This is a book about the journey towards wholeness from a life of unhealthy, addictive, and sinful behavior. In it the author examines how findings from emerging disciplines like neurobiology and behavioral science enrich and even validate the scriptures regarding the reason for unhealthy, addictive and sinful behavior.

Holy Rewired describes how changing our behavior is not simply a matter of being more disciplined about prayer and Bible reading or adding additional spiritual activities like fasting. Behavioral change requires accessing the deepest parts of our emotional lives. Engaging and dealing with our emotions leads to increasing emotional health, which in turn leads to behavioral change. Emotional health allows us to change our thinking about ourselves, our actions, and our relationship to others. It offers the freedom to regain a healthy understanding of who we are in Christ and in our relationship with God the Father. In this context, we can make progress in our journey toward wholeness.

In order to effectively change our behavior, we must also remember who we are as created by the Father. The ultimate impact of sin has been to destroy our sense of identity. We have lost the sense of being created in the image of God and being created for perfect relationship with our Creator. Because we are broken eikons (the Greek word for man being created in the image of God), we are searching to discover who and whose we are. Unhealthy behavior is an expression of that searching and longing that is within all of us. However, without the reshaping skill of the Potter, the cracked pots cannot be made whole and thus continue to struggle finding themselves in a world ignorant of the hope that brings wholeness.

Unfortunately, the institutional church has frequently dismissed the issues of unhealthy behavior as simply sin or a lack of self-discipline. The antidote for dealing with the behavioral dysfunction, according to those who emphasize spiritual disciplines, is to do more things that are spiritual: pray more, read the Bible more, spend more time in church. This prescription is limited in addressing the real cause of destructive behavior. It does not address the impact of other people’s destructive behavior upon us. The unhealthy behavior of others can negatively impact our own behavior. The negative impact is often, perhaps even always, the source of the unhealthy and destructive behaviors a person exhibits.

In addition, the spiritual prescription does not take into account multiple memory storage areas with which our minds are created. The emotional memory holds traumatic experiences, which cause us to react out of pain when we sense we are in a similar situation. These experiences, part of our emotional memory, are rarely readily accessible in our cognitive memory. These memories must be probed, remembered, and released.

Drawing on recent research from emerging sciences such as neuroplasticity, emotional intelligence, and family systems theory, behavioral change is a result of our journey towards emotional health and wholeness. It requires us to unlearn and put aside the practices and effects of self-destructive behavior and fully embrace our identity as people created in the image of God for relationship with him.

Endorsements:

In this encouraging study of spiritual whole-making, the key to a whole-souled life is to be wholly souled in biblical truth and integrity. – Leonard Sweet, Drew University, George Fox University, sermons.com

Purchase Now

MORFX Press, a division of Missional Press, is pleased to announce the publication of “Free to Be You” by Dr. Fred Antonelli, Ph.D.

To celebrate the publishing of Free to Be You, Missional Press is offering the book at the discounted price of $12.99.  To order, click here.

Dr. Antonelli is founder and director of Life Counseling Center with offices on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Delaware. He is a former Senior Pastor of 23 years as well as a licensed pychotherapist specializing in crisis marriage and pastoral counseling. Fred lives with his wife of thirty six years, Debbie, in Easton, Maryland.

The Forward by Dr. David Stoop

“Who am I?” has always been a difficult question for us to answer.  With all of the peer pressures and cultural expectations of our day and age, perhaps this has become the hardest question to answer.  In our attempts to answer the question, we often pick some role we play that is important to us and use it to define our answer.  Most men will say that “I am what I do”-especially my work.  Most women will say the same kind of thing, such as “I am Zachary’s mom.”  But pressed beyond what we do, and we often don’t have an answer.  Someone has said that we are not “human-doers” but we are “human-beings.”  But if the questioner says, “I want to go beyond what you do, to who you are,” we are at a loss for words.

Dr. Antonelli has tackled this question of “who am I” and helps take us step-by-step on a journey of self-definition-what kind of “being” are we?  Weaving together his pastoral experience with his clinical experience, he has creatively provided tools we can use in practical ways to break away from what he calls the “messages and signals” of our family-of-origin, and from the cultural pressures that have often trapped us into an understanding of ourselves that isn’t really who we are.

Beginning with the ability to dream again-to envision what stirs deep within us, Fred goes on to combine your dream with God’s dream for your life. Then he lays out practical ways you can nourish yourself so that you can persevere on the path God wants to lead you on so as to enjoy your life. In these pages you will find ways to redefine yourself that are biblically based, rather than culturally based.  And when you dig in to this book, you will find out how to answer that “who am I” question.  Enjoy the journey!

David Stoop, Ph.D.
Author and Psychologist

We all enter adulthood with many internalized messages that can hamper us from fulfilling God’s plan for our lives.  Free to Be You provides practical as well as biblical insight that can help you overcome hampering “Messages & Signals” that have been implanted from childhood.  I am sure the reader will find this a very helpful resource.

Dr. Archibald Hart
Author, Clinical Psychologist & Former Dean
Fuller Graduate School of Theology