Wednesday, September 9, 2015

No True Love Without Freedom

I've been reading the book Could It Be This Simple? A Biblical Model for Healing the Mind by Timothy R Jennings M.D. instead of doing housework today. Well not quite instead, I've had to take breaks, think on his writings while working. The book is thought provoking.  Chapter 5 is called The Law of Liberty. Below are some excerpts from the book:  In this universe we have a law---ordained by God Himself---called the law of liberty.  It is a universal reality, as with the law of gravity. Think about the law of gravity.  You don't have to know about it for it to work, Nor do you have believe in the law of gravity to feel it's effects.  In fact you can deny that it exists at all, but if you ride the elevator to the top of the Empire state building, proclaim that no such thing as the law of gravity exists, and then jump off, you will quickly find yourself under the jurisdiction of the law whose reality you deny. Violating the law of gravity has accompanying consequences, whether or not one anticipates them.
The law of liberty works in a similar manner, regardless of whether one believes in, acknowledges, or recognizes it. The author gives some illustrations of which you will have to read the book but the predictable consequences of that occur when someone violates the law of liberty: it always destroys love and incites rebellion. There can be no true love without freedom.
Think about it, this happens wherever and in whatever circumstances our freedoms get violated. I'm going to skip now to something else that struck me in this book. The paragraph on Mutually Exclusive Beliefs Destroy Reason (again this is straight from the book)
One of the methods Satan uses to destroy reason is to convince people to believe things that are antithetical (incompatible or opposite) and that don't make sense. To achieve his goal, he influences them to disregard their reason so that they accept two things that cannot be true at the same time.
    For example, Satan counters the truth that God is love by encouraging us to believe that He chooses who will be saved and who will be lost, insisting that we have no free choice in the matter.  As we have previously seen, love cannot exist without freedom.  Therefore, the two beliefs are mutually exclusive. Both cannot be true at the same time, and the only way to believe both is to surrender reason.  In such a situation we rationalize the contradiction by saying, "I take that on faith," which, as we have seen, isn't faith at all.
So I've finished the book and will pass it on to someone but it always and I mean ALWAYS comes down to the final authority, the Bible. Read that with unfiltered eyes, heart and brain.  After reading this Could It Be This Simple? I have come to the conclusion Timothy R Jennings M.D. did his homework by studying the Bible First. Actually on the back of the book it states:  during residency, for every hour he spent studying traditional theories of psychiatry, he spent two hours searching God's word for Biblical insights into mental wellness.

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