In this sermon, the preacher warns against the dangers of philosophy and psychology, claiming that they can rob believers of the power of the Holy Spirit and keep them in bondage to sin. He emphasizes the importance of walking in Christ, being rooted and built up in Him, and remaining established in the faith. The preacher also criticizes psychology for being atheistic and evolutionary, arguing that it goes beyond mere description and delves into speculation and philosophizing. He raises questions about the validity of mental illness and suggests that psychology's definitions and beliefs are problematic.

I'd like to read to you from Colossians chapter 2, verses 6 through 10. As you have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him. Rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and you are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power. Paul is writing this epistle in order to protect these believers from these men who have crept in with a doctrine that was undermining the sufficiency of Christ. There were men who had come into the church and they acknowledged that Jesus was important, but they said that there was something else that was needed to really bring them to completion as Christians. There was a special knowledge that they needed to pursue and seek to attain to. And they were coming in and they were leading the people astray. They were leading them astray after philosophy. And so Paul is writing to them and he says, in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He said to them, Jesus is all that you need. And so we believe as God's people today through what we have stated in the scripture, that Christ is sufficient. As a Christian person to know how to live life to the glory of God here in this world, I need one thing. I need Jesus Christ and all that is included in Him, His Word, His Holy Spirit. That's what I need. I need nothing more than that. I need Him. I need for life and godliness in this world. That's what we believe. That's what the Bible teaches. It's very clear about that. But yet, just as was the case in Colossae, so today in the modern church, men have crept in. Men have come in under the guise of science and they've said, Oh, Christ is good. Of course, we need Jesus. He's the Lord and he can surely meet your spiritual needs. But there are other things that you might deal with that, of course, Christ and and his apostles, they didn't address in the Bible. And therefore, you need something beyond the scriptures. We live in the modern world and we have different problems and life is much more complicated. And so we need some help. We need something additional to Christ in the scriptures. And they've come in and they have spoiled many. They've led many people astray. They've robbed many people of the fullness of what Christ has for them. They've deceived them through philosophy, philosophy. The word itself simply means love of wisdom. Love of wisdom is the literal meaning of the word philosophy. The term has come to refer to systems of thought. Systems of thought. And we use that word frequently. And we use it to describe a variety of systems of thought. You know, you might say to somebody, well, what do you think about this? And they say, well, you know, my philosophy on that is such and such. A person maybe has a business. You say, well, you know, how do you approach your business? Well, you know, my philosophy on business is that the customer is always right. So they're using the term philosophy to express a system of thought. In its classical sense, philosophy refers to human reasoning and speculation on the meaning and purpose of life. That's in its classical sense. When we talk about philosophy in the classical sense, that's what we're talking about. Human reasoning and speculation on the meaning and purpose of life. And that's the philosophy that Paul is warning the Colossians concerning. Human reasoning and speculation on the meaning and purpose of life throughout history, philosophy has proven to be the great enemy of the Christian faith. Many in the church have found the forbidden fruit of man's wisdom irresistible. Many in the church as far back as apostolic times. And so the apostles addressed this issue. Paul here in Colossians 2 and more thoroughly even in 1 Corinthians chapters 1 through 3. Because man has always been attracted. Christian people have been attracted quite often to human reasoning, human speculation, human understanding. And so philosophy has always been a very powerful tool in the hand of the devil from apostolic times up into the present time. Philosophy is still the great foe of the Christian church. Although there are many philosophies that have and still do affect the church, there is one in particular that I want to concentrate on. And that is the philosophy known as psychology. Now maybe you're saying, wait a second, this guy's confused. He's talking about philosophy. He's talking now about psychology and he's saying that psychology is philosophy. Doesn't he know that there are two distinct areas of learning there? Psychology isn't philosophy, psychology is science, people say. But the fact is this, psychology is a pseudoscience. It is more accurately philosophy. And one of my goals here today is to prove that to you. Psychology, the word itself, is a combination of two Greek words. The word literally means the study of the soul or the study of the mind, the study of life in the sense of the immaterial aspect of man. That is what psychology is. It's the study of the soul. But Christianity and the biblical revelation claims to be the authority on the soul, on the mind, on life, on the immaterial aspect of man's being. So here you have Christianity that claims to be the authority on these things. And then you have psychology that comes along as a so-called discipline that is going to put forth expert information on the soul, the mind, on life. Psychology was born out of a rejection of God's revelation found in the scriptures concerning the soul, concerning the mind, concerning life. We need to understand that. It was born out of a rejection of God's revelation found in the scripture. Let me quote to you from Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology. Since all of these psychologies were based on secular philosophy and values, they were explicitly or implicitly hostile to religion, especially Christianity. Initially, these psychologies functioned as alternative worldviews or secular religions, primarily in the lives of psychotherapists, most of whom were drawn to modern psychology because they were already alienated from traditional Christianity or Judaism and were looking for an alternative understanding of life that could be interpreted as scientific and as compatible with the increasingly secular world. So you see, psychology was born out of literally a rebellion against Christianity. All psychology, listen closely, all psychology is rooted in philosophy. All psychology is rooted in philosophy. Some psychology such as self or humanistic psychology is purely philosophy. Let me give you a brief history of psychology. In 1907, Herman Ebbinghaus penned the epigram. Psychology has a long past, but only a short history. Psychology's past goes back at least 2000 years into the early beginnings of philosophy. Its history goes back only to 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory in Germany. Three disciplines played key roles in the growth and development of psychology, philosophy, physiology, and psychophysics. Most surveys of the history of psychology trace the philosophical beginnings at least as far back as Plato and Aristotle. Rene Descartes freed philosophy from the bonds of theological and traditional dogmas and helped to establish the dominance of a new force, empiricism, the search for knowledge by the observation of nature itself. British empiricism and associationism, as represented in the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, David Hartley, James Mill, and others, provided the basic subject matter for the newly emerging science of psychology. All of these men, all of these names that I just read to you, beginning with Plato, these men, you can find their names in the who's who of philosophy. They are all philosophers. They were all philosophers who rejected God's revelation of himself, God's statements concerning the world, the existence of man, the purpose and meaning of life, and so forth. And they are the ones who are behind psychology. Notice, again, they provided the basic subject matter for the newly emerging science of psychology. So from the historical account of the beginnings of psychology, we see clearly that all psychology is deeply rooted in philosophy. All psychology is deeply rooted in philosophy. But you see, there are variations within psychology. Some people will say, oh, no, now, you know, you're getting confused because there's, you know, yes, there is the scientific or yes, there is a philosophical aspects. But, you know, there's much that is just purely scientific, not true. All psychology, we just read it, all psychology is deeply rooted in philosophy. But as I said a moment ago, some psychologies such as self or humanistic psychology, which, by the way, is the most popular form of psychology. And the one that is having the greatest impact on the church is purely philosophy. It is purely philosophy. And according to one authority, it is simply a commercialized American packaging of much of European existentialism. Existentialism is the philosophy that has destroyed Europe. Born in Denmark through a man named Kierkegaard and then propagated by a man named Sartre. And yet here we find that this doctrine that the church is so enticed by and becoming increasingly immersed in is really just a new version of existential philosophy. And so psychology is philosophy and falls under the condemnation of the apostle Paul. There could be no question about that. Psychology is philosophy. Now, the scripture is clear that we are not to be getting involved with philosophy. That's what the apostle is saying to the Colossians here. Beware, lest any man spoil you through philosophy. And so it's clear that psychology is philosophy. All of its roots are in philosophy and some of it is purely philosophy with nothing else to it. But going one step further, we can safely say that psychology is not only philosophy, psychology is an alternative religion to Christianity. Psychology is an alternative religion to Christianity. And in the public sector, you see how fiercely the psychologists contend against their opponents, the Christians. When there's a problem in society, who do we call for? The world calls for the psychologist. If anyone is ever for a moment to suggest bringing a Christian in, oh no, we can never do any such thing. If a young person is going for some sort of therapy, the psychologist will generally give a warning, keep them away from the Bible, keep them away from Christians, don't let them get any of that kind of information that'll just confuse the matter. You see, there's fierce competition out there. Psychology is a competitive religion to Christianity. It is beyond a philosophy. It has become the religion of secular humanism. Now, the founding fathers of psychology and especially the most popular form of psychology, they were all men who really understood that that was exactly what they were doing, developing an alternative to Christianity. They were men who understood Christianity, rejected it, and chose to develop a system outside of it. Men like Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and those who followed after them. Sigmund Freud, he's the man who stated that all religion is a form of, or all religious thinking or, you know, religious desire or any of that is a form of neurosis. That's what he believed. He was an atheist, he was a Jew, ethnically, and he was very hostile to Christianity because he felt that the church was anti-semitic. He rejected his own Judaism, was an atheist, but he was also hostile to Christianity. But he actually set himself up as somewhat of a messiah, somewhat of a religious figure. He had a people that were his devoted followers, and they must adhere closely to his doctrine. And those who were in most agreement with him were rewarded, and those who disagreed with him were chastised and sometimes even excommunicated. He was really, in many ways, a religious figure. Freud directly acknowledged the essential similarity between psychoanalytic therapy and religious counseling by describing psychoanalysis as, listen, pastoral work in the best sense of the word. He understood that they were replacing the pastor, that what they were doing was coming in and bringing counsel and advice and wisdom to people that was contradictory to the message that was being given by the pastor from the Bible. So he said, what we're doing is pastoral work in the best sense of the words. This is really it. We've got the truth. We've discovered it ourselves. Carl Jung, who was a contemporary of Freud and briefly a disciple of Freud, later developed his own school of thinking and had his own loyal followers and so forth. He was different than Freud. He rejected Freud's idea that religion was a sign of neurosis. He thought that religion was beneficial. He believed that all religions were forms of mythology, but yet they did have some benefit to man because they helped man to cope, even though they weren't true, even though there was no fact behind them. They helped man to cope with life, and therefore he saw some benefit in them. So he did not discourage people from being involved in religion. He encouraged it with the exception, of course, of true biblical Christianity. Now, it's interesting. Some Christians really are very sympathetic toward Carl Jung, and they kind of paint him as a victim of his of his day and age. They almost give the implication that if he had really come into contact with a true Christianity instead of the liberal Protestantism that he had grown up with, that he probably would have actually been a Christian. But that is far from the truth. He understood Christianity. He rejected it. He developed his own version of it. He would use things from both the Old and the New Testament to help illustrate his principles and all, but he thoroughly rejected the essential doctrines of the Christian faith. And not only did he reject those doctrines, but he took many of them and he revised them to accommodate his own theories. Let me quote from Carl Jung. He said, "...patients force the psychotherapist into the role of priest and expect and demand that he shall free them from distress. That is why we psychotherapists must occupy ourselves with problems which, strictly speaking, belong to the theologian." Here is an admission by one of the founding fathers of the most popular form of psychology. The things that we're dealing with, they belong, strictly speaking, to the theologian. In other words, he understood that what they were doing was developing a new religion, a religion based on humanism, a religion based on man being at the center, a religion that was an outright rejection of the revelation of God revealed in the scriptures. Jung's most prominent student, a man named Jacobi, he said this about Jungian psychotherapy. He said, "...it is a way of healing and a way of salvation, a system of education and spiritual guidance, both ethically and intellectually, an extremely difficult task which can be successfully performed only by the fortunate few, those elected and favored by grace." So he's borrowing from Christian theology, those elected and favored by grace. You see, Jung did understand the doctrines of the New Testament, but he rejected them. The last stage of Jungian salvation, called the path of individuation or self-realization, the goal of self-realization or actualization is at its very heart Gnostic. The heart of Gnosticism was to know and ultimately to know yourself, and that's what's at the heart of Carl Jung's philosophy. Know yourself. In contrast to and replacing the Judeo-Christian command to love God and to love others, know and love yourself. So we see in Freud, we see in Jung, we see men who rejected the gospel, understood it, rejected it, and developed systems of thought based upon their own biases, their own human reasonings that were intended to be competitive with Christianity. Now, the clearest expression of psychology as religion is seen in the self or the humanistic psychologies, which, as I said a moment ago, these are the most popular forms of psychology. And today, if a person is referred out to a therapist, just generally speaking, they're going to be coming under the counsel and the advice of someone who is indoctrinated in what's called the self-psychologies. And the men who were the primary founders of the self-psychologies are named Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Eric Fromm, and they followed, they are what you would call Neo-Freudian. They followed Freud to a certain degree, but they rejected much of what he said. But there was another contemporary of Freud. His name was Adler, and he, like Carl Jung, became popular and went off and developed his own system, and they followed him more closely. Now, Eric Fromm sums up the religious aspect of this psychology in the title of one of his books, You Shall Be as Gods. It's the title of one of his books, You Shall Be as Gods. And all throughout self or humanistic psychology, you find that it is very, very religious with man at the center rather than God at the center. Fromm said, if the doctrine of original sin were true, my psychology would be untenable. That's a statement. If the doctrine of original sin were true, my psychology would be untenable. In other words, what he's saying is if the Bible is right, then I'm wrong. But of course, he believed the Bible was wrong. The doctrine of original sin, teaching that man is born in a sinful condition, that man is innately evil because of his fallen nature, not innately good. Fromm rejected that and believed entirely in the goodness of man, that man's actual self is perfectly good. And so you have your actual self, the one who is really you, who is perfectly good, entirely good, but then you've got this other self that has the negative side. And so the goal in all the therapy is to attain to the actual self. So you see, it's all a search for self in contradiction to the scriptures. And yet the man himself admits that if the Bible is right, he is wrong, but he rejected the authority of scripture. Now, here's the thing that is very difficult to understand. Seeing that psychology is at best philosophy and at worst another religion. How is it that so many in the modern church have embraced it, received it, promoted it? How has that happened? It's obviously philosophy. They make no bones about it. You can read the history of it. You can go back. We looked at Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, these men, Hume, the existentialist philosophers. It's all there. It's all in the historical record. It's obviously philosophy, but as you look a little further, it's more than philosophy. It's an alternative religion. So how is it that leaders in the church have embraced it, brought it in, support it, encourage people to be involved in it? As a matter of fact, many pastors will send people out to the psychologist. How has this happened? It is a very mysterious thing. To me, it's unbelievable what has happened. But there are, I think, some answers to that question. But before we answer that question, let me address a couple of things. Now, having said this and describing psychology as philosophy, which it truly is, seeing it as an alternative religion, some people will say, now, wait a second. What about the things like the psychologists have learned and discovered about methods of study and learning and those kinds of things? Well, there is, and there was in the early days of psychology, something known as functional psychology. And through functional psychology came things like educational psychology, animal and human learning, and things of that nature. Now, listen, this is all psychology can do. This is the only valid part to it. And remember, there's a large variety there, but the most popular psychology is purely philosophy. But the only valid thing psychology can do is just simply describe what it sees. There's validity to that. Descriptive, giving a description of what is going on. There's nothing the matter with that. We can analyze something, we can give a description of it. And that's not a problem. And that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about psychology. See, the problem is not describing something. The problem begins when you try to define it. And your base of defining it comes from human thought rather than God's revelation about man. So you see, anything that's just purely descriptive, you know, you hear psychologists have found that under these types of circumstances, seven-year-olds concentrate better. Great. I'm glad they discovered that. They're just describing what's going on under certain circumstances. And that's fine. We all do that. So that's not what we're talking about. And that is just a very small area. But even there, you have to make sure that you don't go beyond description. If you go beyond description, then you start getting into speculation. Then you start getting into, you know, putting forth your ideas. And it all depends on what you believe. And as I said, psychology is, you know, primarily atheistic. And it's evolutionary. And so once they begin to define, that's where the problem begins. Now, another thing that arises is questions about what is called mental illness. What about serious mental illness? And I'll tell you something that's quite interesting about that, by the way. Those who are among the self or the humanistic psychologies, they do not have any interest in dealing with the people who are labeled as truly mentally ill. Schizophrenics, the manic depressives, those kinds of people, they don't have any interest because there's nothing they can do for them. They admit that. Now, what about those kinds of things? That's the question. Now, what we have to understand is that there's some bad terminology that's used, and we need to get some clarification. The term mental illness, it's an invalid term. Because the mind is immaterial. The mind is immaterial. As a matter of fact, no one can even explain what the mind is. There's no description of it. Psychologists have labored in vain to try to describe the mind. So how are they going to tell you what it does if they don't even know what it is? You see, so the whole idea of mental illness is an inaccurate definition. Definition. Remember this. Your mind is immaterial, but your brain is material. Your brain is organic matter. Your brain is a physical organ. And in some cases, but know this also, that the numbers are very few. In some cases, what you have is actually brain illness. There's an illness in the body. Perhaps it's affecting the brain. Many things affect our brain. We don't realize that. Did you know that your pancreas can have a radical effect upon your brain? If your blood sugar levels go too high or drop too low, that will affect your brain. People who have low blood sugar oftentimes have bizarre things going on in their brain and bizarre neurological things happening. It's because of a lack of sugar to the brain. Your thyroid gland can affect your brain. A lack of producing of that particular hormone or an overproduction of it can affect your brain. And then I'm sure that to some degree there are there are simply illnesses of the brain that nobody's really been able to totally discover at this point. But you see, that falls more under the realm of neurology and certain aspects of psychiatry. There's a difference between psychiatry and psychology. Unfortunately, for many, many years, psychiatrists were no different than psychologists. They were medical doctors who were indoctrinated in talk therapy and those kinds of theories. And the only distinction between the psychiatrist for a long time and the psychologist was that the psychiatrist would just prescribe medication for the patient. The psychologist has to work with an MD in order to get a prescription. But in the last 10 years or so, there's been an emergence in the realm of psychiatry where psychiatrists have realized, wait a second, we're medical doctors. The brain is a physical organ. Let's get back to treating the physical organ. And so there's a new dimension, a fairly new dimension in psychiatry known as biopsychiatry. And so these psychiatrists, instead of sitting you down and talking to you for hours on end about what might have happened back in your mother's womb, they will evaluate you, maybe run some tests on you and so forth, and then they might prescribe some sort of a medication to you. But there's a danger in that also. I have a friend who's an MD in practice psychiatry, and we were talking a while back, and he said that talking about the assumptions that people have and things you pick up from just maybe reading the newspaper or magazines or whatever, but now there's an assumption about us because of things that are being communicated to us that aren't really accurate, but there's an assumption that you can test your brain chemistry. You go down and draw some blood, and it tells you all about your brain chemistry, and if it's messed up at all, it'll come up right there on the test. And so he was telling me, he had a patient come in a while back and said, uh, doctor, could you test my brain chemistry? And he said, you know, he's kind of a joker, he said, well, he said, it'll be a little difficult, but yeah, I think we could do it. The guy said, okay, well, what do we need to do? He goes, well, first of all, we got to get your brain out of your head. We got to slice it up several pieces, and we got to begin to, you know, put it under the microscope and all of these things. His point was this, you can't really test your brain chemistry. You can draw a person's blood, and you can get an idea of serotonin and different things like that, but that's in no way conclusive as to what's actually going on in your brain. There's not an ability to do that. There are a lot of assumptions. So this is the danger of biopsychiatry. You see, if a person is behaving a certain way, they have concluded that it's because your brain chemistry is off in this particular area, and so they'll give you some medication to supposedly help you when that isn't the issue at all. There are a lot of people that are out there medicated who shouldn't be medicated, but there are certain people that need to be medicated because there is genuinely something that in the brain, and the medication helps them and keeps them able to function fairly normally. So biopsychiatry, there's a good aspect to it, but the danger with it is that it tends to base itself on another form of psychology known as behaviorism, which essentially says that man is just a byproduct of chemical reactions. So you see, psychiatry, psychology, as I said earlier, for the most part, is atheistic. So this biopsychiatry, the danger there is just reducing man to nothing but chemical reactions. All of your emotions, all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, all of your actions are simply a result of certain chemical reactions. If we can just change the chemical reactions, then we'll change the behavior of the person. So you see, there is an inherent danger in that also, and we need to be careful even as we consider those things. But there is, let me make that clear, there is the possibility of brain illness or some other organic abnormality that is affecting the brain, and that's where we thank God for neurologists and the things that they've been able to discover about the brain and so forth, and that's where we acknowledge that there are times and places when certain medications can be very beneficial and helpful to a person. But there's another factor that is, for the most part, never taken into consideration, and I think it's probably one of the major factors in all of it, and that is demonic activity and in some cases demon possession. But now, when you're dealing with atheists, materialists, people who don't consider the spiritual realm, you won't expect them to even consider those things. But that is a very real possibility in some of these cases. So we're not talking about psychology in the sense of, you know, descriptive, observing and describing. We're not talking about psychology or psychiatry in the sense of true brain illness or organic problems that are affecting the brain. We're talking about this psychology that is, at best, philosophy and, at worst, an alternative religion to Christianity, which is, again, the most popular form of psychology and the one that has had the greatest impact on the church. So going back to the question I asked earlier, how in the world did this happen? How have things come to where they are? How did the doors open so freely for this to come in? I think there are three factors. The number one factor in allowing psychology into the church, I believe, is pride. It's pride. Those men wanting to be accepted by the world as intellectual, as sophisticated, they embraced it. And that's been the case all throughout the history of the church. There's always been that temptation all the way back to the days of the apostles. The Corinthians were doing it. They were so enamored with the philosophers, and they were welcoming philosophy into the church in Corinth. And Paul rebuked them sharply for it, and he warned them against it. And he said that he would know nothing among them except Christ and Him crucified. And then he dealt with the Colossians, as we're reading here in our text. And then as you go through the history of the church, you find that there was a constant battle, philosophy always trying to make its way in and, unfortunately, so often being brought right in through the churches. For many centuries, the dominant philosophy in the church was Aristotelian philosophy, which was the philosophy of Aristotle. There were some in the church that even taught that Aristotle was a forerunner to Christ. Aristotle was a pagan, thoroughly and completely. He was not even remotely a forerunner to Christ. But many of the leaders in the church, they embraced Aristotelian philosophy, and that pretty much governed the church from post-apostolic times all the way up to the time when Descartes and these other rationalists came for it. Now let me tell you something about these philosophers for just a moment. These philosophers, I'll tell you, I think a lot of these guys had brain illness, and yet they're looked upon as brilliant men, great thinkers. Descartes, his approach to everything, his philosophy, his philosophical approach was to doubt everything. And so he began by doubting the existence of God. That's where it started. Then he doubted the existence of the universe. Then he doubted the existence of the material world. He finally got to a point where he doubted his own material existence. He doubted his own material existence. Now, does that sound like a brilliant man? Does that sound like a great thinker? It sounds to me like someone who has a true chemical imbalance, a true problem, somebody who's deceived. I mean, I'm not saying that was the case with him, but, you know, what I'm trying to do is show how, you know, what is so brilliant about these people? Now, here's what he finally concluded. He was doubting his own existence, but he found that because he was still thinking, he must indeed exist. And so that's where he came to. I think, therefore, I exist. I do exist. After all, what a glorious discovery he made. He did exist. And then he went in the opposite direction. And, you know, he took and he came up with his philosophies. But, you know, this is just one example of these people who are looked to as great thinkers, brilliant men. These are the people that we need to follow after and so forth. And we want to impress the world, the church said. And so it was embracing the philosophy of Aristotle. Then it was embracing the philosophy of these guys as they came along. Europe, the church in Europe embraced existentialism, Christian existentialist. And the church in Europe is history. It's dead. And that's always been the case. So in America, you know, European philosophy hasn't had the impact on American society directly. You know, and I really do think this, you know, we as Americans, we're not into thinking as much as Europeans are. Europeans just think all the time, sit around thinking. You know, Americans are doers. We're just doing all the time. I'm too busy to think, man. I'm having fun. I'm into pleasure and things like that. So, you know, those philosophies, although, you know, if you've gone to a university or something like that, of course, you've understood those things. And they're more subtly communicated. But those same philosophies that dominate Europe do dominate us, but just in a slightly different form. As the one I quoted earlier said, what we have with from and these guys is just a repackaging. It's an American form of existentialism. So it's all been welcomed into the church. Why? Because of pride. We don't want anyone to think that we're unsophisticated, unintelligent. We want them to know that we're right up there with everybody else. And they've fallen into the same air as the Corinthians. That's where the Corinthians were. The Corinthians did not want to be thought of as fools for Christ. And Paul rebuked him. He said, you are wise in Christ. We, the apostles, we are fools for Christ. And he was rebuking them for their unwillingness to be a fool for Christ. You see, this is the bottom line. If you're a Christian and you adhere to the gospel of Jesus Christ, you are going to be thought a fool. Are you willing to be? If you're not, then you're going to have to compromise. And that's what's happened in the church. The church did not want to be seen as foolish. And evangelicalism, let me give you just another little brief history here. Evangelicalism was born out of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism has become, you know, a pathetic thing. And of course, is the brunt of, you know, much political joking and things like that. But fundamentalism in the beginning was basically true Christianity standing against the liberal theology that was dominating the churches at the time. And so what happened is some men came together and they put together a series of lectures called the Fundamentals of the Faith. And fundamentalism was born out of that. But in a process of time, the fundamentalist kind of lost touch with the world and started to become a little bit backward and kind of withdrew from the public square and was no longer out there giving an apologetic and contending for the faith and so forth. So there was a need to, you know, bring forth something new. So evangelicalism was born to bring back intellectual respectability to the Christian faith. And there was something that was valid to that at the time. Because Christianity is certainly not anti-intellectual. And we are supposed to think and use our minds and give a defense for the faith and love God with our minds and all of that. But evangelicalism was born out of that desire to bring back intellectual respectability to the faith as much as you can do without compromising. But in the process of time, wanting to maintain intellectual respectability, compromise was needed. If you're going to maintain respectability out there, you're going to have to embrace psychology. You're going to have to embrace evolution because after all it's, you know, it's pretty well proven that that's how we originated. And so there's been this great compromise going on in the evangelical church, embracing, compromising all for the sake of being accepted by the world. So that's where it all begins. But secondly, it is a demonstration of unbelief. The church no longer believed that Christ and his word were sufficient. That's why the embracing of psychology, that's why the looking to philosophy, no longer believing that Christ and his word is sufficient, coming into a place of kind of a dead orthodoxy where you no longer see the life of Christ being manifest. And so now there's no longer the conviction that the word of God is true, because after all, we're not seeing people with real problems get changed. You see, but the problem was this, they weren't preaching the true gospel. They weren't giving Christ his proper place. And so they were saying, well, you know, we're not able to help these people. And it must be because, well, you know, this is, these are different problems than, than we've been accustomed to dealing with. And it's a different age and, and, you know, there's all kinds of new difficulties. And so psychology, they seem to be, you know, tapping into this, we better tie into that also. You see, it was a result of unbelief, a loss of faith in the word of God, the authority of scripture, the person of Christ and his power to transform a person regardless of who they were and what their background was. So it was human pride. It was unbelief in Christ and the scripture. And I think the third thing, which to me, I think is very significant, was the rejection of the true biblical doctrine of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the person and the work of the Holy Spirit. About a hundred years ago or so, people in the church, leadership in the church, they reacted against what was initially called the, the Pietist movement. Now the church, there was the reformation back with Martin Lutheran, John Calvin, those guys. And there was a period of, you know, life that resulted from that and, and a new work of God. But it wasn't too long before Protestantism, reformed Protestantism became really just dead orthodoxy. It was just a matter of believing the right creed and there was no life involved in it. And it was just a stagnated representation of Christianity. The Pietist rejected that. They said, no, God is real. He's alive. You can experience him. And so they began to seek to experience God. And that was a good desire to, to come out of dead orthodoxy and get back into a real vital relationship with God. But they took it too far. They got to the point where experience was the primary thing and no longer was the scripture the authority to monitor experience. Experience meant everything. And so they went to extremes. And I believe that as a reaction to those extremes, which were being attributed to the Holy Spirit, by the way, there came forth this new school that certainly did not want to be among the dead orthodox, but did not at all want to have anything to do with the extreme emotionalism either. And so they came up with, with an idea, a teaching that's not based in scripture, but yet, you know, they try to prove from scripture that the Holy Spirit's ministry changed after the apostolic age. In other words, what you read about the Holy Spirit in the new Testament and what was going on with the new Testament churches stopped with them. And the Holy Spirit has somewhat of a different relationship to us today. And I believe that that has been very significant in the church turning to the world and turning to philosophy for help. Because if you reject the Holy Spirit, you quench the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is the power that God has made available to us. And you see, without the Spirit of God working, because He's been quenched, then we're missing the power of God. And so how do we live life? How do we get by? How do we deal with these things? Oh, we need somebody else to help us. We need someone, someone to write a manual for us, someone to instruct us on the finer points. As I pointed out previously, there's no room for the ministry of the Holy Spirit. And so I believe that those are the three things that have contributed primarily to the church embracing psychology, which is philosophy and an alternative religion to Christianity. Now, do you think for a moment that this is valid? And, you know, the sad thing is that the people who have done this and continue to do this, they would listen to what I'm saying today, and they would just mock it. They'd just say, oh, you know, fundamentalism. That's it right there. Pure and simple. Fundamentalism. Anti-intellectualism. You know, and it's sad, but their pride, their pride led them into their position, and their pride keeps them entrenched in their position. And they go out of their way to try to convince us that God has brought us psychology. It's a gift from God. But let me ask you this. Because psychology is philosophy, do you think God would contradict his word and go against what he had his apostle Paul pin and allow us in the 20th century to go ahead and embrace philosophy, even though in the first century they weren't allowed to? But you know something that's interesting? The philosophy in apostolic times was superior to the philosophy today. It's a fact of history that philosophy has degenerated over the ages. The Greek philosophers were the purest philosophers. Their philosophies were really the most noble and the most desirable if you were going to live by philosophy. The more modern philosophers have just gone from bad to worse. So if we are supposed to embrace philosophy, if philosophy has something to offer to us, if there's something in it that we need as Christian people, Jesus Christ and Paul the apostle and the other apostles would have said, you guys, now look, when it comes to this, I want you to get Plato's stuff and I want you to study that. And you know, Socrates had some great things to say about this. And Aristotle, now you need to really, you know, look to him when you're going to deal with these things. They would have instructed us to look to the philosophers, but they didn't do that, did they? They warned us against it. And so those philosophers were the best that there's ever been. And yet Paul warned us against them. How in the world can Christian men say that God has brought us psychology? It's natural revelation. He's revealed things to us that we need to know through these men, and we today need to embrace it. It's not possible. It's contrary to the plain teaching of scripture. It's contrary to the principles that we find in scripture. And what is the warning? Beware, lest anyone spoil you. You see, here's what happens. You'll be robbed. The word spoil has two ideas behind it to rob and to take captive. An army would go in and ransack a place and they would spoil it. They would take the goods and they would take the people captive with them. And that's what philosophy will do for you. That's what psychology will do. It will rob you of what God has for you. It will rob you of the power of the spirit of God in your life. It will rob you from the victory over sin that Christ will bring, and you will remain in bondage to your sin. And there are multitudes of Christian people today who are living in sin because they've been spoiled by philosophy. And they're being told by their quote-unquote Christian therapists, this fornication, don't worry, we've diagnosed it. You've got the disease of sex addiction. And we're confident that through enough therapy and after enough time, we can get you over it. But you'll always be a sex addict. And of course, you know, you're probably going to have some lapses. It's not going to be easy for you. You're going to slip back into it on occasion, but in the process of time, we're going to get you out of it. And so today, so-called Christian psychologists are encouraging people to stay in their sin, but they're calling it something else. It's a disease. It's an addiction.