Let's Talk — honest conversations about tough topics; Pastor Joseph Lo

Pastor Joseph Lo addressed the historic tension between Christian faith and psychology at Anchor Community Church in “Let's Talk about Psychology and Christianity: Who Will Deliver Me?” He brings together learnings from his study of Scripture, having over 20 years of pastoral experiences, and weaves in his psychological training.

This talk explains that psychology does not displace divine truth, but rather provides an empirical framework to better understand the human experience—specifically how sin, trauma, and grace manifest in the physical body and mind. These are the key points, followed by the full transcript. Watch on YouTube or Listen on Spotify.

Full transcript

We're going through our Hot Topic series. As you know, it's called Let's Talk, and we're talking about a bunch of controversial topics.

I think this one's less controversial in a lot of circles, especially for the younger generation, but we're talking about psychology and faith. Mental health has become less taboo, and it's become more common to go see a counselor or therapist. So in a lot of ways, some of you might be wondering, what's the controversy here?

But in the circles I grew up in, even as a psych major in my undergraduate years at UCSD, this was a topic that came up. Why? If I can oversimplify for a moment, what made an impression on me during my undergraduate years was reading one of Freud's first books. Sigmund Freud, one of the founding fathers of psychology. In his book, he explicitly said he wanted to replace religion. A lot of the founding fathers of psychology, not all of them, were secular humanists. They wanted to replace God.

Now, most people in the mental health profession would agree that psychology today takes a very different approach. It doesn't have that same worldview-driven agenda, though maybe some still do. Psychology has come to rely much more on research, neurobiology, and empirical evidence as a way to understand the human experience.

So here's what I would say. If we believe the Bible's claims about human anthropology, about our purpose, our meaning, what makes us tick, and if everything the Bible claims about the human experience is true, then wouldn't we be able to observe it in our reality? That's what the study of psychology is trying to do: understand human experience.

Let me give you a silly illustration. Imagine it's my birthday, and we break out the birthday cake, and everyone says, “This cake is so good.” They ask, “Joe, why does this cake taste so good?” And I say it's because my wife made it with love. Some people like that answer.

But imagine P Ben is at my birthday party, and he says, “No, Joe, it's actually because she used two cups of flour, three eggs, butter, sugar, and vanilla.” He gets really factual. And I say, “Stop, you're ruining love,” because I'm the touchy-feely guy.

But here's the thing. If we take a step back, knowing the ingredients of a cake doesn't make love disappear. At the same time, knowing the ingredients doesn't explain how much care and attention my wife put into making the cake. That's part of what psychology does. It helps us investigate the ingredients of human experience: our brains, our bodies, our relationships, our attachments, our learning, our emotions, our trauma, our cognition, our behavior. But describing these things doesn't mean we've explained away God. It doesn't mean we've explained away sin. It doesn't mean we've explained away grace or redemption. And if the gospel is really about transforming the whole person, why should the gospel be threatened by our effort to understand the whole person?

I don't want to turn this sermon into a lecture or a debate, because it's still a sermon. This message was hard to write because I was trying to integrate all these really complex ideas and make them simple without turning it into a weird debate or lecture. So let's see how psychology helps us understand how the gospel affects the whole person. In understanding the whole person, we better understand what drives us to sin, and we better understand what encourages health and growth. That's what we're trying to do this morning.

Let's read from Romans 7, starting at verse 14. This is a passage many of you are familiar with. It's Paul's description of his human experience, of his frailty and his limitations.

“For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.”

Sorry, that's such a tongue-twister of a passage. I like the NIV here because it adds an “Oh”: “Oh, wretched man that I am!”

Let's pray. Father in heaven, this morning we endeavor to explore the depths of our human experience, our struggle with sin, our humanity, our limitations. Lord, perhaps it will move us to despair. And yet, Lord, we know that is the first step to knowing your grace. I pray that this morning you would renew our hearts in Christ. Lord, we thank you. We pray these things in Jesus' name, Amen.

Embodied souls with limited agency

The first thing I want us to think about is when Paul talks about the flesh. What he's saying is that we are embodied souls, embodied souls with limited agency. What does that mean? Basically, our souls are intimately woven into our bodies. We experience reality through our bodies. We interact with the world through our bodies, and the world interacts with us. Our bodies help us feel, they help us think, they help us desire. That's the idea that we are embodied souls.

But then Paul goes on in this passage to make the point that we are limited in agency. Look at verse 14: “For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin.”

Verse 15: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” And verse 17: “So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.”

What Paul is saying here is that in my mind, body, and soul, I experience this limited agency. I don't have full control. I do the things I hate, the things I don't want to do, I keep doing. And when I want to do good, evil lies right there beside me. I feel like sin lives in my body. Sin dwells in me. Not only does my soul dwell in my body, but the sin nature dwells in my body too, and it wages war against me.

So how do we understand this? This is kind of interesting, and it's very nuanced. The literal translation of this idea is “the flesh.” But the NIV chooses not to use the word “flesh.” They translate it instead as “sin nature.” I think the reason they do this is that they were afraid we would come to the conclusion that our flesh, or our bodies, are inherently evil. And that is not true.

When Paul talks about the flesh, he's talking about the frailty and weaknesses of our human experience. He's not specifically saying our bodies are evil by nature. That's why the NIV translators said “sin nature.”

If you think about it, that's true, because Jesus lived in a body. He understands humanity. He understands our biology. He experienced it, and yet he was without sin. So there's nothing inherently evil about our bodies. In fact, our bodies were created good.

But you'll notice the ESV uses the word “flesh,” and this is really important. It could just be because the ESV likes to keep things as literal as possible, but I can't help thinking there's also this idea that sin expresses itself in our bodies, that sin is embodied through our bodies. Another way of saying this is that sin exploits our bodies.

What in the world do I mean by that? Let's look at something like human sexuality. Human sexuality is a good thing, especially if you're married. One of its purposes is to glue husband and wife together, to bond them. It's a physical and spiritual act of intimacy.

But when you're not married, those appetites don't just disappear. What sin does is take those appetites and try to disorder them. We have temptation that exploits our bodies, the appetites that are there, so that we might seek intimacy outside the covenant of marriage. It wrecks what God intended for sexuality, which is to be expressed in a healthy way within the covenant of marriage. If I didn't have those sexual appetites as part of my bodily experience, then sin wouldn't be able to exploit them.

So let's think about it this way. Psychology is the study of the human mind, the brain, its functions, and how it affects our behavior. It helps us understand why we think the way we do, why we feel the way we do, and why we act the way we do. What I think psychology can do is help us understand why we sin. Why does sin have such a huge power over our lives? That fits in with Paul's idea of embodied sin. Sin exploits our flesh, our bodies, our brains, our weaknesses.

History becomes biology

One way a psychologist or therapist would summarize this idea is that history becomes biology.

What do we mean by that? Take trauma, for example. Maybe you've had a really traumatic experience in your life. Your brain and your body automatically decide, usually without you knowing, that you cannot experience this again. So they set up new neural pathways to warn you. Anything that reminds your brain or body, unconsciously, of that traumatic event will set off fire alarms. History becomes biology.

Triggers can be completely random. For some reason, your brain has associated that thing with danger. And when you're triggered, it causes all this dysregulation. It can make you really aggressive. It can make you really scared, like you need to run. I'll give you a silly example.

When I was in college, I was driving down the freeway and everyone suddenly braked really hard. There was an accident in front of us. I slammed on my brakes and stopped in time. I didn't hit the car in front of me, but the person behind me didn't stop in time and rear-ended me.

For decades afterward, my brain automatically responded to that, and my wife hates this about my driving. It took a long time to go extinct. Every time I saw a brake light somewhat close to me, I would slam on my brakes, and my passengers hated riding with me. The only way I could stop it was to really focus and tell myself, OK, I'm not going to respond this way. It took a long time, and psychologists call it extinction. That's an example of history becoming biology.

How does this help us understand sin? Trauma is one thing, and that could be a whole other message, or a workshop. But look at relational traumas, or injuries. Many of you are familiar with attachment theory, the idea that if you had relational injuries in childhood, unfortunately caused by the way your parents related to you or didn't relate to you, it can shape how you automatically approach relationships.

You could become avoidant. Your brain is automatically telling you relationships are not safe, so you avoid them and become very independent. Some people would say you're kind of cold. Or, on the flip side, maybe your parents raised you in a way that left you obsessed with relationships. You get really anxious about them, and when you feel threatened, you get really aggressive. There are mountains of research on this, and it makes absolute sense if you think about it.

But here's the thing. Why do I get defensive? Why do I have a hard time loving? Why do I have a hard time drawing near to people? It's because my history became biology. And on the flip side, why do I get so aggressive? Why do I get so obsessed with these relationships? I start nagging, or I become really aggressive, or even start yelling at people. I get completely unhinged. It's because my history became biology.

Now here's the thing. How about addictions? Let's say pornography. I work with a lot of people who are struggling with pornography. One thing I've found, not in all cases but in a lot of them, is that there are deep traumas underneath. There are hurts and emotions that are so hard for them to deal with, like massive amounts of shame, anxiety, whatever it is. And pornography is the only way they know how to cope right now.

Here's what I don't want us to misunderstand: understanding someone's sin is not the same as excusing sin.

Understanding someone's sin is not the same as excusing sin. But it does help us understand our brokenness. It helps us see what's underlying our sin and driving us to these things, without making an excuse. At the same time, we can have a little more compassion for ourselves. We can empathize with ourselves, maybe the way Jesus does. As the author of Hebrews wrote, he sympathizes with our weaknesses, because he knew what it was like to be human.

Understanding what drives us can also make our repentance more concrete. Otherwise we just say, “Stop your sinning. That's awful. You should feel terrible about yourself.” I guarantee you that people in addictions hate themselves already, and that's not going to help them. You can't hate yourself into transformation and change.

Here's what happens when you start asking what's underneath. What wounds are underneath this? What beliefs? What habits? What relationship traumas? What circumstances? What's behind those patterns? Now you're identifying idols in a person's life. And now you know where the Lord's healing hand needs to do some transforming work. Now we can shine a light and bring the gospel into those hurts, those injuries, those traumas.

Despair, surrender, and grace

When we think about Paul's experience, where he says, “What a wretched man I am,” I think we can all, to some degree, relate to that. Can't you? When I read, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”, Paul is feeling despair. He's feeling a kind of helplessness. He's not saying he isn't morally responsible. He's not saying that at all. But he is saying, absolutely, I can't save myself. I can't change myself. Somebody needs to help me. Somebody needs to rescue me.

Honestly, this verse is a very vulnerable spot for me, because I've felt that helplessness. I've felt that powerlessness. And I have a feeling everyone in this room, if you've been honest with yourself, has felt it too. You know what it's like to be in those moments where you don't know why you do what you do, but you keep doing it and you hate it.

This moment of despair is the first step to change. It's the first step to rescue. It's where you say, “I am affected by powers and patterns within me that I do not fully control.” And many of those powers are rooted in deep injuries and pain.

And here's the thing: why did Jesus choose to rescue us? He said it in so many different ways. He said it's the sick who need a doctor. He said we're like sheep without a shepherd. He said, “They do not know what they do.” And as I mentioned earlier, in the book of Hebrews, he sympathizes with our weaknesses. There's a part of our human experience where, when Jesus sees our sin, it's like he sees an illness. He has the remedy, and he wants us to come to him to find our cure and our healing.

Martin Luther wrote a really interesting paragraph about despair. It says:

“But no man can be thoroughly humbled until he knows that his salvation is utterly beyond his own powers, devices, endeavors, will, and works, and depends entirely on the choice, will, and work of another, namely, of God alone. For as long as he is persuaded that he himself can do even the least thing toward his salvation, he retains some self-confidence, and he presumes that some time or work may help him, by which he may at length attain to salvation. But when a man has no doubt that everything depends on the will of God, then he completely despairs of himself and chooses nothing for himself, but waits for God to work, and then he has come close to grace.”

Those who fully understand their need for a Savior are the ones who run to grace, and they are the ones who will find grace.

Here's something interesting. Andrew Huberman is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford Medical. He's also a professor of ophthalmology. Total underachiever, right? I was listening to podcasts and he made this observation. I'm pretty sure he's a person of faith. He said that when people are not able to suppress actions, particularly addictive or compulsive behaviors, and they decide to give that process over to a higher power, the success rate of people being able to suppress that behavior is astounding.

He said this is totally counterintuitive. It's like you're driving and you say, “I can't stay between the lines,” and what helps is letting go of the wheel and trusting in a higher power. We could probably psychologize this too. But let's stick with theology. What we know is that despair leads to surrender, and it pushes us to Jesus, and it leads us to transforming grace.

In this passage, when Paul says, “Oh, wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me?”, this is Paul letting go of the wheel. This is Paul running to Christ, and the remedy is “Thanks be to Jesus Christ.” In the moment he's writing Romans 7, his self-righteousness and confidence have crumbled, and he crumbles into the arms of Jesus, where he finds healing. This is the pathway of spiritual transformation.

The Holy Spirit as a corrective experience

We're running out of time, but Romans 8 is an amazing passage. We've gone through despair, and Romans 8 is the new life in Christ under the gospel. Now the Holy Spirit dwells in you too. Sin dwells in our bodies, but the Holy Spirit also dwells in our bodies. This could be Part 2 of faith and psychology, and we won't go into it because there isn't enough time, but let's touch on it lightly. An important ingredient in the gospel's power to transform our lives is the work of the Holy Spirit. Verse 15:

“For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”

If you wanted to study this the way a psychologist might look at it, they would call what the Holy Spirit provides a corrective experience. A corrective experience is one where our old patterns, our old expectations, our old relational beliefs are met by a new and transforming experience, where something different happens. It could be in therapy, in prayer, with a spiritual director, or in our relationships with people.

Let me give you an example right here in this passage. In our lifelong struggle with sin, the Spirit of Christ reminds us over and over again that we are children of God. Why is that a corrective experience? Because it's not what we would expect. It's not what we often experience in everyday life. In our despair over our sin, we would often expect to be met with shame and condemnation. Instead, we are met with grace and love. The Holy Spirit reminds us that we have a heavenly Father who sings over us and rejoices over his children. He continually calls us his beloved children. He sends the Holy Spirit to dwell in our lives to remind us again and again that nothing can separate us from his love and faithfulness.

This is where that corrective experience can heal the wounds from our earthly fathers, wounds from spouses, wounds from our failures, wounds from our disappointments and failed dreams. The Spirit turns our despair into gladness. And it is the gospel that provides this corrective experience through the Holy Spirit.

There's so much more we could talk about, but let's focus on the first step: before we get to grace, we need to understand despair. We need to surrender. We need to admit and confess to God, “I cannot change myself. I need a Savior. I need you to deliver me.” And when we admit that, we begin to experience grace.