First Love

Voiceover: Welcome to First Love with Dr. Robyn Kassas and Dr. Nathan Kassas, where faith meets real life. In this weekly broadcast, you'll discover practical and spiritual keys to reclaim God's story in your life, deepen your relationship with Jesus, and encounter Him as your first love, whether for the first time or all over again. No topic is off-limits as we make Jesus real, relevant, and relational. Stay with us; your journey back to first love starts now.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Hello everybody, and welcome to First Love. It's so glad to be back with you again. My name is Dr. Nathan Kassas, and I have sitting across from me Dr. Robyn Kassas. Dr. Robyn, how are you doing tonight?

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Much better than I was, thank you very much. I did damage my toe, but I'm feeling much better.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We're praying for you and believing for full recovery and restoration. If you didn't know, Dr. Robyn, you dislocated your toes, so it's been a bit of a struggle this week to get around. But you're leaning on the Lord.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Very much so.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: You're resting, if we would say, in His story as we've been talking about.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: A lot of rest has taken place.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Speaking of rest, Dr. Robyn, we are talking about reclaiming God's story for your life. Last week, we had an opportunity to hear again from the seminar that we preached on earlier in 2025 about that very topic that you actually heard the Holy Spirit talk about: reclaiming God's story. We were bringing out the legacy and heritage and the difference. The week before that, we came to station two of God's story, which is trust.

Station one is rest. Our church has actually been on this series of rest for a couple of weeks, really diving into the depth of what rest in Christ really is.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: We spoke about resting, meaning resting from your works or resting from work.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Those are two very important distinctions. I just want to say the clip that you've got on YouTube from our team where you define the difference in that sermon has nearly 5,000 views. 5,000 people are hearing the difference about rest and resting from your work.

Now we come to trust, which was the next station. Trust is important because after God creates in us and through us on the first day, then we come to the next station, which is trusting Him in His story. Last week, we began to unravel the difference between a heritage and legacy. Why don't you quickly just comment on what you believe the main difference is between heritage and legacy?

Dr. Robyn Kassas: One is passed on. Heritage is passed on. Legacy has to come from within you. It means you need to be involved in it in some way, like change in you, so that in you, you then can be changed.

What changes you can be moved into someone else—not just passed on, but it becomes a part of someone else in your life as you become transformed by being transformed by Him.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: You've rightly said it. Heritage is something that gets passed down, and legacy is something that happens in us and is given over or passed on. It's really important. We can't really talk about fully trusting God until we address another "T," which is trauma.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: You'll be the one that can qualify in this one to talk about it because you're doing all the degrees and the courses.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Also yourself, because you've been the one that walked me through before any of these degrees or courses how to be counseled by God in my own trauma.

Dr. Robyn, you made a statement when we were talking about this episode. You said we can't move on to trusting God with our lives until we've trusted Him with our trauma. That's a very important statement because sometimes we like to do what I would call "spiritually bypass." What that means is we like to use what God is doing, or even who God is, to try to bypass our own pain and our own experience.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think what I wanted to add to that is the fact that we can bypass it deliberately or we can bypass it ignorantly. It's a very important distinction.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I think it would be good to unpack this tonight because there are a lot of people coming up to me and to you and saying, "I don't know why. I've been walking with the Lord for this many years and I've been having the conversations, Pastor Nate, but there's something that's not clicking. There's something that's not turning over." You get to that tipping point, and it's not tipping. Usually, what I would say in response to that is when you come to that kind of place in your life or that cyclical place where cycles start to repeat, it's because of unprocessed trauma.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I also think that this unprocessed trauma can sometimes be out of ignorance. We really need to look at that because with the trauma, we think that's just a part of life. We don't even give it an address. We just think it's a part of life. We don't see that we need to address the trauma before we can move on, because we'll go back round that mountain again.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: You've said something very powerful there. You said we don't even give it an address, and then you said we need to address it. When we don't give God our trauma and allow Him to touch it, we actually don't give an address to the trauma.

We have to give an address, meaning a noun. We have to give our trauma—it is a person, place, or thing. If our brain doesn't allow us to give an address to trauma, it's like a package that floats around without ever being delivered.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think that also with trauma, we often misinterpret. I think we think that trauma is caught up sometimes with us having to get cleaned up. When we misinterpret what God is saying by His Spirit in that, that's when we fall into thinking, "Well, that's just part of life." You've misinterpreted what the Spirit is doing, and then you will bypass it through ignorance.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: That's spiritual bypassing. That again goes to my example. When you send a package to someone, you have to give it an address. If you don't give it an address, then the delivery man could interpret wherever he wants to send it.

That's kind of what we do when we don't allow God to address the trauma. There are two states: we have to give an address, literally, a place to the trauma in our brain and in our lives, and then we have to allow God to address the trauma as a verb. Then we won't engage in what we were talking about, which is spiritual bypassing. I know as we go into the break, you're going to drop something very powerful and we're going to talk about spiritual bypassing when we come back.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think it's because we misinterpret what God is doing by His Spirit. That's what it is. We think we have to clean ourselves up. Why don't we come back after the break and talk about that?

Voiceover: You're listening to First Love with Dr. Robyn and Dr. Nathan Kassas. The story isn't finished yet, and neither is what Jesus wants to reveal to your heart today. Let's jump back in and pick up right where we left off.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: All right, Dr. Robyn, we're back and we are ready to dive deep into this topic. Let's talk about quickly this term "spiritual bypassing" and what it is and what it isn't, just to give people an understanding of the definition and what comes along with it. When we talk about spiritual bypassing, I'm talking about when we use spiritual language to avoid emotional processing.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: So that's not out of ignorance; that's out of deliberate action.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We're talking at first instance and first example. I'll address from the psychological point of actual deliberate spiritual bypassing, and then I'll throw it over to you for this ignorant as well as using this language of "I need to clean myself up," which is still pride, but negative pride.

Spiritual bypassing, this is what the language sounds like: "I forgave them, I'm fine. God is in control. All things work together for good. I just need a little bit more faith." But internally, what's going on is your amygdala is still hyperactive, so you're still fear-centered and controlled by fear in your life. Your nervous system is still bracing for a threat, and the memory is still fragmented.

I explained in my sermon on Sunday from bitter to sweet: it's not complete until it's sweet. I was talking about this trauma with the children of Israel, how they had never allowed God to integrate what had happened to them for 400 years in a trauma state into their actual relationship with Him and create a conversation around it. When He brings them out from Egypt through the Red Sea and He performs all these amazing signs and wonders and miracles, they can't accept it because trauma is still reigning in their mind. They still see God like Pharaoh.

When we still see God like Pharaoh, it doesn't matter what He provides for us, whether it's manna, or if He gives us the whole tabernacle system—until we stop misinterpreting what we see and we give the address to what really took place in our life, a correct address, we will always keep interpreting God as the hard taskmaster, Pharaoh.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That's where if you do it deliberately, you're not addressing the trauma at all. But a lot of the time, we think it's what we are hearing from the Holy Spirit is a cleanup. We're to be cleaned up. How can you be cleaned up if you don't know what's going on? God doesn't keep you in the dark.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Because sometimes in that deliberate spiritual bypassing, this is what creates performative faith, where we perform in our faith for love instead of live from love. It suppresses grief, it suppresses shame, it delays integration. It also gets us to live in that "I can do it for you, God" survival mode. This is that deliberate kind of not acknowledging or addressing. Now we talk about with you, not the deliberate type, but the maybe "I'm unaware, accidental," or "I think this is a problem in me that I need to change."

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That's the key. That will cause us to go back to work, to go back to your work, and it will also cause us to not trust.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Totally relying upon something true. But unless you've actually talked through the trauma, you can't rely on what's true because you don't have an integration of what's true. Very important scientifically here, and I could expound on this for episodes to come—I can't get it all out in this one episode, so I've got to stop talking so fast because I get excited.

When we have a traumatic event, trauma is defined as something that our nervous system cannot handle. It's an overwhelming amount of information, an overwhelming experience, or an overwhelming response that our body can't integrate. When we integrate, we take all that information in through our eyes and our senses, and our brain is able to process the information at a rate which it can handle. But trauma is any event in life at which we cannot integrate because it's too much.

You can have trauma from the smallest thing in life to the biggest thing in life. That's where multiple personality disorder comes in, borderline personality, dissociative identity disorder, because these are the way that the brain shapes and copes with this inability to integrate what has happened. Scientifically, what's going on is in that trauma, my brain is taking a snapshot like a little camera. It's taking a freeze frame.

Rather than holding onto that freeze frame and overwhelming my nervous system—if I could explain it simply—what it does is it fragments the picture into these little pieces. Then it fragments it and sends it without an address, so it sends it out on this journey into my nervous system, into my body, and into all the parts of who I am, but it has no address. Without an address, these things don't have a name. It's very important for God to have things with a name because name gives purpose. Things without an address don't have a purpose.

What happens in trauma integration is when we allow God to bring us into the right interpretation of what took place—not our misinterpretation—we actually take those fragments that have been scattered and we bring them back to their homeland and we give them a right address. By giving them the right name and the right purpose, we're able to integrate them into our healing. I know I just said a lot, but now I'm going to throw it over to you.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I'm just saying that I'd like to talk about when we don't know, more so than when we do know, and we're not trusting God. When we don't know because we've misinterpreted what God is really saying by His Spirit, we do things to change ourselves. But we have to learn nothing transforms us but the Spirit of God.

You cannot transform you. You cannot change you. Only the Spirit can change you. So if you don't understand what's going on, you need to leave space for the Holy Spirit to show you something isn't right. Then, as you wait upon the Holy Spirit, He will begin to show you there's something in your life that needs to be released or you need to be released from. That's that trauma you're talking about. If you don't understand it, you will try to fix yourself every single time.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: If I could throw some scriptural examples in here, we have a really important example in Jacob, another example is Joseph, and then another example that I'll even throw in is David.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: They've all done it.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Jacob was one of the people that represents, "Oh, I don't really have trauma." The Bible says he was a usurper. But from the beginning of time, God gave Jacob a specific personality temperament. He said to Rebecca, "Two nations are in your womb, and the older will serve the younger." So He had already set in order Jacob's position.

What happened was Rebecca got a hold of that because of her trauma and she made it happen.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Because of her past experience.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Let's talk about that quickly. Rebecca got up so quickly to leave her father's house. "Oh yeah, I'll go, I'll go." Great obedience, but she never integrated that experience into her actual processing with the Lord. There would have been emotions that she would have gone through, but she just said, "I'll just do it." God loved her for it, but He always wants us to integrate our humanity. Jesus never once didn't integrate His humanity.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I'll keep my last comments, which I think will maybe bring this together a bit. I'd love to get into this subject to do with us in His story. It is more about what He does beforehand rather than what He has to do afterwards.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Back to the example of Jacob: he never integrated what actually took place. Quickly, he never thought it was traumatic. What his mother did to him by getting him to lie to his father, that's actually a trauma event. But Jacob never really integrated it, meaning he never addressed it as something that was important.

So he goes throughout life not knowing why he's a certain way. All of these patterns keep integrating: usurping, manipulating, and taking things into his own hands. Yes, there was a bit of Jacob in there, but there's also trauma. Again, same thing with Joseph. Joseph never integrated. He thought he could just work his way up in Potiphar's house and make it go away.

But the Lord allows him to go through the process of 13 years of sitting there and having to have a conversation about what God had brought him through. That's the only reason why he could say, "You meant it for my bad, but God meant it for my good," because he had to go back and address it. He had to integrate it in and get the right interpretation.

This is really important, Dr. Robyn, because when we don't integrate, we end up moving in life thinking, "Oh, it's dealt with. It's done." Then we come to David, who never integrated what had been done through his own heritage passed down. In Psalm 51 he says, "In sin my mother did conceive me." That's the psalm that he's addressing after he's committed sin with Bathsheba. So he's going back and he's going, "Right, there's actually a connection here. What happened before I was even born, it integrated into my life and it actually influenced how I walked out these steps." It's not robbing me of choice, but it's actually influencing how I made the choice.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: After hearing what you've said about trauma, I think it's so important that we understand what trauma really is and what it means. Then we can not misinterpret it anymore. We'll be able to allow the Spirit to show the importance of being freed—actually, you can't free yourself, but being freed from this trauma—and how important it is in God's story.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: To go along with God's story, trauma is a heritage that gets passed on that you cannot stop. Biologically and physiologically, you can't stop. If you go through a trauma, it's embedded into your system and you pass that on because when you had me, you passed that on.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: But we don't want to pass trauma on. What we want to do is go from what the effects of legacy is.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Legacy is the change that you allow God to create within you.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Which only comes via the Holy Spirit because you can't change yourself. Be transformed—it's a work of the Holy Spirit. No man can change themselves. They can change their action, but they can't change themselves inwardly.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: That brings me to my final important example before I throw it to you for your final words. A lot of the time we come to this trauma experience and it represents a fence around this barrier of our life. Some people say, "Get over it. Jump the fence and just keep going." Some people go under the fence; they go under to the pain. Other people just say, "Well, I'll just get through it by myself."

Dr. Robyn Kassas: No, you cannot get through anything by yourself. Like you said, we have to find the gate and have the key through it.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: God wants to create a conversation, give it an address, and that actually locates the gate in the fence, which unlocks the access. Now I'm throwing over to you because you want to talk about how this unlocking comes not from just letting God own the moment, but from letting God...

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Create the moment. I just want to talk about how we are always allowing God to own the moment, which is after the fact. After the fact is okay. It's wonderful, we get healed. But the ultimate for transformation, which is the legacy of God, is to allow Him to create the moment, then own the moment by us giving Him the ownership of that moment.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: So when we release the trauma, He owns the moment.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That's after. But we want to get to the point where we allow Him to create it beforehand. Then we will not be always giving a heritage of the past to anyone in our lives.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: That brings out that Genesis 50:20 verse: "You meant it for evil against me, but God meant it for my good."

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think our language has to change because we see how soft that is until it's addressed. When we turn around and say the word "exposed," it's got a real harshness to it because exposure is a trauma. It becomes a trauma, and I'll tell you what, that is when you will bring your work in. That's when you lose all your peace and your trust and your rest.

Voiceover: Thanks for spending time with us today on First Love. If today's message spoke to you, share it with someone. And if you're looking for more teachings, visit www.torcc.org. That's T-O-R-C-C dot org for more. We'll be back next week, same time, same truth. And as you go, don't forget: the one who loved you first is still loving you best.