Ten Books I Loved in 2023, Part 2

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

you, and I'm excited to bring you the second part of our two-part series as

we get close to the end of the year here on the 10 books I love the most in 2023.

Again, these aren't a ranking. We're going to talk about the last five and some

honorable mention books, and we're going to finish with the one book that I

think is the best book I read in 2023.

I think it's going to bless you. But before we get into the episode, I have an announcement.

We are going to be at the the Twig Bookshop in San Antonio, Texas on Thursday evening, 5.30 p.m.

Thursday, December 21st. Lisa and I and our family will be down there.

They've invited us for a book signing, the great folks down at the Twig,

and we would love for you to come out so we can meet you, sign a book,

shake your hand, take a picture, and get to know you a little bit.

If you're in the San Antonio area and you would like to come and hang out with

us for a little bit, then Thursday,

December 21st, 5.30 p.m., twig bookshop downtown san antonio 306 pearl street

lisa and i and our family will be there and we would love a chance to meet you

and since we're going to be at the bookstore then we're going to get into an

episode about books this is part two of the 10 books i loved in 2023,

and all you need to do my friend before we get there is answer one question for me.

Hey are you ready to change your life if the answer is yes there's only one

rule you have 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 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, let's get after it. Hey, we're here on Wild Card Wednesday.

You're gonna hear this on the Wednesday of Christmas week. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and this is part two of 10 books I loved in 2023.

So again, I'm giving you 10 books that I read that I think are valuable and

I think will help you change your mind and change your life in some way.

And I think reading is a great way to get unstuck when you only hear your own

ideas or the only ideas you hear are those people that are around you in your

world or what you get on media or social media,

and you don't actually take time to ingest wisdom or controversial or opposite

viewpoints or other ideas, I don't think you can grow and learn as a human as much as you can.

And of course, I read all the time. It's part of my daily practice.

I get up in the morning, I read something, I try to discern something new in

context of what I've read in the Bible that day and what I've prayed about,

what I've listened to in worship music and what I'm preparing to bring to you

if I'm podcasting or writing that day.

Books are an important way to expand your mind and grow and learn and change.

And so I just remind you to check them out. So I'm giving you five more books today.

Don't forget to check the links of our affiliate partners, the sponsors in the

show notes to help us fund and support the podcast.

We really appreciate that. And in the show notes, there'll be links to the books that I mentioned.

If you buy them through those links, we get a little commission from Amazon, so that's helpful.

So if you go to my website or any of the places where you have show notes for

the podcast, you'll see the list of the books we mentioned today.

And you can buy them through our links or not. You can get them at the library,

local bookseller, any place.

But I highly encourage you to check out these five books. I think they'll be

incredibly helpful to you in changing your mind and changing your life.

And without further ado, I hope you enjoyed part one.

And if you haven't already heard it, go back to Monday, back to Mind Change

Monday, and hear part one of this two-part episode of the 10 Books I Loved in 2023.

Today, we're going to give you five more books, books, some honorable mention

books that are also amazing, great books, but I didn't take the time to pull

quotes from them and show you five things from each book that I love for a variety of reasons.

And also I'm going to give you the one book this year that if you're only going

to buy one book off my list or go to the library and read one book off my list,

it's going to be the one that I give you today.

I think the number one book I read in 2023, Lisa read it also.

I think it's a game changer wherever you are in your Christian walk.

If you're a seeker, you haven't yet figured figured out what you believe,

even if you're agnostic and don't know, check this book out because it'll give

you an insight into who Jesus is, who Christians are from a real scriptural,

legitimately biblical-based place.

And it's a great book. I think you'll really enjoy it. We're going to get there

soon. I can't wait to tell you what my favorite book of 2023 was.

But in the meantime, let's start with number five and let's get after it.

Again, these are not rankings, okay?

They're just a list of books that I love and I think they will be helpful to you.

The first one is not necessarily a book that I would recommend that you read

unless you love science and unless you like to read things that are very sort

of technical and hard to, they're not easy.

This is not pop fiction and it's not pop psychology.

This is significant science, but written, Stephen Meyer writes in a very accessible way.

You're a smart person or you wouldn't be listening to this podcast and you could read it.

But if you don't love science, It might not be for you, but this is a book called

The Return of the God Hypothesis, Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the

Mind Behind the Universe.

And Stephen Meyer covers some amazing ground in this book.

And number one is the fact that the media, the mainstream science and the media

has convinced us that it's silly for smart people to think about God or believe in God.

But the truth is the very disciplines of science themselves started as a way

for people to honor God by discovering things about their creator and how to

discover and worship God for his creativity.

So the very idea of science in the beginning was a God-seeking endeavor.

And that's why the book is called The Return of the God Hypothesis.

Because science arose out of the God hypothesis.

If God did this, there must be a way to, we can study it and understand it and

harness its power and do good things with what he gave us and honor him by learning

about his creation. So here's five quotes I love from this book. The first one, no proof.

This is talking about logical proof and rhetoric and logic when you're trying to prove something out.

No proof can establish any conclusion with certainty since all proofs must make some assumptions.

The point here is he's talking about big things like the origin of the universe

and how physicists think the whole cosmos may have started.

And if you don't involve God in that, then how do you explain it?

And he's basically saying that no matter what kind of mathematical model or

theory or model we come up with,

nobody's idea is ever going to be completely certain because you can't make

any kind of proof without making some assumptions.

That's how mathematics and physics work.

You have to make some assumptions. The improbability of many of the individual

fine-tuning parameters.

Now, when I say fine-tuning, Stephen Meyer lays out all

the arguments for why it is so improbable and exactly how improbable it is that

the universe could have just happened to come into being with just the right

properties and just the right chemical elements and in just a certain way at

a certain time the right chemical reactions occurred,

that there were enough of these molecules together and they

just happened to mix together in just the right ratios to

create planets and solar systems and stars that

could potentially have created a planet that might be

hospitable to life and that then it did do that and then that atmosphere happened

to be conducive enough that life sprang up and it managed to handle all the

mutations and all the permutations and all the difficulties and somehow it turned

out to where we're listening to podcasts billions of years later that all of that,

that requires what they call fine-tuning.

Like there is a specific set of circumstances and requirements that would have

been necessary to allow the universe and life itself to even begin.

And it turns out that they were actually there and they were fine-tuned.

And all of that kind of supposes that there was a designer.

If you walk into your house and the lights are just right and the temperature's

just right and dinner's on the table just right and everything's just right,

then you'll know that your spouse spent some time designing that environment

for it to look perfect when you got home, right?

If you walk into a factory and you see how everything's laid out and the machines

are just right and the tools work properly and the parts fit exactly on the

assembly line just right and everything is perfect,

you would naturally assume that somebody designed it to be that way.

And the universe has all of these highly improbable, finely tuned parameters.

And it's just stunning that some people think that that could have happened by accident.

So Meyer says it this way, the improbability of many of the individual fine-tuning

parameters to say nothing of the improbability of the whole ensemble seems to

preclude a straightforward appeal to chance.

In other words, the more scientists learn, the harder it is to swallow the idea

that it was just a random accident that all of this came to be.

Indeed, Meyer says, the laws of physics do not account for why the laws of physics are as they are.

That is, why they have the precisely fine-tuned features that they do.

And this is an important point because a lot of times you'll hear scientists

talk and they'll be making these blanket statements of how we evolved this way

and the cosmos started that way and how it's stupid to think about God and you

don't need a God of the gaps to imagine that all these things happen.

We can prove it with science and all that.

Then they'll start talking about the laws. They can use the laws of physics

to explain certain things.

But what you need to understand is that the law of physics and the law of gravity

and all these other mathematical laws.

Don't explain themselves how they came to be.

They just describe the behavior of certain phenomena, right?

So understanding how to mathematically model gravity, for example,

doesn't explain gravity.

It just explains gravity's behavior.

So Meyer says it this way, indeed the laws of physics do not account for why

the laws of physics are as they are.

That is, why do they have the precisely fine-tuned features lectures that they do.

To see why, consider that several key fine-tuning parameters,

in particular the values of the constants of the fundamental laws of physics,

are intrinsic to the structure of those laws.

This is really important. It's nerdy, heavy stuff.

But if you are a parent, if you're a grandparent, if you've got kids in public

school, if you have a child or a loved one who's interested in science,

make sure that they have their heads on straight.

Because at At school, they're going to get told, oh, it just happened this way.

There was a Big Bang and then we evolved and that's all science.

It's not. It's not proven.

And in fact, the more the physicists and the mathematicians and the cosmologists

and the astrophysicists and the biologists look and learn,

and the better our tools get at seeing things at smaller and smaller levels

and farther and farther back in space-time,

the less clear it is that their ideas were that it could have just happened.

And now they all, almost all universally agree that there had to have been a

beginning, which for many years they all thought the universe was just eternal

and somehow all this came out of nothing. So Meyer says this.

These specific and contingent values cannot be explained by the laws of physics

because they are part of the logical structure of those laws.

Scientists who say otherwise are just saying that the laws of physics explain

themselves, but that is circular reasoning.

No known law of physics can explain the initial distribution of matter and energy

at the beginning of the universe.

Since the laws describe how various forces or fields act upon on specific material

conditions once those conditions are present.

They do not explain how the conditions arose in the first place.

They presuppose them. This is so important.

And if you're not a science person, I apologize, but it is critically important

that you understand this because there is a cognitive dissonance that all Christians

have been forced to swallow.

And that is, if you believe in God and have faith in God, then you have to,

at some level, decide in your mind that the scientists are wrong about some things.

And at the same time you rely on science to

give you medicine and to make televisions and to create

cell phones and all that so science works and we

know that science can prove things so when scientists come on tv or write books

and say there is no god and it's stupid to think so that creates a cognitive

problem for you meyer's saying they're the ones with the cognitive problem Because

they talk about how laws of nature work,

but they presuppose the fact that nature was there for those laws to work upon.

And they don't admit that the idea, the truth is that the laws describe nature

that was already there, but they cannot describe how nature got there.

There's a famous quote about the survival of the fittest model from Darwin that

says, survival does not explain arrival.

So you can learn all you want about evolution, and you can believe that if you

want to, and you can learn about Darwin's theory and how incremental change

over time could potentially have one species turn into another over millions

and millions or billions of years,

but none of those theories of how biology moves forward could explain how biology

started in the first place.

His survival does not explain arrival.

Okay, that's a great book. It's heavy. It's not easy to read. It's fascinating.

If you're into science, it would really help you if you have a child or a grandchild

who's bent towards science and they're old enough to read, maybe you should give it to them.

But if they're younger, maybe you read it yourself and use it to educate them

and make sure they're not fully indoctrinated by the schools telling them that God is made up.

Because the fact is science is beginning to ask better and better questions

and some of the things that they always thought are turning out to be very much in question.

And Stephen Meyer did an amazing job in this book and I'm really proud of how well he laid this out.

Stephen Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis. Next, Rest and War by Ben Stewart.

This book bent my brain up a little bit.

Tremendous book about how busy we are and how anxious we are.

And he says this, listen to what 1 John 3, 8 tells us.

The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. Why did Jesus come?

He came to give you abundance because the enemy wants to steal, kill, and destroy.

And John tells us in 1 John 3, 8, he came to destroy the works of the devil.

Jesus came here to fight a war.

He came to destroy destroy something. You might object and say,

wait, I thought he came to save, to bring peace, to heal. What do you mean to destroy?

Well, think about it. To save means there was a person or force holding people

captive that must be overcome.

To bring peace suggests a prior state where there was no peace.

To heal suggests that there was a disease or a sickness that must be cut out.

For Jesus to save, bring peace, and heal, he had to destroy something.

Liberation required destruction. instruction.

He talks about Philippians chapter four. He says, I tell people that I live

in Philippians chapter four, where Paul actually said, do not be anxious about

anything. Isn't that powerful?

Think about it for a minute. Anxiety is never godly. Friend,

if you don't hear anything else I say today, I'm going to look right in the camera and say this.

If you don't hear anything else I say, the Bible doesn't give you a choice about

whether to choose to worry or be anxious or not.

It says, do not be anxious for anything.

Now, hear me very clearly. There are anxiety disorders.

There are times when anxiety fills you up and you need help.

Sometimes you need a doctor or a therapist if you have crippling anxiety or

a disorder where you can't break out of it.

But every day, we can choose to live in the victory where our mindset can change

away from anxiety and towards gratitude and thanksgiving.

Remember I told you, the way the hippocampus works, you can't be anxious and

grateful at the same time.

And you have a choice, but the Bible doesn't give us a choice.

It says, be anxious for nothing.

Don't choose to worry and fret. Remember Psalm 37, fret not yourself,

it tends only to evil. You don't have to live in that anxious state. You do not.

Ben Stewart says, the Bible says anxiety is never godly.

There will never be a circumstance in which you are obligated to worry.

My friend, the Bible says no to that. There is no value in it at all.

It says, do not be anxious about anything.

And the root of the word translated as anxiety in this verse means to draw in

different directions or to distract.

Scripture can guide us towards our twin goals of relinquishing anxiety and pursuing

intimacy with God. Paul gave us three steps in the process.

Ben Stewart writes this very well out of Philippians 4. Release your worries first.

Release your worries first. I love it. He uses a passive voice.

Let your requests be made known to God.

It makes it sound like your requests want to come out. You just need to let them be made known.

If it sounds silly, don't forget, forget all intimacy requires honesty.

If you're not real with another person, you cannot have a real relationship

with them. And the same is true with God.

Look through the scriptures at those who enjoyed a deep fellowship with God.

Often their moments of greatest intimacy began in a moment of brutal or uncomfortable honesty.

Sometimes where we are is not where we want to be.

But friend, Ben Stewart says this very well, and you got to hear me, start where you are.

That's That's why I always say start today. Don't try to fix it and get ready and then start today.

Thinking about the thing, preparing for the thing isn't doing the thing, okay?

You have to start where you are. And finally, he says this, Paul described the

implications of this outpouring of our concerns in the following verse.

The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and

your minds in Christ Jesus, Philippians 4, 7.

When you place your cares into the hands of the King an otherworldly calm that

extends beyond human comprehension will step in front of your heart's door like a bouncer.

It will refuse to let anxieties pass the velvet rope into the exclusive inner

sanctum of your heart and mind.

The peace of God will guard your heart, friend, in Christ Jesus.

When? When you pray with thanksgiving and choose not to be anxious.

That's when you get this peace that you can't even describe.

And that's what Rest in War by Ben Stewart is about. It's incredible.

The next book, another one of these deep science, philosophy,

science, neuroanatomy, neuroscience book, The Mind and the Brain,

Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.

And this is by Jeffrey Schwartz. And I'm gonna tell you, this is one of those

books that if you read it, somebody's gonna email me and say,

hey, that guy's not a Christian.

Why are you writing about him? And his ideas are all mystical.

He talks about Buddha and all that. Yes, that's true.

But I wanna tell you why this is valuable.

I think God calls each of us out of his unique gifting to us into places where we will encounter him.

And I can't imagine a better example of that than Jeffrey Schwartz.

He's this famous neuroscientist, psychiatrist, works at UCLA,

has written all kinds of books about OCDs, therapy techniques are famous.

And this famous guy in the mind and the brain is when he starts wrestling with

this problem of what creates what. Does the mind create the brain?

Does the brain create the mind? Is there such a thing as mind or is it just

an electrical thing happening in your brain? Am I just my brain?

All that stuff. Like what's going on?

And neuroscience, actually the hardcore materialist neuroscientists don't even

believe that there is such a thing as mind.

They just think it's all some kind of chemical thing happening in your brain

and you're just perceiving things that are phenomena of your brain and eventually

we'll be be able to explain them all scientifically, but there is no mind, right?

So Jeffrey Schwartz starts out as this hardcore materialist scientist.

And over the course of the three of his books that I've read.

I didn't put the other two on the list, but we're going to get to them,

and I'm trying to get him on the podcast someday.

But you start with the mind and the brain, and you'll hear him recognizing that

functional imaging studies, for example, are showing that there's some benefit

to prayer and meditation.

He starts being kind of interested in this idea that there's more to the story

than just the electrical phenomenon happening in our brains.

By the third book, in the first book, he talks about the phenomena of religiosity

and what it does on a neuroimaging standpoint.

In the second book, he starts openly grappling with spiritual ideas and the

fact that there's some value to them in people's lives.

In the third book, he dedicates to Jesus.

And what does that mean? It means that somebody in his life came alongside him

and said, you have a gift.

You're being drawn towards something bigger than yourself. And let me show you

who it is. His name is Jesus.

Somebody brought him to the Lord through his leanings of interest,

His interest in science, and science brought him to the Lord.

And I haven't heard him tell that story, but I can just tell you from reading

his three books and the last ones dedicated to Jesus, this guy changed.

And that's why there's value in reading broadly, in reading widely, okay?

And so also it's why when you read a book by somebody that has great insight and great ideas,

but obviously doesn't have your knowledge of who Jesus is, you should pray for

that author, that God will use that interest that they had to write that book

to lead them to another book, to more research that will lead them ultimately

to the foot of the cross and their Savior.

That's going to be amazing.

So, all that to say, Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain,

says this, this has been one of the greatest triumphs of modern neuroscience,

this mapping of whole worlds of conscious experience,

from recognizing faces to feeling joy, from fingering a violin string to smelling

a flower onto a particular cluster of neurons in the brain.

So powerful and enduring has been Alcman's hypothesis about the seat of mental

life and his intellectual descendants equating a brain and mind that most neuroscientists

today take for granted that once you have correlated activity in a cluster of

neurons with a cognitive or emotional function,

or more generally, with any mental state,

you have solved the problem of the origin of mental events.

What he's saying is that most scientists think that we'll eventually be able

to sort out what's happening in people's minds, and it's just electrical stuff in their brains.

The next quote, to the mainstream way of thinking, the mainstream materialist

way of thinking, only the physical is real.

So you see what they're saying is that the brain is real because you can touch

it, but the mind is not real because it's chemical, it's electrical,

it's just a phenomena of the brain.

So we're going to get down to what is really important here.

In this school of philosophy, Schwartz says, at least among those who don't

dismiss the the reality of mind entirely.

The mind is the software running on the brain's hardware.

Now, you've heard me say that before. Mind is software, brain is hardware.

Here's the critical difference.

These guys, material scientists, neuroscientists who don't believe in God and

don't believe in mind at all,

it's just all some chemical, electrical sack of neurons and their behavior that

creates your concept that you even have a mind or a self or that there's anything

real outside of the things you can touch.

The problem with that is that model would then imply that the computer can create its own software.

And you already know that that's not true.

Because if you buy a new Macintosh computer and they don't install any software

on it or a new PC and they don't put any software on it, it's just a bunch of

parts put together and you turn it on, you might get a power light on,

but that computer's not gonna do anything thing because the computer lacks the

ability to create the software programs that tell it what to do with all those parts, right?

So from a Christian standpoint, obviously we think mind is a top-down control

structure on top of the brain that tells the brain what to do.

You can't have mind without brain because the brain is the physical organ that

hosts and gives power to the mind, but the mind mind controls the brain and

not the other way around. And we know that there's reciprocation there.

But this idea that Schwartz is talking about is in mainstream neuroscience,

they believe that the mind is software if there is any such thing as mind that's

created by the underlying hardware.

And you don't know any model where that would make sense.

Schwartz says, but if you equate the sequential activation of neurons and the

visual pathway, say, with the perception of a color, you quickly encounter two

mysteries, and here they are.

So you've got the electrical phenomenon, okay?

You've got the electrical phenomenon of light hitting the retina and turning

into a chemical electrical event that travels down neurons to the brain,

and that's an event that happens.

But what in the world is it that you feel when you see something that's blue

or something that's red, right? It's not just a mental event.

In your brain because a blind person you

can tell them what blue is and you can tell

them what red is but they don't see it they can't know it

they can't experience color because color is a concept right but if you if you

put that signal in your retina and it goes back to your brain and somebody's

taught you the difference between red and blue and and blue gives you not just

not just that you can recognize the color because you've been taught that red is blue,

but blue makes you feel something and red makes you feel something.

And that's not explainable by the activity inside the neurons. It's not.

Schwartz says this, if nothing else, there's a serious danger of falling into

a category error. We've talked about category errors before.

That's where you sort of make a logical mistake because you're lumping two things

together or you're taking something from one category and and rationalizing

it in another category where it doesn't make sense.

And the category is ascribing to particular clusters of neurons properties that

they do not possess, in this case consciousness.

So a bunch of neurons firing electrical activity down your retina and optic

nerve to your occipital cortex doesn't give you the feeling of what a particular

color means to you or the memories that are associated with that color.

It doesn't give you consciousness.

It's just an electrical event. The software isn't created by the hardware.

And that's some of the millions of things, the dozens of things that I learned

from Jeffrey Schwartz's amazing book, The Mind and the Brain.

The third one, How to Hear God, A Simple Guide for Normal People.

We talked in the first episode about how to pray, A Simple Guide for Normal People by Pete Greig.

This is another one of his books that I think are life-changing.

I was not going to include this one because I went so deep on how to pray,

but I have to because this book is the best book on how to hear God that I've

ever read. I've read Dallas Willard.

I've read all of them. Greg Pruitt. I've read everybody.

And Pete Greig is the best. It's just the best. It's the best book on prayer.

It's the best book on hearing. It's incredible. Check this out.

Jesus is what God sounds like. You don't have to wonder what God's voice sounds

like. It sounds like Jesus.

You have his words in the scripture. So the most important point about that

is if you hear something in your head and you think it's God and it contradicts

the written word that God's already given you, or if it contradicts the character

that he's revealed about himself in Scripture,

and you find yourself saying, wait, Jesus would never say that.

It's not him because Jesus is what God sounds like. He's literally the living word of God.

Remember, the answer to suffering isn't a what, it's a who.

It's Jesus? Well, the answer to hearing is you must meet Jesus and get to know

him if you wanna know what God sounds like.

Pete Greig says, all the other ways in which God communicates through the Bible,

prophecy, dreams, visions, and so on, come through Jesus and point back to him too.

When it comes to hearing God, the Bible is the language of his heart.

Nothing he says in any other way, in any other context will ever override,

undermine, or contradict what he has said in the scriptures.

My friends who are more charismatic than me, listen very carefully here.

If you think that you have a spiritual experience, a dream or a vision or a

prophecy, and it contradicts something that the Bible says, I've heard people say it before.

I feel like the Lord is releasing me to have this affair.

He's releasing me to be with this person because that'll make me happy.

He's telling me it's okay to cut this corner because he's got a plan for my business. He's not.

If it contradicts what the Bible says, it's not God that's speaking to you.

It's not. That's an incredible danger in thinking that God is saying something

to you that contradicts something he's already said, because he never changes.

He's the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

His written word is inviolable, and he will never violate it.

So Pete Griggs is exactly right. When it comes to hearing God,

the Bible is the language of his heart.

Nothing he says in any other way, in any other context, will ever override,

undermine, or contradict what he has said in the Scriptures. That is true.

Next, by harnessing the power of imagination and meditation,

this practice called Lectio Divina, we've talked about it a million times on this podcast.

I keep saying a million. We probably haven't talked about it a million times.

We've talked about it frequently. This idea of taking a scripture,

chewing on it, meditating it, journaling it, writing it down,

sending it to yourself in an email, constantly bringing it up,

talking about it, taking a scripture and just ingesting it until you own it,

until it becomes part of you, until you absorb it and digest it.

And it becomes alive in your heart and it starts doing something.

It starts reading you and asking you questions about your own self and your

motivations. That's what the Bible does.

Lectio Divina can leave our hearts burning within us as fresh revelation begins

to flicker from familiar texts.

The four traditional steps of the practice of Lectio Divina,

Pete lays out, are simplified into the acronym PRAY. Pause, read, reflect, and yield.

Pause, read, reflect, and yield. You want to know how to read scripture?

Pray through it. Pause over it. Spend time with it.

Chew on it. Take a verse that God promises His Word will never go out empty.

It will accomplish what He intends for it to accomplish.

Pray, pause, read, reflect, and yield.

That's the best book on how to hear God I have ever read.

Now, one more quote. Of course, we want Him to be unmissable and unmistakable.

We expect Him to flash all around His all-access pass to kick the door down

of our lives, but instead, He does what He did in the Bible.

He waits for us to ask Him to get into the boat. He waits for us to invite Him to our house.

He shows up on the road and He's gonna pass by unless you invite Him.

Tata and I talked about that recently.

He's gonna walk on by the boat unless you invite Him.

In the words Emily Dickinson said, He tells it slant. Like, He doesn't come

right at us. He's a gentleman.

He doesn't run straight in our face. He wants us to invite him.

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant, Emily Dickinson said.

Like, give us a little slant on it, and that's what Jesus does. He's right there.

He wants to tell it to you, but he waits for you to invite him.

He waits for you to invite him.

Okay, the next slide. There are 10 book covers on here if you're watching the video.

If you're not, I'm just gonna run through them real quick. These are 10 other

books that I thought were amazing that I read this year.

And I just wanna mention each of them briefly. The Mind Shift by Erwin McManus.

Erwin McManus was on the show a few months ago. His book, Mind Shift,

it doesn't take a genius to think like one, transformative book.

Dawson Church, I read three of his books this year. Again, Dawson Church, not a Christian.

He's gonna get on our podcast and we're gonna have a conversation.

And I believe he may have one of those Jeffrey Schwartz transformations that

we talked about because this guy is knocking at the door of understanding how

the Lord communicates to us through our minds.

He has made some incredible insights. He explains things in a beautiful way.

He ties together physics and neurobiology and electromagnetic field theory and

all this stuff, quantum mechanics, all in a way that you can understand and relate to.

And he wrote the book, Mind to Matter, or The Astonishing Science of How Your

Brain Creates Material Reality.

This book is the idea behind the thoughts become things.

It's the processes behind how thoughts become things.

It talks about epigenetics and neurobiology and interpersonal neurobiology. It's a powerful book.

And I believe that God is knocking on Dawson Church's door.

And I think someday there's going to be a book. It might be me that writes it.

I'm not sure I'm qualified. qualified, somebody's going to write the book that

ties all that stuff together and Jesus, because that's when it all becomes infinitely

connected. So Dawson Church's book, Mind to Matter.

Don't email me and tell me he's not a Christian. I already know it.

It's powerful. It's useful. If you like that kind of stuff, you'll learn a lot from it. It's powerful.

His book, Genie in the Jeans, and his other book, Bliss Brain, equally powerful.

My friend, Michael Gillen, Dr. Michael Gillen wrote Let Creation Speak.

He was on the podcast recently, A Hundred Invitations to Awe and Wonder.

It's just science and amazing aspects of God's creation.

It's a powerful book. You can read it to your kids. It's written on a really

simple level that anybody could be amazed by.

It's an invitation to awe and wonder. Michael Gillan knocked it out of the park.

Greg Pruitt, Extraordinary Hearing. He was also on the podcast recently.

Another one of the best books I've ever read on how to hear God.

It's important. Gordon is necessary. Greg Pruitt, Extraordinary Hearing.

Kurt Thompson's book, The Deepest Place, Suffering and the Formation of Hope

is another one of the best books I've ever read on suffering and how we find

hope through it, not because of it or not in spite of it, but through it. How do we find hope?

Kurt Thompson, MD, tremendous book, Suffering and the Formation of Hope.

He is, we're back and forth with his publicist about having him on the podcast in early 2024.

Kurt Thompson, The Deepest Place, you gotta read it. Annie Grace,

she was on the podcast. I was on hers.

This Naked Mind, Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness,

and Change Your Life. This is the book.

That we started talking about the cognitive dissonance issue behind alcohol

and other numbing behaviors.

And Annie has helped over a million people find freedom from alcohol, okay?

If you're one of those people that struggles with that, then Annie's book,

This Naked Mind would really help you.

It's science, it's biology, it's psychology.

It's a great pulling together of all these different disciplines and the truth

about what alcohol is and what it does and what it does to you.

And I think it would be incredibly helpful for you to read.

James K.A. Smith's book, On the Road with St. Augustine, A Real World Spirituality

for Restless Hearts, tremendous look at worldview and what Augustine did and

it's just a great, great book.

And I read it after I read John Mark Comer's book, Live No Lies,

I think it would benefit you. It's fun to read.

He looks at popular writers and all these road analogies and it's just a really great book.

James K.A. Smith, who is not doing podcast interviews in 2023.

I've already reached out to him. So hopefully maybe someday we'll get him on the show.

Norman Doidge, MD, The Brain That Changes Itself. This is one of the best looks

at the history of neuroplasticity and what we understand about it.

It's a New York Times bestseller, The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.

Tremendous book. Again, not a Christian book, but a great look at neuroplasticity.

Kayla Craig was on the show recently with her book, Every Season Sacred.

Sacred, great look at how you can use the liturgical calendar of the Christian

year to help your family navigate hard times and find hope no matter what happens.

Every Season Sacred, a ECPA bestseller.

My book was, I was honored to have my book close to hers on the bestseller list

for a week or two with the Christian Book Publishing Association.

Kayla Craig, Every Season Sacred, tremendous book for your family.

And I love it. I think it's a great book and you should read it.

And finally, Susie Larson's book, book, Fully Alive, Learning to Flourish Mind, Body, and Spirit.

I read this book audio version while I was on the tractor this summer, pulling the bush hog.

And it's one of only two times I've ever stopped my vehicle to write something

down that I heard in a book.

Because when she talked about Psalm 4610, when God says, cease striving,

be still and know that I am God, her take on that scripture changed my worldview

about what God is telling us in that.

When he says, be still and I know that I'm God. He's not whispering.

He's yelling and it changes everything. I'll let you read it to find out more.

You can go back to the episode where Susie was on my podcast to talk about that

book and it's tremendous.

Now, we did five books on Monday. I just gave you four more and then we glanced

at 10 more and now I'm going to give you what I think is the best book I read in 2023.

I could have given you 20 more because I read about 60 books this year.

I could have given you lots more. They were all powerful and all good.

And there's lots of good books out there.

But the best one I read in 2023, without any doubt, was this book here.

Closer Than Your Next Breath by Susie Larson. Where is God when you need Him most?

That's the question all of us, when we have trauma, tragedy,

massive things, it's the question we're all asking, where is God when we need Him most?

And Susie's book says the answer definitively, He's closer than your next breath.

She says this, your core beliefs need to be based on God's word, not your experiences.

God is only and always good and you can trust Him.

That right there, If I had had that sentence before I wrote Hope is the First

Dose, I might not have needed to write the chapter on prehab because that's the prehab, okay?

You put some stuff in your heart that you believe and you know you can call

on it, friend, when life gets hard.

So you don't have to wonder what you believe when the rug is swept out from under your feet.

Susie said it. Read it again. Your core beliefs need to be based on God's word, not your experiences.

God is only and always good She says this when she was dealing with chronic illness.

Proverbs 13, 12 says,

fulfilled as a tree of life. And she says, imagine my surprise when I realized

that the word deferred in this verse is a verb.

It's an action word. I wasn't heartsick over the delayed answer to my prayers.

I was heartsick because I had deferred my hope.

I had put it aside because I was tired of waiting for a breakthrough.

Friend, this is a groundbreaking insight.

This is important. This is self-brain surgery.

The Bible says, if you take the hope that God has given you,

because you always have hope because your hope isn't in something or in some

outcome, your hope is in someone and his name is Jesus.

And you can always have that hope no matter what you're going through.

So if you choose to defer that hope, if you choose to say, I can't be hopeful

in this circumstance, I can't be hopeful when this is happening,

how could I have hope when that happened, when she left, when he died,

when this occurred, deferred, how can I have hope?

Hope deferred makes you sick.

Not just in your heart, in your brain, in your body. Hope deferred.

Hopelessness is deadlier than cancer. I wrote a whole book about that called

I've Seen the End of You. Hopelessness is deadlier than glioblastoma.

And Susie Larson, I wish she had just taught it to me. I might not have had

to write two books. She says, hope deferred makes the heart sick.

You're not heart sick because God isn't answering your prayers.

You're heart sick because you've chosen not to remember, or maybe you never

knew, that you can have hope even while you're waiting waiting for him to answer your prayers.

That is a tremendous breakthrough.

Susie says this, we're prone to rehearse the things God has decidedly forgotten.

And we're just as apt to forget the things he has distinctly asked us to remember.

Remember Isaiah, there's this verse in Isaiah where he like claps his hand.

Like I always think about my dad, like look in the camera right now,

look in the camera right now. And he says, hey, look in my eyes.

And when you look in my eyes and God says this, says, come now,

let us settle the matter.

Some translations say, let us reason together.

But I like the one best where he says, come now, let us settle the matter.

Though your sins were as scarlet, I have washed them white as snow.

David says, you've removed my sin as far as the east is from the west.

God says that stuff is settled.

He is not holding your sin against you if you've claimed the blood of Jesus on your life.

Susie said it perfectly. We're prone to rehearse the the things that God has forgotten.

You don't have to go back and beat yourself up for the stuff that you've done.

If you've given it to him, he's already forgotten it. So you need to as well.

And you're just as apt to forget things that he's already promised you.

You forget that you're living in victory.

You forget that he came here to give you an abundant life. You don't have to.

We have to stop having selective amnesia about his blessings.

And we have to stop having tremendous tremendous recall of the things he's already

forgotten. Susie taught me that.

She says this, faith is our fuel and our actions give us traction.

Nothing happens in the spiritual realm when we say one thing and believe another.

That's cognitive dissonance, by the way. Nothing happens in the spiritual realm

when you have cognitive dissonance around what you believe.

We spin our wheels while the enemy has a heyday in our lives.

So in other words, you have to believe, know what what you believe and make

actions that are consistent with that belief.

That's what you have to do if you want to see progress in your life.

She says this, I don't want to be one of God's children who squanders my faith

to the point that I barely escape the flames.

I want to live all in, on mission, full of faith and abounding in love.

I want to take him at his word and trust him for the things I cannot see.

I want to live a life that God is thrilled to reward and establish because we're

in sync and my heart beats in rhythm with his. is I want my life to bear all

the fruit that God intended from before time.

And I think you want that too. Friend, Susie Larson's book, Closer Than Your

Next Breath, was the favorite book that I read in 2023.

I love it. I love how she writes. I love how broad it is. I love how it could

apply to every believer, every seeker.

There's something in there. She just writes with this incredible honesty from

a place of brokenness. She's been hurt.

She's very vulnerable. very open about the things she's been through.

She's been assaulted. She's got chronic disease.

She hasn't had this rosy, perfect life. And yet she writes with such faith and

such passion and such hope because all of us can choose not to defer our hope.

In fact, why would you defer your hope? You don't have to. It makes your heart sick.

And so closer than your next breath, just for a variety of reasons,

not the least of which is that Susie Larson is just this incredible incredible

person. Lisa and I have become friends with her.

She's this amazing faith-filled person, but she writes in just the most accessible

and honest way, and I think you'll love it. Closer than your next breath.

Is my favorite book of 2023 that I read.

And I think it'll bless you and help you in your life.

And I hope that you read it. Friend, I hope these 10 books, these really 20

books have been a blessing to you. I hope that you'll read some of them or all of them.

Some of them are nerdy. Some of them are deep science. Some of them are practical work-related books.

And some of them are faith-based books about prayer and hearing God and Christian living.

And I just think there's a broad spectrum of reading across a diversity of interests,

all of which will help you change your mind and change your life.

And that's what we're after.

So here on this Wildcard Wednesday, I hope you've enjoyed these 10 books.

I hope you read some of them. And I hope you'll remember the one super important

thing that I need you to remember is that you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And the good news is you can start today.

Day 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 audiobooks hey the 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,

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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.