Aug 12, 2026 · 40 min · 14 segments
Do you live with an anxious dread about connecting with God? Do you find yourself living a performance-based lifestyle so that you won’t be punished by God? Do you find yourself relating to God…
Mark DeJesusHost
Now, when you work with people and help them in their mental health or emotional health or relationship health journey, and all just healing and freedom stuff, you can begin to see how they relate to God.
It doesn't take very long once you get into conversation and open up about their faith journey.
In fact, I find that within 10 to 15 minutes in talking to people about their battles and struggles, I can very quickly pick up on the way they relate to God and how they see Him.
And, and how they relate to God begins to come up, and what the highlighted areas are.
Some of it's powerful, biblical, and great, but there are a lot of aspects to it that are not of God.
And I like helping believers to recognize the God distortions in my life because I had to welcome a journey of that myself.
And so it fed a lot of fear in my life, a lot of anxious striving, a lot of apprehension, a lot of hypervigilance, a lot of shaming, guilting, condemning kind of spirals that I found myself in.
And when there are distortions that are infecting our faith, it's gonna affect how we talk to Him, how we relate to Him, how we see ourselves certainly, and then how we relate to the world around us.
Do you relate to this? So let me start with this scripture passage, because this lays the foundation to what a punishment-based relationship looks like, but also what it needs.
1 John 4:18 is an incredibly helpful mental health, uh, insight that we all need.
And the NIV does a great job here in bringing out nuance to this word of what fear brings about.
And for many of us, we'll find the antidote to many of our anxieties, worries, ruminating, all the panic and obsessions, to the actual thing that we need.
It says here, "There is no fear in love." Which God is love, and He's seeking to root us in His love for us.
Now, when you work with people and help them in their mental health or emotional health or relationship health journey, and all just healing and freedom stuff, you can begin to see how they relate to God.
It doesn't take very long once you get into conversation and open up about their faith journey.
In fact, I find that within 10 to 15 minutes in talking to people about their battles and struggles, I can very quickly pick up on the way they relate to God and how they see Him.
And, and how they relate to God begins to come up, and what the highlighted areas are.
Some of it's powerful, biblical, and great, but there are a lot of aspects to it that are not of God.
And I like helping believers to recognize the God distortions in my life because I had to welcome a journey of that myself.
And so it fed a lot of fear in my life, a lot of anxious striving, a lot of apprehension, a lot of hypervigilance, a lot of shaming, guilting, condemning kind of spirals that I found myself in.
And when there are distortions that are infecting our faith, it's gonna affect how we talk to Him, how we relate to Him, how we see ourselves certainly, and then how we relate to the world around us.
Do you relate to this? So let me start with this scripture passage, because this lays the foundation to what a punishment-based relationship looks like, but also what it needs.
1 John 4:18 is an incredibly helpful mental health, uh, insight that we all need.
And the NIV does a great job here in bringing out nuance to this word of what fear brings about.
And for many of us, we'll find the antidote to many of our anxieties, worries, ruminating, all the panic and obsessions, to the actual thing that we need.
It says here, "There is no fear in love." Which God is love, and He's seeking to root us in His love for us.
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