What Is Controlling You? A Conditioned Stimulus? By Kelly Durant
Galatians 5:1 Stand fast therefore in the liberty by which Christ has made us free, and do not be entangled again with a yoke of bondage 5:13 For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.
2. Have you heard the expression that when someone says, Jump!” that one shouldn’t ask, “Why” but rather, “How high? We love and serve each other, we influence and restrain one another, but we must become aware of the whys and motives. Control over another is a strange phenomenon; I observe many people are unaware of who is pulling their strings! This is an important topic to cover as many people are submitting to outside controls and influences not being aware if these controls are of good or evil. Today the minds of the uniformed of the gospel of Jesus are being seduced into the bondage of the world as never before! God is not allowed in the schools, workplaces, and government and consequently these powers now want to reign as the only gods of authority, but they are failed systems, corrupted, and unworthy! Too many people are being controlled by hypocritical, self-destructive, liberal, double-standard philosophies from agendas devised to control human behaviors into submission. How does control work?
I never liked the comparison but it can be observed that people are comparable to Ivan Pavlov’s experimental dogs. Do you recall that the psychologist Pavlov would ring a bell at the same time he would feed the hungry dogs to conclude later that if he rang the bell even without food, the dogs would salivate anyway? This is a conditioned stimulus. It is the combining of a normal daily action with another outside stimulus in order to get a predetermined outcome. It is the attaching of an expectancy, position, or emotion to a normally unrelated event. Why do I mention this? Because many people are unaware of how they emotionally, not logically, respond to the current matters of today! The media and peer pressure is brainwashing people who are not truth seekers into being someone they did not use to be! Truth is the new enemy!
Speaking of a ring, I have seen some people cringe their teeth when a certain person or their spouse is ringing the cell phone! It is almost as if the cell phone ring invokes fear and nervously, they answer fearing that a communication could be to ask for money, or to get yelled at over some imaginary wrong doing of theirs. People precondition and control other people and often neither one analyzes how they have been preconditioned to the other! Don’t be guilty of dishing out abuse or of permitting yourself to receive abuse as these types of controls are “opportunities of the flesh” to manipulate and are not of the spirit. Another example of conditioning is this, some people when hearing the word, Christian, or conservative are cross-wired to not take the words for their intended meanings (as something good) but rather they have been conditioned by movies, college professors, and the media to envision a bigot, racist, or a deceiver. Most all of the time Christians and conservatives are good contributing much to society contrary to what accusers and maligners say! Don’t be a preprogramed dog! Don’t respond irate overriding what a normal response should be!
3. Control, or managing the behavior of another, may be employed for good or for evil. Control is usually done by invoking fear! God wants us free from all fear but one, the fear of Him! One verse that stuck with me for a long time is this, Matthew 10:28 “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”. In other words, fear God only as only He is the ultimate one in control of your soul and the universe and He decides if your soul will be saved or go to hell according to your heart!
There are so many verses against fear such as 1 John 4:18 “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love”. Proverbs 29:25 “The fear of man brings a snare, But whoever trusts in the Lord shall be safe”.
God alone should be the only one in control of anyone! (repeat) The problem is that people who do not know God’s word and obey it fall victim to being dominated by fear, or being in the flesh living an out-of-control life unaware of the truth of that. Dominating or being dominated are both “opportunities of the flesh”. A person without God may allow another person to be in control of them (by intimidation), or in a worst-case scenario allow a demon to be in control of their spirit! If it is not God’s rule dominating your heart controlling your behaviors, then it is someone else’s perverted precepts. This is a usurping of God’s statutes, which is a grave sin!
4. Let’s begin with the first principle in the verse of today being “liberty”. If a Christian is free, and is healthy in obeying God, he or she enjoys freedom with no one is pulling their strings, no one is feared or controlling them, and no one but God dominates their behavior. So, he or she never allows another person to control them, and by it being this way, then God, the Holy Spirit, and the person’s will is in harmony to have the control producing true liberty. The truth shall set you free!
The problem with liberty though is that it is a paradox. How do most people understand liberty? For example, if I tell you that God’s freedom allows you to do as you please, would you agree you can do “all” that you please because you are free? Obviously not! This is because you would then be abusing your liberty to satisfy carnal desires which is “an opportunity for the flesh”. To be out-of-control with your own life will destroy you and consequently adversely affect the lives of many others. The book of Romans speaks a lot about the subject of what you should or shouldn’t do in regards to your freedom, living under law vs. living without law, but that will be a subject for another day!
One major point of this liberty is this: in life control is needed, but control must originate from within our own internal conviction to obey and respect (fear) God. We must with God’s help by the Holy Spirit have control over ourselves in every aspect. It is good to have a partner to be accountable to as well as this is very important to reinforce us away from our weaknesses, fears, and temptations. Who are you accountable to? If not controlled by God a person like you or me becomes more abusive over time and this damages the holy relationship we must all strive to maintain with God. How in control are you of your own spirit, emotions, and fears? How is your control (or lack thereof) being “opportunity to the flesh” affecting you and others?
5. Let’s go deeper into what control bells do not mean for us as we establish our relationship with God, taking prayer as the example. For the non-Christian prayer is a time of spacing out of control allowing the mind to wander, not really caring about what is said or believing that what is said is what God will hear and answer. But for the Christian, who has already been affected emotionally and seen many people be emotional in prayer being desperate or elated because God answered and saved someone’s life, prayer then becomes a time of intimacy, soberness, joy, and concentration. James 5:16 (b) The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
But I will argue that these effects of prayer are not a conditioned response as in Pavlov’s model, they are instead a quality that just naturally takes place because it is a real experience! (or supernatural one!). If prayer was of no use billions of people would not do it daily! Prayer and the worship of God will always be unique with each person but it is conclusively very effectual and encouraging and necessary for the spiritual strength one needs in life to overcome fears, the flesh, and manipulations. Some people get prayer only on Sunday but we need it daily!
The sad thing is some people never experience the amazing blessings and feelings God has in store for them because they will not allow God to take full control of their life! This is due to pride and you must get free from it! For the Christian who loves God, freedom or liberty takes on a deeper meaning than what others understand it to be because it is our spirits that get free from the control of others who rely on the stimuli of fear to manipulate our behavior. Many Christians of late are caving to intimidators with nonsensical ideologies and political correctness, and this brings on bondage of spirit and a state of mental slavery, not liberty as God intended.
6. What I loathe are all the increasingly belligerent conditioned stimuli or “controls”, stigmas, and misconceptions being placed upon young people in society and on Christians or anyone who speaks truth standing up for their convictions! Never allow your right to be heard be bullied into bondage by intimidators! Recognize it and fight it when someone from some preconditioned mindset is trying to “control” and suppress you, or shame or ridicule your God-given right to your faith convictions. Expose them for trying to demonize you by shaming them for trying to rob you of your God-given rights and freedom! You do have free speech rights and freedom of religion until now! But not for long if we don’t fight to keep them! The disciples went preaching everywhere, “Daily in the temple and in every house” (Acts 5:42) as the “Good News” was mandated to be shared to all everywhere and it legally cannot be degraded into oblivion as how evil men would like to see happen.
Our freedom of expression to proclaim our Christian faith must be freely exercised or we will be intimidated, controlled, and be forced to live in fear under someone else’s subjugating Satanic agenda in the form of government or religion. Here, and around the world, many laws prohibit Jesus from being mentioned or taught with the penalty of execution or imprisonment! 35 Islamic nations prohibit Jesus’ gospel to be taught! Many other communist/socialist countries as well! Many laws today directly contradict God’s statues that respect life, the mentioning of His Son Jesus such as in schools to children, and do you not think Jesus is offended? Matt 18: 6 “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea. 7 Woe to the world because of offenses! For offenses must come, but woe to that man by whom the offense comes!
We must be bold and disobey anti-Christ agendas by people that try to control us so we fear and do not take the liberty to tell others about our liberating Jesus. Peter and the disciples lived by this standard of freedom and we must as well! Acts 5:28 Saying, “Did we not strictly command you not to teach in this name? And look, you have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this Man’s blood on us!” 29 But Peter and the other apostles answered and said: “We ought to obey God rather than men.” No man has any right of control over the mission of all Christians to preach Jesus Christ! “The earth is the Lord’s” but Satanic powers keep trying to subdue others by fear robbing God of His power and glory.
7. Our verses of today in Galatians deal with the Jews trying to “control” the new Christians by imposing on them the Mosaic law to rob their new freedom granted by God through Jesus’ redemption. To be honored as a pious perfectionist law abider was the goal amongst the want-to-be leaders in that day as well as today. But God’s favor is by grace in Jesus, not by works.
If we translate this “control” into today’s modern world, from college classrooms and city halls the objective is to by man’s laws and regulations facilitate, indoctrinate, and intimidate everyone into accepting and practicing their anti-God, anti-Biblical, precepts which obviously enslave and destroy as “the wages of sin is death”. Regarding passions of the flesh, Satanic ones parade the freedom to “do as one pleases”, and tout ‘freedom from religion’ (or from a guilty conscience which they never achieve!) as their model of freedom. These ones in the world are diametrically militantly opposed to the Word of God presuming the stance that you are your own god. After all, you should be free to let your carnal out-of-control flesh do all that it pleases without any bigoted, biased, racist religious person suggesting that self-control under God brings more peace and meaning to life than their hedonism!? The reality is, once you get to know them (as we all have), these so called liberated liberal proselytizers entrapped in their unreconciled deceptions live miserable lives enslaved to many agendas converting them into embarrassing hypocrites. Pray that God helps them to fall off of their high horses as Paul the apostle did to see the light of their bitter, murderous, intentions and repent.
So unprecedented laws (actually lawlessness) permit the common people the liberty of nihilism, to consume drugs and commit acts that spread diseases, and while they are enthralled in ignorance the ones in power get away with scandal after scandal making mega billions each by corruption, lies, and extortion. Are you not tired of the poor getting poorer and having no power of say so? Well, expose the corruption and mental enslavers at every chance then! Check to make sure you are not subconsciously controlled by the deceptions and lies in the media, lies that are all touted in the name of equality being the perversions of standards, which are not the standards of God that have worked for 3,000 years ever since they were given to man.
8. So one important concept of this verse in Galatians 5 of today is that after one becomes a Christian and God frees you from your own sin, which was the liberation of the lawlessness of your own fleshly passions, or the freedom from the pride of trying to be more lawful, pious, and controlling than your peers, you must never go back to be entangled again or you are condemned! Never allow yourself the control over your own life (as it belongs to God now) or the desire control over others! Your freedom is in Christ alone and it is the only healthy freedom that exists to make one happy, holy, and superior to others who are enslaved to their illusive freedom of “doing as they please” or by pretending to be more righteous that you!
You must keep in check any of your desires for “control”. God is your pilot, but if you take the control panel over over-ridding Him for sure you are in danger of a crash before reaching your destiny! So liberty in God is a paradox, it is freedom but bound by the control of your will and at the mercy of God’s will.
Here is one more aspect in the verse where it says, “but through love serve one another”. Leaders, pastors, government officials, or anyone can control what they want others to do by applying the conditioned stimulus model with threats, bribes, and coercion, but imposition then transfers into the sinful “opportunity for the flesh”. When a person takes advantage of others or becomes the controller over another’s actions, beliefs, or behavior that becomes something not “done in love” and it is a SIN. God is love and it is in divine love that we choose to serve each other!
9. Serving one another in love is a voluntary submission doing what we do for the glory of God and the desire is never to control another, condition another, or take advantage of their goodness. We must never invalidate our faith by being carnal, abusive, controlling, or out of control as these things are all “of the flesh”. You don’t need to be an atheistic liberal to offend others, you can be a rude Christian making others serve you, but if you are offensive and people find out you are a dog that barks and bites, you may discover that others are getting conditioned to avoid you! If you can’t love your brother whom you have seen, how can you claim to love God whom you have not seen?
Criminals feed on making their victims fear, ask yourself “Am I one that loves power and control”? The fear of God liberates and overcomes, but fear torments! 2 Timothy 1:7 “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind”. Don’t control others or let yourself be controlled! Never be out of control and in the flesh! Examine what you agree with to compare if it is the world that has programed you by a conditioned response, you or by the truth in the Word of God! Don’t live as a preprogramed dog! Revelation 22:15 For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.
May God help us to live out and share the gospel of Jesus in order to liberate others who are enslaved to ungodly permissiveness in the form of worldly precepts, laws, or destructive ideals controlling them that they are not even aware of it! Thank you Jesus for freeing us and giving us clarity of vision to see through lies, deceptions, and enslaving agendas: may we keep on living free! Ask yourself, am I being controlled? Am I a controlling individual? Jesus liberates! John 8:36 If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.
