In times past, sickness and disease were considered only something related to the body. But with the advent now of modern psychology, there's a new term that has come into being and I'm sure every one of you have heard it. It's a term, mental illness.

What exactly is mental illness? What does the scripture have to say about it? Because it's not good enough to listen to what the psychiatrists and the psychologists tell us because they don't base anything that they teach or believe on the word of God. And there's a tendency for us to follow man instead of God. And today, mental illness has become the domain of the experts.

In the same way, actually, that physical illness has become the domain of the experts. But yet, in times past, God was involved in all of those. But today, we kind of feel that we must just preach practical stuff like living the spiritual life and ministry and leave medical problems to the experts.

And as I said last time, sometimes even by law, you are required to leave it to the experts. So, I'm delving into territory right now that if I'm not careful, could get me into trouble for preaching against what is being firmly believed and taught out there. Okay, so let's first look at what they do teach out there.

What exactly does the world say about mental illness? I just took a little excerpt off a site, an American mental illness health site, mental health site. And this is what they said. Mental illness is a disease that causes mild to severe disturbances in thought and or behavior, resulting in an inability to cope with life's ordinary demands and routines.

There are more than 200 classified forms of mental illness. Some of the more common disorders are depression, bipolar disorder, dementia, schizophrenia, and anxiety disorders. Symptoms may include changes in mood, personality, personal habits, and or social withdrawal.

Mental health problems may be related to excessive stress due to a particular situation or series of events. As with cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, mental illnesses are often physical as well as emotional and psychological. Mental illnesses may be caused by a reaction to environmental stresses, genetic factors, biochemical imbalances, or a combination of these.

With proper care and treatment, many individuals learn to cope or recover from a mental illness or emotional disorder. And that last statement is given in hope because very few people do recover the kind of treatment that is being offered by the world. Now mental illness is not new.

It was known already back in Bible days. Although modern psychology has now coined that term and given it a greater explanation, they've always known what it is for a person to be mentally imbalanced and out of order. And in fact, even in Jesus' time, those people existed already, and actually Jesus was also involved in bringing healing to such people.

In Matthew chapter 4 verse 24, we read these words, and his fame went throughout all Syria, and they brought him all sick people that were suffering from various different diseases and acute pains, and those who were possessed by demons, and those who were insane, and those who had paralysis, and he healed them. So Jesus healed the insane, as well as those who had physical illnesses. Now in those days, they believed that most of the time it was caused by the moon.

So a person who was mad was known as a lunatic, a lunatic based on the moon. It was called moon madness. So some people, they looked at the moon, they turned nuts.

So that was early psychology. Now, madness is not just the obvious insanity. Sometimes, when a person just isn't thinking straight, and they're not acting rationally, we say you're mad, you're nuts, man.

It's in our language, and it was actually in the language back there already. Paul was standing up giving his defense before Festus, and in Acts 24, in 26-24, it says, and as he was defending himself in this way, Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, you're out of your mind. Lots of studies made you mad.

And he said, I'm not mad, most noble Festus, but I'm uttering the rain with words of reality and soundness. You're nuts, Paul. You're talking nonsense.

You're mad in the head. Okay, so we kind of understand what this means. We've always understood that there are some people who just, their minds just don't seem to work right.

They're weird. There's a whole range in between. Okay, now, where does all of this originate? How does it come about? How should we be viewing it as believers, and how can we deal with it spiritually? Instead of running to a psychologist who will say something like, we'll put you on the couch for six months, and maybe if you're lucky, you may improve.

They actually have no guarantee, because they're treating an illness that they don't know what it is. They don't really know what causes it. And the best they can do is to alleviate the symptoms.

Kind of a lot like what medical doctors do a lot of the time. Let's knock out the pain. We don't really know what's causing it.

There's certain illnesses doctors can't cure. I remember when I first came down with arthritis many, many years ago, the doctor said to me, you're going to be taking these tablets the rest of your life, because there is no cure for arthritis. We can only alleviate the symptoms.

Psychology is kind of approaching it the same way. But you know what? I believe God has something better than that for us. And when it comes to mental illness, God also has something far better for us.

So let's look at the subject. We looked last time at the body, and the sicknesses, and illnesses, and the healing that needs to take place in the body. The realm of the mind is the soul, because the mind is contained in the soul.

We have the mind, the emotions, and the world. Now, our soul is our control tower. God has made us to be a spirit, a soul, and a body.

And although we kind of preoccupy with our bodies most of the time, in actual fact, our soul is in control. Soul is the boss. It's the control tower.

Whatever the soul decides, your body is going to do. So we're getting now at a deeper core of where a lot of our problems come from. And last time I mentioned that our emotional condition can even lead to physical illness.

So if we can deal with the problems of the soul, chances are we're going to solve most of the problems that we have in the spiritual life, because we've got to bring that control tower to order. Now, the soul, like the body, is designed to heal itself. God made it that way.

Sickness doesn't just come and be inevitable in the body, because the body heals itself. Until the body can't cope anymore, the body will remain healthy. And the same applies to the soul.

The soul doesn't just suddenly accidentally catch some weird thing called mental illness. We don't know where it came from. We don't know how to treat it.

We don't know what to do. We can just hope for the best. No.

God made your soul to maintain itself and to keep itself healthy. Now, the body absorbs nutrients as we eat and throws away the wastes. We don't have to think about how it does that.

We just eat and get rid of the rest. Our body does all of these things naturally. And the soul actually does exactly the same thing.

You see, we have to feed our soul in the same way that we feed our bodies. And the way we feed our soul is we put information into the mind. That's why people always see the mind as being everything.

Out there, they speak about a person being body, mind, and spirit. They forget that the soul is more than the mind. But because the mind is the main part of the soul, we always think of the mind first.

And so really, mental illness is really soulish illness, if you really want to think about it. Now, an accumulation of poisons can cause a body to malfunction. In fact, most diseases caused that way.

Well, it may interest you to know that an accumulation of poisons in the soul will do the same thing. You got too much toxic data in your mind, your soul will become overwhelmed and can't cope with it anymore. And that's the first step towards what they call mental illness.

You can't cope anymore with the problems of life, with the assault that's being made against your mind. And so the soul tries to protect itself from harm, just like the body protects itself from harm. And the soul will react to what influences are brought on it to somehow protect itself.

And in order to heal itself, even as the body will draw from its own resources, from everything that's available in the body, when something goes wrong in one part of the body, the whole body rallies together to bring healing. The body draws from its own health and resources to bring healing and to fight toxins. Well, the soul does actually exactly the same thing.

The soul has a deep resource to draw from, that it will pull out what it needs in order to fix itself and to keep itself healthy. What it draws from is actually what's been put into it. You see, when you are born, your body already has all of the functions built into it, and you don't have to think.

Thank the Lord for that. If you had to think, you would die because the child can't think. And actually, as an adult, we can't think either.

If you had to remember to tell your heart to beat and your lungs to breathe, you would die very quickly. See, all of these things are built in, and they are automatic. But when you are born, your soul comes as a clean slate.

There's no memories, there's no knowledge, there's no anything there. Just the little bit you probably picked up in the nine months or so when you were in the womb, and that's it. So, the baby responds mostly to physical stimuli, but the baby doesn't have anything, any resources in the soul to draw from.

As you grow up and go through life, you start to feed information into that resource that started out empty. Now, psychologists call that the subconscious mind, because it's not something we're consciously aware of. In a computer, it's like what's stored on your hard disk.

It's not what's running in the memory of the machine right now. And so, what we do is we pull a program off the hard disk, and we run it in the memory. While we're running our app, our app is in control, but there's a whole lot more stuff hidden away there that's been stored.

See, and that's the way God has made us. We have this inner storage that we've fed information into. Now, a lot of that includes knowledge and data and experiences, emotional experiences.

Some of the things that happen to us in life, in fact, everything that we go through, it gets stored deep down into our memory. And so, when you have a wonderful, positive experience, the memory of that experience, along with the feelings, gets stored down there. When you have a bad, negative experience, the same thing happens.

All of that memory includes not just what happened, but what you felt when it happened. It's like a complete picture. So, when we fully recall something to memory, we don't just remember the scenes like we're watching it from a distance.

We're getting it in full 3D with all the emotions and the feelings and everything that went with it. You can remember what you felt when that thing took place. Okay.

Now, this produces what I've called templates, a little inbuilt programs in us that help us to know what to do when we face situations in life. See, when the baby faces something, it doesn't know how to respond to it. If you threw something at the child, it would just lie there and get hit.

Now, you've learned, when you see something coming, you lift up your hand and you protect yourself because we learned that through experience. So, we learn through these experiences and eventually, we have these little inbuilt mechanisms that allow us to very quickly respond to similar circumstances when they happen again. Okay.

Those are little templates. And when we go through a similar experience again to what happened back there, we experience what I call a trigger. In other words, you find yourself automatically responding with the same feelings, with the same emotions, with the same choices that you made back there when that first thing happened.

Now, that can be great when it was a good experience. Oh, I can relive it all over again. But when it was a bad, fearful, painful, negative experience, we don't want to go there.

We can't help ourselves. A similar set of circumstances created again triggers in us those same feelings. Those hurtful, painful, fearful, guilty, whatever they are, those same feelings come out.

And you don't want those feelings. They come out automatically. Okay.

So, some of what gets stored down there is good. It helps us to learn to respond positively and to enjoy life. But some of the things down there, they become a problem because they remind us of all the painful experiences that we had in life that we want to forget, but we can't forget because it's stored out in that resource.

And so, when your soul digs down into that resource to pull something out, sometimes what it pulls out is something that's going to be harmful. If you like, it's a stored toxin. It's a poison being stored down there, which continues to poison your system, makes the soul unhealthy.

Okay? Make sense? Now, the soul also needs diet and exercise, just like the body. Well, the diet part, we never have a problem with, do we? We always got our favorite foods. And you know, our soul also has the favorite foods.

There are things we just love to watch and read and listen to. It's just things that we like to surround ourselves with. Exercise.

Exercise is always an effort. I know there are people who are exercise junkies out there, and that's because they've learned to turn exercise into an exciting experience. But for most of us, exercise is an effort.

And you know, it's an effort for the soul as well. And I'll get to that shortly to show you what kind of exercise we need for the soul. But your soul needs certain essentials to survive.

And when we looked at the body, we saw there are certain things the body has to have. It has to have oxygen. It has to have water.

It must eat. Otherwise, it cannot survive. The soul has essential requirements for it to continue to function the way God designed it to function.

Now, just like the body needs water and cannot go probably longer than three days without it, your soul needs sleep. Now, you're thinking, now, hang on, hang on. We're talking about the soul now, not the body.

Your body needs sleep, right? Because your body gets tired, right? Actually, your body only needs about an hour of sleep at night. That's all it needs. About an hour of your sleep at night is for your body.

The rest is actually for your soul. Most of us don't realize that. We think, I'm tired.

Yeah, I can push on through. You don't realize the damage you're doing to your soul. Your body can handle it.

You know, I still feel good. I didn't have much sleep, but you know, I'm still strong. It's not your body.

That's the problem. It's your soul. Sleep, and especially the kind of sleep in which you dream, what the experts have called REM, or rapid eye movement sleep, because while you're going through that sleep, if you look at a person, you see their eyes start, when that happens, they're dreaming.

Dream sleep is absolutely essential, not to your body, but to your soul. Why is that? Same reason you need to go to the bathroom quite frequently. It's this junk you need to get rid of.

You usually kept eating and eating and eating, and never put anything out. You'll die. Your body will become clogged with poisons.

If you ever suffered from constipation, you know the bad effects it can have on you. Man, you get so filled with poisons, and you get into mental confusion, and you feel ill, and it's horrible. Well, sleep is the way your soul gets rid of the poisons.

Did you know that? See, because throughout the day, you are going through experiences, some good and some bad. And some of those toxic, hurtful, negative experiences that you have during the day, they've now started to get placed down into that storage. And the soul says, I don't want that junk there, thank you.

We've got to get rid of that. The soul actually does that while you're sleeping, and it does it while you're dreaming. Ever wondered why sometimes you dream the biggest junk in the world? You know why? Because that's all the toxins that your soul didn't want, and it threw it out in the dreams.

Threw it out. And sometimes some of that gets in us, and it's still there. And the next time you have another positive experience, the soul says, hey, I've got something better to put in that place.

Let's chuck out the old junk and put some new stuff in. Sometimes you'll dream of things that happened years ago. They've been lying in you there, poisons that are actually poisoning your system, and your soul says, I don't want this, let's get it out.

See, your soul is purging itself all the time, all the time. Your dream sleep is very important. You say, well, I never really dreamed.

Actually, you dream every night. I don't remember dreaming. That's because you didn't wake up during your dream.

If you didn't dream, you'd die. Your body has to get rid of the negative influences in life, all those bad emotions that you picked up during the day. You've had a stressful day at work.

You've had problems. You've had conflicts. You've had all sorts of things.

You've been exposed to influences that are evil and bad. You can't let those sink down into that deep part of your memory. It's got to get taken out.

That's why you have to sleep. Now, what happens if you don't sleep? You know, these people have gone on competitions to see how long you can stay awake. Some people, they're busy writing exams, so they can't sleep because their mind's in turmoil.

They push hard, stay up late, trying to cram for the exam the next day. You know what happens if you do that long enough? Your soul says, I need sleep, and I need it now, so I'm going to make you dream while you're awake. You've got to dream while you're awake.

You know what that is? We call it hallucinations. That's all an hallucination is, is dreaming while you're awake. Your soul says, I can't wait for you to go and lie down and sleep.

I'm going to do this now. And suddenly you start seeing things that aren't there. There's fire shooting out of the wall there.

What the? Where did that come from? I'm sure I saw somebody there. What is that? You're hallucinating. You know what? You're dreaming while you're awake.

It's absolutely essential for you to dream. Dreaming, sleep, dream sleep is essential, as essential to your soul as what water is to your body. So don't deny yourself.

And if you're only sleeping for short periods of time, the chances are you don't sleep long enough to get from that first phase where you put your body in knees, which is only about an hour or so. And from there you go into the deeper sleeps and you come through these cycles. And during those cycles, you begin to dream and your soul begins to purge and throw out all the junk that shouldn't be there.

If you have too much sleep loss, your soul starts to accumulate junk that begins to affect it. And just as in the same way the body gets ill when it's full of toxins, your soul starts to become ill because it's full of poisonous information. It's been fed into it.

Don't ever discount the importance of sleep. Don't get on somebody's case and say, what's wrong with you? You're sleeping all day. You're lazy bum.

You may be denying them the very thing that they need to rise up and be fully efficient. You need more sleep, have more sleep. Sleep is one of the best healers you can have.

The soul needs interaction with other souls, with other human beings. Social interaction is one of the essentials to maintaining a healthy soul. Now there's a huge industry out there called the entertainment industry.

There's a huge realm known as social media. So many of them on the internet these days, you lost count. And they're all designed to get you to interact with other human beings on a social basis.

Yeah, it has advantages in that we can do marketing and business and selling on it as well. But most of the time, we like to interact with people. We like to post something on Facebook and have somebody come and say, I like that.

Somebody responded to the comment and say, that was awesome. That blessed me. Makes you feel good.

You've interacted with other human beings. Without social interaction, your soul begins to dry up. And if you have too many hurtful experiences of life, you begin to avoid fellowship and interaction with other human beings.

And you become introverted and drawn into yourself. And when you do that, your soul starts to die. Your soul starts to become ill.

And then you draw even more into yourself. And the problem gets worse and worse. So what causes mental illness? Our experiences in life and the way that we respond to those influences.

Well, what else do we need? We need some kind of exercise, right? We need some kind of exercise for the soul. Well, what's the best exercise for the soul? You've heard this word, but you've never heard it much in the church. Meditation.

You mean you're talking about transcendental meditation, where you sit there and you go, um, no, no, that's not biblical meditation. But you'll find the word meditation quite frequently in the scriptures. See, meditation is a form of exercising the mind and exercising the soul.

Very important. Meditation involves not just thinking, but speaking. Because the words that you speak tend to occupy your mind.

It's impossible to speak about something without visualizing it in your mind. Okay, I'm going to sit down and have a great big juicy steak. I bet you're not thinking about your car.

You're seeing it. Because while you're saying it, you're seeing it. And meditation involves muttering to yourself.

I know they say that is the first sign of madness, but actually it's not. It's the first sign of cure. When you mutter to yourself.

Come on now, Liz, pull yourself together. Come on, boy. You can do all things with Christ who strengthens you.

Now don't wallow there. David did it all the time. Why are you cast down on my soul? Sort yourself out, boy.

You're hoping the Lord. See, that's meditation. It's not just going into this ethereal, emptying your mind.

No, true meditation biblically is actually filling your mind with the right things. And one of the best ways to do that, if you're not speaking, is writing. Because writing is like speaking.

And we call that process journaling. See, if you're journaling, you're beginning to fill your mind with good things. And we'll look at that more shortly.

Now, where do you draw your source for meditation? From that inner resource that's within you. So as you think about something and meditate on it and mutter it to yourself, you begin to tap down into what you already know, that God has taught you, the experiences that you've had in life, and you begin to combine those. So as you read the Word, you don't just read it, you meditate it.

As you read the Scripture, you say, now, what other Scripture have I read that agrees with the Scripture? What does the Scripture really mean? And then you start thinking of some of the experiences that you've had in life, and you see whether this Scripture addresses or enhances or shows you something about the things that you've experienced. See, that's the process of meditation. In other words, you're putting in the new, and you're pulling out the old, and you're doing it together like that.

Now, one of the ways of meditating is to daydream while you're awake. You're encouraging. Now, I keep telling my child, stop daydreaming.

Come out of the clouds, man. My dad always said to me, just come and join us in the real world here, please. They're always in your little fantasy.

Well, if you're called to be a prophet, you're going to spend a lot of time there. That's why prophets get good revelation. They're in meditative phase more frequently.

Allow yourself to daydream. Allow your inner being to come out. See, because while you're feeding in, nothing can come out.

See, while your eyes are drawing in, while your ears are drawing in, while your five senses are feeding information inwards, what's inside can't come out because you're pushing downwards. When you stop the outward, the inside starts to come out. Now, we teach prophets how to get visions that way.

Close your eyes and just don't specifically think about anything. Just let your mind go and let it do whatever it is. Now, what pictures are coming into your mind? See, it's coming from inside you.

See, that's the meditation process. God's given us a little tool to make it even easier. It's called praying in tongues.

Because while you're praying in tongues, you let your mind loose. As your spirit is praying, while you're doing that, your mind starts to throw up. Now, one of the other ways to get stuff to come up from there is while you're talking.

Don't you ever notice while you're speaking to somebody, you just come up with some brilliant ideas? While we're speaking and discussing what we're going to do, suddenly you think, hang on, why don't we try that? Well, where did that come from? And from some of that stuff you had stored down in there, well, there's a bit more than that. There's the influence of the spirit as well. But we're going to leave the spirit for next week.

Okay, but the spirit is there as well. We're just going to touch a little bit today. But we need to tap into the inner resources.

What are we doing? We're feeding into the soul from down here, instead of from out there. So, the soul needs both. It must feed from out there.

You should be getting new information. You should be learning new things every day. Because the soul is like a sponge, wants to soak it up.

And then you need to be taking what is already in there that you've learned over your 68 years in my case. I've got a lot more than you. Tap into that and pull some of it out.

There's some good stuff there that you forgot. Now, we have a little thing called temperaments, which the soul likes to use. You know that the soul loves temperaments.

How are temperaments produced? Oh, we've got a mind, emotions, and a will, right? Well, the mind is filling itself with all of these things. And the mind is saying, I've got all this information, and I need to let it out. How's that information let out? It's let out through your feelings and through your actions.

See, now, I can look at you. And unless I've got revelation, or could read your mind, which usually is demonic, unless the Lord allows us to do that, I don't know what you're thinking. I don't know what you're thinking.

But I can watch you. And I see that frown on your face. And I have a bit of an idea what you're thinking, more or less.

I see the way you act. And I know I get some kind of representation of what might be in your mind. You see, your emotions and your will, they actually reveal to the world what is actually going on inside of you.

Now, those are the two things that determine your temperament. I've taught this in detail, so I'm not going to go into it. You see, if you are the person who likes to express your feelings, or a person who doesn't like to express their feelings so much, you have two different possibilities.

If you're a person who likes to assert their will on others, or a person that rather would like to submit, let other people dominate, we have another two parameters. And those two combined together give us four temperaments. So you can be high on emotion, low on emotion, high on assertion of your will, low.

And so that's how we get our four temperaments. And your mind, your soul, eventually comes to the place where it says, I feel comfortable expressing myself through that certain temperament. I feel comfortable being expressive and showing what I feel, and telling the world what to do, and being bold and strong and emotive.

I must say, I like to just keep things to myself. Thank you. I will meditate and think and come up some brilliant ideas.

I'm not going to let you know what I'm feeling. We call that the analytical. And we have a whole mix.

Which is the right one? Which is the right one? But you will form a habit pattern of the way you express what's in your mind. And that becomes your temperaments. Our temperaments can change, and we can change them.

And we can decide to move from being withdrawn to being more emotive. We can decide from being more submissive to being more assertive. And that will change our temperaments.

But if you keep following a specific way of doing things over the period of time, it becomes a habit. And a habit is something you do without thinking. Each one of us, as we grow up, according to how we chose to respond to what's in our mind, we chose a temperament that we were comfortable with.

And as we continue to sit in that temperament, it became a habit for us to function that way. And so people will look at you, and they will be able to judge your temperament, because most of the time, that's the way you are. You may change every now and then, depending on circumstances, but most of the time, that is where you are.

Okay? Now, add to that your templates and your experiences that you had in life, combine with the habit pattern that you formed through your temperaments, and you get a mix that becomes who you are. We call that character traits. And so you can take each person and say, this is the way they are.

This is their character trait. This is the way they express their temperament. This is the way they handle the problems in life based on their own templates.

This is the choices they made. This is their outlook on life. We all become specific, unique individuals based on all of these things.

Well, is that bad? No, it's actually the way God made us. The problem becomes when we become so settled in it that we don't want to change. And that's when we limit ourselves, because we put ourselves in this little comfort zone of protection.

We build this little wall around ourselves to prevent any further hurtful experiences. And some people, they do it by being, it will scare everybody off. Others hide away, so nobody can get to them.

It closes their heart off. All of these are our responses to the circumstances of life. And all of these actually, in the end, bring your soul into a kind of a bondage that it can't break out of.

What causes illness in the soul? Our experiences in life. You begin to get a picture of how these things begin to take place. Now, the earliest experiences that you have are probably in the home.

And for different folks, that can be very different. Sometimes children are brought up by their grandparents or by strangers and not by their own parents. And all of those have marked effects on us.

But how you are treated as a child is the first step towards deciding what you're going to become. Along the way, after you leave home, there are other experiences in this world and the way other people treat you. And how you respond to those, all of these begin to color your soul and make you into the person you become.

And your soul becomes more and more contaminated, more and more limited and restricted and bound by the things that have happened to you and by the way you've responded to those events. Now, here's the problem. We are born in a condition the Bible calls the flesh.

In other words, we're sinful creatures. And that sins of the flesh, it gives rise to a kind of a tree which has three main roots. And every problem that we have in life and every difficulty that takes place in our soul, every aspect of what we call mental illness can be traced back down to one or more of those three roots of the flesh.

One of the things that are produced is bitterness. In fact, it's the tap root. It's the most common one of all.

Because all of us have been hurt and been ill-treated somewhere along the way by somebody and we became angry and we became bitter at them. Bible calls it a bitter root judgment. You have a law of judgment that comes out which says, I can't stand that person.

I hate that person. I want to get even with that person. Or you even may make an inner vow that says, I will never be ever like that person.

Or I will never ever allow a person to do that to me again. It happened to you? Not let any man treat me like that again. No way.

Not let any person in authority treat me the way my teacher treated me. Never ever going to allow this to happen to me. See, you just put a lock on yourself, just opened the door for a disorder, a psychological disorder that could affect you the rest of your life.

The other roots is based in sexuality, lust, sexual desires. Sexual problems in life are caused by sexual experiences that we have. Sometimes those experiences come at an age where you weren't ready for it yet or you didn't even understand what was going on and it leaves a scar that affects you for the rest of your life.

The third root is that of a desire for things, for fortune and fame. You become preoccupied with needing to buy things and to have pretty things and to own things in order to feel happy. Now, all problems in life can be traced down to one or more of those three.

We try to deal with the problem and that's like just chopping off the branches of the tree, but the roots are still there. You've got this tree growing in your soul. That tree is going to keep bearing fruit again and again and again and again.

Your soul will remain contaminated the rest of your life. You're allowed to continue. What are some of the effects that can take place in our soul as a result of the experiences of life? One of the most common is what we call insecurity or an inferiority complex.

Because of the way people treated you, you begin to make an assessment of yourself where you say, I'm stupid, I'm ugly, I'm useless, I'm below par, I don't come up to everybody else's standard, I'm third rate. You make an assessment of yourself and you see yourself as so small and so insignificant and so nothing that you allow people just to dominate you and push you around and you accomplish nothing in life. Well, actually, there are other effects, the insecurity, and one of them is the total opposite.

We call it the spirit of control. Because you see, when people push you down, you don't feel good. You feel uncomfortable.

So, when you're given an opportunity to be in control, you actually become a dominating control that will not allow anybody to put you down. So, a boss or a supervisor that is insecure will be the most dominating of all. But actually, inside, they're a little scared little child.

They're afraid that you're going to show them how weak they really are. So, they put up this great big front to pretend to be, but they're not. You swing from one extreme to the other.

And some people, because of insecurity, feel they cannot even open their hearts and interact with other human beings, certainly not adults. Children, on the other hand, are not such a threat. Children won't reject you.

Children won't be nasty to you. They won't say things to hurt you. So, you feel very comfortable with the kids.

Some people think they've got a child ministry when actually all they have is an inability to relate to adults because of the bad experiences they've had in life. Your soul is contaminated. Your soul has a weakness.

Some people, it's even worse. They're comfortable only with animals. Or can animals meet your need? Yeah, they can meet your social need even, because animals also have a soul.

And animals are so obedient and so, except for cats. I just don't like cats, but dogs are great. Dogs are great.

They give your love back again. Cats are selfish, but that's my opinion. I love my kitty, my little doggy.

Meets your need. You feel comfortable. You're not rejected by that person.

It's he. There's nothing wrong with loving animals. I love animals too.

But you know when you are so consumed with the love for animals and you treat humans like dirt, something's wrong. Chances are you've had bad experiences along the way where people have treated you badly, so you don't like people. But animals have been good to you, so you like animals.

You love being with children because they don't hurt you. These are all signs. Something that's wrong in your soul that needs to be addressed and dealt with.

You don't have to remain with that. You don't have to say, this is the way I am. I'm just going to have to live with it the rest of my life.

Probably the most powerful effect is negative emotions. And the strongest of these emotions is fear. We grow up with a phobia.

There are some things we should fear, because we've learned through experience there are some things that are harmful to us. You don't go sticking your hand in the fire. It's going to burn you.

So you fear it. It's a healthy fear. But a phobia is when you're so consumed with the fear that all you can think about is what can go wrong.

You know, I don't like spiders. I don't like snakes. These things are dangerous.

They can hurt you. If a spider walks across my path, it committed suicide. Or a spider, just minding his own business, walking along.

See, sometimes it becomes a paranoia, a phobia that consumes you and controls you. Now you have something that's actually interfering with your peace. And you know, if Satan wants to distract you from what God's called you to do, he just needs to send some of these things across your path.

So watch out for fears and phobias. Some people, they're just paranoid about silly things. To you, it might seem.

But to them, it's very real. A moth lands on my wife, she goes crazy. This is a little moth, for goodness sakes.

See, but you don't like moths. Where do these things come from? They come from the experiences of life. They also come from what people have told us, all the stories we heard.

Guilt is one of the other strongest ones. You did something and you screwed up bad. You made a fool of yourself.

You did something in public. You got embarrassed. And you want to go hide your head in shame.

It leaves a scar. You're afraid to ever try that again. You decided to stand up and sing in public.

And somebody came to you and said, you know, if I had a voice like that, I wouldn't dare to sing. You don't want to do that again, do you? You don't want to do that again. See, sometimes people accuse you of things that you actually are not guilty of.

Happens in families. You didn't live up to our family heritage. Just look at you.

You're not doing what we do. You do things differently. You're not following our culture.

Make you feel guilty about something. It's not sin. It's false guilt.

And that false guilt is more painful and destroying than real guilt. Because real guilt, where you have done something wrong, can easily be fixed. If it's with a person, you can go to them and say, I'm sorry, forgive me.

If it's the Lord, you can say, Father, forgive me and cleanse me from my sin. And you can be set free. But how can you be set free from something that you forgot to do? I feel so guilty because I forgot to do it.

It was my responsibility. I was supposed to do it, but I didn't. See, these are the kind of things that eat at your soul, can control you and prevent you from doing so many things in life.

Because you're consumed with guilt. Satan is there as the accuser of the brethren to make it worse. Perhaps there's certain kinds of people you just can't stand and you hate.

Maybe certain nationalities, maybe certain races, maybe even genders. Why? Somewhere along the line, somebody in that group treated you badly, angered you, made you mad. You say, I hate.

Come on. Comes out of our mouth before we even realize it. You know, one thing I can't stand is, your soul's not free anymore, is it? What if God tells you to do the very thing that you hate? To go to that person that you hate and show them love.

It becomes very difficult. Your soul is in bondage. Sometimes we have an insatiable lust.

It cannot be satisfied. This leads to all sorts of perversions, an inner drive that you cannot understand. It's caused by the experiences of life.

And it's caused by a mixture. And these are all deep things. And we can go into these in a lot of detail, and we can later.

But I'm just showing you some of the areas you need to look at. And then we have depression. What makes a person depressed? Well, you know, it must have been the hamburger I ate last night.

There must be some gene in my body, some germ, some disease. What is it that made me suddenly feel depressed? You go to the doctor and the doctor will give you some medication to help you overcome your feelings of depression. Depression is a disease of the soul.

So how can you have a medicine to cure it? I've got a complete study on depression. I can tell it to you in a nutshell. Depression is when something happened and you weren't happy about it and you responded to it incorrectly.

Perhaps you came to show somebody love and they snubbed you. Perhaps you tried hard to succeed and you failed. Perhaps you came up with this brilliant idea and everybody thought it was stupid.

And your first response is, I'll just withdraw. I'll just withdraw. I won't even try to do that again.

And you withdraw into yourself and you feel bad. And because you feel bad, it affects what you do and what you don't do. And you just need to have a couple of those experiences.

And you find yourself caught in a downward spiral like this. It just gets worse and worse. And as your feelings get worse, you get to the point where you say, I don't feel like doing anything.

I don't feel like going to work today. I'll just book in sick. I don't feel like cooking the food.

Family can make their own food tonight. I don't feel like going to church. I'll just stay home.

I don't feel like, I know what I'll do. I'll just sit and watch a movie. Just chill out and forget the problems of life.

That's what depression does. It's a spiritual problem. It's a mental illness.

Yeah, they rightly mentioned that one because they think they've got to treat it with drugs. No, no. Mental, that kind of mental illness is caused by you responding sinfully to a situation in life.

And it can be solved actually very easily. Then we get this thing they call bipolar, also known as manic depressive. You know somebody who's bipolar? We all are at some stage, especially us expressives.

One moment we're shooting for the stars. And the next moment we're dying in the hole. I'm going to give it a great big bash.

Follow me, people. We're going to conquer the world. And you hit the wall.

You think, OK, I'm not going to do that again. I'm just going to sit and wallow. See, wrong response to a problem.

I'm going to sit and wallow. I'm going to think about how tough life has been to me, and how bad everybody's treated me, and nobody loves me, and nobody cares. Nobody liked my Facebook post.

I sent out that email and not a single person responded to say even amen. You enter the depressive mode until eventually you're tired of being in the depressive mode. You think, let's try something exciting again.

I'm an expressive after all. Let's go out and conquer the world and be back into manic. Another you do is an illness.

It's your response to life. But shame, shame, you poor thing. You've got bipolar disease.

We'll book you off work for six months because you can't work in that condition. We'll give you a nice medication to keep you on a lovely feeling where you're neither manic nor depressive. It's a disease of the soul.

And do you know what causes the diseases of the soul? It's a three-letter word spelled S-I-N. It's our incorrect response to what life throws at us. I must go on.

When it comes to physical sickness, there are more than germs and viruses involved. As I shared last time, sometimes there are spirits of infirmity. There are demons that get involved in attacking our body.

And the exact same thing happens in the soul. You see, your soul is always open to spiritual attack. Demons cannot enter your spirit as a believer because the Holy Spirit dwells there.

But they have full license to get into your soul. And actually, if you allow them, they can even come and live in your soul. And when that happens, a believer can manifest every symptom of demon possession.

Actually have a demon living with them in their soul. And what does the demon want to do? Well, you know, I would be fine if it wasn't for the demon. It's the demon that made me do this.

Actually, you invited the demon by saying, I like doing this. And the demon said, I can give you some help if you want. Would you like me to come help you do that? You like being depressed? Let me come help you be depressed more.

In fact, I'll help you so bad, we'll get you to kill yourself. That's how suicide comes. You eventually keep submitting that part of the flesh and your soul to the enemy.

Satan will eventually come in and stick around because it's an area of weakness in you. So demon forces are very much involved. Demons can put thoughts in your mind, which leads you to do wrong things.

And they enhance those weaknesses so that they become even worse. And you become totally helpless. Now, what's the way of overcoming this? I painted the bad picture for you.

And I think all of us have had some of these. We all have because we're alive. We're human.

We're living in this world. And we're sinful creatures. And we're subject to the darkness that's around us.

But you see, we don't have to remain bound by the roots of the flesh, because God has offered an alternative, and it's called the fruit of the spirit. Bitterness will consume your soul and poison it. Lust will consume your soul and control it.

People with lust have far more than sexual desire. They have a desire to control. When Jesus said that when a man looks on a woman to lust after her, he's committed adultery with her in his heart.

He's not thinking, I would like to have sex with you. He's thinking, I'd like to own you. That's why rape very seldom has a sexual connotation to it.

It's a spirit of control. It says, I will dominate and control you. The desire for things so consumes our soul that we become selfish and filled with ourselves.

Now, what's the only true medicine for the soul? Love, joy, and peace. Love is the greatest force in the universe. Because love and light and life are all the same in the scriptures.

And death cannot overcome life, and darkness cannot overcome light. Love is one of the most powerful forces. And when you allow the love of God to come into your heart by the fruit of the spirit, the roots of the flesh, bitterness just vanishes away.

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