"In many communities of Christ followers, there is the belief in the innate desire for a relationship with God. It was that way in the beginning...Genesis 2 and the relationship of Adam and Eve with God in the Garden is the story of 'the fatherly God who is near.' It was a place where all their needs were met. They were whole.
"When Adam and Eve sinned...that relationship with God was distorted. The eikon, the image of God in which humanity was created, was cracked...Humanity, once living in perfect happiness and union with God, finds itself helpless, afraid and hiding from God...Humanity's broken relationship with God results in the brokenness and helplessness of humankind. We struggle to do the right things...There is an inner conflict; there is an embedded desire to live right lives but an inability to do so...
"Not only do we cause harm to others, but we also live with the impact other people's brokenness has upon us...No one is immune from the brokenness humanity has brought upon itself."
Quoting from Ron Martoia, the author says,
"When we look at human sin, most of it swirls around our efforts to produce Garden (of Eden) type benefits and satisfaction that just can't be duplicated outside that context. We could say that sin is a fundamental effort to experience something the Garden had for us in its original setting...we attempt to experience it in inappropriate ways. When we end up alienated from God and need restoration, we are seeking a return to the Garden that is available only when we are in relationship with the God of the Garden..."
Phillips continues by saying that sin is trying to be like God; it's an attempt to find wholeness, meaning and life within ourselves rather than in Him who is the Source of all life and meaning; we are meant to be the reflection of that Source. We are at odds with God and with ourselves because of the inner yearning for the Eden environment while rejecting the Source.
Next Phillips talks about the "heart." In summary, he explains what the Old and New Testament meanings of the word "heart" are:
- Old Testament: "...the seat of one's intellectual and spiritual life...also the seat of a person's emotional life and the origination point of the will...the word heart encompasses multiple, interrelated aspects. It is the person with all of his/her urges...the totality of the person."
- New Testament: "...the heart is the person, the thinking, feeling, willing, ego of man, with particular regard to his responsibility to God."
"Sin introduced brokenness into the emotional, cognitive, and physical aspects of humanity. As fallen beings, humanity, therefore, has an identity crisis. Humanity's relationship with God is broken, and it does not understand who it is."
Our addictive behaviors "are an attempt to bring comfort" to our pain which is a result of a lack of emotional health.
God's solution is what Christianity calls the Gospel - the person and message of Jesus - the embracing of which by faith puts us on the journey towards wholeness and fully restored relationship with the "fatherly God who is near." Phillips goes on to point out that "The Gospel is more about experiencing a sense of God's shalom - wholeness and wellness - than about escaping the clutches of hell. The gospel also announces a life lived under the reign of God...Thus our desire to be God will no longer be necessary because we have situation ourselves underneath the reign and rule of God. His is our King. He is Father. He is our 'daddy.'
"The gospel, therefore, introduces us to the transformative relationship, namely Jesus. Jesus is the one relationship that enables us to become the people we were created to be...The working out of Jesus and his gospel in our lives, then, is a process where God seeks to re-shape and re-form us into our original identity...It is also a process where our (other) relationships are Christ-differentiated - where we are no longer manipulated or controlled by others, but where we live in peace with others out of an understanding of who we are in Christ."
Phillips ends this chapter commenting on the Church's response: "The unfortunate aspect in all of this is that a large portion of the institutional Church has dismissed the issues of unhealthy behavior as simply sin or a lack of self-discipline. The antidote for dealing with behavioral dysfunction, according to those who emphasize only this, is a need to do more things that resemble religious activities: pray more, read the Bible more, spend more time in church...(this) spiritual prescription does not take into account the greater complexities of our physical, emotional and cognitive makeup.
"For example, it does not take into consideration the way in which our minds are created or wired. We have multiple memory storage areas. The emotional memory holds traumatic experiences, which cause a person to react out of pain when he senses he is in a similar situation (as one in his past). These experiences, while part of the cognitive memory but often forgotten, are rarely readily accessible. These memories must be probed, remembered, and released...We are then able to accept them as being part of life. As a result, the experience is 're-owned.' Once we acknowledge and re-experience the pain of those emotions, hope develops and change can take place.
"Changing behavior, therefore, is not simply a matter of being more disciplined or doing more religious activities...It first requires us to engage the deepest parts of our emotional life because it is by accessing our emotions that we change our behavior...Changing behavior also requires us to recover who we are as a person created by the Father...Unhealthy behavior is an expression of that searching and longing (for who and whose we are) within all people."
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