Weekly Recap: Rich in Gratitude/Thin on Anxiety

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

It's Sunday morning and this is Dr. Lee Warren here with you.

I don't always release, usually I, in fact, don't release an episode on Sunday.

But today I have two things that came up in two different conversations that we had on

the podcast in the last week.

One from Robin Long and one from Erwin McManus, and they both mentioned the same thought process.

And I think it's so important that it showed up twice, I want to make sure you didn't miss

it. So I want to just recap that.

Also wanna give you one more clip from Erwin McManus when he talked about gratitude and how anxiety

and gratitude really can't coexist and how we can use gratitude to overcome anxiety when it shows up.

And also wanna give you a personal thing to pray about in regards to what's happening in Israel,

because I think especially on today as all this conflict has broken out,

there's a particular person I wanna put in front of you to pray, a friend of ours who's there.

And I just think it would help you to focus your prayers on Israel

if you have a person, a face, and a name to think about.

So we're gonna get all that done and just in a few minutes here,

try to get our minds together for a solid day, hopefully worshiping,

hopefully with some rest and Sabbath for you.

But whatever you're doing, don't forget that there's really only one question.

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 for 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.

Okay, friend, real quick. Last week, we had an episode from Robin Long,

who wrote this incredible book, Well to the Core.

She's a fitness instructor, an author, a mom, and she had a story to tell

about something that happened when she was a little girl.

It's an offhand comment that someone made to her that reframed how she saw her own body

and created shame and worry and stress in her that lasted for years.

And the interesting thing is that the thing the person said may not actually have been intended for her to receive in that way

Here's what she said all have these things that live inside our head 30 40 years later,

And when we do the work to look back and say wow, you know What's been my biggest insecurity my whole life or they weren't good enough or they weren't and everybody's got their own thing,

And I think it's just powerful to look back and say what are some of those messages we heard from people around us or that?

We inherited through others that maybe we're subconsciously still living out of and believing

that is restricting the freedom in our life and keeping us in a place of guilt or shame or hiding.

There's something really important in what you said that these labeling sentences that

we absorb from our childhood, we're the ones who attach the meaning to them.

So sometimes we tell ourselves a story for years, maybe for the rest of our lives that

It wasn't in any way related to the truth of what the person actually meant.

See that people say things to us and we receive them and the way that we receive them is impacted

by our own thoughts and feelings and experiences and they may or may not actually be real.

Okay, so you can have something that applies to your life that nobody ever intended for

it to apply to your life. The same thing happened in my conversation with Erwin McManus.

Check this out.

Little point that we didn't hit as you were telling that story about how important it is to say things to people that are empowering. We all accept

these labels in our lives, but that psychiatrist when you were 10 years old

told you that you were a genius. What if he had said, hey kid you're a moron. What

would your life have been like? Yeah, it didn't even matter if he was right.

That's powerful, isn't it? Yeah, the power wasn't in the accuracy of it. The power

was in how it began to reshape my own identity of myself.

Wow. It says a lot about what we say to our kids and our spouses and everybody around us, doesn't it?

Yeah, no, absolutely.

And just even the negative input. That's why, growing up, I've been married 40 years to my wife, Kim,

and one of the things we really focused on was, you don't ever tell a kid he's a liar.

You tell him he lied, and you don't call him a liar. That's right.

You don't tell your child they're a thief.

But they're not the and a lot of times we have the tendency to define people by their worst behavior,

rather than by their best behavior and I think it's so much it identified bad,

behavior by identifying.

Music.

So, the concept here is that we accept labels in our lives instead of letting God tell us who we are.

And the problem with that is, sometimes we have these labels applied to us,

maybe that last for the entire rest of our lives, that were never true in the first place.

I'm gonna give you an example.

I spent half of 2005 in a tent hospital in the Iraq War.

I've talked about that a lot, I wrote a whole book about it,

My first major book, No Place to Hide, is about my experience of the war

and what happened to me after and PTSD and all that stuff.

If you wanna read that, you can find it anywhere books are sold, No Place to Hide.

Anyway, I came home from that war with this deep sense of not having done enough.

For years, I felt like I should have stayed in longer. I was offered a chance to go back to Iraq.

I was offered a promotion if I would stay in the Air Force. Later, a general officer came to our office in Auburn

and asked if I would go to Afghanistan.

And the timing just wasn't right. They couldn't guarantee how long I would be gone.

And we had a business with 10 employees and I was the only doctor there.

So if I left for more than a month or so, we were gonna go out of business and it just didn't work for our life.

And I had this guilt over not being there to help soldiers and civilians and people that were hurt.

So I just, I accepted a label that said insufficient.

And for years I felt guilty that it hadn't done enough, and it took some work,

some conversations with Lisa and some prayer and some work with my friend, Pastor John and with Tata,

to say, hey, wait a minute, you stepped up when your country called you.

You went and did the thing, and you poured out your life and your heart in that place,

and you saved a lot of lives, and you did a lot of good, and you did what you were called to do.

Don't accept this idea from even your own mind that it was insufficient, or from this general officer

who tried to make you feel like you should go and do more, when you couldn't.

And so that was a label that I accepted that was a lie. And it created stress and anxiety and guilt and shame

and all those things that God doesn't want us to feel.

He wants you to look at your past with realism and look at your future with hope,

and he's gonna write your story for you.

So the question isn't what did I do in the past and why do I have these labels on me?

The question is, what does God see me as?

How does God view me?

Because that's the label that's real.

And I just thought it was interesting that that showed up twice on the podcast in the last week.

So it felt like there's somebody out there who's living under a label that isn't accurate,

that you need to know isn't who you really are.

And you need to learn how to peel those labels off when they're not accurate.

So, that came up twice, I wanted to recap that and give it back to you.

It's always good to go back, because when we do episodes almost every day, then it can

be easy to kind of lose something in the mix.

And this is something I felt like the Lord was saying, there's somebody out there listening

today who's wearing a label that's not the name or the idea or the identity I want them

to have in their life.

And so strip that label off, friends. Search for it.

Find ways that you may have applied something to your life that wasn't even close to what

what somebody may have actually meant, or even if they did mean it that way,

that just because somebody says something to you does not change the reality of who God created you to be.

Okay, that was important. The other thing that's going on that's devastating

is the world found out yesterday that there's a war raging now in Israel.

The Hamas terrorists

have invaded Israel, are murdering civilians, kidnapping people, and there's war.

Well, obviously we need to be praying for Israel and for peace, but I just wanted to

give you one more thing to pray about.

We have a friend named Catrina Henderson, who is one of the founding pastors of Hillsong

Israel, who lives in Australia now, but she is back in Israel for a visit, and she's right in the middle of it.

And she posted on Instagram yesterday that the bombs were going off, and she's a real

person that we know, in fact she endorsed my book, Hope is the First Dose, Katrina is

a real person and I wanted you to have a focus when you pray for Israel.

There's real people there, families, little children, people with names and stories just

like you have, people who are just as valuable to God as you are, all of them are, and they're in real danger.

And so just take a minute to pray for Israel. Also just put Katrina Henderson's name on your lips and ask God to keep her safe, to

to bring her back to her family and to keep all those around her safe.

And when we go to war, it creates all kinds of trauma in your heart and in your mind.

It took me years to get over some of the labels that war put on me.

And whatever happens in Israel, once this is over, there's gonna be a lot of people who are struggling

with these massive things that have been brought into their lives

that they weren't ready for, weren't expecting,

and now they're having to deal with them.

So just pray that God will break forth His light of healing and hope for them.

That peace will rise up, and that governments will make good decisions,

that hatred will be tamped down, and that God will just break the spirit of the enemy

that wants to bring war and strive into this world.

And when you are facing something in your life that creates anxiety, Erwin McManus talked

about that again. Paul in Philippians 4 talked about this idea of being anxious for nothing, and obviously

it doesn't mean that when somebody's shooting at you that it shouldn't create anxiety.

It doesn't mean that.

It means that in every situation, you can always go to God and give Him your concerns

and He'll help you think more clearly and find your way out.

I found that to be true in Iraq, that when we were in the middle of something really

It would create tremendous anxiety, but if I prayed and focused my mind, I could always

find a path forward of what to do, how to do it better, how to get myself out of physical

danger and find a barrier, or if I was in an operation that was dangerous and stressful

and seemed out of control, that I could find my way forward using prayer and using sort.

Of the idea that God was able to rise up and help me in the midst of any situation.

And when he talks about being anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer and

supplication make a request we may know to God and the peace of God will guard your hearts

and minds in Christ Jesus.

This idea that with thanksgiving we can overcome anxiety.

Gratitude and anxiety can't coexist at the same time. Now what does it mean?

Are we supposed to just say, oh I'm so thankful for everything even though I'm getting shot at?

That's not what it is. an opportunity to bring our concerns before the one person who actually can

take charge of any situation and help us find a way through it. And that should

produce a sense of gratitude. I'm so glad I'm not in this on my own. I'm so glad

I'm not dealing with this by myself because God has enabled me and empowered

me and invited me to bring it to him. And he cares about you, friend. If you're in

Israel and you're hearing this, know that he cares about you and he's fighting for you.

If you were somewhere else dealing with cancer or dealing with stress or something else that's hard,

He cares about you and He wants you to bring it to Him and be grateful and thankful that you have

an alternative to sitting there and worrying about it. You can do something about it and that something

that you can do starts with prayer. Here's what Irwin McMahon has said about it and I'll leave

you with that. So somebody that's listening to this show today has just gotten that news, like

they've just gone through the hardest thing they were ever going to go through. They've lost a

a child that got in a bad diagnosis,

what does Erwin McManus say they ought to do next?

Whenever you've gotten bad news, one, I hope you have people in your life.

At Kim, I have two kids, they've become my best friends.

I have a community of friends and people in my life that if I call them, they show up.

I actually think people who have sustained success make relationships their highest value,

because relationships are the most important commodity for true wealth, but if you lack that in your life,

one of the things I would do is I would step back and realize that no matter what you're facing,

it's not your whole story.

The failure isn't permanent, it's not personal, and it's not pervasive.

And so I step back and look at everything good in my life.

I step back and look at things that I'm grateful for.

I step back and make sure the environment from which I'm absorbing this pain is gratitude,

because gratitude is far more powerful disappointment. And when I am thin on gratitude, the smallest difficulty or.

Tragedy or hardship brings me down. And when I'm rich in gratitude, I'm incredibly resilient and I can face pretty much anything in the world.

That's it my friend. I wanted to give you back those two ideas about labels. I

wanted to bring before you the people of Israel and our friend Katrina Henderson

in particular, and this idea that you can face anything in your life, you can face any type of stress,

any type of hardship, and you can overcome the anxiety

in it and help find a path and move forward,

by engaging the opportunity that your Creator gave you to bring it to Him, and that should produce gratitude.

When you're rich in gratitude, you can face just about anything that life is facing you.

Pray with us for Israel, pray with us for Katrina, Pray with us for helping people overcome

the harmful and false labels that life has put on them, and pray with us that you can overcome anxiety

no matter what you're facing.

But you got to start today. One, two, three, four. You.

Music.

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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.