In Which Sheila Chats About Medical Science and the Gospel

The jury is in.  We have proof that "as a woman thinks in her heart, so is she".  Medical science has verified what the Bible has always told us about the heart being the seat of choice, imagination, and emotion.

And every emotion releases its own chemical into the bloodstream, for health or for harm.  There is not a thought you can think that does not carry with it an effect on your body.

It is no mystery where migraines and fibromyalgia and back pain comes from.  First the cause, then the effect.  We are literally making ourselves sick, bathing ourselves at a cellular level in negativity, criticism, and depression.  The chemicals released correspond to the emotion.  The emotion corresponds to the thought.

I take it a step further and deeper.  I say:  your every thought is conceived from a basis of what you believe about God.

Bottom line.

After spending hours reading over the groundbreaking work of neuroscientist Candace Pert, and digesting the research of Dr. Caroline Leaf, I am jumping up and down in a frenzy of cross-application.

The poet Robert Frost said that intelligence is a feat of association.  God has wired my brain to make connections across seemingly incongruous ideas.  I can get revelation into the ekklesia when I read about sea turtles.  This ability to connect is both a blessing and a curse.  It sometimes makes me darn near inscrutable when I try to explain where I am coming from.

Friends, you are so what you think about.  You aren't merely becoming what you choose to focus on, you already are.  You already are who you are going to be.  The only answer for every woman is to repent - changing our mind should be a way of life.

The only hope for change in the life, is a change in the mind.

I'll say it again:  Lady - change your mind!

You better be stuffing the good news of the gospel into your brain, beginning day before yesterday!  You better be about the full time business of renewing your mind, else you become a jaded, cynical woman who cannot change her mind to (literally) save her life.

No wonder the devil gets upset when grace is fully and purely preached.  What we believe about God is either the truth that sets us free, or clever lies, posing as truth...lies that imprison us.

Scientists have isolated and named the one thing all negativity springs from:  fear.  God has always known this.  He said, "She who fears has not been made mature in love." 

Oh, how He loves us!  How He loves us, oh!  He surrounds us, and He is love and grace and mercy.  He requires nothing from us that He has not first provided for us in Jesus Christ.

If you struggle with the  doctrines of grace, you struggle at the core.  My heart breaks for you.  When, when will you tire of the veil that shrouds your spiritual understanding?  When, when will you properly diagnose your relational dysfunction, your physical disease, your utter weariness of soul?  When, when will you be honest?

See, your brain is "always watching you".  Your brain knows what you actually think and believe.  Sounds a lot like the Bible when it says, "No man knows the thoughts of a man, save the spirit of man that is in him..."

Whenever your life is at cross purposes with what you truly think, whenever you invent your own version of events, every time you pretend, the heart knows.  Go on and spend the rest of your life justifying it or covering it up - it will come out in another form, usually pain in your body.  The only remedy is to wash your mind clean with the Word - making what you think line up with the only sure plumb line in the universe:  God's thoughts.

They are not your thoughts.  You have to get outside yourself to think a God-thought.  Your first reaction is usually not a God-thought.  Your opinion is usually not a God-thought.  Your finest effort on your finest day is not His way.  The heart knows, each and every time you fall short of the glory of God.

Medical science proves that we must be washed, day in and day out, Sunday in and Sunday out, with good news.  Dendrites don't form strong and true any other way.  A topical sermon here and there, brushing up against the gospel but rarely grasping it and examining it at life-long-lengths is not enough to form even the physical connections across synapses, much less a transformed soul.

It's why you are okay one day, and not okay the next.  It is why you hurt.  You haven't lingered over what is true, lovely, and of good news to you.

The jury is in.  You must understand how very much you are loved.  It will be health to your bones.