Two Kinds of Light (Theology Thursday)

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and I am so excited and

grateful to be doing some self-brain surgery with you today.

It is Theology Thursday. This is the day of the week that we take a little bit

deeper dive into something scriptural, spiritual.

We try to tie that spiritual, scriptural information into something related

to science so we can smash them together like particles in a super collider

and release that energy to help us become healthier and feel better and be happier.

I believe that you're designed on purpose, for a purpose, and that purpose is

the reason that you can sustain the traumas and tragedies and massive things

that occur in life, and even the little dramas of our day-to-day existence.

We can find resilience and peace and hope as long as we have purpose.

And if we have purpose, then we can move forward and we can find that it's actually

true what the Bible says. It says that when we undergo persecution and trial

and tribulation, that that'll develop character, and character will produce

godliness, and godliness will produce hope.

And hope is the first dose. Hey, today, we're going to talk about light.

Last Monday, not this week, but the previous Monday, we had a long talk about

light and physics and all these interesting things about what light is.

And today, we have two more little ideas about light.

This was inspired by Tara Lee Cobble's Bible recap yesterday.

Yesterday, we got into Psalm 119. It's this incredible longest chapter in the

Bible, and there's all kinds of great stuff in Psalm 119.

And one passage that's very famous that we're going to talk about today that

refers to light and what the light of God's Word does and is.

And I'm going to give you a little information that might be interesting and

might be something new for you.

But before we do any of that, my friend, here on Theology Thursday,

I have a 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, I got an email from our friend, William Gilchrist.

William's one of the great listeners of the show, writes in frequently,

always with really compelling questions.

And here's something William said about Monday's episode about the default mode network.

He said, Dr. Warren, I read your transcript about the default mode network to

my wife and daughter, and they asked me, okay, then tell me what to think.

I punted the ball. It's okay, William, you can punt the ball. It's okay.

He says, you know, like the scripture. Seriously, it seems like such an elementary

question, but maybe like the common book of prayer, we need it specifically

spelled out because I believe that you are totally correct.

However, I find myself asking God to show me how to think about this or that

problem because I'm lost for the moment. Now, that's exactly right, William.

We are supposed to ask God how to think about it. If you accept my premise that

you are not a brain-up process,

that everything about your life is not just the result of some neuron firing,

and that everything about our whole life is not just this meaningless, random,

electrical activity of a brain that wasn't designed on purpose.

It just accidentally happened because of evolution and because of chemical explosion

in the universe billions of years ago, and you don't really have any say about anything.

If you accept my premise that you were actually designed and

created in the way that you were for the specific purpose of having a mind that

is non-local to brain that can communicate with the great physician and that

that mind can control and change structurally the brain and therefore everything

about the body and its interaction with other people and even our generations

through the magical, amazing science of epigenetics.

If you accept that premise, then we have to start understanding that our job

is to continually try to improve how we use our mind.

And if my premise is correct, that if Jesus never sinned with his mind, because remember,

one of the prayers in scripture is that may the words of my mouth and the meditation

of my heart be pleasing to you, which means that God's interested not just in

the things that we say and do with our hands, but in the things that we think about.

We're told over Over and over in the New Testament, change your mind,

renew your mind, control your thinking, radically transform your thoughts,

take your thoughts captive.

Like basically the New Testament is all about self-brain surgery.

And Jesus told us that, yeah, it's fine. You say, I haven't murdered anybody.

I haven't committed adultery. But if you've lusted, if you've hated,

you might as well have because the things you do in your mind turn into the things in your life.

And if your mind is wrong, you're wrong, even if you manage somehow to control

your behavior. So, if you accept all of that, William, then I would say that

our constant goal is to be in communication.

This is the pray without ceasing idea that we get from Scripture,

to be constantly in communication with our Creator.

To get better at getting better, remember what we're doing, we're getting better

at. That's one of the Ten Commandments.

And over time, dialing down our default mode, which again is all about self.

It's all about worrying about the past. It's all about fretting over things

that might happen in the future. It's all about what am I getting now? Who's after me?

Who's on my side? Who's against me? What can I get? Where can I do this?

Why did that happen to me? Why is my life always this way?

All that stuff, that's default mode. So when you quiet yourself and you're not

actively busy, all that stuff comes percolating up.

Jesus says, get your mind under control.

Get that default mode turned down and get something else turned up. So how do you do that?

Well, the prehab process that we talk about in Hope is the First Dose is all

about putting good stuff in your heart so that you have something to fall back

on when you're under stress.

So you don't say oh my word I'm so anxious am I

still anxious and you're testing that hypothesis over time

and you're stuck in that quantum Zeno state of continuing to look at something

from the same perspective so it becomes more and more and more true and then

if you feel anxious and you think about being anxious and you're worried that

you might continue to be anxious and you test to see if you're anxious and yes

you are then all of a sudden you're worse and worse and more and more anxious

instead of saying Lord I'm,

I'm really anxious right now. Test me and know my anxious thoughts.

Help me be still and know that you're God. And you're dialing down one network

and dialing up another network.

And that other network is that central executive network, the frontal lobe network

that says, hey, wait a minute.

Yes, I feel this. No, I'm not under an active threat.

Yes, there is something going on, but I can handle it because I've handled it

before. I've seen how other people can handle it. There is a path through this.

I don't have to suffer and succumb to this. I can overwhelm my overwhelm with gratitude.

I can switch directions in my limbic system. I can take control of this complex

system, and God will help me improve my mind and my brain.

If Jesus never sinned with his mind, that means his brain continued to optimally

be improved and structurally rewired for success in his thinking and his outcomes.

And we want the mind of Christ, and we're promised that we can have if we believe

in him. and therefore we want our brains to become more like His must have been

if He never sinned with His thoughts, right?

Okay, William, I hope that was helpful. Listen, Psalm 119, longest chapter in the Bible.

Yesterday we did it in the Bible recap with Terri Lee Cobble, and it's amazing to me.

I've been reading the Bible most days of my life since I was a kid and certainly

essentially every day of my life as an adult.

And Lisa and I read it through practically every year. There's occasionally

a year where we'll do something more topical or whatever, but almost every year

we read the whole Bible through.

Some years we do the 90-day Bible, and some years we do it every day,

and some years we do chronological.

But this year, based on a lot of contact from listeners and several people that

had done Bible Recap, Lisa found out about the Bible Recap and encouraged me to do it.

One of our listeners mailed Lisa a copy of the Bible Recap book,

So it felt like God was saying, hey, you guys need to do the Bible recap.

So we did. And what's amazing to me is when another person dives deeply into

Scripture and talks about it, you almost always get something out of a verse

that you've never seen before.

I think that's one of the reasons we're supposed to be in church.

It's one of the reasons we're supposed to be in Bible class.

One of the reasons we're supposed to read Christian books and listen to other

believers and have conversations about the Word.

That's why Deuteronomy says, talk about it. Put it on your lamppost.

Discuss it with your kids. Talk about it in the public square.

Keep the Word out there and have conversations about it because the Word is

living and active and it never stops teaching you and inspecting you.

The Word is an MRI scanner that reads you while you're reading it.

And Tara Lee Cobble, almost every day, despite my many years of reading the

Word and studying the Word diligently, not just reading it, she says something

that I've never thought of before.

Lisa and I talk about it all the time. Oh, I never saw that before.

I never heard that before. It's just amazing how much I've learned this year,

even though I'm already a seasoned, I wouldn't say scholar, but certainly I've

put a lot of effort and time in my life in learning the Word of God, right?

When we're in Psalm 19, which everybody's read, hopefully you've read a lot

of it. You've heard lots of passages from it.

Psalm 119.45 is one of my favorite verses. I will walk about in freedom,

for I have sought out your precepts.

So friend, you want to know how you set yourself free from the troubles and

tragedies and difficulties in your life?

You put His precepts in your heart. That's the prehab verse, Psalm 119.45.

If you want to be free, if you want to learn how to be resilient,

if you want to learn how to become untouchable based on the traumas and dramas

and tragedies and massive things, how do you hold on to hope and faith anyway?

How do you live on both sides of the John 10.10 and the John 16.33 three conundrum

of having a hard time, but being free, having a hard time in the world,

but overcoming the world, being stolen, killed and destroyed,

but also being abundant.

How do you find that duality, that quantum physics, two things can be true at

the same time, put the word in your heart and have something to fall back on

when you're under pressure.

That's the answer to William's question, by the way.

It's Psalm 119, 45. I will walk about in freedom where I have sought out your

precepts. That's when you start hearing the little voice that Isaiah talks about.

It says, don't go that way, go that way.

I've got you. You're not alone. I'm with you. God doesn't sort of beam you up

out of your troubles as Pete Gregg said.

He parachutes down to be with you in your troubles.

He helps you on the battlefield rather than delivering you from the battlefield right now.

And it's how you remember what Psalm 103 says. I bless the Lord,

but all that is within me, bless his holy name.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.

What are his benefits? He forgives my sins and heals my diseases and crowns

me with love and compassion and redeems me from the pit and satisfies my desires

with good things so my youth is restored.

He does all that stuff. So you put all that medicine in your heart.

That's how you get the default mode under control. That's how you get yourself

free from falling prey to the circumstances and traumas and dramas and whatever

of our life. That's the message. That's the medicine.

That's the prescription. That's the self-brain surgery right there. Psalm 119.45.

Well, that's a mini lesson. The thing that blew me away yesterday that I never

saw before was a comment about the very famous verse.

It's a song. It's a famous verse. Everybody's heard it.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Psalm 119, 105.

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path. Why does he say light twice here?

Why does he give us two different pictures for light?

I've never thought about that. I've just never considered it,

read right past it a million times.

Turns out there's two different Hebrew words here that refer to light.

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.

I did a word study on this after Tara Lee said, hey, notice that there's two

different kinds of light. There's a lamp and a light. What's he talking about?

Well, it turns out in the Hebrew, the word for lamp here refers to like a candlestick,

the menorah that those guys would have had in their homes.

They would have had a candlestick. And at night, if you get up and you can't

flip the light switch because they didn't have electricity yet,

you got to have a candle to walk around your house so you don't bump your foot

or kick your shin on the doorpost or bump into something or trip over somebody.

You've got to have a lamp for your feet.

And so the lamp to my feet refers to this.

Every step that I take in the darkness, I need a little bit of light to show

me where to put my foot so I'm safe and so I can navigate my way through this dark time.

And that's the lamp to my feet. Like your word is literally the lamp that's

showing me the next step that I can take.

Okay. But then the other half, it's a different word, a light for my path.

This reverts to the whole light, the sunlight, the light of the world.

So you're outside and it's daytime and you don't recognize, we don't think about

light during the day because it's daytime.

Of course it's light. But the fact is God is providing that universal light

that lights up the whole world and shows us where to go and the path that we

can take and that we can see each other and we can interact with each other.

Remember, we talked on Mind Change Monday last week about light.

And it turns out, so if you remember Genesis 1, God said, let there be light and there was light.

And it also tells us in John that everything that was made was made by Jesus.

So when God said, let there be light, Jesus made photons.

Jesus created light. And remember, there was light several verses before there was sun.

So that's not saying that when God said, let there be light,

he created the sun. He made the light first.

The sun and the moon, he tells us, he created to separate the day and the night,

right? But light showed up before sun.

And so when Jesus made light, what he's making is a physical representation

of what He actually is, because we learn from Scripture that God is light and

in Him there is no darkness at all.

And now, in the 21st century, we're learning from quantum physics and from modern neuroscience.

That light turns out to probably be the thing that transmits information between

mind and brain, that light probably is the physical connection between thoughts and things,

that light is what turns our thinking into real things in our brain,

that the transmission of information happens because of light.

And so it turns out your word is a lamp to my feet. It's the light that's right

around me that helps me to hold on and see the things in the darkness around

me so I don't stumble and fall.

And it's the whole light of the entire world and the universe.

And everything that I can see is because of your word, because you said, let there be light.

And there was light. That is a mind-blowing, stunning connection that I never

saw until Tara Lee Cobble said it yesterday.

So thank you, TLC, for that amazing moment of insight.

And she's not the first one that had it, of course. You go out and study that, Google it.

There's a whole study about these words for lamp and light. And it's amazing.

But I never saw it until I read Bible Recap yesterday.

And I'm just so grateful because it just lit me up. And I said to myself,

and I told Lisa yesterday, this is Theology Thursday.

This is so important that people understand that the word of God is the specific

flashlight and it's a candle in your hand to help you navigate dark times and

traumas and dramas and tragedies and massive things and hardship.

And where do you put your foot when everything feels so scary and you're so

worried and you're so anxious and you're so upset and you're so stressed out?

The word will show you where you can safely plant your next step.

And when you just wonder how you're going to get through this whole life and

where can you turn from the darkness of the secular culture,

the darkness of the chemotherapy room,

and you need to know that there's light still out there. He says,

hey, I said, let there be light.

I already said, fiat luce. And Jesus is the light.

In Him, there is no darkness at all. And that's how you communicate,

and it's how you navigate, and it's how you handle everything in this life because

your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

And let me tell you one more thing I learned in that study yesterday.

This is fascinating. I never saw this before. So Terri Lee Cobble said that

about there being two different Hebrew words.

So of course I went and searched out Hebrew words and looked this up and I never noticed it before.

But in Deuteronomy 17, 18, and 19, when God was giving the law to the people,

he said, and this is before they had a king,

by the way, he said, when you do have a king, Deuteronomy 17,

18 says this, and it will be when he sits upon his royal throne,

that he shall write for himself two copies of the Torah and it shall be with

him and he shall read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to fear

the Lord, his God, to keep all the words of this Torah and these statutes to

perform them. Do you hear that?

God was telling the people that once they had a king, the king was supposed

to write the word out, the entire Torah out himself,

two copies, and keep one with him all the time and read it all the days of his

life so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God.

So now David in Psalm 119 is the king, and he's saying, your word is a lamp to my feet.

He's holding, literally carrying a copy of the word.

It's legally required of him to hold and keep a copy of the word of God with him at all times.

And he's telling us that it's that word of God that provides the light for his

feet, the lamp for his feet and the light of the whole world.

So David, not a quantum physicist, okay? David, not a 21st century neuroscientist,

could not have known that light was the mechanism by which God would connect

mind and brain, by which God would connect spirit to mind to brain.

That light was the substance that God created to transmit information in our lives.

Couldn't have known that, but he did know that he was supposed to keep the word

with him at all times and that the word would give him the light for the step

in front of him and then navigate the darkness.

And that the word was giving the whole light for the whole world.

All the light, every light, all light is him.

It all came from his word. It all came at his word and by his word.

And it was created by his hands.

And so this is, my friend, this is the stunning, stunning connection of Old Testament theology.

Old Testament law that God gave us is that, hey, you need the light with you,

and the light is the word, and you need to keep it with you all the time because

it's going to light up your path, and it's going to light up the whole world,

and you need to recognize that.

And someday, thousands of years from now, smart people are going to start figuring

out that this whole light thing is not just a metaphor, but it's actually how I do business.

When God says in him there is no darkness at all, God's economy runs on light,

and light is word, and word is life.

His word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path. You want to walk about in freedom, friend?

You want to walk about in freedom, William?

Guess what? Get you some word. Because in the word, there's life and there's

light and there's healing and there's help and there's purpose and there's meaning

and there's everything.

We in him, we live and move and have our being. It's how Paul said it in Acts.

That's why we need the word. it's a light it's a

lamp it's everything mark twain

said a long time ago this is a really complicated sentence

he said history never repeats itself but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the

pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of

antique legends now holy smokes that's a complicated sentence history never repeats itself.

And another time he said, but it does often rhyme, and I've done a couple of

episodes about history poems where history kind of reminds you of something

that you've learned in the past.

And that's what the word is supposed to be, okay? The word is supposed to bring

you into this present moment and remind you of the past and give you hope for the future, okay?

That's how hope is built. It's built on memory and movement.

Find a promise, look in the past to see how God's kept it before,

and look into the future to know he'll keep it again.

That that light's going to keep on shining and keep those promises.

And Twain reminds us, and we know from neuroscience now, that we're not made

up of history, but we make history with our choices, how we look at things, how we attend to things.

The attention and the density of attention that we give to things is what makes

them true and become more and more true.

And when we think about the past, what happens is we're drawing in memories,

we're attaching present emotions to those memories, reason. We're redefining

what they mean, and we're redefining even the events, what they were in the

past aren't exactly what they really were.

And we're telling ourselves a story of what the past has been.

And if we're not careful, what will happen is we'll begin to turn our attention

towards that past and believe that it begins to define our future.

But the quantum physicists have

told us in no uncertain terms that history is not what we think it is.

Stephen Hawking said, we create history by our observations.

History does not create us. So we are not defined by what's happened in the past.

We actually redefine what's happened in the past every time we think about it.

When you access those memories, the neurobiology is clear.

You change the memory, and what you think you're remembering is more influenced

by what's happening now than it was about what actually happened.

So it's not a fair fight. You can't blame yourself. You can't shame yourself.

You can't spend time in the past because you're never actually there you're

only here now and you're looking forward so what's needed is light you need to shine light.

On your past and your present and into the future. And the good news is, it's all right there.

Your word is a lamp to my feet and the light for my path.

It's the lamp in my hands, the candlestick in my hands showing me the step to

take in the dark, and it's the light of the whole world.

We're all connected in this quantum

universe that our God says two things can be true at the same time.

You can have a troubled and broken past, and you can have a beautiful and redeemed future.

You can have pain and drama and trauma and

hardship and toil and strife and disease and you

can have abundance in the same moment you can feelings aren't facts my friend

and thoughts aren't always true and the darkness cannot withstand the light

and you got two kinds of light with you all the time that's why you need the

word that's why you need the light and that That, my friend,

is why it is very good news that you can start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

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from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audiobooks.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

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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.