The Desire Line

What does "heaven" mean? What does "going to heaven when you die" mean? We take a look at the Gospel, Gospels, heaven and the Kingdom of Heaven. Is heaven a place that you go when you die? Or is the Kingdom of Heaven here? We talk about how Jesus, in the Gospels talks about His message of the Kingdom, and how His coming completes God's plan for new creation. Both tell stories of spiritual development and how our perspective started to change when we began to study the bible in college and read through the whole thing. There was a time when Susette began to be allow herself, through invitation from pastors and professors to ask questions and change her thinking. N.T. Wright quote: "Heaven is important, but it's not the end of the world."

The Gospel: an invitation to participate with God the King in new creation that was introduced when Jesus came, loved, taught, died, and rose from the dead, conquering death, and ascended to the Father. Our RESPONSE to the Gospel is often viewed as the Good News itself. It's not "you accept Jesus into your heart and he forgives your sins" (which is true) but not the central message

Jesus is the King. Our response to this good news is: Confessing: Confess our sins, recognize what we've done. Repenting: We turn from what we worshiped before. Believing: We believe He's the King, and new creation is here. Following: We follow Him and engage in relationship for our life.

Cognitive theory: Piaget https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html

Assimilation and Accommodation Jean Piaget (1952; see also Wadsworth, 2004) viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation (adjustment) to the world. This happens through:

Assimilation – Which is using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation.

Accommodation – This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.

Equilibration – This is the force which moves development along. Piaget believed that cognitive development did not progress at a steady rate, but rather in leaps and bounds. Equilibrium occurs when a child's schemas can deal with most new information through assimilation. However, an unpleasant state of disequilibrium occurs when new information cannot be fitted into existing schemas (assimilation).

Equilibration is the force which drives the learning process as we do not like to be frustrated and will seek to restore balance by mastering the new challenge (accommodation). Once the new information is acquired the process of assimilation with the new schema will continue until the next time we need to make an adjustment to it.

Jean Piaget's concept of adaptation

Example of Assimilation A 2-year-old child sees a man who is bald on top of his head and has long frizzy hair on the sides. To his father’s horror, the toddler shouts “Clown, clown” (Siegler et al., 2003).

Example of Accommodation In the “clown” incident, the boy’s father explained to his son that the man was not a clown and that even though his hair was like a clown’s, he wasn’t wearing a funny costume and wasn’t doing silly things to make people laugh.

With this new knowledge, the boy was able to change his schema of “clown” and make this idea fit better to a standard concept of “clown”. New information includes disorientation, because it shakes up what we've always thought was truth.

Quote from Frank Viola, "Pagan Christianity" “As stated previously, the sinner’s prayer eventually replaced the biblical role of water baptism. Though it is touted as gospel today, this prayer developed only recently. D. L. Moody was the first to employ it. Moody used this “model” of prayer when training his evangelistic coworkers.

But it did not reach popular usage until the 1950s with Billy Graham’s Peace with God tract and later with Campus Crusade for Christ’s Four Spiritual Laws. There is nothing particularly wrong with it. Certainly, God will respond to the heartfelt prayers of any individual who reaches out to Him in faith. However, it should not replace water baptism as the outward instrument for conversion-initiation.

The phrase personal Savior is yet another recent innovation that grew out of the ethos of nineteenth-century American revivalism. It originated in the mid-1800s to be exact. But it grew to popular parlance by Charles Fuller (1887–1968). Fuller literally used the phrase thousands of times in his incredibly popular Old Fashioned Revival Hour radio program that aired from 1937 to 1968. His program reached from North America to every spot on the globe. At the time of his death, it was heard on more than 650 radio stations around the world.”

This week Susette Magana shares a sermon on recognizing and accepting our emotions, learning to regulate them and integrating them in our relationship with God.

Emotions (all of them) are normal.

• EMOTIONS and BEHAVIORS are different. When we feel something, we then make a choice to act.

“Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality; listening to our emotions ushers us into reality. And reality is where we meet God.” Dan Allendar.

• God created us to experience a full range of emotions, but not to be subject to them (let them run our lives).
• If we don’t deal with painful emotions, like anger, fear, sadness, they can become WAYS OF LIFE or part of our IDENTITY, like being resentful, anxious, or hopeless.

Ezekiel 36:26 NLT I will take your stony, stubborn heart, and give you a tender, responsive heart.

• Emotional regulation: Once we know what’s happening, we can learn to regulate it.
• Our Body: deep breathing, exercise, muscle relaxation for tension
• Our Mind/Heart: Acknowledging our pain & fear, resisting shame, & asking for help.

1 How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

2 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts

and day after day have sorrow in my heart?

How long will my enemy triumph over me?

3 Look on me and answer, Lord my God.

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,

4 and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”

and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

5 But I trust in your unfailing love;

my heart rejoices in your salvation.

6 I will sing the Lord’s praise,

for he has been good to me.

The soul seeks harmony, connection, and integration.

Dallas Willard

PROBLEM:

DISINTEGRATION: When these parts of our soul feel disconnected (from self or others) or overwhelmed.

If we don’t deal with painful emotions, like anger, fear, sadness, they can become WAYS OF LIFE or part of our IDENTITY, like being resentful, anxious, or hopeless. These are more postures that our soul takes than emotional responses.

In order to NOT fall into these ways of living, we need to acknowledge them or confess them before God and trusted people, and work to keep our hearts and minds tender & responsive towards others.

Ezekiel 36:26 NLT

I will take your stony, stubborn heart, and give you a tender, responsive heart.

WHAT IF:

• We could feel a full range of emotions, without self-judgement, but that we have enough wisdom to not “REACT” to them, but to “make decisions & respond” when we feel them.
• What if emotions were a normal part of our daily life, instead of something that we avoid or demand attention for?
• What if, as the family of God, we invited a full range of emotions into our prayers, song, and relationships?

We take a look at The Critical Journey theory by Hagberg + Guelich, which looks at the external + internal spiritual journey. We weave in a lot of Peter Scazzero's Emotionally Healthy Spirituality theory, and how important that perspective has been.

"You can't be spiritual mature if you're emotionally immature." Pete Scazzero

The Critical Journey Drawing upon this classical vision of the Christian life and drawing from the work of James Fowler’s seminal Stages of Faith, Janet O. Hagberg and Robert A. Guelich, developed a stage theory model for the spiritual journey that they call “the critical journey.”

6 stages: First 3: the “external journey” (1) Recognition of God—a believer first encounters God and experiences the life of faith; (2) Life of Discipleship—one engages in the disciplines and practices of their faith; (3) the Productive Life—one moves towards a productive and active life working for God.

Next 3, Inner Journey What do you think it ends with?

(4) Inner journey, doubts and disappointments, loss of previous structures, church may not make sense DESIRE LINE! (5) Journey outward, toward others, freedom to be, no need to prove their faith or earn anything In love, submitting to God’s perfect love We see love is all in all (6) Life of Love, union with God

“For most of us the Wall appears through a crisis that turns our world upside down. It comes, perhaps, through a divorce, a job loss, the death of a close friend or family member, a cancer diagnosis, a disillusioning church experience, a betrayal, a shattered dream, a wayward child, a car accident, an inability to get pregnant, a deep desire to marry that remains unfulfilled, a dryness or loss of joy in our relationship with God, a building permit denied by the community for the fourth time.” Peter Scarzerro

“The Wall experience”, Hagberg and Guelich explain, “is the place where psychology and spirituality, converge.”

Ignatian Spirituality "Finding God in All Things" Check out this article on Ignatian Spirituality http://jesuits.org/spirituality

You can't be spiritual mature if you're emotionally immature. Pete Scazzero

Matt 23:26 "First wash the inside of the cup and the dish, and then the outside will become clean, too."

John 1:1-5 (NLT) 1 In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He existed in the beginning with God. 3 God created everything through him, and nothing was created except through him. 4 The Word gave life to everything that was created,[a] and his life brought light to everyone. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.

With Spiritual Development, what you're going through, isn't chaos. It makes sense. Anything that brings up fear, or the unknown-- trusting God and seeking Union with HIM is what gets you through.

How do Christians engage in drawing closer to God in a real church environment? This is a break-it-down episode, where we spend time talking more about moralism + hedonism and how we experience M. Scott Peck's Stage 2 in our lives, and in our churches.

We break down the concept of inviting God into the darkness of our shameful thoughts by asking "God, how can you be so good?" in the midst of it.

Stage 2 can be associated with high degrees of rigidity

Brandon's theory: The Anatomy of Religious Rigidity

Two ways to soothe Anxiety: Moralism/Hedonism (maladaptive coping skills) that don't help us in the long run.

People have anxiety because they have insecurity, people compensate by being rigid, because that feels like piety, piety feels like God will like us, soothes our anxiety

“In”-- am i in? What if I'm rejected? Am I fully loved, accepted, respected by you?

Looking at expectations of pastors in church--how do church members respond when pastors talk about difficult concepts or try to deal with difficult issues in the church? How do Christians engage with their pastors, and what roles to they expect pastors to fill?

Susette talks about her experience in shifting her pastors out the expectation of being close friends, or in an intimate relationship, even though the pastor-church goer relationship feels so intimate.

But anyone who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise that person at the last day. John 6:54

Integrating love into shame is a spiritual discipline, and a neuroscientific process. Inviting God's goodness into the dark thoughts that we have, instead of hiding as a result of the thoughts, can neutralize them.

Brandon invites us to an exercise: when we're angry, sad, ashamed or embarrassed, or in the darkest thought of hatred, sexual desire, etc, we can state "God, how can you be so good?". We invite "light" into the "darkness", which neutralizes it.

The Word gave life to everything that was created, and his life brought light to everyone. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it. John 1:4-5

This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all. 6 So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth. 7 But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin. 1 John 1:5-7

More on: False self vs. True self

https://cac.org/the-illusion-of-our-false-self-2017-08-15/

Neuron info, with myelin sheath: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology/neuron-nervous-system/a/overview-of-neuron-structure-and-function

"One of the signs of maturity is the thought that no longer occurs to you." --Dallas Willard

Outro music:

Feel Your Love by Still Spoken featuring Soy Maulit

Last episode we continued our discussion on spiritual abuse. This week Brandon Cook shares a sermon he gave titled Forgiving Reality. In light of our arc on abuse we have explored the place forgiveness has on our path to healing from our trauma. Brandon takes the discussion a step further by suggesting that we have the choice to also forgive reality and the difficult circumstances and truths it brings.