Fear and Trust and How to Live

Torah and Christa Black Gifford’s book Heart Made Whole

“Fear and Trust and how to live”

Tehillim (Psalms) 16:8-11 p 500

Ephsiyah (Ephesians) 2:1 p 883

“And you has he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sin.

Ephsiyah 2:6

Tehillim 139:7-11

Hearing the word is relational

Romans 10:17 

stress  means we have to step back and spend intimate time with YHUH...

Ephisyah 1:18

Intimate relationship with YHUH guards your mind with shalom...

so you don’t have to fear. > it will keep your imagination from running wild... (shutting down those thoughts before they start!)... because you made a better choice!

-  Camping alone in the mountains in Oregon...

Philippians 4:7

Eyes of my heart

Psalm 18:2

Psalm 23:1,5

Psalm 27:4

Psalm 91:4

Psalm 18:6

When I start feeling sorry and shameful and needing forgiveness:

Prodigal son story -

“Every tie my heart sees the truth of this good Father within my heart, it gets easier and easier to actually experience His love and mercy.

Philippians 4:8

“For years I had focused on all my problems, trying to change myself through study, works, and dutiful service.  But concentrating on my problems always left me feeling ashamed, and focusing on all my problems always left me feeling ashamed, and focusing an all my negatives only seemed to produce more negatives.”

“Yet, seeing (Yahusha)  kept making me more like Him.  Each night as I spent more intentional time talking, laughing, resting, and just hanging out with Him, I found that my heart started recognizing His abiding presence during the daylight hours.  In fact, it was as if the overflow of our time together was spilling into everything, and as a result, my thoughts, emotions, speech, and actions were changing - to the point where my husband and family started to notice.”

“The more I communed with the solution FIRST - the presence of the living God - the more His goodness, kindness, and love began to fill up the rooms in my heart and kick out old, unwanted tenants of fear, shame, bitterness, and anger.  It was like i was being stretched and pulled outward and upward, creating more and more capacity inside for abundant life to keep bursting out.”

**

Rostral Prefrontal Cortex - ROPFC

left eye to left eye... right brain emotion

Mom and child brain synchronizes... bouncing emotional signals back and forth 6x per second

“When a baby looks into the face of someone who is glad to be with them, the strengthening body delights it and its joy tank quickly reaches its capacity.... so babies look away when overwhelmed....... as more neural pathways develop - baby can look longer.... like being tickled too much (E  James Wilder).... it’s funny and then it’s not tolerable.

A baby who has reached their joy capacity will break eye contact and look away, and a responsive parent will match their emotion, waiting for the child to look back and connect once again. 

Every time this cycle happens - they are climbing the Joy Mountain (Wilder)

where the baby’s brain exceed capacity for joy, stimulating more nerve development in the brain.  .... as this happens more and more - the ROPFC grows and grows with JOY.

Increasing capacity.

The greater your joy capacity - the easier you deal with problems.

You can only deal with pain to the extent that you have more joy than.

You can only deal with other’s pain to the extent that you have dealt with your own!

If the challenge in front of you is greater than your joy capacity - then you will react in ways you will be sorry about later!

When challenge is greater than capacity, you can get stuck in pain instead of being able to walk through it tot he other side.

“But if you keep your heart connected to Yahusha building space inside for constant relationship,  - then love joy and shalom increase... out weighing the negative emotions. 

BUT many people have  a lot of unhealed pain they are dragging around, and the JOY capacity they have left is very very small....

Graham Cooke says, “If the enemy can’t penetrate your peace, he doesn’t know what to do with you.”

Christa Black Gifford in Heart Made Whole - explains that babies brains develop a lot before birth... and after they are born ... they keep growing - unless there is trauma...

            type B - things that happened to you

            and

            type A - things that are absent from you...

and then growth can stop...and it can even decline.

“The brain development will suffer if there has been a lack of positive emotional stimulation for the heart.”

Christa goes on to say:

“BUT God created everything about us to be redeemable and renewable - especially in the realm of our hearts and minds.  We aren’t stuck with the brain we were born with.  Our brain is neuroplastic, which  proves that our thought life can actually change the physical and chemical structure of our brain.  This is important to understand, because

EVERYTHING THAT WAS LOST CAN BE RESTORED”!!!!

ROPFC - is part of the brain - it knows by EXPERIENCE.

“The right brain doesn’t hear words, but instead computes melodies, intonation, pictures, and rhythms.  Your right brain feels before it understands.  Ad as it fires up inside, it’s much faster than the conscious thought of the left hemisphere.”

“The left brain is what allows you to speak your language and decipher  the words of others.  Yah created our left brains to name and explain things - using logic analysis, and reasoning skills.  It’s the seat of all language an words, factual stories and descriptions.”

“When you experience something, your brain believes and files it away a fact.”

“Which is WHY - when you experience Yah, it sure gets easy to believe Him forming concrete facts about His goodness.”

This is why we need to be spending a lot of time in the Spirit.

So if you have experienced life as unsafe, you MUST have/need a greater experience with Yah - who is protector.... 

You have to have more JOY (positive strength) than negative.

We have to experience YHUH / encounter YHUH!

2 Corinthians 3:17

Galatians 5:1

But if my right brain EXPERIENCED bad stuff  - like abuse, or physical sickness that went unhealed... my left brain locks it away as belief... that this is how it works.

If my right brain has known rejection then my left brain has a huge case against Yah’s love!

But if we are ever going to change - and believe the Truth - then our hearts need an encounter with Truth.

We need to know Yahusha closer than our pain! 

We need to know love greater than our fear!

“Truth is built in a safe relationship”.... and we can have that relationship.

YHUH wants to have relationship so much with us - He gives us a new heart of flesh and His Spirit comes and LIVES inside us!

Christa says “Every part of your brain that might be in a deficit because of your past can be repaired and restored by being in relationship with someone who wants to be with you!”

This means that no matter what trauma you have experienced... or all the trauma you have experienced

            1. Type A - things absent

            2. Type B - things that were in your life that didn’t belong

            and as Caroline Leaf PhD says...

            3. Ruminated on

           

            It doesn’t matter any more because YHUH can heal your brain and your heart!!

so....

A. Pay attention to how YHUH is speaking to you:

1.   Circumstances

2.  The Word

3.  Other believers

4.  What you hear - internally and externally

5.  What you see

B.   “Meditate” on His Word... in order to encounter His Presence

C.    Consider your capacity - is it filled with old hurts not healed, or is it full of shalom so that you have the mercy to deal with circumstances that come up in your life?

D.   Consider - if you can heal... if your brain can change and be transformed by the it’s renewing... are you willing to do this - or continue to do this?

Christa tells an amazing story of a vision with Messiah she had while mourning the death of her infant daughter.... and in it... she is angry... and then collapses in Yahusha’s arms...  and then... she realizes that He is angry... and this is what He said...

            “Feel my scars...  Feel my side....  Who do you think could possibly possess more fury for your loss than Me - the One who bled so that she could live?  Who could be more angry about her death than ME... the one who suffered and died so that it wouldn’t happen!”

Now put that in your story... the story of your hurts and rejections and injustices you have received...

We live in a  place where hasatan is the prince of the air....

and bad things happen.  disasters happen....  death happens... rejection happens... pain past what we think we can bear - happens... 

But Yahusha came and lived and died and rose...

            So that this bad stuff would be overcome!

What if we saw all of our hurts like that ?

that Mashiach hurts more than we do?

Even though Yahusha has the victory....

the battle rages for now....

Remember a few weeks ago - I taught about the anger of Yahusha....  righteous anger....

and maybe our righteous anger is important.

The Word doesn’t say don’t be angry - it says don’t sin in your anger.

You see we have created a very distorted picture of Mashiach (Messiah)... based on the lies we believe... based on our miserable and disappointing and painful experiences...

and that picture says Messiah is far away... so far away in fact - that He will do things for other people, but not for me.

And our distortion has completely lost touch with reality - ...  that he became flesh - and He can relate to every emotion we have.  ...

He feels our pain... and knows exactly what we need when hurt tries to destroy your hearts

Christa writes...

“[Yahusha’s] intention for us as believers is never to suppress the truth of our emotions and put on fake religious smiles, attempting to deal with very natural feelings on our own.”

“When life hurts, we hurt just as He did - and that’s simply okay.”

“He never wants us to beat up our hearts as they bleed, kicking our emotions to the side, quoting Scripture at them in anger, or willing ourselves to change.”

Pain brings deepest brokenness, and a hurting child always wants to run into the consoling, safe arms of a loving parent.” 

“Feeling our pain doesn’t prove that we lack faith - it proves our need for constant connection with YHUH.”

Yahusha taught us...

He sweated blood.

He wept, he sobbed and he groaned.

He was sad.

As we decide to feel everything.

We don’t have to carry the emotion by ourselves to heal our own hearts...

She goes on ...

“Wholehearted living doesn’t mean living void of pain.  It means being so alive in every moment that we’re also able to stay present without trying to escape - even when everything hurts like hell.  But the only way to accomplish this is to learn to be with someone inside of that pain - Someone  inside of that pain  - Someone so strong that He takes the pain and exchanges it for constant comfort, healing, counsel, hope and love.”

Definition of JOY according to Christa = “Someone's glad to be with me.”

Yahusha never expects us to be happy because of trauma!

The awful won’t ever make us happy...

but happiness doesn’t come from that....

Happiness comes from the one you are in relationship with!

“Each day as my heart would scream to be numbed, I would turn around and face the truth. 

Christa writes,

“Each day as my heart would scream to be numbed, I would turn around and face the truth. 

And the truth is, I was in agony, not knowing how to survive the death of my daughter.  I would close my eyes and see my bleeding heart - mangled, torn and full of pain -- knowing that without the right medicine, that pain could turn into disease like bitterness, distrust, despair, and unforgiveness.  So instead of ignoring my heat as it screamed, I would intentionally hand it over again and again to my best friend [Yahusha].”

“In those moments of surrender, I learned the unfathomable power of raw acceptance and confession!

and she said she prayed... something like...

“this is where my heart is today and it is a mess.  I am not going to condemn it for being a wreck, beat myself up, try to heal myself, or force myself to change.  I’m going to accept that if this is where I am today -- wounded and broken - then you will meet me right there in my pain and begin to heal me with your love.”

...

and worry comes - as we are functioning so well in the battle...

worry and fear... ideas or pictures of my loved ones getting hurt....

“Remember argument in 2 Corinthians 10:5 are thoughts that haven’t yet become beliefs and strongholds are beliefs that have rooted within the heart. 

So we have to immediately renounce it repent of it and declare the truth...

Fear and bitterness can’t take root in our hearts so long as perfect love reined.

I John 4:18

So when we hurt... over and over again we have to make a choice to turn TO Yahusha!

“For decades my goal was to avoid pain at all cost.”  She writes.. doesn’t that sound like the world?! And ourselves!

“The hell of the experience is miraculously bearable when the kingdom of heaven when the kingdom of heaven is alive within my heart.”

~

So we have to feel the emotion /PAIN with Yahusha. 

“So take a moment with the hurt....  breathe deeply....  and practice the art of raw acceptance.”

“Accepting that you are without shame....  will change everything about your life.”