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There are some words here that I would like to unpack and clarify in my mind because they have been thrown around all my life without really grasping what they really imply. There are a great number of religious words like that that I have been investigating for some years now and my research has really helped transform my own personal experience.
The words in this verse are bless, curse and rejoice. I thought that weep would not need checking out but as I just now looked at the original Greek word for this I realized how important it is to even check out words that I assume I know. The word for weep means not only to sob and weep but it also does not mean quiet, internal weeping. It specifically means external expressions of sadness. I'm not sure how much to make of that distinction but it is interesting to observe.
I touched a little on bless last time. This word is the same word as eulogize. Most people know what it means to eulogize someone's life at their funeral and how sad it is that we don't do it while they are still alive and can benefit from all the nice things people say about them. I remember the very powerful movie called Tuesday's with Morrie in which he arranged to have his funeral months before he died so that he could enjoy it along with everyone else. I believe God is challenging our social paradigms about this whole idea by telling us here that we need be practicing the art of eulogizing all the time, not just at funerals. If we are being transformed into the likeness of God we will see a radical difference in the way we talk and think about others, even those who persecute us according to these verses.
The word for curse, as far as I can decipher from the Greek, is just the opposite of bless or eulogize. It means to execrate, to put down, to shame or devalue others by speaking badly about them. This is the natural response that we have in our flesh against anyone who we feel is persecuting us, but God says emphatically here that we are not to do that. Earlier in Romans Paul made it very clear that if we follow the natural desires of our flesh we are headed for death. Indeed, we are already filling ourselves with death.
Just because it feels normal and natural does not justify it such a reaction. Just because someone seems to deserve our antipathy and resentment toward how they are treating us does not make cursing acceptable for a real Christian. God's ways are radically different than the ways of the world and the flesh, and we must increasingly become more aware of how we still mingle in habits formed in the flesh to the new ways of thinking brought to us by the Spirit. The surrounding verses in this passage amplify this injunction to bless and not curse and it seems that this verse is a main high point that is at the center of a chiastic structure that was a literary tool often used by Bible writers.
This strikes directly at the core of my own tendencies toward criticism, fault-finding and negative thinking. It seems so natural for my first reactions to a new situation to look for the problems, to assume negative intent on the part of others, to be suspicious and wary in order to protect myself. Even more subtle is to appear to be noble by being suspicious of others motives in religion in the name of protecting the purity of truth. I have seen this modeled by very many in my life and it is so easy to follow that pattern. But I strongly suspect that this mode of thinking is that described in verse 16 as being haughty in mind even though that word is definitely not complimentary. Having a critical attitude toward others who do not see things as I do may feel very righteous and I may think I am defending the truth, but it turns out that from heaven's viewpoint I am really engaging in cursing others while being wise in my own estimation. God have mercy on me and continue to transform me.
Be of the same mind toward one another; do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own estimation. (Romans 12:16)
My left brain wrestles against these verses and is eager to rationalize very plausible-sounding excuses as to why they should not apply to my defensiveness for “the truth”. But I am reminded that this passage must be understood from the viewpoint and context of the condition of my spirit much more than my relationship to intellectual truths. It is too easy to justify all sorts of dysfunction in my spirit by resorting to dogmatic stands for the truth that I am sure is truth and needs defending. But this is not the ways of God. Truth does not need defending but it does need exposure through the lives of people being transformed into beings of beauty, sweetness and attractiveness.
I noticed something very interesting the other day when I was meditating on these verses. This text talking about rejoicing and weeping with others in the body is really an explanation of what scientists today are learning about how the right brain functions. It is now being learned that the right brain, where most of our emotions and deeper beliefs about ourselves are based, is the part of our mind that takes charge whenever we find ourselves in trauma situations. An under-trained right brain (which applies to most of us) will often shut down the left brain temporarily and will take over control of our life until the intense part of the trauma is past and then allow the left brain to come back online.
This phenomenon is sometimes referred to in legal cases as temporary insanity. That is because a person often acts very uncharacteristically from that which they are typically know to act under great stress and it is assumed that somehow they have gone insane for a few minutes because they did not really know what they were doing.
This is partially true. And it may be so largely if they have made the mistake of living primarily from their left brain most of their life and so their perceived identity was that of the person created in the left brain while avoiding right brain functions. But it could also happen from living life following one's feelings without restraint which also leaves the mind very unbalanced and immature. This unbalanced state of mental function becomes very evident under times of stress when the right brain suddenly takes over, as it was designed by God to do, but does not have adequate training to know how to respond properly. Since all the facts and training and information about how to act may have been stored in the left brain alone for much of the life and the left brain is now unavailable with all of its facts and identity knowledge-base, the right brain will act very differently than the person usually does when they are living life heavily from the left brain. The right brain will always default back to the example stored in emotional memory of others and how they acted under similar emotions.
To avoid this many people believe that they must work even harder to suppress all right brain activities and emotions so as to hopefully prevent it from taking over during a time of crisis. They have very nice-sounding religious reasons for doing this and believe that it is equivalent to crucifying the flesh and all sorts of other religious-sounding ideas. But actually they are trying to defeat the very design that God built into our brains to live life the way we are supposed to live. We are not supposed to suppress our right brains but to respect and train them the way God designed us to do so that they can function properly in tandem with our left brains under times of testing and trauma. This is the real meaning of maturity. But this is another arena in which our false notions about religion have terribly distorted and stunted our lives while purporting to be God's will for us.
It is now becoming more clearly understood that the right brain learns primarily by imitation. The right brain, which is the most important part of our mind that has been abused and misused ever since sin entered into this world, is the primary receptacle for our true identity and the primary place that connects with our heart and our spirit. I also believe that it is the primary communication link for our ability to hear the Spirit of God. That does not mean that the left brain has no part to play in listening to God. But “religion” has so confused our thinking that we have often tried to replace the proper functions of the right brain in our relationship to God with the rational, logical, formula-based functions of the left brain with very sad results. An intellectually-based religion is not a relationship of the heart and is not acceptable to God. It is the religion that was practiced by the Pharisees and religious leaders in Jesus' day and is still very much in vogue today even though it is extremely difficult to detect in one's own self. But it is definitely not the true religion of heaven.
Since the right brain was designed by God to take control during times of crisis and will typically function that way, it is important that we learn what is involved in training the right brain properly so that we can experience the results that reflect the character of God being implanted into our souls instead of the dysfunction of our false ideas about religion. Since the right brain cannot understand spoken words it does very little good to employ teaching in the usual ways that we think of teaching.
The right brain pays attention to body language, tones of voice, facial expressions and even sensing of the spirit of other people. The right brain is extremely active in learning and being molded in the early years of life by observing how the people close the us act under various circumstances. All this information is stored permanently in the emotional memory banks of the right brain and is drawn on during times of similar circumstances to know how to act like one's self. Our sense of personal identity is largely acquired by observing how “our people” act under various times of intense emotion, not by lectures and sermons and other logical explanations or instructions.
Joy and peace is the natural state that our minds were designed to thrive in and return to from every other emotional state. The way our brains learn how to return to joy is by observing and sensing how others who are mentoring us act and react during times of similar emotional tension. It is very important to learn early in life how to properly return to our natural state of joy from all of the other six big negative emotions or we will have problems for the rest of our life. And the way we learn to return from those emotions is by having someone join us in our emotional state who is more mature than we are and then demonstrate to us how one returns to joy from that feeling.
What is exciting is that verse 15 here is stating this very principle that God designed into our brains. The only way we can learn how to return to joy from any emotion or trauma that may have us trapped is for someone who is “one of our people” to join us in that emotion and then carefully, lovingly guiding us emotionally back to a state of joy (which means someone is very glad to be with me). Whenever someone who is themselves experienced in recovering from that emotion comes to me when I am stuck in an emotion that I have not learned to recover from yet, and then joins me without criticism or shame or rebuke in my emotion, I am then empowered to learn by their example and sharing in my emotion how to return to joy with their assistance. This is one of the most important reasons that we need to live connected to the real body of Christ.
The way we learn our true identity is by right-brain training through the Spirit of God and the example of others more emotionally mature than us who are also learning to reflect the true character of God. It is impossible to grow and mature effectively apart from community – that is just the way the human mind is wired. Given this it is no wonder that Satan does everything possible to try to keep us at odds with each other so that real community cannot be experienced. For he knows that when we start mentoring and relating to each other the way God designs for us to do that his deceptions and dysfunctions in our lives will quickly come unraveled and his lies will be exposed for what they really are. If he can keep us locked in our intellectual religion or tied up in emotional dysfunction separated from each other, then he can keep manipulating us like puppets on a string while having us believe we are living in God's will.
It is very important that we learn how to act like ourself under stress. And for that to happen several things must be in place. First we need to fill our minds with the real truth about God, what He is like (and not like), how He feels about us and what His real desires are for us. Then we need to learn the real truth about ourselves and begin to discover not only our faults but more importantly the true identity implanted into our hearts by God at our conception. If we are to learn how to really act like our real selves, we need to discover the real self that was designed in the image of God, not the perceived self that we have assumed all our lives from what others have imposed on us, accused us of being or even our own conclusions.
It is very important to understand that our true identity is not the sum of our mistakes or the description of our past performance, good or bad. This perception of identity is what the Bible refers to as viewing people according to the flesh. It is almost exclusively what we are most familiar with but it is not reflective of real reality. Part of the transformation process of verse two is learning to perceive our true identity as well as that of those around us through the eyes of heaven and not our own opinions or feelings. We have to be actively led by the Spirit of God as described in chapter eight if we are to live as real Christians and relate to each other properly in the body of Christ. This includes constantly listening to the Spirit of God with our open spirit to update our perceptions about true identity that is radically different than what we normally assume, both our own and others. As we learn to do this we will even find that our perceptions of the identity of Jesus will begin to change.
Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh; even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him in this way no longer. Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. (2 Corinthians 5:16-17)
