Some of us have things in our past that we would love to forget. They remind us of moments of being less than our best selves or of pain that resurfaces to wound again and again. The past...that foe that just won’t let us go although we try our hardest to slay it. But should we?
One thing about our common enemy, the Satan, is that he knows that our past can be a means of growth, healing and good if we can see it differently. This is not to minimize trauma that has occurred, nor abuse at the hands of another human being. These are real and difficult circumstances to overcome and should not be thought of as things that can just be brushed off. However, it is the story of our past that shapes its power and place in our present. If the past is to be useful to us we need to rewrite the narrative.
Paul writes something very powerful to this end that we should see afresh from the perspective of retelling the story of our past. In 2 Corinthians 10:3-7 Paul writes
3 For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. 4 For the
weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 5 We
destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every \
thought captive to obey Christ, 6 being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience
is complete.
I want to make a statement here that might be a bit controversial, but I believe is both warranted in our current climate and, because it is scripture, true. At the root of mental health is the belief in narratives that run counter to the truth of the Word of God. Let me make it clear from the start that I am not a trained clinical psychologist. My views are not the views of empirical data or science. I am a pastor-theologian who believes that all science, if it is true, will be so because it is connected to the Word of God.
These days mental health is everywhere because mental health is a real problem. Along with that I believe that what we are seeing in the cases of mental health should be understood in the light of how and why God made man. Man was made by God and for God meaning that our true self and our complete, whole self is intimately connected to our operating in that purpose. So, we can rightly say that the first person whose mental health was disrupted was Eve's (Genesis 3). Made from the rib of the man who was made perfect, she was deceived by the enemy to go against the design of God and, because of that, chaos entered into the world. We know it was mental because the scripture tells us so.
3 But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led
astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ (2 Corinthians 11:3).
This verse is instructive because it tells us the fundamental reality that bring chaos: when our thinking becomes disconnected from a pure devotion to Christ. Paul uses Eve as the example of what he means in this verse and he teaches us that Eve's act of rebellion was because of a mental disruption of her devotion to the Lord. In other words, the first human's mental problem was the result of her disconnecting from the purposes of God.
The reason I am writing this in the light of 2 Corinthians 10:3-6 above is because I believe that we have isolated mental health from spiritual health and, as such, have made it a discipline of study that can exists without intimate consideration of the spiritual. We speak about mental health devoid of spiritual health and this, to me, is the root cause of the growing cases of mental health in our country. Is there more to mental health? Of course. But there is nothing more foundational to understanding mental health than its connection with the purposes of God.
Now, in 2 Corinthians 10 Paul is talking about mental health, spiritually! He is speaking about more than this but not less than this. He is saying that the battles we are losing or winning are all due to the condition of our mental health. We are either believing the Word of God and, as a result, bringing every thought captive, or we are letting the enemy continually write the script and believing him. Our past haunts us based on how and with what we are fighting it.
Paul tells us that we are destroy arguments and opinions. Those words speak to logic. They speak to the story that someone is or has told us about our lives and our past. Paul teaches us that our mental health is connected to our tearing up the script of the devil and replacing it with the transforming, forgiving and restoring power of the gospel of God in the Lord Jesus Christ. This gospel tears down strongholds – our longstanding and unbiblical thinking about our past that we have believed from the enemy’s script. The gospel, however, begins chipping away at the narrative the enemy keeps feeding us about our past and it begins makes room for the love and truth of God to prevail.
The past that haunts us and feels debilitating is really a mental health issue. Paul is teaching us that mental health is killing everything that competes against the knowledge of God being prized in your heart and mind. Our past haunts us and stifles us because, in truth, we are not rewriting the devil's narrative with the gospel. We are believing what he says about us as opposed to what Christ has done for us and what God says about us. We are viewing our past from the enemy's perspective and all he tells us is how bad we were, how wrong we were and how much we deserved what we received. That is not the narrative of the gospel.
The gospel tells us that we are redeemed, forgiven, reconciled, free, cleansed, holy, loved, and that we are the delight of God. The gospel reminds us that we are recipients of mercy and that grace and love are the banners that now stand forever and only over our lives. This is the narrative of the gospel. This is the perspective from which we are to see our past. When this becomes the framework of assessment we will to learn to say with Joseph our past: "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good,... (Genesis 50:20).
We have to keep reminding ourselves of this truth every day, however, because the devil has more scripts than McDonald's has burgers. He is relentless and he is crafty and cunning. He will not stop fighting you to disbelieve what the Lord has said about you just as he did with Eve. I will continue this probe a bit more on mental health in the coming posts. I believe that the enemy is winning spiritually in the lives of men and women because we are dis-associating mental health with the gospel and spiritual health.
If sin came into the world because of mental chaos then all mental chaos is, in some way, connected with depravity. I am not saying that a person's own sins are the reasons for their mental health, although this can and is true in some cases. What I am saying is that the chaotic presence of sin in the world is the reason we have mental health issues in the first place.
May we always see the gospel of Christ as central in all things.