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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. Hope you're doing well. I am Dr. Lee Warren,
and I am here with you today on Theology Thursday for some self-brain surgery.
I have a whole episode about worldview that I'm in the middle of recording,
and as it happens, my surgery schedule got completely wrecked yesterday by an unplanned emergency.
We ended up having to move a couple of surgeries to today, which which resulted
in having to move about 30 clinic appointments to tomorrow.
So basically my schedule got whacked this week by unplanned emergency,
had to be available to help somebody in an unplanned situation.
So that has resulted in me not being ready to give you this incredible Theology
Thursday episode that I intend to give you, and it's going to help you.
We're going to look at the worldview issue, how we see the world makes a huge
difference in the way we approach the world with hope and faith and the way
we make decisions and all of that.
We're going to look at the difference between atheism, pantheism, and theism.
And then we're going to learn the difference between, or rather the ability
to discern when there's a category error in how two people are conversing about
something when they think it's the same thing, but it's really not because of
worldview differences.
So we're going to get that done at some point tomorrow.
I have an incredible episode, a conversation with Dr. Josh Axe.
But today I'm going to give you back a Throwback Thursday episode, an episode about the.
Armor of God that we talk about in 1 Thessalonians, the helmet, the hope of salvation.
We did an episode way back in season three. This was in 2021.
It hasn't been available in a long time, so you haven't heard it.
It's going to be helpful to you.
And I got into it because I'm writing a talk for the Norplat mayor has invited me.
Great honor to be invited to speak at his prayer breakfast next week.
So I'm going to talk about prayer. I talk about neuroscience and quantum physics
and prayer, what it is, what it's for, what it does, and all that stuff.
And in the context of prayer, you have to talk about the armor of God.
So we're going to talk about that a little bit today in my preparation for my
thinking about the mayor's talk.
It reminded me of this old episode, and I'm going to bring that back to you
today. It's going to be helpful.
God always does that. There's somebody out there that's going to be helped by this episode.
And if it turns out to be you, shoot me a voicemail, speakpipe.com slash drleewarren
or email me lee at drleewarren.com.
I'd love to hear from you if this episode turns out to be helpful.
We are going to be picking the winners of the Andrea Herzer book in the next 24 hours.
If you heard that episode yesterday from Andrea Herzer and you would be considered
for one of the free books from her, Incurable Faith, an incredible book about
chronic pain and how to find hope and faith while you're holding on to something
that isn't going to go away, then get involved in that.
Send me an email. We're going to be picking those winners in the next 24 hours.
So be sure you go back and listen to the Andrea Herzer episode and let me know
if you would like to be considered for a free copy of that book.
And today we're going to talk about how to hold on to
hope as a helmet to protect your mind against the
things that happen in your lives and hold on to faith and hold
on to hope and always manage to change your
mind and change your life but before we do that my friend i have a
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 science 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 Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
I got a really cool text message a few days ago from an old friend from San
Antonio named Keith Leslie.
Keith, if you're listening, hope you're doing good, brother.
Keith sent me a screenshot of my podcast, and he said, hey, I didn't know you had a podcast.
I saw this popped up today, and I listened to it, and I really liked it,
and we reconnected, and hadn't heard from Keith, or he hadn't heard from me in years.
And I kind of you know it's one of those people that once I moved away from San Antonio in 2005.
I haven't seen him I saw him once maybe in 2007 or 8 he came through Alabama
and stayed with us for a couple of days and I just haven't ever seen him again
and so we haven't talked in a long time and it reminded me as we talked that
Keith had an organization I think he still has an organization called Full Armor
and it's basically a Christian kind of entertainment publishing,
conglomerate there in San Antonio, and they did a bunch of different things.
And of course, the name Full Armor comes from the verse in Ephesians 5,
where it talks about the full armor of God.
And I remembered as I was chatting back and forth with Keith that really,
probably the reason that you get newsletters and books and podcasts from me
now is that Keith gave me an opportunity to publish articles in his newspaper,
the San Antonio Christian Beacon, back in the the days when I lived in San Antonio.
So some of the early stuff that I wrote as I started to work through some of
my troubles with Iraq and some of my thoughts on scripture and all of that,
some of that early grappling with some things in the writing form came through
those weekly article or monthly articles in the San Antonio Christian Beacon.
And Keith gave me that opportunity.
And so I don't think I've told him enough. Keith, if you're listening,
thank you for giving me that early platform that really kind of convinced me
that, that, um, I could put things down in written form that would help people figure stuff out.
And, and, uh, we got a lot of really cool letters over the years as we,
um, put those articles out and people would write in and say how much they meant
to them. And, and so that's all about Keith Leslie.
Well, thinking about Keith made me think about full armor and full armor made
me think about the scripture.
And of course, as I think about scripture and how I can apply that to helping
you become infinitely happier, I came across some interesting things,
and so today we're gonna talk a little bit about that.
And you know, my podcast, just like my books, is really about faith and doubt
and science and the knowledge, science and knowledge and the gray zones in between.
It's about grappling with fear and doubt and faith and hope and all those hard
things that come along in life and how we can navigate all of them and learn
how to separate our peace of mind and joy from our circumstances.
And in so doing, we really need some.
Some tools which I try to give you with the self-brain surgery techniques but
we also need some defense mechanisms some body
armor if you will and we also need some weapons right so
scripture is the sword of the spirit that's the weapon that we have the only
offensive weapon in that list but there's a lot of defensive tools and that's
what the full armor is about so today we're going to talk a little bit about
the full armor about something that I'm going to call hope helmets and as always
we're going to start today I'm going to ask you a question before we get started here.
Why do we need helmets in our regular lives? Why do we need helmets?
Let me tell you why. Simple question, right? Why do we need helmets in our lives?
Well, obviously the obvious answer is to protect our head, right?
Now, as a neurosurgeon, unfortunately, I've had way too many conversations with
parents whose children died after bicycle or skateboard or rollerblade accidents
because they hit their head and weren't wearing a helmet.
Or something like eight times more likely to die or develop a severe brain injury
if you're not wearing a helmet.
So it's just tragic when I sit down face-to-face with parents and say,
we did everything we could, but a helmet would, you know, I don't ever say it,
but everybody knows a helmet would have prevented that injury most of the time.
And I read an article this week. Like there's approximately 600 deaths per year
in the United States from motorcycle accidents that the government thinks could
be prevented if those riders had been wearing helmets.
So 600 people die on motorcycles a year that wouldn't have died probably if
they'd been wearing helmets.
And there's hundreds more from bicycles, skateboards, rollerblades,
rock climbing, all that stuff. People not protecting their head.
And then often I see parents riding down the road on bicycles with little kids
and they've got helmets on the kids, but not on the parents.
And it seems to people seem to think that once you're a certain age,
you don't need a helmet anymore. Well, your brain doesn't like to hit the concrete.
Friend. There was a neurosurgeon when I was a resident, a famous neurosurgeon
who was the chief of the department who was riding a bicycle on his block with
his grandchild and just kind of got tangled up in the pedals and fell over and
hit his head and died from a head injury.
How ironic is that? A neurosurgeon. So you need a helmet, right? It's simple.
Get you a helmet because helmets help protect your head.
And I told you before, talking with Keith Leslie again reminded me of the Ephesians
5 about the full armor of God.
And here's what it says. Ephesians 5, starting verse 10 through 18.
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.
Put on the full armor of God so that you may take your stand against the devil's schemes.
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers,
the authorities, the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces
of evil in the heavenly realms.
Therefore, put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes,
you may be able to stand your ground. And after you've done everything, to stand.
Stand firm then with the belt of truth buckled around your waist,
with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with the feet fitted with
the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.
In addition to this, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish
all the flaming arrows of the evil one, and take the helmet of salvation and
the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, and pray in the Spirit on
all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.
With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord's people.
Now, I had that all kind of swirling through my head and we're finishing up
the 90 day Bible reading.
We read with several hundred, a hundred or more of our readers,
the entire Bible in the last 90 days and we're almost done.
And we came across 1 Thessalonians this week too.
And so I had the full armor in my head from Keith Leslie and from Ephesians 5.
And then I read 1 Thessalonians chapter 5, and Paul references the armor again,
but he only talks about two of the pieces.
He only talks about two of the pieces. And here's what he says,
1 Thessalonians 5, starting in verse 4.
And it's one of those things where I've been reading the Bible my whole life,
and I don't recognize that I ever noticed this before.
It's just kind of jumped off the page to me. He says, I love that about the
Bible. You read it your whole life, and you still is fresh every time you read through it.
And here's what Paul said, 1 Thessalonians 5, starting in verse 4.
But you, brothers and sisters are not in darkness so that
this day should surprise you like a thief you are all
children of the light and children of the day we do
not belong to the night or to the darkness so then let us not be like others
who are asleep but let us be awake and sober for those who sleep sleep at night
and those who get drunk get drunk at night but since we belong to the day let
us be sober putting on faith and love as a breastplate and the hope of salvation as a helmet.
For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath, but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.
He died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him.
Therefore, encourage one another and build each other up just as in fact you are doing.
Back to verse 8, the hope of salvation as a helmet.
The hope of salvation as a helmet. I never caught that before.
And again, why do we need helmets?
To protect our head, to protect our brain, our mind, our heart,
and our hope. Head injuries happen by impact.
By the sudden deceleration of your brain when it's moving fast down the road,
by penetration of objects through the skull and into the brain,
and by sheer forces that rip and tear asunder the neurons and axons in your
beautiful, precious nervous system, the delicate parts of your brain that head injuries injure.
And if you don't protect your thoughts, friend, if you don't get your hope helmet
situated, the hope of salvation, you can forget that you're supposed to be infinitely happier.
You need to get yourself a hope helmet. Now, before we go any farther,
let's hear from Tommy Walker.
I believe, I believe, I believe, I believe in Jesus. Hi, I'm Tommy Walker,
and I've been a worship leader and songwriter for over 30 years.
By God's amazing grace, he's allowed me to write some worship songs that have
been sung in churches all over the world.
In 2015, I started my own nonprofit called Tommy Walker Ministries so I could
start giving away all my songs and music and worship resources. sources.
Since then, we've had people from over 80 nations download our charts and performance
tracks, and we've given away over 100,000 of them now, and we're so blessed and honored to do it.
We have a passion to declare the gospel through worship in a powerful way,
so we're so careful to fill up our songs and our videos with God's Word.
And if you're interested in becoming a partner with us, just visit TommyWalkerMinistries.org
and become a one-time or monthly partner.
We'd be Be so grateful. And let me just say God's richest blessings on you all.
If you aren't already, become a passionate worshiper of the Most High God. Amen.
Thank you, Tommy. Again, why do we need helmets?
To protect our head and our brain and our mind and our hope, okay?
So life is hard. Hard things come at us. And some of them come from inside our
own heads and those negative, hardwired, instant thoughts and from the attacks
of the enemy and from regret in the past and all those things.
And I'm reading a book right now from Randy Alcorn called Happiness.
Imagine that. I'm reading a book about happiness. Randy Alcorn said this.
It's another one of those things about the Bible that I never saw until Randy
Alcorn pointed it out. Here it is.
Randy says, The angel's message to the shepherd at the birth of Jesus condenses
the gospel to its core. He said, I bring you good news of great joy that will
be for all the people, Luke 2.10.
The gospel isn't for some, it's for all. The Greek adjective translated great here is megas.
It's the root from which we get the word mega in English.
This isn't just good news. This is mega news. It's good news of mega joy.
It's the best news there ever has been or ever will be.
What characterizes this good news is a deep, everlasting joy for anybody who will receive it.
The contemporary English version renders the verse this way.
Good news for you, which will make everyone happy.
Listen, friend, God is promising us that through Jesus, you can have mega joy, infinite joy.
It's available to us when we get to know Jesus. It's the difference between
that weak sauce that Dan Harris is selling people and what he calls 10% happier.
You can just get your mind calmed down and learn how to meditate and you'd be a little bit happier.
That's not what God came here to do. He said, I bring you mega joy.
I'm trying to give you infinite happiness. And why would you then settle for a neuroscience trick?
Really, seriously, by the power of meditation and thought control and changing
how you think, you can actually learn how to slow down your brain and gain control
of your thoughts and gate them better.
And you can improve the dopamine and serotonin levels in your own brain,
and it will reliably make you feel better.
That's true. So if you're not a believer and you just wanna feel a little bit
happier, you can learn how to think better thoughts and you can actually increase
the dopamine and serotonin levels in your brain and make yourself feel a little bit better.
And you can also do it through medication like serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Zoloft.
And you can scoop up a little more of that happy juice that your brain makes.
But those are chemistry tricks, they're shadows.
They're not the real mega joy that you can have if you learn how joy is supposed
to be apportioned to you in knowing Jesus. Like the woman at the well.
They had to keep coming back every day to get more water because she kept getting thirsty.
These neuroscience hacks will soon wear off, and you'll be sitting in the dark
with your legs crossed trying to find some inner peace or popping another pill soon.
And let me say as a disclaimer, by the way, there are some medical conditions
and there are some psychiatric conditions where you actually need medical help,
and sometimes you need medication for crippling anxiety or depression, suicidal thoughts.
If you're having real trouble getting that stuff under control,
go see a doctor. I'm not saying you should never need medicine to help you think
differently. Sometimes we do.
It's something God gave us, the ability to figure out how to make these medicines.
So go see a doctor if you're really struggling. But for most of us,
most of the time, we can make our lives better by gaining control of our thought processes.
But to be mega happy, to be infinitely happy, we have to have a little bit different level.
We have to know the source of the living water. We have to know the source of
the guy who thought of neurochemistry. We have to know the great physician,
the master brain surgeon, the master heart surgeon, Jesus.
So what happens is life throws all these projectiles at us. It knocks us off
our bikes and we hit our heads. We let our thoughts get wounded.
We start believing the problems more than the problem solver.
And we start succumbing to the onslaught of life.
And we lose the battle of the gap because we forgot to put on our hope helmet.
In Romans 4.16, this is where this idea of the battle of the gap that I came
up with is. Romans 4.16, Paul reminds us of the story of Abraham.
Abraham was an old man. He was 100 years old. And God says, I'm going to give
you a son, and I'm going to make of you the biggest nation there ever has been.
I'm going to make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the
grains of sand on the seashore.
And Abraham was an old, dried-up man with an old, dried-up wife.
And the Bible says, though, he didn't give up. He said, against all hope,
Abraham, in hope, believed.
And I want you to see that. That the gap between against and hope is where faith lives, friend.
Against all hope, Abraham believed anyway. That's where faith lives,
is in that gap between against and all hope.
In the Ephesians description of the full armor, we have the shield of faith
and the helmet of the hope of salvation.
And I think it's interesting that hope goes on your head because the thing that
you need to protect you from dangerous thoughts and regrets and hardships and
poisons of the past and all of that stuff is you need hope and you need to have
it protecting your mind.
It's our defense against the road coming up to crush our skull and smash our
brain and poison our minds and make us forget the mega infinite joy that we can have in Jesus.
Now, my friend Clay that I told you about that we met in Florida gave us a piece
of paper, gave me a piece of paper that he carried around in his wallet.
And on that piece of paper, he had a whole bunch of God's promises written down
that he pulled out and used when he needed to wield that sword of the spirit.
It was like a, like in a sheath on his side, he had it ready.
Whenever life was trying to attack him, he had the scripture, the sword.
I'm going to give you my, one of mine, I've got this written actually in the
acknowledgements and I've seen the interview.
I wrote it down because this is one of my weapons that I use to protect myself.
I carry, I carry it in my heart.
And I said, and I've seen the interview when I said, I'm going to tell you some
things I'm acknowledging, some people that matter to me. I started with God.
I said, I must start by thanking God who has, as the psalmist David wrote,
taken note of my life, Psalm 56, 8, and a life full of reasons to wonder.
God's promise-keeping character has proven time and again to be the deciding
factor for me between faith and doubt.
He's been close when I was brokenhearted, Psalm 34, 18, and strong when I was
weak, Philippians 4, 13.
He's given me shelter from the storms of life, Psalm 32, 7. And he's armed me
for the battles I would face, Psalm 144, 1.
And he's given me, against all odds, the most important resource for a healthy,
successful, and happy life, which is hope, Jeremiah 29, 11.
That, my friend, is my hope helmet. That bunch of scripture built together and
formed into the shape of a helmet to go over my head to protect my brain and
give me hope in this life.
Look, 600 people died last year in the United States because they weren't wearing
a stupid motorcycle helmet.
It's tragic, and it's dumb to go through life throwing your head up against
the wall because you didn't remember to put your helmet on. Silly.
But millions of people spend their whole lives, not just 600,
millions of people spend their entire lives hurting, afraid,
in despair, and without joy or peace because they didn't wear their Hope helmets.
Recognize this. Those folks with the helmets on can still crash their bikes.
I will too, and you will. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that this terrible
false prosperity gospel that you see these days is actually true,
where the Christians will tell you that if you have enough faith,
nothing bad is ever going to happen to you as long as you give money to the church, right?
It's not in the Bible. It doesn't say that God will heal and save you from everything
that comes along. It doesn't say that God will make you rich.
It doesn't say that God will solve all your problems.
Jesus said in John 16, 33, that in this world you will have trouble.
But even though wearing your helmet won't prevent all the accidents and problems
in life, guarding your noggin and guarding your head and your brain and your
mind adds so much safety to your life.
And that's why Proverbs 4, 23 says,
above all else, guard your heart for everything you do flows from it.
So see your heart and your mind in neuroscience terms are basically the same thing.
Guard your mind. He's saying, guard your heart, put a helmet of hope on your
head because everything comes out of your mind. Everything comes out of your heart.
Your whole life comes out of there. So get yourself a hope helmet, friend.
Guard your thoughts. Guard your precious peace of mind from all those lies your
enemy throws at you and all the negative thoughts and all the bad memories and
all the shame and the regret and the troubles that life is trying to use you,
use to get you to crash. And you'll find your peace.
Find that mega joy. Find that infinite happiness that Jesus wants you to have.
And don't get on a bike without a helmet. For crying out loud, it's just stupid.
Stop riding your bike. Stop riding your motorcycle without a helmet.
Quit it. Protect your head.
And in life, don't go through your life without your hope helmet on.
Strap it on and go after the abundant life that you were designed to have.
And for crying out loud, friend, 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.