Sid Roth

Sid: My guest by way of telephone is Dr. James Richards I’m interviewing him on his book “How to Stop the Pain.” Pain maybe in evitable but suffering optional, but what’s even more exciting to me is there are walls between husbands and wives, children and parents, wives and husbands, pastors and members of the congregations, employers and employees, schoolmates everything these walls… and God is supernaturally showing us how these walls can come down and we don’t have to keep that pain Yeshua took the pain for us. But one of the most fascinating things Jim in your book has to do with the correlation between sickness and judgment. On yesterday’s broadcast you were saying that physiologically when we make judgments we open ourselves it’s almost like a door is open for sickness explain this.

Jim: Exactly that’s right and incredibly the mind always seeks equilibrium. In other words, the moment you pass a judgment everything in your mind and in your brain actually goes to work to prove that it’s true. There’s a little bundle of nerves…

Sid: Give me an example of a judgment and then explain what you’re explaining.

Jim: Okay the judgment is assuming to know why someone is doing something. Of course the brain actually does this on any assumption it doesn’t have to be a judgment. I’ll give you a good example let’s say you look down the street here and you a lady and she kind of dressed maybe what you might consider a little like a temptress or something.

Sid: And you see, hay not down the street you see them in church.

Jim: Yeah.

Sid: And you form that judgment, that everyone can relate there.

Jim: You say “This is why she is this way she’s loose she’s immoral.” And you watch her as she walks down the street and you notice that she’s walking up to men and talking to them. So you’re absolutely sure then that she’s a prostitute and that she’s trying to sell herself to these men. And everything that you begin to see there’s a little bundle of nerves called the reticular activating system at the base of the skull…

Sid: And you know the devil doesn’t even have to function in this you’re doing just fine you’re doing his job. (Laughing)

Jim: You’re doing his job and he’s taking a little break and laughing at you. Well the moment that you pass a judgment or make an assumption the reticular activating system starts changing the function of the brain and you go into selective processing and you begin to only see and notice those things that support your judgment or your opinion. So now you’re seeing all of this stuff that tells you this woman’s a prostitute. Now when she gets up to you she walks up to you you’re ready for her to proposition you she hands you a track and you find out that she’s a Christian and she was witnessing to those people and you didn’t even notice that she was carrying a Bible, and you didn’t even notice any of these other factors all you noticed would be those things that would support your judgment.

Sid: Selective editing.

Jim: And we do that I don’t know if you’ve ever done it you go to the grocery store and you’re wife says go pick up this stuff and make sure you get this brand and make sure that it doesn’t have any salt in it. You run in the grocery store you look at the label you pick it up you run back home; you open the bag and you proudly hand it to your wife and she’s like “What did you get this for?” And you look at it and its like “That’s not what I bought.” But you and I both know that you can look at something and believe that you’re reading a different label.

Sid: So we humans because of Adams original sin, our disposition is to judge and when we judge what happens now physiologically?

Jim: When we judge… here’s the incredible thing here’s the place that judgment and sickness comes together is basically the judgments we pass about ourselves and even the judgments that we pass about God. If I’m… see guilt brings the expectation of punishment. And so when I commit when I commit a particular sin when I struggle with something and I pass a judgment on God you know and maybe things begin to go wrong in my life I say “This is why this is happening God is doing this to me.” You know we run a substance abuse clinic for years and we found that you can’t get people off drugs and you can’t get people well if they believe God’s doing it to them or they believe that it’s punishment for something they’ve done.

Sid: Hm.

Jim: Now what happens every cell in the body actually has intelligence. With the advent of our understanding of DNA this has become common knowledge in the scientific community. And you figure that there’s enough intelligence in a cell to clone a human being possibly, we know that they can clone an animal so there’s a lot of intelligence there. Well that intelligence in every cell is not just intellectual intelligence it’s also emotional intelligence. So anything that you believe at a very deep level every cell in your body believes it and works to make it happen. So if I’m in expectation of punishment coming to me from something that I have done the fact that I’m expecting that, the fact that I have…

Sid: Isn’t that what Job was saying when he said “The thing that I feared…”

Jim: Sure.

Sid: “…has come upon me?”

Jim: Exactly, that’s what the children of Israel did. They said the tested or tempted God they put God on trial they passed the judgment that says “He could not be trusted.” And that’s why they fell in the wilderness. So the person that believes something every cell in their body works and if you believe for example that you’re unworthy of success then every time you have the opportunity to succeed you’re going to have a conflict with your boss and something’s going to go wrong. And you can scream at the devil you can pray more but the truth is until you release your judgments and renew your mind it’s going to keep going that way.

Sid: Someone that’s accident prone that might be the reason.

Jim: Exactly. Interesting thing, I don’t know if we have enough time to go into this, but I had a problem that where every time I had an off day I got sick. I either got sick, felt bad or injured myself. And so this went on for years and finally after several years in my lightning quick mind I said “There’s a problem, there’s something wrong here.”

Sid: (Laughing)

Jim: I spent some time in prayer and meditation just seeking God and the Lord brought to my memory a time when I was a child and my father had come home and beat my mother all night. And the next morning she was getting ready to go to work I was extremely emotional I was crying and I was pleading with her “Please do not go to work.” And she said “Son as long as I’m able I have to work.” Now I developed a belief from that that said “The only reason not to work is to not be able.” Out of that belief every time I’d get an off day I’d get sick or injure myself and when I realized that all of this was emerging out of my own heart it was as simple as releasing that belief choosing a new belief and moving on and bringing an end to it and it doesn’t happen anymore.

Sid: Do you think that all sicknesses is a result of what you just described?

Jim: No, I don’t think that all sicknesses are we have physiologically things that happen to us. I have found that the ability to recover from sickness is directly related to our beliefs and particularly our beliefs about worthiness.

Sid: Give me another specific example.

Jim: A specific example?

Sid: Yes.

Jim: I have had dozens of people in my clinic that this has happened to. A person comes in… I’ll give you one on weight loss this is

Sid: Oh, I want that one.

Jim: There’s somebody that comes in their… and this actually happened a lady she was probably 300 pounds overweight she had tried everything in the whole world nothing ever worked. I began to work with her and she had lost about 80 or 100 pounds. Suddenly she just loses her mind, metaphorically, goes crazy goes on an eating binge disappears won’t come back into the clinic. Now ultimately what I was eventually able to discover in working with her was that she had a belief that if she was thin that she would get into sin because she had a promiscuous past. And she had passed this judgment about herself and about why I do this and why you know why it would happen to me if I looked thin again. And so even though she was getting the desired results she sabotaged it. Actually studies show that most people’s fatal illness occur at their moments of great opportunity.

Sid: Explain that.

Jim: Really most people don’t believe that they deserve to retire they’ve worked all of their life they don’t feel qualified, they don’t feel it’s right that they have something. Like in my example I grew up believing that I was unlovable. So when I would get in a relationship the moment the relationship would begin to become good I would destroy it and run. See the same thing happened with sickness, it happens with finances if we live out our beliefs and judgments and literally can’t see life any other way.

Sid: Jim how did you come to all of this understanding? This is brilliant it really is.

Jim: Well again you know fortunately for me I wasn’t raised in church so I didn’t have a lot of preconceived ideas. And when I read the Bible I didn’t read it so much from a mystical point of view I read it from a very practical point of view. And really all of this came out of number 1 the pages of the Bible, and then me applying this to my personal life. Then taking it into the lives of the people that I have ministered to for these 30 years.

Sid: Quick give me a testimony of somebody that’s read your book and what’s happened to them.

Jim: This doesn’t have anything to do with healing but one particular testimony pops in mind was a man who calls me and he said “You know something my wife and I have been reading your material.” And he said “We’ve been married we’ve come from a strict background not a lot of love and compassion shown in his background.” He said “You know for the first time in 21 years out of her own initiative she put her arms around me and told me she loved me.”