First Love

Announcer: 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 back to First Love. My name is Dr. Nathan Kassas, and I am sitting with Dr. Robyn Kassas. Dr. Robyn, how are you tonight? We are continuing on Dr. Robyn's introduction from two weeks ago about the Yada Times and knowing how we connect with God.

We've just come off our season casting 5786, a prophetic vision casting for the year ahead. Dr. Robyn, it was all about heaven connecting with earth and bringing down God. I think this is an important topic because the Lord wants to re-establish how we're connecting with Him. How do we connect with Him? Through prayer. Why don't I throw it to you and you begin to walk us through? We began to speak on the outer things last time, but you want to take us to the next stage of Yada Times.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Yes, I do. We call it Yada Times. It's a time of sharing love together. The translation for the Hebrew word is "to know," the word for intimacy or an encounter. We think prayer is doing something. It is not doing something; it's being in touch with someone.

It's not a work. It's a sharing of love. It becomes a sharing of love with someone like a friend or with the Lord. It's not a waste of time. If you are coming in contact with someone, it's not something I've got to do; it's being in the company of someone you love. It is not an obligation at all.

It's really important that we go through this process. We took you through this process of being on the outer part of us, sharing things on the outer part of us like the weather or sports—anything just to get that conversation going.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We came from the scripture in Psalms: the heavens declare the glory of God. We were actually showing that David began with the outside things and then he ends that Psalm by saying, "May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight."

There's a journey for those inner things to be fully trusted to the Lord. My job is to provide some science, so I just want to quickly add to the outer things a little scientific fact. I'm coming from Psalm 104, and it says, "Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise."

The outer things, as you've taught me, Dr. Robyn, when we look at the trees and the sky and nature and creation, stir gratitude in us. We begin to thank Him for His creation. What that does psychologically is gratitude activates the prefrontal cortex and dopamine pathways, shifting our brain from a survival mode to an actual trust.

The key word is receptivity. We cannot actually hear the voice of God clearly until we have a spiritual and a biological receptivity turned on. Gratitude for the outer things of life actually turns on a receptivity. A lot of people will find that when they try to move to the innermost thoughts, they can't get past their fears and anxiousness because when He speaks, it doesn't resonate; there's no reception in their mind.

Studies in neurotheology show that expressing thanksgiving increases serotonin and oxytocin, which are the bonding hormones. You can't bond with someone that you don't trust. Thanksgiving is the precursor to bonding. It prepares you for a deeper spiritual connection. The outer thing is so important. Like I said last time, we have not really explored the depth of trusting God with the outer things or even speaking to Him. I was challenged myself about how much I talk to the Lord about the outer things. When I'm driving, how much do I notice and am I thankful for the trees and the birds and the sky?

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Praying about the weather and such is really pretty unusual these days. But I was saying about prayer being in touch with someone. It's not just doing something, like going to a prayer meeting or praying. You love someone; you want to be simply enjoying that love with someone.

That is very much what prayer is. If you're in contact or you're touching someone, then you're enjoying being in that company of someone.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: That revolutionized my prayer life. Just what you said about looking at the outside things and being in contact with the Lord about these outside things. I was driving to the gym and I just started to say, "Thank You, Lord. Thank You for the air that I'm breathing. Thank You for the trees. Thank You for the sky." All these things exist under Your dominion. They remind me that You are in control, even when life feels like it's out of control.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think also that we learn about prayer. We learn that there are different levels of intimacy. We don't even think about that. We just think prayer is just something we do, and we don't even give it that place that there are different levels of intimacy and friendship with God. We establish this by going to different levels—the outer part of us, and then we come to the next stage, which I would call the second stage.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Why don't we pause there? We're going to have a quick break just to get our breath together, and we're going to come back and you're going to unpack this second level of beginning to trust. We want to stress the importance of understanding prayer is not a rescue and it's not an obligation. This is a journey that we're going on. Again, we're reminding you this is the importance of what the Lord is doing in 2026 to connect heaven and earth. You've got to know how to connect properly. I think for those that have been walking with the Lord for a long time, we've maybe lost the luster of connecting with God like we had in our first love experience.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Because we thought it was something to do instead of something to be.

Announcer: 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. Robyn Kassas: Prayer is intimacy. It is not a chore or doing something. It's a level of intimacy outside of us, then we come to the second stage of trust. This is where our relationship will begin to grow to trust.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We're going to focus on this inward step of beginning to trust. I just want to reiterate how important it is that we can't get to beginning to trust God with our inner thoughts until we have the receptivity turned on by the outer things. What is the gateway that turns that receptivity on? It's gratitude. Science tells us that you can't possess gratitude and fear in the same space. Fear cancels out gratitude neurologically, and gratitude cancels out fear neurologically.

There is a speaking out of our gratitude that brings us to this next step of building inner trust. As we do that, our brain is literally rewiring itself for joy and peace, away from fear and anxiousness. That's why we can go to Philippians: be anxious for nothing, but with everything in prayer and supplication and gratitude, let your requests be made known to God. Thanksgiving is the step. Why don't you bring us into this next step about building trust?

Dr. Robyn Kassas: It's a relationship, and it grows. As we begin to trust, we can talk about particular situations. We now want to build on that level of trust and intimacy. We can talk about what we think about and how we feel about things. We can begin to share our feelings and share our thoughts.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Are you telling me that God is actually interested in what I feel and what I think about life? That it's not my flesh?

Dr. Robyn Kassas: The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord. They're ordered, and therefore, He wants to know everything about us. That's why we have communion with God—two-way communion. David talked about all that He created, and he talked about what he felt in himself, and God wanted to hear it.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: God is interested in what I feel, but not my opinion. There's a difference. We totally mix up all the time that our opinion is what we feel. We think that our opinion is what we're emoting, and that's how the enemy really gets us to discount the voice of the Lord with our own words—our inner opinions are not our inner emotions.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: Opinion's not intimacy. It is not. You need when you start to share your feelings and your thoughts, you're beginning to become a little bit more intimate. But if you start bringing your opinions up, then this is the break of the intimacy.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: Opinion, analytically as I've learned, is judgment. You can't judge something and be intimate with it at the same time.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: When we're being intimate on that second stage in trust, we want to see how He'll respond to what we share: our thoughts and our feelings. We want to see how He's going to respond—His view on situations, His opinion about situations, worldly affairs, and things like that.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: If we shout out an opinion, we're not giving room for Him to share what He feels, because the judgment totally cuts that connection off.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I think that opinion should be replaced with view. Give our views on things, not our opinion. Our opinion takes a very strong position.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: If I had a "gem button," I would press it right now. To back up in scripture, Proverbs 3:6 says, "In all your ways acknowledge"—and the word there is "Yada"—Him. So we're not just now moving in the outward ways; we're saying in all your ways, the outward and the inner. Again, we're moving from talking about God and what He's done to now talking to Him.

Dr. Robyn Kassas: As we do this, we begin in this stage of intimacy—that level—to build deeper bridges with Him. We can see that we can go to Him. It's more than just touching Him now; we're actually moving into a journey with Him.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: We're going to wrap up for this episode because we've dived into the inner trusting and building trust. Psychologically, our alignment stage engages what we call mindfulness-based attention, which strengthens the anterior cingulate cortex. This is the region responsible for focus and empathy. By acknowledging His presence, we are training our brain to recognize divine awareness over anxious distraction.

The fact that we've now let gratitude open the window and open the door allows the brain to become receptive to hear His emotions and thoughts. Now, as we begin to share and build these inner steps of trust on our views, not our opinions, we are allowing our brain now to get wired for joy, for peace, for hearing His heart. Wouldn't that be amazing—understanding that your brain is being wired to hear the heart of God?

Dr. Robyn Kassas: I never quite thought of it like that, but I can tell you when we build this bridge, this deeper bridge with Him, we can then see Him as the bridge that we can walk along to get close to Him.

That's really important because we've never seen prayer like this before. We've only ever seen it as something that we go to a prayer meeting for, or we have to pray in an emergency. No, we need to be in touch with someone. When you go and talk to someone you love, you're not doing an obligation. You're doing something very intimate: communicating.

Dr. Nathan Kassas: This step of building trust is so important. Until we build that trust, we can't focus on what God is going to say to us in the inner steps.