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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. Dr. Lee Warren here with you for Wild Card Wednesday on the podcast.
Today, we're going to bring back an episode from season nine about worldview.
And when trauma and tragedy and massive things strike us in our lives,
it can knock us off our feet and it can leave us confused and wondering why
the things we thought we knew didn't turn out to be true.
So having your worldview right, your set of beliefs and ideas and principles
and thoughts Thoughts about big ideas like who God is and what you're going to do when life hurts.
Having that right and understanding what you really believe is an invaluable
tool to help you hold on when life hurts.
And to help you become healthier and feel better and be happier no matter what you're going through.
Let's get after it. I got an email yesterday from a woman named Susan.
Susan, thanks for your email, by the way. And she wrote in and talked about
a book that she had read by John Mark Comer and how his work she thought would be helpful to me.
And I just want to tell you, Susan, you were spot on. John Mark Comer's book,
Live No Lies, made a big difference in my thinking and how to clarify what I
was trying to say back in Mind Change March about worldview.
John Comer's book, Live No Lies, was really the first place where I ever heard
it articulated very clearly the difference between the Augustinian worldview
and the way that Western thought was significantly shaped by Sigmund Freud.
And I want to bring this back to you today. We've talked about it a few different
ways in different times with James K.A. Smith's work and others.
And we even did a whole series about being on the road with St.
Augustine and all of that. But all that came out of really, I think I first
kind of started thinking about it because of John Mark Comer's book, Live No Lies.
And so this episode that we did back in March for the paid subscribers called
To Thine Own Self is basically a look at worldview.
And I'm just going to tell you, as much as we talk about brain science,
as much as we talk about prehab and scripture and all these things,
if you're not careful, you can allow a secular worldview to sneak in and influence
your thinking without even realizing it.
Because it's so pervasive that the whole entire society is telling us all the
time, follow your feelings, be true to yourself, live your best self now.
You do you. You find your truth. And those little ideas, especially with our
children and our young people, get kind of mixed in with a Christian worldview.
And over time, what will happen to you if you're not careful is you'll just
develop this sort of culture light where your faith and your Christianity sort
of looks just like a little bit better version of the culture that you're living in.
And I just wanna use this episode to remind us that we have to be constantly
vigilant because what the world needs is not a little bit lighter version of its own culture.
What the world needs is the radical transformation available with the new life
and the transformed mind that Jesus Christ offers us, okay?
That's what the world needs and that's what we need. And if you wanna become happier.
If you want to feel better and be happier and become healthier,
all those things that we talk about all the time, then you've got to radically,
carefully steward your worldview and make sure that you're not living a truth,
but that you're living in the power and the freedom available with the truth.
And so this episode, we looked at all that, and it really was inspired by John Mark Comer's book.
So thank you, Susan, for reminding me that I hadn't, I guess I just didn't realize
that that episode had only really been available to the paid subscriber.
So all that to say, I went back in time to pull out an episode that was only
ever available to the paid subscribers.
We're going to make that available to you today for Wild Card Wednesday in response
to this incredible email that we received yesterday from Susan about the way
that my thinking was shaped by John Mark Comer's amazing book,
Live No Lies. We're going to talk about several books in this episode.
It's not one of the three book episodes I told you I was going to do this week.
It's just kind of a bonus. us and I hope it's a blessing to you.
But before we get started, I want to just remind you, radically assess your worldview every day.
Pay attention and make sure that your worldview hasn't been sort of absorbed
into a cultural one, but that you're continually resetting yourself up against
the standard because that's what your friends who don't know Jesus need.
They don't need you to be a little bit affirming of their worldview.
They need you to show them the way, the truth and the life that's available in Jesus Christ.
They need you to help them see that there's a better way.
Everybody's wondering why they can't feel happier when they're pursuing their truth.
And it's because you can't really find happiness and peace and wholeness and
purpose and meaning and all these things, especially after you've faced trauma
and tragedy and massive things until you line your worldview up with the truth.
That's where there's power and freedom is why Christ set you free,
Paul said. And Jesus said,
I just have one question for you. Hey, are you ready to change your life?
If the answer is yes, there's only one rule. You have to change your mind first.
And my friend, there's a place where the neuroscience of how your mind works
smashes together with faith and everything starts to make sense.
Are you ready to change your life?
Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,
take control of our thinking, and find real hope. This is where we learn to
become healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
I'm making an assumption, number one, that you are committed and dedicated to
the idea of changing your mind and changing your life.
And learning the art of self-brain surgery to get that done,
that you are committed to the idea that science and faith don't have to be opponents
because they work together to help us figure out who we are and how we're wired
and maximize our ability to utilize these incredible brains that God has given
us to manage and navigate our life and help other people find the light as well.
Number three, I'm assuming that you've understood that hopelessness is the worst
thing that can happen to a person and that we have to fight for hope and that
hope is a verb. we flex those memory and movement muscles, and we're changing our minds through that.
That constant knowledge that hope is
a decision that we can make right but also
i'm making an assumption that most of you are
followers of christ that you because we talk a lot about
the bible we talk a lot about spiritual things in the podcast so
i'm probably making an assumption that most of you who
have decided to take this little deeper step with me
are people who follow the way of jesus and
if you're not if you're not then i want to encourage you send me
an email Lee at drleewarren.com to connect with
me and let's talk on a deeper level about that or find somebody
even better find somebody in your community in your world
closer face to face so you can talk to about these things because
this is the most important decision that you'll ever make is the
decision to align your life with his and today I just want to talk for a minute
about a stunning realization that I made and I made it in reading a book by
John Mark Comer John Mark Comer has written several books the first one I read
was Garden City which is about heaven and about Sabbath and learning to rest.
And the second one that I read was The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
Which is a whole concept about understanding how to slow down and not let life
be overwhelming and stressful to you.
And obviously didn't listen because I still have a lot of those issues,
but those two books were good and they were really helpful to me.
But not long ago, I was reading a book and often when I'm to find a book that
I wanna share with you, I'll go out to Amazon to get the link to share it.
And one of my letters are on a post like this.
And down at the bottom of a post about a book will be a list from Amazon about,
you know, readers who read this also read that.
And that's where I found John Mark Comer's latest book, which came out last year, Live No Lies.
Live No Lies is one of those books that is just completely blowing my mind.
And I learned something in it that I've never, I've known.
In fact, we've been talking about it. We had Elisa Childers, we had Natasha Crane.
We've talked about Chris Hodges' book, The Daniel Dilemma. All these books about
culture and secularism versus a biblical worldview and all that.
But I've never quite put my finger on exactly what it was that I was trying
to say. and all these different times that I've told you that you can't find
happiness and peace and hope by trying to be a better person,
by trying to perfect humanity.
And that's the basic difference. Politically speaking, it's the basic difference
between progressives and conservatives is that progressives basically believe
that the whole problem of man is that they just haven't perfected government yet.
We haven't perfected our ability to make laws and create policies and put up
governmental systems that will make people behave in a way that will perfect humanity.
That's basically the idea of progressivism. And conservatism is almost the opposite of that.
It's basically the big problem with man is that there's no way to solve all
these human problems without some external guidance, that we need to have a
moral code and a fiber that helps us to make decisions,
and that government really is designed to form a protective and general framework,
work but that it can't ever make people better that the
bigger the government gets the more inherently corrupt it gets
and so those are two general ideas about conservative concepts and
liberal concepts or progressive concepts and when you take those same
ideas and apply them to a biblical worldview of course it gets muddy because
biblical worldview is not political and it's not left or right there's ideas
if in fact if you look at jesus you'll if you really look at jesus through the
lens of what he was and what he is and what he said about himself and what he
did, it's hard to put him in a camp.
He cares a lot more about justice than you do and I do, but he also cares a
lot more about personal responsibility and holiness than you or I do.
And both sides of that coin would challenge most thinkers on the right or the
left at the political spectrum.
So we're not talking about politics today at all.
We're talking about how we get ourselves squared away when we try to say,
how do we find hope? How do we find peace?
How do we find happiness? Well, there's some ideas that the world has given
us that in this day and age, if you listen to the Natasha Crane interview that I released on Saturday,
the whole issue of a secular worldview is that it promises that it can make
you happier if you'll just create a better system and believe in these tenets
of secularism, which are laid out pretty clearly that, you know,
that there's no absolute truth,
that your feelings are your guide, that God's just a guess and your version
of God is no better or no more valid than mine.
And that judging other people is the ultimate sin and all of that, right?
If you believe that, then you're going to have a hard time allowing anybody
to tell you that there's a better way because you think there's no definition
of what the better is except what's true for you.
So John Mark Homer put something in my head that I just want to share with you.
I'm going to rip it straight out of his book. I want you to read it, Live No Lies.
But I just want to give you a couple of things to think about about why that
worldview isn't working.
When people say, I want to be happy and pursue my own truth,
But the problem is they keep doing it and the target keeps changing and they
never seem to actually be happy.
And the reason why, friend, I just want you to know it because I think it's
important to teach our kids, tell our families, and shine that light for other people to see.
Because you have to change your mind about what happiness is and what hope really is.
And you can't do it by trying to be a better and better person.
You do it by surrendering to somebody else who has already shown us the path
to those things, the eternal path to those things.
I'm also going to give you back what ought to be our theme song for Mind Change
March, one of my favorite Tommy Walker songs, All About Your Glory.
And this idea, I want to make my life all about your glory, is the antithesis
of a progressive mindset.
Because the progressive mindset is, I want to make my life all about my glory.
I want you to acknowledge me. I want my feelings to be validated.
I want my true self to be found and pursued.
And those two ideas are the opposite of one another.
And only one of them can produce happiness. Only one of them can produce freedom.
And only one of them can actually be true.
And so the question for today is if you're living your truth and it doesn't
set you free, is it the truth?
Or is it just a truth that's not actually true?
I know you trust me, so I just want to lay this out, okay?
I started reading several years ago books that were talking about the difference
between Christianity and secular culture.
And just this idea started for me with Chris Hodge's book, The Daniel Dilemma.
It's about how do you live as a Christian and make a difference and look different
and attract people to the gospel and to the ideas that really set them free.
How do you do that in a secular culture without becoming like
the culture and he used the story of daniel and shadrach
meshach and abednego in the old testament and how they would not bow
the knee to nebuchadnezzar the king and
even even though they knew they were going to get potentially thrown into the
lion's den or thrown into the furnace of fire they were not going to bend the
knee to the culture so so chris hodge's book is more about how do we do that
as a church right how we stand up against culture and not become stained by
the world as paul would say and that That was important. And then I began.
Just this long discussion as I started doing research for Hope is the First
Dose, like what really makes people happy and what is happiness really?
And the big problem, I'm probably going to write a book called Redefining Happy
at some point, because Jesus said, I came, the thief comes to steal,
kill, and destroy, but I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.
And the Beatitudes, when he says, blessed are, blessed are those,
blessed is the one, blessed is he, that word blessed is actually not the right word.
We've talked a lot about makarios and my friend Randy Alcorn's book, Happiness.
And blessed is poorly translated there because the real word that Jesus said is happy.
Makarios means happy. And we've taken this idea that happiness means something
that's not biblical or spiritual.
And that's a trick of the enemy because the world is saying, I want to be happy.
You can't tell me that I can't do these things that are going to make me happy.
Be my feelings or my ultimate guide as Natasha Crane
would say is the tenant of the secular worldview right and Jesus
then if we allow ourselves to
believe that he was talking about some spiritual sort of state of divine you
know joy as Christians sometimes say then that means that Christians aren't
supposed to be happy then that means that the world has no real compelling reason
to come to Jesus if they think he's not going to make them happy.
But what if the truth is Jesus was about that all along except that happy doesn't
mean pursuing whatever your feelings tell you to pursue.
What if happiness is this ability to be at peace and have hope and be happy
and content in your spirit regardless of what happens instead of I can only
be happy if this happens.
What if real happiness has to find by Jesus turns out to be I am happy because
I have him, because I am saved, because I have eternal goals,
because I have this untouchability of my spirit,
because I know that my Redeemer lives and I know that he's taking care of me,
even if my circumstances look poor, then that's really happy.
And so what I discovered in my research is that happier people are the ones
whose emotional state is not tightly coupled to their external circumstances.
The degree of coupling of emotion to circumstance, the lower the happiness scale
is for an individual. So that's important.
And so until I read John Mark Comer, though, I wasn't clear.
I've read Elisa Childress' book, Live No Lies, Live Your Truth and Other Lies.
And I've read Natasha Crane's book, Faithfully Different.
But I just couldn't quite put my finger on it until John Mark Comer said it
really plainly in his latest book, Live No Lies.
And here's the bottom line it's a quick idea i want
to share with you and we're going to get after i'm going to play our theme song and
we'll get on with your monday because i'm going to more fully expound
on this in a longer post i'm not just going to rip it straight from john mark
but this is the genesis of my thinking on this or it's the clarification of
my thinking i finally got a way to understand it plainly okay here's the deal
most of western thought most of what you
think the culture defines happiness as? It comes down to.
The history of understanding how Western thought came about.
And John Mark Comer lays it out really clearly.
The philosopher Charles Taylor wrote a book called The Secular Age.
So when Natasha Crane's writing about secular worldview, John Mark Comer's pointing
out Charles Taylor's work on the secular age.
And he says this is how the West changed from a culture of authority to a culture of authenticity.
And that's important. This is a crucial piece. We used to be people who were
defined as a basic ethos by Christian ideals and principles of an external authority
in our lives that gave us direction and helped us make decisions on how we lived our lives.
And that changed, something changed that to now being authenticity.
You need to be authentic to your true self. You need to know who you are.
You need to follow your heart, right?
Have you heard that in the culture? Of course you have.
And so if you think about it, here's where it came from. John Mark Comer says
it this way. The tipping point was Freud.
Freud, according to psychiatrists and psychologists now, most therapists would
all agree that Freud was pretty much wrong about most of what he thought, right?
If you read about psychology today, Freud's largely been discredited.
But somehow his ideas stuck around and they created, as Comer says,
the cultural air that we now breathe.
So even though his psychiatry ideas were wrong, and even though most therapists
don't practice according to Freudian principles anymore, the ethos that he prescribed.
That he described has stuck around. Here's what Comer says.
Prior to Freud, most people in the West, even if they didn't know it,
thought about desire through the lens of the fourth century philosopher Augustine.
Augustine set out these ideas. St.
Augustine was actually a North African, but he basically gave rise to Western
and European thought for a thousand years.
And here's what Comer says. According to Augustine, the basic problem of the
human condition is that of disordered desires or loves.
In his view, human beings were created in love and for love,
so we're lovers first and thinkers second.
We live primarily from desire, not from our rational minds.
In his view, the problem with the human condition isn't that we don't love.
It's that we love either the wrong things or the right things, but in the wrong order.
So in Augustine's eyes, it's not bad to love your job, but it's disordered if
you love your job more than you love your children.
Or your spouse that's disordered and it'll create problems it's
not bad to love your child but if you love
your child more than you love god it's disordered and it'll
deform how you relate to both and actually hurt your child because they don't
learn the proper relationship between god and man it's not even bad to love
sex but if you love sex so much that it becomes its own path to salvation for
you or if you turn it into something that you worship and pursue in your life above all other,
then it becomes a pseudo-god that you look to for identity.
Hear that word and think about our current culture. If sexual things become
your identity or your ability to belong to a community or for your satisfaction of your life,
then it becomes the philosophical word soteriology,
which is the study of how you become saved.
If you think you can be saved through sexual things or through sexual identity
or identifying with a group of any sort, then that becomes its own God and it's disordered.
And that leads to frustration and pain and angst and difficulty.
And you can just look, I'm just telling you, not to say anything about tolerance
or love, but just to say what is the fruit of that type of living? If you pursue a thing...
Whether it's a gender identity or a sexual ethos or anything in your life,
if it's disordered and not in the proper context, it becomes something that
creates bondage and not freedom, right?
So that's what Augustine said. Basically, order things properly and understand
the hierarchy of how things should be laid out.
So in the pre-Freud West, human flourishing was about saying yes to the right
desires, the higher desires for love, and no to the lower desires,
the baser, more appetite kind of desires.
And you would navigate your desires by this mental map, this code that you inherited
and were taught by trusted external authorities like parents and teachers and
people who had your best interest in mind.
And those external authorities were guided by principles that were from the
higher authority, the Bible, Jesus, the New Testament.
And basically that Western civilization was designed and laid out according
to these ideals and was perverted by people,
of course, but laid out with this idea of ordering your desires in the service
of the external authority who has the proper perspective on what those desires are for,
and that will help you to have a happier, healthier life.
But then Freud came along, and Freud's take was contrary, radically different than this.
Again, Comer's laying this out. For him, for Freud, our most important desire
was libido, which he defined as our desire not just for sex but for pleasure as a whole.
Because libido without restraint, he understood, would lead to anarchy.
And because of that, our parents and cultural structures forced us to repress
our desires. and for Freud, and this is the key of all of Freudian psychology,
repression of desire is the basis for all neuroses.
So basically Augustine, or Augustine, depending on who you read and how you
pronounce his name, but Augustine said...
Desire is properly manifested when
it's in the right context and restrained by the right kind of
ideals so that you don't get it disordered and don't
let desire itself become the goal and Freud
said repression of desire makes you
crazy and everything that's wrong with people is because some
parent repressed them some internal disordered
thinking oppressed them or kept them from pursuing what
would really make them happy and that the reason people are unhappy
happy is because other people are telling them that they can't do
stuff and there's a there's a better definition of what
we're seeing in our culture right now i can't find
one it didn't you know uh comer says
this this great line right here it doesn't take a
private investigator to work out whose ideas won the fight
for the west's view of reality freud's ideas show up in the popular slogans
and catchphrases of our day and this is where john mark homer and elisa childers
and chris Hodges and Natasha Crane and all these books I've been reading have
kind of come together because culture right now is telling you the heart wants what it wants.
Follow your heart. You do you. Just do it. Speak your truth. Live your truth.
And the best one, be true to yourself.
And here's what the whole point of why I wanted to share this with you today,
because I'm going to put this together in a more detailed fashion later because
it's lining right up with my next book, Self Brain Surgery.
Here's the deal. There's a slogan that you learned from high school and you've
heard it in culture a million times and it came from Shakespeare and you've
heard it, to thine own self be true.
Popularly stated these days be true to yourself that came
from shakespeare and because it came from shakespeare lots
of people use it as a slogan they put it on t-shirts they
get tattoos to the unknown self be true be true
to yourself live your truth but here's the punchline and
this is it's crazy to me sometimes i
see when the devil has done something and it's
just right on the nose it's right in your face and you
can't even see it we can't even see it it's so tricky that
he's done this to us but you got freud who
has made us redefine our ethos for
our entire society into one of pursuing our own desires
and not letting anything external including god tell
us how we can live our lives because in the secular culture judging
and and trying to evangelize are two of the greatest
sins in secularism right read natasha crane's book again faithfully different
but so So Freud has been largely discredited by his own peers because his psychological
ideas don't really help people and they don't really turn out to be useful in therapy.
So you've got a discredited psychiatrist who has successfully defined our entire culture and ethos.
And then you've got a Shakespearean quote to that own self be true,
but guess who said that in Hamlet?
Guess who said it? It wasn't Hamlet. It wasn't the king. wasn't the wise person in the play.
It was Polonius, who was a moron.
Polonius was a windbag. He was deceitful. He was evil. He was the guy who got
everything wrong in that play.
He was the ultimate villain. Polonius was a fool.
He was a moron. He was an idiot.
And Shakespeare wrote that into the play because he was trying to make the point
that if you try to live according to whatever will make you happy,
you're not going to be happy.
To thine own self be true turns out to be a terrible idea. It doesn't work.
And Shakespeare was writing that from a tongue-in-cheek position. But guess what?
Culture and the devil have made it an ideal now.
So I just the whole thing I wanted to share with you on mind change monday is
there's two ideas you need to get out of your head one is that the pursuit of
desire it leads to happiness,
that that repressing your desires leads to fruit to slavery because it doesn't those those are wrong,
pursuit of desire ultimately leaves you wanting more and just think about it
how many times have Have you pursued something that was not God's plan for your
life and you've got it and it didn't make you happy?
When you've had that bag of Cheetos you had your eye on and you ended up still
being hungry or you had that extra glass of wine and you ended up still not
being happy or satisfied and you wanted something else and that led to pursuing
more and more and more and now you have an addiction, right? Right.
You finally had that relationship that you've been pursuing and it led to the
destruction of a lot of the peace of mind and happiness in your life where it
led to some other form of bondage.
Then you pursue these desires and then you find that you're still hungry and you're still thirsty.
And Jesus comes along and he says, I'm going to give you some water that when
you drink it, you won't ever be thirsty again.
I'm going to give you some food that when you eat it, you'll be finally satisfied.
I'm going to give you some words that when you read them, you will be filled
by them and they will help you in your life.
That's what a life that's not defined by the pursuit of desire leads you to.
So today I want you to break that idea. The Mind Change Monday concept is get
rid of this idea that pursuing desires is the ultimate aim of humanity.
Because friend, it's not. It leaves you empty and it leaves you more in bondage.
Because if you think that there's a desire that if you finally get it,
you'll finally be happy, it's you're chasing your tail for the rest of your life.
And you're gonna teach your kids that that's what they need to do too.
And that is not, my friend, the good life.
And the second thing to break is this notion that to thine own self be true
leads to some sort of happiness because the guy who said that was a moron and
it doesn't lead to happiness.
You don't need to be true to yourself. You need to be true to somebody else
who's telling you what yourself was created for.
The highest ideal and aim of man is to minimize ourself so that he can maximize
ourselves and he can make you fully who you were created to be.
Because if you look at the evidence of what happens when people try to make
it themselves, it's a disaster.
And that's what's wrong with our culture right now.
So my friend, here on Mind Change Monday, I want you to read John Mark Comer's book, Live No Lies.
And some of his writing is a little out there. It seems kind of crazy.
But this idea about culture and identity and the pursuit of what's really going
to be able to make you happy in your life is spot on.
And I'd never heard anybody put Freud and Polonius from Shakespeare right next to each other.
And that's exactly what I've been looking for. It's exactly right.
The enemy has convinced us that we need to live our own truth,
that we need to pursue our own happiness, that anybody that comes in between
us and what will make us happy is repressing us or hurting us.
And those things, my friend, are not true.
And that's why Paul said in Romans, don't be conformed to the world,
but rather be transformed by the renewing of your minds.
That's what self-brain surgery is about. It's about changing your mind so you
can change your life. And the good news is, my friend, you can start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship
the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,
check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,
WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.
And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,
every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries
around the world. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon.
Remember, friend, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And the good news is you can start today.
Music.