First Love

Announcer (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 Friday, everybody. Dr. Robyn, it is Friday.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Another Friday.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We are so honored to be with you on this Friday and come into your cars, your lounge rooms, wherever you're listening on Spotify, Amazon, wherever you're listening from. There's a lot of places you can listen from, Dr. Robyn.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And you're coming from our recording booth. It's a wonderful blessing from the Lord.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: If you don't know who we are, my name is Dr. Nathan Kassas, and I have sitting across from me in our recording booth Dr. Robyn Kassas, and we are the hosts of First Love, bringing you back to the one who loved you first because He still loves you best.

We've been on a journey talking about the gates of Jerusalem as a physical gate but also a spiritual gate and what that represents in the believer's life. We've gone through the sheep gate, the fish gate, and now we are going through the old gate. What does that mean to the person listening, Dr. Robyn?

Dr. Robyn Kassas: It's something to do with bringing alignment in your life. That's not bringing correction; alignment means putting you in a position to walk through. To me, alignment is coming back to the original plan so that we can then be put in the right position to go into God's heart field.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We keep talking about God's heart field, so very soon we're going to be explaining what that heart field is and how it works with biofeedback as well as the spiritual correlation.

With this episode, Dr. Robyn, we've come to the place with the old gate where we want to mention a couple of key statements and truths that will help the listeners. We've gone through the theology with Dr. Tony, and yesterday we went through some neurology and understanding what's going on in the brain to do with memory reconsolidation and how God is not removing the memory but changing what the memory means today.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And also, we were going through God's word, will, and way in that remembrance. Very important.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I'm just going to start by saying a couple of key statements and asking you to expound on them and give a little bit more detail. Then you'll say some key statements, and I'll expound on them. First key statement for today is the old gate is not taking you backward; it is reconnecting you to what should have never been left behind.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Revisiting what was left behind so that you don't leave it behind. That's the ancient truth.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I think we do leave truths behind when we get so overwhelmed by circumstance and life. There are things that we take along on the way and we pick up about God's character, about His love for us, His relationship with us, these things that light in our hearts and they come alive. But it's like that parable of the seed that was sown; the choking of the cares of the world spring up when we least expect it and they choke that seed from being able to be rooted deep down.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: You know what? We could think about this: we don't renovate the ancient truths; the ancient truth renovates us. That means the word of God through the letter of the Lord and through the spirit is renovated in us. It's important for us to know that so that we don't run from it, but we embrace the spirit leading us through it.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Another key statement here is some old things need burial, but ancient things need to be recovered.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: That's a good reason for recovery because that's something the world does. They go in to find ancient things and putting value on them. We need to follow suit. We need to see that that's a way to put value back on these ancient truths.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I think it's powerful, like you've just said with archaeology, we're going back to what was there before and we're uncovering it. It's still been there all along; it's just the sediment, the sand, the nature, life, the debris has gotten on top of it and masked it, covered it up so that we can't see it. But it's always been there.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And it doesn't go away. It's a lie to think that it does. God wants us to remember so that it can become valuable to us. These memorial stones were stepping stones that we could walk through the water. When we looked back and saw what the memorial stones were, we know that we could step into the water and step on those stones and get through and not drown.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Another important statement here that we've said previously is your oldest wound is still younger than God's truth.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Tell me more about that.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Sometimes we think, "You don't know what I've been through. You don't know the hurts I've got." And yet God's truth has been there all along and it's outlasted even the hurts, the wounds, the pains. It's the only thing that stands the test of time.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And God can change what yesterday means without pretending yesterday never happened. We don't have to pretend that yesterday never happened. He can change what it means.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I think that we need to let the Lord change what it means because I'm going to talk about predictability quickly. When we don't remember right, it actually causes us to predict wrong. Our brain is a prediction machine. It's a filing cabinet, but it's a prediction machine.

I just want to help some people out there. It moves in two main areas: what should happen and what could happen. Fear is telling us what could happen. You get in the car, you're driving down the road, and your brain all of a sudden goes, "Wow, if I miss that turn, my car could rumble over and end up in the gutter." Or you could end up on the other side of the road in a car accident. Your brain is able to paint the imagination picture.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And we go on a tangent. It's crazy. Your brain is able to try to predict what could happen. Then in another circumstance, you come into a room, you see something going on, you have an opinion about something, and your brain starts to predict in the scene what should happen. Your person that you're with talking should maybe talk to you differently. And we don't prophesy, we pro-phil-ly. We do. And therefore our brain goes on a tangent and we start to forget God's word, will, and way in how to handle these situations.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Just a physiological response is that these prediction things always recruit sympathetic responses. A sympathetic nervous system increases our heart rate, it alters our breathing, we get sweaty, we have muscle tension, heightened vigilance, we tighten our jaw because our brain is causing our body to move counter to what it was created to do. We were wired for love, programmed by fear.

Prediction is fear-based because it's using what has happened in the past in an ungodly way. It's not referencing the ancient in a godly way; it's referencing the old, not the ancient. Prediction always uses the old and says that the old will take place again because that's what I'm predicting will happen.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And we're always crying out for revival. Revival begins when the old book became the present word of God again.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I love this about Jesus. Jesus never predicts a thing. He never moves in prediction once. He always goes back to what His Father has already said and then He prophesies from that place. Prediction is fear-based, but prophecy is faith-based. We'll come back.

Looking for a real relationship with Jesus? Join Dr. Robyn Kassas and Dr. Nathan Kassas every weekday for First Love, where prophetic insight meets real theology. Learn how God's voice activates your mind, body, soul, and spirit, helping you renew your mind, transform your life, and return to the one who loved you first. Catch First Love Monday through Friday, 5:00 to 5:30 p.m. Learn more at torcc.org. The one who loved you first is still loving you best.

What a great first segment, Dr. Robyn. I didn't predict anything.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: No, we're just going with the flow.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Again, on this prediction thing and understanding this mechanistic function of our brain, why it's so dangerous is because when we remember the wrong things the wrong way, we predict the same pattern for today.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And we also interpret. Interpretation belongs to God. It doesn't belong to man. When we get to interpretation of this moment, is it my history or is it His truth?

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Your history will tell you it is your history and it will predict your future based on your history.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And based on your experience. This is crazy to me.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I want to read this key statement here and then I want to tie in a little example. This one is very powerful: healing changes yesterday's authority over today without rewriting yesterday's facts. What is changing is not the facts; it's the authority that yesterday has over today. And that's what God is trying to get us to go back to, to remember correctly, so that the authority that we've given the wrong memory is removed over the present day.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Could you repeat that one again?

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I said we're going back to remove the wrong authority that we've given the wrong memory. When we remember, we remember wrong. We remember according to our own emotional interpretation and our own perception.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And our perception is our deception. It is. It is.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: This is why I know the Lord is telling us you have to remember right. This is why Moses was told, "Set up memorial stones and write the laws on it." Every seven years when you go into this land of promise, I want you to pull out the law and I want you to read it from top to bottom because time is going to go by, things are going to change, stories are going to be modulated. But here's the truth of what happened: I brought you out of the land of Egypt. I set you up as a nation. He's giving the law literally on these tablets that they set up.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And I told you to follow me. This was not your idea, Peter; this was my instigation. I grabbed you first before you took ahold of me.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: What's happening here is God is saying remember that what I established before your wound still has authority after your wound. Jeremiah 1:5: "Before you were formed, I called you and I knew you and I appointed you as a prophet to the nations."

Before Jeremiah, your father's influence to try and pull you into the priesthood and just be another Levitical priest, forsaking the call I put on your life. Before the trauma of not being counted. Before the trauma of not being seen.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And the same happened with Abraham. Before I showed you who I was, and you then saw what you had was not me. You had your father's beliefs, your father's culture, and then when you saw who I was, then I promised to take you out and put you on a journey and give you a promise of Isaac.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: This is powerful because the Lord is literally telling us here, yes, your nervous system has learned a response; it's learned a perceived condition. It's actually been conditioned into a condition. But here's the key: before your nervous system learned to protect itself, God already established your identity.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And that's the thing we need to come back to. That's the ancient truth. We're not coming back to the ancient wound or the old wound. We're coming back to the truth that was ancient and has not moved. Man could not move it, no demon could move it, no god could move it, and no mind control, no belief system. It was established.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: I think a key here is because when we don't remember rightly, what does that do? It removes responsibility. Responsibility is the ability to respond. If I want to prevent what happened yesterday from happening today, I have to respond.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And we have to respond correctly.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: This is what wrong remembrance does: it removes responsibility. Responsibility gives me the ability today to respond so that present-day decisions don't align with yesterday's mistakes.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: And I can tell you wrong remembrance brings us into our experience. And that will start to move in our lives and rob us from coming back to that original plan and wholeness. We need to have wholeness, not healing. Healing we have to keep coming to get it. If we have wholeness, we have it once and for all.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: It's not that God is restoring old identity; He's restoring His original plan.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: He sure is. He had that plan in the beginning, before the beginning, before you were formed in your mother's womb, before you were an idea for your mother and father. He had that plan for you. You are no accident. You are here on purpose. You need to remember this so that you can come back to that first love that was put in you before you were formed. Because when you were formed, you were programmed through circumstances to hate, to not believe, to be angry, all these things because of circumstances and situations around you. You were never programmed for that.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We were wired for love, but programmed through fear. Formed for love.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I like to say it we were formed because of His love. Because of love. That's so powerful.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Another thing that I'd like to add to this is incorrect remembrance actually turns the brain on in a way that it has been numb. When we don't remember correctly, the brain actually numbs because of pain or trauma or because of disappointment. It actually numbs to healing those past memories. When we don't remember correctly, we just regurgitate a same emotional wound.

By the Lord saying, "I want you to remember correctly," now with responsibility, if I remember correctly, then I can't blame God for everything. I have to take responsibility. I have to say, "Yeah Lord, that was me. I fought against You in that moment. I didn't allow Your Spirit to flow through me in that moment." By doing that, I'm allowing God to touch that memory.

In neuroscience, that memory can be reshaped or reconsolidated or reappraised.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: So it can actually be interpreted correctly according to the truth of what God is, who He is, how He moves, and His word, will, and way. But if I don't allow God to give me the ability to see and recognize where my responsibility is, it's like it cuts itself off from being able to be adapted.

I see what you're saying here and I can agree with that: our interpretation is very involved with our remembrance. If we remember correctly, we will interpret the situation correctly. That's so powerful.