Spiritual Brain Surgery (Frontal Lobe Friday)

Hey lisa hey lee it's good.

To see you today it's good to see you too will you

help me with something of course i can't remember what day it is it's frontal

lobe friday hey my friend welcome back to the dr lee warren podcast i have been

away for about two weeks we've been preparing for season 10 which is coming

at you soon this is the last of the bonus episodes that we're going to give

you in between the two seasons.

I've been carefully bringing back to you for your listening pleasure some old

episodes that we've been wanting to get you back in mind, to have top of mind

as we prepare for season 10.

Season 10, we are having a little fork in the road here. We're going to split.

Now, I'm never going to stop having everything I do be about you finding your

way spiritually because that's where the hope is found in your life.

It's just where you can land when trauma and tragedy and other massive things happen.

But I do want to branch out a little bit because there are some episodes.

We've always done Tuesdays with Tata and we've done some quiet times and Bible

studies. And there's some episodes that are almost purely on the spiritual side.

And then there's some episodes that we get deeper.

We have an author on or talk about something, leadership or finance or something

that's not directly spiritual.

And then a lot of things that are more deeply scientific than some people want

to talk about. And these are just things that I always do and talk about.

So we're going to split out the spiritual brain surgery into its very own podcast.

And there we're going to have completely the theology Thursday,

Tuesdays with Tata, different kinds of Bible studies and all kinds of information

about how we use our minds and our brains and even neuroscience to go deeper

to answer the big questions of our spiritual life and our life in general.

And then the main Dr. Lee Warren podcast, Self-Brain Surgery,

We're going to be giving you practical tools on how you can change your mind

and change your life, how science and faith smash together the way we've always

done it, but even on a deeper level on the science side.

And I think you're going to enjoy that because I really want you to understand.

How your brain and your mind work together and were created fearfully and wonderfully

by your creator to help you become healthier and feel better and be happier.

And to do that, you need to understand that science is not your enemy.

Me science is very much my friend your friend and it'll help you so as we get

into that ready for that dividing line we've already got a couple of incredible

spiritual brain surgery episodes recorded today i wanted to give you a little intro.

To spiritual brain surgery, just so you can be aware and what it's all about

and be ready to go and subscribe to that show.

When we launch a new show, it's really important that people subscribe and download

that first episode so that it helps other people find it on the algorithm of podcasts.

You get a little bit of a free press when you launch a new show,

especially on Apple and Spotify.

If a bunch of people download that first episode, then it's likely to pop up

on the Apple or Spotify homepage so people can see it who aren't already connected

to the show. And so your job will be to go out when I tell you and find the new show and follow it.

That's all I need you to do. And that'll help other people find it because we

really want to help people change their minds about how God created their brain

so that we can help them change their lives, right?

We want them to become self-brain surgeons like you and I are.

Listen, if you're one of the new listeners that saw us on Daystar,

Lisa and I had an amazing opportunity to go down to Dallas and on Monday,

spend some time on the Daystar Network and met Joni and Doug and the great people

down there. and I'll put a link in the show notes to that appearance on the Daystar Network.

Lisa got to be with me on the show and all over the world, people got to hear

us tell our story about Mitch and about Hope is the First Dose and it was just

incredible to get to be down there.

We also got to spend the weekend with my mom and dad who live in Dallas and

my sister Michelle and her incredible family and we just had a great time.

So if you heard us on Daystar and you're listening for the first time,

welcome and thank you for connecting and we've already heard from several of

those folks that saw us on Daystar and we are really, really grateful for the

Daystar team and the great work that they're doing.

That's a great ministry, by the way. If you want some real encouraging television

content, some great worship music and great ministry content.

Then Daystar is a great place for you to check out.

And I'll put a link in the show note to Lisa and my appearance on the Daystar show.

Ministry Now is the name of the show that was on Daystar on Monday.

I just had a really great time. So we're gonna get after it in just a minute.

Before you do that, I wanna play you the intro. This is Lisa and I have been

developing this for a couple of weeks now.

Here's the intro to the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. This is kind of a first draft of the intro

that I think will be showing up all around the world next week as we launch the show. Here we go.

When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up or does it crumble

under the weight of doubt?

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, your host, and this is Spiritual Brain Surgery,

where we'll take a hard look at what we believe,

why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains

can work together to help us

build a bulletproof faith that will withstand anything life throws at us.

Whether you're struggling with anxiety, grief, doubt,

or you just want to go deeper into the big questions we all have,

remember, you can't change your life until you change your mind,

and sometimes it takes spiritual brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.

Music.

All right. Are you ready to get after it? Here we go. Okay. In spiritual brain

surgery, there's a number of things that we're going to do, but here's where it came from.

The more I learn about neuroscience, the more I understand that the way you

use your mind actually influences the physical structure of your brain.

Remember all the things we've learned with directed neuroplasticity.

When you direct your thinking to change how you think, it creates physical connections

called synapses in your brain and literally changes the way your neurotransmitters

and the cells in your brain works.

It changes the way your hormones are produced. It changes genetic switches on

and off in your body and literally can change your entire life by changing how you think.

The problem is we're so good, our brains are so good at automating things that

if you don't carefully direct your thinking, then those new cells and new synapses

that are formed every day as part of how you're fearfully and wonderfully made.

They will wire into the same old, same old of how you've always thought and felt and behaved.

And so you can either let your experience, your past, your circumstances,

your brokenness, your trauma, your tragedy, your massive thing,

you can let all of that direct how all of your newly created brain cells and

synapses every day behave automatically.

And you can let life shape your brain for you.

Or you can choose to become a self-brain surgeon and you can start directing

those thoughts and creating a new brain.

So it dawned on me that when we have the ability to create our brains by how we think...

Then that means that if we're supposed to be like Jesus, in 1 Corinthians 2,

Paul tells us we have the mind of Christ.

If you're a new creation, and I'm talking about believers here, okay, friend?

If you've never given your life to Jesus, and you don't have the Holy Spirit

inside you, you need to make that decision.

And we'll talk more about that as we get into spiritual brain surgery,

and we'll lead you down the path of how you can make that decision.

But if you're just coming to this, and you've never given your life to Jesus

Christ, there's a difference in how your mind works. if you're doing it on your own.

But 1 Corinthians 2 tells us that once you're a new creation,

once you've given your life to Christ, you have the Holy Spirit of God.

You have Jesus' mind inside you.

And his mind will direct your mind to become healthier and feel better and be

happier and be more holy and continually become more like him.

He says, if you delight yourself in the Lord, he'll give you the desires of

your heart because your heart will become more like his.

Okay, so it dawned on me, friend. This is where this whole podcast came from.

It dawned on me that you can sin with your thoughts.

And we all know that. I mean, Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount,

he really laid it on everybody and told them, hey, it's not just that you commit adultery, that's a sin.

If you think lustfully about someone, you're committing adultery because your

thoughts become your things. Your thoughts become your life.

So if you murder somebody in your heart by hating them, you've just,

in your internal life, you've committed murder just as well as if you did it with your body.

And the government doesn't think so, but God has a higher standard for you.

And so if it's possible to sin with your thinking, and if Jesus lived a sinless

life, which is why he became the basis for the perfect sacrifice that saved

us from our sin and gave us hope, that means, and this is the bottom line, listen,

pay attention here, friend. My dad would say, look in my eyes.

And listen, if Jesus never sinned, that means Jesus never sinned with his thinking. either.

That means not one time in his entire life did he follow a rabbit trail of a

negative thought down a hole of cussing somebody out in his mind or planning

all the way to the temple what he was gonna do and how he was gonna tell these people off.

And boy, they better not say, today's not the day to mess with me.

I'm gonna let them have it. Those kinds of things that we think about in the

shower or on the drive to work.

He never did that. He never looked at a girl and had a lustful thought.

He never let his mind direct his brain brain towards something that would be unholy or sinful.

And so, here's the way your weird friend, the neurosurgeon, Dr.

Lee Warren, thinks, okay?

We know that mind directs brain. We know that when we spend time meditating

and praying, when we think better thoughts, our hippocampus and the parts of

our brain that give us resilience and ability to resist, fight, flight, flee, reflex,

fight, flight, freeze, reflex, and all those things, we get better at handling

our responses responses when we think better thoughts.

It just occurred to me yesterday, I was working out and I thought,

I wonder what Jesus' brain looked like.

You know, there's all this research that's been done on Einstein's brain.

Albert Einstein, arguably the smartest physicist that ever lived,

at least in the 20th century.

When he died, somebody stole his brain. There's a long story about that.

We'll do a whole episode about Einstein's brain sometime. It's fascinating.

But they stole his brain, ultimately released photographs, and they've done all these studies.

And even to this day, There's whole research papers being written about the

differences structurally between Einstein's brain and average brains of people

his age and his sex and that sort of thing.

There's like multiple different characteristics of how his brain was structurally different.

One of those is that his corpus callosum, the bundle of white matter that connects

your left and right halves of your brain, was dramatically thicker than an average

person's corpus callosum, which means he had a structural advantage in thinking amazing thoughts.

And all of his great experiments, special relativity, general relativity,

unifying theory of gravity that overturned 200 years of Newtonian physics.

Ultimately taught us how the space-time fabric of our universe is put together.

All of that started with thought experiments in Einstein's head.

He would sit and think up ways to illustrate how gravity and time and space

might be related to one another.

And it turns out the parts of his brain that are involved in integrating thought

and emotion and feeling and memory and all those things were dramatically larger in his brain.

Now, were they larger because God built him that way and he had a built-in advantage,

or were they larger because he spent his time in a contemplative state thinking

and preparing in his mind ideas that turned out to be things,

thoughts become things.

So was it a chicken or the egg thing? So all kinds of other parts of his brain

were structurally different and bigger and more enhanced than people of his

same age and sex as found out in his autopsy.

Einstein's brain was different. So it dawned on me, I think we are going to

do an episode sometime about Einstein's brain. It's really interesting.

We'll probably bring a guest on. He's an expert in that.

So, but it dawned on me, what would Jesus' brain look like if Jesus spent his

entire life not giving in to rabbit trails of negative thought,

not accepting labels that other people put on him, not spending a whole night

worrying about what might happen the next day.

If he did that and he used his mind to capture his thoughts,

to take them captive, to transform for him, his mind, to continually try to

conform to what the Spirit and what the Lord wanted him to think about and how

they wanted him to behave.

And his connection with God was continually the go-to touchstone place that

he went to to control his thinking and get his emotions under control and decide what his steps would be.

What would his brain look like? Because mind creates brain. Mind makes brain different.

So I started thinking, the more we align our thinking, our thought life to Jesus,

the more we line up our minds with the mind of Christ, which by the way,

you don't have to wonder if you can have, you don't have to wish you had. Paul says it plain.

If you've given your life to him, you've been buried and raised again as a new

life, you have the mind of Christ.

So the big trick of the enemy is to continually convince you that you don't

have the mind of Christ, that you're all in this alone, that you've got to do

it all by yourself, that you're thinking is hopelessly stuck or any of those things. It's not true.

You're living one way, but you actually have the mind of Christ.

That's what James said. We have a double mind sometimes. We forget that we have the spirit.

We have the ability to align our thinking, to submit our wills to his mind.

And so the more closely, this is spiritual brain surgery right here, friend.

The more closely we align our thinking with the mind of Christ that we already

have, the more we will build our brains brains to look like Jesus's brain.

And so if you want to say, how can I live this life where Jesus could always

make the right decision and always go the right way and always influence people

the right way and always read people correctly and have great intuition and

do all the things that he did and so kind and gentle and gracious, how did he do that?

His mind directed his brain to build a brain that influenced his neurotransmitters

and hormones and other organs and even

his genes and everything to work as optimally as possible in his life.

Now, make sure you hear me clearly, friend.

You have 40,000 automatic negative thoughts a day.

You do, you have all these, that's an estimate. There's been all kinds of research

and they argue if it's 60,000 or 20,000 or 40,000.

But there's, the bottom line is, clearly you have tons of thoughts that pop

into your head every day. Most of them are negative.

Most of those automatic negative thoughts are not true.

And it's not a sin to have a negative thought.

It's not a sin for your eyes to fall on another person or something and have

a thought that, wow, that's beautiful.

Or, wow, that's wonderful. Or, wow, she's really pretty.

Or whatever, that first thought is not a sin, okay?

Jesus had those. He had negative thoughts. He had things that popped into his

head. How do I know that? Because the Bible says he was fully human.

He had a brain just like you do. And he had negative thoughts.

He was in the garden and he was thinking, God, I really don't wanna go and let

them flog me and nail me to the cross. I really don't wanna do that.

So can you take this cup from me? That thought of how painful it was gonna be,

how horrible it was gonna be, how awful what he was about to go through popped into his head.

But what he didn't do is what I usually do and what you probably do.

He didn't take that and go, man, I haven't done anything wrong.

Nobody respects me. I've come down here, I've served these people and they just

continually turn their backs on me.

Now they wanna kill me. Are you kidding me? Look what I've done for these people.

He didn't do that. He didn't take the original thought and follow it down a rabbit trail.

What he did rather was submit it to God.

He showed us a model. He said, God, if you can take this from me,

take it, but your will be done.

I'm with you. I'm all in. I know I want to align my will and my brain and my

body and my heart and my spirit with your will.

That's what Jesus did, okay? The pretty girl walked by.

He definitely said, that's a pretty girl. What he didn't do next was say all

the things that men typically think about that girl.

He controlled his thinking. He turned his eyes. He submitted his will to the mind of Christ.

He didn't get offended by a friend and spend the next 10 years griping in his

mind every time he saw that friend and holding that grudge against him.

He didn't come up to Peter every time he saw him and say, hey,

remember that time you abandoned me and I forgave you? Remember that?

Remember that? You wanna talk about how tough your life is, Peter?

You remember what you did to me? He didn't do that.

He had normal human emotion and normal human thought, but he submitted them

to the will of God and he used his mind to control his brain and his brain structurally

would have changed and been different.

What did it look like compared to Einstein's brain? I don't know.

But I do know that he spent his entire life never having given in to a single sinful thought.

He never submitted his mind to his own flesh. He controlled it.

He didn't sin with his mind. And I don't want to either.

Now, that's just the tip of the iceberg, big thought.

What would Jesus' brain look like? And how can we become more like him in his

mind, in his brain, in his life?

That's some of the things I want to talk about on spiritual brain surgery. Pretty interesting.

So when we talk about spiritual brain surgery, we're going to need to understand

what types of things we can do to get to know God more, to understand scripture

more appropriately, to be able to apply it in our lives, to be able to defend

it and help other people find their way too.

To be able to understand how our own biases and problems and past experiences

and upbringing and all that plays into how we come to scripture and interpret it and understand it.

So there's some big words that we're gonna be throwing around.

Theology, for example. We always talk about get your theology right.

Theology is the study of the nature of God and religious beliefs.

So some episodes, We're going to talk about theology.

Let's talk about understanding who God is from a Judeo-Christian standpoint

and what the difference is between God and Allah or the God of other religions.

Are we serving the same God as they are?

Is there a difference between the God, say, for example, the Protestants talk

about versus the God that Mormons might talk about and that sort of thing?

Is there a difference? We'll have some episodes about theology, okay?

We're going to have some episodes about apologetics. In fact, our very first episode,

we're going to have an intro episode So the very first real episode next Tuesday

is going to be a conversation with Elisa Childers, a writer and former famous

Christian music star who's now written some amazing books, and she does apologetics work.

And her book writing partner, Tim Barnett, have written an incredible book called

The Deconstruction of Christianity.

We've already recorded this episode. It's going to be the first branded episode

of Spiritual Brain Surgery next Tuesday.

We're going to talk about what the deconstruction process is and what it's not and what it means.

And if you're going through it or you've been through it or somebody you care

about is going through that process, we want you to have some tools to be able

to converse with them, pray for them and help them so that hopefully they don't

deconstruct all the way out of their faith altogether.

So apologetics is the set of arguments or teachings or writings that you can

use to justify what you believe.

So what tools do you need to be able to converse rationally with somebody who

doesn't believe and defend the Christian faith? That's apologetics.

We're gonna talk about exegesis. Exegesis is this sort of.

Critical examination of something, particularly scripture,

so that you understand how to open the word of God and study it for yourself

and have a set of tools for how you can go about learning and extracting the

truth and meaning from the word, okay?

Really important to understand. God doesn't have grandchildren.

He only has children. What does that mean? You can't get to heaven on your parents'

faith and your kids can't get to heaven on your faith.

You can't know the word of God for somebody

else like your kids and your grandkids need to know it for

themselves so you being a good student and learning

exegesis learning a set of tools for how

you can study the word will help you teach and influence other people around

you to be able to do the same too the world right now doesn't need a bunch more

preachers it needs a bunch of bible readers it needs people who believe in the

infallible word of God and know how to study it and learn how to build and defend

and know the truth truth, the truth for themselves.

We're gonna talk about hermeneutics, which is how it's a philosophy of how we

come to know things, how we interpret things.

And it's especially important in Bible study to understand that you come to

the word with a set of filters, a worldview that you use to interpret things.

And that's based on how you were raised, what your parents were like,

what the church was like that you grew up in or didn't grow up in.

It's about your experience, your previous traumas and the way that you baseline

beliefs that you have about things and labels that you've accepted for yourself. If you, for example.

Think that God is a big bully and that you've sinned so badly that you're never

going to be forgivable and you're unlovable and God is just waiting to smite

you, if that's your basic worldview,

then when you come to the Scripture, you're going to bring that whole set of

things to what God says and you're going to have to filter what He says through

all of that stuff that you've got in your heart.

And there's a thing called eisegesis, different than exegesis.

Eisegesis is when we read into a text, We interpret something in a way that

we bring all of our own hermeneutic, our own background, training, biases,

experiences, hurts, and all

of that stuff into the text, and we make it say what we want it to say.

So you have to be very careful. If you're going to really try to change your mind spiritually,

do some spiritual brain surgery and learn what the Word actually wants you to

know, you've got to get your own hermeneutic, your own filter,

your own eisegesis out of the way.

There's another thing called a heuristic, which is a philosophical term.

It's basically a process by which we use mental shortcuts to arrive at decisions.

It's the rules of thumb that we have. And some of us have a whole set of these

that we use to apply to things that we're trying to learn.

One of them is in medicine that's really dangerous is something called an availability heuristic.

So basically if I see a rare disease in the clinic, I see a guy that's got a super rare problem.

Then the next 20 years that I practice medicine, and everybody I see that has

symptoms similar to that guy, I'm gonna try to make that diagnosis of that rare thing again.

Even though it's one in 20 million and I'm probably never gonna see it again

in my whole career because it was an available idea in my mind and some of the

features of what that guy had line up with what you have.

It's gonna be easy for me to snap to a decision or diagnosis and try to make

you have that disorder even though that's not the most likely thing.

We have this old saying in medicine that we say medical students often they

hear hoofbeats off in the distance and they think it's a zebra because they

saw a zebra once in the clinic when it's much more likely to be a horse because

there's lots more horses than there are zebras.

So we have these heuristics that we apply to the way we look at things.

We have to understand how to do brain surgery on ourselves to get rid of those

heuristics and hermeneutics and not bringing eisegesis and our own interpretation into the text.

So in this podcast, podcast, we're going to look hard at the ways that we learn things.

We're going to look hard at our own biases and our own filters and try to learn

what the word actually wants us to know.

Because of that, my friend, is where the hope lies.

We want to be less self-directed and more spirit-directed. We want our minds

and our brains to function like Jesus's did.

I really want to know what Jesus's brain was like in his physical body.

And I want mine to be more like his because because he did it better than I

can do it. So here's the deal.

I believe that happiness doesn't make people happy because what the world thinks

is happiness is a constantly moving target.

We think if I finally get this girl or if that guy marries me or if I have this

amount of money or if I get this promotion or if I make it to the NFL or if

I get my book published or if they finally notice me at work and I finally get

that promotion or my grandkid finally comes home and tells me he loves me, then I'll be happy.

But the problem is once we have that thing that we thought we needed,

then that person is going to die or that job is going to end or we're going

to get disabled and not be able to play in the NFL anymore.

Or something is going to change and that thing that we thought we had to have

to make us happy isn't going to make us happy anymore.

It's just not because happiness, quote, quote, happiness, doesn't make people happy.

We're only really happy when we're connected to our power source,

our creator, the great physician.

He gives us the things that can really satisfy and heal us.

He gives us food that doesn't leave us hungry and water that doesn't leave us

thirsty anymore. It's what the book of John is all about.

So being able to continually improve our understanding.

Our systems of learning, our approach to knowledge, and rewiring our brains

to be less hindered by our past and our past ways of thinking and therefore

more efficiently wiring our brain to be these first-generation Christians with our own faith,

the ability to explain Scripture, defend our beliefs, and make it real for ourselves

and others is the only way to have real hope, my friend, as the Word comes alive

in us. And that is spiritual brain surgery.

We're going to talk about hope and faith and doubt and suffering and meaning

and purpose and science and scripture smashing together with reason and faith.

And we're gonna have this ability to look at people that say things like,

oh, science is evidence-based and faith is just faith-based belief.

It's not real, it's not scientific. We're gonna learn how to think differently

about that and how to be able to defend what we believe in a valid and logical and reasonable way.

Hebrews 4.12 says, the word of God is living.

That's our theme verse. We want the mind of Christ, and we're going to use the Word of God to get it.

Because the Word is the best MRI scanner in the world. It is a functional scan of your heart.

When you read the Word, unlike any other book, that book, the Word of God,

reads you back, and it will tell you who you are. It will show you the places you need to change.

It will show you the places you need to line up your will with his.

And if you want your brain to be more like Jesus's brain,

If you want your mind to be more like his mind, you need to submit your will

to the mind of Christ because you already have it, my friend, if you've accepted him.

We're gonna play a song called Get Your Hopes Up by Josh Baldwin.

It's not a new song, but it's new to me. I just finally found it.

We're gonna listen to this song. I just want you to kind of worship.

Get your hopes up because we're gonna do some spiritual brain surgery.

We're gonna become healthier and feel better and be happier, and it's gonna help us.

And we're gonna be able to get all this done because we're starting a brand new podcast friend.

And this one's not going anywhere either. We are going to go deeper than you've

ever imagined into how you're made so you can understand a way that you can

live that'll help you change your mind and change your life.

And the good news is, my friend, here on Frontal Lobe Friday,

getting ready for spiritual brain surgery so you can start today.

Music.

I see the sun waking up the morning reviving dreams,

I feel the wind on my back with promise remind me.

Music.

Get your hopes up, lift your head up, let your faith arise.

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.