Thursday, May 8, 2014

You Are Wired For Love

By Dr. Caroline Leaf

Have you ever thought about what it means, really means, to be made in God's image as it says in Genesis 1:26?

This is something I have spent much time meditating on over the years, especially when I was still in clinical practice. I would have patients coming to me with lots of baggage, which included all kinds of evaluations and assessments of all their learning problems and emotional issues.

Although I have a healthy respect for the diagnostic tools they had gone through and that I had been trained to administer, I felt we had to dig below the surface of the issues to separate out the real person from the person they had become. Only then would I really know how to help my patient.

And so I pursued a line of research that would show me that God made us PERFECT in His image and that the negatives in our life come from voluntary choices we make, reactions to events and circumstances and things that can happen to us that we have no control over (Ecclesiastes 7:29; James 1-3: Philippians 4:4).

But despite all this, we still were originally created in the perfect image of a perfect God - and this is the core of who we are. It also becomes the departure point from which we deal with who we have become.

I found this to be the case as well in my scientific research - that we are designed brain and body to only think good thoughts and be in health (3 John 2) and that toxic thinking ravages the brain body in the same way sickness ravages the brain and body.

In Science this is called the optimism bias. God made everything and science is a name for describing how the universe and humans and animals and plants and the forces of nature work. So using science to understand God more is also a way of increasing our admiration for this mighty God we serve.

Instead of thinking of yourself as a poor old sinner saved by grace; rather think of yourself as a magnificent creation of God who has made some bad choices or experienced some knocks in life and who, through the grace of Jesus Christ, can choose to appropriate his grace and receive forgiveness and cleansing. This wonderful choice actually rewires the brain back to its original state each time we acknowledge Him.

This is where science and grace meet. You see - we are wired for love! And as we practice His presence daily we step into this, which is our original design and we follow the command in Matthew 5:48, which says to "seek after perfection as He is Perfect."

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