WEBVTT 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:19.000 All right, well, for those that don't know, this is a prescription bottle. 00:00:20.840 --> 00:00:21.600 This one's mine. 00:00:25.120 --> 00:00:33.400 It's for medication that I take to help manage my post-traumatic stress disorder. 00:00:33.400 --> 00:00:38.800 I'm showing it to you because today, 00:00:38.800 --> 00:00:43.360 we're talking about something that I think a lot of pastors won't. 00:00:45.720 --> 00:00:48.520 And I'm not going to come at this just academically. 00:00:50.520 --> 00:00:57.880 I'm going to come at it from the chair that I sit in once a week to speak to my VA therapist. 00:01:00.160 --> 00:01:05.200 What I've learned in those moments, really about how the human body 00:01:05.200 --> 00:01:14.960 responds to fear, to threat, safety and love, and 00:01:14.960 --> 00:01:16.720 how it's changed how I read the gospel. 00:01:19.120 --> 00:01:21.520 So that's what we're going to do today. 00:01:21.520 --> 00:01:28.240 Over the last six weeks we've, we've been going through this series. 00:01:28.240 --> 00:01:30.840 Who told you that? 00:01:30.840 --> 00:01:34.680 We've named where the picture of God, most of us inherited, came from. 00:01:36.960 --> 00:01:40.560 That quick call back because today builds on every one of those. 00:01:41.880 --> 00:01:44.920 We've talked about these chick tracks. 00:01:44.920 --> 00:01:48.320 Do you guys remember, is there a picture of them? 00:01:48.320 --> 00:01:56.440 The chick tracks, yeah, the next one, yeah, you were wrong. 00:01:56.440 --> 00:01:59.200 You didn't accept Jesus Christ's your own Lord and personal Savior. 00:02:02.960 --> 00:02:05.520 She's holding a mask or a head, I don't know. 00:02:07.720 --> 00:02:10.400 Chick tracks, over a billion in circulation. 00:02:10.400 --> 00:02:13.360 They're designed to scare people into a prayer. 00:02:16.760 --> 00:02:21.640 We talked about Jonathan Edwards in 1741. 00:02:21.640 --> 00:02:24.320 One of the most influential sermons in American religious history. 00:02:27.320 --> 00:02:31.800 Read what people in the pews were told God was like. 00:02:31.800 --> 00:02:37.680 Jonathan Edwards in his sermons, centers in the hands of an angry God said. 00:02:37.680 --> 00:02:42.840 The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or 00:02:42.840 --> 00:02:50.320 some loathsome insect over the fire abhors you and is dreadfully provoked. 00:02:50.320 --> 00:02:56.000 He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. 00:02:57.440 --> 00:03:00.320 I encourage you. 00:03:00.320 --> 00:03:06.840 This sermon shaped American Christianity, American Evangelical Christianity for 00:03:06.840 --> 00:03:08.000 almost three centuries. 00:03:08.000 --> 00:03:13.400 It's our spiritual DNA, whether we have ever read that sermon or not. 00:03:16.400 --> 00:03:19.160 One that I haven't talked about in the series because I've heard about it before. 00:03:19.160 --> 00:03:21.560 I grew up with it, so I've mentioned it. 00:03:21.560 --> 00:03:23.960 Some of you like me, he like lived it, right? 00:03:23.960 --> 00:03:26.400 Heaven's gates and hell's flames. 00:03:26.400 --> 00:03:27.880 Anybody? 00:03:27.880 --> 00:03:28.720 Yeah, somebody? 00:03:30.800 --> 00:03:39.320 It started as a traveling, like evangelistic drama that this reality 00:03:39.320 --> 00:03:41.080 outreach ministries group did. 00:03:43.280 --> 00:03:46.360 It's run now, it's still going for over 60 years. 00:03:48.000 --> 00:03:51.600 Viewed by millions in churches around the world every year. 00:03:53.440 --> 00:04:00.040 28 shows happened in Uganda alone, not too long ago, where the host church 00:04:00.040 --> 00:04:05.000 publicly stated their goal was 15,000 salvation across the run. 00:04:07.760 --> 00:04:13.680 I was in this, I wish we had, no, I don't wish we had phones that took pictures back then. 00:04:13.680 --> 00:04:17.240 But I was in it when I was in youth group. 00:04:17.240 --> 00:04:21.000 It was an annual production that we did right around Halloween because, you know, 00:04:21.000 --> 00:04:21.680 you get to dress up. 00:04:23.080 --> 00:04:24.000 We rehearsed for weeks. 00:04:24.000 --> 00:04:27.800 We would literally, I try to scare the hell out of people. 00:04:29.440 --> 00:04:38.880 And the whole point was an altar call at the end to scare you, 00:04:38.880 --> 00:04:40.640 show you all the bad things that you do in life. 00:04:40.640 --> 00:04:45.800 And then the altar call at the end fear as the conversion mechanism that was by design. 00:04:45.800 --> 00:04:51.880 It's a fear-based evangelism in its purest form and it's still running today. 00:04:54.080 --> 00:04:58.840 Because before anybody says, like, this is old school stuff, nobody preaches that anymore. 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:01.440 We can talk about now. 00:05:01.440 --> 00:05:06.040 There's pastors like the senior pastor of Lake Point Church in Rockwell, Texas, 00:05:06.040 --> 00:05:07.960 up by Dallas, his name is Josh Howarton. 00:05:09.320 --> 00:05:11.360 Pastor is one of the largest churches in the country. 00:05:11.360 --> 00:05:15.320 He preached a sermon this year titled, "What Jesus Really Said About Hell." 00:05:15.320 --> 00:05:20.400 In it, he tells the congregation, direct quote, "Then anyone who believes in a God of love 00:05:20.400 --> 00:05:24.360 "and not a God of wrath is deceived, and that's really stupid." 00:05:27.200 --> 00:05:32.360 Yeah, guys, like Mark Driscoll, Doug Wilson, who's the president, or the president. 00:05:32.360 --> 00:05:40.760 He's the pastor for the secretary of defense, I might call him the other thing. 00:05:43.760 --> 00:05:47.800 Pete Higgs said, "Doug Wilson's the guy that thinks that women shouldn't be allowed to vote, 00:05:49.160 --> 00:05:52.040 "that their husband should tell them, or should vote for the family. 00:05:53.040 --> 00:06:00.040 "He believes in like, dominionism, like spreading the gospel through any means necessary." 00:06:00.760 --> 00:06:06.200 He has like Joel Webb and again, someone who said that women shouldn't vote, land and shot. 00:06:06.200 --> 00:06:12.920 He's another pastor up in Dallas who wrote a book not too long ago about LGBTQ 00:06:12.920 --> 00:06:20.280 where he said they are possessed by demons. This is still happening. 00:06:20.280 --> 00:06:28.360 Different platforms, same operating system, the wrath of God, the urgency of hell, fear is the engine. 00:06:30.280 --> 00:06:33.720 And these guys are just the loudest voices, like they're the easy ones to find. 00:06:35.720 --> 00:06:41.000 But they're not outliers, like the same theology runs quietly underneath thousands of churches 00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:47.480 across the Western world right now. The same theology that many of us grew up under. 00:06:49.080 --> 00:06:53.160 It's a theology built on threat. It's a delivered through threat. 00:06:53.160 --> 00:06:59.960 It is producing people shaped by threat. And here's what nobody I believe is asking about these 00:06:59.960 --> 00:07:08.360 theologies in this way of teaching. What is it doing to the bodies of the people in the pews? 00:07:11.720 --> 00:07:17.720 I know for some of us, we were told like our body is wicked, the flesh is wicked. 00:07:18.680 --> 00:07:23.080 You know, what does it matter, what it's actually doing to the actual body? 00:07:23.080 --> 00:07:27.640 And I would argue that when Jesus resurrected, he resurrected in a body. 00:07:27.640 --> 00:07:32.920 He cooked dinner or cooked breakfast. He ate breakfast. Like he came back to a body. 00:07:33.800 --> 00:07:35.320 He walked around in a body. 00:07:38.040 --> 00:07:47.080 Paul even talks about in one of his letters that he can't wait for the body to be redeemed. 00:07:47.880 --> 00:07:54.440 Not just the spirit gone, but the body. This thing that we live in is not just some 00:07:55.080 --> 00:07:58.360 suit that we just live in for a little while as a spirit and then we leave it behind. This is 00:07:58.360 --> 00:08:07.160 something that matters. And my question is, what is the theology that is led by fear and threat? 00:08:07.160 --> 00:08:11.320 What is it doing to the bodies of the people that are sitting in the rooms listening to it? 00:08:11.320 --> 00:08:12.520 What has it done to our bodies? 00:08:16.200 --> 00:08:19.400 Here's what I've been sitting with and I want to kind of invite you into it. 00:08:21.400 --> 00:08:26.040 Fear-based theology isn't just theologically off. 00:08:28.360 --> 00:08:33.000 It looks like it's it's doing real measurable harm. 00:08:35.160 --> 00:08:43.480 Like to real bodies including mine. And the gospel, Jesus actually preached the one we've been 00:08:44.200 --> 00:08:50.760 trying to recover across this series isn't just more beautiful. It looks like it might be what 00:08:50.760 --> 00:08:53.640 the human body was designed to receive in the first place. 00:08:57.960 --> 00:09:01.720 Three places that we're going to look at during this conversation today. 00:09:01.720 --> 00:09:05.720 Scripture, science, and our own bodies. 00:09:08.200 --> 00:09:12.600 So I'll bring in a couple of voices, some experts before I unpack any of this. 00:09:13.320 --> 00:09:21.160 There's a researcher, Dr. Basel, van der Kolk, psychiatrist, 40 years of trauma research. 00:09:21.880 --> 00:09:27.960 His book The Body Keeps the Score has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over five years. 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:31.320 Here's how it describes the body under chronic threat. 00:09:32.360 --> 00:09:38.680 Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe in their own body, inside their own bodies. 00:09:39.480 --> 00:09:43.480 The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. 00:09:44.200 --> 00:09:51.240 Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs. And in an attempt to control 00:09:51.240 --> 00:09:57.640 these processes, they often become experts at ignoring their gut feelings. They learned to hide 00:09:57.640 --> 00:10:04.440 from themselves. Read that last line again. They learned to hide from themselves. 00:10:07.320 --> 00:10:12.040 It should sound familiar because Genesis 3, Adam, and Eve are in the garden. 00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:18.280 And when they hear God walking through the garden, the first thing they do is they hide. 00:10:22.200 --> 00:10:28.840 The lie about God enters into the story and immediately they cannot tolerate being seen, 00:10:28.840 --> 00:10:35.480 even by themselves. They don't want to see themselves, so they hide. The body knows. 00:10:40.440 --> 00:10:46.600 Another one is also a psychologist, but a survivor. Dr. Marlene Wannell, 00:10:48.040 --> 00:10:55.000 she grew up in a missionary family, 25 years working with people leaving high control 00:10:55.000 --> 00:11:02.600 religion now as a psychologist. She coined a term for what she kept seeing in her practice. 00:11:02.600 --> 00:11:07.480 And some of you have probably seen this. Maybe some of you have experienced this. It's religious 00:11:07.480 --> 00:11:17.560 trauma syndrome. Here's how she describes it. RTS is a function of both the chronic abuses 00:11:17.560 --> 00:11:23.160 of harmful religion and the impact of severing one's connection with one's faith. 00:11:23.880 --> 00:11:27.800 It can be compared to a combination of PTSD and complex PTSD. 00:11:29.720 --> 00:11:38.360 It's not similar to PTSD. It is PTSD caused by religion. 00:11:40.680 --> 00:11:48.040 Symptoms that she documents, hypervigilance, difficulty trusting, depression, chronic shame, 00:11:48.040 --> 00:11:51.960 black and white thinking, loss of identity, panic responses. 00:11:54.920 --> 00:12:03.800 I know those symptoms, personally, from a war zone. And many of you know them from church. 00:12:09.880 --> 00:12:15.160 We're going to walk through how this actually works in the body. I'm going to give you four 00:12:15.160 --> 00:12:20.840 pieces of evidence that each one's going to build on the last. So number one, 00:12:23.480 --> 00:12:32.120 the amygdala. It's a small structure deep in the brain. You may, you maybe I'll see it. It's the 00:12:32.120 --> 00:12:36.760 little like jelly bean looking thing in the right behind the eyes. You see it, the pink one? 00:12:37.720 --> 00:12:42.120 That's the amygdala part of your brain structure. It's it's deep in the brain. 00:12:42.120 --> 00:12:47.400 It's the threat detection center of your brain. It's faster than thought, 00:12:48.840 --> 00:12:55.160 faster than reason. It's faster than theology. It's one job is to ask before anything else, 00:12:55.160 --> 00:13:02.280 am I safe? It doesn't wait for you to evaluate the situation. It fires first. 00:13:03.880 --> 00:13:11.320 And a researcher named Stephen Porgis calls this this this firing of the amygdala, the neuroception. 00:13:13.160 --> 00:13:18.120 It's your body's scanning for safety or threats before your conscious mind even gets involved. 00:13:19.640 --> 00:13:25.720 Porgis in his own word says this feelings of safety emerge from internal physiological states 00:13:25.720 --> 00:13:32.280 regulated by the autonomic nervous system. Safety is detected by the nervous system before the mind 00:13:32.280 --> 00:13:38.440 weighs in. Nothing in the soul heals until the body receives a credible cue of safety. 00:13:40.600 --> 00:13:49.960 That last line, like Bert burned that in. Nothing in the soul heals until the body receives a 00:13:49.960 --> 00:13:57.880 credible cue of safety. Jonathan Hite is a social psychologist. I've talked about moral 00:13:57.880 --> 00:14:10.680 psychologist. He describes the mind as a writer on an elephant. And the writer is your conscious 00:14:10.680 --> 00:14:17.240 self. It's the reasoning part of your brain. The part that that reads theology nods along at 00:14:17.240 --> 00:14:23.560 sermons can say, I know God loves me. And then the elephant is your emotional automatic system. 00:14:25.320 --> 00:14:31.560 Bigger, faster. It was their first Hite's insight from decades of research. He says this. 00:14:32.360 --> 00:14:37.960 The writer does not control the elephant. The writer thinks he does. But the elephant decides 00:14:37.960 --> 00:14:44.520 where to go. The writer's real job is to explain afterward why the elephant went that direction. 00:14:45.640 --> 00:14:48.200 Says the writer is a press secretary, not a president. 00:14:50.680 --> 00:14:57.960 The elephant is the amygdala. It's that the quick reaction. The writer's irrational brain. 00:14:59.080 --> 00:15:04.760 And fear-based theology trained the elephant before the writer had words for a lot of us who 00:15:04.760 --> 00:15:11.240 grew up in church and grew up in children's church. And we were told pretty early that you were broken. 00:15:12.440 --> 00:15:19.800 Your sin are going to hell. Before we could even figure out what those words meant. 00:15:24.120 --> 00:15:28.280 Fear-based theology trained the elephant before the writer had words. Remember, 00:15:29.080 --> 00:15:34.520 we talked a little bit ago, a couple of sermons ago about the God concept versus the God image. 00:15:35.640 --> 00:15:39.480 God concept is what you say out loud. Your theology, your beliefs, the God image is what 00:15:39.480 --> 00:15:47.400 you brace for. What you actually expect from God when you fail. Those are the writer and the elephant. 00:15:50.040 --> 00:15:57.320 This information alone, the idea is like information alone, hearing theology, hearing 00:15:57.320 --> 00:16:07.320 information, it cannot heal a fear-based God image. You can hear God loves you every Sunday for 40 years. 00:16:09.880 --> 00:16:15.560 The writer can agree, you take notes, say the prayer, but if the elephant was trained in 00:16:15.560 --> 00:16:22.760 childhood but God is a threat, the writer cannot argue the elephant out of it. The elephant overrides 00:16:22.760 --> 00:16:31.960 the writer every time. And the writer writes a theology paper then explaining why it was reasonable 00:16:31.960 --> 00:16:41.480 to be afraid. Because the writer is the PR for the elephant. Here's why fear is a good thing for me. 00:16:43.800 --> 00:16:49.080 Even though God loves me, I can explain why fear works, why it matters. This is the writer 00:16:49.080 --> 00:16:51.400 just trying to explain why the elephant did what the elephant did. 00:16:55.720 --> 00:17:02.200 So another scientist, a neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky. He's a Stanford neuroscientist. He's 00:17:02.200 --> 00:17:10.760 spent 40 years on this studying chronic threat to the body. His findings are textbook. When the 00:17:10.760 --> 00:17:17.880 body lives in sustained threat, cortisol stays elevated. Chronicly elevated cortisol suppresses 00:17:17.880 --> 00:17:23.640 the immune system, damages the hippocampus, drives inflammation, contributes to anxiety and heart 00:17:23.640 --> 00:17:30.520 disease and shortens life expectancy. Chronic fear isn't just a spiritual problem. It is a 00:17:30.520 --> 00:17:36.920 physiological one. It gets in the body. It stays. It is killing people. 00:17:39.880 --> 00:17:46.200 Now hold that next to what we just walked through at the beginning of this talk, 00:17:46.200 --> 00:17:52.520 Edwards centers in the hands of an angry God. Chick tracks, heaven's gate tells flames, 00:17:52.520 --> 00:17:58.200 howarts and telling people that anyone who believes in a God of love is deceived and stupid. 00:17:59.080 --> 00:18:05.080 A theological system explicitly designed to keep the body in sustained, perceived threat. 00:18:07.480 --> 00:18:14.200 What happens when a religion does that to a person, year after year, starting in childhood? 00:18:16.120 --> 00:18:24.840 The threat doesn't stay external. It gets attached. It gets attached to the very person you're 00:18:24.840 --> 00:18:35.160 being told to love most. I believe fear-based theology installs God into the amygdala. 00:18:38.680 --> 00:18:45.800 A person formed inside the framework of fear cannot read God through a present tense lens of love. 00:18:45.800 --> 00:18:53.080 They read God through a trauma template of threat. So prayer feels like surveillance. 00:18:54.280 --> 00:18:59.880 Communion feels like a courtroom. Confession feels like Russian roulette. Worship feels like 00:18:59.880 --> 00:19:06.760 you're auditioning for something or you're performing. And in silence feels dangerous. 00:19:11.240 --> 00:19:17.720 This person that their body is doing exactly what bodies do under chronic threat. The framework 00:19:17.720 --> 00:19:23.080 wasn't just theologically wrong. It was doing biological damage and it still is. 00:19:27.960 --> 00:19:33.560 Bernay Brown's research draws one more line under this. She says, Yilt says that, 00:19:34.360 --> 00:19:40.600 we've talked about this. I did something bad. Shame says I am bad. And shame, she's found, 00:19:40.600 --> 00:19:47.080 is highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, suicide, eating disorders. Shame doesn't 00:19:47.080 --> 00:19:55.320 produce change. It produces hiding. So a theology that begins with, you are born guilty, 00:19:57.240 --> 00:20:03.800 that builds its altar call on shame as the engine, doesn't produce holiness. 00:20:05.640 --> 00:20:14.920 It produces what Venderkolk said trauma produces. People hiding from themselves. Genesis three all 00:20:14.920 --> 00:20:34.280 over again. I can tell in the room, this harm is not abstract. People who lived under fear-based 00:20:34.280 --> 00:20:44.120 theology the longest were the ones who saw what it was doing first. If you start to read like 00:20:45.880 --> 00:20:52.280 womanist theology, which is theology through the lens of a black woman, 00:20:54.520 --> 00:20:59.800 you'll begin to see that they could point out some of the problems with this fear-based idea. 00:21:01.320 --> 00:21:04.920 Dr. Dolores Williams, she's a womanist theologian at Union Seminary, 00:21:04.920 --> 00:21:10.680 she wrote a book called Sisters in the Wilderness. And in it, she asked the question that most 00:21:10.680 --> 00:21:18.040 American theologians wouldn't. She said, does a theology that requires an innocent body like 00:21:18.040 --> 00:21:26.600 Jesus to be tortured, to satisfy a wrathful God, have anything to say to people whose bodies have 00:21:26.600 --> 00:21:35.480 been violated inside that same framework for 400 years. She went back to a store in the Old 00:21:35.480 --> 00:21:45.400 Testament of Hagar. Hagar was the enslaved woman of Abraham and Sarah. Sarah was unable to have 00:21:45.400 --> 00:21:54.440 a child and God had promised Abraham a child and so instead of waiting on God, they brought Hagar in. 00:21:55.240 --> 00:22:00.200 This enslaved woman and said, you're going to have a child with Abraham. 00:22:02.920 --> 00:22:10.840 They used her. And then when Sarah got mad and they got pregnant herself, they discarded Hagar. 00:22:11.720 --> 00:22:17.880 They sent her into the wilderness with her dying child. She was used and discarded. 00:22:18.600 --> 00:22:23.000 And if you look at the story in the Old Testament, God shows up, not in some temple, 00:22:23.000 --> 00:22:30.440 not like to this king to tell them to go find Hagar. No, in the wilderness, to the one that the 00:22:30.440 --> 00:22:39.960 system threw away. And in that story, Hagar gives God a name that no one else in the Bible gives. 00:22:41.240 --> 00:22:50.200 She says this. She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her. You are the God who sees me. 00:22:52.360 --> 00:22:59.880 And the Hebrew, it's Elroy. Not the God who required her suffering, not the God who 00:23:00.760 --> 00:23:05.000 was okay with what she went through because he was going to redeem it. No, no, no. The God who saw 00:23:05.000 --> 00:23:18.040 her and he stayed with her. The God who saw her. It's liberation theology in like five words. 00:23:20.280 --> 00:23:31.160 Is what a body under chronic threat actually needs. Not a transaction, which needs a witness. 00:23:32.280 --> 00:23:41.720 Not a verdict. Presence. A presence that says, I see you and I'm not looking away. I'm here with you. 00:23:43.240 --> 00:23:54.120 Another theologian. Howard Thurman. Black theologian is a mentor to MLK. He wrote this in 1949 in 00:23:54.120 --> 00:24:03.320 Jesus and the disinherited. Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage. 00:24:04.440 --> 00:24:09.400 For he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of 00:24:09.400 --> 00:24:14.840 hell that track the trail of the disinherited need have no dominion over them. 00:24:16.600 --> 00:24:25.320 He said, the three hounds of hell. Not in the afterlife. Now. He's speaking of the current moment 00:24:25.960 --> 00:24:29.800 and in the current moment, of fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, 00:24:31.400 --> 00:24:37.640 tracking us in this life, in our bodies, in our churches. These are the hounds of hell. 00:24:39.800 --> 00:24:47.240 And Jesus, if we believe this gospel says that he comes announcing the good news that they no 00:24:47.240 --> 00:24:56.600 longer have dominion over us. And what Howard Thurman is saying is this is what the gospel 00:24:56.600 --> 00:25:01.480 actually sounded like to people whose nervous systems were already on chronic alert. 00:25:02.520 --> 00:25:05.640 The gospel was not a threat. It was a liberation. 00:25:10.120 --> 00:25:12.600 It's back to the bottle. 00:25:16.280 --> 00:25:23.000 I've been doing a EMDR therapy for the last six months, maybe. 00:25:26.600 --> 00:25:30.280 For the PTSD that this medication helps me manage. 00:25:34.040 --> 00:25:44.840 It's a eye movement desensitization reprocessing. Thank you. 00:25:45.880 --> 00:25:48.840 I thought I had it written down in here, but it's EMDR. Okay. 00:25:53.000 --> 00:26:03.480 Is what? Oh, for my perspective, here's how EMDR works. You sit with your therapist, 00:26:04.680 --> 00:26:10.840 for me, mine is online with my VA therapist, so we're talking to the computer. And 00:26:11.960 --> 00:26:20.440 you bring a traumatic memory to your mind, whatever trauma caused, maybe some of this PTSD. 00:26:21.400 --> 00:26:25.720 So you bring that memory to the mind and you hold it there. And then this ball starts bouncing 00:26:26.680 --> 00:26:32.040 back and forth on my screen. It's like this. And so you're just supposed to fall out with your eyes. 00:26:33.240 --> 00:26:40.440 And for me, it takes me like she's like, okay, think about go through the memory, watch the ball. 00:26:41.480 --> 00:26:47.960 And for me, like the first couple of times that we get together, the first time the ball is 00:26:47.960 --> 00:26:55.880 bouncing on the screen, she's like, okay, take a breath. What was happening? What were you thinking 00:26:55.880 --> 00:27:01.000 about? And I was just thinking, stop watching the ball. Stop like focusing on the ball. 00:27:02.680 --> 00:27:06.600 All right, let's try this again. So you're supposed to just let your eyes just do the work, right? 00:27:06.600 --> 00:27:14.440 While you're thinking about this, this memory, look, it's a battle, okay? Left, right, left, right, 00:27:14.440 --> 00:27:20.520 your eyes follow it while you hold that memory. It sounds strange, but that eye movement is supposed 00:27:20.520 --> 00:27:28.280 to mimic what your brain does during REM sleep. And during REM sleep is when memories get processed 00:27:28.280 --> 00:27:32.840 and kind of filed away, it makes me think of like inside out, oh my gosh, she's asleep and they start 00:27:32.840 --> 00:27:40.680 putting things away, right? Traumatic memories though, they get stuck because the brain couldn't 00:27:40.680 --> 00:27:47.880 process them. It can process what happened when they happened. So MDR creates the conditions for the 00:27:47.880 --> 00:27:52.680 brain to finally do what it's trying to do all along. It's trying to process through and 00:27:54.440 --> 00:28:03.320 put this memory away. But during MDR, the memory doesn't disappear. I'm still going back to this 00:28:03.320 --> 00:28:15.960 event, but my body's relationship changes to that memory. There's like this alarm that's wired 00:28:16.600 --> 00:28:26.520 in my brain to that moment that we've talked about before. Like, I would go into say a movie 00:28:26.520 --> 00:28:33.000 theater and sit in the dark movie theater, and my brain would go into hypervigilance and protection 00:28:33.000 --> 00:28:39.080 mode. And I'm thinking about the ways I'm going to protect my family and plan my escape route 00:28:39.080 --> 00:28:49.000 in this room because my brain is sensing threat. And it knows what to do with threat because we've 00:28:49.000 --> 00:28:56.040 been here before in places that I can't control the things around me and something happened to me. 00:28:57.080 --> 00:29:01.960 And so my brain goes into this hypervigilance and hyper awareness and I start to plan and 00:29:03.160 --> 00:29:10.760 that's not good. Like, it makes it where I can't enjoy a movie with my family. But what we do is 00:29:10.760 --> 00:29:16.600 go back to the memory that caused this rewiring of my brain and I look at it differently. 00:29:17.960 --> 00:29:22.280 It's a part where I'm actually seeing like 23 year old Chad in this moment where 00:29:23.400 --> 00:29:32.120 a vehicle exploded and threw me on the ground. And I'm angry now. I mean, I survived. So that's 00:29:32.120 --> 00:29:39.080 good. But I'm upset because I couldn't control the moment. And a lot of my fear is built on 00:29:39.800 --> 00:29:44.760 not being in control. And I'm mad at the people around me that were in charge and 00:29:45.960 --> 00:29:54.680 but as we go through this process, my mind shifts. And I'm actually looking at 23 year old Chad and 00:29:55.560 --> 00:30:06.520 I'm just sad for him. Like, you didn't want to be here. You didn't choose really this. You didn't 00:30:06.520 --> 00:30:12.600 know what you're getting into. You're in a war that shouldn't be happening. And people whose land 00:30:12.600 --> 00:30:17.560 you're on trying to control them or mad at you. And so they're trying to kill you. And 00:30:18.520 --> 00:30:27.160 we're all just confused. But I look back at young Chad and now all I care about is how do I get 00:30:27.160 --> 00:30:36.280 him healthy? How do we not carry this anymore? How do we rewire the brain to where my body 00:30:36.280 --> 00:30:47.960 can lower the cortisol levels? Healing, it's not amnesia. It's reinterpretation under conditions 00:30:47.960 --> 00:30:57.800 of safety. So a month ago in that therapy room, something hit me that I haven't really been 00:30:57.800 --> 00:31:05.560 able to stop thinking about when when MDR is doing this with my PTSD, I believe this is exactly what 00:31:05.560 --> 00:31:11.640 Jesus was trying to do for the human condition when he came back. Not erase what happened. He's 00:31:11.640 --> 00:31:18.920 trying to change the meaning, trying to explain to us to restore the body to create conditions of 00:31:18.920 --> 00:31:25.320 safety where transformation becomes possible. He didn't come to teach us new set of rules. 00:31:26.440 --> 00:31:32.360 He came to fix the picture of God. People had been handed by their religion that was causing 00:31:32.360 --> 00:31:38.600 them harm. Hebrews one says it directly. It says, "In the past God spoke through the prophets, 00:31:38.600 --> 00:31:44.760 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son." The exact representation of his being. 00:31:47.480 --> 00:31:52.760 It's the actual picture, the true word, the actual picture doesn't like lead with threat. 00:31:55.240 --> 00:32:01.400 Listen to how Jesus talks. Throughout the gospels come to me. All who are weary. Do not be anxious 00:32:01.400 --> 00:32:09.640 about tomorrow. Look at the birds. Look at the lilies. Your father knows what you need. Read that 00:32:09.640 --> 00:32:17.480 as someone who studies trauma. Jesus is grounding people in the present moment. Don't worry about 00:32:17.480 --> 00:32:27.000 tomorrow. A textbook intervention for anxiety. Reminding them that they are seen. Asking them to 00:32:27.000 --> 00:32:34.280 look up and notice safety in their actual environment. He's quite literally helping bodies regulate. 00:32:36.440 --> 00:32:43.960 The God he reveals is not the God in the amygdala. He's a God who heals what religion broke. 00:32:48.920 --> 00:32:59.720 I think it matters for people in this room. A year ago, almost to the day, March 18th of last year, 00:33:00.680 --> 00:33:08.200 I recorded the video that you saw earlier. No script. I've been asking questions about the 00:33:08.200 --> 00:33:19.240 gospel for a long time. That was just one of those burning questions I had. I had no idea what I was 00:33:19.240 --> 00:33:26.840 doing. I had no idea that the question I asked at the end of that video was going to take me back 00:33:26.840 --> 00:33:32.200 to school for psychology. I had no idea it would become an eight week sermon series called Who 00:33:32.200 --> 00:33:39.720 Told You That. I had no idea it would change how I read, what I read, how I pray, how I pastor 00:33:39.720 --> 00:33:46.440 this church. But that question, who told you that? It was the start of everything that led to this 00:33:46.440 --> 00:33:52.120 next phase for us. I'd love to tell you that I'm a really good planner. I did that. A year later, 00:33:52.120 --> 00:33:58.040 we started this series. It was just random. I was like, I wonder when I shot that video, 00:33:58.040 --> 00:34:02.600 literally yesterday. And I went to look and I was like, oh, it's March 18th. And I was like, 00:34:02.600 --> 00:34:11.800 oh, I said, who told you that in that video? What? Look at the whole spirit. 00:34:19.000 --> 00:34:25.400 The arsenal didn't become this kind of community by accident. It became this kind of community 00:34:25.400 --> 00:34:37.160 because I couldn't live inside the old theology anymore. And a lot of you were there with me. 00:34:39.480 --> 00:34:43.560 We're here today asking these questions out loud on a Sunday morning in a church because 00:34:43.560 --> 00:34:51.480 that question wouldn't let me go. And if this series has been hard for you, I know some people 00:34:51.480 --> 00:35:01.080 that's been disorienting, grieving, maybe relieving all three at once. I want you to know that it 00:35:01.080 --> 00:35:11.080 costs me too. It's still costing me. I'm still in the chair with my therapist. I'm still relearning 00:35:11.080 --> 00:35:17.560 my own God image. But what I can tell you is this. On the other side of that question, 00:35:19.080 --> 00:35:29.800 there's a body that finally feels held. A faith that finally feels honest and a community, 00:35:29.800 --> 00:35:41.240 this community that finally feels safe. And that's what Jesus does, not metaphorically, 00:35:41.240 --> 00:35:45.000 like actually in the body over time with the right question. 00:35:46.760 --> 00:35:51.560 He says it in a sermon on the Mount. Six times he says, "You've heard it said, but I tell you." 00:35:53.320 --> 00:35:58.200 The traditional read is he's raising the bar. He's making the law harder. 00:35:59.960 --> 00:36:06.440 But read it through everything we covered today. I'll just read one. You've heard it said, 00:36:06.440 --> 00:36:13.400 "Do not murder." But I tell you, anyone who is angry with a brother is subject to judgment. 00:36:15.560 --> 00:36:22.040 He isn't making a rule stricter here. He's pointing to the internal state, the chronic anger, 00:36:22.040 --> 00:36:31.320 the threat response running as a way of life for someone that produces the desire to harm 00:36:31.320 --> 00:36:39.080 another person in the first place. The law, it managed behavior. And Jesus is addressing 00:36:39.080 --> 00:36:48.840 the operating system underneath that. Every antithesis follows the same move. Jesus didn't 00:36:48.840 --> 00:36:54.040 come to raise the bar of the law. He came to offer the therapy that the law could never provide. 00:36:55.640 --> 00:37:02.120 Over and over he does this. And then he gets into the beatitudes where you hear him through 00:37:02.120 --> 00:37:07.080 the same lens of a regulated body, a nervous system at rest, like listen to how he says this now. 00:37:08.040 --> 00:37:12.520 "Blessed are the poor in spirit, not the performers, 00:37:14.840 --> 00:37:22.600 blessed are those who mourn." Why? Because those are the ones who can actually feel something. 00:37:25.400 --> 00:37:31.480 "Blessed are the meek, strength that doesn't need to prove itself. Blessed are the peacemakers, 00:37:31.480 --> 00:37:44.360 those who actively construct safety for others." Every one of these "blessed are" is a body that's 00:37:44.360 --> 00:37:55.560 no longer on guard. Everyone is the opposite of trauma. And the line that has crushed people 00:37:55.560 --> 00:38:08.840 inside of fear-based theology for centuries, love your enemies. Neurobiologically, that's 00:38:08.840 --> 00:38:16.200 impossible from a threat state. You cannot love your enemy while your alarm is running. 00:38:18.680 --> 00:38:26.360 From a body that knows it's loved, a body that has received enough safety, that the alarm has 00:38:26.360 --> 00:38:33.000 finally quieted, then loving an enemy isn't heroism. It's just an overflow of that love. 00:38:34.200 --> 00:38:36.920 It is seeing someone from a different perspective. 00:38:40.280 --> 00:38:48.280 Jesus wasn't asking for superhuman moral performance here or to fake it. He was describing 00:38:48.280 --> 00:38:56.920 the natural fruit of a body that knows it is loved. I'll close to this one verse and one question. 00:38:59.480 --> 00:39:07.240 John writes this in his first letter. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will 00:39:07.240 --> 00:39:15.160 have confidence on the day of judgment. In this world, we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. 00:39:16.120 --> 00:39:21.560 Perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment. 00:39:23.800 --> 00:39:31.240 The word for confidence here is "prescia" is boldness. Freedom to approach without covering. PSA that 00:39:31.240 --> 00:39:35.880 we talked about a while back told you that you can only appear before God if Jesus is blocking the 00:39:35.880 --> 00:39:44.680 view. He's your snow covering on the dung that you are. That's a quote from an actual pastor. 00:39:47.080 --> 00:39:55.160 I think it was Jonathan Edwards actually. John says love made complete produces the ability to stand. 00:39:57.000 --> 00:40:03.160 And the fear John names, the one love drives out, is specifically fear that has to do with 00:40:03.720 --> 00:40:13.320 punishment, with the bracing, the God and the amygdala, the fear experience of standing in front of God. 00:40:15.880 --> 00:40:21.560 And if that's still your experience, if fear is still what drives your spiritual life, 00:40:22.200 --> 00:40:29.640 John is telling you something is incomplete, not your faith, your experience of the love that God 00:40:29.640 --> 00:40:39.880 has for you. The transformation hasn't landed in your body yet. Here's where we've been all hour. 00:40:40.680 --> 00:40:47.960 We're trying to move God. I know. Not out of your life, but out of your amygdala, 00:40:49.720 --> 00:40:55.080 out of the alarm system, out of a place that causes fear and into the part of you that knows how to 00:40:55.080 --> 00:41:04.920 rest in a safe relationship. Paul tells the church in Galatia what life actually looks like 00:41:05.720 --> 00:41:12.360 if you're experiencing this love. He calls it the fruit of the spirit. Fruit of the spirit is love, 00:41:12.360 --> 00:41:17.800 joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 00:41:18.840 --> 00:41:26.040 Read that list as a neuroscientist would every single thing on it grows only in a regulated body, 00:41:27.880 --> 00:41:34.360 a body that knows it's safe. You can't manufacture any of these out of fear. 00:41:35.240 --> 00:41:42.200 Try producing patience when your alarm is going off. Try producing kindness from a body that's 00:41:42.200 --> 00:41:49.880 bracing. Try producing peace when you're scanning for threat. You can fake it for a while, but 00:41:50.920 --> 00:41:55.560 you can't bear that fruit. That fruit only grows where it was made to grow. 00:42:00.600 --> 00:42:05.800 John tells us exactly where that's at. It's in the midst of the love that God has for you. 00:42:07.560 --> 00:42:14.520 It's the question I leave you with is this. What would it feel like in your actual body, 00:42:14.520 --> 00:42:20.280 not as a theological idea, just in your body? What would it feel like to stop bracing in the 00:42:20.280 --> 00:42:27.320 presence of God? To approach prayer like you approach a conversation with someone who is 00:42:27.320 --> 00:42:33.640 completely safe for you, where you don't have to manage how you're coming across, where you can 00:42:33.640 --> 00:42:38.440 be tired, uncertain, angry, wrong, and know you're still held. 00:42:42.440 --> 00:42:47.720 What happens in your body in that moment? What should happen is your shoulders should drop, 00:42:48.840 --> 00:42:57.800 your breath should deepen and slow, and something clenched in you can let go. This is the body 00:42:57.800 --> 00:43:07.880 receiving what it was made for. It's the only place that fruit grows. So let's hopefully, 00:43:08.840 --> 00:43:13.720 as we walk through this, the invitation today isn't to believe a new theological proposition. 00:43:16.280 --> 00:43:22.680 It's to let your body do something it may not have been allowed to do for a long time when we talk 00:43:22.680 --> 00:43:39.480 about God. Just relax. The God revealed in Jesus doesn't work through threat because threat cannot 00:43:39.480 --> 00:43:49.400 produce the kind of human Jesus called blessed. The theology of secure love is not soft. It's not 00:43:49.400 --> 00:43:58.120 a soft alternative to a hard gospel. It's the only theology whose fruit the body can actually bear. 00:44:00.120 --> 00:44:11.640 Our soul. God love us. It's who you're meant to be. We'll see you next week.