REWIRED: Breaking The Neurology Of Fear-Based Faith

There Is Nothing Wrong With Your Faith — Your Nervous System Was Just Never Shown the Right God

This episode goes underneath the neuroscience and into the quantum biology, ancient Hebrew word studies, and thousand-year theological history that explain how the fear-based God of Western Christianity was built — and what full restoration looks like in the body of a human being who finally encounters the God who was never their threat.

This is a DEEP DIVE on my latest Youtube Video: https://youtu.be/368DcafGt28 

IN THIS EPISODE:

— HeartMath Institute research on heart-brain coherence

— The observer effect, neuroplasticity as quantum biology, and epigenetics

— Why epigenetic fear may be heritable — and why it is also reversible

— Five Hebrew word studies: Shalom, Yirah, Shav, Nephesh, Shabbat

— The neuroscience of awe versus terror

— Anselm of Canterbury, Calvin, and the 1,000-year history of the fear-based God

— Christus Victor — the atonement framework the early church used for a thousand years

— Four embodied formation practices to begin the neurological rewiring process

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

— Andrew Newberg — How God Changes Your Brain

— HeartMath Institute — heartmath.org

— Bruce Lipton — The Biology of Belief

— Dacher Keltner — Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder

— Gustaf Aulen — Christus Victor

Transcript

Why Neuroscience Struck A Nerve

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Alright, everybody, welcome to the Shepherd's Tent Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Cesto. Guys, I did not realize you all were going to just absolutely lose your minds with this neuroscience connection with faith. It blows me away. And so what I'm about to do is do a deep dive. And again, I'm assuming that you have probably already watched the YouTube video that's come out. You've definitely read the article that went viral. So let me just back up a little bit, tell you what happened to me so that way you can have some context. And then we're going to deep dive. I'm telling you all, when I say deep dive, we're going to talk about some stuff that the podcast didn't even come close to, and neither did the article. So get ready for neuroscience, get ready for quantum biology, get ready for the scripture. This is going to be an amazing time together.

Nashville Encounter And Inner Healing

SPEAKER_00 1:15

But guys, what happened that put me on this neuroscience piece, because this is pretty new to me, was a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to be a part of a gathering in Nashville, Tennessee. I was invited by a friend of mine by the name of Taylor Welch. Most of you know him through his podcast, The Deep End. Phenomenal time that I had there. That was my first time really being around anything like that in my life. Um, it was amazing. And so during that time, there was like two days where they did some stuff connected to the podcast. And then the last two days was people coming uh together and learning about neuroscience and self-concept. And guys, a lot of this was leading to some inner healing, some different things. And honestly, guys, I had never really taken any of that stuff very seriously. So when I say that I dishonored it, I don't mean in the sense of like I was opposed to it. I just treated it as common. And so I had never experienced anything like that. So I go through the first full day of learning the neuroscience part and starting to do some of the practices that go along with it. And I could just feel this thing building and building and building until eventually when they released us, I went to my vehicle and I just wept and went into an encounter with the Lord that lasted for hours. And it really like just did something in me that I've never had happen to me before. And it was like God reached into my future, my past, brought it all into the present to make me a more whole man. It was a deep inner healing work, something that maybe I'll talk about in days to come. Definitely not ready to unpack that now. So come back to Covington, get into the studio.

The Viral Article And The Response

SPEAKER_00 3:10

And when I get in the studio, I fire my computer up, and the first thing that I see is an article from Relevant Magazine from a neuroscientist talking about the neuroscience of encountering God. Guys, I read that article and I was like, man, I really believe the Lord is speaking. And I was asking for confirmation. I had text a couple friends of mine who was like, hey, pray with me. I feel like I got a missing piece here with this neuroscience stuff that's really going to help me with discipleship, a spiritual formation, not only for myself, but for other people. So I'm reading this article and I'm like, man, like I want to put some thoughts of mine to this article. I release it, and then within 24 hours, like a thousand people had shared this article. Hundreds of thousands of people had read it. And I started getting text messages, phone calls, emails, DMs. And guys, the comment section alone just blew me away. And so the stories I heard, some so sad, and then others hopeful because people have found this path and they see healing and restoration in it and finding the gospel in it, that it's confirming the kingdom, it's confirming the scriptures, it's confirming what the words of Christ. And so just an amazing thing to see. And so I want to honor that. I want to honor that not only for the encounter I had in Nashville, I want to honor that because of how it resonated with so many of you. And then I want to honor that because I believe that it's a piece that I'm going to carry forward. So we're going to deep dive. I hope you're ready. If you're not familiar with me, I've been a pastor, an evangelist, a preacher for many, many years. I don't run out of words. Not a lot of times. I don't run out of words. And so this is going to be probably about an hour long. But hey, that's the beauty of a podcast. You can hit pause, but at least this can help you for a couple more drives to work. Uh, maybe throwing it on the background while you're cooking food. Um, but I believe it's going to be an amazing

Fear-Based Theology Hits The Body

SPEAKER_00 5:16

time. So again, if you watch the YouTube video this week, you understand what fear-based theology does to your limbic system. I even did a post on that on Facebook. You understand that your brain cannot tell the difference between a physical threat and a theological one. And you understand that a God organized primarily around punishment and surveillance of your failures will keep your nervous system in a state of chronic activation that makes the peace Jesus promised neurologically impossible to access. So today we go underneath that. Okay. We're going into, get ready, I said this is a deep dive, into quantum biology of what is actually happening in your body when you encounter the God of the gospel versus the God of Western legal theology. We're going into five ancient Hebrew words that have been mistranslated, or maybe a better word is actually under-translated for centuries. And when you see what these words actually mean, you're going to understand that the Bible has been describing your nervous system's restoration for 3,000 years in a language that neuroscience is only now catching up to. Guys, we're also during our time together today going into the thousand-year history of how the fear-based God was assembled, not by the Holy Spirit, but actually by an 11th-century monk trying to apply medieval feudal law to the nature of the creator. And this one I love. We're going to look at that framework or at the framework that the early church used for the first thousand years of Christianity that the Reformation largely buried. And then I keep seeing, I keep saying and because there's so much I want to talk about. We're going to close with four embodied formation practices drawn from both the neuroscience and the contemplative tradition that will begin the actual rewiring process in your nervous system. Not in six months, starting tomorrow. So, friend, this is not theology for the sake of theology. This is the map back to the life that Jesus actually promised. And again, for those of you that are new here, my name is Mark Casto. This is the Shepherd's Tent. And I want to say this right out the gate. If you're struggling right now in your faith, let me say this: there's nothing wrong with your faith. Your nervous system was just never shown the right God. So let's dive into it.

Heart Coherence And Perfect Love

SPEAKER_00 7:59

To fully understand the depth of the damage and the full depth of the restoration available, we need to go into quantum biology. Okay. Because what is happening in our nervous system organized around the theological thread is not just psychological, it's not psychological. Okay. Or let me say it this way, it's not just psychological. It's happening at a subatomic level. Okay. And the restoration that Jesus promises is not just spiritual. It's actually quantum. And I believe maybe those two things are the same. So let me start with HeartMath Institute, okay? Because their research is the most directly applicable bridge between the neuroscience that we established in the YouTube video and the deeper biological reality we're exploring today. So the HeartMath Institute in Boulder Creek, California has been conducting peer-reviewed research on heart brain coherence for over 30 years. That's incredible. And what they found fundamentally changes the assumption that the brain is the primary organ of intelligence and experience in the human body. If I had more time to talk about this, there's actually been people who have experienced heart transplants that they will have memories come to them from the people who had the heart transplant. I know freaky stuff. It's crazy. We'll get into that another time. But the heart, okay, generates an electromagnetic field that is approximately 60 times greater in amplitude than the electromagnetic field generated by the brain. 60 times, guys. And this field extends outward from the body in all directions, measurably detectable several feet away from the physical body. I think that's so fascinating. But here's probably what, at least in my opinion, is most relevant. Okay. The state of that electromagnetic field is coherence, it's stability, it's power. It's directly determined by the emotional and psychological state of a person, of the person generating it. Okay. So a heart experiencing fear and anxiety and threat produces incoherent, chaotic electromagnetic field. Okay. The waveform's erratic, it's irregular, and that incoherent field feeds directly back into the brain, specifically into the amygdala, amplifying the stress response and further dysregulating the nervous system in a feedback loop that compounds over time. See, a heart experiencing love, this is what I love about the opposite. So when your heart's experiencing love and gratitude and a secure sense of being cared for, that produces what heart math calls a coherent electromagnetic field. So the waveform is smooth, rhythmic, and stable. And that coherent field feeds back into the brain in a way that calms the amygdala, activates the prefrontal cortex, and produces what the research describes as a state of optimal cognitive and emotional functioning. Now, I know I just used a lot of jargon there and a lot of stuff I've had to look up the meaning of those words, but hear what I just said through the lens of the gospel. Okay. First John chapter 4, verse 18 says that perfect love casts out fear, not manages fear, not reduces fear, casts it out. And the Greek word there is ekbalo, which means to drive out, to expel, to throw out forcefully. So heart math research is showing us the biological mechanism by which that promise operates. A heart that's been brought into genuine contact with perfect love, with the steady, coherent, non-threatening love of God, who is not primarily a judge, but primarily a father, generates a coherent electromagnetic field that literally, measurably, physically drives the fear response out of the nervous system. Did you hear what I just said? When we come into that place, a heart in contact with perfect love, it drives the fear response out of our nervous system. See, the gospel has always been a promise about what happens in the body. We, over the years, we spiritualized it into a promise about what happens in the afterlife. But neuroscience is returning it to where Jesus always intended it to land in our physical bodies on earth as it is in heaven, in the nervous system, in the body of a living human being right now. Now,

Attention Rewires Brain And Biology

SPEAKER_00 12:43

let me take this a little deeper into quantum physics. Again, I don't fully understand all of this. I'm getting into it and studying and learning with you. But in quantum mechanics, okay, there is a phenomenon called the observer effect. At the subatomic level, the act of observation, of focused sustained attention, measurably affects the behavior of a physical matter. So particles exist in a state of superposition, okay? Multiple potential states simultaneously until they're observed. So the act of observation collapses the wave function and determines which potential becomes actual reality. I think that's so fascinating. So if we take that into Romans chapter 12, verse 2, Paul says to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The Greek word for transformed there is the same root as metamorphosis, okay? A complete structural change at the level of form. And so I hope you hear this when I'm saying this. This is not just a behavioral adjustment, okay? This is a fundamental restructuring, and the word for renewing is anakinos, anakinosis, a complete making new, a renovation at the level of foundation. So Paul is literally describing a process of sustained directed attention, the renewing of the mind, that literally produces a metamorphic structural change in the person. Friend, that's not a metaphor, that is a description of neuroplasticity 2000 years before neuroscience had language for it. And neuroplasticity, the brain's capacity to restructure itself, operates at the level of synaptic connections. Okay. Synaptic connections are quantum biological systems. Okay. The restructuring of the brain through sustained attention is a quantum-level physical event. So what you consistently attend to is literally restructuring the physical architecture of your brain at the quantum level. So why is all that important? Well, fear-based theology trains sustained attention toward threat, failure, unworthiness, and of course, divine disapproval. And that sustained attention is physically restructuring the brain around those orientations. And that again is not a metaphor for spiritual damage. It is a description of literal, measurable, physical restructuring of neuroarchitecture in response to sustained theological input. So the messages we've received from Pentecostal legalism, the doomsday Bible prophecy prophets, the demon hunters constantly making us focus on the demonic, that is restructuring the neuroarchitecture of our brain. Now, if we go deeper, and some of you that have dove into like epigenetics, which is the study of how experience affects gene expression, research pioneered by scientists like Bruce Lipton, they've demonstrated that the beliefs and emotional states that we sustain over time do not just affect our psychology, they affect which genes are expressed in our cells. So things like chronic fear and stress, including the chronic theological stress of a nervous system organized around an angry, punishing God, it activates gene expression patterns associated with inflammation, suppressed immune function, accelerated cellular aging, and increased vulnerability to disease. But again, going back to the good news of the gospel on the opposite side of that, states of love, security, and coherence, the states produced by a nervous system that's encountered the God who's not a threat, activate gene expression patterns associated with healing, cellular repair, immune resilience, and what researchers describe as the biological signature of thriving. Man, that is so fascinating. But let's look back at fear-based theology. So, fear-based theology is not just psychologically damaging, it's written into the cellular biology of the people who sustained it over a lifetime. And here's where epigenetics becomes like the most sobering, okay, and the most hopeful part of this conversation. Epigenetic changes are heritable, okay? Meaning the gene expression patterns established by sustained fear can literally be passed to children and grandchildren through epigenetic inheritance. Okay. So the trauma of a generation of fear-based religion is not just contained within the people who lived it, it is potentially written into the biology of their descendants. So how important is it for you and I to get free? But like always, we have good news. Epigenetic changes are also reversible. Gene expression is dynamic, it responds to sustained changes in belief, emotion, and attention. I think we're starting to understand that what we've called generational curses is really just generational thinking being passed on, not only into our minds, but into our bodies. So the same biological mechanism that wrote fear into the cellular expression of a generation can write love back into it. So this is what Paul means in Romans 8 when we look at verses 19 through 21, when he says that the creation itself is waiting in eager expectation for the manifestation of the children of God or the sons of God. The I believe that that includes obviously being filled with the Spirit, but it's the restoration of a people who have been brought into the coherent love of the Father, and they don't see it as just a spiritual event. It's a biological one, it's a quantum one. It reverberates outward through electromagnetic fields, through epigenetic inheritance, through the neural architecture of every person whose nervous system is finally allowed to encounter the God who is not a threat. Guys, creation is groaning for the manifestation of people whose nervous systems have been rewired by love. I've got all kinds of Bible verses for it, but let's keep going because those people carry a biological signature that is itself a form of witness. Now, for all of you brainiacs out there in the neuroscience world, you're like, okay, Mark, thank God you finally joined the party. Okay. But there's some of us that didn't grow up in this, that were new to this, especially a lot of believers that would be following me on this podcast. So

Five Hebrew Words For Restoration

SPEAKER_00 19:47

now I think that we can make a shift here because there's some of you that need some scripture and some word studies to really bring this home. Because for me, um, seeing how neuroscience connects to faith and how it's actually confirming the faith and confirming the kingdom and confirming how Jesus plans for us to live is a really fascinating thing for me. So I want to show you that the Bible has been describing everything that we just covered in language so precise and so embodied that when you see it, you will understand that the neuroscience is not adding something new to the gospel, it is finally giving us vocabulary for what the gospel has always been saying. So here we go. Five Hebrew words. I want you to hear each one, not just as a theological concept, but as a biological description. Okay. If you're taking notes, write this down. The first word is shalom. Okay, S-H-A-L-O-M, shalom. Most of us that are familiar with that word, we translate shalom as peace. That translation is not wrong, but it is radically insufficient. Shalom is not the absence of conflict, it is the presence of complete wholeness, physical, psychological, relational, spiritual, and communal well-being integrated into a single, indivisible reality. But the revelation is in the letters themselves. Okay. Ancient Hebrew is a pictographic language. Each letter carries a visual image and a concrete meaning beyond its phonetic value. Okay. So when we look at the word shalom, it's spelled Shin, Lamed, Mem in Hebrew. Shin is the image of teeth. It means to consume, to destroy, to press. Lamed or Lamid is the image of a staff. It means authority, direction, the power that leads and governs. Then you have mem, which is the image of water. It means colour. Chaos, the unknown, that which overwhelms and floods. So reading those letters together, shalom literally means, and you would read this right to left like the like you would Hebrew, means the teeth that destroy the authority of chaos. So shalom, when we put all that together, is not a passive word. Shalom is active, aggressive. It's an active, aggressive, consuming force that destroys the neurological authority that chaos and fear have claimed over your life. That's a good place right there to say yes and amen. So if we go into heart math terms, um, so heart math would term the word shalom. Um if we put all this together, it would be the coherent electromagnetic field of the heart destroying the incoherent, chaotic field produced by sustained fear. So in neuroscience, terms like shalom would be what would translate as a regular like a regulated parasympathetic nervous system overcoming the chronic activation of your nervous system, okay, or the HBA axis. Okay. So when Jesus says in John 14, 27, My peace I give you, not as the world gives, he's not offering you stress management. He is offering you the shalom of God, a force that actively destroys the neurological architecture of fear that has been built inside of you for some of you since the day you were born. Friend, when I look at the globe, the globe, and we talk about the world's peace, okay? The world's peace, um, the way that they they look at peace is to manage chaos. But Jesus's shalom is the biological and quantum destruction of its authority over your nervous system. So I think we gotta we gotta recognize, man, we're setting on really powerful truth just in that one word study. Okay. Now let's go to the second word, which would be yeah-ra, y-i-ra-a-h. I'm probably not saying that right, but I'm gonna try to pronounce it anyways. So when we look at like the book of Proverbs, chapter 9, verse 10, it says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. So for centuries, the Western Church has used that verse to justify a posture of terror before God. But the Hebrew word translated fear in that verse is urah. Okay, and yeah does not mean terror. The root of urah is the verb raha, which is to see. Urah is the response to seeing something so vast, so beautiful, so incomprehensibly good that it produces in you a complete undoing of your smaller self and a rebuilding in the presence of what you have just encountered. So yeah is awe, not terror, but awe, like AWE, awe. And if we go to uh, I believe it would be said Dasher Keltner at UC Berkeley, literally they've spent decades studying the neurological effects of awe specifically, okay? And his findings are directly applicable here, okay? Awe produces a measurable and rapid reduction in cortisol levels. Did you hear that? So the fear of the Lord reduces cortisol levels. The same cortisol that fear-based theology has been chronically elevating is driven down by the experience of genuine awe before a God who is revealed as vast and good rather than threatening and punitive. Okay. Awe activates the default mode network in ways that reduce self-reverential rumination, the anxious mental chatter about your own failures, your own inadequacies that fear-based theology produces as a chronic background noise. And many of you, I know, uh just by reading the comments, or going have gone through that or going through that now. But what awe does is awe produces what Keltner calls the smaller self effect, okay? Which is a temporary but profound dissolution of the rigid ego boundaries that keep us trapped in performance and self-protection. So when we have these overwhelming encounters, the overwhelming encounter with something vast and good makes the anxious performing self feel temporarily irrelevant. And in that space, something deeper and more stable is able to emerge. So terror and awe produce completely opposite neurological outcomes. Why is this so important, guys? Because I'm explaining to you the significance of mind renewal. Okay. Terror activates your nervous system, that chronic stress response. It floods the body with cortisol, it suppresses the prefrontal cortex, it produces hyper hypervigilance and emotional rigidity and exhaustion. But awe deactivates the HPA axis, it reduces cortisol, it activates the prefrontal cortex, it produces openness, creativity, connection, and rest. Okay. So the beginning of wisdom is not a state of terror before a punishing God. It is a state of awe before a God so vast and so good that your nervous system finally exhales. Friend, the Western church collapsed yeah, that word yeah, into terror and produced a generation of people whose devotional lives were activating their amygdala. Okay. So the recovery of Eurah as awe is not a softening of the gospel. It's actually a return to what the Hebrew was always saying. Every time that we bring the goodness of God, people are like, Mark, you're watering down the gospel. You're softening the gospel. No, we are actually proving the gospel through what we're saying. It's just that in the West, we've been so bound by fear and legalism that we have watered down the gospel with fear. We have watered down the truth. And so this is not a softening or a watering down. This is a return back to what the Bible actually says. Okay. Ready for the next word? Shov. Okay, Psalm 127, verse 2. That's S-H-A-V, if you're taking notes. Psalm 127, verse 2 says, In vain you rise up early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat, for he grants sleep to those that he loves. See, the word translated in vain is the Hebrew word shav, and shav does not just mean pointless or futile. Okay. The full semantic range of shav includes the definition uselessness, emptiness, idolatry, and evil. It is the same word used in the third commandment, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in Shav. Okay. So the writer of one Psalms 127 is saying that chronic overwork, the performance treadmill, the inability to rest belongs in the same semantic category as idolatry. It is shav. It is the worship of something other than God. And in this case, the worship of productivity and the approval that performance is designed to earn. Friend, that is a staggering reframe for anybody who's been told that their busyness is faithfulness, that their exhaustion is sacrifice, that their inability to stop is evidence of devotion. The Hebrew says it is idolatry. And the contrast in the second half of the verse is equally staggering. It goes to the opposite. He grants sleep, rest, Shabbat, the complete cessation of striving. Okay. And he does that to his Yadid, his beloved, okay, his most intimately loved one. So the Hebrew word yadid comes from the root dod, which is love, beloved, the intimate affection between people who belong to each other. So it's the same root word used throughout all the Song of Solomon for that word beloved. So rest is not the reward you receive after you've earned enough. Rest is the gift he gives to his most intimately loved. And the ability to stop is not a sign of faithfulness, it's a sign of belovedness. Okay. We're almost there. Word number four, and these are all going to be important. We're building a foundation here, nefesh. Okay. So in Psalm 23, verse 3, David says, He restores my soul. The Hebrew word translated soul is nefesh. And nefesh is perhaps the most consequentially mistranslated word in the entire Western Christian tradition. Okay. In the Western theological framework, inherited from Greek Platonic philosophy, the soul is an immaterial spiritual substance separated from and superior to your body. Okay. The soul, in the Greek thought, is the real you, and the body's just a temporary vehicle. But Nefesh in Hebrew means nothing of the kind. Nefesh means the whole living person: body, breath, emotion, desire, appetite, and identity integrated into a single indivisible reality. The first time you see this word is actually in Genesis chapter 2, verse 7. God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living Nefesh. That the text there is not saying that a spiritual substance entered into a physical body. It is saying that the integration of divine breath and physical matter produced a living person. So Nefesh is not the spiritual part of you. Nefesh is all of you. And this changes everything about what Jesus promised in Psalm 23. He restores our what? My Nefesh. He's not promising to fix your spiritual life while leaving your nervous system in chronic activation. He is promising the complete restoration of your integrated personhood, your body, your breath, your emotional capacity, your desire, your identity, your nervous system, your cellular biology. Friend, the restoration of the Nafesh is the healing of your central nervous system. It is the coherence of the electromagnetic field of the heart. It's the restructuring of the neuroarchitecture from threat to love. It is the epigenetic rewriting of cellular expression from fear to shalom. He restores my Nefesh. See, I'm starting to tie it together for you. Friend, that is a comprehensive biological, neurological, quantum, and spiritual promise. And it is for you and it is for right now, not after you've sufficiently performed. Last word study here, Shabbat. Okay. The word Sabbath comes from the Hebrew word Shabbat, which means to cease, to stop, to desist. Okay. The deeper root connects to the number seven, Shiva, because the Sabbath was built into the seventh day of creation as its architectural conclusion. Okay. The crown of the creative week was not the making of human beings on day six. It was the resting of God on day seven. And God did not rest on the seventh day because he was tired. He rested because rest was the final creative act, because shalom, which is the wholeness and completion of all he had made, required the act of ceasing as its consummation. So the creation was not complete until God stopped. Friend. And when God stopped and built into the biology of the creatures that he had just made, he placed inside of them a rhythm that mirrors that creative architecture. So here's a term for you ultra DN rhythms. Okay. Ultra DN rhythms. Okay. The natural cycles of the human nervous system. They operate on approximately 90 to 120 minute cycles of high neurological activity, followed by a necessary period of rest and integration. Okay. So when we override those rest periods, what we do is we start to accumulate what researchers call ultra DN stress. Okay. There's probably another way of saying that. That's how I'm pronouncing it. What do I mean when I say that? It's a progressive dysregulation of the nervous system that compounds over hours and days into the chronic exhaustion that has become the defining experience of high-performing people in the Western world. Friend, God did not command Sabbath because he needed a day off. Guys, the commandment to rest is the creator telling his creatures to honor the rhythm he wired into them. So when Jesus comes on the scene in Matthew 11, 28, and he says, Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest, the Greek word there is anapossis, okay? A compound of anna again and anew, and paw to stop decease, which means a renewed stopping. It's a return to the original rhythm of Shabbat that fear-based religion had stolen from an entire generation. So again, Jesus is not offering stress management, he is offering a return to the biological and spiritual architecture of creation itself.

How The Fear-Based God Was Built

SPEAKER_00 36:38

Now I've been excited about getting here, okay, because I need to show you where the fear-based God came from. Because understanding the history externalizes the source of the wound. It shows you that the image of God that's been activating your amygdala for decades was not handed to you by the Holy Spirit. It was assembled by human beings in a specific historical moment for reasons that had everything to do with medieval Jewish prudence. I say Jewish prudence, jurisprudence, okay, and very little to do with the gospel of Jesus Christ. So let's go all the way back to 1098 AD. It begins with a man by the name of Anselm of Canterbury, okay? Anselm wrote a theological treatise called Why Did God Become Man? Okay. And in it, he developed what became known as the satisfaction theory of atonement. So to understand Anselm, you have to understand the world he was living in. Again, when you study theology, do do me a favor. When you study theology, don't just study the theology of the man without studying the times of the man who developed the theology, because it's going to influence the theology. So again, we need to understand the world that Anselm was living in. So go back 11th century, feudal Europe was organized around a single supreme social value, honor. So in the feudal system, an offense against the Lord was not merely a personal injury, it was a disruption of the entire social order. And the severity of the offense was determined not by the nature of the act, but by the honor rank of the person offended. So an offense against a king required a response proportional to the king's honor. So Anselm applied that framework directly to the relationship between God and humanity. So human sin had offended the infinite honor of God. The satisfaction required was therefore infinite. No finite human act could provide it. So God sent his infinite son to make an infinite satisfaction on behalf of humanity. Now, notice what drives the cross in Anselm's theology. It's not love, it's honor. Not the father's desire to be reunited with his children, a legal obligation. Not the shepherd leaving the 99 because he could not bear the loss, the necessity of satisfying a wounded divine dignity before grace could be extended. Friend, that is not the God of Luke 15. That is not the father who sees his prodigal son while he's still a great way off and runs completely undignified in a culture organized around honor and falls on his neck and kisses him before a single word of repentance has been spoken. That father does not wait for satisfaction. He runs toward the one who sinned against him before the debt has even been addressed. See, Anselm's God could not do that. Anselm's God had to be satisfied first. So then fast forward to John Calvin in the 16th century, he took Anselm's framework and sharpened it. Okay, because he was a lawyer. John Calvin was a lawyer before he was ever a preacher or a theologian. He was a lawyer. So of course he's going to take Anselm's satisfaction theory and he's going to sharpen it into what we now call penal substitutionary theory of atonement. Not just God's honor, but God's justice requires that every sin be punished. The punishment required is infinite. So Jesus steps in as our penal substitute. The wrath of God is propitiated, legally satisfied, and God is now judicially free to extend grace. So I want to be precise here. Okay. I am not dismissing the cross. The cross is everything. What Jesus bore on our behalf was real and costly and the decisive event of human history. What I am saying is that when penal substitution becomes the primary and controlling framework or becomes our primary theory of atonement, when the first and loudest thing we say about God is that his wrath required legal satisfaction before he can love you, we have produced a portrait of God whose default posture toward humanity is punitive. And that portrait, preached consistently for five centuries, has been activating the amygdala of everyone who tried to approach him. Friend, the early church had a different primary framework. It was called Christus Victor, Christ the Victor. It was the dominant understanding of the atonement for the first thousand years of Christianity before Anselm replaced it. See, in Christus Victor, the cross is not a legal transaction satisfying divine wrath. It is the decisive invasion of God into the domain of the powers that had held humanity in bondage, sin, death, the enemy, and the entire system of fear and accusation that had separated human beings from the life of God. Friend, the theologian Gustav Olaon, who recovered this framework in the 20th century, described it as a cosmic drama in which God in Christ attacks and defeats the hostile powers that hold humanity captive. The cross is not the place where God's anger is absorbed, it is the place where God's love wins. The God of Christas Victor is not waiting for satisfaction before he can love you. He is charging into the darkness to rescue you. He is not, he's charging into the darkness. I want you to hear this again. He is charging into the darkness to rescue you. He is not the offended judge requiring payment. He is the father who will not rest until his children are free. And here's what changes neurologically when Christus Victor replaces penal substitution as your primary framework. Okay, listen. Your relationship with God is no longer organized around the debt you owe. It is organized around a rescue that you received. Your devotional life is no longer performance management before an evaluating judge. It is intimacy with a father who ran towards you while you were still a great way off. Your sense of identity is no longer defined by your failures. It's defined by the fact that the Son of God considered you worth everything. Not to satisfy a legal requirement, but because he could not bear the thought of eternity without you. Friend, that God does not activate the amygdala. That God produces the awe that is Ura. That God generates the coherent electromagnetic field. That heart math describes. That God rewires the neural architecture of the brain from threat to love. Friend, that is the gospel. The one that was preached for a thousand years before Anselm built a different one. All right, this is where we're going to begin to land the plane, or in old preachers speak, that this is where I'm beginning to close. But I'm going to warn you, uh, when I was a kid, my dad, I grew up in a pastor's home. He's like, okay, in closing. And I asked my mom one day, what does that mean when he says in closing? And my mom said, absolutely nothing. So I'm going to try to make this my first closing. Okay. So everything that I shared today is only as valuable as what it produces in your actual daily life. Okay. The shift from a fear-based God and the fear-based neuromap of God to a love-based one does not happen through intellectual agreement alone. It requires sustained, repeated, embodied practice. Okay. What the ancient contemplatives called formation and what neuroscience calls neuroplasticity. Okay.

Four Practices To Start Rewiring

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Neuroplasticity. Okay. Four practices, specific, targeted interventions in the neurological architecture of how your body relates to God. You ready? I'm going to give these to you. And I'm hoping that you'll implement them in your life. So feel free to pause, write this down. Uh, better yet, I've got something for you that I'm going to share here in just a minute. So, practice number one, I call this the rewired morning. Okay. Before you check your phone, before email, before news or metrics or the to-do list, five minutes, one thing. Okay. I want you to think about the goodness of God towards you specifically. Not your theology about God, not your output, not your failures from yesterday, His goodness toward you. Okay. One specific moment, one specific provision, one time that he came through when you had no reason to expect it. And I want you to name that out loud because spoken language is encoded in the brain differently than silent thought. So the act of speaking it engages both hemispheres and it anchors the experience more deeply in the long-term memory. And then once you do that, I want you to sit with it. Don't turn it into a prayer request. Don't pivot to intercession or the day's agenda. Just receive. Let the goodness of God be the first input that your reticular activating system processes before the world has a chance to orient it toward threat. Okay. See, the reticular activating system is the brain's primary attention filter. So it determines what you notice based on what you've trained it to prioritize. So fear-based theology trains your RAS to scan for spiritual threat and personal inadequacy. So this practice systematically retrains it to scan for divine goodness and personal belovedness. Five minutes a day, 90 days of consistent practice, friend, after 90 days, you're not trying to feel different. You are training your brain to be structurally different. So the full written version of this practice is available as a free download. So the link is in the show notes below. You got to go check that out. Okay. Then we've got practice number two, the coherence breath. Okay. So this practice comes directly from Heart Math Institute protocol, takes three to five minutes and can be done anywhere. So place your hand on your heart physically. The physical contact activates afferent neural pathways between the hand and the heart that accelerate the coherence shift. Breathe in slowly for five counts, directing your breath and your awareness to the center of your chest, hold it for one count, and then breathe out slowly for five counts. And as you breathe, focus your awareness on a genuine feeling of appreciation or care. Not a thought about appreciation, the felt sense of it in your body. A person you love, a moment of beauty, a specific experience of being cared for. And do this for three to five minutes. And see, heart mass research shows that this practice measurably shifts the elect the electromagnetic field of the heart from an incoherent stress pattern to a coherent love pattern within minutes. It activates the vagus nerve, the primary neural pathway of the parasympathetic nervous system. Guys, your body's rest and restore system. So it directly counters the cortisol activation of the HBA axis. So this is the biology of what David was doing in Psalm 23. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my Nefesh. Friend, the ancient practice of stillness before the shepherd was always a practice of coherence. The science just gives us language for the mechanism. Okay? Then let's go to practice number three. This is going to be really helpful for you. Called, we're going to call this one the Nefesh Inventory. So once a week, same time each week, because rhythm reinforces neurological encoding, take 15 to 20 minutes to do a Nefesh inventory, a whole person check-in that honors the integrated reality of your personhood. So this practice draws from the Ignatius examen tradition that combined with somatic awareness practices from contemporary trauma-informed therapy, both are pointing at the same thing. The importance of honest, embodied self-awareness before God as a formation practice. So, four questions. Take your time with each one. Start with your body. What is my body telling me right now? Where am I holding tension? What physical sensations am I aware of? See, fear-based religion taught us to distrust the body, to override its signals in the name of faithfulness. The Nefesh inventory gives the body permission to speak. Then we go to our emotions. What am I actually feeling right now? Not what I think I should be feeling, my actual felt experience in this moment. See, David didn't perform his emotions before God. He brought them raw, fear, rage, grief, despair, all of it, and found that God, that the God he brought them to was large enough to hold all of it. So the Nefesh inventory gives you permission to do the same. And don't worry, Nefesh is not some weird word if you're just jumping into this. It's actually a Hebrew word, okay, of the soul. Now, move on to desire. What does my soul actually long for right now? What do I want? See, fear-based religion treated desire as suspect, okay, as evidence of carnality requiring suppression. But Nefesh is appetite. So desires built into your personhood by the one who made you. So the question is not whether you have desires, but whether you bring them to the one who gave them to you. And then lastly, we check in with belovedness. What is one specific way that I've experienced being loved by God this week? Not theological, specifically, one moment, one provision, one unexpected kindness. And the more consistently you can answer this question, the more your neural map of God shifts from threat to father. Now, let's move to practice number four. Shabbat Sabbath as a biological reset. So I want you to take one day a week and practice Shabbat. Cease. Stop. Not in order to recover enough to perform again, but as an act of worship, as a biological act of alignment with the rhythm God built into creation. Don't check email, don't engage with metrics or output. Don't consume news or social media. Eat food you enjoy, sleep if you need to, be present with the people you love, take a walk, sit by the water if you can find it. And notice what happens in your nervous system during the first hour of genuine rest. Notice the anxiety that arises, the conditioned response of a system trained to equate stillness with failure. Notice it without judgment and stay in the Shabbat anyway. Because what you're doing in that moment is you're choosing rest over the anxiety that demands productivity. That's literally what the ancient Hebrew called Sadiq, righteousness. Okay? Not as a legal status earned by performance, as a description of alignment. You are aligning yourself with the rhythm of creation, with the architectural intention of the one who rested on the seventh day, not because he was tired, but because rest is sacred. Friend, on Shabbat, you're not being lazy. You are being loved. And your nervous system, the HPA axis, the electromagnetic field of the heart, the epigenetic expression of your cells, is responding to that act of belovedness in ways that compound over weeks and months into the biological signature of a person who has been restored. He restores my soul, my nefesh. And that's not a future promise. It's a present process. And it begins with the choice to stop. Now, again, I said this was my first closing, but it's let me give you my second closing, and I promise you I'm stopping now. Okay.

Final Blessing And Next Steps

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So I want to close with the person who needed to hear this the most today. Not the person already left who's already left the church and looking for validation of their departure, the person who is still there, still showing up, still serving, still loving Jesus with everything they have while quietly carrying an exhaustion that no amount of prayer and devotion seems to be able to touch. Friend, that person is not failing. That person has been handed a portrait of God assembled by an 11th century monk applying feudal law to the nature of the Creator, and they have been trying with everything in them to love God, who in that portrait was never fully safe to rest in. And the longing they carry, the hunger for the peace that surpasses all understanding, for the rest that Jesus promised, for the joy that's supposed to be their strength, is not evidence of spiritual immaturity. It is the Holy Spirit refusing to let them settle for a God who is smaller than the gospel. Friend, there is nothing wrong with your faith. Your nervous system was just never shown the right God, the God of the gospel, the God of Christus Victor, the God of Luke 15, the God of Psalm 23, the God whose shalom destroys the authority of chaos, whose year aw produces awe rather than terror, that God is available to you right now, not after sufficient performance, not after you've cleaned up the vineyard within. Right now, in the same condition you're in with all of it. He is the father running towards you while you're still a great way off. He is the shepherd who insists on your rest besides still waters. He is the beloved of Song of Solomon who looks at the exhausted, weathered Shulamite and says, You are altogether lovely. He is not your threat. He has never been your threat. He is your rest. And your nervous system was made to know the difference. Friend, this is episode one of Rewired Breaking the Neurology of Fear-Based Faith. Next week, we're going to go deeper into the Christmas Victor framework. It's going to be a full theological and historical reconstruction of the gospel that the early church preached for a thousand years before the legal framework replaced it. And we're going to look at what happens in the body, specifically in the nervous system and the electromagnetic field of the heart when Christus Victor becomes not just a theological position, but a lived experience. Again, the free rewired morning practice guide is in the show notes below. It is the practical starting point for everything we talked about. So make sure you go get that. And if you're ready to go beyond the podcast, guys, I want to invite you to the Shepherd's Tent Partner Community. You get access to extended teachings, formation practices, and a private community doing this work together every week.

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We weren't made for the treadmill. You were made for the tent. Go deeper at marcasto.co. This is the shepherd's tent with Marcasto.