I had a close family friend in his mid-80s explain to me the other day how he was simply not the type to rely on any savior to take care of him. “I learned early on in life that I had to rely on myself and no one else,” he explained.

If you ask me, he’s resigned himself to possibly not going to heaven based on a classic old cop-out: “Well, that’s just the kind of guy I am.” It’s the Frank Sinatra line, “I did it my way.”

*****

Self-image is a result of a person’s belief system and people are often largely unaware of how much their beliefs have been unconsciously formed, starting in early childhood, from past struggles, experiences with success and failure, humiliations, rejections, peer pressure, role models, etc.

“All your actions, feelings, behavior—even our abilities—are always consistent with this self-image,” writes Dr. Maxwell Maltz in his classic self-help book from 1960, Psycho-Cybernetics. “The man who conceives himself to be a ‘failure-type person’ will find some way to fail, in spite of all his good intentions, or his will power. The person who conceives himself to be a victim of injustice, one ‘who was meant to suffer,’ will invariably find circumstances to verify his opinions.”

Maltz also notes, “Out conscience works upon the information and data we feed into it (our thoughts, beliefs, interpretations). Through our attitudes and interpretations of situations, we ‘describe’ the problem to be worked upon. . . If we feed ourselves information that we ourselves are unworthy, inferior, undeserving and incapable, this data is processed and acted upon as any other data in giving us the ‘answer’ in the form of objective experience. . . Our conscience makes use of stored information or ‘memory’ in solving current problems and responding to current situations.”

*****

Proverbs 4:23 advises, “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.”

My pastor, Richard Jordan, explains, “All capacity for life—everything you have the capacity to do in your life—is initiated in your heart. That’s what God says. It starts in here. Jesus said in Mark 7:21 that ‘out of the heart proceed evil thoughts.’ It isn’t where you are, it’s who you are that’s the problem.

“Now, that’s a fundamental thing you have to understand about your nature. When you see the things you’ve produced in your life, understand where they came from. Your emotions are designed to be responders and respond to what your heart initiates.

“Basically, you have three aspects: the mentality of your soul, the physical actions you’re going to take, and the emotions. The way you were originally created by God to function was for your mind and your will to decide upon a course of action, and then for your emotions to respond to what’s in your mind, producing the action. That’s the natural way to function.

“The problem with that is we’re not in the natural state (since the fall of Adam and Eve) because sin corrupted all that. And so, in the new man (you gain as a Believer) you still have this same makeup—your mind, your will, and the emotions that are going to respond—but instead of thinking, and then feeling, and then taking action out of your feelings, God says, ‘Now take the way you think, and take the actions, by faith.’

“It’s not based on your feelings because your old sin nature corrupts the feelings and distorts the feeling, and if you’re going to take action out of your feelings, well you know that your feelings are too dumb to trust, don’t you?

“How do emotions work? They are always followers, aren’t they? They have no intelligence, no intellect. They can’t discern the difference between fact and fancy. They can’t tell the difference between the past, the present and the future. They have no ability to do that. All that’s done in your mind. And you emotions respond to what’s in your mind.

“You can sit here this morning and think about something that happened in your life 20 years ago that offended you, and then think about, and think about it, and think about it, and what do you do? You get mad as if it just happened yesterday! Then if you think about something possibly happening in the future, and think about it long enough, you can be just as anxious about it right now as if it already happened. It’s an unreal thought.

“Now, you don’t have to live in this think-feel-act circle. Romans 12:2 says ‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’ You need to look at life through God’s eyes. God says your mind’s like a computer. It can be programmed one way or another.”

*****

The real culprit in life is not the particular circumstances or trials we face; it’s the attitude we take toward them, says Jordan.

“If you’re going to handle your emotions in general, you have to understand the relationship between the way you think and the way you feel; the relationship between your emotions and your thinking,” he says. “To understand that, you need to understand how you as a person have been created by God to function.

“You need some real biblical analysis of your makeup; a biblical picture of who you are as a person, what your makeup is, how you were created by God to function—how it is you come to the place where you feel like you feel, do what you do and think like you think.

“This stuff doesn’t just happen, and if you can understand how God created you, and how He made you to work and function, then you’ve got a real leg up on things.

“In I Thessalonians 5:23, Paul writes, ‘And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

“Part of the essence of your humanity is that you have a spirit, a soul and a body. That’s the essence of what it means to be a human. Your spirit is what gives you the capacity to have consciousness of God. God is a spirit. Those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. You don’t worship God first with your flesh, or first with your soul.

“You worship Him first in your spirit. His essence, or Spirit, has a place in your essence that it connects and plugs into and that’s your spirit. That’s why Paul tells us in Rom. 8:16 that the Spirit of God does witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.

“While your spirit gives you God-consciousness, the soul gives you the capacity to be conscious of your self. Your soul is the seat of your personality—of you as an individual. It is the part of you, by the way, that you never share with anyone else. The soul is the seat of who you are. The Greek term ego actually means ‘I am.’ The essence of who I am; that’s the soul.

“Now, your body gives you the capacity to communicate with the world about you. It’s the vehicle in which your spirit and soul reside and carry it around.

“In your spirit is your mind. It’s what gives us that capacity of knowing. The reason you and I can communicate together today is because I have the spirit of a man and you have a spirit of a man.

“I can teach my dog to go fetch a ball or paper because of behavioral learning capacity, but we couldn’t communicate. I couldn’t say, ‘Would you go get me a Dr. Pepper?’

“Human spirits give us the ability to communicate from one person to another with words. That’s what the Bible calls your mind. That same level in your soul is called your heart. ‘In the heart’—that’s a function of your soul.

“In your soul, the mentality of your soul is your heart. Proverbs 23:7 says, ‘As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.’ In the mentality of your spirit, you have mental capacity; a memory center, vocabulary, frame of reference you get from all the things you know.

“Here you have a way of thinking. But when it comes up over to your heart, it’s no longer a way of thinking, it’s a way of believing. Romans 10 says, ‘With the heart man believes to righteousness.’ It’s when you know the difference between knowing something and believing it.

“You say to a kid, ‘You know better than that!’ It’s the difference between having the knowledge of a thing and having reached out by faith—by an act of your will—and having brought that into being a part of you and who you are.

“I know many things about a lot of different things that I don’t make the basis upon which I live. I know a lot about theology, much of which I don’t believe. I’m not going to make it a part of myself. It’s in my mind; it’s in my understanding. I grasp it, and I understand what’s being said, but I don’t base my life on it.

“You hear people say that heaven and hell can be 18 inches apart—you can have a head knowledge but not a heart knowledge. What they’re talking about is a difference between something in your spirit and something in your soul.

“The idea is I bring it out of the realm of what I know and I say, ‘This is what I’m going to believe; this is going to become the foundation upon which I take my life action,’ and then it becomes a part of my soul; of the essence of my being.

“It’s the will that takes that information from here (in my head) and puts it in there (in my heart). And so it’s important to understand the will is the decision you make to take what you know and make it a part—make it the foundation—upon which you’re going to live.

“That’s why when someone becomes a teenager, they’re having to make decisions; certain principles, ideas. They have to make the decision: ‘Who’s authority; who’s wisdom? What is the basis for which I’m going to make my choices?’ You do that as adults too.

“With the soul, its essence has a heart (the mentality, the thinking process of your soul), it has a will (a volition responsible to make its own decisions and choices), and it’s the seat of your emotions. Jesus said in the garden, ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death.’

“It’s the soul where the emotions reside. You have five senses by which you assimilate information; five systems that operate your body—circulatory, nervous, skeletal, muscular, respiratory.

“With an unsaved person, their spirit is dead toward God—dead, alienated, functionally cut off from God. Ephesians 4:17 says they ‘walk as other Gentiles in the vanity of their minds.’

“Now, a dead spirit functions in relation to other people—Satan and his policies and programs—it just doesn’t function in relationship to God. He doesn’t receive God’s things; he’s receiving the philosophies of the world; his ideas from human viewpoint, human training.

“The human ideas and everything he has to draw upon to put over into his soul comes from bad sources. His authority—his source of enlightenment—comes from the philosophies of this world; the lust of the flesh, the eye, the pride of life. That’s where he gets his input. That’s where his soul draws into itself from.

“Romans 1:19-22 says there’s a blackout of the soul. Why? Because instead of light and truth coming in through the spirit, what comes in is darkness. The Bible says the ‘entrance of thy Word gives light,’ but if the Word doesn’t come in, what’s left? Have you noticed light requires something, but darkness doesn’t? To get rid of darkness you’ve got to turn on the light.

“The body is depraved. That is, your body is the source; it’s called the body of sin in Romans 6. It’s the seat of your old sin nature. It’s the place where sin gets its control. Just like God is going to work out through your spirit out, sin works from your body in. It’s the part of you that’s still kin to Adam that way.

“As an unsaved person, your ‘heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it.’ (Jer. 17:9) The self-consciousness that your soul had—sin turns it into self-importance and distorts it. Your will becomes a slave to your passions; the emotions. And your emotions are in revolt. So rather than functioning the way God intended you to function, it all gets messed up because of the entrance of sin.

“Now, you go to the Cross and trust Christ as your Saviour and God does some radical things to you. First thing He does is He regenerates you. Your dead spirit that was cut off from God is now given the life of God. ‘The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life,’ and now I have God’s life. No longer am I dead to God; ‘now I’m alive unto God.’ Now my spirit isn’t missing a whole bunch; it’s completed! God’s truth can now be assimilated into my understanding.

“I say this to you all the time: eternal life doesn’t mean you have to wait ’til you die and go to heaven to get it. Eternal life, it lasts forever, but it’s your present possession the moment you trust Christ. That means right now, having trusted Christ, you have, on a daily basis, the resource in your life of HIS life! Paul says ‘the life in spirit of Christ Jesus has made me free. Paul says, ‘I m crucified nevertheless I live.’ Paul says, ‘For me to live is Christ.’ Paul says, ‘When Christ WHO IS our life.’ Do you see that’s right now?! Eternal life is a present possession!”

“When I got saved, this dark spirit in (me) had the light turned on. You remember the verse in II Cor. 4: ‘If our gospel is hid, it’s hid to them who are lost’? That light is shined into us and now we have light in our soul. We have the capacity now to receive, and to assimilate, and to apply in our life sound doctrine, because we can see. The light’s on. And so our soul, our will, our emotion have all been now put into the light.

“Now, our body over here has been crucified with Christ; it’s rendered dead. That is, it is not to be the source of our operating. Death in the bible is when your soul leaves your body.

“If God’s going to leave you here to serve Him, He’s got to leave you in that body, but He fixed that body—your relationship spiritually to that body—where it doesn’t have to run your life anymore. You are free from its dominion. Now, you can choose to be influenced by it, but when you do it’s because you make a choice. Because God set you free where you don’t have to make that choice.”