Paradigm Formation
“Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then you also can do good who are accustomed to doing evil.” Jeremiah 13:23 NASB
Accustomed– How difficult it is to change how we think about life! We can be presented with all kinds of compelling “evidence,” yet our real operating procedures remain fixed by past experience. We can follow the logical arguments, yet deny the conclusions. We can be pressed by circumstances, feel the need, and still stick with the ways we know. Why? Why is it so hard to adjust our worldviews so that we look at a different picture and change our behavior? Beatrice Chestnut offers some insight:
Over time, early and necessary (and sometimes life-saving) defensive maneuvers and coping strategies evolve into “patterns” of thinking, feeling, and behaving. These patterns come to operate like “organizing principles,” or beliefs about how the world works and how we must act in order to survive or thrive. These patterned coping strategies turn into invisible and automatic “habits” that influence where your attention goes and what adaptive strategies you employ to interact in the world.[1]
Each of us automatically adopts specific strategies for defending ourselves against threats, and these strategies work together to make up the organizing principles of our personalities.[2]
Perhaps your religious bent toward life is more a product of what happened to you before you realized you were making decisions than it is a function of your current apologetics. Perhaps the reason someone simply doesn’t “get it” is more about how they grew up than about examining what you consider the truth. Face it. People don’t like change. They want to remain “comfortable with what I believe.” When you approach anyone with a new way of seeing the world, especially if that new way is tied to old beliefs about God and salvation, resistance is nearly automatic. Why? Because threat elicits defensive patterns that have been ingrained into the automatic operating system long before you showed up. Neuroplasticity has hardened into rigid synaptic pathways. It just isn’t possible to think differently without undoing who I believe I am. When you show up and ask me to take a brick out of my religiously fortified wall, I hear the sound of collapse. I do not see a new window on the world.
We often read this passage in Jeremiah as an indictment of the hypocrisy. The wicked can’t do good. They can’t change their “spots.” But Jeremiah uses the word limmûd, a word that is about teaching, not inherited characteristics. Leopards are not taught to be spotted, but human beings are taught to see the world in a particular way. In Hebrew, learning and teaching are intimately connected to behavior. If my life doesn’t change, I didn’t learn—I wasn’t taught. Suddenly the responsibility of parenting is exponentially increased. How I see the world becomes a function of the patterns I developed as a result of the circumstances my parents provided. I am a mimic of my teachers. This is why Gabor Maté can write: “Blame becomes a meaningless concept if one understands how family history stretches back through the generations.”[3]
“Parenting, in short, is a dance of the generations. Whatever affected one generation but has not been fully resolved will be passed on to the next. . . ‘The generations are boxes within boxes: Inside my mother’s violence you find another box, which contains my grandfather’s violence, and inside that box (I suspect but do not know), you would find another box with some such black, secret energy—stories within stories, receding in time.’”[4]
Can a leopard change its spots? Obviously, no. Can I change the way I view the world? Well, that’s not so clear. I will have to go back to my beginning (which is not when I was born) to discover how I was trained to be spotted. Then I will have to unpack each of those “spotted” lessons and ask myself, “If this really who I am, who do I want to be?” If I don’t do this, I will pack a suitcase filled with assumptions and hand it to my children. If I do this, I will endure incredible emotional and cognitive dissonance. But unlike the leopard, I can choose. And unlike the leopard, I will be accountable for the outcome.
Topical Index: accustomed, limmûd, taught, learn, parents, Jeremiah 13:23
[1]Beatrice Chestnut, The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge, p. 4.
[3]Gabor Maté, When the Body Says NO, p. 216.
[4]Lance Morrow citation and comment in Gabor Maté, When the Body Says NO, p. 216.
If I am to change, I must seek to see and know Messiah in the circumstances of my daily life. I must hunger and thirst for righteousness for his name’s sake, to know the ways in which I am not like him but should be, and to obtain the help of the Ruach HaKodesh to not only reveal these ways, but to then help me with the willingness to change and to impart the very empowerment I need to then actually change, to put off the old and putting on the new!.
I cannot just analytically unpack my generational past and identify what has gone wrong before me in the development of my personality and moral character. I must see the right pattern of how I ought to be, instead, who is Messiah. I must be sufficiently convicted of my waywardness with some degree of godly sorrow and a genuine, even if possible, heartfelt longing to please the Father and the Son, and I must THEN choose, not only TO change, but HOW I will change…..through psychological analysis, mere insight, and likely futile, self-reliant effort…..or…..through the help of the HELPER…..THE RUACH HAKODESH!
We must avoid the temptation and trap of self-righteousness, trying to make our selves righteous by ourselves, i.e. by our own even sincere affections, “good will”, and intellect, but NOT with the help of the Helper. We must not only seek to know the Father by knowing the Messiah, we must seek to know Messiah by knowing the Ruach HaKodesh.
The way to change is to “live by the Ruach”.
Have we received the Ruach HaKodesh?
Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. He gives the Ruach to whoever asks!
Unless He builds the house, those who labor, labor in vain!
If we began by the Ruach, shall we continue in the work flesh?
He who began a good work in us, will complete it…..by His Ruach!
Thank you, Jerry and Lisa: Messiah is EVERYTHING!!!!!
Yet another excellently delivered description of the human condition. What comes to my mind is the memory and experiances I have had of God changing me. I know he’s been working on my cherecter when I recognize a diffrent response to a similar pattern of behaviors. When my behaviors have changed God has moved in me to bring about change. Surley I have a part and bare responsibility to desire and intend (repent) to align with more godly behaviors, and I do. The incremental changes can be excruciating but I go not alone into that at dark night of learned behaviors. For I am not my own, I am not the captin of my soul…
Perhaps pertinent to this and other recent conversations. Oswald Chambers 10/5 “The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for man’s sin; but that the disposition of sin ,viz., my claim to my right to myself, entered into the human race by one man, and that another Man took on Him the sin of the human race and put it away (Heb, 9:26)-an infinitely profounder revelation. The disposition of sin is not immortality of wrong-doing but the disposition of self-realization-I am my own god. This disposition may work out in decorus morality or indecorus immorality, but it has one basis, my claim to my right to myself.”
Most people I know have been taught not to question what they were taught about God and Jesus.
It would be interesting to see a family that was attempting to change generational patterns of dysfunction. I know if I had a family that would have been my goal.
We are hardwired to do as we are done by, that’s for sure. The Golden Rule is striking in that it insists that we must do as we SHOULD BE done by. Impossible! Not one of us can “change (our) spots”! What to do? No one yet pulled themselves out of that hole by the bootstraps (all the therapy of the world notwithstanding, for those of us who have tried it, anyway) for when we attempt to do so, we just eat our tails and rob Peter to pay Paul; the addictions just get transferred over. Nope: we need to be forklifted! (Wait: we need a Redeemer!)
We are also hardwired to spiritually link with a “god” (God) that directs (authority) our choices. If we refuse the Spirit of the living God in that role, we are left with the gods of our (default) (non)choice; we become slaves to whatever programming (“nature”, or biology) and experience (“nurture” – or lack thereof!) we are saddled with. Slaves. No choices left. How to choose ourselves back out of the hole of slavery to the self we inherited and grew up with? Repentance! Halleluah!
We were created to be symbionts with God: co-inhabitors of our spirits with the Holy Spirit directing our traffic. He can (and does!) rewrite the biology and the mental programming at the same time He transforms our spiritual DNA (halleluah! healing IS the children’s bread!) at the same time He heals the results of disobedience. What I have found most of do not have the ability to realize is that the body, mind and soul are seamless, and that disobedience to physical laws can (and does!) cripple us in mind and spirit just as much as obedience in spiritual or mental matters transforms the body back again. How many cancers out there are a direct result of unforgiveness (bitterness)? (What do we end up doing when we are bitter? Probably not healthy choices.) Bitterness is a cruel god; even the American Medical Association recognizes that it is a driver of many deadly diseases. We need to be forgiven before we can heal, but we need to forgive, too.
How many enfeebled spirits are there that are suffering because people have no idea that what they put in their mouth (or eyes: “by beholding we change”) or bodies (“temple of the living God”) affects their ability to even have spiritual health (love)? Repentance (turning around) encompasses ALL choices! Its hard (or even impossible) to do good when we are feeling bad! Thus Paul writes in 1Thess. 5:23 that he desires the believers to be “preserved blameless” (“sanctified”) in “body, mind and spirit”. Devotion (“holiness”) in our thoughts; what we allow our minds to dwell upon: devotion in our spirits; who (or what) we allow to yank us around or be our authority (fear): devotion in our bodies – our “living temples”; what we allow to come between us and our Lover; what we turn to for comfort (carbs or media, etc, anybody?).
Lots of spots to repent for and submit for reformation! Trading time. Junk DNA from our ancestry or horrific mental patterns or degrading spiritual realities? Time to take responsibility (“confess”, or, recognize) and repent! When Israel stood, after the Babylonian captivity, and “confessed the sins of their fathers”, what do you think they were doing? Resetting their (inherited) DNA and mental patterns! We can, too. Halleluah!
Love this!!!!! (thumb up wasn’t going to cut it). Truth is better than carbs:) Although,…one can argue that since God is all in all, – flaky, buttery croissant……..LOL
The Legend of Bagger Vance. Life is a game you cannot win only play.
But life isn’t a game, and it’s not about winning. Is competition a good thing? I’ve always wondered.
Maybe games and the competition that goes along with it gets in the way of relationships. I have to be smarter, better, richer , fill in the blank to matter in this world. Is capitalism good and socialism bad? It seems that God promotes a combination of the two. Competition. I don’t think so.
In those dark nites of the soul, I painfully learned it takes courage to just BE and accept the good, the bad and the ugly in me yet in faith HOPE. In my patience, He always meets me in my emotional need and turns my darkness into light for another season until….
I needed to read this now. It confirmed my understanding of the sins of the fathers to the second and third generation. I’ve heard “generational deacons” blamed for our learned behaviors. I’m resistant to the concept however am I to Greek?
Res
Bob, the world can ‘blame’ all day long, but that is not really taking responsibility; the responsibility that got dropped when the wrong choice got made in the first place. Recognizing the problem is essential, but even recognition is still not going to solve the problem. How, then, do we take responsibility for choices we didn’t make but still got saddled with the consequences of?
I think the word “confess” is important: it encompasses recognition as well as responsibility: it names the sin as sin before God, but it also recognizes that the problem has landed on our plates even though we did not actually make the choice (sin). (Confession, however, is NOT the same as repentance – which is where we admit the sin as our own sin – even though confession acknowledges that the buck stops here; that sin payment will be made at this counter.)
It is interesting to me that guilt and shame and fear can be inherited (results of sin), even though the sin (choice) itself is NOT inherited (“original sin”). Sin is all about handing someone else the bag and running, after all (in fact passing the buck may be the very definition OF sin). But, I digress.
I think of “learned behaviors” (as you put it) as attempts to manage the consequences of sin – of wrong choices – on our own, without God. We were sold into this slavery to sin by our forbears; into this propensity to continue poor choices. To reset this generational mess requires confession, which is taking the responsibility they did not for those choices: naming the sin and claiming ownership of it for the purposes of hauling it to the cosmic dump: the deep sea where sin gets thrown as soon as somebody claims it and takes it to the cross as the trash it is.
Yes, we CAN take the sin of our forbears to the cross, even though WE DID NOT DO IT OURSELVES, and get it paid for and dumped (stop the curse of that sin – on US, anyway)! Halleluah! Did I say it was our OWN sin? I did not (nor did I say that we can REMOVE (repent for) the personal guilt of others for their own sins – which is what indulgences, etc. attempt to do) I just said that we take ownership OF the sin others dumped on us for the purposes of dealing with it. Forgiveness is HOW we do this.
For example, if I stand while you are dumping on me and take responsibility (forgiveness) for your sin while you are doing it to me and get it dumped (back off of me) as fast as you are sinning towards me, you are going to experience something really strange: you are not going to like doing the sin! The ‘reward’ isn’t there. You are much more likely to just quit (or not even start) because sin ‘needs’ somebody else (scapegoat) to take the blame: that is the reward (energy to do it) it must have or else it cannot be itself. Forgiveness is where we refuse to do that. (Unforgiveness (or complicity of some other sort), of course, is where we do choose to let somebody else hand us the bag while they run.)
I say let’s learn to quit taking the blame in our generations (by continuing to participate in the problem we got handed by perpetuating behaviors we got saddled with because we did not know to forgive) and start taking responsibility instead (by confession and forgiveness), today!