You wake up in the morning with a pain that causes you concern and even though its against your religion, you take yourself off to the doctor. After taking temperature, blood pressure and pushing on your abdomen in the region of the pain to confirm you are in pain, you will be sat down and questioned. Invariably the Doctor will ask about your family’s medical history. You get lots of diseases from your parents.
However knowing your family history can do very little to make you better you can’t go back and choose another set of parents and even if you did, you’d probably be swapping the problem you have for something worse. If you want to get rid of the pain, you have to take the appropriate cure. Blaming your parents won’t help.
The same is true for your psychological makeup. It is very helpful in the diagnosis to work out which bit of your early life contributed to your phobias and hang-ups but finding a cause is not the same as applying a cure. Its good to give the demon a name but knowing his name won’t necessarily make him want to leave.
Modern psychology is big on dragging up the past if it can’t find any suppressed memories it will suggest a few you should have. People always feel better when they are told someone else’s to blame you have done nothing wrong – you are a victim of circumstances. Its enough to make you want to keep returning to your psychologist and at the prices they charge, he’s happy that you do.
God has a somewhat different approach. He’s not all that big on encouraging us to go back into our past. He reckons we have a better chance of changing our future. His diagnosis? Your problem is sin, pure and simple and that problem came about because you are by nature and chosen inclination, a rebel. You’ve come from a long line of rebels who have been practising the art of rebelliousness with a passion for thousands of years. Your parents probably did a bad job of bringing you up but then, so did their parents and the ones that brought your grand parents up weren’t too hot either. So you might as well go right back to father Adam and mother Eve and be done with it. What you will discover if you have honesty at all, is that they did exactly what you would have done had you been in their position.
This is actually good news, not because it gives us someone to complain about next time we sit on the couch, but because God has a cure for you. If fact he worked it out even before he created the universe. That cure is Jesus on the cross taking the blame and copping the punishment.
Appropriating his work begins when you admit that a fair share of your problems are down to you. When you do that God will forgive you and cleanse you. However it won’t work unless you also forgive from the heart those that have hurt you. You can’t benefit from this cure unless you want others to benefit also. How you want God to treat others is exactly how he will treat you. Its good medicine but sometimes you have to take it a while before it begins to take effect.
The more you take it the better you will get, you can never overdose on it and the only side effect is that you might reduce the possibility of passing some of your problems onto your own children or other people that you hang around with.