First Love

Guest (Male): 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: Happy Tuesday everyone. Welcome back to First Love on this beautiful afternoon. My name is Dr. Nathan Kassas and I have with me the one, the only, Dr. Robyn Kassas.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Hey, I'm here. Hello for Tuesday.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Yes. We have been diving deep into a deep gate, Dr. Robyn, the Valley Gate, and what it means in the believer's life, as well as everybody's life. Everybody has a valley that they have to walk through.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think that we're learning what it means: deep cries unto deep. The deep of God cries unto the deep of us.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Oh my Lord. But sometimes God's deep is crying and we don't want to go deep because we're scared of the deep. Because the deep brings the unknown.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: The uncovering for our sake.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Wow, so powerful. So, yesterday we began to unpack and pull off all the understanding of what this Valley Gate is all about. And we're going to dive deep—I'm going to keep saying that word 'deep'—now into my favorite part, as well as the scriptural part, is how the science and the neuroscience work within the brain.

So, I'll quickly inject this, because I know we're going to come to a break, but I'll give people time to chew on this: the valley is so important because it exposes your automatic brain.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I have no idea, but you will show me. I'm telling you, it's like we have two brains.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Yes, sometimes it is like that. It's like we have a system that we live by, and then a system that we live on the inward by. Like a double life. And the automatic brain, we've talked about this on First Love before, we've talked about the DFM mode—Default Mode. And what the automatic brain is, is it is something that is revealed only when pressure is applied.

So, even though I say—I'm going to put it into a hypothetical—even though I say I trust God, and I use that as my statement and my confession, when the pressure is applied, the automatic brain will reveal in me: do I really trust God or do I only trust Him when I can know what's next? See, the pressure of uncertainty, the pressure of not knowing, that means pressure can reveal the pattern that has been hiding underneath the surface.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: So do you mean that you can actually locate and you can recognize this, even not saying fruit, but it's like fruit or action of that brain function? You're saying that. So can God trust us with His silence? Because I'm telling you, God is silent sometimes to see if we trust Him.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Oh, that is so deep. Because the silence of God for us feels like pressure. Because that reveals, like we said in the beginning of this journey for the Valley Gate, it reveals what we've been feeding off. Have we been feeding off the truth? Have we been living off it? Has it descended deep enough into us so that when the pressure is applied?

I think about gold. When they're refining gold, they have to apply pressure. They have to blast it for all the impurities to come to the surface. And that pressure is applied through heat. It's literally put in a fire and an oven. It only comes to the surface through the pressure being applied.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: But I was going to use this other example on a more personal basis to do with a husband and a wife. Can the husband or the wife trust each other with silence—a silent language of love? Where you've grown to know that person so much they don't have to keep telling you all the time that they love you, or "I'm here for you." You could grow in that so much that you know it. You know it, and you don't have to hear it. Because if you have to keep hearing it, you're never going beyond immaturity.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: It's so true. I, by the grace of God, have come to that place. I'm nowhere near experienced in 30-plus years of marriage like you are. But I've come to the place where I've been married for 14 years. In the first two to five years, on that honeymoon period, it's statistically proven that dopamine lasts for couples for two to five years. Then you start realizing your partner instead of idealizing your partner.

When you start realizing your partner, you start getting pressured because you see the things that aren't like you. Then you are forced to think, "Should I change that, or should I see that as a complement to who I am, completing me?" Anyway, that's a marriage counseling thing that we'll talk about another time.

But something here is I've come to the place with my wife, Natalie, where we sometimes don't see each other throughout the day because we have six kids and we have full-time ministry. It used to feel like rejection. But something in me knows that Natalie's with me, even though she's not in the room, and that I have her support. I don't have to hear her say "I love you" all the time or text me. In the early years, it was always texting, "How's your day today?" I know she's thinking about that.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: But I was also thinking of an example today. We were so caught up in doing the recording with Karen for her auditions that you couldn't take Natalie to her checkup for the birth of this baby she's carrying. So she said to me, "Can Dad take me?" And I said, "Of course he can." There was never a feeling like, "I've got to have my husband take me." That's the type of thing that the Lord is trying to get us into—a form of trust where sometimes there's silence, sometimes there's change. But you don't revert straight back to, "He doesn't love me" or "He's rejecting me."

Dr. Nathan Kassas: The daisy petal Christianity: He loves me, He loves me not. I'm so glad you used that example because I have been taking Natalie to every appointment, and the midwives know that. They've seen me and seen me and seen me. It was good for that today to be a different experience because I needed to be there to support my daughter because she was doing something in faith, stepping out into her next step.

Her mother wanted me to be there. So it actually healed Karen to see that Mom released me to support her instead of having to do what would typically be considered the right thing. I was able to just say to Natalie, "Thank you for releasing me. You know I'm with you in spirit." She goes, "Absolutely, I know." It was great because we didn't have to fight through the performance mentality that comes up: "I should be there because I'm the husband and that's my role." That's the predictability coming in.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: But it also did something on the other side where my husband, Tony—Granddad—he was able to be a part of this today. That gave him just such a warm feeling inside him. That's what I'm talking about. Sometimes it's silence, sometimes it's change. This is why we're going deep. Because these deep things have to last. They're the ancient truth that has to last. Does God have to walk past you and tap you all the time and say to you, "I love you"? Or can He walk past you and you trust Him that He loves you?

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Well, maybe if you trusted Him the first time He said it and ate on it and lived on it and emotionally attached truth to it, you wouldn't have to have a new meal every time. Jesus only got three words from His Father in the sense of three times the Lord said, "This is my son in whom I'm well pleased," and that had to carry Him through the cross. He never had to ask for another affirmation all the time.

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Dr. Nathan Kassas: All right, Dr. Robyn, we are back from the break and we said something very crucial that I don't think a lot of Christians really take note of in understanding the life of Christ. It goes to your point about silence being real intimacy. Is my intimacy with God strong enough to withstand the pressure of silence?

What I have learned as I've studied the Scriptures and understood the importance of silent intimacy is that Jesus, from the time He begins His ministry to the time that He goes to the cross, He only gets three public responses from Father God. First time when He's baptized with John the Baptist and the Spirit comes and descends on Him: "This is my son in whom I'm well pleased, listen to him."

Second time at the Mount of Transfiguration with Peter, James, and John. And third time when He's on the way to Calvary and He says to His Father, "Father, glorify your name," and the Father responds and says, "I have glorified it and I will glorify it again." Why is that important? Because He was not constantly getting the affirmation that we so desire. He only got three public responses.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And why is that? I'll tell you why: because He never lost His first love. Never.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: My Lord. Wow.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I'd like to just give you an example because as I grew up in my faith, I learned there are different ways that God can touch you. God can, with His Spirit, walk past you, touch you all the time so you feel Him there. But we must grow beyond that point. We must grow to a place where He can walk past you and just occasionally touch you. Then the ultimate of trust with God is when He can walk past you and not touch you because you are so trusting who He is.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Well, didn't He do that with His disciples? He walked past them in the boat. Sure did. But they didn't trust Him. They thought it was a ghost because they had seen the demons be cast into that part of the water before. So that reveals—

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That's because they didn't go through those other two parts.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: My Lord, that is so powerful. So you're reframing silence. Silence here is not what we think it is. Silence comes with a valley, it does. Where you feel in parts of life, "Why isn't God responding to me? I've been praying all these things. Why aren't I getting an answer?" You always apply a worldly schema to it. Performance says, "This is what I've done wrong and this is why He's upset with me and so He's ignoring me."

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Or the schema says, "This is what I've got to do," depending on what's coming out of you. But I'm telling you, God loves when He can trust us to trust Him with silence. That means that He's in control of the situation and He knows the situation and we just need to hold on to Him and trust Him.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Wow. Dr. Robyn, you just said something and it alighted on me. If He's in control, that means that I can trust that greater revelation because my relationship with Him is not based on the feeling of having Him near. A lot of us base our relationship with the Lord on the feeling of having Him there.

But David says, "If I go down into the depths, you're there. If I go into the highest place, you're there. Where can I run from your spirit, oh God? Even in the depths of Sheol, you're there." So he's going through that valley as he's writing that psalm and he's coming to the realization: you don't have to be in front of me for me to know that you're there. I can trust you with silence and you can trust me with silence.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Yeah, because when that man at the pool had Him stand in front of him, he still didn't recognize who it was. So it's not about that. It's about we need to trust who He is in our lives.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: And when we don't trust who He is, it's because our automatic brain has rehearsed something different than what our heart has believed. Our heart is where belief lives, not in our head. Belief does not live in the head, it lives in the heart. The Scripture says, "So as a man believes in his heart." This is very important. Sometimes what you believe can be conflicting with what you rehearse. What you rehearse, unfortunately, will always develop what you automatically live, not what you believe.

I want to tie this in scientifically. When life is predictable, comfortable, and controllable, we may have enough cognitive resource to consciously choose our response. But when the valley introduces the pressure, the uncertainty, the loss of contact—not loss of communication, loss of contact—or a perceived threat, the brain will always likely lean on previous learned patterns. So, pressure doesn't only reveal what you believe, it reveals what your brain has rehearsed.

And this is a powerful thing because what is happening neurologically here? Our brain is constantly trying to answer what is happening, have I experienced something like this before, and what should I do next? If I could dive deep into the science here, I would actually show you what's going on in the different lobes and the different questions they're trying to answer. But maybe we could come to that in another broadcast. I want to get back to what you just said about trusting the Lord to walk by. That's the ultimate trust.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think we have a look at what you said, but you know the one thing that was missing? The why. We don't want to look at that because that will cause us to have to go deep into it.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: It's so true. Every believer wants to know what God has for them. The main two questions that we ask of God—which are not very relational, by the way—are what and how. I was saying to someone that I was counseling this past week, "You know the what of God, and because you know the what of God, you jumped automatically to the how of God."

You know what God wants for your life and your future, so you've jumped to how that is going to happen. But the most important foundation that you've skipped is why is it going to happen? Because why is tied to Jeremiah 1:5: "before you were formed, I knew you." Your purpose. If you don't know your purpose, then you will practice things outside of your purpose as default.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think that that's exactly right. And we avoid the why. The why causes us to recognize and locate; the others don't, but the why does. Why is this happening? Why are you doing it this way, God? It's always conversational, the why, because it means deep crying unto deep.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Wow. So God's pressure of silence, let's look at it this way through the analogy or the metaphor of Nehemiah's wall. God's pressure of silence is revealing where the wall still needs repair. You've moved on thinking it's good. You've come back to that ancient truth and go, "No, I'm good, I don't need that repair in my life." But you do, because under silence you still consider it rejection and not connection. Silence is connection, not rejection. That's what you're saying.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I am saying that. Real silence is intimacy. People find that very hard to understand and believe. But if you've been married for years and years, you don't have to talk all the time to your husband or your wife. There is a conversation going in silence.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Wow. And so the problem with the default brain is that it can't handle silence. It always wants to be talking to answer a question, whether it's—