Label Maker: Who Decides Who You Really Are?

Good morning my friend, I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren here with you today and I am excited because it's wildcard Wednesday

and wildcard Wednesday we can talk about whatever we want to talk about and I've got a little

story for you today about labels.

I want to talk about labels, about what's on the outside of a container and what that

has to do with actually what's on the inside of that container and what in the world does

Does that have to do with you and your faith and your doubt and the neuroscience of what's going on in your brain?

And how can it change your mind? And how can it change your life?

We're gonna talk about labels. But first, we're gonna start with one question.

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. Let's get after it, hey, I love Wednesdays.

Wednesday is the day that we sort of have free form here.

We do Mind Change Monday and we talk about specific ways that we can change our mind,

using the power of neuroscience and some ideas from scripture, how we can smash those things

together and really change our minds, because you can't change your life until you change your mind, right?

Tuesday, most of the time we do Tuesdays with Tata or something really heavy on the spiritual

side neurotheology or something sort of deep in the scriptural faith-building world.

And Thursdays, we often do, that's the one day of the week that I try to give you something

from the past that's going to be helpful, throwback Thursday kind of idea, and I go

back and find something we've dealt with before and either add some additional content to

it or bring you back an old interview or something that's helpful if it's relevant to the time.

Friday, we've been doing these frontal lobe Fridays where we go a little bit deeper into

the neuroscience side of what we're actually doing when we talk about how our brains work.

And then Saturday, of course, we do self-brain surgery. Saturday, I try to give you practical tools, something specific that you can do.

Here's how you do a thought biopsy.

Here's how you do a radical lousy attitude lobotomy, for example.

Here's how you do a trust transplant and all those things.

Here's how you do a suffering substitution. We take those ideas that are going to be my next book, the self-brain surgery, the manual,

the power of how you actually do this thing that we call self-brain surgery, right?

And then of course Sundays, I either often give you a day off and we take a Sabbath or

I just do a little Bible study or a little prayer time or bring you something back from

the past that's already sort of what I'm working on for that day in my own spiritual walk.

And that's kind of how the week has gone. But Wednesdays, it's free form and it's whatever God puts on my heart and we do wild card Wednesdays.

So here we are today and I want to just tell you a little story.

This episode we're going to talk about labels.

And at the end, we're going to play a song from my friend, my brother, Tommy Walker.

My mom says, he's like your brother from another mother, and he really is.

So shout out, Tommy, if you're listening.

So Tommy has a worship album that he released years ago called Make It Glorious. Make It Glorious.

And I think that Make It Glorious, top to bottom, is probably still one of the best

worship albums, one of the best albums, amazing musicianship, singing, the way it's all put

together, the songs are great.

But it's a tremendous start to finish worship album. I think it still holds up.

You can get it on Spotify for free, wherever you listen to music.

But there's a song on Make It Glorious called Your Word Will Be The Last Word.

Your Word Will Be The Last Word. And we're going to play that song at the end.

I'll tell you why in a minute. But the other day, I went out to our shop.

We have this incredible 40 by 80 foot shop on the property that Dale and Joe Margaret

built years ago. stored his tractor in there and his RV and all kinds of stuff.

And of course, my wife, Lisa, being an interior designer, we use it to store our tractor and

our lawn mowers and all that stuff, but, and our gun safes and whatnot.

But we also have a workout area in there and she's turned it into a great place to watch

a football game or Tata plays golf in there.

We play golf on Tata's golf simulator and we have our treadmill in there and our gym

equipment and all that stuff. So it's kind of become part of an extension of our home.

And so in the shop, we also have a rack of shelves where we have stuff from all these

times that we've moved. Right?

We moved from Texas to Alabama to Wyoming to Nebraska and along the way as you move

around in your life, you accumulate a lot of stuff and sometimes that stuff ends up

being extra or something you don't need right then.

So what happens to it? It goes into storage, right?

So we have all these bins that we've used to move stuff around the country at different

times and there's things in them. And once in a while, I'll be in need of something and I'll say, hmm, I know I've got that out

in one of those bins in the shop.

And I'll go out and try to look for them.

So along the way, Lisa got a label maker, one of these handheld devices that'll print

off whatever you want to put on it, right?

And it's fun. Kids love to play with label makers, right? They label the dog and they label the cat and they label all the stuff in the kitchen

and they just go around printing labels and sticking them on things.

And in the course of many moves, sometimes a bin will have a label on it that doesn't

any longer correlate to what's actually inside the bin.

This happened to me the other day, but Lisa has subsequently, full disclosure, Lisa has

subsequently standardized the way those bins look, they're all the same, and she has corrected all the labels.

So now this problem I'm about to describe to you no longer exists because my incredible

wife not only has a little touch of OCD like I do, wants everything to look the same and

be organized, but also wants things to be accurate. So the labels are correct.

But the other day, this is several months ago.

Had this thing that I needed I can't even remember what it was now that I needed,

And I knew that it was in one of those bins in the shop And so I went looking for it and what I discovered after rummaging around in several bins for a while.

Is this one idea that I'm gonna give you and you could stop the episode after you get it if you,

Can think down the path of what it actually means and how you could play it out in your life

Here's the here's the idea that I had,

the label Lacks any power to actually define the contents of the labeled thing.

The label lacks any inherent power to define the reality of what's inside the labeled thing.

Think about that for a minute if you had a Joke that you wanted to play on somebody and you got a label maker and you went to the kitchen and you labeled the flower

bin and the sugar bin opposite so that they look kind of alike from a distance

right if you had clear plastic bins that had flour and sugar in them and you

switch the labels if somebody tried to cook let's say you tried to make biscuits like my mom used to make with she'd get the flour and make homemade

biscuits and tell my uncle had a heart attack we had bacon and eggs and biscuits and gravy almost every morning of my childhood which is a wonderful

really wonderful until my uncle dick had a heart attack and ruined everything we

We all had to start eating healthy.

No, I'm just joking. He was okay, by the way.

So if you switch the sugar and the flour labels, and then you tried to carry on as if the label

identified the thing, and you tried to bake biscuits with sugar instead of flour, what would happen?

Or if you tried to sweeten your coffee with flour instead of sugar, what would happen?

Well, obviously, it wouldn't work. The sugar could not make biscuits, and the flour could not sweeten the coffee.

It'd be disgusting, right? It wouldn't work.

But what if you were insistent that the label defined the thing, and you continued to try

to feed your family, or you continued to try to sweeten your coffee with flour and sugar

that were improperly labeled? What would happen?

Would it work? Would it actually produce any value or benefit in your life, or would it continue to harm

you by the futility of your thinking.

Just think down that path for a minute and I could stop right there because you're smart enough,

To know if you have the wrong label on something it doesn't define what's actually inside it

But if you try to live like the label tells the truth,

There's going to be some issues,

There's an incredible book written by Arden Bevere Arden Bevere is Addison Bevere's brother

Addison's been on the show a few times and has written the book words with God

which I think is one of the top books on prayer I've ever read, and,

Arden is the son of John and Lisa Bevere. You've heard me talk about them.

They've both been on the podcast. John Bevere wrote The Awe of God, which is the best book on,

holy fear and what the fear of the Lord means that I've ever read. The Bait of Satan,

which is still the best-selling and best book on the problem with being easily offended that's ever been written.

In fact, I saw a best-seller list from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.

And that's the organization, ECPA, the Christian publishers that awarded me

the Memoir of the Year back in 2021 for I've Seen the Interview.

And I just found out, by the way, a little announcement. My new book, Hope is the First Dose,

showed up as number 11 on the ECPA bestselling new releases for Christian books this year, which is cool.

Never been on a bestsellers list like that before, but that's pretty cool.

But on the list of non-fiction bestsellers, the ACPA big list, John Bevere's book,

The Bait of Satan, which was written 20 years ago, is still on there.

That's how important that book is, okay?

The book continues to sell because it's a defining book about how Satan uses the temptation of being easily offended

to control us and ruin our lives. It's worth it if you've never read it. That's an aside.

But anyway, John and then Lisa Bevere wrote the book, Adamant, which is the best book on what truth really is I've ever read.

Has produced some incredible works of theological power that have changed my life and Lisa's life.

And we've been interacting with them for years now and Addison's actually become a good friend

and they're amazing people.

But I bought Arden's book, his first book, Redefined, which is a book about labels.

And he's got this heart for people of his generation, the 20s and 30s, who have been labeled really,

that they've absorbed a lot of labels from society.

And they believe a lot of things about themselves and it's limiting how they can live out their lives.

And so he wrote this book to say, hey, let's look at the labels that we put on ourselves

or other people have put on us, and let's understand what they really are.

And in that book.

Redefined he says this this is the last chapter of the power of a thought And he says this this is a quote from Arden Bouvier.

Every word we speak originates as a thought that sound familiar to you Every word we speak originates as a thought we give credit to our tongue for pronouncing the words we speak,

But we don't give enough credit to our minds for conceiving those words words.

Whether conscious or subconscious, our words, phrases, and sentences flow from the ideas inside our heads.

That is why it's so important to control what we think. Somebody you know, a friend of yours, is always saying you can't change your life until you

change your mind.

This is what Arden is talking about here. Then he goes on to say, even the field of science recognizes the power of a thought

and medical studies have shown that what people believe can impact the way their bodies respond to treatment.

It goes on to talk about the placebo effect and how people's minds can create realities

based on what they think they are or even what they think the medicines that they're

taking contain, even if they don't really contain those things.

I told a story in my new book, Hope is the First Dose, about a woman who had back surgery

that I did a long time ago in Alabama.

She called her pain pump lady because she came to her two-week post-op appointment after

major spinal fusion surgery. I'm talking about screws and rods and heavy metal I had to put in her spine to straighten

her up and help her out.

And post-op, she went home and she came back to the two-week post-op visit and I said, how are you feeling?

And she said, I'm great. I haven't had any pain since you put that pain pump in me.

And I said, what? What are you talking about pain pump?

She said, you know that thing that was sticking out of my back that was a pain pump

that put the medicine in my back. I didn't have any pain.

Didn't fill my prescriptions when I went home. I never took a dose of Tylenol.

I just have had no pain since surgery. You're a miracle worker.

And I was like, ma'am, you didn't have a pain pump. You had a drain.

There was a blood drain in her back that we took out a few days after surgery.

But what had happened was this woman had had a prior knee surgery and the orthopedist used a device called Oncu

which is a little pump, a little device that puts medicine into the joint after surgery

to deliver pain control.

And it actually delivers medicine into the area that the surgery has happened in.

And it can provide post-operative pain relief. And she had one of those for her knee surgery.

And it looks a little bit like the type of device that I had put in her, which is just

a drain to remove blood from the surgical field. But it didn't have any medicine in it.

So she did not actually have a pain pump in her back.

But she thought she did.

And the thought that she had a pain pump was enough to control the incredible amount of pain

that she must have had after surgery and she didn't feel anything.

So she went two weeks after surgery without ever taking a dose of narcotic pain relievers

I went back and checked the hospital record She never took any morphine or anything after surgery at all because she believed that she didn't have any pain.

So the power of a thought is real Okay, you've been hearing me talk about that for 900 episodes now and some change right the how we think,

Determines how we live and now we are understanding we're going deeper here on the podcast

So what actually happens when you think?

What does it do? It's not just magic.

It changes the way genes are turned off in your brain, in your body.

It changes the way organs interact with each other.

It changes the electromagnetic field of your body and how that interacts with other people.

Thoughts become things and this is the beginning of understanding that.

We're starting to understand the interpersonal neurobiology, the epigenetics, the neuroendocrinology

of it all. There's actually something that happens when you change how you think, right?

So Arden's point here, how we think impacts the way our bodies respond to treatment, it's actually 100% true.

And there's some other things that Arden talks about in this book.

Let me share another couple thoughts with you.

So he says, he's referring to how the labels on our lives can give us shadows, that they

create these dark realities for us.

And he says, however, rather than living under these negative shadows, we must realize something.

A label limits us to how the world sees us. A label speaks to who we are now,

and it limits us to what has already happened.

Think about that. A label speaks to who we are now, and it limits us to what has already happened.

Okay, think about that. If you've had some terrible thing in your background,

you've got a DUI, you committed a felony, You did something wrong, you raised your hand to someone, and now you've got a label.

I'm an abuser, I'm an alcoholic, I'm a criminal, I'm a felon.

Whatever might have happened in the past, God forbid, You've been labeled as something.

Well, is that is that thing that label does it become your entire identity and that's the shame and the I'm an addict

I'm a divorcee. I'm a this i'm a that does that become your reality?

And even on the traumatic side on the trauma tragedy and massive things that we talk a lot about how losing a child for example or

having your spouse die or you know being Being abused or raped or whatever can happen, that thing can become the thing that defines

your entire life.

That label can turn out to be who you think you are for the rest of your life.

It can be the only thing that you think of for your entire life when you think about yourself.

The problem is though, remember what I said, the label lacks the power to actually define

who you are on the inside. You have to give yourself that power.

If you believe that the label defines you, you will live that way.

And I've got some bad news for you.

I'm going to tell you, let's just imagine, for example, that a person was taking a medicine

that had been mislabeled by the pharmacist, God forbid, like it's a wonderful life.

The pharmacist puts poison in the blood pressure pill jar, okay, and the person takes it every

day thinking it's controlling their blood pressure, but eventually the poison builds

up and they die from it and it's the coroner.

That ultimately determines that the medicine was mislabeled and defines what was actually happening to the person and the reality is this person has been poisoned to death,

Because they believed a mislabel on the pill bottle, right?

So at the end of a long life of living out labels as reality Somebody else will determine who you actually were

were. Somebody else will call, make the final call on what your life was about.

It won't be you. You'll be dead, right? You'll be gone. Somebody else is gonna say

this person lived out a life that was unfortunately mislabeled and they believed some things about themselves that changed the entire course of the

rest of their life and they died believing something that wasn't true.

That the medicine wasn't what the label said. The person wasn't what the Behavior had been that God says something different about you than you say about yourself,

And I'm just here to tell you a friend today on this wildcard Wednesday like you want to live a life. That's really free,

You've got to have the right label on your life. You've got to understand what the what the actual identity of you is.

Arden Bevere says this is a powerful line Then the book is called redefined confronting the labels that limit us by Arden Bevere. I'll put a link in,

He says this, our calling trumps our label every time.

God has called you to something, friend. And listen to this, Arden says, labels shrink our world.

And we become defined by the thing, by this thing that's on the label.

He says, labels shrink our world, but calling enlarges our world.

Labels disqualify and limit us.

Callings qualify and release us. Labels are temporary.

Callings are eternal. There is a call on your life, my friend,

that your creator placed you here for.

You've got a purpose and there's a plan for you. Jeremiah 29 11 says, I know the plans I have for you,

plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

God has a plan for you. He has a label on you.

In fact, Revelation says that he has a name for you.

It's not the name your mom and dad gave you.

You're gonna get a stone when you get to heaven that's got your real name on it.

And my friend, that is who you are.

God has a name for you, precious child, beloved person that he created in his image

and you are fearfully and wonderfully made.

And what's on the label that you've absorbed from your life, that you've inherited from your parents,

that you've believed about your genetics,

that you have received because of your past behavior or something that someone else has done to you,

that label has no power to define who you actually are.

And just like a kid running around goofing off with the label maker, sticking the name dog on the cat,

or sticking sugar on the flower as a practical joke, that doesn't change the reality of what's inside.

So my question is, would you rather wait until you die and the coroner says who you really were,

or you get to heaven, or you get to judgment, and God says who you really were based on how you lived

and who you thought you were?

Hey, are you living trauma-informed to yourself? Are you saying, what's the matter with me,

instead of what happened to me?

Or what are people saying I am versus who I really am, who God says I am?

Let me give you some scripture to wrap this thought up, okay?

I'm gonna give you a few scriptures. There's a whole bunch of verses in the Bible.

There's dozens of them about our identity in God.

Second Corinthians 5.17, therefore if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation.

The old has passed away, behold, the new has come.

Friend, if you got something in your past that is making you ashamed or limiting you

or you believe you can't get past it, Jesus says, that's not true.

If you're mine, you are something new.

There's something different about you and I define who you are.

First Peter 2.9, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,

a people for my own possession, his own possession,

that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Addicts struggle with this a lot.

Had a good conversation on the podcast a while back with Caroline Bidler. She's recovering addict

She's written this incredible book downstairs church And she said that the addiction puts a label on you and it's hard to ever see yourself as anything other that than that ashamed

Person who did all these things to get drugs and went through all these things and you just had this shame,

Label on you that you're worthless and you're an addict and you're hopeless and God says something different,

You're a chosen person, you are a royal priesthood.

I called you to be holy, you're mine. You're a person for my own possession

and your job is not to live in the shame of what you did before.

It's to proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light.

Remember Jared Stevens, my friend, says scars tell better stories than trophies do.

No, but it's boring if you meet somebody who was in the Olympics 50 years ago

and all they can do is wear their medals around to talk about that one time that they pulled off

that perfect dive, and that they're bragging about their past in this one thing.

That's kind of a boring story, right?

It's great that they did that, but a much more compelling story that's relevant

to your life is a story about somebody who says, I was down and out, I was lost and now I'm found,

I was a slave and now I'm free, I was broken and now I'm healed,

God called me out of darkness and into his marvelous light, and you can be that too.

That's a label that will help you live your life. Ephesians 2.10, we are his workmanship.

Friend, he built you.

You are created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that you should walk in them.

That's who you are.

Galatians 2.20, I've been crucified with Christ. It's no longer I who live with whatever labels were on me before,

but Christ who lives in me.

And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me

and gave himself up for me. Here's something I want you to understand, friend.

The devil, your enemy, other people, want you to believe that your value and worth

It's dependent on what you do every moment of your life.

And if you do the wrong thing, you might as well forget about it.

You're written off. You're lost. That's how I grew up in this, not from my parents, but from the church I grew up in.

You are one bad moment away from being sent to hell for the rest of your life.

You're one wrong statement away from being lost forever and never being found again.

Just one. It's all up to you. Let me give you an alternative to that.

Jesus said the John six thirty seven.

All that the Father gives me will come to me, and the one coming to me I shall not cast out.

King James says it this way.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me, and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.

That in the Hebrew, that's a double, I'm sorry, in the Greek, that's a double negative.

And it basically means, how we would say it is like, I will never, ever, ever change my mind about you.

I will never give up on you Dana. I will never ever ever throw you out Juliana

I will never quit on you Charles or Brian or John or David. I will never give up on you.

Won't quit on you Beth He's saying no matter what happens,

I've already labeled you as mine and nobody else can change the reality of that by getting crazy with the label maker and

Sticking another name on you. Nobody can't,

So get used to the fact that I know who you really are.

Don't wait for the corner to tell you that your life was lived under the wrong label. You were tucking the wrong medicine,

and don't wait for that, friend.

It's wild card Wednesday. Change your mind and change your life. You can do it.

Let me give you one more thought before we go today. My wife, Lisa, just got up a few minutes ago

and was having a cup of coffee and we were talking about this idea of labels for a second.

And she said, hey, you remember Daniel?

The story of Daniel? I said, of course I do. What part about it?

The lion's den, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and all that?

No, I remember his name. And I went and looked at Daniel chapter one.

Lisa made this amazing point.

In Daniel chapter one, there's the story of how the King Nebuchadnezzar went and took,

all these people from Jerusalem and brought them into his kingdom and decided to take

the most excellent young men and retrain them to become his servants.

And the first thing he did, he wanted to make sure that they understood that they were in a new place

with a new king and he gave them new names.

He says it this way, among those who were chosen or some from Judah, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.

The chief official gave them new names, to Daniel, the name Belteshazzar, to Hananiah, Shadrach,

to Mishael, Meshach, and to Azariah, Abednego.

Now, two things happen after this. Daniel, for the rest of the book,

continues to refer to himself.

Daniel. That's the name his parents gave him. That's the name God gave him. And he

didn't care that the king called him something else. He didn't care that

somebody put a new label on him. He knew who he was, and he lived his life

refusing to accept a label that somebody else put on him. Now Shadrach, Meshach, and

Abednego, the new names those guys got, their real names were Hananiah,

Mishael and Azariah, they apparently accepted that label because the rest of

the book when they're referenced again, it uses their new names Shadrach, Meshach,

and Abednego. And I'm not saying there was anything wrong with how they lived

because obviously when it came down to being thrown into the fiery furnace they

said, our God will save us and even if he doesn't we won't worship you, we know who

we are. So yeah, maybe they accepted the label for a while, but when

When it came down to it, they remembered who they were, and they lived according to their

real identity and not according to the label that somebody had put on them.

But Daniel didn't even accept the name. He's like, you can't put that name on me. I know who I am.

And so my friend, the question for us today is when the world puts a label on us, will

we accept that and live as if it's true, or will we remember this thing that I told you this morning?

The Warren's Law of Labels. A label does not change the reality of the labeled thing.

A label does not change the reality of the labeled thing.

You know what has the last word on who you are? God's word does.

You know who defines who you are?

God does, your creator. And he said a whole lot of things about you.

Remember I said a while ago that sometimes even other Christians in the world,

and our enemy, and our parents, and society He wants us to think that we're just one bad decision

away from being lost and they're gonna prove right all these things that they've said about us all along.

Right? God's word says something different about that. It says something very different about that.

That our behavior doesn't define our identity.

God defines our identity.

Isn't that something? That's amazing.

So let's just wrap this up By going down to the neuroscience for a minute,

Kurt Thompson in his book, The Deepest Place. Kurt Thompson is a Christian, he's also a psychiatrist.

He's written some incredible books. The most recent one is The Deepest Place.

I'm gonna try to get him on the podcast in a few months. We've been in conversation about it.

Here's what he says about the way we perceive ourselves in the world is it starts with a sense,

Within intuition something that we feel.

We sense something about ourselves and we sense that based on our culture and our family of origin and the things our parents do and

Say around us and the way that they treat us and we grow up with all these ideas about who we are.

But the thing is Kurt Thompson says it this way and I love how he says it first we sense and then we make sense of what we sense

So you've got all these systems in your brain that are designed to pick up cues from the environment and start to internalize them and make

synapses and create realities based on what you perceive and feel before we ever even think about it.

And so, as he says, as we have seen, first we sense and then we make sense of what we sense.

It began rather as an amalgam of my temperament, my parents' unhealed wounds that they passed

on to me epigenetically, and my attached patterns that I formed with them.

He's talking about how he had this idea that he was unwantable.

Even though he grew up in a loving home, his parents loved him.

He didn't have, you know, abuse or any of those things, but he had this deep and abiding

sense growing up that nobody wanted him, that he was unlovable.

Where did that come from?

It came from all these external cues and little unsaid things.

And somehow he accepted a label that nobody actually intended to put on him.

He put it on himself. And we've heard recently on the podcast, in fact on Sunday I released an episode where

I played clips from Robin Long and Erwin McManus.

Lots of smart people have come to this same idea, that we live under labels that were put on us

even by people who didn't intend for us to receive that type of label, right?

So, Kurt Thompson says this, we sense something in our environment, and we begin to try to

find a way to make sense of it, and we generally mess that up if we don't understand that our

real identity comes from God.

If we start trying to identify ourselves based on what society does, or how parents behave,

or how siblings behave, or even not understanding that we inherit things from our epigenetics.

Remember the old adage, like Jesus might live in your heart, but grandpa lives in your bones.

You receive genetically some things that your parents were afraid of or that your grandparents

dealt with traumatically which turned genes on and off and led to them being passed on

to your parents and to you where you're dealing now with the sour grapes that your

grandfather ate and that's why your teeth are set on edge, that's why you're afraid

of certain things, that's why you're uncomfortable in certain environments because you received

an epigenetic switch that you started at a point where you were already dealing with

Something that you didn't know you were dealing with and the that's the bad news

The good news is we understand now that through the science of directed neuroplasticity.

Interpersonal neurobiology and Epigenetics that we literally can change our own DNA and we can our own,

expression of DNA and we can live a different reality than we thought we had to live and.

The reason for that my friend is that labels don't define what's actually inside

They don't define the reality of what's actually inside. Can they actually describe can they accurately describe it?

Yes, do they often inaccurately describe it? Yes

Daniel did not accept that name that he was given because he knew who he was and,

Today on wild-card Wednesday. I'm just gonna ask you I'm gonna beg you if you want to change your mind and you want to change your life

You need to let God's Word have the last word about who you are. It's time to strip off those incorrect labels

So it's time to do what Lisa did in the shop,

to go and buy bins that are better and replace the stuff, the old broken bins

that we've moved around with better ones and they all are standardized and they look the same

and put something in there and we label it correctly.

So I can now go out into the shop and I can exactly know that if something is on that label,

it's gonna represent what's inside that box.

And that my friend is what I want for you. I want you to let God put a label on you that says beloved.

I want you to believe with all your heart that when He created you, if it's really true

what the Psalm says, that He knew all the days of your life before one of them came to be.

If you know that you tend to make your most rash decisions when you're under great stress,

then imagine Jesus going to the cross, being flogged, being whipped, being beaten,

being accused of something He didn't do.

And in His humanity, at the most stressed point He ever felt, if He didn't give up on you then.

If He didn't say, God, just curse all these people and send them to hell, I don't wanna die for these people,

they don't deserve it.

If He didn't give up on you then,

Why in the world would you think that now, thousands of years later, sitting at the right hand of God,

healed from his wounds and redeemed and restored to the eternal glory as the right hand of God that he is,

why would he give up on you now when you make some silly mistake?

He's gonna look on you with compassion. He's gonna look upon you with love,

and he's gonna say, I know who you are because I created you.

Does that mean he doesn't want you to sin? Absolutely he doesn't want you to sin.

Does it mean he doesn't become distressed or unhappy or hurt when you struggle with things?

Of course he does. But is he going to give up on you? No. He's going to keep reminding you who you are because the old is gone and the new has

come.

And if you accept him as your savior, as your creator, as your redeemer, as your healer,

he will help you operate your brain in a way that will begin then to unlock some of this

old trauma and old ideas and start to be able to strip off labels and see yourself as a

person with scars that tell better stories than any of the trophies that you might have

been told that you should have won by now in your life.

And friend, you can change your mind and you can change your life, but you've got to let

God's Word be the last word.

And the good news is, you can 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 book,

if you're not already tired of hearing my voice.

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.