The How and the Why of Mind Change (Theology Thursday)

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

and I'm here with you today on Theology Thursday for a little self-brain surgery.

We're going to just cover a small amount of ground today, but I want to give

you kind of one idea that you can hold on to.

And we're at this tip of the iceberg point. I've been reading a lot of kind

of geeky neuroscience, and I'm coming to put some things together from all these

different imaging studies and all these different books and all these different ideas.

I'm coming to start to put something together that we're going to talk about

tomorrow on Frontal Lobe Friday about a part of your brain called the orbital frontal cortex.

That orbital frontal cortex is famous in studies about obsessive-compulsive

disorder, but it's also famous in some other studies related to prayer and meditation

and what happens when you develop a spiritual practice.

And I'm starting to put some things together, and I think it's going to be helpful to you.

But today on Theology Thursday, I'm going to give you a little groundwork work,

some things you can think about, a little prehab, some things you can put in

your heart for when life gets hard.

Because I know you're going through some kind of trauma or tragedy or other

massive thing, or you're recovering from one of those things,

or you're trying to figure out how you can recover from one of those things.

And if you're not in a place right now where you are in the middle of some kind

of massive thing, then I want you to be ready for the inevitable time when you

get that phone call, or you get that letter in the mail, or you find that text

message on your your spouse's phone that you didn't want to see.

There's going to be some massive thing that comes along for him.

We need to be ready. That's why we have to have a treatment plan.

That's the whole reason I wrote my book, Hope is the First Dose.

And if you haven't read that, it'll really help you as we go on this podcast

journey together, especially as we get close to season 10.

Season 10 is going to be the deepest stab we've ever done.

And we're going to split out the spiritual brain surgery episodes.

And you're going to have two different podcasts to attack this problem of of

how we handle trauma, tragedy,

and other massive things in the most effective way to land on hope and find

our faith and move forward towards the things that God has for us, even when life hurts us.

And we're gonna do all that, but today I'm gonna give you just a few scriptures

and some thoughts, a little quiet time Bible study on Theology Thursday to help

get ready for this big paradigm shift I'm gonna give you tomorrow in front of Lobe Friday.

And before we do any of that stuff, 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, let's get after it. Hey, somebody wrote in not long ago,

and we talked about this once before, but somebody wrote in and they said,

hey, you talk about all this self-brain surgery and self-help stuff,

but you just need to understand that nobody can change themselves without God.

Nobody can become happier. Nobody can really find any progress in their life without God.

And I want to challenge that just a little bit, because it's objectively untrue on one level.

Now, obviously, I believe, somebody wrote in the other day and asked me for my statement of faith.

And my statement of faith is, as a way to communicate with the Godhead and that

we are created to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

That's my statement of faith, that sin will separate us eternally,

that that's a freewill decision that we can make to not spend our eternity with our Creator.

He doesn't damn anyone to hell. We do that ourselves if we choose not to follow Him.

And I believe that science is catching up to support the clear and almost inevitable

conclusion now that there had to have been a beginning of the universe,

that there had to have been a significant design input,

for all these things that have occurred, to have occurred, and the way that

they did, that the fine tuning of the universe clearly states and obviously

shows that this is far beyond random chance.

So that's a general overview of my statement of faith.

I hope that helps you. But as I said, it's objectively untrue that somebody

can't find their way to a happier life without God.

Now, in one sense, and what I mean by one sense is this.

There are clearly things that you can do and make your life better regardless

of what your spiritual beliefs are.

You can get yourself in better shape by going to the gym and exercising more.

You can lose weight by getting your diet in order.

You can improve your cardiovascular health. And you can improve your mental

health by learning lots of things that smart people have figured out.

Therapeutic techniques, talking to a therapist, using pharmacological things

when you need them. that there's clearly ways that you can make your life better

with or without acknowledging God.

Now, on the higher level, God made all those things.

He inspired all those people to discover things and be able to be smart enough

to make medicines and come up with treatments and all that stuff.

So I think all of it is part of how we live and move and have our being in Him.

So, yeah, on the one hand, nobody can do anything without God,

obviously. But you can do lots of things without acknowledging God or accepting

Him or having a relationship with Him.

You can't. And that's why it's obvious that the self-help industry is effective

for a lot of people in some ways.

And that's why it's a $15 billion industry in the United States.

There are things that you can learn and ways that you can improve your life.

Dan Harris has made millions of dollars with the 10% Happier mantra.

Mantra, this idea that if you just do what we did a couple of days ago,

get yourself a good mental image of how to clear the noise away,

turn down the volume on all the noise and all the voices that are in your head,

and just learn to focus in on peace and calm and quiet and put a little space

in between the stimulus that you receive, whatever it is that happens, and the response.

That's basically Eastern meditation stripped of any kind of spiritual context.

And studies have shown you can improve your brain chemistry.

You can improve your ability to be resilient in hard times, and you can get

better without any sort of spiritual overlay.

So it's just sort of silly for us to say that people have to call on Jesus'

name to make their lives feel better.

If that was the truth, then the devil wouldn't have very much to sell, would he?

It wouldn't be very effective at convincing people that they could be happier

if you had to have Jesus to feel a little happier in your life.

Now, the deeper level is this. If you want to be significantly happier,

then you can kind of take the middle road.

So you're not objectively spiritual or bending your knee to the Savior,

but you can get deeper into how your brain works, and you can learn a lot more

about what happens inside your mind.

You can understand how your brain waves work, and you can start to develop a

practice of meditation or really

develop some good practices around mental hygiene and mental first aid.

And you can study the science and understand what happens in your brain when

your amygdala is out of control and when you short-circuit your hippocampus

to amygdala and you can learn how to get out of fight-flight-freeze and you

can manage PTSD symptoms better by understanding more about what's happening in your mind,

and you can become significantly better.

Without any sort of spiritual overlay. It's interesting to me that a lot of

those people, Dawson Church is a good example,

can become masters of managing the meditative state,

masters of getting themselves out of this beta anxiety state in their brain,

masters of connecting with their brains and their minds and getting their bodies in better control,

and masters of connecting science and physics and observational theory and putting

all these things together in ways that make sense and even being able to write

amazing books that tie a lot of things together that help me understand neuroscience on a deeper level.

And you can do all of that, and you can still give the universe or random chance

or evolution or accidents the credit for how we can have developed such abilities.

It's stunning to me. But you can do it.

You can actually become significantly happier, significantly more mentally healthy.

You can become significantly more resilient.

Without any sort of spiritual overlay. You can. But let me tell you what the truth is.

All of those things are the result of God-given processes.

All of those things are the result of understanding something that God has done.

And it shouldn't surprise us. We've talked about on the podcast before that

magic always precedes science.

In other words, all throughout history, someone has observed a phenomenon.

They see how lightning strikes and catches a tree on fire. And before they understood

what was happening, they would say, oh, there must be some magic about that

tree. And it blows itself up and catches on fire.

Or the gods must have been angry at that tree, so they blew it up and caught it on fire.

There's always some sort of magical explanation for something.

But then there's always a smart person that comes along and says,

wait, let's study this phenomenon.

Let's try to understand what's happening. And they start to begin to model the

phenomenon and start to make math equations to try to describe it and start

to do experiments to try to figure it out.

And before long, they can sometimes uncover the how about how something occurs.

And they can model it and understand it and start to explain it.

And then there's always somebody that comes along and hacks the process,

understands, hey, I can make this phenomenon happen.

I can create the environment where lightning might strike. I can put this pole

up in the air and attract the electrons.

I can make it happen. And then they can monetize that magic and sell it to other

people as being able to control these things or predict them or force them to happen.

There's always somebody that sort of hacks the system.

And then before long, the scientists catch up, and they explain it.

They make it available to everybody.

They teach everybody how it works. They take the veil away.

And before long, people understand it. And then it's not magic anymore.

Then it's not evil or good anymore.

Then it's just a phenomenon that we can understand and we have our hands around it.

But it never, understanding the how never explains the why, right?

If you walk into the kitchen and you find a cake that someone's made,

your Aunt Martha made a cake, but Martha's not there, you can figure out that she made a cake.

And you can take that cake and you can experiment yourself in the kitchen and

try to model how that cake tastes.

And you can eventually maybe figure out if you're a great chef like Lisa,

you can eventually figure out how she managed to make that cake or you can send

it down to a chemistry lab and they can break it down into its component parts

and they can sort out all the ingredients and the ratios and they could figure

out exactly how that cake was made and they could print out a piece of paper

with the recipe so you could make the cake too.

But all of that being able to reproduce or replicate something wouldn't explain

the why of Aunt Martha making that cake until you could ask her.

She would say, oh, I made it because it was Tuesday and Tuesday was your Uncle

John's birthday, and every time he has a birthday, I make a cake to remember him by.

So now you would understand the why.

But being able to understand the ingredients and the ratios and replicate the

process and recreate the cake would give you the how, but it would never give you the why, right?

So I think it's silly to think that without God, you can't make your life better.

And the reason is, clearly in the Bible, we have some scripture.

Jesus said himself, Matthew 5, 45, God says, you're the children of the Father who's in heaven.

He makes the sun rise on the wicked and on the good. He makes the rainfall on

the upright and the wrongdoers alike.

See, God gives general grace to all of us. He gives gravity to all of us.

He gives sunlight to all of us.

He gives the ability to have sun and rain.

He gives, in 2 Corinthians 9-10, He says, God supplies seed to the sower and

bread for food. He gives to everyone. one.

And then we start to see, well, God makes the rain shine, makes the rain fall

on the just and the unjust.

He makes the sun shine on the good and the evil. He gives seed to the sower

and bread for food to everybody.

Why would He do that? Why would He give good things to everybody,

even if they don't acknowledge Him?

Well, I think we get to the answer of that over in Acts 17, when Paul's preaching in Athens.

And he says this, this is Acts 17.

Starting in 24. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord

of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.

And he's not served by human hands as if he needed anything.

Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.

From one man, he made all the nations that they should inhabit the whole earth.

And he marked out there are appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.

Listen, friend, God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out

for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us,

for in him we live and move and have our being.

So I want you to catch this, friend. I want you to catch this.

Wherever you are in your life, whatever you're going through in your life.

Whatever trauma or tragedy or massive thing you're going through,

you can understand the what.

And you might be able to use this podcast or other tools to get your brain in

better control, understand how you think, understand how trauma affects your

body, understand interpersonal neurobiology and epigenetics and all the things we talk about.

You might start to be able to understand the how of what we're doing and how

we can do it and how how we can manage to pull ourselves up out of this pit.

But the why is the important question. That's what we're going to talk about

on Theology Thursday here.

God put you in the place you are in your life, okay?

He foreknew everything that was going to happen. He knew all the things you

were going to do, all the steps you were going to take, all the turns you were going to make.

And He did all that out of this time environment because He's a quantum God

who's not bound by the same rules that we're bound by in this earth.

And he set apart your appointed time and where you should be so that, here's the why,

so that you would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him,

though he is not far from you.

Because in him, you live and move and have your being, even if you don't acknowledge

him, even if you don't call on him. him.

He's provided the seed for the sower and the bread for the eater and the sunshine

and the rain and gravity and your body and your spirit and all these things. He provided them.

And the reason is because he wants you to seek him and find him.

That's what he wants. And that, my friend, what we're getting at today is this.

You can become almost infinitely happier here.

If you learn to stop saying, why did this happen?

And start saying, what now, Lord?

I want you to come into this place with me. I want you to walk in this with me.

I want you to remember the promise you made to me, that you would wipe away

my tears, that you would be close to me when I'm brokenhearted,

that you would redeem this problem and open a door of hope in the midst of this valley of trouble.

I hope I'm making sense to you.

I hope I'm making sense to you. The difference between those people who are

able to hack the process a little bit and become a little happier, maybe 10% happier,

and those people who are able to go significantly deeper into it and understand

it and explain the science and model it and use it for their own benefit and

take all that sunshine and rain and the seeds and the bread that God gave us

and use it to have a healthier, better, happier life,

and those people that then take that significantly better life and take it all

the way to the infinite level, the difference,

is that we have this extra connection.

We have the connection with the Creator that allows us to say,

hey, I'm going to put hope on my head as the helmet of salvation.

I'm going to put hope on my head to protect my thoughts from all this craziness

that my brain wants to give me.

And that's 1 Thessalonians 5, by the way. Put on your head a helmet of the hope of salvation.

I'm going to put that protection. I'm going to say, God, block out.

Put my thoughts in a Faraday cage and block out all that craziness,

all that stuff that pops in and makes me be so afraid.

Because you said that I'll call on you and you would answer me and redeem me

from all that makes me so afraid.

And that's why you said in 1 Thessalonians 5, 16, Rejoice always,

pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will

of God in Christ Jesus for you.

What's the will of God in Christ for you, friend? that you would pray without

ceasing, that you would rejoice always. Why?

Because we learned the other day that your hippocampus is the center of whether

you're going to be anxious or grateful.

And if you decide to be anxious, if you allow the default to occur,

the short circuit from hippocampus is to amygdala, to limbic system,

to fight, flight, freeze, to fear, anxiety, and stress.

The long path is from hippocampus up to the frontal lobes to get the executive

function, to connect the Wi-Fi network to your spirit that will help you not be so afraid.

Get your brain under control, and you do that through gratitude.

You get to that pray without ceasing state.

We're going to get into this tomorrow. This is the tip of the iceberg.

Tomorrow we're going to talk about obsessive compulsive disorder,

the orbital frontal cortex, and what happens when you learn to allow some spiritual

influence into your thought process.

And what happens is you find that you're being rescued from everything that makes you so afraid.

And what we're getting into here is if you can learn to put that helmet of hope

on your head, to start putting your thoughts in that Faraday bag.

There's one reader wrote in and said a faraway bag. I love that because you're

putting your thoughts far away where you can't get to them.

You're giving them to God. He's going to put them in a bag where you can't reach

them and they can't reach you, and you're going to learn to hear his voice.

And he's going to say, this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus.

Now let's finish that thought.

We're at 1 Thessalonians 5, okay? And we're in verse 16, and he says,

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.

These are three little self-brain surgery tools here on Theology Thursday.

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances. Here's the why.

That's the how. If you want to be less anxious, rejoice always,

pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances. Here's the why. Are you ready?

For this is the will of God in Christ for you. Do not quench the Spirit.

Friend, I hope that hit you in between the eyes like a sledgehammer.

Listen, he says, friend, you want to be less anxious.

You want to be less stressed in your life. You want to be more than just 10%

or more than just significantly happier and able to handle the hard things that come along.

And understand when I say happy, I'm not saying problem free.

I'm saying resilient and untouchable in the midst of the things that you're

going through because you're going to go through them. Okay.

You're going through some of them now.

There's liver cancer, and there's glioblastoma, and there's infidelity,

and there's financial ruin, and there's osteoporosis, and there's cardiovascular

disease, and there's a loss of phone call when you find out your son died,

or was stabbed, or was drowned, or died of a heart attack, or committed suicide.

Okay, those things are going to happen. The question is, what then?

Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Again, I'm not saying be happy when these

things happen. That's not what rejoice means.

It means, thank God I'm not alone in this.

Thank God I have a place to turn. Thank God that the Savior of the world has

a long narrative arc of a story that's going to end and all this pain being redeemed.

Pray without ceasing. That's how you can say, whoa, that was a close call.

Thank you, God. Whoa, what do I do now?

I don't know how to respond to this. Let me take a breath. God is speaking to this situation.

Now I'm going to respond. I'm ready. Give thanks in all circumstances for this

is the will of God. Do not quench the Spirit. Okay?

Here's the why. God gave you the mind that he did that exists non-local with

your brain that's in your head. It's a separate entity.

And he did that because that's the Wi-Fi router to communicate with the spirit.

Your ability to be infinitely happier, to be infinitely more resilient,

to be infinitely more able to handle the hard things that come along in life

and do so in a way that shines some light on the path before you so you can

see where you're going and behind you so others can follow without falling into

the same holes that you've fallen into.

The way is to connect to the Spirit that's inside you. Jesus said it to the

apostles and John before he went.

He said, it's better that I go so the Holy Spirit can come and he'll remind

you of all truth. It's better.

And what separates you, friend, from those people that don't have that,

from those people that are striving so hard to get 10% happier,

from those people that are scratching out the best understanding they can so

they can become significantly better in their lives.

The difference we find in the other self-brain surgery passage, Ephesians chapter 4.

When Paul says this, don't be immature like children. Don't be tossed around

and blown about by every wind of new teaching.

Speak the truth in love. I'm summarizing here.

The bottom line gets down to what the Gentiles do, the people who aren't saved.

In verse 17 of Ephesians 4, Ephesians 4, 17, With the Lord's authority I say

this, live no longer as the Gentiles do, for they are hopelessly confused in

the futility of their thinking.

They are hopelessly confused in the futility of their thinking.

Then he goes down to 23. Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes.

Friend, here's the whole game. Here's the whole game, not just the how of 10%

or significantly happier, but the why.

Why God gave you the mind that's separate from your brain, the mind that you're

able to improve with meditation and prayer, The mind that's able to pray without

ceasing, if you connect it to that Wi-Fi router of the Holy Spirit that wants to help you,

it's because He will renew your thoughts and attitudes.

What got you here, the attitudes and thoughts and feelings and responses and

reactions and plans and purposes that you've made in response to everything

you've ever been through, if you're bumping up against the fact that it has

not helped you manage those in a way that you would like to.

The next step is you've got to change your mind.

Let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitude.

Roman 12 says it more succinctly. Don't be conformed anymore to the way your

life has tried to make you think. That's my paraphrase.

Instead, be transformed by the renewing

of your mind. You've got it in Ephesians. You've got it in Romans.

Instead, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. You've got it in 1 Thessalonians.

Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances.

Do not quench the Spirit. That's the why.

This is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

My friend, you want to become infinitely more able to handle what's going on in your life.

Tomorrow, I'm going to give you the neuroscience of it, okay?

I'm starting to pull some threads together, and it's blowing my mind.

After 24 years being exposed to more than that, being exposed to neuroscience,

I'm finally starting to understand why God did it this way.

And tomorrow I'm going to give you some information that we've learned from

studying the brains of obsessive-compulsive people and studying the brains of

people who are prayers and meditators.

And we're going to start putting some things together.

And I'm going to teach you how to become infinitely happier.

But the secret's right here on Theology Thursday.

Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances.

For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. I've given you the how.

I've given you the why. and now the only question is, are you ready to 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.