Changing Our Brains with the ABIDE Method (Self-Brain Surgery Saturday)

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. Dr. Lee Warren here with

you, and it's Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, and we've had a long night.

I had significant dental work done yesterday.

Twelve hours ago, I couldn't move my face on the right side,

and I was really worried about that because it was taking way longer to wake

up than I thought, and then I thought it should, and so when I went to bed last

night, I woke up at about 1130,

my face on fire, and just worried about my face.

And it took me a while to get my mind under control and give that to God.

And I thought that was ironic because yesterday on Frontal Oak Friday,

we talked about this new practice we're gonna do.

And heard from many of you yesterday that you're all in on eight weeks of abide

to train your brain 10 to 12 minutes a day to learn how to abide,

get your thinking under control, learn how to approach God and hear him in a

new way and rewire your brain to become more resilient and able to handle the

things that come along, on, these traumas and tragedies and massive things.

And just last night, here I was struggling with worry over something I could

not control in the middle of the night.

Finally got up at 1.30 to go take some Advil and try to get my face to stop

hurting and drop something and woke Lisa up.

She was supposed to fly to San Antonio this morning for her grandson's birthday.

I was unable to go because of my dental work and because I've got patients in

the hospital. hospital.

So for the second year in a row, missing my grandson's birthday.

But here we were at 1.30, I woke her up.

While she was up, she checked her app to find that her flight had been canceled.

So that led to a couple of hours of trying to figure out what we were going

to do about trying to get her to San Antonio.

And I think we got that all sorted out. But nevertheless, it just turned out

to be a really long night.

And so I thought, well, I'll just go to sleep and I won't release least an episode

today but as I went to sleep or as I tried to go to sleep I should say I put

myself through the abide process that we talked about yesterday and in the middle

of that I received the clearest most beautiful.

Peaceful set of instructions I can only call it of what I needed to share with

you today and what I needed to write down because this is going to form the next layer,

the next level of our Abide practice.

And for those of us who have committed to trying to learn how to do this,

to try to learn this technique of prayer and meditation that doesn't just calm down the noise,

but actually turns up the voice of God and helps us find our feet and our place

in our life and helps us rewire our brains structurally,

because we're really literally doing self-brain surgery,

then I need to share this with you.

And it became so crystal clear, basically why I'm doing all of this.

And I'm going to give you that today on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

Apologize if my voice is still kind of weird. Again, 12 hours ago, I couldn't move my face.

So I'll try to make it as normal as possible. But I have to share this with you.

And I think this is going to lead to some even deeper levels in the future.

I'm excited to see what God's going to reveal to us. But we're going to learn

another level of how to abide today. day.

I'll give you a little bit of music to practice with, and we'll take it to another level.

And we're going to do all that right after you answer one question for me.

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 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, we're going to get after it. Why is it important to develop a habit of

intentional, purposeful, quiet time in prayer? Why is that important?

Well, first, I would just say from a very practical way, is if we're going to

try to imitate Christ in His life, then we need to kind of imitate the things that He did.

And Luke 22, 39 through 44 says it very plainly.

He left the upper room with His disciples and went as was His habit to the Mount

of Olives, his place of secret prayer.

Jesus had a habit, and everybody knew it. That's how Judas knew where to find

him when he betrayed him, because he knew Jesus had a habit of going to a specific

place at a specific time to get alone with God,

to sort out his thoughts, communicate in prayer, and get his mind under control.

That's what Jesus did, okay? Now, on the night, the story in Luke 22,

this is the night before he's crucified, okay? Okay, he's in the garden and

he's dealing with the hardest, biggest thing in his life.

And he should have said or could have said, I'm way too busy to go out there

and pray. I'm about to get crucified up in here.

Right? He didn't. He carried out

his disciplined habit because in the most important moment of his life,

He needed to ground himself and center his mind and be ready to handle that

in the best way that he could possibly handle it.

And so he continued to go to his place of prayer as was his habit.

And so that's the practical reason why you ought to have a habit like this too.

You think you're too busy?

You're probably not getting crucified and being punished for the whole sins

of the world and then have to deal with them for three days and then have to

be resurrected tomorrow.

You're probably just going to a difficult day at work, right?

You're going through a divorce. You're dealing with a difficult diagnosis.

Those are hard things, okay? But Jesus gave this example of don't skip the habit,

don't skip the process of getting your mind and your brain on the same page,

getting your spirit connected to your mind and your brain when you're going

through the hard things,

because that's where you find the power to manage and go through those hard

things, to be more resilient,

to be able to land on something that's going to hold you up.

This is where we handle our traumas and tragedies and our massive things.

Is developing this disciplined life with something that's going to hold us up

when life seems to make us crumble.

Remember the Chris Voss thing we always talk about when life gets hard, when the pressure's on.

You don't rise to the occasion. You don't suddenly become able to do all these

amazing things that you need to do in the heat of the moment.

No, you basically fall back to the plays you've been running in practice.

You fall back to the habits and disciplines that you've developed.

You fall back on your preparation, on your beliefs, on your promises,

on the things you've held onto, on the prehab that you've done.

That's the treatment plan in my book, Hope is the First Toast.

You fall back on that stuff.

So we're going to fall back like Jesus did, as was his habit.

So remember the other day we talked about scripture in 2 Corinthians that said,

we have the mind of Christ.

If you've been saved and you have a relationship with him and you've been given

a new spirit, a new life, a new mind, a new body,

1 Corinthians 2.16 says we have the mind of Christ.

Not we can have, not we should have, not we might have if we get ourselves perfect enough.

We have it. So the problem with our life is we're constantly living in this

state of cognitive dissonance of where we're living as if we have our own mind,

as if we're stuck with our own thoughts, as if we're stuck in our own feelings,

as if we're stuck with our own past.

And really, we have the mind of of Christ. So how do we move the line that we're

living on to the line that we actually have?

How do we transform our minds, as Romans 12 says? How do we do that?

Well, I think it starts with this disciplined approach to learning how to abide in Him.

Go back to yesterday and the day before. Spiritual brain surgery on Thursday,

frontal lobe Friday yesterday.

Those two episodes will get you caught up if you haven't heard this before, if this is new to you.

We're going to go back to the book How God Changes Your Brain by Andrew Newberg.

Again, he's not a Christian.

He's an evolutionary believer, psychologist.

He's not writing this book from a place of how to exploit your Christian life.

He's not doing that. he's writing in what happens in brain research when they

scan people's brains after they pray and meditate and has observed these changes that happen.

He chalks them up to evolutionary accidents.

I think there's something else. But he tells the story early in the book of

a man named Gus who was getting older and losing memory and worried about his memory.

And he joined Andrew Newberg's research program to try to learn a habit of meditation

to see what would happen in his brain and see if it would help him with his memory.

And he learned over time, after eight weeks of a 12-minute-a-day program using

an Eastern meditation program called Sata Nama,

which is basically repeating these phrases over and over and learning to tap

and do things with his hands to get his frontal lobes calmed down and all of

that, that he doubled his performance, almost doubled his performance on a memory test.

He significantly improved. And the functional imaging showed significant changes

in the parts of his brain,

prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, thalamus amygdala,

all that stuff that are involved in resilience and memory and emotional regulation

and reducing anxiety and all those things got better after a very short period

of time because he focused.

And so yesterday I said, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to learn

how to focus, except we're not going to use some Eastern meditation technique.

We're going to try to see if God will keep His promises to us if we approach

Him and seek Him with all our hearts, like He says He will.

But I want to give you this information from Newberg. It's important. He says this,

Spiritual experiences and the techniques we use to evoke them involve a complex

network of interconnecting neural functions that are equally influenced by our

thoughts, feelings, memories,

physical conditions, genetic predispositions, and the personal experiences we've

had throughout our lives.

But the key to meditation, and thus our ability to change our brain,

can be reduced to a handful of specific steps. Specific steps.

Gus's memory improved for the following reasons. Here's the four things I want you to get today.

He wanted to improve, so he had a desire to get better.

Two, he stayed focused on his intention and goal, so he did the work, okay?

This is not some magic trick. He did the work. He did the process 12 minutes a day for eight weeks.

Number three, he consciously regulated his breathing, posture,

and body movements. months.

And number four, he practiced the skill over time. When the pressure's on,

you don't rise to the occasion. You fall back to your preparation.

Gus practiced the skill.

So Newberg says, the first step begins with desire, the conscious wish to change.

Once that decision is made, you must train yourself to remain focused on your

goal. And it takes practice.

But it can happen quickly that the synaptic connections and dendritic changes

in your brain happen almost immediately.

But to root them and firmly establish them in your brain, you've got to practice over time.

Focused attention begins to build new neuronal circuits that once established

will automatically activate those parts of the brain that involve motivational activity.

And the more that activity is repeated, the stronger those neural circuits become.

Now, we did a few episodes a while back about the anterior mid-singulate.

Andrew Huberman and other people have recently been talking about this,

is the fact that your mid-singulate is the part that involves willpower.

And at first, when you try to do something new, you don't have a lot of willpower.

But what's been shown now clearly is when you make yourself do something that

seems hard or seems uncomfortable,

not only can you get that done, you can drive yourself through it,

but the anterior mid-singulate becomes stronger and more able to help you accomplish

other things that seem hard and undesirable or hard and unattainable or hard

and impossible. possible.

The more you practice hard things, the better your brain becomes at getting

you through things that seem hard.

So it's this process of what you are doing, you're getting better at.

That's one of our corollaries to the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery.

What you're doing, you're getting better at.

Okay. So let's take these coming 12 weeks or eight weeks rather,

and let's spend 10 or 12 minutes a day doing this thing that seems hard to try

to learn how how to abide and watch God keep his promise.

Watch the self brain surgery work out because Jesus isn't just a good guy,

he's a great physician, okay?

He's going to change your mind and change your life and change your body and

change your habits and change your circumstances and help you break free from

the trauma and tragedy and massive things of your past. He's gonna help you get unstuck, okay?

Because remember, Hebb's Law, the cells that fire together wire together.

We're going to tell our brains which cells to fire, and we're going to try to get better together.

So that being said, yesterday we talked about the fact that Jesus had a habit

of going out to pray and doing this thing in a private place,

and I want you to do that too.

And I want you to remember that our self-brain surgery passages,

Ephesians 4, Paul, rather, through the Holy Spirit, It gives us this incredible

example and a promise here that's easily missed if you're not careful. It starts in verse 11.

Christ himself gave the apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors,

and teachers to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ

may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of

the Son of God and become mature,

attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

You see this right here? Throughout history, since Christ came and established

His church, He has provided a line of pastors, teachers, evangelists,

prophets, apostles, people who can train and equip us.

And right now, I'm doing that with you. And you can do it for other people.

And you have people in your life, pastors and chaplains and teachers who can help you extract.

Remember our Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, we're talking about the exegesis

discipline that we want to develop of going into Scripture and drawing everything

out of it, that lectio divina, that chewing on it and holding it in our minds

until we extract everything we can from it.

And the Holy Spirit begins to teach us new things about that book.

And the Word doesn't just be read by us. It's actually reading us and shows

us places that we need to change. That's what we're going to get into today

with our deeper level of Abide.

But here's the promise. It's easy to miss this.

We are intended to attain to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

If Christ had a mind, okay, if you think about Jesus as a person,

a human being in a body who's also God, he had a brain like you do.

He had joints and tendons and ligaments and a heart and two lungs and two kidneys

and and a liver, and small and large intestines, and an esophagus,

and earlobes, and all the stuff that you have.

He had a human body, and he had a mind and a brain that were connected.

And his mind was intimately connected to his father.

And we learn in 1 Corinthians that we have, if we've been transformed physically,

We have the mind of Christ, and the difference is we always have the fact we see this in physics.

We see it in Newtonian physics and relativity.

We see it all over the place in medicine and astronomy and cosmology and evolutionary biology.

We're learning to see that there always is something that seems obvious on the

surface but turns out to have a deeper level that's actually better for us when

we study it and learn more about it. We're going to talk more about that in my letter tomorrow.

If you're not getting my newsletter, by the way, check out my newsletter.

Later, okay? It's important.

But there's a scripture that says the man who thinks he knows something should

take care because he doesn't yet know as he ought to know.

He doesn't yet know as he ought to know.

That's 1 Corinthians 8, 2, and 3. If any man thinks he knows something,

he knows not yet as he ought to know.

So there's this level where we think we know something, thing.

We think we can observe it and see it and figure it out.

But we don't actually know yet that there's actually another layer, another level.

And so we have this mind of Christ. We've been promised we have this mind of

Christ, but we live in this other mind that's my brain last night, this monkey mind.

What if my face doesn't get better? What if I can't talk? What if I can't podcast or record books?

Or how am I going to talk to my patients if I'm drooling out of the side of

my mouth? What's going to happen if I don't get that under control?

And I'm spinning sinning out, I'm basically sinning with my thoughts.

I'm not trusting Christ that that local anesthetic is going to go away and the

dentist didn't actually injure my facial nerve and I'm going to be okay and all that stuff.

And I'm stressed out and I'm not living as if I have the mind of Christ.

I'm living in my own mind.

And so He promises us here that if we practice this life of pursuing Him,

abiding in Him, we can attain to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

So the deep level, the reality is that we have the mind of Christ.

He says what happens if you attain to the whole measure, verse 14,

Ephesians 4, then we will no longer be infants tossed back and forth by the

waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning

and craftiness of people and their deceitful scheming.

If you don't get the mind of Christ right, if you don't pursue this idea of

making your mind more and more like his, you are vulnerable when life hurts

to being blown around by things that people tell you, to being blown around

by the new thing on Instagram or the new trend on TikTok,

to being influenced by the media or by somebody else who has a different idea than you do.

And this may lead to deconstruction. like we talked about on the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast.

It may lead to you deciding you don't believe what you thought you believed

because you're blown around because you haven't attained the fullness,

the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. And this is very important.

Down in Ephesians 4.17, he gives us the perfect contrast of people who have

and live in the mind of Christ and the people who don't. So he calls them Gentiles.

And understand the metaphor here wasn't a metaphor in his time.

He's talking about the Jews who are God's chosen people who are now Christians,

who have accepted that He was the Messiah, and they've received the Holy Spirit,

and they're saved, versus the Gentiles.

And in that worldview, that meant anybody who wasn't a Jew.

And in Paul's line of thinking then, there was anybody who had not yet accepted

Christ, he's lumping into this Gentile category.

So in our world today, we would say saved and unsaved people,

people who have received Christ and those who have not. verse Ephesians 4,

17. Listen to this very carefully, friend.

I need you to hear this today. So I tell you this and insist on it in the Lord.

That's my dad snapping his fingers. Look in my eyes, Paul's saying.

I insist on this. I tell you this. I insist on it, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do.

Now, don't over-dramatize this. He's not talking right here necessarily about

unholy living or sin or lust or adultery or murder or any of those things.

He's saying, because there were some Gentiles, and I know many people who aren't

saved, who were good people, who lived good lives. They obeyed the law.

They were good moral people. They held up a good standard for their own lives.

So this is not necessarily saying, change all your habits, change all your patterns,

stop living like those people over there, get off of Instagram, all that.

That's not what he's saying. What does he say after the comma?

I tell you this, insist on it in the Lord that you must no longer live as the

Gentiles do, do, in the futility of their thinking.

They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God

because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.

Listen, this is really important, okay?

We use the term ignorant usually as an insult, but what it really means is that

you're unaware of something. You don't know about something. thing.

And they've hardened their hearts to truth because they don't understand that

if they would just change their mind, they could change their lives.

And then they begin to be people who pursue things that they think will make them happy. Okay.

So don't, again, don't say it. Don't, in your mind, automatically think that

that means these were all horrible people who were, you know,

engaging in these horrendously bad acts.

It says they lose sensitivity and they they give themselves over to sensuality.

I always read that as sexuality, but what it really means is you're pursuing

things that you think are going to make you happy.

When the mind of Christ says, here's what really makes you happy,

you keep eating and getting hungrier and drinking and getting thirstier and

pursuing happiness and finally getting the thing that you thought the guy or

the girl or the job or the money or the diagnosis is better or whatever,

and you still aren't happy because the target keeps moving and the truth is

you can't ever get to a place,

where you're happy and can live in that abundance that john 10 10 says that

jesus came here to give you until you get your thinking right until you do self-brain

surgery until you change your mind you will never be able to go back up into

the chapter in verse 14 to stop getting tossed around,

by everything that changes and everything that happens and every wind and every

every cultural movement and every moment happens, you get blown around and you

still can't find your way because you're not living in the reality that you

have the mind of Christ, okay?

So again, this episode is not trying to be a Bible study.

I'm trying to give you this idea that there is a path to you living in this

abundance, and it starts with abiding in Him.

Now yesterday, yesterday we covered this little mnemonic that I gave you.

Instead of Sonomate having some Eastern mumbo-jumbo wrapped up in our head that

we try to memorize and use, let's have a word that we can remember.

Remember, John 15, in the first 10 verses, Jesus used the word abide in me,

abide, abide, abide, 10 times in 10 verses. That's obviously important.

And because of that, I wanted to give you the word abide so that you can say,

hey, how can I get into this habit like Jesus did?

And we talked about approach.

Let's just get into this place. Go to your quiet place. Find your quiet time.

Put on some headphones, play some music that doesn't have words maybe to help

you not get drawn into singing lyrics and using your frontal lobe to remember lyrics and all that,

but some instrumental music, some quiet music so that the right side of your

brain can come online and your

parietal lobe can begin to relax and unself you to move you into a more.

God-honoring position of being able to think about what He wants and what He

needs and what other people want and what other people need and what God wants

you to be about and and think about, and feel.

So approach him, and turn down that volume.

Maybe close your eyes if you're not driving, or running, or whatever,

and see this darkness, and this warm environment envelop you, and calm yourself,

and reach down, and there's a volume knob on your left, and just turn that down,

and in your mind, imagine that you're turning down your ability to hear your

racing thoughts, and you're not gonna worry about your face not looking better

tomorrow, and you're not gonna worry about whether you're gonna be disfigured,

or be unable to podcast anymore. more.

You're going to turn down that voice, that thing you always hear,

that thing you always worry about. Why is everything so hard?

I'm never going to be okay again. You're going to just turn that down, okay?

And we're going to just approach this environment, this time,

and we're going to then reach down, and there's another knob on our right-hand side.

We can start to turn up and say, God, I'm just going to turn this up,

and I'm waiting for you to speak here into this moment, and I'm trying to hear you and listen to you.

I'm going to play that Carl Minor music that I played you yesterday,

just for a couple of minutes, this music.

Music.

Relaxing. Just breathe. Just breathe.

Kind of scan your body. Find anything that's uncomfortable, anything you need

to kind of let go of in your mind.

Just kind of breathe and regulate and slow your heart rate down.

Music.

Now let's just invite him into this moment. Just say, God, just just come in

here and calm my racing thoughts and keep your promise to relieve me of my fears

and just be with me here, Father.

Just be with me in this moment. I invite you here.

Surrender my will to you as I'm inviting you into this place.

Music.

Now we're going to acknowledge that we depend on Him. I can't fix my facial

nerve if it's messed up, but you can.

I can't solve that financial problem while I'm asleep and the bank's closed

and I can't call the landlord. I can't do any of that tonight.

I'm just, in this moment, I'm depending on you. You're already working on what I need.

Music.

I'm depending on you.

And then God I want to experience you I want to hear

your voice I want to develop a real relationship with you

I want my mind to be like yours you said I have the mind of Christ turn my mind

into that help me think like you help me respond like you help me react like

you help me forgive like you let me experience what it's like to live a life with you and in you.

Music.

That's Carl Miner and the North American Guitar Company. I think that's beautiful

music, and it's very helpful to me to just kind of turn the words off and go

through this abide process.

Approach him. Breathe and regulate and calm your body down.

Invite him into the moment. Tell him how much you depend on him and experience

him and just see what happens.

If you do that for 10 or 12 minutes a day, maybe if it's hard, just do it for a minute.

Maybe just a minute and then two minutes the next day. I read something this

morning, if you want to really develop a new habit and get good at something,

it's 1% a day improvement in some area of your life will produce a 37.7% improvement

in that area over the course of one year.

So 1% a day produces 37% change.

And you can manage 1%, right? If I can pray for one minute today and I can pray

for one minute and 1% more the next day, then I can do that.

I can grab on to the idea that 1% is attainable.

I can pray for that. I can find a way to deal with 1% more. I can do that.

So 1% a day produces 37.7. So can we just do that? For the next several weeks,

can we just start to abide? abide, okay?

Approach, breathe, invite, depend, experience.

I would say that's the hearing part. That's learning how to feel and hear God's

presence and start to think like He does during the day and start to look for

places where His mind might be different than mine and then trying to rectify

those two lines, those two minds.

I'm living like I have my mind, but I have His mind, so how can I move my mind towards His, right?

That's what this abide process is going to do.

But now I want to take it to another level, a deeper level. This is what God

gave me in the middle of the night, early this morning.

Self-brain surgery practice. And remember, when I say self-brain surgery,

the only part of self-brain surgery that you do yourself is to admit to yourself

that you can't do it by yourself.

You need him to do it. He's a great physician. I'm just a good one.

You might not even be a physician, but you've got to practice to become better,

more like the great physician.

And there's five more letters that he gave me last night.

And if you're going to perform an operation, the first thing you have to do

is assess your patient and figure out what the story is and develop a plan and

a stepwise approach to that operation and believe that you can accomplish it.

And then at some point, you've got to stop thinking about it and start doing it.

You know, to pick up the scalpel and make the incision, widen the exposure,

get down and get after it, and then expect a good outcome for your patient.

Okay, those are steps to a good, successful operation.

And so what he gave me last night that I thought was so beautiful and kind is this. assess.

So we're going to do abide again, but it's not approach, breathe,

invite, depend, experience here.

That's the first level of hearing and experiencing Him. The second one is the

actual operation that we're going to do on the things that He reveals to us.

And that first starts with assessing it. Look objectively at the situation and

compare what the difference would be between that situation handled by the mind

of Christ and that situation handled by my mind,

the one I'm living with and believing that I have when I actually have the mind of Christ.

And then I'm going to start believing His promises. I'm going to find through

Scripture and pray through a particular promise that applies to this situation, okay?

So last night I could have said, and I'm assessing the situation,

Christ's mind would not worry.

He would give this to God, and he would believe the promise that God can heal all our diseases.

Psalm 103, 2. God can heal my disease.

If this nerve is injured, he can heal it. It's probably just the anesthetic

that's going to wear off.

If not, he can heal it. And whether he does or not is up to him,

but I can trust that he can.

And remember the difference between faith and hope. As I said, hope is the first dose.

Faith is the belief that God can do the things that He says He does,

that He can do the things that He says He can do.

And hope is the belief that He'll do them for me, the belief that I can get

there from here. Yes, He can do that.

And so since I can't do it but He can, I'm going to believe that He'll keep His promises.

I'm going to start to relax my mind and my body and try to rest.

But once you make that decision, though, it's time to pick up the scalpel and

actually do the operation.

I have to pick that scalpel up and I have to make the incision.

I've got to start the process. I always say at the end of every podcast,

start today. The good news is you can start today.

What's the best time to change your mind and develop the mind of Christ?

20 years ago. The Japanese have a saying, when's the best time to plant a tree?

20 years ago. When's the second best time to plant a tree? Right now.

The same thing is true with changing our mindset. The best time in your life

to develop the mind of Christ would have been years ago so that you didn't have

to live all these years without it, right?

But the second best time, my friend, is right now when I'm in the operating

room and we've got everything ready and we finally get all the drapes on and

we've looked at the x-rays and we've signed the consent form and we've made

the plan, we've given the antibiotic.

At some point, I am the operating surgeon.

I've got to take command of the room. We do a timeout and make sure we have

the right patient, make sure we know which side of the body we're operating

on and what the plan is, and we've all agreed on it.

But at some point, everybody's waiting on me to say, knife, knife.

And Morgan or Megan or Tracy or Tristan or somebody hands me a scalpel because I said knife.

I picked up the knife and got after it. It's time to start the operation,

and that's the third step of this abide.

The second level of the abide process here is going to be incision.

At some point, you have to start the operation.

Jesus isn't going to start it. He's going to wait for you to say,

knife, let's get after it. Let's start. Let's make the incision.

And then I have to actually, after I make the skin incision,

I've got to go through all that.

There's fat and there's muscle and there's bone and there's whatever it is that

I'm trying to do, remove a tumor or whatever.

I've got to deepen my approach to the problem until I actually get to it and can start working on it.

Not just the superficial stuff, not just deciding to make the phone call to

try to reconnect to the sister that I haven't talked to, not just picking up

the phone and dialing the number, but when she answers, not hanging up because

I'm nervous, but actually having that conversation.

I've got to deepen that thing, okay?

I've got to deepen it. I've got to go deeper until we're at the target and we

can actually do the thing that we're there to do.

I can give that to God and say, hey, now I'm ready. I'm ready to give you this habit.

I'm ready to give you, to see what would happen if you took this from me for

a few minutes a day for the next several weeks.

And the last one is I have to expect.

A good outcome. I've got to know that the plan was solid. We did everything

in our power. We've made the incision. We've done the exposure.

We've followed proper technique. We've done everything we could.

We called on our training.

And now we just have to expect that the process and the physiology is going

to, the healing is going to happen.

The patient's outcome is going to be good. We're going to expect that God is

going to keep his promises here.

And then we're going to rest in that.

Because at that point, I can't do, if I operate on you and then I send you you home.

I can't keep you from smoking or tearing your bandage off or getting in a hot

tub before your wound is healed and getting it infected.

I can't keep you from getting on a horse the day after surgery.

But I have to just expect that since I've done my part and God's done his part

and our team has done their part and you've been educated about your surgery

and you know and you hopefully want yourself to have a good outcome,

I'm going to expect that you're going to carry that out and that the outcome

is going to be what we all want because I expect you to act in your your best interest.

Well, I'm also going to expect God to act in his best interest and carry this

thing out, that whatever it is that we've been praying about,

that whatever it is that I've been abiding in this morning, that he's going

to carry it out and he's going to make it happen, okay?

So that's the second level of this abide.

Assess, believe, incision, deepen, expect. That's self-brain surgery as applied

to prayer and meditation.

So play your music, play your, play your music or get out of that headspace

or whatever it is that go for a run or do whatever it is that you need to do

to get into this place where you can develop a regular habit of getting deep with God.

An approach, breathe, invite, depend, and experience is level one. It's how you hear.

It's how you begin to experience Him and get to know Him and hear His voice.

And the next level is when you actually start making the operation happen.

You assess it, believe it, and make the incision and deepen it and expose it

and get after it and perform the process that He reveals to you that needs to be done.

And then expect the outcome to be what you want it and what He wants it to be.

Because He promises us when you delight yourself in Him, you align your will

with Him, He will give you the desires of your heart.

He will eventually carry out His will in the way that He knows best,

in the time and the place and the fashion that He intends for it to be carried out.

And if your will is aligned with Him, you can expect He will accomplish His

good work in a way that's pleasing to Him on your behalf. He will.

He's faithful to carry it out. Now let me just give you one example.

At the time, we need to be done here.

One example, and this is in the area of personal purity.

If you're a man and you struggle with lustful thoughts or pornography or inappropriate

behavior towards women, if you're a woman and you struggle with those things

too, some women do, then this is an idea for you.

If you're a grandmother or a parent and you have men in your life,

young men who need to think differently, here's an idea.

What if you took that idea of assessing what the mind of Christ would look like

as it relates to interpersonal behavior with other people?

And what your mind tends to be like? What if you just zoomed out and were compassionate

to yourself and thought of looking down on your mind as if you were looking

on someone else's and say, hey, gosh, there's a pretty big gap between the mind

of Christ and this mind over here.

Maybe it might be helpful to you if you change the way you thought about this

and you could sort of start to push your mind towards the mind of Christ in

this position, and there's some Scripture that would come to mind.

Like 1 Timothy 5, too, it says, I demand, I insist, Think about older women

as sisters and younger women as daughters.

If you look at a woman or a person and you tend to have lustful thoughts or

bad thoughts toward them, well, guess what?

Think about it as if they were your mom or your sister or your little cousin.

Think about them in familial terms in some way that would be less likely for

you to be able to apply that disordered thinking to your thoughts about them.

Then Job 31.1, Job says, I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a young woman.

So you can make a decision that you're going to make a mindset shift,

and you're going to make a deal with yourself not to look on people in dishonoring ways.

And then there's another one, Psalm 101.3 said, I resolve to set before my eyes

no vile thing. So that would get into changing how you handle your time with

the computer or the smartphone or with magazines you might purchase.

It would get into your head that you've made a covenant. You've made a decision

here. I'm not going to set something before my eyes that's going to lead me

into disordered thinking.

So I'm going to assess the situation, be honest with myself about what my mind

looks like compared to what the mind of Christ looks like.

I'm going to believe that God has promises and practices and ideas and practical

things for me that if I followed His way, I would have better control over that

situation or better victory in those situations.

And I'm going to then pick up a knife and make some decisions.

So what would I need to do to actually move my mind towards this mind in that

situation, whether it's interpersonal purity or finances or work or relationships or whatever,

what would I need to do? What would the operation need to look like?

And at some point, I need to stop planning it and start doing it.

So I'm going to make an incision. And just for the next hour,

I'm going to put my phone on airplane mode when I'm at a time when I normally

would click on the wrong thing.

I'm going to do this. I'm going to call somebody and tell them,

hey, go over tomorrow and check my internet browser. I want to be accountable

to you in the way that I spend my time on the Internet.

So make some decision in size. Make the incision and get after it, and then deepen it.

So find other ways to apply that line of thinking, God's promises,

practical steps you could take to change your mind into something that looks

more like the mind of Christ.

And then expect that if you do those things, He'll begin to honor your commitment

to following Him, and He'll begin to keep His promises to you.

And you'll see, I think, as we saw with Gus in Andrew Newberg's book,

you'll see some structural things start to change in your brain.

You'll see some practical things start to change in your life.

You'll see some baseline thoughts start to get stronger and more reinforced in your mind.

And you'll start seeing that thoughts will become different things than they

have in the past. You'll start having a different outcome.

And so let's abide. Let's abide on two levels for the next several weeks.

Let's not just approach and breathe and invite and depend and experience,

but let's also do the operation.

Let's assess and believe and

make the incision and deepen the exposure and then expect a good outcome.

And we can do all those things, my friend. Even here on Self-Earned Surgery Saturday, we can do it.

We can change our mind and change our life and we can become healthier and feel

better and be happy. We can get to know Him more.

We can make our mind more like His because we already have His mind. We just forgot.

We haven't remembered. remembered. We don't want to have futility in our thinking.

And my goodness, we want to change our lives, and we want to start today.