Part III: The Process of Right Thinking 9 Deprogram and Catharsis

Part III The Process of Right Thinking

9 Deprogram and Catharsis

We cannot ask someone to make a particular commitment unless they know something of the content. A mature commitment is based on an understanding of the content they are committing to. For example, people sometimes make a decision for Christ without adequately understanding the content of their faith. Therefore, they may end up making a sincere but naive commitment.

We want to start committing ourselves to act on the information that we have received about right thinking. Look at the 139th Psalm. In the first three verses, David wrote, “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.”

David went on to say, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain” (verse 6). God’s wonderfully intimate knowledge is too much for us to comprehend. Why would the holy God of the universe know us this well? Why would He set His affections

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upon us to the degree that He would go to any lengths— even the death of His Son—just to see us redeemed so that we might have fellowship with Him? God knows us more intimately, more perfectly, and more realistically than we even know ourselves.

David said later in this psalm, “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” (verse 16). God knows every aspect of us. His knowledge of us must become more and more our own knowledge of ourselves. We need His help to see ourselves as He sees us, rather than how we see ourselves or how the world sees us.

We need God’s vantage point. We need to have His thoughts about us. Isaiah 55:9 declares: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” We should seek to bridge the chasm between what He thinks and what we think through an understanding of His Word.

Now, we’re going to move to the actual process needed to achieve right thinking. We have been looking at how wondrously the mind of mankind was originally created. But we fell and our minds became darkened. We now have a perverted mind that is no longer capable of receiving God’s thoughts or thinking His thoughts. Therefore, we need Him to renew our minds so that we receive and start appropriating or adopting the mind of

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Christ. And we also need to have our minds cleansed of our unworthy concepts of God.

Our principal thesis has been that the quality of a person’s living cannot rise above the quality of their thinking. Therefore, if you want to alter someone’s living, alter their thinking. The quality of our lives as Christians cannot rise above the quality or the correctness of our thinking about God. This is where Jesus Christ comes in.

In Need of a Good Cleanse

Now I want to share with you how to deprogram the mind of all the wrong concepts of God. Satan’s chief point of attack is to try to constantly call into question, lower, and confuse our concept of God. He knows that if he can get us to think wrongly about God, soon he will cause us to act disobediently toward and independently of God.

There’s a key verse that I want us to look at, and it’s John 15:3. Jesus said, “You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.” Isn’t this great?! We are made clean by the word which He has spoken to us.

There are some prayers printed in the back of the hymnal in Methodist churches. When congregations take communion, they sometimes read a prayer that deals with cleansing. It says this:

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Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name: through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We should indeed ask God to cleanse the thoughts of our heart. Remember that the heart is the seat of reflection more than the seat of affection. “Cleanse” is an exceedingly rich word because in the original Greek it is the word from which we get catharsis.

Psychologists talk a great deal about catharsis. It is the experience of emotional cleansing. When a person breaks down and weeps and lets everything pour out, we say that this person has had a cathartic experience. They have had a cleansing. They have allowed all that had been pent up to flow out.

So Jesus said in John 15:3 that we have been cleansed. We have received a catharsis through the Word that He has spoken to us. Since we’re talking about deprogramming the mind from an incorrect view of God, His Word gives us a mental catharsis. It deprograms us and cleans out all the mental garbage if we will allow it to do so.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

As we grow up and live in a society where we are con-

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stantly bombarded mentally and emotionally by the garbage of this world, we collect it all in our minds. Then all that has been stored up tends to come back and trigger certain thought patterns. This worldly junk manipulates our thoughts and causes us to think with the carnal mind rather than the spiritual mind. This is why we need to have a mental catharsis.

I want to give you a rather graphic illustration of this. I hope you won’t take it in a crude sense because it’s not meant that way. What a colon cleanse is to the body, the Bible is to the mind. It cleanses. As we study and memorize and meditate on God’s Word, it literally cleanses our minds. It gives us a mental catharsis that begins to clean out all the garbage that we have collected through the years.

Unless we let this cleansing take place, we will keep that garbage stored up in our minds. We need God’s cleansing desperately, because unless we have a mental catharsis, these old thoughts and habits will constantly come back and trigger certain behaviors.

Our problem is that we can be like the Pharisees, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day. We are far more concerned with external cleanliness than with internal. Let me share a quotation from Matthew 23:25–28. Jesus was speaking to the scribes and the Pharisees, saying,

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup

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and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

Jesus pointed out that the scribes and Pharisees had cleansed the outside and looked clean and pure and righteous to others. But on the inside, they were full of hypocrisy, lawlessness, and unrighteousness. This is the real problem of mankind. We are far more concerned with externals. When we try to cleanse the externals, we’re dealing with the fruit rather than the root. Jesus said it’s far more important to cleanse ourselves internally, and then the internal catharsis (mental and emotional) would lead to an external catharsis.

The Prodigal Son’s Brother

There is an appropriate example of this internal catharsis in one of the stories that Jesus told—the story of the

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