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When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up, or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren- I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered where God is in all this mess. This is The Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, where we'll take a hard look at what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier, feel better, and be happier so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us. You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers, but you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's gonna take some spiritual-brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you, and it is Spiritual Brain Surgery.
We are going to give you today some self-brain surgery in the Bible.
I've been working on my new book, The Manuscript, is done. It's in the hands of the publisher.
And over the next few months, we'll be going through the hard work of editing
and line editing, copy editing, book design, cover design,
title formatting, writing, audio book recording, all the stuff,
marketing and sales and all the stuff that happens to lead up to a book.
And it's going to go really fast.
I feel like tomorrow when I'm sitting here telling you that the book's getting ready to come out.
But it's going to be a year from now, February of 2026.
Good folks, Lord willing at Tyndale Refresh are going to be bringing to life
the Self-Brain Surgery Handbook.
How to rewire your brain, reorder your mind, and radically transform your life.
That's the working title. Now, sometimes titles change.
Actually, my books, we've been pretty lucky. The first book,
No Place to Hide, was actually not called that.
It was first called A Brain Surgeon Goes to War. That got remodeled and redone,
and No Place to Hide became the title.
The second book I've seen, The End of You, actually, that's the title I started with.
So we ended up doing a whole bunch of marketing stuff, and the Penguin Random
House ultimately gave me the title that I started with. Same thing with Hope
is the First Dose. But sometimes book titles change, so stay tuned on that.
But today I want to talk to you about the fact that the Bible actually has a
lot to say about mindset, about the way we think, and how that affects how we
live, and what we call self-brain surgery.
So I'm going to just give you today some guiding scriptures.
If you wanted to take a look at what does the Bible say that we can use in our
concept of self-brain surgery and this idea that we're practicing directed and
applied neuroplasticity to smash together with our faith to make us more resilient
and hold on to hope when things get hard and perform better and break through
limitations and all that stuff.
What does the Bible have to say about it? That's what we're going to do today,
and we're going to start with that right now.
Now, this will be by no means a comprehensive list of scriptures related to
mindset and what attention and mindset and thought processes have to do with
your life, but it'll just get us started.
Now, it's really important to realize that the Bible is not a science book, okay?
The Bible doesn't generally tell us how God did things.
The Bible doesn't give us physics equations or explain how things work on a molecular level.
Rather, it tells us that God did things. And so if you read the Bible properly,
you're not looking for scientific explanations to what God did when he said,
let there be light. He's not going to give you the physics.
OK, he describes what he did and generally prescribes a way of living that will
lead to human flourishing.
So if you look at the Bible through the lens of how do we best live a life that
leads to our flourishing.
Then you can see the Bible is stating principles that science later comes around
to agreeing with and explaining how they work.
So this helps us achieve the abundant lives that Jesus promised in John 10.10.
So don't look for God telling us how he did things.
Look for him telling us that he did things through the lens of everything he
did is designed to help us flourish if we live our lives in a particular way.
So scripture obviously predates modern science by thousands of years,
millennia, right? It's got timeless wisdom that aligns remarkably,
though, with what we're now understanding about the brain, the mind, and human behavior.
So what generally happens is science, quote-unquote capital S science,
scientists and researchers and people with agendas, will generally decide that
they believe something is true, and they'll push that out as quote-unquote science.
Then if that ever seems to conflict with something the Bible says,
here's what I want you to pay attention to, okay?
So the Bible said 2,000 years ago, for example, people are happier when they
live a certain way, when they behave a certain way, when they think and do certain things.
And then science will come along and psychology will come along and say,
no, Freud will come along, for example, and say, just follow your heart,
do what makes you feel good, and that's science.
But then over time, one year, five years, 10 years, 20 years,
you have to have a long view.
Eventually, if you pay attention, you'll start noticing the research says,
wait a minute, we didn't get that quite right.
That doing X doesn't actually make people happier, doesn't actually make people healthier.
Maybe we should do Y instead. And what I'm going to tell you is if you pay attention,
if you go back through the history of modern science and the current history
of psychology and therapy and ideologies of various sorts,
I'm trying not to descend too far into political things here.
But if you just pay attention, what you'll see is that over time,
science begins recommending things as helpful that the Bible already said.
Science over time is a long arc, but it bends back towards biblical wisdom.
That's my working premise in theory. I've been paying attention to this for
years, decades, really, as a scientist.
But what happens is that the wisdom of the Bible ultimately begins to be bent
towards by the science over time.
So if you ever see science seeming to contradict something that the Bible says,
my mode would be don't throw out the Bible, just wait, pay attention.
Hang on, because eventually it's going to come around and the Bible's going
to start sounding a little bit more consistent with science.
And the flip side of that is that science will begin to reinforce and actually
prove out things that the Bible said a long time ago. So just pay attention.
So for example, when the Bible says, hey, renew your mind, Romans 12.2.
When it says, guard your heart, Proverbs 4.23. When it says,
take your thoughts captive, 2 Corinthians 10.5.
It turns out that those practices line up with the latest findings in neuroscience
regarding neuroplasticity and emotional regulation and the powerful role that
attention plays in shaping reality. And over time, science begins to bend back
towards biblical truth.
Just pay attention to that. So that should start to build confidence with you
then that if you read some scripture and the Holy Spirit kind of nudges you,
the great physician's working on you in some way, that's gonna turn out to be
the thing that's gonna lead to your flourishing if you follow that.
Now, we've talked a lot on my show, on the Dr. Lee Warren podcast,
and on here on Spiritual Brain Surgery, a lot about this concept that part of
the treatment plan from my book, Hope is the First Dose, that we call prehab.
This idea that when you're under pressure, when you're under stress,
you don't rise to the occasion, you fall to your preparation.
And part of that prehab process is preparing your mind and your heart for what
you're going to do, what you're going to turn to, what you're going to believe,
what truths you're going to call on, what truths and foundational principles
you're going to plant your feet on when you're under stress so that you can
stand up and those things will help you and not hinder you.
That you won't be asking questions about what you really believe because you'll
already know it. You've prepped it. You've rehearsed it. You've practiced it.
And you know where you're going to fall when things get hard.
So doing that prehab process in advance, storing up in your mind words and beliefs
in advance of the trouble allows you to access them when you're struggling.
My friend Mark Roggepp, in his book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy,
observed that hope springs from truth rehearsed. And we've talked about that before.
Mark's been on the show a couple of times, three times, I think.
Hope springs from truth rehearsed. Memorizing scripture can act as a mental
and spiritual tissue bank.
If you want to think about biopsying your thoughts and severing sick synapses
and all these things that we talk about with self-brain surgery,
then if you're going to cut out a harmful thought, you need a transplant bank
of thoughts to put back in there.
And I would suggest that scripture is a healthy place to go.
You don't want an organ donor bank full of diseased organs. You don't want ideas
that are going to crumble under the weight of scrutiny.
You don't want things that are going to turn out not to be true to hold on to.
You're going to want to reach for alcohol that's not going to hold you up when
you're under pressure. You want to reach for something that's really going to hold.
So using a healthy tissue bank of thought transplants then would be a wise move, right?
So that you rehearse these things and prepare them and memorize them and have
them in your heart when you're ready to go under pressure.
You're going to not rise to the occasion. You're going to fall back to these
things that you prepared for.
So that'll help you transplant positive, healthy, hold up thoughts when false
or negative beliefs start to try to take over. And to that end,
I'm going to give you today just a bunch of scriptures, and you can use these
as you're getting close to the end of the year in your own journaling and your
own thought preparation,
to say, hey, when I encounter this difficulty, when I go to this hard thing
with my family, when I hit that anniversary or it's the first Christmas since
my mom died or since I lost my child or whatever, you're going to have some tools to hold on to.
You're going to have some useful things in your mind to know that they're true
and they're going to help hold you up.
So these following scriptures are going to highlight principles from neuroscience
that can guide us toward profound personal transformation. This is how we radically change our lives.
We reorder our mind.
In other words, we change the order and the mechanism by which we think about things.
We change how we value the things that we process in our mind.
And they illustrate, these scriptures will illustrate how integrating faith
and science will empower us to practice cell brain surgery in our daily lives.
We align our thoughts, our beliefs, and our actions with God's design for human flourishing.
Remember, he's not going to tell us how he did things. He's going to tell us that he did things.
And looking at scripture through the lens of how did God design us for our flourishing,
that'll help us maximize what we get out of using scripture and knowing that
science is ultimately going to bend back to scripture.
So the first one, Romans 12, 2, do not conform to the pattern of this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
That's neuroplasticity in a nutshell. When you change how you think,
it changes what your brain does structurally.
And the more you do that, you get better at getting better.
The more you focus your mind and your thoughts on better thoughts and allow
God to transform your mind instead of conforming it, instead of pressing your
brain into the shape that the world wants you to think, the way that the world
wants you to view things,
the way the world wants you to react to things instead of pressing and conforming
your mind into that, you're gonna transform.
You're going to renew your mind. That's Romans 12, 2. Okay, that's going to
lead to radical transformation. Philippians 4, 8.
Finally, whatever's true, whatever's noble, whatever's right,
whatever's pure, whatever's lovely, whatever's admirable, if anything is excellent
or praiseworthy, think about such things.
This is in the passage, Philippians 4, 6 through 8. It's the self-brain surgery in a nutshell.
It is, don't be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication
with thanksgiving, me, present your request to God, and the peace of God,
which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
So that's the preamble to this list of things to transplant, right?
It's this idea, we know now, the neuroscience has bent the knee to science,
to scripture over time, not being anxious comes from being grateful.
Your hippocampus can't multitask. It's going to switch towards gratitude.
Frontal lobe control, reason, ration, calm decision making, all that stuff.
Or it's going to switch down to sympathetic nervous system, amygdala,
fight, flight, freeze, stress response, cortisol, all that stuff. You can't do both.
You can't be anxious and grateful at the same time. So what Paul is saying here,
Philippians 4, 6 through 8, your self-brain surgery handbook,
don't be anxious, be grateful, pray.
We know now that prayer and meditation, for example, increases the size of your hippocampus.
It literally makes your hippocampus better at getting better,
at managing stress, at being emotionally resilient, at recalling memories that
are helpful, at using the hope muscle of memory and movement that I wrote about
in Hope is the First Dose.
And by the way, if you haven't read Hope is the First Dose or if you want to
give someone a gift for Christmas, Hope is the First Dose would be helpful in
helping somebody be more emotionally resilient when they face trauma and tragedy
and drama and massive things and all the stuff that we go through in life.
That's a little plug for Hope is the First Dose. If you haven't read it,
you ought to read it. If you want to gift it to somebody, it will help them. I promise it'll help.
Philippians 4, 6-8 is the passage that gets us into the self-brain surgery mindset
of rehab and prehab and all those things that help you be prepared for what
to do when the pressure's on. That's Philippians 4.
So go read it. Journal it. Write it down. Memorize it.
Whatever's noble, pure, lovely, admirable. Those are the things you want to
be able to reach for and transplant when you're dealing with harmful thinking.
Proverbs 23, 7 says, As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.
Okay? This is a little bit out of context. If you read the Proverbs 23,
it's talking about eating and drinking at somebody's table and you're eating
their food and they're acting like they're glad to have you there,
but they're really in their mind wishing you wouldn't be eating so much of their
food and all that. But the principle holds.
Somebody might do something and behave a certain way, but it's how they think
that really is the truth. So what he's saying here is correct.
As you think in your mind, in your heart, remember in the Bible,
heart and mind are transplanted for each other.
As you think, so you are. Your life comes out of your thinking.
It's the power of thought in shaping your identity and your actions.
Because as Jesus said, out of the heart, the mouth speaks.
Isaiah 26.3, you will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are set on you
because they trust in you.
Isaiah 26.3 tells us, if you want to be peaceful, if you want to be less anxious,
fix your mind on Jesus. Fix your mind on God, his principles,
his plans, his purposes, because they're designed for your flourishing.
If you want to say, how do I feel less anxious? How do I stop being so stressed out all the time?
Focus your thoughts on something that's not temporary.
Focus your thoughts on something that's not going to shift and crumble and let you down.
This is the idea of focus and attention density. We've talked about the quantum
Zeno effect, about the idea that the more you pay attention to something,
Like if you're feeling anxious, the more you think about your anxiety,
the more anxious you get.
But when you shift your brain, you focus on something eternal,
something real, something powerful, something that's not going to crumble,
then you'll find perfect peace. He will keep in perfect peace.
Those whose minds are steadfast because they trust in him.
2 Corinthians 10.5 is the biopsy passage. We demolish every argument and every
pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God,
and we take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ.
This is literal. If you say, how often should I do self-brain surgery?
How much should I pay attention to my thing? Is it okay to blow up every once
in a while or freak out every once in a while or vent my frustrations every
once in a while when somebody stresses me out? Well, maybe.
But what the Bible says doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room here,
does it? We take every thought captive.
So how many of your thoughts should you be responsible for? How much of your
thinking should you submit to this self-brain surgery practice?
How much time and mental energy should you focus on trying to get your thinking
and your thought life under control?
2 Corinthians 10.5. We take every thought captive. And what happens is,
remember the ninth commandment of self-brain surgery.
I'm getting better at what I'm actually doing. So if you practice biopsying
your thinking, guess what's going to start happening?
You're going to start hearing in your mind, no, I'm not going to believe that
thought. That's a false thought. I recognize that voice. No,
you're not going to get me there today.
I'm not going down that path of being offended. I know what you're trying to
do to me, brain. I know what you're trying to do to me, devil.
Remember, it's devil and diagnosis. Sometimes it's mental.
Sometimes it's spiritual. But you're going to hear thoughts in your head that aren't true.
And when you start the practice of actually investigating and thoroughly looking
at your thinking before you react to it, it becomes easier.
And it actually becomes default because you're designed for that.
God built you that way in the first place, but you grew up in a house,
in a culture, in a worldview, in a lifestyle where you react to your feelings.
You're taught to believe what you feel and think.
You're taught to respond and react in certain ways. So before you even had the
ability to communicate, You had a set of rules by which you were taught to live.
All of us do. It's not your fault. But once you're aware that you can change
that for your own good, then it becomes your responsibility to practice in a
way that doesn't violate the first commandment of self-brain surgery.
I will relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise.
Now we want to get on top of that cycle where we're thinking in a head about
what we're thinking about.
Matthew 6, 22 and 23. The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy,
your whole body will be full of light.
But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.
This is linking focus and perspective with flourishing and mental clarity.
Jesus is saying, what you look at, what you think about, what you pay attention
to, what you let into your eyes.
It's what's going to become who you are.
If you're looking at the wrong things, thinking about the wrong things,
paying attention to the wrong things, focusing on the wrong things.
Ruminating on the wrong things, guess what's going to happen?
Your brain's going to wire in a way that gets better and more automated at thinking
and looking and ruminating about all those wrong things.
And as you think, so you are. Remember that?
Proverbs 4.23, above all else, guard your heart for everything flows from it.
Above all else, about how many else? All else.
Guard your heart. Now remember, mind and heart are the same thing.
So above all else, guard your brain.
Guard your mind. For everything comes out of what you think about.
This is the importance of monitoring and shaping your thought life,
your inner life, your emotions.
Don't get in the shower and think about all the things you wish you had said
when your husband said that thing or you intend to say to your boss or if that
guy says this thing one more time or if that girl says that to the office or
brings that attitude, I am going to let her have it.
If you sit there and ruminate and plan that, guess what's happening?
You're making a set of synapses that are going to make it easier for you to
go down a mental pathway that will not lead to your flourishing.
If you want to flourish in your life, if you want to become healthier and feel
better and be happier, what does he say?
Think about certain things and not other things.
Guard your mind for everything flows from it. Remember, thoughts become things,
right? That's the 10th commandment. Thoughts become things.
So the stuff you think about turns into what you say when you're not paying attention.
It turns into what you do. It turns into how you use your eyes to glare at somebody
or not, to give life with your words or not, to build somebody up with your
behavior or not. It starts with your thinking, my friend. Colossians 3.2.
Set your mind on things above, not on earthly things. This is that same idea.
The eyes are the lamp of the body.
The things you think about become what you do. So think about better stuff.
This is perspective shift.
Change what you think about. And that's going to line up with all these studies
that show that optimism and resilience and positivity actually produce better
physiology, produce less stress, produce longer lives.
Did you know that people with a negativity bias to their thinking don't live
as long as people with a positivity bias to their thinking? It's actually true from neuroscience.
John 10, 10, I've come that you might have life and have it abundantly.
Okay, this is the idea of human flourishing and abundance is the outcome of
aligning with divine principles, aligning your life up, especially your thought
life with his principles.
Jesus said it plain. The thief comes to steal and kill and destroy.
You're gonna have trauma. You're gonna have drama. You're gonna have tragedy.
You're gonna have massive things.
You're gonna have times when you feel like you're settling, when you're listening
to labeling stories, all that stuff's gonna happen. Jesus says you can live
in that life and have abundance at the same time if you learn how to think properly.
If you want to flourish, you want to have abundance, you got to set your mind on different stuff.
Ephesians 4, 17. So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord that you no
longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking.
Ephesians 4 is the war and peace version of self-brain surgery.
It goes through the whole thing of what God intends for your life to look like
and what happens when you don't think right.
He calls these people Gentiles, the people that don't have the spirit,
the people that aren't saved, that don't know God.
And he says the entire problem with their existence is that their thinking is futile.
Their thinking is wrong. That's what's led them into darkness.
That's what's led them into depravity.
That's why they keep searching for things that they think will make them happy
and they don't. And they just get worse and worse and they get more and more
miserable because their thinking is futile.
And he turns that around in 4.23. He says, I want you to be made new in the attitude of your mind.
So the whole idea, my friend, of self-brain surgery, you can go find another
hundred scriptures. There's thousands of them. But this is the handbook version, okay?
The whole idea is that when you choose to think about one thing and not another
thing, what you're really doing is surgery.
Because you're changing synaptic connections that activate networks in your
brain that produce hormonal and neurochemical changes,
that produce epigenetic changes in your genes that you pass on to your family
members, that produce changes in your electromagnetic field,
produce changes in your quantum state that affect other people in real ways in the real world.
When you think about one thing and not another thing, you are making a decision
to structurally change your brain to reinforce that type of thinking and that
future behavior because thoughts become things.
You are making a decision to turn one thing into reality and not another thing.
And so the question is, when you're not under stress, when you're not in duress,
when you're not in trouble?
What are you thinking about? Because it's what you're thinking about then that's
going to come out when you are under stress.
So self-brain surgery then really, if you want to know what it is,
is the active practice of setting your mind right so that your brain and your
body respond in ways that lead to your flourishing, which is what God wants for you anyway.
God doesn't tell you not to sin because he wants to control your behavior and make you miserable.
God tells you what he wants that will produce flourishing and abundance and peace in your life.
Because I promise you, you'll never wake up one day and say,
gosh, I wish I had committed adultery one more time.
I wish I'd had one more bottle of whiskey yesterday. I wish I had done X,
Y, or Z, embezzled a little bit more money. I wish I'd watched a little bit more pornography.
You're not going to get to the end of your life and look back finally on all
the things that you did that didn't produce flourishing.
You're not. I had a conversation with a loved one yesterday who's older.
And she said she was really having some regret over some interactions that she'd
had with her parents when she was younger, because now they're both gone and
she can't go back and say, gosh, I wish I had valued my time with you more.
And I wish I had paid a little more attention.
I wish I'd spent more time with you. And I didn't. And now I can't.
So I'm just telling you, friend, I promise you, at the end of your life,
because I'm the guy that sits at the bedside and is with people at the end of their lives.
I've never heard anybody wish that they had done more selfish things,
wish that they had engaged in more things that were considered sinful or harmful.
They always wish they'd done something different. They'd spent more time with
their family. They'd been a little more faithful to God.
They'd been kinder, that they had been less offended.
They always wish that they had done things that led to more flourishing.
And so the way to get ahead of that is to start preparing your mind to produce
flourishing in your life now.
And these scriptures will help you. That's just a run through of what self-brain
surgery in the Bible looks like. It's a little guidebook for you.
Some scriptures you can memorize or write down and print off and put in your
purse or in your wallet to have handy.
I met a man named Clay Risk when I was in Florida at the Bonita Springs Church
the first time a few years ago now.
And they invited me down to speak my book, I've seen The End of You was their
book of the year for 2021.
I went down there to speak and Clay came up. He's an anesthesiologist.
And he said, hey, from your book, I got this idea of thinking about better stuff.
And he unfolded a piece of paper that he carries in his wallet of all these
promises of God and scriptures to go along with them.
And he basically carries that in his wallet to continually remind himself of things that are true.
And that's what we need to do. That's why Deuteronomy says that.
Talk about it. Write it down. Put it on your forehead. Write it on your wristband. Tell your kids.
Rehearse truth. Hope springs from truth rehearsed, friend.
So that's self-brain surgery in the Bible. It's designed to help you flourish.
God doesn't tell us how he did things. Usually, he tells us that he did.
And if you read scripture through the lens of what did God do that will produce,
what did God say or do that will produce flourishing in my life,
it will produce abundance.
When the steal, kill, and destroy is out there, how can not have abundance anyway. John 10, 10.
That's what's going to happen when you start practicing self-brain surgery.
And the good news, my friend, is you can change your mind and you can change
your life and you can start today. That's spiritual brain surgery for this week.
We're praying for you. I know it's almost Christmas and you're going to have
some stressful times and some last minute crazy stuff and hopefully some wonderful
peace-filled quiet moments too.
But these scriptures will help prepare you for what to do when things get hard.
They'll help you decide that you really can change your mind and change your
life and that you really can start today.