When God Lives in Your Amygdala: The Gospel Your Body Was Made to Receive | Who Told You That? (Week 5) | Chad Belew

All right, well, for those that don't know, this is a prescription bottle.

This one's mine.

It's for medication that I take to help manage my post-traumatic stress disorder.

I'm showing it to you because today,

we're talking about something that I think a lot of pastors won't.

And I'm not going to come at this just academically.

I'm going to come at it from the chair that I sit in once a week to speak to my VA therapist.

What I've learned in those moments, really about how the human body

responds to fear, to threat, safety and love, and

how it's changed how I read the gospel.

So that's what we're going to do today.

Over the last six weeks we've, we've been going through this series.

Who told you that?

We've named where the picture of God, most of us inherited, came from.

That quick call back because today builds on every one of those.

We've talked about these chick tracks.

Do you guys remember, is there a picture of them?

The chick tracks, yeah, the next one, yeah, you were wrong.

You didn't accept Jesus Christ's your own Lord and personal Savior.

She's holding a mask or a head, I don't know.

Chick tracks, over a billion in circulation.

They're designed to scare people into a prayer.

We talked about Jonathan Edwards in 1741.

One of the most influential sermons in American religious history.

Read what people in the pews were told God was like.

Jonathan Edwards in his sermons, centers in the hands of an angry God said.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or

some loathsome insect over the fire abhors you and is dreadfully provoked.

He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire.

I encourage you.

This sermon shaped American Christianity, American Evangelical Christianity for

almost three centuries.

It's our spiritual DNA, whether we have ever read that sermon or not.

One that I haven't talked about in the series because I've heard about it before.

I grew up with it, so I've mentioned it.

Some of you like me, he like lived it, right?

Heaven's gates and hell's flames.

Anybody?

Yeah, somebody?

It started as a traveling, like evangelistic drama that this reality

outreach ministries group did.

It's run now, it's still going for over 60 years.

Viewed by millions in churches around the world every year.

28 shows happened in Uganda alone, not too long ago, where the host church

publicly stated their goal was 15,000 salvation across the run.

I was in this, I wish we had, no, I don't wish we had phones that took pictures back then.

But I was in it when I was in youth group.

It was an annual production that we did right around Halloween because, you know,

you get to dress up.

We rehearsed for weeks.

We would literally, I try to scare the hell out of people.

And the whole point was an altar call at the end to scare you,

show you all the bad things that you do in life.

And then the altar call at the end fear as the conversion mechanism that was by design.

It's a fear-based evangelism in its purest form and it's still running today.

Because before anybody says, like, this is old school stuff, nobody preaches that anymore.

We can talk about now.

There's pastors like the senior pastor of Lake Point Church in Rockwell, Texas,

up by Dallas, his name is Josh Howarton.

Pastor is one of the largest churches in the country.

He preached a sermon this year titled, "What Jesus Really Said About Hell."

In it, he tells the congregation, direct quote, "Then anyone who believes in a God of love

"and not a God of wrath is deceived, and that's really stupid."

Yeah, guys, like Mark Driscoll, Doug Wilson, who's the president, or the president.

He's the pastor for the secretary of defense, I might call him the other thing.

Pete Higgs said, "Doug Wilson's the guy that thinks that women shouldn't be allowed to vote,

"that their husband should tell them, or should vote for the family.

"He believes in like, dominionism, like spreading the gospel through any means necessary."

He has like Joel Webb and again, someone who said that women shouldn't vote, land and shot.

He's another pastor up in Dallas who wrote a book not too long ago about LGBTQ

where he said they are possessed by demons. This is still happening.

Different platforms, same operating system, the wrath of God, the urgency of hell, fear is the engine.

And these guys are just the loudest voices, like they're the easy ones to find.

But they're not outliers, like the same theology runs quietly underneath thousands of churches

across the Western world right now. The same theology that many of us grew up under.

It's a theology built on threat. It's a delivered through threat.

It is producing people shaped by threat. And here's what nobody I believe is asking about these

theologies in this way of teaching. What is it doing to the bodies of the people in the pews?

I know for some of us, we were told like our body is wicked, the flesh is wicked.

You know, what does it matter, what it's actually doing to the actual body?

And I would argue that when Jesus resurrected, he resurrected in a body.

He cooked dinner or cooked breakfast. He ate breakfast. Like he came back to a body.

He walked around in a body.

Paul even talks about in one of his letters that he can't wait for the body to be redeemed.

Not just the spirit gone, but the body. This thing that we live in is not just some

suit that we just live in for a little while as a spirit and then we leave it behind. This is

something that matters. And my question is, what is the theology that is led by fear and threat?

What is it doing to the bodies of the people that are sitting in the rooms listening to it?

What has it done to our bodies?

Here's what I've been sitting with and I want to kind of invite you into it.

Fear-based theology isn't just theologically off.

It looks like it's it's doing real measurable harm.

Like to real bodies including mine. And the gospel, Jesus actually preached the one we've been

trying to recover across this series isn't just more beautiful. It looks like it might be what

the human body was designed to receive in the first place.

Three places that we're going to look at during this conversation today.

Scripture, science, and our own bodies.

So I'll bring in a couple of voices, some experts before I unpack any of this.

There's a researcher, Dr. Basel, van der Kolk, psychiatrist, 40 years of trauma research.

His book The Body Keeps the Score has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over five years.

Here's how it describes the body under chronic threat.

Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe in their own body, inside their own bodies.

The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.

Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs. And in an attempt to control

these processes, they often become experts at ignoring their gut feelings. They learned to hide

from themselves. Read that last line again. They learned to hide from themselves.

It should sound familiar because Genesis 3, Adam, and Eve are in the garden.

And when they hear God walking through the garden, the first thing they do is they hide.

The lie about God enters into the story and immediately they cannot tolerate being seen,

even by themselves. They don't want to see themselves, so they hide. The body knows.

Another one is also a psychologist, but a survivor. Dr. Marlene Wannell,

she grew up in a missionary family, 25 years working with people leaving high control

religion now as a psychologist. She coined a term for what she kept seeing in her practice.

And some of you have probably seen this. Maybe some of you have experienced this. It's religious

trauma syndrome. Here's how she describes it. RTS is a function of both the chronic abuses

of harmful religion and the impact of severing one's connection with one's faith.

It can be compared to a combination of PTSD and complex PTSD.

It's not similar to PTSD. It is PTSD caused by religion.

Symptoms that she documents, hypervigilance, difficulty trusting, depression, chronic shame,

black and white thinking, loss of identity, panic responses.

I know those symptoms, personally, from a war zone. And many of you know them from church.

We're going to walk through how this actually works in the body. I'm going to give you four

pieces of evidence that each one's going to build on the last. So number one,

the amygdala. It's a small structure deep in the brain. You may, you maybe I'll see it. It's the

little like jelly bean looking thing in the right behind the eyes. You see it, the pink one?

That's the amygdala part of your brain structure. It's it's deep in the brain.

It's the threat detection center of your brain. It's faster than thought,

faster than reason. It's faster than theology. It's one job is to ask before anything else,

am I safe? It doesn't wait for you to evaluate the situation. It fires first.

And a researcher named Stephen Porgis calls this this this firing of the amygdala, the neuroception.

It's your body's scanning for safety or threats before your conscious mind even gets involved.

Porgis in his own word says this feelings of safety emerge from internal physiological states

regulated by the autonomic nervous system. Safety is detected by the nervous system before the mind

weighs in. Nothing in the soul heals until the body receives a credible cue of safety.

That last line, like Bert burned that in. Nothing in the soul heals until the body receives a

credible cue of safety. Jonathan Hite is a social psychologist. I've talked about moral

psychologist. He describes the mind as a writer on an elephant. And the writer is your conscious

self. It's the reasoning part of your brain. The part that that reads theology nods along at

sermons can say, I know God loves me. And then the elephant is your emotional automatic system.

Bigger, faster. It was their first Hite's insight from decades of research. He says this.

The writer does not control the elephant. The writer thinks he does. But the elephant decides

where to go. The writer's real job is to explain afterward why the elephant went that direction.

Says the writer is a press secretary, not a president.

The elephant is the amygdala. It's that the quick reaction. The writer's irrational brain.

And fear-based theology trained the elephant before the writer had words for a lot of us who

grew up in church and grew up in children's church. And we were told pretty early that you were broken.

Your sin are going to hell. Before we could even figure out what those words meant.

Fear-based theology trained the elephant before the writer had words. Remember,

we talked a little bit ago, a couple of sermons ago about the God concept versus the God image.

God concept is what you say out loud. Your theology, your beliefs, the God image is what

you brace for. What you actually expect from God when you fail. Those are the writer and the elephant.

This information alone, the idea is like information alone, hearing theology, hearing

information, it cannot heal a fear-based God image. You can hear God loves you every Sunday for 40 years.

The writer can agree, you take notes, say the prayer, but if the elephant was trained in

childhood but God is a threat, the writer cannot argue the elephant out of it. The elephant overrides

the writer every time. And the writer writes a theology paper then explaining why it was reasonable

to be afraid. Because the writer is the PR for the elephant. Here's why fear is a good thing for me.

Even though God loves me, I can explain why fear works, why it matters. This is the writer

just trying to explain why the elephant did what the elephant did.

So another scientist, a neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky. He's a Stanford neuroscientist. He's

spent 40 years on this studying chronic threat to the body. His findings are textbook. When the

body lives in sustained threat, cortisol stays elevated. Chronicly elevated cortisol suppresses

the immune system, damages the hippocampus, drives inflammation, contributes to anxiety and heart

disease and shortens life expectancy. Chronic fear isn't just a spiritual problem. It is a

physiological one. It gets in the body. It stays. It is killing people.

Now hold that next to what we just walked through at the beginning of this talk,

Edwards centers in the hands of an angry God. Chick tracks, heaven's gate tells flames,

howarts and telling people that anyone who believes in a God of love is deceived and stupid.

A theological system explicitly designed to keep the body in sustained, perceived threat.

What happens when a religion does that to a person, year after year, starting in childhood?

The threat doesn't stay external. It gets attached. It gets attached to the very person you're

being told to love most. I believe fear-based theology installs God into the amygdala.

A person formed inside the framework of fear cannot read God through a present tense lens of love.

They read God through a trauma template of threat. So prayer feels like surveillance.

Communion feels like a courtroom. Confession feels like Russian roulette. Worship feels like

you're auditioning for something or you're performing. And in silence feels dangerous.

This person that their body is doing exactly what bodies do under chronic threat. The framework

wasn't just theologically wrong. It was doing biological damage and it still is.

Bernay Brown's research draws one more line under this. She says, Yilt says that,

we've talked about this. I did something bad. Shame says I am bad. And shame, she's found,

is highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, suicide, eating disorders. Shame doesn't

produce change. It produces hiding. So a theology that begins with, you are born guilty,

that builds its altar call on shame as the engine, doesn't produce holiness.

It produces what Venderkolk said trauma produces. People hiding from themselves. Genesis three all

over again. I can tell in the room, this harm is not abstract. People who lived under fear-based

theology the longest were the ones who saw what it was doing first. If you start to read like

womanist theology, which is theology through the lens of a black woman,

you'll begin to see that they could point out some of the problems with this fear-based idea.

Dr. Dolores Williams, she's a womanist theologian at Union Seminary,

she wrote a book called Sisters in the Wilderness. And in it, she asked the question that most

American theologians wouldn't. She said, does a theology that requires an innocent body like

Jesus to be tortured, to satisfy a wrathful God, have anything to say to people whose bodies have

been violated inside that same framework for 400 years. She went back to a store in the Old

Testament of Hagar. Hagar was the enslaved woman of Abraham and Sarah. Sarah was unable to have

a child and God had promised Abraham a child and so instead of waiting on God, they brought Hagar in.

This enslaved woman and said, you're going to have a child with Abraham.

They used her. And then when Sarah got mad and they got pregnant herself, they discarded Hagar.

They sent her into the wilderness with her dying child. She was used and discarded.

And if you look at the story in the Old Testament, God shows up, not in some temple,

not like to this king to tell them to go find Hagar. No, in the wilderness, to the one that the

system threw away. And in that story, Hagar gives God a name that no one else in the Bible gives.

She says this. She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her. You are the God who sees me.

And the Hebrew, it's Elroy. Not the God who required her suffering, not the God who

was okay with what she went through because he was going to redeem it. No, no, no. The God who saw

her and he stayed with her. The God who saw her. It's liberation theology in like five words.

Is what a body under chronic threat actually needs. Not a transaction, which needs a witness.

Not a verdict. Presence. A presence that says, I see you and I'm not looking away. I'm here with you.

Another theologian. Howard Thurman. Black theologian is a mentor to MLK. He wrote this in 1949 in

Jesus and the disinherited. Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage.

For he announced the good news that fear, hypocrisy, and hatred, the three hounds of

hell that track the trail of the disinherited need have no dominion over them.

He said, the three hounds of hell. Not in the afterlife. Now. He's speaking of the current moment

and in the current moment, of fear, hypocrisy, and hatred,

tracking us in this life, in our bodies, in our churches. These are the hounds of hell.

And Jesus, if we believe this gospel says that he comes announcing the good news that they no

longer have dominion over us. And what Howard Thurman is saying is this is what the gospel

actually sounded like to people whose nervous systems were already on chronic alert.

The gospel was not a threat. It was a liberation.

It's back to the bottle.

I've been doing a EMDR therapy for the last six months, maybe.

For the PTSD that this medication helps me manage.

It's a eye movement desensitization reprocessing. Thank you.

I thought I had it written down in here, but it's EMDR. Okay.

Is what? Oh, for my perspective, here's how EMDR works. You sit with your therapist,

for me, mine is online with my VA therapist, so we're talking to the computer. And

you bring a traumatic memory to your mind, whatever trauma caused, maybe some of this PTSD.

So you bring that memory to the mind and you hold it there. And then this ball starts bouncing

back and forth on my screen. It's like this. And so you're just supposed to fall out with your eyes.

And for me, it takes me like she's like, okay, think about go through the memory, watch the ball.

And for me, like the first couple of times that we get together, the first time the ball is

bouncing on the screen, she's like, okay, take a breath. What was happening? What were you thinking

about? And I was just thinking, stop watching the ball. Stop like focusing on the ball.

All right, let's try this again. So you're supposed to just let your eyes just do the work, right?

While you're thinking about this, this memory, look, it's a battle, okay? Left, right, left, right,

your eyes follow it while you hold that memory. It sounds strange, but that eye movement is supposed

to mimic what your brain does during REM sleep. And during REM sleep is when memories get processed

and kind of filed away, it makes me think of like inside out, oh my gosh, she's asleep and they start

putting things away, right? Traumatic memories though, they get stuck because the brain couldn't

process them. It can process what happened when they happened. So MDR creates the conditions for the

brain to finally do what it's trying to do all along. It's trying to process through and

put this memory away. But during MDR, the memory doesn't disappear. I'm still going back to this

event, but my body's relationship changes to that memory. There's like this alarm that's wired

in my brain to that moment that we've talked about before. Like, I would go into say a movie

theater and sit in the dark movie theater, and my brain would go into hypervigilance and protection

mode. And I'm thinking about the ways I'm going to protect my family and plan my escape route

in this room because my brain is sensing threat. And it knows what to do with threat because we've

been here before in places that I can't control the things around me and something happened to me.

And so my brain goes into this hypervigilance and hyper awareness and I start to plan and

that's not good. Like, it makes it where I can't enjoy a movie with my family. But what we do is

go back to the memory that caused this rewiring of my brain and I look at it differently.

It's a part where I'm actually seeing like 23 year old Chad in this moment where

a vehicle exploded and threw me on the ground. And I'm angry now. I mean, I survived. So that's

good. But I'm upset because I couldn't control the moment. And a lot of my fear is built on

not being in control. And I'm mad at the people around me that were in charge and

but as we go through this process, my mind shifts. And I'm actually looking at 23 year old Chad and

I'm just sad for him. Like, you didn't want to be here. You didn't choose really this. You didn't

know what you're getting into. You're in a war that shouldn't be happening. And people whose land

you're on trying to control them or mad at you. And so they're trying to kill you. And

we're all just confused. But I look back at young Chad and now all I care about is how do I get

him healthy? How do we not carry this anymore? How do we rewire the brain to where my body

can lower the cortisol levels? Healing, it's not amnesia. It's reinterpretation under conditions

of safety. So a month ago in that therapy room, something hit me that I haven't really been

able to stop thinking about when when MDR is doing this with my PTSD, I believe this is exactly what

Jesus was trying to do for the human condition when he came back. Not erase what happened. He's

trying to change the meaning, trying to explain to us to restore the body to create conditions of

safety where transformation becomes possible. He didn't come to teach us new set of rules.

He came to fix the picture of God. People had been handed by their religion that was causing

them harm. Hebrews one says it directly. It says, "In the past God spoke through the prophets,

but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son." The exact representation of his being.

It's the actual picture, the true word, the actual picture doesn't like lead with threat.

Listen to how Jesus talks. Throughout the gospels come to me. All who are weary. Do not be anxious

about tomorrow. Look at the birds. Look at the lilies. Your father knows what you need. Read that

as someone who studies trauma. Jesus is grounding people in the present moment. Don't worry about

tomorrow. A textbook intervention for anxiety. Reminding them that they are seen. Asking them to

look up and notice safety in their actual environment. He's quite literally helping bodies regulate.

The God he reveals is not the God in the amygdala. He's a God who heals what religion broke.

I think it matters for people in this room. A year ago, almost to the day, March 18th of last year,

I recorded the video that you saw earlier. No script. I've been asking questions about the

gospel for a long time. That was just one of those burning questions I had. I had no idea what I was

doing. I had no idea that the question I asked at the end of that video was going to take me back

to school for psychology. I had no idea it would become an eight week sermon series called Who

Told You That. I had no idea it would change how I read, what I read, how I pray, how I pastor

this church. But that question, who told you that? It was the start of everything that led to this

next phase for us. I'd love to tell you that I'm a really good planner. I did that. A year later,

we started this series. It was just random. I was like, I wonder when I shot that video,

literally yesterday. And I went to look and I was like, oh, it's March 18th. And I was like,

oh, I said, who told you that in that video? What? Look at the whole spirit.

The arsenal didn't become this kind of community by accident. It became this kind of community

because I couldn't live inside the old theology anymore. And a lot of you were there with me.

We're here today asking these questions out loud on a Sunday morning in a church because

that question wouldn't let me go. And if this series has been hard for you, I know some people

that's been disorienting, grieving, maybe relieving all three at once. I want you to know that it

costs me too. It's still costing me. I'm still in the chair with my therapist. I'm still relearning

my own God image. But what I can tell you is this. On the other side of that question,

there's a body that finally feels held. A faith that finally feels honest and a community,

this community that finally feels safe. And that's what Jesus does, not metaphorically,

like actually in the body over time with the right question.

He says it in a sermon on the Mount. Six times he says, "You've heard it said, but I tell you."

The traditional read is he's raising the bar. He's making the law harder.

But read it through everything we covered today. I'll just read one. You've heard it said,

"Do not murder." But I tell you, anyone who is angry with a brother is subject to judgment.

He isn't making a rule stricter here. He's pointing to the internal state, the chronic anger,

the threat response running as a way of life for someone that produces the desire to harm

another person in the first place. The law, it managed behavior. And Jesus is addressing

the operating system underneath that. Every antithesis follows the same move. Jesus didn't

come to raise the bar of the law. He came to offer the therapy that the law could never provide.

Over and over he does this. And then he gets into the beatitudes where you hear him through

the same lens of a regulated body, a nervous system at rest, like listen to how he says this now.

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, not the performers,

blessed are those who mourn." Why? Because those are the ones who can actually feel something.

"Blessed are the meek, strength that doesn't need to prove itself. Blessed are the peacemakers,

those who actively construct safety for others." Every one of these "blessed are" is a body that's

no longer on guard. Everyone is the opposite of trauma. And the line that has crushed people

inside of fear-based theology for centuries, love your enemies. Neurobiologically, that's

impossible from a threat state. You cannot love your enemy while your alarm is running.

From a body that knows it's loved, a body that has received enough safety, that the alarm has

finally quieted, then loving an enemy isn't heroism. It's just an overflow of that love.

It is seeing someone from a different perspective.

Jesus wasn't asking for superhuman moral performance here or to fake it. He was describing

the natural fruit of a body that knows it is loved. I'll close to this one verse and one question.

John writes this in his first letter. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will

have confidence on the day of judgment. In this world, we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love.

Perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment.

The word for confidence here is "prescia" is boldness. Freedom to approach without covering. PSA that

we talked about a while back told you that you can only appear before God if Jesus is blocking the

view. He's your snow covering on the dung that you are. That's a quote from an actual pastor.

I think it was Jonathan Edwards actually. John says love made complete produces the ability to stand.

And the fear John names, the one love drives out, is specifically fear that has to do with

punishment, with the bracing, the God and the amygdala, the fear experience of standing in front of God.

And if that's still your experience, if fear is still what drives your spiritual life,

John is telling you something is incomplete, not your faith, your experience of the love that God

has for you. The transformation hasn't landed in your body yet. Here's where we've been all hour.

We're trying to move God. I know. Not out of your life, but out of your amygdala,

out of the alarm system, out of a place that causes fear and into the part of you that knows how to

rest in a safe relationship. Paul tells the church in Galatia what life actually looks like

if you're experiencing this love. He calls it the fruit of the spirit. Fruit of the spirit is love,

joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Read that list as a neuroscientist would every single thing on it grows only in a regulated body,

a body that knows it's safe. You can't manufacture any of these out of fear.

Try producing patience when your alarm is going off. Try producing kindness from a body that's

bracing. Try producing peace when you're scanning for threat. You can fake it for a while, but

you can't bear that fruit. That fruit only grows where it was made to grow.

John tells us exactly where that's at. It's in the midst of the love that God has for you.

It's the question I leave you with is this. What would it feel like in your actual body,

not as a theological idea, just in your body? What would it feel like to stop bracing in the

presence of God? To approach prayer like you approach a conversation with someone who is

completely safe for you, where you don't have to manage how you're coming across, where you can

be tired, uncertain, angry, wrong, and know you're still held.

What happens in your body in that moment? What should happen is your shoulders should drop,

your breath should deepen and slow, and something clenched in you can let go. This is the body

receiving what it was made for. It's the only place that fruit grows. So let's hopefully,

as we walk through this, the invitation today isn't to believe a new theological proposition.

It's to let your body do something it may not have been allowed to do for a long time when we talk

about God. Just relax. The God revealed in Jesus doesn't work through threat because threat cannot

produce the kind of human Jesus called blessed. The theology of secure love is not soft. It's not

a soft alternative to a hard gospel. It's the only theology whose fruit the body can actually bear.

Our soul. God love us. It's who you're meant to be. We'll see you next week.