WYC 2009: This Mind In You

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GYC West

Magna Parks: Secular Psychology - Satan's Alluring Path

Magna Parks

Secular Psychology - Satan’s Alluring Path, Part 1

Our Father which art in heaven, we're so grateful to be able to come before you.

We're thankful for the opportunity we have to bow before you.

And as we go into this topic about secular psychology, we ask for your Holy Spirit to give me, the speaker, wisdom and understanding and how to present and then that you may open the minds and hearts of our dear people who are here.

We thank you so much for your love for us.

We thank you for the truth that you've given to us and we may we learn as your people to embrace it so that we can know to deal with everything that comes our way.

In the name of Jesus, your son, we do pray.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself.

Many times people refer to me as a clinical psychologist, but in the psychology world, if the clinical psychologist heard me being referred to as a clinical psychologist, they would not like that, although we do very similar work.

I am a counseling psychologist with a PhD, received that from Ohio State, and I've been in the field of psychology since 1988.

I taught for 7 years and then I was in private practice full time between 94 and 2007.

In 2007, I ran across a sermon by Pastor Ophiel online, blasting a lot of what I learned.

Didn't like it at first and the Holy Spirit led me.

And I started to do more studying and found out that much of what I learned was not biblical.

I thought I was helping people, you know.

I thought I was helping people with Freud and Carl Rogers and all of these folks.

I'm gonna talk a little bit about them later.

But as I started to read more of the Bible, Spirit of Prophecy, and even science, which I call true science, when it supports Bible and Spirit of Prophecy, is showing something different than what people are doing in their practices.

And so I wanted to share some of that with you today, not only how psychology has come in and affected us as individuals, but how it affects us as a church.

And then talk about some of the concepts that we just throw around and have accepted as truth, when in actuality there's a lot of error that's there.

I'm just curious, how many people in here are in the field of social work or psychology or something related?

I used to tell people not to go into these fields, and then that's when I was first exposed to the truth, and the Lord has kind of brought me to the center that I recognize we do need people to do counseling and things of that nature.

We just need people to be following Bible and spirit of prophecy and true science.

I like to use those as the 3 sources, okay?

And I've entitled this Secular Psychology, Satan's Alluring Path, because it's very alluring to come into this field, and you'll understand why as we move on.

Now let's just briefly start out with the great controversy.

Basically, there's a war between Christ and Satan.

It's either Christ's way or God's way versus Satan's way.

His character has been maligned starting in heaven.

Satan came up with all of these lies about God's character, and the universe is now wondering which is truth, which is error.

Now when Christ died on the cross, it began to show the universe the true nature of Satan, but the controversy still continues.

And the question that the universe and the world is asking, is his way the best?

Can we as earthly beings truly follow and keep his law?

Can we emulate Christ or God's character?

The Bible tells us in 1 Corinthians 4, 9, for we are made a what?

Spectacle unto the world and to angels and to men.

People, beings, here and in the universe are watching us, wondering can they carry this through?

Satan's goal is to deceive men to follow his way.

His goal is if I can get people to believe my way, I will have this world in the palm of my hands.

He leads men to think they don't need God, and neither do they need to follow His law or his?

And he wants us to depend on more on what?

Do you see psychology coming to your mind now?

He wants us to follow our natural inclinations, do what seems best, do what feels good.

All of this is part of Satan's plan to win the great controversy.

And so he's found various avenues through which he can come in and especially deceive us as God's people, Christians and even more Seventh-day Adventists, deceive us into thinking his way is better.

That's where the great controversy is being played out for us on an individual level, in our minds.

He does not want us to have the mind of Christ.

But Satan is saying, we don't want him to his imps.

We don't want them to have the mind of Christ.

Alistair Wong this morning shared so wonderfully about fiction and how that is affecting our mind and how we are learning or picking up the character of Satan.

I believe, brothers and sisters, I'm going to make a bold statement that secular psychology, psychology that is not based on God's principles is another avenue that Satan is using to get control of our minds.

And I believe this is so important for us to understand, especially as we are here at the very close of time.

And I'm so grateful to the Lord that he pulled me out of that darkness into his marvelous light to understand this and share this with others.

And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be open, and ye shall be as God's, knowing good and evil.

Now read that verse, or keep that verse in mind, given what I just shared, and you know some of the things about the great controversy.

Satan's first experiment was with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

And I was reading 1 book that said how he, or actually I wasn't reading a book.

I was listening to someone on AudioVerse, and he said that the way he got Eve was to reorganize her whole mind.

If Satan had come to Eve straight out as an evil being, Eve would not have been deceived.

But he had to reorganize the mind, and he had to deceive her by mixing truth and error.

The truth is their eyes were opened and they did no good and evil.

And My belief is that the reason secular psychology has had such a hold on us is because in it is a mixture of truth and error.

And you will see that as we go on and talk about some of these concepts.

The servant of the Lord tells us, the track of truth lies close beside the track of error.

And both tracks seem to be 1 to minds which are not worked by the Holy Spirit and which therefore are not quick to discern The difference between truth and error.

Secular Psychology - Satan’s Alluring Path, Part 2

Father, again, we thank you that we can come before you to continue this topic, and we pray for your Holy Spirit to come in this room, continue to give wisdom, guidance, and we thank you for what you will do.

In the name of Jesus, your Son, we do pray, amen.

Several of y'all have been asking me where you can get the book.

You know, they have several ministries with booths right down at the meeting place.

We have a booth there, Be In Good Health.

We have not only this book, but we have a little book that I wrote on using the laws of health to treat depression.

In fact, I have this book on actual audio book, the same book on the dangers of secular psychology and some other things you might be interested in.

My husband and I have a full-time ministry now where We do seminars, health seminars.

He was trained through correspondence and then a little bit of campus work through Uchee Pines.

And then I'm also starting to get back into the counseling realm again, because there is a great need.

Let's move on talking about Satan's alluring path.

The second part we're going to be looking at some of the different concepts that have come into our world as Christians that are affecting us through secular psychology.

And we use a lot of words, and we don't recognize that some of these words have a lot of secular psychological roots.

1 of the words we use a lot is self-esteem.

We talk to people and say, you know, they have a low self-esteem.

We throw that word out and we don't recognize that there are not a lot of biblical roots for that word.

And we're gonna have some verses up there to kind of support that.

But many of these things, there we go, praise God.

Many of these things we don't realize has been something that Satan has brought in to turn us away from God's true way.

How many of you have heard of Abraham Maslow?

Abraham Maslow actually says, I sometimes think that the world will either be saved by psychology in the broader sense, or else it will not be saved at all.

So his belief was, psychology will save the world.

I thought that after I finished graduate school.

I said, I'm going to go and mix psychology with what we know as Adventist, and I'm gonna help the Adventist families and marriages in our churches, because this information I have is so wonderful and I'm gonna do a lot of helping.

So I had the same kind of belief that Maslow has and a lot of us psychologists believe that.

You know, when you deal with the mind, it places you in a really superior kind of mindset.

People will say to me sometimes, when I tell them I'm a psychologist, they'll say, what am I thinking right now?

You know, they really give us a lot of power, and we don't recognize that.

And that's why I think, I really believe these are 1 of the areas that Satan just loves, because he can really let this mind be in you.

He can really move us away from having the mind of Christ because of the fact that psychology deals with the mind.

And Carl Rogers was 1 of the psychologists who really pushed this self-esteem idea.

He's, this is another person, Eric Fromm, I'll talk a little bit more about Rogers in a minute.

Eric Fromm says, the doctrine that man is selfish and has nothing good in himself is not healthy and promotes self-hatred.

So when the Bible says there is none righteous, no not 1, and these kind of things, Fromm would say, oh, these poor Christians, just breeding self-hatred.

And then in the book Hidden Heresy, written by Pastor Mostad, I mentioned earlier, the 1 who talked about the Baptist professor, he mentions a televangelist who we all know, I'm not gonna mention the name, someone warned me about doing that, and I listened to them saying this goes all over the world, so don't mention people's names.

If you come up to me later on, I'll tell you who it is.

Sin is any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem.

Anything that robs you of your self-esteem.

The same Italian evangelist says, to be born again means we must be changed from a negative to a positive self image, from inferiority to self esteem.

I'll say even more, and you may figure out here, right here in the state of California.

Unfortunately, brothers and sisters, this self-esteem idea has even come into the church.

And some of you have heard me talk about this before.

In our hymnals, there's a hymn called At the Cross.

The wording of that was changed based on the self-esteem idea.

Alas, and did my Savior bleed and did my Sovereign die, would he devote that sacred head, it used to say, for such a worm as I.

Now it says, alas, and did my Savior bleed and did my sovereign die?

Would he devote that sacred head for someone such as I?

Now I don't believe when the hymnal people sat down at general conference that they said, you know, we need to raise people's self-esteem, so let's change the wording.

I think it's so invasive, so pervasive, that we don't recognize that this idea of, you can't tell people they're worms.

They're not gonna grow and become better people.

We need to recognize that people are people.

And the idea is that we have to raise self-esteem for people to feel better.

I don't know how many of you all have read this book by Dan Lucarini.

He's a Sunday keeper, wonderful, powerful book.

He says, in my own experience, I noticed we contemporaries, these are the people who follow the contemporary Christian music movement, preferred to raise our faces and hands up to God and call that worship.

I thought back to when I first changed my personal worship style from bowing my head to looking up.

I remember the good feeling it gave me that I was for the first time a participant in worship with God, not some lowly, there's that word, worm, who had to prostrate myself.

So this whole way of worship has some roots in this self-esteem movement because now we're worshiping a way that'll make us feel good about ourselves.

You know, in the Bible, sometimes people would come and just basically fall flat on their faces.

You know, but that was putting down their self-esteem too much.

Now we have to raise our self-esteem and worship in a different way.

Unfortunately, it's even coming into some of our publications.

Secular Psychology - Satan’s Alluring Path, Part 3

Our Father which art in Heaven, we thank you again for being able to come before you.

We thank you for all you have done for us.

We pray that you may be with not only this seminar, but the other seminars that are going on at the same time.

And as we continue to talk about the dangers of secular psychology, we again ask for your wisdom and for the presence of your Holy Spirit to give understanding.

We thank you so much for all you've given to us and may we not take this information for granted, Father, but continue to study and grow and learn in the grace and knowledge of Jesus.

All right, we started out, I think you remember, this was the last quote I put up.

We were talking about studying and dealing with emotions, and I shared with you how psychologists place emotions as primary when they're dealing with problems.

And we're going to move on to another major emotion that psychologists focus on that's also important in our Christian walk, and that's guilt.

Doris Jeanette, and she pretty much summarizes what most secular psychologists think about guilt.

She says, guilt is the worst experience known to humans.

It makes you feel unworthy and miserable.

It is caused by thinking you have done something wrong.

You are taught to feel guilt when someone judges you about anything, how you dress, how you think, what you do.

There is no right or wrong, only experiences to learn from.

So get out there and enjoy learning and living and growing.

Guilt is damaging And so when you're dealing with clients, you need to help them, you know, absorb their guilt, get rid of their guilt.

Guilt is something that's bad, damaging, and bad.

Always keep that in mind when I'm talking, because there is some truth to that.

Guilt can be damaging, and we'll talk about that.

Then some of you might have heard of Albert Ellis.

You've heard of cognitive behavior therapy, right?

And there are some things I really like about cognitive behavior.

In fact, that's probably 1 of the things that I held onto in my training because it fits so much the biblical injunction, as a man thinketh, so is he.

But even with the fathers of these theories that are good, they have their interesting viewpoints.

And Albert Ellis says, the more sinful and guilty a person feels, the less chance there is he will be a happy, healthy, or law-abiding citizen.

That's what makes psychology, secular psychology, so alluring because it just mixes truth and error in such a really deceptive way.

Now we talked about the contemporary Christian music movement and I keep bringing that up because you might not have known that it has a lot of psychological underpinnings to it.

We talked about self-esteem and this unconditional acceptance thing, and this whole idea about guilt really fuels that whole music movement, because the idea is to go to church to feel good.

You don't want to make people feel guilty.

You want to leave church feeling good, not guilty.

There are very many in the churches who are deceiving their own souls.

They reach a standard of their own creating.

They think that religion consists of going to church to hear sermons and to have a what?

This was going on even in her day, that they were going to church.

You know, I want to feel good when I leave church.

They do not comprehend that if they ever reach heaven, it must be by daily self-denial and conflict.

This fair-weathered Christianity will not do in the time toward which we are rushing.

Now, right before the close of probation, under the sun of scorching trial, all such will be found withered away.

My contention is that as we focus on this, if we take this idea pushed by secular psychology that people shouldn't feel guilty and they should leave church feeling good.

What kind of Christians are we producing, brothers and sisters?

Strong Christians who can stand with what's coming ahead of us?

Not very strong because their religion is based on a set of producing good feelings.

And feelings are so unstable, they do not last.

And if we're looking for a religion that produces good feelings, when the time comes, we will not stand.

Now this was written by a psychiatrist who is not even a Christian, but wrote a book, Whatever Became of Sin.

He started to look at the mental health field, and he says, something is wrong here.

I don't hear the word sin at all in mental health.

And he recognized that the sin problem is at the root of a lot of our mental health problems.

And this is what he says, where indeed did sin go?

The very word sin seems to have disappeared.

It was once a strong word, an ominous and serious word.

It described a central point in every civilized human being's life and lifestyle, but the word went away.

It has almost disappeared, the word along with the notion.

Isn't that amazing that a non-Christian mental health professional would recognize that we don't talk about sin anymore?

But he did say he's not, he wasn't even following his Jewish beliefs, but you're right.

Remember earlier I talked about the psychiatrist getting on the television talking about why the South Carolina governor was having an affair.

He's narcissistic, he's in a leadership position, on and on and on, but no 1 says it's because of sin.

You didn't hear any of the psychiatrists saying that.

That is not something that's spoken about.

There has been a strong tendency for the preacher to move into the field of pastoral counseling.

Basic to most techniques of counseling is an avoidance of any response which might impute wrong or moral judgment upon the individual being counseled.

We're still talking about this move away from guilt.

And the idea is that when you leave the role as a pastor and you move into pastoral counseling, you have to get to the point where you're not judging your person, you can't give them any of your values.

And so that takes away, well, let me continue to read the quote.

This attitude has frequently been translated into the pulpit presentation of the preacher.

No longer are right and wrong clearly defined and congregations are left to their uncertainty and sin.

But true repentance is only realized when what?

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Series

Magna Parks: Secular Psychology - Satan's Alluring Path

Secular Psychology - Satan’s Alluring Path, Part 1

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Breakout Session A

Prodigal Child

50m

Healing the Mind: Psychology and the Bible

Christians, Beware of Secular Psychology, Part 3

1h

Healing From Bad Religion and Church Hurt

We Need Counseling

55m

Young Professionals

Process of Progress

49m

Magna Parks: Secular Psychology - Satan's Alluring Path

Secular Psychology - Satan’s Alluring Path, Part 3

57m

Called to Lead

02 I Thought, So...

56m

Healing the Mind: Psychology and the Bible

Christians, Beware of Secular Psychology, Part 1

1h

Rethinking Mental Health In Evangelism

54m

Plenary Sessions

Sabbath School Lesson Study: Life More Abundant

1h 32m

Annie Morgan, Kevin Sears, & Wes Peppers: Unashamed in Your Neighborhood

Sharpening Your Sword: How to Give a Bible Study

56m

Sound Doctrine