Heart’s DeLight: a Way to Wellness

Your words were found, and I ate them,
And Your Word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart;
for I am called by Your Name, o Lord of hosts. – Jer. 15:16

HEART’S DeLIGHT COUNSELING TOOLS combine Psycho-social Therapy, Christ-centered Biblical Discipling, Insight Development (wisdom & understanding), Psycho-education and Skills Development for Emotional Healing and Relational Restoration. Every heart yearns for this truth: that God delights in you. Only then can you delight in yourself, embrace who you are and take delight in other people.

The Self-help Workbook and Counselor Handbook is an effective therapeutic tool for:

1. Professional Counselors that want to incorporate Spirit-led, Christ-centered ministry in their therapeutic approach.
2. Church-based Christian Counselors can use it for Emotional Healing and Relational Restoration in Individual Counseling or in Bible Study Groups.

Individual & Family Therapy

– Abuse: physical, emotional or sexual, includes Adult survivors of Childhood Abuse
– Alcohol & Drug Dependency
– Anxiety: individual therapy
– Behavior difficult children
– Bereavement
– Depression
– Eating Disorders
– Family Therapy
– Personal Development & Spiritual growth
– Marriage Counseling
– Relationship Counseling

HEART MATTERS:
Your heart was made for LOVE, to be LOVED and to LOVE.
Jesus said to him, You shall LOVE the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul (your passion) and with all your mind (intellect). You shall LOVE your neigbor as you do yourself. These two commandments sum up and upon them depend the Law and the Prophets. – Mat 22: 37-39 (Amp)

1. LOVE GOD: Delight in God
In Him we live and move and have our being. Wholeness and Wellness starts with this truth: “The Lord your God is with you, He is mighty to save. He will take great DELIGHT in you. He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing.” “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart. ” CREATED FOR JOY: Pursuing God’s glory = pursuing my joy. God’s aim in history was to fully display His glory. God’s aim was that His people delight in Him with all their heart. – John Piper (Don’t waste your life)

2. LOVE YOURSELF: Delight in yourself
To love oneself…seems like we always love ourselves too much or too little. We need to love ourselves, to be able to love others. Your heart is beautiful: “the incorruptable beauty of the hidden person of the heart.” “It is Christ in us, the hope of glory.” If the God of the Universe loves you and likes you so much that He chose to live in you…how can you not love yourself? You need to see yourself as He sees you. You are a spirit, you live in a body and you have a soul…the soul is flawed and no amount of constant frantic renovations can fix that. That is why the Bible teaches that we have to die to self, in order to live. That a seed needs to fall in the ground and die, to live and become so much more. The soul is the seed, and the life of the spirit is the tree.

Your heart is the core of your being. “Above all else guard you heart, for it is the wellspring of life.” Your heart can be wounded, broken or crushed. This can happen through parenting, people, circumstances, tragedy and trauma. Trauma can block your inner well and make it impossible for you to move on…you may need some help to unblock your well. “From your inner most being will flow rivers of living water.”

Is. 61 promises that God’s Spirit anoints us to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and opening of prison to those who are bound. To give them beauty for ashes, oil of joy for mourning and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. They shall be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord. That He may be glorified.

Roots and Fruits: When your Identity is rooted in Christ, you bear the fruit of the Spirit. Your Temperament is inborn, it is who you are in the flesh, your mind/thoughts, emotions and will. With innate strengths, weaknesses, career aptitude, intelligence style, learning style and social style. For every temperament flaw there is a fruit of the Spirit (Spirit-controlled Temperament/Christ-Character). This is God’s way of teaching us that we cannot lean on the flesh/our own strength but that we need Jesus.

“The Gospel is better than unconditional love. The Gospel says, “God accepts you just as Christ is. God has
‘contraconditional’ love for you.” Christ bears the curse you deserve. Christ is fully pleasing to the Father and gives you His own perfect goodness. Christ reigns in power, making you the Father’s child and coming close to you to begin to change what is unacceptable to God about you. God never accepts me “as I am.” He accepts me “as I am in Jesus Christ.” The center of gravity is different. The true Gospel does not allow God’s love to be sucked into the vortex of the soul’s lust for acceptability and worth in and of itself. Rather, it radically decenters people—what the Bible calls “fear of the Lord” and “faith”—to look outside themselves. – David Powlison, Idols of the Heart & Vanity Fair.

3. LOVE OTHERS: Delight in others
We can delight in others, no matter how imperfect they are. If we see them as God sees them, when we no longer look at others according to the flesh, but look at them according to the spirit. See their potential, see who God created them to be, and see it unfold in their lives as they grow into that person and become a Christ-container…a work in progress. When you understand another’s Temperament, how they think and feel and react, you can have tolerance and compassion and take delight in that person’s heart. You’ll see that “there is a time and a season for every purpose under heaven”. That we all fit together, all 4 Seasons work together to create a whole and to bring balance. We need each other, we complement and complete each other.

Unforgiveness, unresolved conflict, resentment and hate can harden your heart and block your inner well. Some hurts are very deep and you may need some help to go through a process of forgiveness and relational healing.

12 KEYS TO UNBLOCKING YOUR INNER WELL:
Key Points:

· Invite the Constant Gardener in:
1. Admit own Powerlessness
2. Hope in God
3. Turn to God
· Weeding your Garden/ Unblocking your inner Well
4. Inventory: Free to Love Workbook
5. Repentance
6. Willing to change
7. Prayer
8. List of people wronged
9. Restoring relationships
· Sow the Incorruptable Seed
10. Regular inventory
11. Walk and Talk with God
12. Testimony

Baobab Therapeutic Tools:

Secret Garden of the Heart:
Jesus the Constant Gardener
Spirit-controlled Temperament
Free to Love Workbook:
Honor and Dishonor
Curses to Blessing
Inventory and Forgiveness
Christ-Character
For your e-Book (pdf):
DeLight Workbook for Ladies/ Men
or DeLight Counselor Handbook
order it from our Product List.

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO REPAIR AND REFORM THE FLESH

-Watchman Nee

Man is not regenerated by doing something special but by believing the Lord Jesus as his Savior: “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1.12-13). Those who believe the Lord Jesus as Savior are born of God and are therefore His children.

Regeneration is the minimum of spiritual life. It is the basis upon which later building up takes place. One can neither speak of spiritual life nor expect to grow spiritually if he is not regenerated, since he has no life in his spirit. Just as no one can construct a castle in the air so we cannot edify those who are unregenerated. If we attempt to teach an unregenerate to do good and to worship God, we are simply teaching a dead man. We are attempting to do what God cannot do when we try to repair and reform the flesh.

It is vital that each believer knows beyond doubt he has been regenerated already and has received a new life. He must see that new birth is not an attempt to tinker with the old flesh or to transform it into spiritual life. On the contrary, it is receiving a life, which he never had and could not have had before. If one is not born anew he cannot see the kingdom of God. He can never perceive the spiritual mysteries and taste the heavenly sweetness of God’s kingdom.

THE REAL YOU

– John Eldredge, Wild at Heart
You are not your sin; sin is no longer the truest thing about the man who has come into union with Jesus. Your heart is good.

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you” (Ezek. 36:26). The Big Lie in the church today is that you are nothing more than “a sinner saved by grace.” You are a lot more than that. You are a new creation in Christ. The New Testament calls you a saint, a holy one, a son of God. In the core of your being you are a good man. Yes, there is a war within us, but it is a civil war. The battle is not between us and God; no, there is a traitor within us who wars against our true heart fighting alongside the Spirit of God in us:

A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death . . . Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells . . . if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus . . . When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. (Rom. 8:2, 9-11 The Message)

The real you is on the side of God against the false self. Knowing this makes all the difference in the world. The man who wants to live valiantly will lose heart quickly if he believes that his heart is nothing but sin. Why fight?