Remember: God's Blueprint to Wholeness

Restoring the Heart, Mind, Body, and Soul

Join James, director of projects and spiritual coach at Regeneration, in this episode of the Remember series. We discuss how Jesus knows and remembers who we were created to be and explore the transformation of our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls. As we reflect on Dallas Willard's insights from Renovation of the Heart, we discuss actionable steps to heal from sexual struggles, betrayal, and more. This episode offers hope, healing, and a renewed understanding of God's love and plan for our wholeness.

00:00 Introduction: God's Memory and Our Wholeness
01:07 The Concept of Restoration
03:01 Understanding the Human Person
04:13 The Heart: Core of Our Being
09:02 The Mind: Thoughts and Feelings
17:05 The Body: Physical Restoration
21:43 The Social Dimension: Healing Through Relationships
25:00 The Soul: Integration of All Parts
27:25 Conclusion and Prayer

ReMember: a night full of worship, art, dessert, stories of God’s goodness, and an opportunity to partner with Regeneration. We invite you to join us for our annual dessert Regeneration fundraiser.  We’d love for you to join us, It will not be the same without you. RSVP here!

It’s that time of year! We are inviting YOU to our annual dessert banquet.This year we have something special planned to go with our theme "RE-MEMBER."

Join us to see, hear, and learn the beautiful ways God remembers details of our stories with us.

Saturday, April 12th DC/ Northern VA: Click this link for more information and to register.

👉Men's Overcoming Lust & Temptation Devotional
👉Women 21-Day Prayer Journal & Devotional - (Women overcoming unwanted sexual Behavior)
👉Compass 21-Day Prayer Journal & Devotional - (Wives who are or have been impacted by partner betrayal)

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Becoming Whole
• 23:52 Understanding God's Intent for Us
• 40:52 The Role of the Heart in Transformation
• 1:05:52 Engaging with Our Feelings and Thoughts
• 1:40:52 Body, Soul, and Social Connections
• 2:10:52 Hope in Transformation: A Prayer

Transcript

James Craig: 0:18

God remembers who he created you to be. Luke 19, 9 through 10 says Jesus said to him. Today, salvation has come to this house because this man too is a son of Abraham, for the Son of man came to seek and save the lost. Today we're continuing our Remember series on Becoming Whole. I'm James, director of projects as well as spiritual coach and a group leader here at Regen. You know an object can only be sought and saved if the creator or owner of that object remembers what that object originally was. Sadly, my wife and I moved recently and we lost my original wedding ring. I often am wearing one of these silicone rings, so I can not scuff up the metal ring, but I can only seek that ring because I know what it was. I can only save that ring because I had a vision. I can see in my mind's eye what it originally looked like. So today, for episode four of this Remember series on becoming whole, we're going to talk about how Jesus remembers us. We've said that every single episode. God remembers you, but specifically how he knows what we were made to be, what we were made to be, the person the glorified the original intent of what he made us to be and in between, you know what we are now, and that kind of glorified vision of who we really are, how he puts together every part of us. We've been doing this play on words. Remember to remember to put members back together, to reintegrate.

James Craig: 2:12

We often say it on this channel we want to have sexual integrity, we want to be integrated sexually, we want to become whole. We want the parts of us to come back into alignment to the whole, being led by the Spirit. So let me ask you all do you want to stop sinning sexually? Many of you who listen to this are here for that exact reason. Do you want to heal from betrayal? How about do you want to help your kid through their own sexual struggles? How about do you want to help your kid through their own sexual struggles? The A to Z of healing is what Psalm 23 calls the restoring of our souls. Psalm 23, I believe it's verse three. It says you restore my soul.

James Craig: 2:58

Now some of the newer translations use refresh and I think that there's a power to that image as well of God refreshing our souls. But I like the old translation that Dallas Willard, who I'm going to be referencing a lot today, originally put me onto that God actually is in the business of restoring our souls. So I'm going to reference actually specifically one particular page from Willard's book, incredible book, life-changing book for me, called the Renovation of the Heart. I recently came out with an anniversary edition but if you're watching on video here you'll see I've got one of the original heart covers. I believe I inherited this from my parents' library and this book was so life-changing, especially some of the pages on what love is and what it isn't, love and lust. He actually goes into that a little bit. But on page 38 of Renovation of the Heart you're going to have to picture this along with me. I'm going to do my best to paint this picture but since I don't have express permission to use this image, you might have to look it up yourself.

James Craig: 4:00

You could look up Dallas Willard um, renovation of the heart, human person image or something like that. But imagine five concentric circle, so like like a target, like uh, something with a bullseye. So the center circle would be the bullseye and then that center circle is surrounded by another circle and that circle another, all the way out to five different circles, the core circle. I'm going to just give you a quick flyover of each circle and then we're going to get into how God wants to restore all that we are. First circle, the inner circle, the bullseye, the heart, is the heart. He also calls it the spirit or the will. He believes that and I see this in scripture as well that when the Bible is using the word heart, it's not primarily talking about emotions that's more of our modern English way of using the word heart. Instead, it's talking about the core of who we are, the center, the command center, if you will. That's why the word will is in there as well. So the spirit, the heart, the will is at the core of who we are.

James Craig: 5:02

Next layer out in this picture of the human person, this target is the mind. For Dallas, that included thoughts and feelings. I think that's a helpful way to think about the mind, thoughts and feelings. Following circle is the body. And notice again, because these are concentric circles, the body kind of in some sense contains the mind and contains the spirit, not in a full sense. We know that even when our bodies die, we will still have our spirits and our minds, but the ultimate picture that God gives us of fully restored humanity is a new body as well. So we have our body as the next circle, circle number three. Circle number four is the social circle. This is our relationships. This is us connecting from body to body, from person to person, and finally, the outer circle is the soul.

James Craig: 5:57

What's interesting here is, typically, when we hear the word soul, we grab on to a Greek understanding or perhaps a Platonic understanding of the soul as the non-material thing. So we've got bodies, we've got souls. The soul is like the part that goes to heaven when we die For Dallas and, I believe, for the scriptures, especially in the Hebrew scriptures. We can see that the soul is kind of this integrating force in our whole life. It integrates the social, the body, the mind, the spirit, and that's why it's the outer circle. So the soul integrates the whole person. It could also be used the word life could be used here, and actually the word that's often translated, soul, actually can be used, for it's used in scripture, I believe for animals. They don't have the same kind of soul we have because we have this mind and this spirit or heart or will. That makes us different, but there's something about this overall idea of an integrating life.

James Craig: 6:54

Okay, so let's get into it. Let's get into how God seeks to renovate us from the inside out, going back to the core, the spirit, the heart, the will. This is the part of us that died. When Adam and Eve first ate from the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it says surely, on the day you eat from that tree. In scripture it says you will die. Now they lived according to scripture, you know hundreds more years, but they died that day spiritually. There was a spiritual death at the core of who they were and ultimately, yeah, that rippled out and their bodies died and, and you know, their whole person eventually died. But the first core part of renovation of the heart is seeing our heart married, seeing our spirit brought to life by the holy spirit. The holy spirit marries our spirit and brings us to a new life in christ and part of what he wants to do. In that initial moment of faith we have his spirit come into the core of who we are.

James Craig: 8:06

But the problem is we're not purely spiritual beings, as I've already said today. We're what Christopher West jokingly calls angel moles. Right, we're spiritual and physical, we're body and mind. We're these dual nature creatures. So the problem with having a revived spirit is that it's still on this earth before we. We are in the new heavens, a new earth.

James Craig: 8:30

Having our spirits revived doesn't immediately change our entire soul. It changes our spirit. And so now we've got this flame inside of us, we've got got the Holy Spirit inside of us, we become the temple of the Holy Spirit. And so now our wills can be engaged toward the good, toward God, toward things of his design and his desires for us, that we could only ultimately desire or seek that which isn't of God, or we couldn't seek God in a super direct way. In other words, we couldn't agape love God before he came into our hearts and revived us. But now we need this to work its way out. We need this to change our entire soul.

James Craig: 9:55

So this is where the mind comes in next. Now, granted, the mind is actually where we first heard the gospel. It says, in this image that I'm referencing from Renovation of the Heart, that the word and the spirit of Christ, first the word of Christ, enters our minds. We hear the gospel over time when that goes from the mind, just knowing the gospel, knowing that God loves us and that he came to save us and have us enter into fellowship with him. When that goes into spirit. That's when we're regenerated.

James Craig: 10:23

But it does start with the mind. It comes into the mind first. You could even say it could start with the body. It comes into your ears first. It starts with the social. It comes from another person, so you can see how these circles again build on each other. It comes from another person, so you can see how these circles again build on each other. But in the mind we have thoughts and feelings. Thoughts can be restored or renovated primarily through engaging with what is true.

James Craig: 10:48

Engaging with what is true, if you want to think of it, on a brain level, which I know I'm skipping ahead a little bit to the body circle when I talk about the brain. But on a brain level, this is often our left brain knowledge. We can't make this everything, but we can't say this is unimportant either. Here's what I mean Learning that pornography is a sin, learning that you've experienced betrayal, learning even that your child is giving in to sexual compulsion or has sexual brokenness, and even learning ways to overcome. That aren't enough on their own, but they are an important starting point. We really do benefit from the truth that sets us free. I've often said it in my own journey, when I first engaged in Awaken, one of our year-round group for men, awaken 360, I came across so much that was true that I had never known so much theological truth. And it wasn't that I was kind of being beaten over the head with it or whatever, but it was like it felt like I was experiencing it, like Jesus said, like the truth that sets us free.

James Craig: 11:54

We need to know what is true. We need to know that change in desires are possible, that over time you can go from desiring, for example, hookups or affairs or any number of things that are not what God wills for us, to, over time, being someone who desires God more than anything else. We need that kind of truth and so much else. We need truth about body and soul and mind and we need truth to a significant degree and we need to feast on it. We need the word of truth, maybe even primarily both Jesus and the scriptures. But we can't ignore our feelings and if you're a Western listener in the Western world maybe perhaps more than the Eastern world I'm not positive, but we focus so much on truth in our sermons, especially if you're an evangelical Christian or you go to a church that preaches through the Bible. We can think that the main thing or the primary thing that's going to transform us are new thoughts, correct thoughts, true thoughts, and again, those are really important, but they're not all that there is in transformation.

James Craig: 13:05

We need to consider our feelings. When I think about feelings, when I talk, especially right now, we're in Awaken360, we're in the heart module, which we're not really using the heart. The same way Dallas says, we're using it kind of as an emotional euphemism, like what you feel. We're getting into these painful feelings. We're getting into things that we've ignored for years and for many men, part of why we've never engaged our feelings, part of why we haven't invited God to bring his renovating power into our feelings, is because we're so afraid of that feeling. Well, first of all, we're just straight up afraid of that feeling. I can just say that with a full stop. We are afraid of feelings. We're afraid of pain, primarily negative feelings, things that bring pain. But what we're also afraid of is falling into the trap that seems like so many in the world do, which is let your feelings lead your life.

James Craig: 13:59

Feelings should be the captain of your ship. Feelings should be the core of who you are. You should do what you feel. If you don't do it, you're not authentic. On the other side, for those of us especially who have grown up in the church, in whatever context, we were often taught that feelings are dangerous. You cannot let feelings be in the driver's seat. I'll share more of this car image in a moment. We can't let feelings be in the driver's seat. So what do we do with them? We throw them in the trunk.

James Craig: 14:30

The problem is, when feelings are thrown in the trunk, they don't just go away. When feelings are thrown in the trunk, they don't just go away the things we feel. I had an old supervisor I think he still works for InterVarsity. His name's Greg Howe and he told me this feelings are valid data points. What we feel is actually trying to tell us something, something really important, and so if we throw the feeling in the trunk, we're missing out on incredibly important data. The reason you feel angry, the reason you feel shame, the reason you feel anxious. There's a reason. Is what I'm trying to say. There are reasons that you feel these things, and so if we just throw them in the trunk, we're actually missing out on what they're trying to tell us. So here's how I often articulate it to the men in Awaken. We're not meant to put the feeling in the driver's seat, the way we've seen be so problematic, but we're also not meant to put it in the trunk.

James Craig: 15:24

Imagine this Imagine a nice car. You're in the driver's seat, your heart is, so to speak, your new will in Christ. God doesn't actually let anyone else drive your car, not even himself. In a sense, he calls us to take responsibility for our own thoughts and feelings. So we're driving this car. Ultimately, the feeling.

James Craig: 15:46

I often want to picture Jesus as our navigator. He's the one telling us where to go. He's sitting right in the passenger seat. I know that might sound demeaning, but no, it's a seat of honor. He's the passenger prince, he's the passenger king. All right, he's guiding us, we're in conversation with him, we're in relationship with him. The feeling can be right in the middle back seat, sharing what it wants to share, but not allowing that feeling to then dictate everything we do. So here's an example If I feel pain and my immediate thing is to lash out at my spouse who really hurt me, or if I feel pain and my immediate thing, the immediate thing I go to, is pornography, that would be an example of letting the feeling, kind of drive the car.

James Craig: 16:30

Instead we can ask questions. We've used this image before. We can meet our feeling on the porch to kind of switch the metaphor up a little bit. But again, we can let the feeling, we can give voice to the feeling without going in the direction the feeling typically takes us, because the feeling, without being led on some level by the truth, by the will, can lead us in places that aren't actually good for us, as we well know. So we need to develop a relationship with feelings and again, I love that idea of it's the feeling in the backseat, but it's Jesus there with us helping this process through them as well.

James Craig: 17:05

So I'm often telling men I walk with get as honest and as real with God as you possibly can. Get like the psalmist, get your feelings completely out there, because if they're already in there, god knows. You're not going to surprise him, offend him by externalizing them, but what you are going to do is you're going to get honest, and this is another example of how the truth sets us free. When we get emotionally honest with God, we're inviting him into those actual places. Instead of saying God, talk to the mask, talk to the mask, talk to the mask. We're saying, god, this is where I'm really at. I'm talking to you directly, face to face. Okay, so we need God's renovation in our thoughts, we need truth, we need God's renovation in our feelings. We need to direct our feelings, to experience our feelings, to process them with God and save others. But we also need God's renovation in the third circle, the body.

James Craig: 18:02

We talk increasingly in this field about how our brains have been wired to go after the unwanted sexual behavior in our lives, that we've learned to medicate pain through incredibly complex neurocircuitry, to go after dopamine in pornography or wherever else your sexual behavior may take you. So we do need time to rewire the brain. This is part of what we have to contend with in the body. One really confusing point, hopefully, if you've been listening to Becoming Whole for any length of time, one confusing thing in scripture for many people can be the idea of the flesh, but here at Regen we talk about how the flesh is often better translated the sinful nature.

James Craig: 18:45

I noticed, though, dallas doesn't just do that translation. He often translates stuff on his own and he keeps the word the flesh. Why? Because there is still some measure of the sinful nature, the old nature, being stored in our brains Does not mean our brains are bad, does not mean God doesn't love our bodies, didn't choose to create us bodily, didn't come to redeem us in the body of Jesus. But what it does mean is that all the old patterns we've developed, all the trauma, all the pain, all the wounds, all the habits of porn and overeating and alcohol or drugs or whatever addictions we may struggle with, have become habituated in our brains. So we do need God to rewire our brains. This looks like healing of trauma in various ways. We don't have time to get too far into that today, but we talked some about that last week. It looks like engaging in healthier and holy alternatives.

James Craig: 19:44

We talk about this a lot in Awaken, finding things that bring us incredible joy that God designed us to have joy with. And it also means doing basic bodily engagement, care, bodily refreshment. We need sleep, guys. We are not unlimited spirits. We never will be. I don't know what it'll look like with our new bodies, but we're not angels. We actually are designed by God to have needs, created by God to need sleep. Created by God to need to eat. We're also created by God to move our bodies, to exercise in one form or another. We need things like water, we need to breathe. All of these very basic things sleep, eating, exercise, water and breathing can be helpful things to look at.

James Craig: 20:35

Not everyone thinks about these things. We think, okay, I'm in this spiritual struggle, I'm struggling with sin, but we don't realize, man, by staying up until 1 am playing video games every night, and then I have to wake up at 7, that might not actually be doing me any favors, because I have to honor these limits. God, I need you to refresh and restore my entire soul, and part of that is restore how I even engage my body. Teach me how to care for the temple that you've given me and I think we've. Often, as Christians, we might look at the culture and say, well, you know, you can go into over-exercising or not eating to a really dangerous extent or whatever, but those twistings don't negate the original good that God designed these things to bring us.

James Craig: 21:23

And I do also want to highlight things like breath, one of the best ways to get regulated in a quick moment, even in temptation. Notice your breathing. Take some deep breaths. God designed the breath. The breath was not invented by, you know, eastern religions or something like that. God designed us to breathe and to help our bodies regulate through breathing. One of my favorite ways to do this is through breath prayers Simply breathing in and, as you breathe in, reminding yourself of a portion of scripture or a short prayer. For example, we're in Psalm 23. As you breathe in, the Lord is my shepherd In through the nose, pushing on the diaphragm, which is the part that separates your lungs from your stomach, so you feel your stomach push out Slowly in, the Lord is my shepherd, and then slowly out. I lack nothing. That's what my translation says. That's just Psalm 23.1. Meditating on scripture is getting scripture deeper in and it's honoring the fact that, again, our bodies are designed to need breath that God provides. So we need to engage healing of the body. Let's move into the social dimension. This is now the fourth circle out.

James Craig: 22:40

We are primarily transformed friends by God's design, through joyful, loving relationships with him and with others. Even though Adam was walking the garden in perfect relationship or whatever way you want to imagine the Garden of Eden looking like, in this incredible intimacy with God, god still said it was not good that Adam was alone. So God is wired into us. I know a lot of our songs say you know, all I need is you, god. And there's a truth to that, because God supplies all we need and is, in a sense, all we need, because everything we need does stem from him, like the head of a river. I mean every air, like we just talked about water. But if we only needed God in the shallower sense of the word, like hey, I don't need anything, I just need God, we would quickly die of dehydration, we would suffocate ourselves, we would die of starvation, we would be in mental ruin through isolation, because God designed us again to need things that he provides People so key. We need loving, joyful relationships when we're connected and when we can be weak, where another person is strong and we're connected. In that way, it transforms your brain more quickly than almost anything else. So the restoring of the social dimension could look like entering into relationships that God uses to heal past wounds, to build maturity where there's been lacking maturity.

James Craig: 24:22

One quote I want to share with you. This is from an author and therapist named Jenna Remersma. Sorry if I pronounced that wrong. She says trauma blocks love, but love heals trauma. Trauma blocks love, but love heals trauma. So part of what might be coming up for you when I begin talking about this social dimension is people have hurt me. You can't imagine the pain I've been through. Trauma is blocking love. Trauma is blocking your ability to connect, maybe even with God.

James Craig: 24:58

So many of us have our image of God really tarnished by the sins done to us by our parents or by authority figures. But it doesn't end there. The story doesn't end there with. Trauma builds into more trauma and then we're destroyed. Love heals trauma, it says in scripture. We're destroyed. Love heals trauma, it says in scripture.

James Craig: 25:20

Love covers a multitude of sins and so perhaps you didn't receive the care you needed growing up from one of your parents, perhaps you didn't receive affirmation, perhaps you were hurt or abused. The way that God, primarily, is going to heal those things is through loving connection where we're synced up in joy with him and with others who bring those things. So this is a super important dimension, especially in our individual culture. It's something worth. It's a drum worth beating over and over and over again. We need loving, joyful relationships.

James Craig: 25:53

Okay, finally, the soul. Like I said at the beginning, the soul is the thing that integrates all the rest. It's the restoration of all that we are. You restore my soul. You're helping the social, to sync up with the spirit, to sync up with the body and the mind, and it's all working together in harmony. It's all being orchestrated, you could say, by the Holy Spirit, who's now married to our revived spirit, and that is like the orchestra, the heart, the command center. It's the conductor of all the rest of who we are, and so our soul is being reintegrated.

James Craig: 26:31

So I want to end today with just a short reflection on one of my favorite passages in scripture. This is 1 John 3,. 1-3 from the NIV says see what great love the father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, notice he's speaking to a group. We often individualize these things. He's speaking to a group, dear friends.

James Craig: 27:08

Now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves. So, friends, we believe that we are saved by our faith in a very important way. But it says here in verse 3, that we are purified, we're sanctified through hope, hoping in this, seeing Jesus, hoping in everything being made right when he comes back, and you might even say we're glorified in his love. We ultimately enter heaven, which primarily isn't about our personal bliss. It's about the joy, love and bliss of entering into the triune life, the life of the Trinity itself. So when we see him, when we see him face to face, he'll wipe tears from our eyes and he will make us. We'll be transformed into his likeness, will be transformed into his likeness.

James Craig: 28:21

So, friends, we're going to artistically engage some of this kind of broad healing process that our clients go through at our upcoming fundraisers in Baltimore and DC. We'd love to have you join us and kind of get a taste through some of the art that our clients have made, some art that we've made to reflect on things we do at retreats or in groups in Baltimore, dc. You can find more information on those in the show notes. Let me just say a prayer as I close out today.

James Craig: 28:45

Father God, I pray that you would encourage the listeners here, that you would restore all of our souls, that you'd give us the faith that you're doing this, that you'd give us hope in you as you're doing this, as you both remember what you made us to be, and as you're remembering us, as you're putting us back together.

James Craig: 29:05

Give us hope in that, in you, in the process you're doing there and, lord, god, most of all, bring us deeper into your love. Bring us deeper to be satisfied in the love of all that you are and loving relationships, god, especially where we need those to undo and to heal some of the places that relationships have really hurt us. So bless our listeners, lord, whether they're dealing with their own sexual sin or the fallout in their marriage or relationship, or even whether they're trying to walk with, with children who don't really know how to, how to think through and heal in all these sexual ways. I pray, lord, that you continue this restoration process and all of our listeners and that that would allow them to better love those around them. Pray all of this in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.