Lifetime Guarantee (3 page)

We’re going to look at how all three flesh types get programmed into Christians. For economy’s sake, however, I’ll only describe in greater detail the structuring of Yukky Flesh. You can then apply how that happens to the development of the other two.

The Word teaches that God
is
love and that He loves us (see 1 John 4:9,10). God created humanity with a burning need for love. That’s why you’re sitting there needing love. If you didn’t need love, you wouldn’t need God. In fact, that’s why you were created with needs, period. God is the supreme authority figure who has the market cornered on being able to supply all our needs. Thus, He created a bunch of people who have a ton of needs. This way, some of us would recognize our need and turn to Him through Jesus to get our needs supplied
His
way. God spells relief
J-e-s-u-s.
Fleshly people spell it
s-e-l-f
(“I’ll do it my way”).

When you showed up on planet earth in a little earthsuit two feet long, you drew a circle around yourself and declared, “I am Lord of this Ring!” Oh, you were willing to let God run the universe, but your attitude was, “I am god of all the turf inside this circle. I will control
this
area.” Playing Lord of the Ring is what original sin is all about. Adam saw to it that you’d be a “born” loser, and you immediately began to demonstrate it. You knew nothing about God and His provision for supplying all your needs, so you took over His role. Since most of your other needs were being met pretty well, you looked to mom, dad, siblings, relatives, and later to peers to satisfy your need for love. That cut God out of His own picture.

A preschool child is the most self-centered creature God ever made; he thinks only of himself and his needs. This being true,
he learns only of himself
as he interacts with others. When the dad of a nine-month-old baby points to his own nose and then to that of his teensy offspring and says, “Nose,” the little one doesn’t reason,
How interesting! Dad and I both have noses!
Oh, no. He thinks,
I’ve got a nose and it looks like that.
Totally self-centered thinking.

Let’s consider what a little child learns who is born to a couple who had to get married due to his unexpected arrival. Let’s name him Charlie. His mom and dad were only sixteen when they were forced into marriage by both sets of parents. Charlie’s imminent arrival caused the newlyweds to drop out of high school in their junior year, which “ruined their lives.”

The little daddy had his heart set on being a college athlete and someday a football coach, but Charlie shattered that dream. It’s now three years later, and dad works at the local Dairy Queen for seventy-five dollars a week. The onset of football season is always agony for him as he meditates on lost opportunities and a hopeless future. He broods a lot over the “life sentence” he’s serving with no hope of time off for good behavior. Color him hostile.

The little mom had always wanted to be a sorority girl at her mom’s alma mater. Mom and her mother before her were both members. In fact, they both still wear their pins at homecoming. This was a “big thing” for her in her childhood, but now, at nineteen, she works at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

Her friends come home from the university on weekends in their fancy new clothes, but she still has to wear her old high school wardrobe, which is now outdated. She listens to their exciting stories of campus life, and she sees their manicured nails, expensive hairdos, polished toenails, and so on—all the result of their being able to invest hours per week on their earthsuits. She is bitter and resentful. She, too, sees herself serving a life sentence for having made one fatal mistake. And to make matters worse, it was
his
idea.

The romantic side of marriage for her has long since dissipated. Sex is more of an obligation than a romantic oasis—“Just one more thing I have to do for that louse who ruined my life!” It’s sort of like cooking another batch of chicken, only after closing hours! Color her despairing.

There are basically two sorts of folks on the earth: “ulcer-givers” and “ulcer-getters.” These two are ulcer-givers; they give them to other folks, mainly to each other. They keep a hot war going on constantly in their little three-room house. Right at the height of the battle (words, not fists), dad will unleash a verbal artillery salvo on Charlie: “It’s all
your
fault, you little bleepity bleep! If
you
hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t be married to this old bat! I wish you’d never been born!” And he storms out of the house in a rage, to the accompanying tune of his wife’s screaming that she hopes he’ll get lost and never be found.

Now, moment by moment, day by day, who is Charlie learning about? Is he learning,
Now, wait a minute, dad! I didn’t ask to be born into this chicken outfit?
No, he’s learning about himself, remember? He’s processing the situation like this:
It’s all my fault that mom and dad are so miserable and unhappy! If I were gone, it’d be better for everybody! I am the problem! I really do need love, but I don’t blame mom and dad for not loving me. If I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t love me either! Sorry, no-good bum! Anybody that would cause the very ones he loves the most to be miserable ought to be shot! I hate myself!
Obviously, he doesn’t verbalize it as I have done, but it’s all coming through to him at the gut level.

Charlie’s family environment represents the whole world to him because it’s the only world he knows. Therefore, he generalizes his attitude to this:
The whole world would be better off if I had never been born.

You have a mind and you have emotions, a “thinker” and a “feeler.” Your feeler responds to your thinker; whatever you set your thinker on, your feeler will react to it. For example, suppose there’s a rattlesnake on the floor coiled to strike you on the leg, and you see it poised. First, you will detect this stimulus with your mind, which responds,
I believe I’m in great danger!
Let’s quantify this on a 1 to 10 scale, where 10 is the greatest.
I believe I’m in great danger, and that’s a 10!
Now, feeler responds to mind’s belief like this:
I feel terrified, and that’s a 10!

Then suppose that on closer examination you detect that the snake is made of rubber. Mind says,
Why, there’s no danger here; I believe I’m safe.
And mind immediately goes back down to level 1. But what about feeler? Does it go immediately back to 1? No way! Oh, it’ll eventually go down all right, but it’ll take thirty minutes to do so. It’ll go down like a BB sinking in oil.

Now let’s say that your mind’s gone down to 1, and in ten minutes your feeler is down to about a 7. Then you open a drawer that’s got a spider in it, and the spider scoots up your sleeve! Your mind goes from 1 to 10 instantly, and feeler covers the three points back to the top in one leap.

Generalizing from this illustration, let me pose a question. What if you are reared in a home where your dad is a rattlesnake and your mom is a spider? Or maybe it’s your brother or an aunt or a surrogate, like grandma. They keep your mind
and
your feeler at level 10 most of the time. When they back off for a few minutes, your mind will go down to 1 and think,
Whew, relief at last!
But feeler only gets down to about a 7 when one of them does it to you again. Wham! Bam! Ten and 10! Due to this process, do you see that by the time you are five years old, it’s been so long since your feeler’s been below a 7 that it sort of bottoms out on 7?
Seven becomes the door, or threshold, below which your feeler does not go.
This is what happens to a child like Charlie.

Psychologists teach that by the time a child reaches age five, 85 percent of his personality is established and is irreversible. Unfortunately, those psychologists never heard of 2 Corinthians 5:17, which says that any person
in
Christ is a
new
creation, that old things
have
passed away, and that
all
things
are
new. What psychologists are observing is that kids’ feelers get programmed, and this controls the person throughout his entire life. But praise God, we walk by
faith,
not by
feel.
There is a way out.

Now suppose Charlie grows up and gets saved by accepting Christ as his personal Lord and Savior. God may do many glorious works to erase some of his hang-ups, but He doesn’t erase them all, and I find that in the vast majority of cases the adult who has had childhood experiences such as I have described has his feeler stuck on about a 7 or even a 9.5. It’s been so long since the points below 7 on his emotional Richter scale have been exercised that they’ve atrophied away like arm muscles in a cast. After many years, they aren’t even operative any longer. They’re like a 1935 Buick that’s been sitting in a little old lady’s garage since World War II. It has all the standard equipment, but it sure won’t run! Its parts are stuck. It needs to be freed up. And the Holy Spirit is the oil who can deal with the problem I’m describing.

God has designed the human brain with memory banks. They’re just like the First National Bank, only instead of being a depository for money, they are depositories for memories. Your memory banks have memory traces burned across them. These are habit patterns of how you
act,
how you
feel,
and how you
think.
The more you repeat these patterns, the more deeply entrenched they become. This is the usual method for their development, although a memory trace may become deeply imprinted in just one (often traumatic) episode.

Some of these memory traces are fine, such as your particular language pattern. These patterns were etched into your memory banks through your experiences, and your speech is now “controlled” by this. And the Lord doesn’t get concerned about whether you sound as if you were reared in California or New York.

Memory traces are like highways, and the more you drive on them, the wider they become. Traffic flow is the key to development and maintenance. The more you spend your time in the pattern, the stronger it becomes. I suppose you’re sitting there with several thousand memory traces ranging from eight-laners to cow trails. Some of them are okay, but some of them are sheer garbage in God’s ecology. Let’s color these green for garbage. These green highways were generated by the “old man” as he sought to get his needs supplied on planet earth using
his
resources and cutting God out of the picture. He (the old man) was his own god. He declared himself Lord of the Ring.

With that understanding, we can see that little Charlie, having been reared with rejection,
learned
that he was yukky. He was trained like a bird dog to accept as “truth” that he really
is
yukky. And now his feeler is stuck on a threshold of 8, having not been below an 8 in years. Digits 1 through 7 are nonexistent. They have atrophied away. As he becomes more and more aware of “who he is” (yukky), his feeler will become more and more programmed. This has become a monstrous, green highway for him. He feels yukky most of the time.

As Charlie matures, he becomes more astute in his observations of the world, better able to objectively assess truth. The only trouble is that since his feeler is stuck on 8 and always has been so far as he’s able to recall, he now has renumbered his emotional Richter scale. Since 8 is as low as he’s ever experienced, he now calls 8 a 1.

Do you see, then, that Charlie can go from his 1 up to 10 five times faster than someone who’s playing with a full deck? He’s got only two points on his Richter scale. But he doesn’t
know
that. He just knows that he reacts internally (or externally) five times as rapidly as other kids do, and then he “objectively” concludes that he’s weird. I use quotation marks around the word
objectively
because Charlie will assure you that he
knows
he’s weird. He believes he has arrived at this conclusion objectively when, in fact, he has arrived at it by virtue of how he feels. This is
his
normal experience. He typically hates himself and wishes he were someone different, someone he could love.

If you identify with this category I’ve been discussing, I’m not making light of you. I know it may be painful to have me dredging up all this trauma from your past, but trust me that the Lord has shown me some solid answers.

Now let’s grow Charlie up to adulthood. His feeler has been stuck for so long that its programming is as deep as the Grand Canyon. He has built his life around rejection. He rejects himself and others, being unable to trust them. He believes that if he gets too close to them, they will hurt him or discover how yukky he really is and turn away from him. Thus, he has learned that it’s safer to just keep everyone away. If anyone earnestly tries to show love to him, even his wife or kids, he will be skeptical of it. Since he hates himself, anyone who tries to love him must be either pretty dumb or else a phony.

What does Charlie do then? He runs tests on the love others offer to see if it will break down. When it does (and it usually will due to techniques he has learned to employ), something inside him seems to “fall into place.”
I
knew
it! I
knew
it!
he thinks.
I
knew
she didn’t love me! I just had this
feeling.
She fooled me for fourteen years, but her true colors finally showed!
Or if the lover’s love does not break down, Charlie may actually drive the lover away, being unable to tolerate the love. He wants it, but he can’t handle it. He’s like a dog chasing a car and finally catching it: “What do I do with this?” He has never experienced a love environment before and he can’t handle it.