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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. I'm doctor Lee Warren, and you are here with me on a very cold morning. It's 12 degrees here in Nebraska on the banks of the North Platte River, and we're going to do a little self brain surgery around the idea of suffering. My most recent book is Hope is the First dose, a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things. And so today, I wanna give you a little idea that came from Hope is the First Dose.
Speaker 1:And if you're one of the new listeners that's we've got lots of new listeners lately. We've had another appearance on Susie Larson's show and some other podcasts and interviews, and it feels like we're gaining a lot of new listeners. So I'm gonna give you back some information that was in season 9 episode 75. So about month ago, we had an episode called Get A Good Theology Around Suffering. It's really important.
Speaker 1:This this is crucial that in hope as the first dose, we talk about a treatment plan, and that treatment plan starts with what I call prehab. If you come to see me in my office for back pain or neck pain or some kind of trouble and I decide that you're gonna need surgery, I'll often send you to physical therapy ahead of surgery so that you can get stronger and build some practices for how you can sort of make sure that you recover fully after surgery because surgery is hard on you. Surgery is a form of trauma. And so knowing that it's inevitable that you're going to experience a bodily trauma when you have that procedure, then it makes sense to prehab yourself and get yourself ready to handle that trauma in the most effective way so that you can maximize your outcome. So we talk about prehab.
Speaker 1:And in terms of our spiritual wounds, in terms of the traumas and tragedies and massive things that happen that hurt our hearts and and hurt our faith and knock us off our feet, in terms of those things, it's important to prehab our mind with some good thinking, with settling some questions. There's a character in the book, Lucky Chuck, who when his wife found out that she had cancer and might die, she said, Chuck, you need to decide now before I get sick what you believe about God. Because when I'm really sick or if you lose me, that's not gonna be the time to be trying to understand what you believe. That's gonna be the time to fall back on your beliefs and have something to hold on to when life is getting hard. And that's a really important point, friend.
Speaker 1:We have to prehab our minds. And I saw something in my Bible study today. Lisa and I are doing the Bible recap plan for 2024 with Terri Lee Cobble. It's great. You can go to the Bible app and get it if you wanna read along.
Speaker 1:Don't try to catch up. It's 9 days into the year. Just start where you are and go forward. And every day, there's a video and she gives some insights into scripture and and a couple of them so far, even though I've been reading the Bible every day for many years now, I've seen some new insights. And that's one of the valuable things about studying the Bible with other people is that somebody will see something, the Holy Spirit will reveal something to you or to somebody else that others might not have seen before, and it's very illuminating.
Speaker 1:And today, she said something about Job 23 that I think is a perfect example of what happens when you're suffering if you had a good prehab program in place. And I just wanna give you that before we get into this theology of suffering episode that I wanna give you back today. We had family in town, they left, We had to get up at 3 o'clock this morning, take them to the airport. So I'm getting a late start on the podcast today. And big winter storm here in the central part of the United States kind of messed up our surgery schedule, so I ended up not having to operate today.
Speaker 1:So that's a blessing. It's gonna make the rest of the week a little busier, but we are ready to give you this episode today. And before we do it, I want to show you this insight. We're gonna talk about the concept of prehab, of getting yourself a good theology around suffering. I wanna show you example of that in Job.
Speaker 1:Now Job, of course, if you don't know the story, the book of Job, Job was a rich man. He had lots of kids and lots of money and lots of livestock, and Satan decided to try to prove to God that if you made something hard on someone that you could make them renounce their faith. And so he afflicted Job with the loss of all of his children and loss of all of his wealth, and then he afflicted him with painful physical disease. And in all of that, Job did not sin, the Bible says, by blaming God for his troubles. But here's what Job said in 23, Job 23 verse 89.
Speaker 1:Listen to this what he says, If I go to the east, he, God, if I go to the east, he is not there. If I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him. When he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him, but he knows the way that I take. Listen, what Job is saying here is that even in a moment when he's desperate, when he's hurting, when he's lost, when he's got lots of questions, he can't see God, he can't feel God, but he knows God is still doing his work.
Speaker 1:Do you get that? Listen to it again. He says, if I go to the east, he's not there. If I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him.
Speaker 1:When he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him. Do you get that? Job has prehabbed his mind. He knows who his redeemer is. He knows who God is.
Speaker 1:He knows that God is still there working even when he can't see him, even when he can't feel him. He doesn't give up the hope and the faith that God is still working in the situation somehow. And friend, that's a crucial mindset to have. That's a crucial prehab decision to make, that you know your redeemer is still working, you know he's still there, and there will come a time in this story when you get to see what he's up to or you'll get to benefit that you'll get the benefit of him having redeemed you at some point in the narrative arc of the story even when it doesn't feel possible. And that's part of having a good prehab process is even when the chips are down, even when the pressure's on, you may not rise to the occasion and become some superstar of faith, but you'll fall back to where you prepared just like Lucky Chuck did.
Speaker 1:You'll fall back and you'll land. You'll find your feet again. You'll know what your hope really lies in. You'll remember those promises of God. You'll remember those scriptures that you put in there, and you can start then to reconstruct your theology of suffering because you know God is still at work on your behalf.
Speaker 1:That's the promise that we have. He's always there. He's always working even when we can't see him or feel him. And if you add that to your theology of suffering, my friend, then your trauma and tragedy and massive thing will still be devastating. It will still hurt, but the enemy will not be able to steal and kill and destroy the abundant life that Jesus has for you.
Speaker 1:That's the message today. Let's get into this episode. It's a powerful episode, I think, of how to get a good theology around suffering that will keep you able to become healthier and feel better and maybe even be happier again, find meaning And I hope you're not in a place right now where you need that, but it's gonna come. We all know, Jesus said it, in this world you'll have trouble. So even if you're not in season right now when you're dealing with it, having that decision made, having that process in place, having a treatment plan ready for what you're gonna do when those inevitable troubles come, that's how you can handle it.
Speaker 1:That's how you can land on your feet. That's how you can find hope and faith in your future again, my friend. Okay. Here we go. Let's get after it.
Speaker 1:Talk that we're gonna have is about suffering. And I think one of the biggest problems we have, because we all know by now, especially if you've been listening very long, that most of the people listening to this podcast, I think, are people who have been through some sort of trauma or tragedy or other massive things. And we talk a lot about neuroscience and how your brain works and how your mind and your brain interface with your creator and all that stuff and how science and faith aren't enemies and all those things. But we do all of that for the purpose of arming you, preparing you for what to do when life gets really hard. And if you're already in that place or you've been through the massive thing already, you've already been through the major trauma, major tragedy, then it's what comes next and what do we do now and how we get back on track.
Speaker 1:And I just wanna tell you today that one of the big problems when we suffer is if we have bad theology around suffering. What's theology? Theology is the study of who God is and what God does. And if we have the wrong idea of what suffering means, especially if we buy into this secular worldview idea that either God can't be real because there's evil and suffering or that God must not love me because this happened or I must not have enough faith because this happened or I must not have given enough money because that happened or all that prosperity garbage that you hear sometimes. If you have the wrong theology around suffering, then you will suffer more and not much light will come to you.
Speaker 1:So I just wanted today, I wanna give you a quick little talk about a good theology that you can build around suffering. We're gonna look an example from a guy in the old testament named David who, of course, wrote most of the Psalms. He was one of the he was one of the kings of Israel and a man after God's own heart. And the whole old testament is full of stories about David and David and Goliath and David and Bathsheba and you know all about him. But one thing you might not have picked up on is there's there's an example of how the same person who knows God well enough that the Bible calls him a man after God's own heart can get confused about where God is and what God is doing during suffering.
Speaker 1:And you can see how easy it is to get off track and how good it is when you get back on track. I'm gonna give you an example of 3 different times when David talked to God about his suffering and how he managed to make himself confused and how he managed to get himself right. And I think that'll help us. We're gonna end with a song that my friend Tommy Walker wrote called Lord, I Run to You. That's right out of Psalm 121.
Speaker 1:The reason I'm bringing that to you today is because I had a really hard time sleeping last night and I was frankly suffering. I've told you before, holidays are a rough time, especially if you've lost a child. And this year, for some reason, one of our daughters is having a little bit of not a little. She's having this scary health care issues. We'll be praying for her.
Speaker 1:And in the middle of that, there's all this memory and and movement around losing Mitch and the holidays are just a hard time. And so we're struggling a little bit. And when you get to remembering and when you get to reminiscing and you will get to bringing up the traumas and tragedies and troubles from the past, your theology can be challenged. And that's why I'm always telling you to have a prehab plan in place and know who God is, make some decisions so that when you suffer, you have the right framework and the right tool kit and you have a floor that even if you fall a little bit, the floor is pretty high and you'll find yourself back on your feet pretty quick. That's what we're gonna do today.
Speaker 1:Just in a few minutes, we're gonna cover that ground about a good theology around suffering and what happens when you don't have a good theology around suffering. We're gonna end with Tommy's song, Lord I Run to You. And before we do any of that, I have one question for you. Hey. Are you ready to change your life?
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:I'm doctor 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?
Speaker 1:This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it. Alright, my friend.
Speaker 1:So the other day, we talked about this quote from J. I. Packer that's really been sticking in my head. We talked about suffering a little bit a few days ago. And I I gave you this quote from J.
Speaker 1:I. Packer when he said, if you ask why is this happening, no light may come. But if you ask how am I to glorify god now, there will always be an answer. And here's the first thing about suffering. The first thing we do at instinctual as humans.
Speaker 1:The first thing we do is we say, why? Why god is this happening? Why is this happening? Why did I lose my son? Why did that tumor come back?
Speaker 1:Why did my finances fall out? Why? Why? Why? And what you what you do when you ask why is usually don't get an answer.
Speaker 1:Like, we don't get to know why Mitch was stabbed to death. We don't get to know why his best friend was stabbed to death. We don't get to know if there was another person there or if they fought or if if one of them went crazy and and something happened. We don't know. I've written about that.
Speaker 1:I've been vulnerable about it. You can read hope is the first dose hopefully, and you'll find a path forward like we did after our massive thing. But the the bottom line is as a woman who's listening today most likely whose son drowned, and she doesn't get to know why. You don't know why some of these things happen. There's a woman in Lincoln whose husband died with glioblastoma recently.
Speaker 1:We've been we prayed for her on our we've asked you to pray for her. And she doesn't get to know why that tumor happened. There's a hospital close to you somewhere wherever you live full of people who are asking why. And most of the time, we don't get to know. And so if you ask why, you find yourself still in the darkness.
Speaker 1:And it's it's natural to ask why. But I'm just telling you that when you start to ask those why questions, that's when the theology issue bumps up. Okay? When you start to ask why and you don't get an answer, you start to wonder where God is. You start to wonder why he's not talking.
Speaker 1:You start to wonder why it's not working out to where you can understand and then you start to ask the next question. Maybe God doesn't love him. Maybe God's not real. Maybe he's not there. Maybe all alone.
Speaker 1:Maybe I it's because I did this thing in the past. Or maybe it's just because I came from the wrong family. Maybe I'm just born to suffer. And all these things that you start thinking, none of which are true, start to cloud your eyes and it gets darker and darker and harder to make yourself move forward. Now that's that's natural.
Speaker 1:But then the next natural thing that happens, if you have the wrong theology of suffering, is you start thinking I'm just telling you this out of my own experience. Okay? And out of my experience of working now for more than 10 years and after losing a son and more than 20 years in neurosurgery around people who are suffering, this is what happens. Like people start getting into this fantasy world where we think if only this hadn't happened, then I would be happy. Or if only I can get this, or if only she recovers, or if only the tumor goes away, or if only I make this amount of money, or if only I get that promotion.
Speaker 1:We start tying circumstance to our potential happiness. And if only God will bless me with this, then I'll be happy. And the problem is, Martin Lloyd Jones said this this way, we have this fantasy where we believe that if a particular circumstance happened, if we could just and you can see it in progressive theology too, by the way. You can see it in progressive politics and people who don't believe in God. They think that building a utopian society, that's what communism is all about.
Speaker 1:We we build the system, build the structure right, make people behave a certain way, get rid of all the bad people, build politics the right way, and we'll build a society where everything is perfect and then everybody will be happy. And that sounds so great, but only a moron would think that we could actually pull that off because you can look at human history and see that no matter how hard you try, there's always a problem. And the problem is people are evil and people are tend people always tend to do what they think is best for them. So when you finally get rid of all the bad people, then only the good people are left, and then they start thinking that the other one across the aisle is the bad person and they start keeping the perpetual problem going. There's no perfect society.
Speaker 1:There won't ever be until we are redeemed. Right? So Martin Lloyd Jones said this, here's the root of the fallacy, the terrible tragic fallacy of the last 100 years and I I would say of all human history, the terrible tragic fallacy has been to think that all man's troubles are due to his environment and that to change the man, you have nothing to do but change the environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in paradise that man fell.
Speaker 1:That's a stunning statement of true theology, friend. If you think that if only this tumor goes away, then I'll be happy, then I'll be okay, then I'll be able to live my life in peace, if only she doesn't die, if only he comes back, if only I hadn't lost my son, if only this, if only that, if you think that will be the thing that finally makes everything right in your life, you have to remember that Adam and Eve had paradise. They literally had a perfect, sinless, disease less, trouble free life, and they still fell. And from that fall came death and sin and disease and loss and pain and destruction and all of that. But they had a perfect environment before that occurred.
Speaker 1:So why would you think that if you could somehow magically have this perfect environment where that thing didn't happen and then you would finally be able to to live your life the way you're supposed to, why would you think that that's gonna solve your trouble? My friend, it won't. So the problem is you get this bad theology around suffering and you start thinking why and then what if and then maybe and then hopefully. And and you wind yourself up into this thing where you realize you can't really ever be okay again because that thing did happen and you forget the rule of trauma that we've talked about a 1000000 times on this show, which is that the rule of trauma as Gabor Mate said so perfectly. Trauma is not what happened to you.
Speaker 1:Trauma is your response to what happened to you. Now we're always talking about the neuroscience of it. But today, we're just talking about the theology of it. That that thing that happened, that massive thing happened. And you can't go back in time and make it not have happened.
Speaker 1:So that means that your response, the way you're living life now and and your hope for the future can't be related to making that thing not have happened. It can't be related to being able to forget that that thing happened. It can't be related to being able to pretend that it never occurred because it did occur. So the whole question comes down to what now? What now?
Speaker 1:So the question is not why did this happen, but how am I to glorify god now? Remember the other day, we talked about the Westminster Shorter Catechism and the idea is the chief aim of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. So if you ask why, you won't get an answer. If you ask how am I to glorify God now? How can god come alongside me in this?
Speaker 1:How can god keep his promises to me in this? And knowing those promises by knowing the word is how you fill your toolkit up with things you can use to perform self brain surgery when you need to put things back together. Stop the bleeding and find treatment plan for going forward because those massive things are going to keep coming. So the question is not, why? The question is, what now?
Speaker 1:That's the whole thing. Now let me talk to you about David for a second. King David, famous guy, David and Goliath. David killed the lion in a pit on a snowy day. David killed the giant.
Speaker 1:David, you know, rescued the people. David overcame Saul and overcame all the enemies of God. He was a great king, but he also had great problems with sin. Right? He committed adultery.
Speaker 1:He impregnated a man's wife. He murdered a man. He did all those things. So David was not a perfect man, but he was a man after God's own heart, which means he kept trying to get his way back. But let me just give you 3 different looks at David.
Speaker 1:So here's David, the guy who knows God well enough to be called the man after God's own heart in Psalm 28. To you, oh lord, I call. You are my rock. Do not turn a deaf ear to me for if he remains silent, I will be like those who go down to the pit. David is saying, there's a place down in the pit where people go, people can die or people can be lost and they can go to this place where god isn't there.
Speaker 1:If you if I can't hear you, god, I'll be like those people down in the pit, which is implying that he thinks when you're in the pit, you can't hear god. God's not there. He's not speaking to you. There there there's a place that you can go where god isn't there. And that's how you feel after a major trauma.
Speaker 1:You feel like God's not there with you. You're saying why into the darkness, you're not getting answers. You wonder where God is. So here's David saying, don't turn a deaf ear to me or I'll be like those poor people down in the pit who can't hear you because you're not there. Psalm 143, the same guy.
Speaker 1:Lord, hear my prayer. Listen to my cry for mercy and your faithfulness and righteousness. Come to my relief. It goes on and on and on and on. Answer me quickly, Lord.
Speaker 1:My spirit fails. Do not hide your face from me or I will be like those who go down to the pit. So now the same guy in 2 different places, he said, I know if I have to go down to the pit, if something devastating happens, if I'm down in that hole, you're not gonna be there. I can't hear your voice. Now he says, I can't hear you.
Speaker 1:I can't see your face there if you're not there. So here's David suffering in 2 different ways at 2 different times and he's saying to himself, I'm I'm in real trouble. I'm like these people who are down in this place and god can't hear me and I can't see him and I'm all alone in this and I don't know what to do. Let me tell you the very same guy in Psalm 139 said this, oh, lord, you have searched me and known me. You've known when I sit down and when I rise up.
Speaker 1:You discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways even before a word is on my tongue, behold, oh lord, you know it altogether. You hem me in behind and before me, you lay your hand on me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high and I cannot attain it.
Speaker 1:Listen to this, friend. The same guy who just said in Psalm 28 before this and Psalm 143 after this, I'm gonna go down to this place. I'm I'm I'm in trouble. And I know if I go down there, you won't be there. I won't be able to hear you.
Speaker 1:I won't be able to see your face. Here's what he said in 139. Where can I go from your spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to the heavens, you're there.
Speaker 1:If I make my bed in the she in Sheol, in the pit, you are there. You see that? David knows. He's found the answer. There is no place he can go where the spirit of the lord is not with him.
Speaker 1:If he goes up to the heavens, god's there. If he goes down into the depths, he's there. He's in the ocean. He's in the sky. He's in the depths.
Speaker 1:He's in the pit. He's in the shield. He's in trouble. He's in pleasure. He's always there.
Speaker 1:This is the same passage where he talks about how I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works. My soul knows it well. He's got a good solid theology of who god is here. But I'm telling you this just to tell you that it's natural for when you're under great distress for your brain to tell you, hey, you're really hosed now.
Speaker 1:God's not not here with you. Your son died. He is not there with you. We're all alone in this. Nobody cares.
Speaker 1:You're gonna all your kids are gonna not listen to you anymore. Your wife's gonna leave you. You might as well just drink yourself to death like your dad did. You just like him. Your genes are are you're stuck with them, and you come from a long line of losers, and you are never gonna be okay, and God's not even with you.
Speaker 1:He can't hear you. You can't see his face. You might as well go down to the pit. That's what your brain will say when you're in trouble. And you know it.
Speaker 1:Your words are different than mine, But that's what your brain says when you're when you're in the pit. And if you don't get the self brain biopsy, if you don't learn how to think about your thinking and turn those thoughts around and take them captive and say, hey, wait a second. That's not what my bible says. My bible doesn't say that God won't be with me. My god says, if I'm up in the sky, he's there.
Speaker 1:If I'm down in the ocean, he's there. If I'm down in the depths, he's there. I can't go anywhere apart from his spirit. He's there with me. Psalm 121, I lift my eyes to the hills.
Speaker 1:Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth. And I just wanna remind you as we talked about the other day, the writer, Ursula Le Guin, had a little note on her desk when she was gonna write. And she said, when I write something I need to know, is it true? Is it necessary or at least useful?
Speaker 1:Is it compassionate or at least empathetic or unharmful? Those three things are great processes and filters to put your thought biopsy through. Okay? Think about this in relation to your theology of suffering. I'm thinking about how I feel about having lost my son.
Speaker 1:I start to go down that hole and I start to think God's not there with me, and I'm a loser, and nobody's ever gonna trust me or love me, and I should have been there and I could have done something different. And why wasn't I there? And was he suffering and I and I couldn't help him and all of that stuff. And then I start biopsying the thought and say, wait a minute. Is it true?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's true that I lost my son. But is it true that my wife's gonna leave me? No. We we managed to make it through 10 years after that happened.
Speaker 1:Our marriage is stronger than ever. Is it true that no nothing's ever gonna become of me because I'm never gonna be able to get over this? No. God somehow managed to give me words to speak to you, to write, to stand up and reach out and help other people who are hurting like Brad and Jill Sullivan did after they lost their child, They started a ministry to other bereaved parents. At least I haven't done that, but we have watched our ability that God has given us to be a light to other people, blossom into something that's helping people all over the world now.
Speaker 1:So the truth is if I start hearing that thought, you're always gonna be sad. Yes. That's true. Nobody said we're gonna love you. That is not true.
Speaker 1:Have to start filtering those downstream thoughts. Is it necessary for me to think about this? No. It's not necessary right now. I need to think about something else.
Speaker 1:God gave me the gift of being able to shift a new selective attention and move forward in a different thought process towards something that is necessary or at least is useful. Can I use this thought? Is it going to help me if I spend time in this thought? Or is it going to ultimately hurt me? Remember Psalm 37, fret not yourself.
Speaker 1:It tends only to evil. The more I think about my own troubles, the more I wallow in them, the more I'm likely to land on something that's gonna push me towards evil. Arguing, fighting, drinking, some kind of behavior to numb myself. Something's gonna happen. If I wallow in that, it tends towards evil.
Speaker 1:Right? Fret not yourself. Is this thought compassionate? God says, love your neighbor as yourself. You're supposed to love yourself too.
Speaker 1:Is this thought process that I'm in right now, this place that I'm stewing, is it compassionate to me? Is it compassionate to anybody else? And if it's not compassionate, is it at least unharmful? Remember, if we're self brain surgeons, that means you're a physician to yourself and the primum the the prime directive. The oath that you take is I will not harm myself.
Speaker 1:1st, no harm. I will relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise. I got a beautiful email from Jenny Norton, one of our listeners who said, hey. I'm I'm following that advice. I'm relentlessly refusing to participate in my own demise.
Speaker 1:I'm not going down these rabbit trails of destructive thinking anymore because I've got that self brain surgery in my heart now, and I'm using it and it's helping me. Listen, friend. That's the whole thing. The first principle is don't harm yourself. Don't harm anybody else, but don't harm yourself either.
Speaker 1:And negative spiraling thinking around bad theology of suffering is harmful to you. You must be purposeful about changing your own mind. I'm just telling you that you can get yourself in the word of God and you can find examples of people who had bad theology around suffering and what happened and find people who had good theology around suffering and what happens then. In Psalm 143 I'm sorry, Psalm 139 is a great example of a good theology of suffering. When you're hurting, god is there for you.
Speaker 1:You need to get you some promises. You need to get you some good words, get you a Susie Larson book or a Max Lucado book or a Philip Yancey book or Richard Foster book or a Pete Greig book or maybe a Lee Warren book and get you some good stuff in your heart on top of the word of God to give you some somebody else's words to help you look at scripture in a different way. And then get into scripture and realize you're not just reading a book. That book is reading you too. When you talk we talk about self brain surgery.
Speaker 1:The word of God is like a functional MRI scanner, and it will get inside you. It will reveal things in you that are broken and will reveal places in you where you're stronger than you think you are, and it'll show you the truth about who you are and who god is. And if you get in that word and you start letting that build up this foundation, you'll have a better theology around suffering. And when you do suffer, when the next time the massive thing happens or that handle gets pulled and you get ejected out of your life and onto something crazy, like like some of the things that are going on in our family right now, there's just some scary stuff happening medically, and you find out that's happening, you won't fall as far before the parachute opens because you've got a good theology of suffering. You've got good prehab.
Speaker 1:You've got some promises in there. You've got some words in there. You've made some decisions ahead of time about what you're gonna do when life really hurts, and you're gonna turn your eyes to the hills and know where your help comes from. The help comes from the door. Right?
Speaker 1:And he's going to show up as a great physician. And you're gonna understand that if you say why, you might not get an answer. But if you say, what am I supposed to do now and how am I supposed to use that for your glory? How am I gonna use this to move forward and find meaning and purpose? Then you're gonna make it.
Speaker 1:Okay? C s Lewis said this, if you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end. If you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin. And in the end, despair. Listen, friend.
Speaker 1:The way you build your theology of suffering in this time of year with the holidays coming, if you've been through something hard, you need to have a good theology because you're gonna start hearing those negative voices you're going to. There's gonna be some quiet time and you're gonna start reminiscing and you start ruminating and that that magnetic tractor beam pull, Granger Smith calls it the slideshow. I call it the staircase. Like like you're gonna start going down there towards those old memories and you better be ready because that's gonna happen. And if you're ready and you realize if I'm looking for comfort, I usually don't find it.
Speaker 1:If I say this thing will make me happier, that didn't happen, I'll be happier. If I just drink this or push click on buying that or send this message to that person or meet that person or do that thing, then I'll feel better and you'll find yourself some dopamine. But in the end, you realize it leads to despair because you the target keeps moving. If you think I need something outside of me, outside of God to make me happier, to make me manage this moment, I need this help to get through this time, you're not gonna find it. But if you search for truth, what am I supposed to do now, god?
Speaker 1:How am I supposed to use this? What do you want me to know now? Where are you? Keep these promises that you made. Start telling them the promises.
Speaker 1:Get in the word and find you some. Get OS Hawkins' book, The Promise Code, and read yourself a promise every day and start looking for the ways that god's gonna make it true. Let that functional magnetic scan of the word of god scan you and show you who you are and reveal who he is to you. And remember, you can lift your eyes and you will see where the help is coming because he's gonna come and help you if you ask him to. He won't leave you alone.
Speaker 1:He won't. Will he snatch you up out of the situation? Probably not. But our god, Hosea said it, he'll take the valley of trouble and show you a door of hope in the midst of it. That's what'll happen.
Speaker 1:So friend, here on Theology Thursday, get yourself a good theology of suffering and that'll help you become healthier and feel better and be happier. It will help you. It will help you because you can't change your life until you change your mind. You change your mind about suffering from why to what am I supposed to do now, that will start paying great dividends for you. And we're gonna finish with Tommy Walker's song, Lord I Run to You straight out of Psalm 121.
Speaker 1:It's gonna help you get your mind around what to do next when life really hurts. I hope it doesn't happen to you. I hope you're the one who doesn't have to suffer, doesn't have to have a massive thing, doesn't have to have a trauma or a tragedy. But you know what? Jesus promised us that we're going to.
Speaker 1:So you better be ready. And when you are, if you have a good theology around it, you'll find yourself able to live in that quantum reality of suffering while you're living in abundance. And that's the best I can offer you. I can't tell you your life's gonna be perfect, but I can tell you that there's a perfect way to learn how to navigate it And that's to let the great physician come alongside you and help you with it. And he'll do that and the good news is he'll help you start today.
Speaker 1:Oh, how faithful he's been. What a good god he is. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Do. You're my ever prayers and help. My tower of strength. Nothing is too hard for our god. Nothing is impossible.
Speaker 2:Oh, you can do all things. So, lord, I and faith. But to be cheer for you have overcome. You've overcome the world.
Speaker 1:Hey. Thanks for listening. The doctor 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.
Speaker 1: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 wleewarrend.com/prayer.
Speaker 1:Wleewarrenmd.com/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 doctor 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.