Swing That Sword (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.

Good morning my friend I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren and I am here with you for some self brain surgery today on frontal lobe Friday.

We're going to talk about a new way to think about your ability to fight the

battles of your life, to deal with trauma and tragedy and other massive things

to deal with the negative voices in your head,

the enemy's voices in your head, the constant attack and negativity that you

hear when you're struggling.

And as we get into the holidays especially, we're going to deal today with a strategy and a tactical,

approach to how to deal with the ability to use our minds and the way they're

designed so that we can have some resilience against this trouble.

Against the hardships, against the memories, against the grief,

against the stuckness and the sameness, but we can also have the agility to

pivot to a better line of thinking,

to find meaning and purpose and

a solid footing so we can begin to move forward again when things hurt.

And we're gonna do all that today in a little bit of time, 20 or 30 minutes.

I'm gonna give you a handful of scriptures to use as some tools,

as some prehab, some things to hold on to, and just a new way to think about

the gift that you have that your frontal lobes give you of selective attention.

You're the only creature, person, animal, planet, matter of any sort,

the only thing that God created that has the ability to use selective attention

is you, because you, my friend, are made in His image.

You are fearfully and wonderfully made. The great physician put together your

mind as a network to communicate with your spirit, with his spirit.

To communicate and control your brain and to turn thoughts into things and improve

your life and the lives of those around you and to help you become healthier

and feel better and be happier and to navigate the traumas and tragedies and

other massive things of this life.

And if you were ready to sign up for that, how do I get stronger?

How do I manage my mind more properly? How do I handle this constant stream

of negative thoughts? How do I take my thoughts captive?

And how do I get on my feet when life really hurts?

Then today's your day. We're gonna get after it on Front Lobe Friday,

but before we do any of that, my friend, I have one question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything

starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

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

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

take control of our thinking and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

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

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time,

my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, my friend, let's get after it. Hey, before we get going,

several of you wrote in and said you were praying.

I mentioned yesterday that one of our daughters was having some medical troubles

and she had an urgent surgery yesterday.

She's doing fine, but kind of a quick short notice problem that popped up and

resulted in urgent surgery.

And she's doing okay. We need some prayers for her and her heart and her spirit

and her family and her husband and children.

And all of that, Lisa's actually on her way to go be with her this weekend and

just kind of help her get better as we get close to Christmas.

And just pray for us. Thank you so much for all that.

And we are grateful for your prayer support. And you know, life jumps up and

bites you sometimes, doesn't it?

No matter what you're going through or how things seem to be going,

you never know, there's always some kind of massive thing popping up.

And we're grateful that God got us through this one and she's gonna be okay.

So thanks for your prayers and we're praying for you too. If anything is going

on in your life, be sure and let us know by visiting the prayer wall at wlewarrenmd.com slash prayer.

Thanks for that. And let's get after it now for this episode of Frontal Lobe Friday.

Hey, a couple of little housekeeping things. One, there are at least four ways

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Number one, if you find it valuable and helpful, pray for it.

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feel better and be happier and change their minds and change their lives.

Just pray that the impact of the ministry will grow and that we can help people

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trying to help us as we move forward After losing a son and everybody's going

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But practically, if you can share it with your friends, that will really,

really help. So thank you for that.

Thank you also, again, for the prayers for our daughter and our family,

we just can't say thank you enough for all of that support.

We love you and we're grateful that you're joining along with us in our time

of need and so thank you for that.

Today we're gonna talk about selective attention. We talked about it before.

You have the ability to change your train of thought.

Harvey and Lewis, before we lost them, it's been another massive thing this

year, losing our dogs of course.

We miss those boys, but Harvey and Lewis, if they got after something,

they couldn't change their mind.

It was a fight to the That's what ultimately costs them their lives.

I got into it with coyotes, and once they're on it, they can't stop.

It's a fight to the death. It's a fight until they run out of steam,

until they absolutely can't go anymore, until we shock them or stop them or

put a leash on them or something.

They're gonna do what their brain is telling them to do, and they're gonna do it.

To their death or to the end, one way or the other, right?

But humans aren't like that. You have the ability to decide that you're gonna

stop thinking about one thing and start thinking about another thing.

And if you learn how to wield that power, then you can become incredibly resilient

in your life against whatever trauma or tragedy or massive thing or negative

thinking or offense that might pop up and you will be able to navigate your

life in a much more resilient and powerful way.

Now, I wanna give you some scripture because I believe as we talked about in

my book, Hope is the First Dose, and we've talked about a million times here.

If you haven't read Hope is the First Dose, by the way, that's another way you

can support all this work and learn something really helpful.

It's a treatment plan for trauma and tragedy and other massive things.

Hope is the First Dose gives you the basics of self-brain surgery and what to do when life hurts.

But in that book, I talked to you about something called prehab.

And prehab is when I see you in my office and you've got a problem with your

back and I know you're gonna have to have back surgery, but I don't think you're

strong enough yet. I don't think you're ready.

I will send you to the physical therapist, sometimes the occupational therapist before surgery.

To do some rehab, to learn how to take care of your back, to learn how to get

over surgery, to get stronger,

to increase your resilience, to be prepared for the assault and the trauma that

surgery brings you and also for the pain and the recovery and how to get stronger

faster and to just to get you ready for the coming battle that you're gonna

have with your body going through surgery, that's called prehab.

And in the spiritual realm and the psychological realm too, we have to be aware

that we're going to face these massive things. There's going to be trouble coming.

And having a plan in place helps you fall less far when you trip,

life will make you trip, life will knock you down.

And how far you fall depends on how well you prepare because remember we've

talked a million times is about Chris Voss, the FBI hostage negotiator.

In his great book, Never Split the Difference, he said, when the pressure's

on, you don't rise to the occasion. You don't suddenly become somebody that you're not.

You fall to your highest level of preparation.

And that's utterly true. It's true in every way you can look at it.

And when you're under pressure, you fall back to where you've prepared, okay?

When I'm in the operating room and something unexpected happens,

something starts bleeding, I don't freak out and go crazy and lose the day and

the patient keeps bleeding.

No, I jump in and immediately apply my training from years of training and years

of practice and time in the military and time in Iraq and times when things

have been really out of hand and I apply all that previous knowledge and preparation

to the situation and I get the bleeding stopped.

What I don't do is turn into somebody that's a better surgeon than I am.

I don't turn into some superstar guy on TV, on Grey's Anatomy,

who's somebody that never makes a mistake. I don't turn into somebody that I'm not.

I fall back to where I've prepared.

And I'm better in the moment of stress because I have prepared for that moment.

So I know what I'm going to do. I have a plan in place and I implement that

plan quickly, even when things seem a little bit crazy in the operating room.

Unfortunately, it doesn't happen very often in regular surgery,

but I had the opportunity to go to Iraq and deal with a lot of major trauma.

And in trauma centers in San Antonio and Pittsburgh and Oklahoma City and other

places, I've dealt with a lot of emergencies.

And so when I'm under stress, I fall back to

my preparation and that's what you can do too and if

you haven't prepared you're gonna fall a lot farther than

if you have that's why you need prehab okay so the

idea behind prehab is to prepare you for the inevitable coming of trauma and

tragedy and other massive things and what happens to your brain and your mind

when you go through it now I want to give you a little tool and And this tool

I got from Pete Greig in his book, How to Pray,

A Simple Guide for Normal People. Pete's gonna be on the podcast soon.

We had it scheduled for last week and I had a patient issue and we had to reschedule

it. And that was a real bummer for me because that interview was on the books for almost a year.

So it'll come and when it does, I know God's gonna bless it and there's gonna

be a good reason why that delay happened and we're gonna have a great conversation.

But he talks about knowing how to fight. He's talking about spiritual warfare.

When the enemy gets in your head and the enemy throws an idea at you or some

kind of negative thought at your head and your mind.

And if you're not a believer, if all this faith stuff is a little new to you

or if you're a little skeptical, that's okay.

Just acknowledge to yourself that you commonly have a voice in your head that's negative.

And you can call it synapses or electrical activity or whatever if you want to.

But I believe it's a spiritual battle and I believe you have an enemy who wants

to hurt you and keep you from being effective and keep you from being helpful

to other people when they're going through hard things. But however you want

to look at it, just think about it this way, and admit to yourself that you do hear a voice.

And that voice says things like, oh wow, now that this has happened,

you're completely hosed. You'll never recover from this.

Your son's died. You're going to be wrecked. You're going to become an alcoholic.

Your wife's going to leave you. You're going to be sad forever.

You're never going to get over this.

Your other kids won't respect you because you lost a child. You might as well

stop. Don't try to write about how to recover because you're not going to recover.

Don't try to help other people. you have no hope at doing that.

That's the kind of thing that you hear in your head, right?

You struggle and you drink a little bit too much and the next day you have a

headache and you say, this is the time I'm gonna get some help and I'm gonna

get over that and I'm gonna become healthier and I'm gonna get rid of that habit

and I'm gonna get into recovery and the voice in your head says, no, you're not.

You've tried before and you failed a million times and you're just like your

dad. You're worthless, you're hopeless, nobody cares about you.

You might as well just keep drinking because you have no hope.

You're not strong enough, you hear stuff like that, right?

If you're in a recovery, 100%, you know that, you've heard that before.

And if you're struggling to get pregnant, you've heard it, why would you think

it's gonna go any different this time?

You've lost all those previous babies and you're never gonna get pregnant and

it's never gonna be okay and you might as well quit and you might as well give

up and maybe there's something wrong with you or maybe there's something wrong

with your spouse and why would you even try? You failed so many times before.

There's something wrong with you. All these other people have kids.

God doesn't love you. You hear voices like that, right?

It's terrible, but you hear those voices And if you don't learn that you're in a fight,

if you don't understand that it's not just electrical activity,

and you don't understand that you have an enemy who's speaking into your heart,

and you don't understand that you're actually equipped for that battle,

then you won't know what to do, and you won't know how to fight.

So Pete Greig gives us this tool, and he says this, to engage in effective spiritual

warfare, you need to know your enemy and your authority. But most of all,

you need to know how to fight.

Pastor John Piper says the number one reason why prayer malfunctions in the

hands of believers is that they try to turn a wartime walkie-talkie into a domestic intercom.

Until you believe that life is war, you cannot know what prayer is for.

That's a big line. Until you believe that life is war, you cannot know what prayer is for.

There are three questions, Pete Greig says, that you should always ask when

confronting any kind of conflict in prayer. The first one, diagnosis.

What is the enemy's strategy against me or against this situation or against the place I'm in?

And Pete says, to answer this question, you need to use some common sense.

You need to use some wisdom and you need to use some spiritual discernment.

So it's often quite obvious what the strategy is.

Wisdom says not all bad things are necessarily demonic.

Sometimes it's just a situation you need to think through. It doesn't mean the

devil's after you every time something negative happens.

And spiritual discernment means that Satan can be a really convincing liar.

He can convince you of a lot of things if you're not paying attention.

Paul, in fact, in 1 Corinthians 12, talks about having learning and discerning

the ability to distinguish between spirits in his list of spiritual gifts, like prophecy.

And he learned what the devil's up to. You learn what that voice inside your head tends to do.

All of us have kind of recurring ways in which we're vulnerable to attack.

And if you open your eyes and say, wait, I've got an enemy here,

or again, if you're not a believer, I've got a neurochemical phenomenon that

happens every time I'm in this situation that tries to discourage me and I need

to think differently about it. However you wanna look at it, okay?

The Lord will open your eyes and help you see, like Elisha the prophet prayed

for his terrified servant. and the Bible says that Elisha prayed,

open his eyes that he may see.

This is in 2 Kings chapter six. Elisha is praying for his servant to be able

to see what's happening around them.

And he says, open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.

Then the Lord opened the servant's eyes and he looked and saw the hills full

of horses and chariots of fire all around him.

See, there was a spiritual war going on and the servant was terrified until

his eyes were opened and he could see what was really happening.

So you got to make the right diagnosis on the situation when you're hearing

those words in your head.

You have to compare them to what God has promised you.

And that's why prehab is so important is you have to know the promise if you're

gonna claim the promise, right? So when you say, wait a minute, I'm not a loser.

I have the blood of Jesus on my life. I'm not destined to be just like my father

because he gave me genes and epigenetic switches.

I have the ability, the power to change that because of how fearfully and wonderfully made I am.

I don't have to listen to you, Satan. so make the right prognosis too.

Once you diagnose the problem, you understand you actually are in a spiritual battle.

Think this, what might God's better plan be for this situation or this person or this place?

And to answer that question, again, you have to listen to the Word carefully

and understand the promises and understand if you have an intuition or a nudge,

it might be from the Holy Spirit.

And the way you know if it's from the Holy Spirit or not is that His voice will

never contradict Scripture. who will always reinforce and remind you of Scripture.

That's what Jesus said in John that the Spirit would do.

And finally, once you know the diagnosis and the prognosis, you have to apply

the right prescription.

I'm loving that Pete Grigg is using medical terminology here.

Put the right prescription on it.

Discern what Satan's trying to do. Discern what your neurons are trying to do

if you want to think about it that way.

What God wants you to do. And then ask yourself, what can I now do,

practically and prayerfully, to thwart Satan's plan and welcome God's better

purpose into this person, place, or situation, into this time in my life,

how can I apply God's promise and that prehab that I put in there to do some

self-brain surgery and move forward into a better situation and not go down

this train of thought, to switch from one train of thought to another?

Well, I'm gonna give you a couple of practical ones today. I love that Pete

Greig talked about that.

The Bible in several different places refers to the Word of God as the sword of the Spirit.

In fact, Paul in Ephesians 6 gives us all these weapons, that the full armor

of God, and I shouldn't have said all these weapons, there's only one weapon.

There's all these other things that are like the breastplate,

the helmet, the shoes, the belt, all these things that God gave us.

Go read Ephesians 6, 10 through 18 to learn about the full armor of God.

The only one that's a weapon is the sword of the Spirit.

The sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Hebrews 4.12 says this way,

the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword,

piercing to the division of soul and of spirit.

You hear that? The sword of the Spirit is your weapon.

And when you learn how to swing it in the fight,

then you can become effective at changing your mind when your enemy or your

negative neurotransmitters or whatever you wanna think about it,

starts to push you down a train of thought that's gonna be harmful to you or

counterproductive or lead you to worsening stuckness or wallowing in your grief

or your misery or whatever it might be.

Instead of switching to something that's more helpful, you swing the sword of the Spirit at it.

Wait a minute, I've got this truth. I can fight this lie with this truth.

It's not a flaming arrow, it's not a battering ram, is the Word of God, Pete Greig says.

It's how Jesus behaved in the wilderness when the devil was tempting him.

Every time he swung back with scripture.

That's the path. That's the method that will help you out of the hole.

And today on Self Brain Surgery's podcast on frontal lobe Friday,

I want you to remember that you have a special gift, a special gift.

2nd Timothy 1 7, for God did not give you a spirit of fear but of power and

of love and of a sound mind.

If you read 2nd Timothy 1 7 in some translations that sound mind is translated

as a discernment or self-control or discipline or something like that,

but the literal translation, the best translation, Jung's literal translation,

the King James and several others use an actual, very literal translation of the Greek word here,

it means a sound mind.

You have been given the ability to transform your thinking and use your good

brain and your good mind to recall the promises of God and speak against those

lies that want to hurt you and keep you stuck.

And you can then wield that sword wisely and you can change your mind and move

forward down a different train of thought.

When you get on the subway in New York City or London or wherever,

you don't just ride until it runs to the end of its course, right?

You get off and get onto the next

train and to the next train that's gonna take you where you want to go.

You don't just let the subway run its course and hope it goes somewhere good for you.

But that's what we do with our thinking all the time. and we just.

The thought pops into our head and we run with it and we run with the next thought

and the next thought and the next thought and before we know it,

we're thinking all these negative things and we're giving up and we're drinking

and we're buying things and we're texting people and we're going places we shouldn't

go and we're wallowing in misery and we're stuck and our cingulate gyrus isn't

helping us and our hippocampus is short-circuited into our amygdala and we're in fight, flight,

freeze all the time and we're not living the abundant life that Jesus wanted

us to live because we failed to practice self-brain surgery.

We failed to use our gift of selective attention. We failed to remember that

we have a spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind.

Friend, that's the path here on Frontal Lobe Friday.

That's the path forward that will help you when the yellow handle gets pulled

and you get ejected from your life onto some trajectory that you didn't want,

like our daughter in surgery yesterday or in all the emails that I got last week.

We got a crushing email from a woman yesterday, lost her mom in January,

filed for divorce in February, had a car accident last week in which three people were killed.

This woman's had a rough year and guess what's gonna start happening?

She's gonna start hearing voices. You've lost everybody, nobody loves you.

You were involved in this horrible accident and maybe you should have just died

too. She's gonna hear stuff like that.

And what's the truth? I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord.

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

She's gonna grab that truth and she's gonna start swinging it in that battle

that she's in against that negative thinking.

She's gonna say, nobody cares about me, my husband left me, and then she's gonna

remember, wait a minute, the Lord longs to be gracious for you.

He rises to show you compassion.

The Lord is close to the brokenhearted. I can do all things through Christ who

gives me strength. You see that?

You find some promises and you prehab them in your heart and then when your

thinking starts to become disordered,

you will remember things that are true and you

will start fighting back with better weapons with the weapon and with a sound

mind You'll be able to swing that sword and change your train of thought and

become healthier and feel better and be happier and you'll find Your feet again

my friend and the good news about all of this is that 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 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.