Thinking Well leads to Wellness

Many of you took one of my classes on Rational Christian Thinking at College Hill, Equipping Ministries or one of our Teleios Training Centers over the years. We figured that over 3,000 people went through Apples and Rational during those wonderful years at CHPC.

Last year I was invited to teach my materials in Randy Clark's online series of courses on healing.  I was supposed to be the Head dude of the Care and Cure of Souls section. As a result my staff and I spent several hundred hours writing and rewriting RCT into Power Christian Thinking along with a basic theology of healing and growth, an updated Breaking Free, and a greatly expanded book on healing the Family Tree. All of these are chock full of new stories and insights about the way God heals His people. He is still the Great Physician. (I also had to write very specific lesson plans and tests. I am no longer on Randy's schedule.)

I am strongly recommending that people interested in dealing with Anxiety and Depression read and learn Power Christian Thinking. It is an incredibly powerful antidote to Stinking Thinking and Foolish Feelings. If you download the PDF. from the store and read it without getting a lot of insights and assistance let me know and I will refund your money or a free book.

Let me remind you that my books are designed for Pastors, Peer Helpers and Friends who stick with needy people. Those with a ZAP mentality and think healing is all about gathering several thousand people together and seeing one or two touched by the Lord will not be happy with my materials. As you can tell from my blog I am strongly committed to congregations, small groups, families and other places where people come together over time with love and caring. I expect to see every single person receive a strong touch of God not just two or three out of ten thousand.

Healing and Growth can require self care, repentance, forgiveness, gathering with others for worship and work. Evey person with whom I meet leaves better and more energized to find God. That is what happens when we allow the Spirit of God lead our thinking rather than the flesh.

The best way to promote Christian Growth and Healing is through communities of truth, love, power and gifts. Every Believer needs that. In the Power Christian Thinking book we describe how it can be accomplished. St. Paul says in Philippians 3:1-16

Further, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord! It is no trouble for me to write the same things to you again, and it is a safeguard for you. For it is we who are the circumcision, we who serve God by his Spirit, who boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh— though I myself have reasons for such confidence.

But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you. Only let us live up to what we have already attained.

This teaching by Paul describes our model for the healing/growth process. Just as we are saved by grace through faith and not our own works, we are sanctified by grace through faith, not by works. However, growth does require us to cooperate with God’s Spirit to receive all He has for us. (Ephesians 2:9-11)