absolute loneliness, nobody
to help her, nowhere to go.
And with one last hope, after 12 years
of this, she just dreams, if I could
only touch the heavens garment, I've seen something
in him so powerful, I believe it can
deal with the past.
And the moment she touched that, her life
was changed, gone.
A woman, you know, seven demons, years and
years of being tormented, day and night.
Oh, the agony, oh, the insecurity, oh, what
a story.
One after another, as Jesus came along and
touched them, but as soon as they saw
who he was, it overpowered everywhere they'd been,
everything that had been done to them.
That's the message of the cross, and if
we don't understand that, and we're trying to
deal with our past with any other way,
and we're going into the psychology or dealing
with the past, it isn't going to work.
But here when people met Jesus, they're in
his presence, it prevailed over all of the
past, entirely.
And as Paul says, if any man be
in Christ, he is a new creation.
Old things have passed away, and behold, all
things have become new.
And the wonderful thing is that when we
stop and realize that on one hand, psychology,
it kind of looks and it tries to
take people there to the healing of their
memories.
That was like in the 80s, you know,
you've got to go back and be healed
of your memories.
And boy, that's a cesspool, why get into
it?
But the biblical Christianity essentially takes us to
the healer of our memories, takes us there
to a being who looks at us and
transforms our life.
But Freudian psychology, it simply tries to deal
with the past, but it's all by human
effort.
A second area of modern psychology, humanistic psychology,
that has actually been around a lot, I
think it's still growing, it's rapidly growing on
the scene.
It was actually started by a man named
Edmund Hess-Searle, who interestingly enough was born
the same year as Freud, died one year
earlier than he did.
But these two men had two schools of
psychology that were entirely opposite.
Freud essentially was Freudian and humanistic, and you
are a result of the past.
But Edmund was a man that he was
the founder of what is known today as
phenomenology.
And it's essentially a radical alternative to Freudian
psychology that says we're influenced by the past,
but phenomenology, which is huge today, at least
I'm sure as big as Freudian, but it
is something that it actually takes the exact
opposite perspective, and it says no, you aren't
so much influenced by the past as you
are actually more influenced by the future as
you believe it to be, than you are
the past.
And this is essentially what phenomenology is, and
it's been around in various forms for a
long time, but he really brought it all
together.
It doesn't say so much that you're not
what you were, but you are who you
hope to become, is fundamentally what he had
to say, and that the real process is
that how I perceive the future.
And many of us maybe grew up with
little nursery stories that were kind of psychology
based on phenomenology, you know, the little train,
I think I can, I think I can,
I think I can, you know, the little
thing, you're going to do it, you're going
to do it, I tell you, you know,
and these wonderful little things that says you
can do anything, and tries to get you
focused.
And Norman Vincent Peale picked up on phenomenology
when, you know, essentially there when the power
of positive thinking, and his thing was who
cares who you were, it's where you're going,
and when you let your mind get let
loose on where you can go and you
really begin to perceive the future, that's the
thing, and Napoleon Hill grabbed onto it and
took it, you know, with his think and
grow rich, see yourself as a millionaire, you
may be flat broke and lived in poverty,
but that's not going to help you, and
you can go back into that forever, but
as soon as you begin to think, and
you're rich, I'm going to be a millionaire,
a billionaire, I'm going to run the world,
and that's essentially, I mean he had the
whole country reading his books.
And then the church, of course, has picked
up on it in positive confession, in this
theology that comes along essentially, based just on
phenomenology there, of I'm going to have this
positive confession of what is going to go
on, and what I have, and I'm going
to be rich, and I'm going to be
successful, and I'm going to be great, and
it's just a rehash, essentially of all of
these, you know, these other things.
And a lot of parents, I think sometimes
we, you know, we're phenomenologists with our little
children, you know, Johnny, you're great, you're going
to be wonderful, you're going to do good,
you know, and we keep telling that hope,
and one day he kind of picks up
on it, and I don't think you shouldn't,
you know, it's not good to look at
him necessarily and say, Johnny, you're too bad
to be true, but the, but that is,
that's a greater truth about Johnny than you're
great.
But the, but essentially, a lot of us,
we're, we use a lot of phenomenology.
To me, I mean, like when I play
golf, I'm a phenomenologist, I'm definitely not a
Freudian, I do not want to respond to
how I played in the past.
When I get up to tee up that
ball, you know, I mean, I'm a phenomenologist,
I, hey, the future is greater than anything
that's ever happened so far for this ball,
I tell you.
You know, I can get out on a
golf course, and there can be a whole
lake and a little teeny island out there
for the green to shoot onto, and I'm
a phenomenologist, I'm going to take the newest,
most beautiful golf ball, because I'm, hey, if
I, it's a negative confession, it's a fruit
of the past, if I give an old
beat up ball to that lake, I'm going
to, I'm going to tell that lake I'm
not afraid of it, I'm putting a brand
new golf ball down there, and I'm going
to hit it and watch it go into
the drink with all the rest of them.
But anyway, the, but so often, you know,
we use a lot of this kind of
thinking, you know, in our lives.
But essentially what phenomenology is, it kind of
tells us there that it, that the things
that we dream of, if we just focus
on it regardless of where we've been, if
we just focus our attention in the right
way, if we look at the future better,
if we learn to daydream about the future
and think about the future and plan, it'll
be much better.
And on one hand, I understand that thinking
as well a little bit.
I can understand why psychology says you're a
result of what happened, and yeah, look at
all this stuff that happened, no wonder I'm
paranoid and angry and hostile and frustrated.
You know, that explains it.
And I see why humanists think this.
Bible Christians shouldn't, but I understand why the
world came up with it, and I understand
why they have phenomenology as well.
I mean, a lot of us just think
if tonight you could leave here and you
could go down and you just knew, you
could go into that store and buy a
lottery ticket and you were going to win.
You just knew it.
You may have came in here kind of
depressed and frustrated tonight, but if you just
knew it, you'd be smiling at me and,
wow, can we go now?
You know, sort of a thing.
And we'd be immediately, you know, soon, however
we perceive the future.
If all of a sudden we may have
had a tough past, but if something happened
where I just believe I'm falling in love,
I've met the girl of my dreams, the
man of my dreams, I'm going to get
the house, I'm going to get the car,
I'm going to get the job that I've
never ever had people finally realize my potential
and they're now going to give it to
me.
And we have that regardless of whatever it
is.
So phenomenology says, hey, who cares where you've
been?
It's where you're going and how you perceive
it.
And if you've got a good outlook and
you've got to get this, then you're going
to be great.
Boy, if I could only get, that's what
I need, a new house, a new job,
a new wife, new kids, new whatever.
You know, if I could have it.
And that's the way a phenomenologist essentially thinks.
And my future is essentially as good as
I believe it to be.
And essentially, I suppose biblical psychology does essentially
say, I am affected by my past.
And Paul, he could openly talk about his
past, but he also, when he looked at
his past, he looked at the greatest event,
there was a part of his past and
that was the cross.
And that overpowered everything else.
That overtook everything else.
And the interesting thing, I suppose you could
say that a Christian could be a Freudian.
And he'd say, I am a result of
what has been.
I am a result.
And I suppose a lot of you in
one sense of people in the Bible were
a little bit Freudian in a sense.
They could look there and say, I was
blind, but now I see.
They could say, this is what happened to
me, but the wonderful thing that Christianity offers
us, I had this, I was this, this
happened to me.
Yes, I was possessed.
And yes, I was, you know, an adulterer.
Yes, I had all these husbands.
But now something happened in their past that
overcame everything else in it.
That's what a Christian is.
And I suppose the wonderful thing as well,
a Christian is also a phenomenologist in the
sense that when you want to look at
biblical psychology in a sense, stopping everything, when
you want to stop and look at a
person who hopes to become something, to think
there's a lot of people out there that
just wish, boy, if I could get a
new house or a new job or a
new car or a new this.
And then they'd be happy with that.
Well, if they'd be happy with that, how
much more ought somebody to be happy with
the thought of, brethren, if we had not
appeared, what we shall yet be.
But when he appears, we, you know, shall
be like him.
Imagine that.
The Christian is somebody that you might say
is the phenomenist of all phenomenologists.
We are one that ought to be able
to look there and say, you know, brethren,
I do not know what I shall be,
but this one thing I know, seeing him,
I will be like him.
I have the brightest future of anybody in
the world.
Somebody else, they can get that house and
they can get that car and they can
get that job, but they'll also lose it
when they die.
I've got something I'll never lose.
I have a home in glory that outshines
the sun.
I have a future that is more wonderful
than anything in the world.
So in Philippians 3 in verse 10, Paul
says, Oh, that I may know him and
the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of
his sufferings.
If that by any means I might be
made conformable unto his death, if that by
any means I might attain unto the resurrection
of the dead, not as though I had
already attained, either were already perfect, but I
follow after that which I am apprehended, that
for which I am also apprehended of Christ
Jesus.
Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended,
but this one thing I do, forgetting those
things which are behind, reaching forth unto those
things which are before.
I press toward the mark of the prize
of the high calling of God in Christ
Jesus.
In verse 20 he says, For our conversation
is in heaven from whence we also look
for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who
shall change our vile body, that it may
be fashioned alike unto his glorious body, according
to the working whereby he is able even
unto subdue all things to himself.
You see here a Christian there in his
psychology on one hand, how does he deal
with the, with the past, the cross?
And what is his future?
It's the coming of Jesus Christ to conform
him into his image.
It's to take his life and to separate
unto himself forever and ever.
And to me such a person who is,
who is willed above all else to be
conformed into the image of Jesus, I believe
they'll have a social and a psychological mindset
that's unbelievably altered from any, anybody else.
They'll have a freedom and they'll have a
joy and they'll have a stability.
And he, no matter where they were in
the world before and what's been done in
the world, when I come to him and
I realize who he is and what he
has done, and to me our future, every
one of us that's a Christian, if our
future is to know him and it's to
make him known, if it's to share his
life and be in his power and in
communion with him and to know his fullness,
if it's this desire, I want to be
apprehended by him by any means, whatever it
is, I want to experience, I want to
be made conformable unto him.
And here when you look at these, you
know, the worldly psychology, what do you do
with the past?
Freud has his opinions on that.
And then what do you do with the
future?
That's phenomenology.
That's what it essentially says about the future
and humanistic psychology.
And then there's another aspect of humanistic psychology
today, and that has a lot to do
with Maslow.
He was the father essentially of that department,
you might say, and that is the issue
of self-actualization or of self-expression.
Essentially there, one of the things that is
taught now for the person when we're not
looking so much at the past and we're
not looking so much at the future, but
the other thing is just who am I
right now?
And this is where another school of psychology
essentially is.
And you're essentially there in Maslow, and you've
probably, you know, heard essentially, you know, what
he had to say, but he was an
American psychologist from 1908 to 1970.
But essentially he gave us the basic needs
that psychologically a human has to have of
air and water and food and sex.
And then he had five broader layers of
psychological needs, and that was safety and security
and love and belonging, the needs of self
-esteem, and then the highest of them all,
and the most important of all of them
was what he noted as self-actualization.
And they started from one, but the highest
form of psychological stability was in self-actualization.
And essentially there, it was in the great
issue there isn't so much to deal with
the past or even to be concerned about
the future, but Maslow was one that says,
who am I now?
Who am I right now?
And how am I dealing with my needs,
whether, you know, when you get the air
and the food and the water and the
sex drive and these other things being met,
and then there's safety and there's stability around,
you know, there, within, there to function and
to eat and sleep.
And then there, after all of that is
done, I need to find myself.
I've got to go on this great search,
and I've got to find myself.
And whatever it is, I've got to, to
let self just go to discover itself.
The releasing, essentially, of the, of the flesh
is what it is really all about.
Then there, that the healthiest person in all,
as far as Maslow is concerned, is a
person who essentially just lets it all out.
He just is finding, letting himself be himself
without any restraint.
And this essentially is, you know, what, what
Maslow's, you know, opinion was.
And one of the greatest sins to, in
modern psychology, is repression, is to hold these
things in, that we have these things within
us there, you know, and, and if we
hold these things, this inner being trying to
get out, it leads to all sorts of
psychological abnormalities if I'm holding on.
I, I've got to say it.
If I feel it and I don't express
it and I don't do it, that is
one of the worst of all.
And that's why in a lot of psychology,
humanists and psychologists, they're, they, they feel you're
very negatively affected psychologically if you repress things.
And so they have, you know, these therapy
sessions where they just get it all out.
Everything you just say it.
And you know, it's interesting, a lot of
these things, they kind of work a little.
Have you noticed about that?
I mean, sometimes, you know, you can be
uptight and you're frustrated, you got all this
stuff and boy, you can just walk in
the door or something and you just let
it all, you know, boom, and you start
saying it and you just let it all
go.
And you kick a few things and knock
something over and, and, you know, and next
thing you know, wow, I feel good.
Everybody else in the house now needs to
go do the same thing back to you,
but, or something for them to feel good.
But essentially, there is something there to where
it's just the whole thing is, I mean,
literally, in some of these psychological thing, they
give you a baseball bats, beat a chair,
this was your father that did this stuff
to you, or you got to get this
stuff out of you, get this anger, get
these hostilities, just yell and scream and do
it all.
And, but interestingly enough, Paul's perspective on that
in Philippians 318, he says, For many walk,
of whom I have also told you often,
and I now tell you even again, weeping,
they are enemies of the cross of Christ,
whose end is destruction, whose God is their
belly, whose glory is in their shame, who
mind earthly things.
Essentially, here is Paul looks here at these
people, he says, you know, God essentially is
their own feeling, it's their own inner needs,
it's meeting their own inner needs, and here
he says, their glory is their shame.
They get their fulfillment, they get their release
through the exhibition of self, through the release
of self, they're relieved, and they feel better.
And I'm not, of course, saying for a
moment it's good to hold these things in,
and we're not, we're not supposed to repress
them, and nor are we supposed to express
them.
Essentially, what a Christian, and there's one of
these things that God offers to a Christian,
biblical psychology gives that's, I suppose, uniquely biblical,
but that is, is that there we can
take all of these things that are going
on within our life, all of our frustrations,
all of our struggles, and lay them upon
him, give them to him.
His presence in our lives relieves all these
hostilities, all this aggression, all this negative things
that can be there.
Essentially, what happens is Paul there, he says,
you don't repress it and you don't express
it, you cast your cares upon him, for
he cares for you.
And we live in this day and age
where people, the expression, you know, you look
at some of these, you know, Clint Eastwood
type of things out there, where you see
this guy that kind of goes through real
quietly, you know, stuff is happening, he's quiet,
he represses, he represses, he represses, until finally,
you know, all of a sudden he pulls
out every weapon, make my day, I move
from repression to expression, you know, or something
there, and, you know, and I'm ready now
to kill and to take on, you know,
whatever it is.
And here Maslow, he taught that this self
-actualization, this self-expression is important for mental
health.
But the interesting thing is, as far as
the Bible is concerned, it isn't self-actualization
at all where mental health comes from.
Actually, it's just the opposite.
Jesus, what he had to say is that
the issue in life isn't finding myself, expressing
myself, actualizing myself.
It's there, Jesus said, whosoever seeks his own
life will lose it, but whosoever loses his
life, for my sake, will find it.
And so self-actualization essentially in the Bible
never happens until you lose self, and then
you find yourself, then you find your life,
you find your identity.
But again, every one of them, the answer,
it isn't Freud, it isn't phenomenology, it isn't
Maslow.
And all of these things that are out
there, the issue is, is Maslow right or
is Jesus right?
And you realize there, no, Jesus is right.
And to me, the wonderful thing is, is
that you and I, you know, tonight, I
don't know where you've been, and I just
know we all grew up in a world
that was far from God.
But the wonderful thing is, regardless of what
you've done and been done to you, I
believe the Lord looks at us and, and
he says, you can lose yourself.
You can lose the past in the cross.
And all that's been done to you, if
you will just see the cross, it will
outweigh what you've done and what's been done
to you.
If it's something there that is, you look
at your future.
The wonderful thing is, is maybe some, our
future is bleak.
A lot of things look difficult.
The world looks difficult.
The, you know, what has been happening or
where life may be seeming to lead us,
there may be difficult.
But the wonderful thing of a phenomenologist, he
realized all I know is the road I'm
going down to is that leads right into
the face of my Lord, who, when I
see it, I will be changed into his
image.
I will be like him.
This is what I have to look forward
to.
And then when I look at my life
right now, Jesus said, lose it.
Don't self-actualize it.
You don't have to try to find it.
If you want to find it, you'll find
it through, you know, through losing it.
And the wonderful thing is that you and
I, as we look at these things of
the beatitude, when Jesus said, oh, how happy,
you know, are the poor in spirit, are
they who mourn, are the meek, and those
who hunger and thirst after righteous, that is
a man who has simply lost himself, and
in the process found himself, found out who
he really is.
And as we close tonight, I just want
us to have a minute to be able
to pray, but as we do, maybe some
of you, you come in, you've got a
lot of baggage that you're carrying with you.
And it's almost some of those things, amazingly,
as terrible and as painful and as hurtful
they are, amazingly, our psyche and our mind
has the capacity almost to take those and
turn them into almost a little teddy bear
that says, but we hold on to it,
because this is who I am.
I hate it, but it's who I am.
But the thing that we can do tonight
is come there and say, Jesus, I want
to find out who I am in you,
not who I am by anybody else that's
touched me, and I've touched.
I want to find out who I am
by being touched by the cross, and I
want to lay it there, and I want
to leave it there.
And maybe some of us, we look at
the future, and the future troubles us.
And yet at the same time, when we
stop and we look there, as Paul says,
what you and I have laid before us
is the most wonderful thing in the world.
And maybe as we even look at our
day right now, and there's tension, and there's
struggles, and there's burdens, and there's difficulties, there
Jesus says, cast it on me.
I care for you.
I'm the eternal psychologist, the past, the present,
and the future.
And it works.
The other ones don't.
The guy there that goes and beats up
a chair or does whatever it is, you
know, it's interesting to me.
I mean, an adulterer is usually just, he's
just a phenomenologist.
I'm going to go out and I'm going
to have a good time, but they end
up condemned, don't they?
A gambler is a phenomenologist.
I'm going to go out and get rich,
and then he needs, you know, bus money
to get home.
He loses it all.
You know, and we have all these different
things.
I'm going to go do this.
And we have no idea.
But the one thing you can be assured
on is to say, I am going to
give my life to Jesus.
That's the one who knows whose image they'll
be in, and he'll have it.
Let's do this.
Father, we thank you for your love for
us, and we thank you, Lord, for your
biblical psychology or whatever you want to call
it, but Lord, I thank you that tonight
I hope every one of us can just
come and realize, yes, we have a past,
and yes, we have difficulties, but Lord, we
want to bury it, and Lord, we want
to do it the same way they did
in the Bible by just all of a
sudden beholding the face of the Lord Jesus
who gave himself for all of the sins
of the world, and to look at him
and say, forgetting the past, Lord, help us
just to lay it down right now.
Help us to put it at your feet.
Help us just to let these things go,
the things we have done, the things that
have been done to us, and say, Jesus,
I am so grateful you have an answer
to all of this.
And Lord, maybe some of us, we look
at the future and it looks bleak, it
looks difficult.
We don't have much hope, but Lord, I
pray that you would tell us, hey, you
don't think you have a wonderful future?
I beg your pardon.
I have prepared for you a home and
glory that outshines the sun.
You will walk on streets of gold.
You'll be conformed into my image, and by
and by we'll be together, I promise you.
And Lord, may we look at that and
become the most excited phenomenologists of all.
And then, Lord, as we just look at
our life right now, as we think of
these three schools of psychology that the world
lives with, may we realize that the issue
isn't self-actualization.
It's the loss of self.
It's the burying of self, the ending of
self.
To come to you and say, Jesus, would
you just help me to reckon the old
man to be dead unto self and alive
unto God.
By the power of your love, by the
power of your Spirit, may you do wonderful
works in many of us, even now.
For Father, we ask it in Jesus' name,
amen.