Christians always seem to get bogged-down with the process of constantly labelling things as good or bad - right or wrong. This, essentially, is legalism and walking according to the flesh. The Biblical term "the flesh" refers to human effort, rather than relying on God's effort according to working the Holy Spirit.
The trouble with labelling things is that people become judgemental. I agree that people should live according to the Word of God - putting the Word of God foremost in their lives. However, believers tend to veer on the side of caution, which can lead them to go to extremes. This is not love - love accepts people and things - just as they are. What ends-up happening is that believers form mental aversions to those things they believe are wrong or bad. Then, believers form attachments to those things they believe are right or good. Another way of looking at it is that we attach a story to those things. This story might be true in part or could even be completely unfounded. What we do when we judge other people is that we classify them according to what we have experienced in the past; this comparison might be far from the truth relation to that person.
The process of living according to rules is nothing more than fear, anger and pride. It is fear because a person creates an aversion to something by fearing the consequences of engaging the thing that is dreaded. It is anger, because a person can naturally gain a sense of frustration and self-righteous indignation towards those people who do not match-up to their standards. It is pride because a person can feel inclined towards comparing themselves worth others and feeling a sense of superiority towards those whom they feel does not meet their standards of excellence. This sense of pride and the compulsion it creates to make other people conform to standards can put a great deal of pressure on people to perform.
There are things in the Bible, which we could say are very much black-and-white, in that they are easily identifiable as being good or bad, right or wrong. However, there are also many things that could be described as being grey-areas, in that it is not always easy to label them as being good or bad, right or wrong. Typically, Christians tend to veer on the side of caution by avoiding those things altogether.
Many Christians will argue and say that it is important to determine what is right and wrong, so that we can make the right choices. However, even if a person believes that he is convinced that he is right or wrong - how does he absolutely know for certain that he is right? We know that for a man to lust after a woman is wrong, Jesus said it was. But even the knowledge of this is not always sufficient in order to stop that person from doing what he knows is sinful.
When people would say to Kenneth E. Hagin that the message of God's unconditional forgiveness of sin would give people a licence to sin, he would reply by saying that people would sin even without a licence. And what about all those grey-areas - the things that a person might be uncertain about? Perhaps a person's judgements based on past experiences, might work for them, say, ninety percent of the time. But what about the ten percent of the time when they get it wrong?
The concept of attachments helps us to bring into perspective the way in which anxious and desperate individuals when it comes to creating fantasies. The Christian message of Word of Faith and prosperity is very much on the same level as self-help methods such as The Law of Attraction and The Secret.
Perhaps some would say that releasing is in some way "Gnostic", as it focuses more on the mind, rather than looking to Jesus and uttering scriptures. I agree that we should look to the Bible as being the written Word of God, but we should do this with the emphasis on seeing that God is love and that He accepts us as we are. When the Bible uses the term “Word of God”, it is usually in reference to God guiding specific individuals, rather than reading the Bible – they didn’t even have the Bible back in those days! I also agree that there are no scriptures, which make explicit mention of the want for approval, control and security - but I don’t think that that is any reason not to practice releasing.
I believe that there are several well-known motivational models in Psychology that bear a great deal of resemblance to the Sedona Method model of the four wants. I am also encouraged by the fact that such a well-known Bible teacher as Colin Dye would make such a profound statement in his book, Mastering Your Emotions, by saying that the core human needs are security, significance and self-worth. For me, these match-up very closely with the three wants in the Sedona Method and Release Technique: approval, control and security. You could say that the need for significance and self-worth are both expressions of the want for approval.
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