Therapy alone has no answers. The best it can do is help you cope with your cage. Therapy may change minds, but only Jesus can change hearts. Therapy helps cancel some lies. Jesus provides ultimate truth and meaning. Therapy validates wounds. Jesus heals. Therapy can give you tactics to deal with your nasty old life. Jesus kills you and gives you new, eternal life. Therapy offers no ultimate hope. Ultimately, hope finds its only anchor in Jesus. 

Because of this, people who don’t know the powerful new life of Jesus lovingly excuse certain disorders of the old mind because they have no answer. The best you can hope for is to be a recovered alcoholic, a coping gender dysphoric, a reformed child molester. It is only because our society staunchly refuses the atonement and resurrection life of Jesus that we choose instead to bravely cope with our pain. Even Christians deal with (and even justify) debilitating mental conditions like anxiety and depression rather than totally renewing our minds through the power of the Holy Spirit.

I know. Anxiety is always knocking on my door with the million and one impossible things I have to do each day that I can’t even begin to understand. It takes true humility to admit that I’m incapable and that by just walking in faith God can solve the problems I can’t even define. 

For God’s power to work its surgery in my heart I have to anesthetize my fleshly efforts and human mind. I have to believe in the power and goodness of God as my only hope. And I have to get out of my boat and walk on the water. It’s humbling. It’s scary. It seems irrationally dangerous. But the truth is, my boat is sinking anyway. I can invite Jesus in, walk to Him on the water, or drown. It’s Him or me, life or death. I choose Jesus.

Blog by Glenn Fink
Facebook: @theoden.rohirrim.5
Instagram: @fink_glenn