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Exposing Psychology, Exalting Christ |
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| Should a Pastor Use Right Brain / Left Brain Theories to Help Teach His Congregation?Question: A good friend of mine who is a pastor has started to use Roger Sperry’s "Right brain/left brain" theory in his approach to spirituality. Do you have any help for me, as I hope to reason with him. Answer: Our question is for this pastor is, what does this have to do with Christian living? How can a pastor justify using these theories in his sermons and teachings? This left-brain/right-brain information would be quite useful if we were all animals, acting upon our instincts. But we are not animals - we are spiritual beings. When a person's spirit is made alive upon conversion, it doesn't matter where that spirit is located in a man (left, right, center, top, bottom, etc.), but simply that the man is born again and now has a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Applying the left- and right-brain theories of Sperry to our spiritual lives is similar to using personality tests like Myers-Briggs and others (which are based on Jung's personality types) to receive direction in finding a job or a mate, for example. When using these psychological methods and tests, one ends up looking to the ways and methods of man to direct one's life, instead of looking to the Lord and following the leading of the Holy Spirit. They amount to trusting in a false idol that competes with the true and living God. I would ask the pastor who is using Sperry's theories, Why do you need to use these theories at all? What's the point - do they help sanctify a person and bring them closer to Jesus Christ? If not, we shouldn't use them! We try to ask this foundational question whenever a "new" idea or method enters the church, and the answer is almost always "no." The #1 goal of the Christian is to grow in sanctification and holiness, and to grow in their love of God and of others (1 Thess. 4:3, Matt. 22:37-40). We grow in sanctification through the reading of God's Word (John 17:17), so if we try to apply anything not in God's Word to our spiritual life (such as left-brain/right-brain theories), it will fail to produce sanctification in us. These types of theories have an intelligent ring to them, which is why they are attractive to pastors who may feel that the Bible doesn't give them absolutely everything they need to help people grow in Christ. But they are man's theories, created by unbelieving men who suppress the truth and do not believe that there is a spiritual component to each us that is either dead in sin or alive in Christ. These theories may find applicability in the animal kingdom, but not to us as Christian men and women who have been born again by the Holy Spirit. We'll pray for you, that God would speak through you to this pastor and that this pastor would depend solely on the sufficiency of the Scriptures in his teachings. Does he have a copy of our book? ================= Q: Didn't man descend from apes and isn't that where our personalities came from? A: 
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