Garwood Presbyterian Church

The Spirit-Mind-Body Connection and Receiving Your Heavenly Father's Love

God's Way to Health, Healing, and Wholeness

"May God Himself sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless." I Thes. 5:23

1. The Mind-Body Connection
   1. It is considered a scientific fact by the medical community that our emotions can effect our body for either good or bad, for good health or for harm with diseases and illnesses.
      1. In the September 27, 2004, edition of Newsweek magazine, an article titled "The New Science of Mind and Body", states, "That thoughts and feelings can affect our health is hardly news. In the span of a few decades, mind-body medicine has evolved from heresy into something approaching cliché. " But it goes on to say, "The relationship between emotion and health is turning out to be more important than most of us could have imagined. Anxiety, alienation and hopelessness are not just feelings. Neither are love, serenity and optimism. All are physiological states that affect our health just as clearly as obesity or physical fitness. Modern life is rife with potential stressors, and there is now little question that uncontrolled stress can kill. Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon recognized 90 years ago that when confronted by a threat - physical or emotional, real or imagined - the body responds with a rise in blood pressure, heart rate, muscle tension and breathing rate. We now know that this physiological 'stress response' involves hormones and inflammatory chemicals that, while valuable in measured bursts, can foster everything from headaches to heart attacks in overdose. Indeed, experts now believe that 60 to 90 percent of all doctor visits involve stress related complaints. As researchers chart the health effects of hostility and hopelessness, they're also gaining unprecedented insights into the mind's power to heal."
   2. Certain emotions, like anxiety and fear, anger and bitterness, and self-rejection and self-hatred can cause us to have a disease or make us more vulnerable to get one, and can make it more difficult for us to get rid of one, because they change the chemical and hormonal makeup of our body in specific ways for the worse over the long run.
      1. Staying angry can cause us to get cancer, or contribute to us having a heart attack.
      2. Self-rejection and self-hatred can give us high cholesterol, coronary artery disease, osteoarthritis, strokes, or an autoimmune disease.
      3. Anxiety and fear can give us a whole list of diseases, including allergies, asthma, backaches. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, fibromyalgia, high blood pressure, hives, hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), insomnia, migraine or tension headaches, Multiple Chemical Sensitiv-ity/Environmental Illness, rashes and itching, reflux, shingles, sinus infections, or ulcers.
   3. The medical field says that about 80% of the diseases and illnesses we get come from a psychological/emotional basis, and not because of a physical reason.
2. The Mind/Emotion-Spirit Connection
   1. Certain emotions are not only harmful to our body, but are sinful spiritually.
      1. Staying angry is sinful: Mat. 5:21-22, Gal. 5:19-21, Eph. 4:26-27, 30-31, Heb. 12:15, James 1:19-20.
      2. Fear and anxiety are sinful: Isa. 43:1-5, Mat. 6:25-34, Mat. 8:23-27, John 14:27, II Tim. 1:7.
      3. Self-rejection and hatred are sinful because God loves us. See III. A., and Mat. 22:38-39.
      4. The Bible teaches that sin can make us physically sick: Deu. 28:15, 21-22, 27-28, 35, 58-61, 65-66; Psalm 119:67; Proverbs 14:30; Isaiah 53:4-5; John 5:1-14; James 5:14-16.
      5. It also teaches that repentance, obedience and righteousness will heal us and give us good health: Ex. 15:26, Deu. 7:11-13a, 15, Isa. 58:6-8, I Thes. 5:23, James 5:16, I John 1:9.
   2. The sinful, harmful emotions are given permission to stay with us by a spiritual defect.
      1. If we are staying angry, the spiritual defect is that we are not forgiving.
      2. If we are fearful, it is that we are not trusting in the Lord and resting in His love for us.
      3. If we don't like ourself, it is that we are not loving ourself like God does.
   3. The right thing to do is to:
      1. Recognize - that the emotion is sinful.
      2. Responsibility - take, that it is yours and who you are.
      3. Repent - tell God that you are wrong.
      4. Renounce - that you are not going to live this way any more.
      5. Remove - it from your life; tell it to get out of your life.
      6. Replace - it with a Godly attitude:
         1. Replace anger with forgiveness.
         2. Replace fear with trust in God and resting in His love for you.
         3. Replace self-rejection with love for yourself like God has for you.
3. Sinful Emotions Can Get Into Us By Our Not Being Loved, and Especially If Not By Our Parents
   1. The solution is to believe and receive the love that God has for us
      1. "I have loved you with an everlasting love.", Jer. 31:3.
      2. "Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.", Psalm 27:10.
      3. "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.", Romans 5:8.
      4. "How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!", I John 3:1.
      5. "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.", I John 4:9-10, 16.
      6. "He chose us in him [Christ] before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accor-dance with his will and pleasure.", Ephesians 1:4-5.
      7. "Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions - it is by grace you have been saved.", Ephesians 2:4-5.
      8. "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.", Romans 8:38-39.
      9. "And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.", Ephesians 3:17-19.