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Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. It is Dr. Lee Warren here with you,
and I am so excited to be doing some self-brain surgery with you today.
You're going to hear this on Friday, the 30th of August, and we are going all in.
This has been the month of all in, and today's the third part of this episode
that I thought was going to be one part, but it's just too good. It's too important.
Approaches have consequences. Today, we're going to talk about the final approach.
We've talked about the approach of looking at your life by not thinking about
your approach and the consequences of that.
We've talked about the approach of getting in despair and dismay and thinking
that nothing can help you and the consequences of that approach and how that
leads frequently to substance abuse and giving up and hopelessness and just
not feeling like there's any possibility that things can get better.
And then we talked about the, hey, maybe something can help me approach and
how that can lead to you settling for a hack,
for just knowing barely enough to get by of not really being curious about the
underlying process of how things really work and the ways that you could become
a super user of your own life, a super operator of your own nervous system.
And we talked about those consequences. And then that led us to talking about
the scientific approach. Maybe science can help me.
And this is not where you're waiting for some scientist or some guru to come
and give you the answer and give you the magic potion.
It's where you develop a disciplined scientific approach to investigating how you see the world.
And you start questioning the ways that you seem to be observing the world.
And then you try to experiment to prove if what you think is true is really true.
And that might lead you to some startling conclusions that you need to adjust your assumptions.
And the things you think you know about your life might turn out to be in need
of some adjustment or some fine tuning.
And it may turn out that you have to make some totally different decisions because
the data just don't support the way that you thought your life was going to
go. And that might lead you.
As we're going to talk about today, to a fourth approach. The consequences of
the scientific approach is that it might very well, like it has for scientists throughout history,
it might very well lead you to the trembling conclusion that there's got to
be more to the story than what we can account for with our own will and our
own intelligence and our own hearts.
And that might lead you to this questioning of what's out there that's bigger
than I am. Is Is there a truth that's deeper?
These scientific pathways that I've been following are producing some results
for me, and I'm finding progress, but there's something more,
and I can feel it, and I can taste it, and there's got to be more.
And that's what we're going to talk about today, the fourth approach,
the all-in approach of what if God can help me? Maybe God can help me.
There's some consequences to that, friend, and we're going to get into those today.
But first, I just want to remind you, this is August 30th.
Tomorrow, we have a final pastoral call of what the all-in life looks like and
what it can be like for you on that day 32, that first day of having gone all-in,
what your life's going to look like now if you really made it.
And I would love to hear from you.
Speakpipe.com slash Dr. Lee Warren. Let me know how this month has gone.
Or if you haven't started, you've got 30 episodes. You'll have 31 after tomorrow.
And you can go back and you can start on September 1st. And you can say,
hey, I'm ready to go all-in with my own life.
You can read Mark Batterson's book. You can read my book. Hope is the First
Dose, and you can go all in.
You need to be the central character of your own story. I don't mean you need to be in charge.
God's in charge. I don't mean to say that you have to do all the work.
God's doing that. I don't mean to say that you have to be responsible for everything. You can't be.
But I just say, God has put you in a story, and His expectation of you is that
you live that story in a way that brings Him glory,
that maximizes the talents and the skills and the gifts and the ways in which
you are fearfully and wonderfully made. And if you've You've been living short of that somehow.
Or if something has broken you and somebody has hurt you and something has hindered
you, it's time to say, hey, I don't have to live that way.
I know that my nervous system is designed to heal. My brain is designed to grow.
I'm making new cells and new connections, which means I'm not stuck with the
brain that I have, that no trauma or tragedy or drama or massive thing can make
me stuck because my God says I can do all things through him who gives me strength.
My God says I can overcome anything.
I'm more than a conqueror. My God says that I can transform my mind.
My God says I can take my racing thoughts under his control.
I can become less anxious by becoming more grateful and learning how to pray
and letting my brain become more resilient.
That's what God says. And so if there is a approach that will tie all that together,
then it's maybe God can help me.
And today we're going to talk about the consequences of the maybe God can help
me approach. approach, but before we do that, I just want to encourage you one
more time to share this with your friends.
Build a community of people who will hold you accountable, who will help you
go all in, who you can help go all in from your perspective to help them see
the places in their life where they need some self-brain surgery.
You've got a two-patient rule. It's not just you that you're affecting when
you practice self-brain surgery.
It's the people around you, the generations after you, and the people that you
encounter in this life that are looking for hope that you can give them by showing
them that they're not stuck with the brain that you have.
You got to change your mind if you want to change your life.
And we're going to start today. Let's get after it right now.
Friend, if you've been practicing, this maybe science can help me approach.
If you've been investigating, you're making observations, you form a hypothesis
about what might work or what might be going on or what the issue might be.
And you've run some tests and you've realized that how you observe the problem
affects the outcome of the problem because you're not in a classical world.
You're in a quantum world, a God who has built you to have an effect on the
universe and the people around you, that your life matters and has a purpose.
Maybe that scientific approach has led you to the startling conclusion that
there's got to be more to the story than this all just being an accidental accumulation
of mutations and changes and explosions and.
Bits of particles being created and combined in some way that over millions
of years you ended up being here.
Maybe there's got to be more to the story than that.
And friend, I'm just here to tell you, if you get to that place where you think,
I love this approach, it's making progress for me, but I know there's a level
I can get to because I can taste it. I just can't quite get there.
Maybe that level is that you need your loving, kind,
generous, generous gracious wise professor he's
not just a good doctor he's a great physician maybe you
need him to come alongside you maybe you've never even acknowledged that he's
out there maybe you've never allowed yourself to believe that there's more to
the story i'm just here to tell you i'm not a moron okay i'm not a simpleton
i am a board certified neurological surgeon i am a lifelong pursuer of truth
i am a neuroscientist i have published in the lancet and the proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences and the journal Neurosurgery and many others.
They have my name on chapters and textbooks all over neurosurgery and spine
and brain surgery and athletics and all kinds of things.
I'm a legitimate scientist, and I'm here to tell you science and faith are not enemies, my friend.
They are designed to complement one another. God, as it's been said,
didn't just write one book, the Bible.
He wrote two books, and the other book is nature.
And using Using science to investigate nature is the way that some of us find our way to God.
You've heard that story. My friend Michael Gillum was an atheist,
and he went to Cornell and got a PhD under Carl Sagan, and in quantum physics, he found God.
Because science, if you have an honest approach, science will lead you to some
questions you can't answer with science.
And you get to them, and you say, wait, wait a minute. There's more to the story here.
And when you start digging into the story, that the idea was always that it
was going to be like a Russian nesting doll, that we were going to keep peeling the layers off.
And eventually we'd get down to the one thing, the atom, the indivisible particle.
We'd get down to the one thing that explained it all. And in neuroscience,
they thought that was the neuron.
And they thought they could just say, okay, one of these days,
we'll be able to explain your whole life by the activity of the cells in your brain.
And now we know that's not the whole story because the mind controls the brain
from a top-down standpoint.
You can put somebody in a functional MRI scanner, as we talked about the other
day, and you can tell them to think about one thing and not another,
and their brain will make structural changes and change the chemical environment
and switch genes on and off.
And it turns out that mind is in charge of brain, and people that continue to
dig their heels in and say that's not the case, they're having to bend over
backwards to make the data try to suggest otherwise.
I'm just telling you, like I said, not a moron.
I'm a guy who's honestly looked at this, and you can believe that the science
is pointing towards things the Bible has said all along.
And the science so far has never contradicted anything the Bible says all along
when it's properly and honestly interpreted.
So if you get to that place, friend, where you just feel like there's got to
be more, I'm telling you what the more is, and it might be that it's time for
you to taste and see that he is good.
It might be that it's time for you to dig in and stop letting people tell you
about God and you deciding you're going to learn about him.
Stop letting people tell you about the Bible and how it was constructed and
what it is and what it's not, and actually start reading it.
I would suggest that you start with the Gospel of John.
If you want to know who Jesus is, don't ask other people. Read what he said about himself.
Read the stories of the things that he did. And don't get too caught up in the
fact that you're going to hear, like the email that we got the other day,
that there's other books out there that weren't included in the Bible.
That's all true, but there's good reasons for it. And you can read J.
Warner Wallace's book, The Truth About True Crime.
You can read Lee Strobel's book, Is God Real? And you can find out some great
information about why the Bible is what it is. There's good information,
historically valid information out there.
And I'm just telling you, though, if you don't want to do all that,
and you're just at that point of trying to taste and see, you can trust me.
The Bible is valid. It's historically more accurate and more reliable than just
about any other type of literature that we have out there. There are more copies
of the ancient manuscripts.
It makes sense to believe it. There's a good rational belief behind the Bible
that we hold in our hands today, being true and being God's Word.
And i'm just telling you if you're at the end of all in august and you haven't
quite dipped your toe in that approach yet If you've gotten to the place where
you're ready to taste and see and and you're testing things out and the questions
keep Generating more questions and you're like I really need another level of
performance another level of help another level of guidance I'm telling you
the approach you're looking for.
It's the maybe God can help me approach. When you get to the place where science
isn't enough, where 10% isn't enough, where you can't seem to break through,
maybe you need that extra help.
Maybe you need to finally give everything to the one who gave you everything.
There's a chapter towards the end of the book, All In, chapter 16,
the idol that provokes jealousy, where God says to the prophet Ezekiel.
This vision of what's happening that makes him feel jealous.
And Mark Batterson makes the great distinction that God is not jealous of anything.
He can't be. He's all-sufficient. He's bigger than everything.
He's more mighty and beautiful and powerful than everything.
He's not jealous of anything.
But he's jealous for everything because he made everything.
And everything about you and your life was made in accordance with his plan for his purpose.
He gave you life and he redeemed you. If you're a believer, he's redeemed you.
Psalm 103 says he's healed all your diseases, forgiven all your sins,
redeemed your life from the pit, crowned you with love and compassion,
satisfied your desires with good things.
He's given you everything and he's jealous for you because he wants you to go all in.
He knows that the thing that you're missing is him, a true relationship with
him to find your purpose, the reason you're here and to live in the full power
of exactly how you were made to make a difference in this world.
There's this verse in Ezekiel 8.3, the spirit lifted me up between earth and
heaven and in visions of God, he took me to Jerusalem, to the entrance of the
north gate of the inner court where the idol that provokes to jealousy stood.
This idea that there was an idol that provoked God to be jealous.
And what it turned out was that there was this worship in a temple of unholy things.
And a lot of them were sexual in nature, just unclean sexual things that people
were spending their lives worshiping, created things that weren't pure.
And it sounds a lot like our culture today. And God said he's not jealous of those things.
He's jealous that people are giving their hearts and their attention and their
time, their treasure, their talent to things that ultimately don't matter or
things that are actually harmful to them.
And so he says, I want you to reorient to the approach like we talked about
the other day. Reorient to the navigation.
Reorient to the proper approach. And you'll find that you might start finally
breaking through when you adopt this maybe maybe God can help me approach.
And I'm just warning you, remember the title of this episode,
this three-part episode now, Approaches Have Consequences, okay?
So if you use this scientific approach and you got to the place where you could
develop this process of checking things out and squaring up your results with
your hypothesis and changing your hypothesis to say, wait a minute, maybe I had it wrong.
Maybe I need to look at it this way. Maybe I need to move my approach and try
this or pay attention to this in a different way or stop focusing so much on
my symptoms and more on my solutions, that you find some way to move forward.
And then you get to this place where you say, wait, there's got to be more than that.
I see all this design and all this organization and all this perfection in the plan.
And there's got to be more than just accidental.
Organization because nothing ever that I can test and measure ever seems to
organize accidentally.
There's got to be more. And you start looking for that source of power and you
finally find it, then it seems like you can finally connect to something bigger than you.
And then it turns out the consequence of that is that guess what?
Your nervous system is designed to operate in accordance with his guidance.
And it turns out that your brain gets bigger and more resilient and more robust
when you pray and meditate and the data all supports it.
The Bible's been saying it all along. And all of a sudden you recognize that
going all in with God actually turns out to be the thing you were missing all along.
And there's consequences. The consequences are, maybe your life isn't just about you anymore.
Maybe you start hearing that nudge. You hear that voice that says,
no, this is the way. Walk in this way. Maybe you're not calling the shots on your own life anymore.
Maybe you recognize that God's got a plan that's better than yours.
Jeremiah 29 11 says, I have a plan for you, a plan to prosper you and not to
harm you, a plan to give you hope and a future.
Maybe his vision for your life is bigger than your vision of your life has been.
Maybe Maybe he wants to call you to a different city or a different job or a
different kind of life than you thought.
Maybe he wants you to give more, serve more, go more.
Maybe he says, hey, it's time for you to heal. It's time for you to put down
this idol of grief or pain that you didn't think you could get past and let
me be big enough to heal you.
Maybe it's time to use that pain that you thought was the defining characteristic of your life.
Maybe it's time to use that to refine you instead. dead.
Maybe it's time to finally put down the bottle and the excuse of, well, I need this.
It's the only thing I can use to get through the day. Maybe it's time to let
him be sufficient for you, to be the all-sufficient Christ for you,
to fill you up with water that doesn't make you thirsty anymore,
to give you food that doesn't make you hungry anymore.
There's consequences to the maybe God can help me approach.
That's why so many people reject it. That's why so many people won't quite go
all in because they get up to that place where they say, wait,
maybe I won't get to make all the decisions anymore.
I'll have a compass that's guiding me that's different than the one I thought.
Listen, friend, he's jealous for you, not of you.
He's jealous for you because he made you. He fearfully and wonderfully made you in his image.
The neurons and the synapses and the chemicals in your brain were created by
him to make you uniquely you.
You've got a mission and a purpose and a calling for your life that is unique
among all the people ever created. and there's a mission for you.
There's a purpose for you.
Your life is not just a series of days and massive things that happen and ways to cope with them.
Your life is meant to be on purpose, for a purpose, heading towards a purpose.
And to help other people find their way too. That's what all ends about.
And maybe God can help me approach is the way to get that done at the highest level.
I've been telling you, my job is not to tell you what approach to take.
It's to tell you that you need to take an approach, that you need to be diligent
about how you live your life. That's why I've been getting up extra early.
That's why I'm doing this work to bring you these episodes every day for the month of August.
I wanna give you a 31-day playbook for how you can go all in that you can use
in September and October and November and December.
And you can use it every month and you can use it to find your way to go all
in to say, Hey, I'm tired of living like nothing can help me.
I'm tired of hacking my life and trying to find just a little foothold to get a little bit better.
I'm tired of working and diligently refining my approach and finding that I
can make things happen, but I just can't quite break through.
And now I'm ready to go all in for the all in all.
I'm ready to let the great physician
be my professor and help me perform self-brain surgery every day.
So I can change my life by changing my mind.
I'm ready to go all in. Friend, are you ready? We got one more day.
I'm gonna give you one more episode.
We're gonna do a little bit of a wrap up in the next episode tomorrow as we finish all in August.
And then remember, there's only gonna be one episode a week from now on,
and in September, there's gonna be some replays of old episodes for the very
specific purposes of getting you ready for October 1st when we go live on the
new network with very different kind of format. Matt.
I'll lay all that out for you in tomorrow's episode. And I'm so excited about
where we're going and the deep work that we're going to be doing.
I'd love to have you continue this journey with us in self-brain surgery as
we're making a difference around the world for people like Aaron and William
and Kathy and Brian and Lola and Joy and people all over the world who are jumping
on the bandwagon and saying, hey, I'm ready to go all in.
Friend, the maybe God can help me approach is the one approach that turns from
maybe to definitely because you find that when you use that approach,
it definitely makes a difference if you go all in. It is time to go all in.
This is episode 30, day 30 of the all-in August for 2024. Are you ready?
Are you ready to go all in? Are you ready to change your mind?
Are you ready to change your life? And there's only one thing left to do. It's to start today.