A Prophet for Our Problems (Theology Thursday)

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. This is Dr.

Lee Warren here with you for some spiritual brain surgery today.

It's Theology Thursday, and we are going to get after it in a minute,

and we're going to talk about prophets and problems, prophets and problems.

There's an Old Testament prophet named Habakkuk, and there's at least six things

that we can learn from him about

what to do when we're stressed out about things that we can't control.

Control. There's some sometimes in our lives when we have issues that arise

and traumas and dramas and tragedies and massive things and elections and societal

stress and all kinds of different things that can happen in our lives.

And sometimes we don't have control.

And sometimes we feel like God is not doing his job. I mean,

honestly, if we're honest with ourselves, sometimes we want to shake our fists

and say, God, what are you up to? Where did you go? Why aren't you here?

And And sometimes that leads us to thinking, maybe he's not there.

Maybe he doesn't even exist.

Maybe he's not on our side anymore. Maybe he's forever gone,

or maybe he never was there in the first place.

And if you're a seeker and you're not sure, or if you're an agnostic,

or even if you're an atheist and you found your way to this podcast somehow,

maybe in your life, you see all these things, you see injustice,

you see suffering, you see problems, you see your own issues,

you see the fact that you've tried all kinds of things to find a way to move

forward in your life and you keep circling back to the same issues and the same

thought patterns and the same problems and see the same results from everything

that God or that the world seems to be doing that seems to be happening in your life,

maybe it's time to take a fresh look at the problem and a new set of eyes.

And there's a guy in the Old Testament of the Bible, and don't balk on that.

Just understand that throughout history, people have dealt with pretty much

the same problems over and over.

And it may not be nuclear warfare and whatever it is that you're concerned about today.

But there was problems that threatened humanity and threatened societies and

threatened communities and threatened families and threatened individuals all

back to the beginning of time, to the beginning of the first humans walking this earth.

And so even if you're not a believer, you can understand that an old guy in

Israel in the 7th century B.C.

Would have a similar set of feelings and thoughts and problems and issues that

we have now, and how he managed to navigate through those could potentially

be instructive to us today,

whether or not you think it's just a story in a book or you think it's actually

the inspired Word of God.

So today we're going to talk about prophets and problems, and that's what we're

going to dig into here on Theology Thursday, because, my friend,

we have an issue with the fact that we can't change our lives until we change our minds.

And before we get started with trying to dig into understanding what prophets

have to do with our problems, I have a question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes,

there's only one rule. You have to change your mind first.

And my friend, there's a place where the neuroscience of how your mind works

smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.

Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place. Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.

Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become

healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

Okay, let's get after it. Hey, somebody wrote in the other day,

and I've been kind of chewing on it and thinking about it since they wrote in.

They said, hey, it's an election year. The last time there was an election year

in this country, there was all kinds of strife and stress and worry.

And how do Christians handle politics? How do Christians handle the fear and

the anxiety and the fighting and the way our society seems so divided across political lines now?

How should Christians handle that? And I've been thinking about that,

and I'm going to try to find a guest or maybe a series of guests as we come

closer to the election in our country.

And I think it will be helpful to think about those kinds of things.

What does citizenship on earth and in an earthly kingdom have to do with our

eternal citizenship in a heavenly kingdom?

And what's all this business about Christian nationalism that we keep hearing

about and all that stuff?

And I think that might be instructive, but that's not for today.

For today, I want to give you an example from the Old Testament of the Bible,

not just about politics,

but about what to do in a situation where everything seems very dire and everyone

seems very divided and everything seems very dangerous.

And maybe it feels like God isn't there and you wonder where justice is and

you're just not sure what's happening anymore or what to do with it.

That situation, I think, will resonate with all of us.

Wherever you fall on the left or right or political spectrum,

wherever you fall on the faith or doubt or agnosticism or atheism spectrum,

wherever you fall on, if you're the least bereaved person, as N.T.

Wright said he was, that's ever been around, he really hasn't ever had any tragedy

or issue in his life, or you're the most bereaved person and you keep having disasters.

I just got a prayer request a few minutes ago. I've been in prayer for this

family of a one-year-old little baby who was killed by dogs in their neighborhood.

Just can't imagine that.

Having lost a child when he was 19, I can't imagine watching your one-year-old

be destroyed in front of you by an animal.

That just seems particularly devastating, and it would leave you with a lot of questions.

So be in prayer for that family. I don't have details on who they are,

what their names are, where they live.

It was just an anonymous prayer request. It happened something that apparently

happened yesterday, or the prayer request came yesterday anyway.

Anyway, and so when you're in

that kind of situation, you would naturally have some questions for God.

And so I thought it would be instructive to see how somebody else who lived

thousands of years ago handled such a situation, because it's always helpful

to go back in time and see what someone in antiquity did.

Remember, I think it was Mark Twain that said, history doesn't usually repeat

itself, but it often rhymes.

And that's we've talked we've had this couple of episodes before

in the past where we talked about what i call history poems where

history just has a way of rhyming like people

face the same issues over and over and they deal with the same problems and

realms of politics when we look at our american politics and maybe the global

politics right now and we are pretty stressed out that it seems so divided that

left and right seem not to try to work together anymore but they're so far apart

And whichever side of that spectrum you fall on,

we've all gotten into this place where almost any behavior on our side seems

justified because, well, at least we're not as bad as those guys or what those

guys did, what that guy did really deserves it.

So, yeah, maybe we should change the law to prosecute that guy and go after

that guy because he's really particularly bad.

And, you know, we've got these ideas that our politics might be as bad as it's ever been.

But the truth is, if you go back in history, and even today in some places around

the world, if you're on the wrong side of a political fight,

you don't just get picked on or have lawsuits filed against you.

You get murdered. You get destroyed.

Throughout the history of the Bible, there's some examples about that.

By the way, I want to give you a little tool to read the Bible.

There's been a lot of talk lately about this deconstruction movement,

as we talked about on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast with Alyssa Childers

and Tim Barnett a few months ago. If you haven't heard that, go back and check it out.

But this deconstruction idea where people are giving up their faith and leaving

the word, leaving this church because something happened or they decided that

the Bible isn't inspired or something in the Bible makes them question God's character.

Remember when you read the Bible that there's numerous things going on in the

Bible and I think it's incredibly honest book because unlike other sacred texts

it doesn't just tell you what to do it tells you what's been done and it tells

you who to be and who to become and where the power for that comes from,

that's what's interesting about the Bible it doesn't cover up the warts and

the flaws of the people in the story and here's a little a little.

Filter that you can run. Sometimes the Bible is prescriptive.

Sometimes it says, do this and don't do that.

And God wants this of you and God wants that of you. But sometimes the Bible

is simply descriptive of what's happened.

And so when you see people behaving in certain ways and it doesn't seem very godly,

make sure that the story that you're reading isn't ascribing something to just

the behavior of broken people who are as broken and and flawed as you are, and I am, by the way.

It's not necessarily saying that's what God wanted. It's not necessarily saying

that's what God commanded.

It's just telling a story of what people did, and then generally around there

will be a story of what God does in response to that, and that's always for

our good, if you look at the long arc of history through the story.

So remember, Scripture can be prescriptive, but it can also be descriptive.

And remember to weigh the word against the word.

Not against our sensibilities, our 21st century psychological interpretations

of things, not against our standards.

Remember to weigh the word. If you accept the premise that the Bible holds itself

up to be the word of God and the premise that the Bible says that God does not sin,

does not change, doesn't change His mind, that everything He does is ultimately

for our good and He has a plan and a purpose for our lives and all of that,

if you accept that premise of the Scripture, and even if you don't think it's

literally true, At least judge the document based on its own premises.

So is it internally consistent with its own premise? And in that regard,

judge the word against the word.

So when you see people doing something and the word says, this is how God would

have wanted that done, then judge the description of what people did against

the prescription of what God did.

And you can see that the Bible holds together as a pretty consistent,

as a completely consistent document over time.

So all that being said, let's go look at Habakkuk here, this Old Testament prophet.

It's toward the end of your Old Testament.

7th century BC is when this guy lived. And the setting was, in that day and age, when kings fought,

the losing king frequently would be held before the winning king and seeing

his family murdered, raped, pillaged, abused in front of him.

And then have his eyes gouged out and then be forced to crawl on his hands and

feet and chains for the rest of his life, with the last thing he saw being the

murder and pillage of his family.

Or sometimes they would make the defeated king watch all that and then kill them in shame.

And so that's the kind of stuff we saw in that point in human history.

And now we have politicians filing lawsuits against each other,

and we think it's horrible, and it is, but it's not as bad as it's ever been.

So don't think that our American politics are as bad as it's ever been on the

planet. It's not even as bad as it's been or is in some places on the planet now.

So there's a little context that's helpful from reading history.

I'm not saying I like what's happening now. I'm just saying there's room for it to get worse.

So 7th century BC, we've got Habakkuk, and he has had enough of people turning away from God.

The setting in the Old Testament is the nation of Israel falling away from God

again. The people have left God again.

And Habakkuk was the prophet who was trying to encourage the people to turn

back towards God. And he was super frustrated.

He was tired of watching them continually sin.

He was tired of watching them leave God and not do the things that they were

supposed to do. He was crying out to God for answers.

And in chapter 1, we get a little glimpse of something that we don't think that

we're allowed to do sometimes.

He shakes his fist at God and he says, How long, O Lord, must I call for help and you do not listen?

How long must I cry out to you?

Violence, violence, but you do not save. Why do you make me look at injustice?

Why do you tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me.

There is strife and conflict abounding.

The law is paralyzed and justice never prevails.

The wicked hem in the righteous and justice doesn't prevail.

Habakkuk is shaking his fist at God. He's saying, why God? Where are you?

Where did you go? Why are you ignoring all of this?

So Habakkuk is giving us an example it doesn't get stricken

from the record here if the Bible was a made-up

book by humans and we were always trying to make God look good and

always trying to make the story seem like if you just do the right stuff everything

will work out the Bible's not that book the Bible's incredibly honest and here

you have God patiently tolerating this guy giving him the business I mean God

is being dressed down by Habakkuk here. He's shaking his fist.

Where are you, God? And God answers Habakkuk. This is fascinating.

It's interesting, though, that God's answers might surprise you.

As it turns out, the book of Habakkuk is a great lesson in patience, hope,

joy, and learning that God's plans aren't always clear or even understandable

to us, but they are always right.

There's at least six lessons that you can pull out of Habakkuk.

There's probably thousands of them.

There's only a short little three-chapter book. maybe take you 30 or 45 minutes

to read it if you were just reading it straight through i think there's probably

dozens but there's at least six lessons that i pulled out.

And just a quick rereading and i spent a fair amount of time in habakkuk to

think about all this stuff because i've obviously been obviously been feeling

kind of stressed about some of these things as well in my own life they're going

on and that email about the one-year-old just that's another one of those times

you better be out there shaking your fist at god say why does this happen Like,

would somebody give me an explanation

for why this thing could somehow be worked out for good in the end?

Like, I just don't understand, God, why a one-year-old would be killed by dogs.

It just doesn't make sense to me.

Habakkuk was definitely in on this idea that I'm always telling about self-brain

surgery. Habakkuk was a self-brain surgeon.

He was in on it. Some of the techniques that I always tell you about to listen

to and apply to change your mind and change your life, Habakkuk gives us examples of here.

Because he goes through a little process of eliminating two thought cancers

and applying two new ways to change perspective and think differently.

And that'll help us change our mind. So the punchline today is we're going to

get to the punchline by saying, if and when in your mind is a thought cancer.

If and when are two thought cancers. And the answer, the transplant that needs

to be made, remember yesterday we talked about the transplant of the mind.

If you're suffering from the thought cancers of if and when,

then you can substitute and transplant though and yet.

If you can swap those two, if and when, swapped out for though and yet,

you'll find the ability to move forward.

If you can learn to replace if and when with though and yet,

then you can learn to change your mind.

And you can get through any type of stressful situation in your life.

That's where we're going today. That's where we're going to start.

So here's the deal. In hard times, when you're wondering where God is,

a great idea is to go back in time and see what he's done in previous situations with other people.

That's what I call this idea of remembering that hope is a verb,

of remembering that hope comes from the component parts of memory and movement.

Somebody wrote in the other day when I talked about how there's no real value

in spending time in the past and dredging up all the old memories and camping

out on them and going to therapy about them.

Please understand. Somebody emailed me about this to clarify the punchline of

what I was trying to say, and here it is.

I said before, if you're going through something, you're struggling with something,

and it's hurting you, you have to name it to know it. We always talk about the thought biopsy.

Understand the things you're thinking and feeling. So there is value in processing old trauma.

The problem is, one of our common societal therapy functions right now is to

go back and process and manipulate and think about and camp out in and dwell

in the problems and focus on the problems and think about the problems and think

about the feelings associated with those problems.

And we started using language like my anxiety or my depression or my diagnosis, my thing.

And we start deciding that the problem has turned us into these people that have these problems.

And now we're thinking about the problems and how to manage the problems or

how to make other people capitulate to the problems.

And as I told you yesterday, the issue is because of how quantum physics works

and therefore because of how your brain works and your mind and your brain interact.

The more you focus on a particular issue, the more stuck you will stay in that

issue, the more unchanging that state will become.

And so the idea then is name it to know it, understand what's happened in your

past and how you got to the place that you are now.

But not dwell there and not go back and continue to try to answer the questions

why and what if and if I'd only,

because then you're focused on the thing that happened instead of the solution

or the response to the thing.

Remember, trauma is not the thing because that can't be changed.

Trauma is the response and that can be changed. So our job then as self-brain

surgeons is not to go back in time and drudge up every issue and focus on it

and try to noodle out the thing.

It's more like a Rubik's cube.

We look at the Rubik's cube and we try to solve it, right?

We don't just say, oh, Jiminy Christmas, somebody gave me a Rubik's cube and

it's impossible and it's all jumbled up and I can't solve it.

And so now I've got to deal with all these feelings that I have about the Rubik's

cube and how broken I am that I can't solve it.

And somebody messed this puzzle up and there's no way I'll ever be able to straighten that out.

And we start to focus on the fact that it's impossible or seems impossible.

And a good therapist then would say, no, wait a minute. There is a way to solve

this thing. Other people have solved it.

There's a way that you can spin this thing around and you can learn processes

and procedures to ultimately solve this puzzle and have it be part of your story

that there used to be an unsolvable problem.

And now there's a a problem that has been solved, and you've learned a whole

new set of tools to deal with the next time somebody jumbles up your puzzle, right?

So that's my point.

Name it to know it, understand it, realize it, recognize it,

put your knee on the ground and say, this is the place where my life was forever changed.

My story changed here in this place, and I don't have to build a monument here

and come back here and worship this place.

I can touch my knee to this hallowed ground, and I can say, this is the place.

Where I began the process of being forged in the fire, in the furnace of suffering.

And God said, hey, you're going to walk through this, but I'm going to parachute

in here and drop into this situation with you.

And I'm going to show you how you can be refined in the fire of this.

And you can come out on the other side as a person with a new set of skills

and a new set of problems and a new way to find hope when all seems lost and

a new story to tell to other people when they're in their darkest days.

And this can be the beginning of a time in your life of refining and changing,

even though you didn't sign up for that.

But because this thing happened, you have two choices. You can give up.

You can make that thing. You can build an altar and worship at the feet of the

thing that happened that changed

your life and ruined your life and mixed up the puzzle of your life.

Or you can go back and look at what's happened in the past, and you can say, that was the moment.

When I had to learn that I was built stronger than I thought,

that God made me with some tools, that my brain was designed to heal,

that the Holy Spirit kept His promise and was close to me when I was brokenhearted,

and I was, at that moment, began the process of being refined into the person

I am today or the person that I'm becoming,

and I have to change some of my strategies if I want to get there,

because what got me here won't get me there, okay?

That's what we get from Habakkuk.

Habakkuk opens the book with a prayerful plea to God, and God's reply is,

Look, I'm doing a work in your days that you won't even believe if I tell you.

And that's what he's doing for you, my friend. Whatever situation you find yourself

in, God has prepared something.

The New Testament says it's greater than you can even ask or imagine for you.

He wants to change your life in response to you being willing to change your

mind. and he's going to help you navigate through this situation.

So the story starts with, hey, I'm doing something in your days that you wouldn't

even believe if I told you.

And Habakkuk ends the book with this sentence, this powerful sentence, though this.

So he stops saying if and starts saying though, even though.

Though this, though this, and though this, I will rejoice in the Lord.

So we're going to go through it. God says in Habakkuk 1.5, look among the nations

and see, wonder and be astounded. it, for I'm doing a work in your days that

you wouldn't believe even if I told you.

So the story starts in chapter 1, and it ends in Habakkuk 3, 17 and 18.

Though the fig tree does not bud, though there are no grapes on the vines,

though the olive crop fails, and the fields produce no food,

though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord and be joyful in God my Savior.

Look, friend, life can be difficult.

And at some point, most of us have wondered, where are you, God?

We may even have thought that it seems like evil is winning and God is silent.

And we have a choice as to how we respond to the difficulties.

We can choose, yet I will rejoice in the Lord today, like Habakkuk did.

Or we can choose to go back and say, oh, why did this happen?

Why does this always happen?

Where are you, God? What are you all about? Why did you give up on us?

Or we can say, hey, God's up to something that I won't even believe if he came

and told me about it and he's not ready to tell me about it yet.

Maybe I'm not at the place where he's gonna deliver me yet, but he is up to

something that's for my good.

So are you going to get stuck shaking your fist at God, or are you going to

go through what the prophet Habakkuk did?

He had an attitude that is worth paying attention to, my friend.

He made a choice to choose joy.

I'm always telling you, you get to choose. You're not a victim.

You're not an innocent victim.

You get to choose the circumstances, and you get to choose the response.

You get to choose the emotional, neurochemical, and spiritual response that

you have been in through the response that you have to the hard things in your life.

They're going to happen. We know that hard things are going to happen,

but you get to choose how you respond to them.

And Habakkuk made a choice to choose joy.

He was really, really upset by the spiritual situation that the people were

in, the moral decline of his society, like we've been talking about.

It was terrible, but God's response made him feel even worse at first because

God said, hey, I'm going going to do something you're not even going to believe.

And what the solution was, was that he was going to raise up an evil nation,

this nation called Babylon, to punish Judah, which was Israel's split off other half.

And Habakkuk didn't understand why God would use evil people to accomplish his purposes.

And Habakkuk was kind of bent out of shape about it. Because sometimes the lesson here is,

sometimes the way God chooses to do something seems odd to us or seems incorrect

to us, but we We have to learn to trust him and know that he's always up to our good in the end,

that he's not going to choose a path that's actually bad.

It may seem hard to understand, but when he does it, it's going to be right.

So we have to learn to trust.

Habakkuk doesn't get it. Why are you going to raise these people up?

He didn't understand why God would do such a thing, and he would raise up these

evil people to punish the good people right in front of him.

Didn't understand it. But just two chapters later, remember,

there's always more chapters in the story.

Two chapters later, he turns to joy because he learned in those two short chapters

how to rely on God's steadfast faithfulness and his unending love.

He learned to remember that he trusted God instead of his circumstances.

Now, although the plan wasn't clear, it was never clear to Habakkuk,

God's plan, but God proved that he's always up to something even when we can't

see it. Remember, we talked about the other day in the paid episode on Sunday, the rescue's underway.

We can't see it. There's a lot happening that we can't see.

It's super important that when we can't see God's plan.

We need to emulate what Habakkuk did. He learned to trust anyway.

He lived by faith and not by sight. He had that faith that created joy in spite of hard circumstances.

And the secret was self-brain surgery.

He stopped stewing in the bad neurochemistry cancers, the thought cancers of

only, if only, and when this,

and he swapped those out for the

very powerful though and yet cures to the neurochemistry cancers. answers.

He swapped if and when for though and yet.

And we got a lot of if and whens in our lives, don't we?

Do you know somebody? Maybe you know somebody or maybe you don't.

You know somebody who never seems to be happy, who never seems to be content.

They're constantly thinking they need this thing or that thing or the new car or the new house.

Or they say things like, I'd be happy if this happened, or I'd be happy if that,

or when I get this job, or when he proposes, or when I buy this house or when

I win the lottery or when she says yes, or when I get a new car,

then I'll be happy. Then I'll have peace.

Then I'll find joy. Or if my wife gets cured of this cancer, then I'll be okay.

The problem is it doesn't usually work out that way because when you get the

thing or if the thing happens, you just find something else to be discontent about.

The target moves or another bad thing happens and that steals your joy.

You finally got the thing And then this other thing happened that steals your

joy, that ifs and whens might happen in your life.

And when they do, if your circumstances define your ability to find joy,

you're going to be hosed again.

But people still find ways not to be happy even when things seem to be going well, don't they?

Because we see movie stars and

rock stars and famous athletes and wealthy people miserable all the time.

And that's why, my friend, we cannot base our joy on the circumstances that surround our lives.

We cannot base our joy on who's the president or who's the senator.

We can't base our joy on who holds the house or who holds the senator,

who your governor is. is we cannot, because if we do, we're going to be in big

trouble when we don't get those things that we think we want the next time.

If we have a good job, we can pay the bills. We've got friends,

we're married, and everybody's super great, and all these things are good.

We might actually find some contentment for a while. We might even feel joy.

But what happens then when the diagnosis comes back, or she leaves,

or you find that he cheated, or if life becomes tough because you lose a child like we did?

What if you lose your job? You can't pay your bills. The market goes south.

They take away your guns or whatever it is you're worried about.

What if you don't have friends you can count on?

What happens then? Can you still rejoice in the Lord in those moments?

Or are you wrecked by the circumstances of your life? Well, here's the punchline again.

Circumstances must never be the dictators of whether or not you have hope or

joy, because if they are, you are in for big trouble, my friend.

Because Jesus said, In this world, you will have trouble.

In this world, you will have trouble. Habakkuk's confident prayer,

his confident choice to be joyful, to declare it was in verse 17 and 18,

like I said, and it's the perfect demonstration of faith.

It's perfect because Habakkuk knew that this world was not his home,

and he trusted God's plan even when he couldn't see it, my friend.

Now, this happens in the New Testament too. 2 Philippians 4,

7 says, the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,

will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

He's talking about the peace that's beyond understanding, the one that you can't

fathom. You can't even ask or imagine it.

The kind of peace that gives you joy, even when you're going through hard things,

that makes you an untouchable.

John 15, 11, Jesus said, these things I have said to you, that my joy may be

in you, that your joy may be full.

He's talking about a joy, a happiness,

a makarios that's not tied to circumstances. It's tied to savior.

It's not tied to situation. It's tied to Savior. It's not what, it's who.

That's where hope comes from. That's where joy comes from.

If you're not a believer, friend, I'm telling you, just acknowledge the fact

that you're listening to a podcast about mind change and life change because

what you've tried before isn't working.

And if what got you here isn't getting you there, then maybe it's time to just

taste and see, to just give it a try, to see if this stuff that we talk about here is actually true.

And the nice thing about God is if when you try him, if you read his word and

apply it and just try and say, pray an honest prayer that says,

I'm not sure I believe in you.

In fact, I don't believe in you, but show me who you are anyway.

He'll show up in that prayer.

He'll send somebody in your life that says, hey, or you'll notice somebody in

your life and say, wow, that person seems to be able to handle things a little differently than I do.

Maybe there's something to that. And you'll find somebody. If you seek,

he will show up. I'm just telling you, he'll give you this understanding and

this peace that you cannot even fathom, this joy that holds up when life gets hard.

If you tie your joy to something that never changes, then you can't be crushed

when the bottom falls out of your world. You just have something you can hold on to.

And those two verses, they talk about peace and joy that are completely decoupled from circumstance.

Remember when I talked before about how I did all this research and how people

into to how people handle hard things that I wrote about in my book, Hope is the First Dose.

That's where the concept of the book really came from. I interviewed all these

people and talked to all these patients and dealt with all these people going

through glioblastoma and hard things.

And I started noticing there's about four patterns of how people process and handle trauma.

And we've talked about them on the podcast before. And if you haven't read Hope

is the First Dose, they're all in there, even with the graphs.

But this is the genesis of where all that came from. And after we lost Mitch,

I had to recognize that I was one of those four types too.

If you tie your joy to something that never changes, you have a place to land

when things get hard, and that's how you can become more untouchable.

I found out that the degree to which joy and circumstance are coupled in your

life is directly proportional to how miserable you are, or conversely, how happy you are.

The more you couple joy and circumstance, the more miserable you are.

The less you couple them, the more you decouple them, the more you separate

joy from circumstance, the happier you can be, almost infinitely happier.

And the path to becoming infinitely happier, my friend, is to decouple joy from circumstance.

And that is the lesson of Habakkuk.

Habakkuk lived in an uncertain time like we do. Habakkuk wasn't sure what was

going to happen, and neither are we.

Habakkuk raised all these questions to God and shook his fist in God's face

and said, how long must I put up with these people?

But he ended just two short chapters later with, yet I will rejoice in the Lord. This is a transplant.

Yesterday we talked about how these two people who were in terrible conflict

with each other could only solve the problem that they both got in the same

mind, not by capitulating to each other's mind, but to having the mind of Christ.

And that's what we have to get to here. It's the lesson of Habakkuk.

He ends with this brain-mind transplant of if and when, for though and yet.

And the path that you take over those three chapters is the path from frustration

and fear and failure and anguish and anxiety and depression and shame to joy.

It's the path from hurt to healing. It's the path from symptom and circumstance to Savior.

And I would highly encourage you to read Habakkuk because sometimes you just

don't understand God's plan.

Sometimes you just don't know what's going to happen. Sometimes you aren't sure

if it's going to be okay, but you want to to have joy during your days on earth,

and Habakkuk shows you how to get it done, and it's a thought transplant,

if and when, for though and yet.

There's at least six other lessons in there, and we're going to save those for

a theology episode on the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast on Sunday.

I'll send you an email about that on Sunday. But for today, I just want to leave

you with the fact that there is a path, a reliable path from if and when, shaking your fist,

begging God to help you understand why, and not being able to process the things

that we go through, the drama and the trauma and the tragedy and the massive

things, there's a path to changing your mind.

It involves transplanting if for though.

It involves this sort of if and when and if only and why, God,

to though this happens, yet I will hang on.

Though this happens, yet I will have joy.

Though this happens, yet I will trust.

Because hope is not an accident. Hope is a verb.

Hope is an action word. It's memory, and then it's movement.

It's saying people have solved this puzzle before, and there is a solution. There is a path.

There is a process, and I'm going to get on it because I'm going to change my

mind, and I'm going to change my life.

And with Habakkuk, we will shake our fists and say, God, we don't understand.

But though we don't understand, yet we will trust you. And yes,

God, we will start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship

the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,

check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.

And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,

every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries around the world.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend,

you can't change your life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.