Part 1
Jeremiah 17:10 NIV
"I the Lord
search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man according to his
conduct, according to what his deeds deserve."
What Do You Know About Yourself?
Perhaps you are like me and find yourself wondering
what to make of the hidden parts of your mind.
It seems so complex and strange, like a cave filled with mysterious
creatures, indecipherable writings and strange pictures on the walls. Unpredictable forces are at work within you
that push you about like a bully on the playground. Do you just let them have their way with you,
impacting what you feel about things and how you react to situations? Can you do something about the internal
forces that affect your life in hidden ways?
Should you be concerned about them or live as if your unconscious
thoughts don’t matter? What does the
Bible have to say about the unconscious world?
Two terms in the Bible, when combined, are what
describe the place of our “inner world”.
The first Hebrew term, lev, is generally translated heart and is what
modern culture thinks of as the mind.
The second, Kilya is difficult to translate but in older English Bibles
is called the “reins” or “kidneys”. It
is the inner place of the self; the deep part of us that includes our thinking,
our unconscious world, our passion and our will. Jeremiah 17: 10 puts both these terms
together and reminds us that God has access to all the hidden places of the
inner being. "I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind, to reward a man
according to his conduct, according to what his deeds deserve." (Jeremiah
17:10 NIV)
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We do though face a great problem when it comes to
our unconscious thought life. It is corrupted. Jeremiah 17:9 says this about the heart. The
heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9 NIV) The effect of Sin at every area of our
thinking, both conscious as well as unconscious, is devastating. It impacts us at every turn in life from how
we feel about things to the way we make our decisions. Our heart is wrecked and we cannot trust it
to effectively take us through life. No
one, not Freud or Jung or Watson or any of the “thinkers” in the study of
psychology understand fully the chaos found in the heart.
There is an interesting term the Bible uses to
describe God’s plan for us. Surely you desire truth in the inner parts;
you teach me wisdom in the inmost place. (Psalm 51:6 NIV) The word translated “truth” is the Hebrew
word “emeth” and means firmness, reliability, faithfulness. As the heart is now, you cannot count on it. The thoughts that are generated by the heart
are at best unreliable; at worst destructive.
You cannot count on what comes out of your heart and have confidence
that what comes out of it will be good.
God’s plan for you is to make your heart trustworthy and the thoughts in
it productive and beneficial to your being.
The only way that is possible is if God gets at the root of the problem,
the Sin that corrupts the heart.
We are reminded in Jeremiah 17: 10, that only God is
the great psychologist because He is capable of seeing into the deepest and
most broken parts of the heart and knowing what to do about it. "I
the Lord search the heart and examine the mind…” The prayer of the Psalmist takes this ability
of God into account. Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me
and know my anxious thoughts. (Psalm 139:23 NIV) Why is this important? What does the psalmist really want? We have no tools for figuring out the effect
of our unconscious thinking upon what we do and how we react to things. God though does and yet He will not simply
take over your unconscious like some hypnotist if we don’t want Him there. He waits for our praying to begin working in
us at the unconscious level.
Consider carefully God’s ability to do something
about your unconscious mind. Psalm 51: 6
insists, you teach me wisdom in the
inmost place. This is not just
insight into how to fix a lawn mower.
You and I want much more than that in the inmost place, in the
unconscious parts of the heart. You want
the supernatural thinking of God that combats the broken thinking of your
unconscious mind. "Where then does wisdom come from? Where does understanding dwell? ... God
understands the way to it and he alone knows where it dwells, (Job
28:20, 23 NIV) With your permission, God
will reshape and remake your unconscious mind so that His wisdom rises up out
of it.
1 comment:
Very interesting, Pastor......
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