Sid: We want everyone everywhere to be free. Jesus came to set us free and so many people are walking around with a hundred pound weight on their head and they don’t know what it is and they don’t know how to get rid of it. And they love the Lord, and I believe Art Mathias we have on the telephone; I’m speaking to him at his office in Anchorage, Alaska. I believe your book “Biblical Foundations of Freedom” was written for those crying out and not knowing. For instances you deal with areas, I mean I believe that this should be basic discipleship, but I know few, few believers that understand these principals that’s why so few are free. Let’s talk today about a subject that I don’t hear much talk about, bitterness, self bitterness.
Art: In Matthew 22, the Lord was asked a question about what is the greatest commandment? And He was being tested to see if He was a false prophet or not. Deuteronomy 13 teaches that anytime we teach something other than the Father, the true Father and a love of Him we’re teaching something false. And Jesus past that test, and He says “We’re to love God the Father with all our heart, mind and soul and to love our neighbor as ourselves.” So the Bible requires us to love, respect ourselves. And today we see in medical reports that almost 23% of American’s have type 2 Diabetes and they call it a lifestyle disorder in medicine and I strongly agree. And we see that people are full of shame and guilt and regrets and sorrows. And those emotions are toxic; they are forms of self bitterness as we classify them; anyway that we put ourselves down is form of self bitterness. God has said “That we’re His children, we’re joint heirs with Jesus,” and when we really learn who we really are, then we don’t have those negative thoughts about ourselves and we need to learn to forgive ourselves and accept the blood of Jesus. And as we see people do this and learn to respect their selves, Type II Diabetes goes away, the “Fight Flight” response stops. That battle between the liver and the pancreas stop as we stop as we stop the negative thought cycle it stops the liver from putting out two much sugar. And then that causes the pancreas to react with insulin to counteract the two much sugar, that’s called a feedback loop and then in time the pancreas just wears out or we become resistant to the insulin and it doesn’t work any longer. That’s Type II Diabetes and as we heal in our thoughts about ourself then the “Fight Flight” stops, the liver response stops, the pancreas stops and it heals. We see type II diabetes healed constantly, that’s just one of the many different kinds of autoimmune diseases. Lupus would be another one, and we see constant healings in lupus.
Sid: How about fibromyalgia?
Art: Fibromyalgia is a similar type of process to where we don’t like ourselves, we don’t feel like we’ve ever been nurtured and taken care of and we’re not worthy of being taken care of. And we are really looking to humans for our nurturing instead of God and so there is a combination of things in that. But again we have 100% success in fibromyalgia where medicine has zero success if people are willing to pray through these style of issues in their lives 100% of people are set free.
Sid: But what about migraines?
Art: Migraines is a similar issue, it’s a conflict inside of ourselves, something that’s happened and events happen and we start second guessing ourselves. And example a teaching seminary in Oregon a year ago and an eighty year old man had been suffering migraines all of his life for over forty years. And I asked him what happened forty years ago? And he was in a car accident where his son was killed. And he had been beating up on himself, not forgiving himself for that mistake in that accident. And he lived in a constant migraine; and I lead him in a prayer in front of three hundred people in that audience. Repenting for whatever he did wrong in that accident, repenting for blaming himself, repenting for not accepting the blood of Jesus, commanding that self hatred to go and his migraine was instantly healed and it’s still gone, he’s not had a migraine since.
Sid: How does someone know and this may be a foolish question, but how does someone know if they have bitterness, what at the symptoms?
Art: I would look for, one if there is the autoimmune style disease.
Sid: So you look at the disease to find out what’s going on inside of the person verses the other way around.
Art: That’s a big clue, I start asking questions; are you hard on yourself? Are you perfectionistic? Do you require yourself always to be perfect? And perfectionism is a form of self hatred and most of us don’t understand because we could never be perfect and when we’re not perfect and then we start beating up on ourselves.
Sid: Give me an example of someone that had this bitterness and what their disease was and how they got healed.
Art: Let me give you a testimony here from Barbara, she was living in chronic fatigue and chemical sensitivities. In her perfectionism she had to be perfect and as she lived in that constant state of having to be perfect and doing 100% right and those thoughts about herself was causing her adrenal glands to constantly put out too much adrenalin to much corticol and over time they fatigued, they stopped working and then chronic fatigue sets in. And then as she alters her immune system of all of those thoughts then the allergies come in and these hypersensitive reactions are created from our thoughts in being angry at people or angry at ourselves. So as Barbara leaned this, forgave those people that hadn’t nurtured her, hadn’t taken care of, repented for looking for her and tending to looking at man for her answers and repented for believing that she had to be perfect to keep God happy, this is one of the major ways we see it displayed. We have a view of God that say He’s a mean, bad dude that He’s going to beat up on them. But when we accept that God the Father always has our best interests at heart and we’re willing to accept His love and repent for believing the devil’s lies about the Father then the healing, the peace comes in. And in my own life as an example of that as I started to forgive and deal with my fears and deal with my own perfectionism, then I was healed.
Sid: You talk in your book about an unloving spirit, what is an unloving spirit? How does someone get it?
Art: The unloving spirit is simply this self hatred that we’ve been talking about. We get it by believing all of the things that Satan has told us mainly about the Father, that He is out to punish us. That He’s different than Jesus and He’s going to punish us for every mistake, He’s setting up there keeping a book about every mistake we make and we have to do all of this good stuff for our mistakes and that He’s keeping this kind of a record. This is what Satan started in Genesis 2 accusing God to Eve, and one of the biggest things we learn in working with people’s lives is that we have to heal in our relationship to our Father and understand that our Father is really a good person, a good God, that always has our best interest at heart.
Sid: Can this rejection be generational, passed on from a father to a child to a grand child?
Art: The sins of the father are passed on to the third and fourth generation according to Deuteronomy, but practically how that happens is that if Dad thought God was a mean guy, and lived in fear of Him, then I’ve learned that from my Father. Who he learned that from his grandfather and so it passes on how we’ve been taught as we’ve observed other people in our generations. So we start forgiving for that, Daniel did that in Daniel 9. Nehemiah did that in Nehemiah chapter nine, they realized why they were held in captivity; they forgave their generations; repented for doing the same things and then God restores.
Sid: Now has medical science verified from a scientific viewpoint what the Bible has taught all these generations?
Art: Absolutely, as I’ve mentioned, medicine teaches that over 80% of our diseases are caused by our thoughts, what they call psychosomatic, psychoneuroimmunology is a whole discipline psychology that teaches that. The Bible says that good thoughts are health to our bones, that negative thoughts are diseases to our bones. And we understand today that the bone produces all of our immune system and if our immune system is weak and that’s only caused by negative thoughts. And that’s suppressed or weakened immune system, any disease can come in.
Sid: But what if its part of our genetic code, these diseases, can that be changed?
Art: Absolutely, that’s one of the most exciting things about what medicine is teaching today in the studies of ethics genetics at Albert Einstein University Medical School and Doctor Segal and his book “The Developing Mind.” Now these, mind you these aren’t Christian people, but they’re teaching that our DNA and RNA is plastic, it’s changeable and then it’s rooted in our experiences. Our genetic expression is 100% rooted in the experiences of our parents and our personal experiences. And as we change our experiences, our genetic expression changes, they’re demonstrating this in medical studies today. And this is what Roman 12:1&2 teach that “As we renew our mind,” and Hebrew 9:14 teaches that we purge our conscience through the blood of Jesus our whole what of thinking changes. As we forgive, we look back at the old memory and it doesn’t hurt any more our way of thinking has changed in and that spiritual miracle we received a physical one, and new Nero pathways and new genetic expression.
Sid: This is so mind blowing, that this explains healing in a depth that most people are missing.
