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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. I'm grateful that it's Theology Thursday.
We've had a long week, a lot of surgery, and this morning I'm feeling pretty contemplative.
I've been doing Bible study and some Abide practice and looking at different
things that the Word has to say when life feels hard.
And just been thinking about you this morning, and I recognize that a lot of
people listening to this podcast come to this place because of some brokenness,
some pain, some trauma, a tragedy,
some kind of drama or a massive thing like we went through losing our son.
Like you got here because you found me on Ann Voskamp or Susie Larson or some
other place, and you were searching for some hope.
And of course, I'm always writing about hope. How do you handle hard things?
How do you find your feet?
When the bottom crashes out from under, how do you regain faith,
how do you find purpose and hardship, and all of that.
So we focus a lot on managing difficult times and strategies for using your
brain and how neuroscience and faith can smash together to find ways to move
forward and understand how your mind and your body and your brain interact and
how that plays on itself.
And of course, we come from a very strong philosophical and theological and
scientific perspective that you are more than just your brain.
You're not just an organ, a bunch of cells that evolved, and your life is not
just the product of random electrical activity that means you don't really have
any say in the matter. You're just going to behave how your brain behaves.
We don't believe that. We believe that you're designed on purpose for a purpose,
that your mind and your brain are not the same thing.
Your mind, body, and brain interact with one another, but mind is in charge.
Mind is connected to God, your spirit, and God communicate with you in real time faster than light,
which explains that spooky action at a distance that Einstein and the quantum
physicists of the 20th century discovered that how can your observation of a
system change that system even faster than light could travel?
And it's clear. That's how God communicates with us.
It's a mental process. It's a physics thing that's just now beginning to be understood.
That gives us hope because we're not just a random collection of cells firing
and happening as they happen and evolving as they evolve.
We have a purpose. We're designed on purpose for a purpose. Even if you don't
believe in God, I think this road of understanding that your life impacts the
universe and the world around you, the other people around you,
that your mental processes turn into real things.
The things you think about turn into stuff in your brain that switches genes
on and off that has a powerful impact on your electromagnetic state and the
way that you interact with and influence others.
And things like mirror neurons and limbic resonance show us that our lives have
power and meaning and purpose and they have an impact.
And so when you're struggling, when you're dealing with hard things,
the first thing is don't feel like your life has become meaningless.
Because as long as you're still here, friend, you have an impact.
You have a role to play. You have a job to do.
And so Theology Thursday, we get into some of that sticky stuff and we talk
a little bit deeper past science and more on the philosophical and theological ideas.
And this morning I've been just sort of resonating with a bunch of that kind
of stuff and spent some time in this abide practice.
And of course, if you haven't done an abide episode with us,
then it's a sort of acronym for an approach to prayer that gets you into to
this contemplative state.
And the purpose of that is to just get your left side of your brain to calm
down a little bit, to stop hearing all the chatter and all the noise and all
the loops of thoughts, the self-referential things that are all about you and
the things you're struggling with.
And just get into that more quiet place where your right side of your brain
can come a little bit more active.
And the right side is so much more than fact-based, two-dimensional things.
It's this nuance and context and big picture stuff that really helps.
Yes, I've been through a hard thing but yes i still have a beautiful life and
yes that person was mean to me but yes i've done that before too and and maybe
there's some something going on in their life that's that's making that happen
this is you're getting this you get this sort of context and nuance.
I want to be very clear. When I talk about meditation, Eastern meditation,
metaphysics, and all those sorts of things is all about really accepting that good and evil coexist,
that there's a balance to the universe, that you're supposed to stop hearing
noise, and the whole idea is to get your brain to go silent so you can communicate
with the universe and find your bliss brain and all those things.
And that has an ability to make things feel better for you. It does.
It works. I mean, we've shown, it's been shown in neuroscience that meditation,
regardless regardless of its underlying spiritual connotation,
makes your brain more resilient.
It helps you handle emotion better. It helps you feel happier.
It helps you be less anxious.
Meditation really does matter. But be very clear when I say that,
coming from a Christian worldview perspective, the way I think God designed
our brains to optimally function,
is to learn to not accept that good and evil coexist, to learn that you're in
a story that ends with evil being vanquished.
You're in the middle of a long story that ends
with psalm 103 being true he forgives all your sins he
heals all your diseases he redeems your life from the pit he crowns you with
love and compassion he satisfies your desires with good things eventually this
story plays out if you believe this story plays out with your redemption your
utter redemption and restoration so the end result is not that good and evil
coexist and we have to learn how to accept that and finally come
to peace with it. It's not that. Evil loses, okay?
So Christian meditation is not about just finding a place, a way to coexist
with everything and be okay with it, even though it's hard. It's not that.
It's, yes, it's hard. Yes, it's difficult. I have an abundant life anyway,
and I know the end of the story.
And so the way the Christian meditation practice works is not to make your brain
go silent and not to make your brain go offline, but rather to to tune your
ear to the voice of the Lord, the one who can really help you.
Not just resign to it, but to actually find the path through it.
And so today we're going to do a Throwback Thursday theology episode that's
about three words that we don't focus on enough around here.
We focus on how we navigate the trauma and the drama and the massive things
and all of those things and still find abundance.
Today I want to give you three more words to kind of contemplate happiness,
joy, and contentment. I want you to find some other things to focus on,
to pay some attention to.
Because remember, the way we pay attention and what we pay attention to comes more alive.
And I want happiness and joy and contentment to come more alive in your life, my friend.
I want them to come more alive in the midst of the hard things,
in the midst of the difficulties, in the midst of the diagnosis.
I want you to find the ability to hold on to happiness and joy and contentment, okay?
And so the way you do it, this is kind of what's been bouncing in my head this
morning, this little idea that when you don't have the words to pray,
when your brokenness, when your difficulties, when you're hurt,
when your pain is so large that you don't know what to say,
bring the word to your words.
When your words are lacking, bring the word to your word.
I think I'll expound on that in a full episode at some point,
but Psalm 19 is where I keep landing this morning.
Psalm 19 kind of gives us this thing that Galileo talked about,
where Galileo said, God has given us not just one book, but two books,
the book of nature and the Bible.
And what Galileo said was, nature and the Bible both show us insights into who
God is. both show us the way God has revealed Himself to us.
God has given us two books, Scripture and Nature, that communicate complementary
truths, and when properly understood, they can never contradict each other.
I had the honor of speaking at the medical school, in the lecture hall where
Galileo taught in Padova, Italy.
I was able to give a talk about my book. I've seen the interview there,
the Italian translation.
We were invited over, and it was incredible to be in that place,
to be in that space where he spoke those words.
And his words are talking about what Psalm 19 is talking about,
that God's given us two books. Let me just give you this real quick.
The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship.
Day after day, they continue to speak. Night after night, they make him known.
They speak without a sound or word.
Their voice is never heard, yet their message has gone throughout the earth
and their words to all the world.
God has made a home in the heavens for the sun. It bursts forth like a radiant
bridegroom after his wedding.
It rejoices like a great athlete, eager to run the race.
The sun rises at one end of the heavens and follows its course to the other end.
Nothing can hide from its heat. He's talking about how God has revealed himself
through the things that he has created.
That's what Psalm 111 says. Great are the works of the Lord.
They are pondered by all those who delight in him.
God is revealing himself. Romans 1 talks about that. Everybody can see what
God has done in the creation. Nobody has an excuse.
And that's what science is for. Science is to continually let us play out this
idea that God's wonders are mighty and mysterious and there's no end to them.
Ecclesiastes says God set eternity in the hearts of humans and he'll never understand
all the things that God has done.
Like this Russian nesting doll, it just keeps getting deeper and deeper and there's more levels.
And right when you think you've reached the end of it, you still have another level to go.
That's how science is playing out over time. People never will be able to reduce you to just a cell.
Every time they think they learned something, there's more to it.
Every time they think they've defined all the elementary particles of the universe
as Newton did, guess what?
They're sub-particles, and they're
sub-sub-particles, and they're sub-sub-sub-particles, and quasi-particles.
It just keeps going deeper, and God has given us this desire to pursue that knowledge.
And so it sounds like I'm on a tangent, but I'm not. Keep going in Psalm 119, in Psalm 19, rather.
He's talked about nature. Here's the other book. The instructions of the Lord
are perfect, reviving the soul.
The decrees of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple.
The commandments of the Lord are right, bringing joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are clear, giving insight for the living.
Reverence for the Lord is pure, lasting forever. The laws of the Lord are true.
Each one is fair. They are more desirable than gold, even the finest gold.
They're sweeter than honey, honey from the comb.
They are warning to your servant, a great reward for those who obey them.
How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart? Lord, cleanse me from these
hidden faults. Keep your servant from deliberate sins.
Don't let them control me. Then I will be free of guilt and innocent of great sin.
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to you,
O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. You hear that?
Not just the words we speak and the things that we do, but the meditation of
our heart. We want to get that right because what you contemplate is what you become.
What you think about is what you turn into. Your thoughts become things.
So when you're in that place and you don't know what to say and you don't know what to think about,
you have this self-referential problem where you go back over the problem and
you focus on the issue and you begin to bring that attention density to it and
it becomes more and more real and you can't break out of it.
And today I just want to give you this notion that when you don't have the words
to bring to your pain, when you don't have the words to bring to your situation, bring the word to it.
And I'll tell you why. It's not just words on a page. John chapter 1,
in the beginning was the Word, with a capital W. He's referring to Jesus.
And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him,
and apart from Him, not even one thing came into being that has come into being.
In Him was life, and the life was the light of mankind, and the light shines
in the darkness, and the darkness did not grasp it. down in verse 9.
This was the true light that coming into the world enlightens every person.
Okay. He's the word. And when you don't have a word, go get some word from Jesus.
He's the word and more than the word, he's the light.
So when you're stuck in a dark place and you don't have the words,
try this abide method, try to approach him and breathe him in and contemplate
the idea that you're not sure about anything, but he's sure about everything.
So invite him into the moment and recognize that you depend on him and then
experience him and let him show up and do Do what he says he'll do.
Say, God, this is so dark. I don't understand.
Can you just turn the light up a little bit? Can you just bring some words in
here to fill out my mind and give me some things to think about and contemplate
and bring some light up, start to raise the light level in this dark place?
So abide then would be approach and breathe and invite and depend and experience him.
And that's the contemplative side of it. We spend some time not trying to eliminate
sound from our mind, not trying to turn off the left side of our brain,
but trying to ask God to integrate our brain with our mind and our body to bring His words to life,
to give me nuance and context and three-dimensional aspects of every situation
so I can see that I'm in the middle of this long story that ends with it all being set right.
And I'm not stuck having to focus on this one thing that's hurting me right
now. to move from that contemplative phase to the operate phase.
And the second part of abide is to do what I do in the operating room.
Assess the situation honestly. Yes, Lord, I messed this up. Yes,
Lord, that really hurt me. Yes, Lord, I'm not sure I have been living like I can't get past this.
But you say that you can let me do all things through your strength.
So I'm assessing it honestly. This is hard. I don't know what to do.
And then I'm going to believe that you do know what to do because you're the
word and the word has the light and the light has the power to eliminate the darkness.
And you made everything, so you can certainly help me manage this.
And I'm gonna make an incision. I'm gonna finally say, it's time to take action.
I'm gonna let you guide my hands. And like a good surgeon, I'm gonna start this operation.
I'm gonna start moving forward into the solution phase of this issue that I've been dealing with.
And I'm gonna deepen that exposure, and I'm gonna go all the way down with you
until we get to the bottom of it. And you're gonna show me how to navigate this.
You may not heal this tumor in this life. You may not take this problem away,
way, but you can give me the steps to navigate it and get through this operation.
And I'm going to expect that bringing that good practice of depending on the
great physician, that bringing that is going to allow me to have the outcome that you want me to have.
I'm going to contemplate on those things that you want me to contemplate.
I'm going to delight myself in your word.
I'm going to set my hope on your words because I don't have the words.
That's the way to approach it. Okay.
That's the way to approach it. I just want to give you that.
Look at the two books. There's nature, there's science, and there's Bible, there's word.
And the word has the light and the power to illuminate what science is able
to uncover and say, okay, you know what?
Every time you say something, it doesn't contradict what science ultimately
discovers if it's appropriately and honestly pursued.
And so today, we're going to go into three more things to contemplate.
We're going to look at three different ways to turn from that pain and that
anguish and the steal and kill and destroy part of what Jesus said in John 10.10.
We're going to go instead to contemplating things like happiness and joy and
contentment. I'm going to give you a whole episode that we did back in August.
But I just wanted to set it up for you to say that there's a way that you can
bring your attention density to something other than the problem that you're facing.
And that will help you navigate it. And abide is the way to get there.
So this is contemplative prayer model that doesn't eliminate the left side.
It doesn't tie off half of your brain. And it also doesn't ignore the fact that
evil needs to be overcome, that God doesn't want your baby to die.
He doesn't want your husband to have a glial blastoma.
He is intending and will keep his promise that this will all be set right at the appropriate time.
And that's why we can have abundance in the midst of hardship,
because he has overcome the world.
Okay, so here's this episode, my friend, about on Theology Thursday here about
contentment, happiness, and joy.
It's going to give you some new things to think about. We're going to do all that.
We're going to get after it right now. Good morning, my friend.
I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren here with you for another episode
of the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast.
We're going to do a little self-brain surgery today, and it's sort of Theology Thursday.
We normally do some kind of throwback episode, but I promise you this week that
we were going to get the first of three things I learned from three books I loved.
And I gave you the Mark Broget piece from Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy earlier this week.
So we'll throw that back in here in a minute so you can have it all in one episode.
But I'm going to give you snippets from two other books that I love.
We're going to address a reader's question, and it's all going to kind of work
together in why I love these two books.
And we're going to get after it in just a few minutes, and I'm going to change
your mind, hopefully, about one thing today.
But before we get to that, 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 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.
You ready to get after it here we go so we're going to do occasionally
these three things i learned from three books i
love episodes i read a
lot and we talk about books on this podcast almost every episode
we mention something i'm reading or i take something from
something that i've read and i have a lot of people write in and say hey you
mentioned these books and we'd love to hear more about them and i'll always
put the link in the show notes by the way almost every time i mention a book
if you go to the notes on that episode wherever you listen to podcasts where
You can always go to my website and get to the Transistor page.
There's a transcript of every episode.
All the new ones that came out anyway have transcripts. I'm going back over
time to add transcripts to the old ones now that that process is a lot more automated.
And please understand, I got a comment on YouTube the other day that the subtitles
and transcripts are computer-generated, and I don't usually have time to go
through and check them word for word.
So there sometimes will be a typo or something funny. So if the words that you're
reading or seeing on the screen don't seem to make sense, just go back up and
usually you can hear what we actually said that the computer may have misinterpreted.
And if you just really get stuck on something, feel free to write in and we'll
see if we can address that for you.
But if you do, take this stress off me and tell me what episode and what time
point in the episode you're confused about so I don't have to go try to sort that out.
We just don't have time, obviously, to go back through 900 episodes and figure
out what sentence you couldn't figure out. So help me out as much as you can,
and I promise as much to the extent that we can, me or one of my team members
will do what we can to help you understand something.
But those transcripts are getting more and more accurate over time,
and that's helped a lot to be able to add transcription to the episodes.
So I hope that you're utilizing that resource. If you're a person who takes
notes or journals or uses these episodes to help you advance in your life,
then the transcripts could be something really helpful to you.
You can copy and paste them into your note-keeping software.
Where I use a program called Evernote every day of my life.
Evernote is a great place to store snippets of things, make notes,
shopping lists, checklists, and all that stuff.
That's not a commercial for Evernote, but I use it every day.
And so you could copy and paste transcripts from my podcast into your journal.
If you're using the podcast to sort of journal and keep track of changes that
you're trying to make in your life, that sort of thing would be helpful to you. Okay.
We do a lot of reading, and we talk about books all the time on this podcast.
And one of the books that has shaped my life more than any other,
particularly as I learned how to write.
And, of course, we all know how to write, right? But when you start trying to
communicate in book form or in blog form or in essay form, you learn pretty
quickly that you need to work on the craft of writing.
And I'm forever in the debt of Philip Yancey, who was one of the first people
to ever say to me, hey, your writing sounds like you're writing for your wife
or your mom or your sister or your brother, somebody who knows you.
You're taking a lot of things for granted that the reader has to make mental
exercise to figure out. And he was exactly right.
My first book called out. I wrote it for friends and family.
I never imagined that anybody like you would want to read or listen to something
that I had to say out there in the larger world.
So I did. There's a lot of inside baseball, inside references and things that
nobody would be able to figure out if they didn't already know me.
And I didn't think about that when I was writing it, that a stranger would need
some explanation or that I should do a better job of taking the workload off
the stranger in some of those places.
And so learning the craft of writing really became important to me.
And when Phillip introduced me to my agent, Kathy Helmers, the very first meeting
we ever had, which was in Nashville, Tennessee, Lisa and I went over.
We actually took Mitch and Kaylin, our two kids that were still at home with
us at the time, and we went to a Taylor Swift and Need to Breathe concert while we were in Nashville.
It was one of our great memories that we had with Mitch and Kaylin together.
It turned out to be about three years before we lost our son.
You don't have any idea when you're sitting at a concert with your son that
three years later he'll be gone.
But these things happen in life, right? And so we had this meeting with Creative
Trust and Kathy Helmers and her two partners in that publishing agency,
representative agency.
Decided to take a chance on an
unknown writer based just really on the recommendation of Philip Yancey.
And so we had this meeting, we signed a contract, and we got after the idea
of turning Called Out into what ultimately would become No Place to Hide.
And at first there was all this discussion of ghostwriters and all that kind
of stuff, and we made a decision that we just couldn't tolerate,
I couldn't tolerate letting somebody else tell my story. And so I said to Kathy,
well, do you think I can write it myself if I study hard enough?
And she kind of jokingly said, well, do you think I can do brain surgery if I try hard enough?
And she was joking, of course, but she basically gave me a bunch of books to go read.
She said, if you're really serious about learning how to write it yourself,
then take a year or longer and go read as much as you can and study and do what
you would do in any academic area and go try to get better.
Start by reading about writing and then start by writing a lot. And so we did that.
And one of the books that she recommended to me was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott,
who had never heard of Bird by Bird.
Some instructions on writing and life, Bird by Bird.
And so there are multiple things. I could do 10 episodes about things I learned
from Bird by Bird, and I still read it again every once in a while.
And one of her books, Almost Everything Notes on Hope, I read almost every year.
It's one of my favorite books about hope.
And I've told you before, when I recommend riders...
That doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with everything they say,
and it doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with their theology if they state
theological positions.
But you can learn something from just about any book and just about anybody,
and I've found Anne Lamott to be somebody I learn from all the time,
although I don't endorse her theology, okay?
That being said, bird by bird, she goes into really a great working definition of what hope is.
I learned from her because she quoted from G.K. Chesterton, which is another
way of saying, read other people's work and you can build on their shoulders.
And you never know if you're G.K. Chesterton a hundred years ago and you write
something that Anne Lamott has moved by and she writes something about you and
her book and Lee Warren has moved by it.
And it turns out to be a little bit of the rope that I'm able to hold on to
when I'm hurting or hopeless.
So Anne Lamott said, hope, as Chesterton said, Chesterton, I'm stumbling over his name today, G.K.
Chesterton, Great book. Orthodoxy is my favorite of his.
So Anne Lamott says, hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful
in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
That's a funny way of saying what hope is. Hope is the power of being cheerful
in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
Now, that's a pretty superficial definition of hopefulness, okay?
You and I both know, and we've talked a lot about it, that hope is not about
being cheerful. cheerful hopes about being able to see a path forward when you're
in a desperate straight.
And I think that's what Chesterton meant is he certainly has a strong theologies.
Chesterton has a tremendous grasp on deep theological concepts,
and he's not saying that you just put a smile on it and act, act cheerful.
And even in a desperate circumstance, that's not what he's saying.
You can have this sort of cheer about you.
I'm going to find a way forward in this because God has promised me that he
will be with me no matter how desperate my situation.
So that's a good working definition. You can have this spirit about you.
In my book, Hope is the First Dose, we call these people untouchables.
These people who are able to plow ahead, knowing the situation is desperate,
knowing that the end point might not be what we would have wished for,
but still knowing that we're not alone and that we have a hope and a future.
And that's what allows us to have this peace about us, this untouchability.
And I call that happiness.
We've talked a lot before about the definition of happiness and how lots of
Christians have been sort of hoodwinked about that word because somehow in the
20th century, people said, you know what? Christians aren't supposed to try to be happy.
They have this joy, this inner peace, this sanguine, joyful state.
And I even got an email from someone recently wonderful email, kind email.
But she said, hey, we love your podcast. And I just want to tell you a word
that I use instead of happiness. I use the word content.
I'm able to be content. Well, let me just challenge that thought a little bit
because content, happiness, and joy are not the same thing.
In almost every example, if you look at the Hebrew or the Greek and the Old
Testament and the New Testament, joy and happiness are essentially synonyms.
The idea that they're are separate things is a 20th century evangelical Christian
construction that's not biblical.
The idea that there's a difference between being happy and being joyful,
that there's some sort of two different states, that happiness is for the world
and joy is for Christians, that's not a biblical concept.
The words are synonymous in every circumstance.
But the word content is an entirely different thing.
It's an entirely different meaning and an entirely different circumstance.
And let's talk about that for a second before we go on to finish why I love Bird by Bird so much.
Okay, so content is a different word than happiness slash joy,
joy slash happiness, okay? I'm not being disrespectful.
This is really important because I think it's a trick of the enemy.
The enemy, your enemy of your soul, has convinced us as a church,
as a group, that we're not supposed to worry about being happy.
And the problem is the most basic human drive inside us, I said the way that
our nervous system is wired is to seek reward and pleasure.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Don't hear me wrong. I'm not saying seek whatever strikes your fancy.
I'm not saying that that's what makes you happy. I'm saying the opposite of that, so stay with me.
Your nervous system is wired with this internal reward system that when you
do something that produces reward, it makes you feel a certain set of things
that you associate with well-being and happiness.
That's just how you're wired. God made you that way.
And so to tell the outside world who don't know Christ,
who don't know the hope that we have, to tell them that it's inherently wrong to want to be happy,
is basically trying to convince them to join a team that goes against all of
their basic internal neurophysiological drives.
Don't worry about being happy. That doesn't make sense. And it creates cognitive
dissonance inside you. The difference is this.
There is a type of happiness, a pursuit of things that actually produce happiness
that does not pale and become stale and decay and rot and die.
And that's what we should be shooting for as Christians. C.S.
Lewis said it perfectly.
When you aim at heaven, you get heaven with the earth thrown in.
And when you aim at the earth, you end up with neither, neither heaven nor earth.
And what does that mean exactly?
Well, what it means is if you spend your life pursuing things that you think
will make you happy, okay?
And that's what your goal is, to feel something, have something,
earn something, win something, win somebody over to your perspective or into
your bedroom or into your life.
If that's what defines happiness for you, then you will end up having nothing
able to satisfy that for you.
And that's the entire problem I would submit to you. That's the entire problem
of our current and really all human history's secular worldview.
You, is that we think we're chasing something that lacks the inherent power
to produce real happiness.
The Bible says it plain, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the
desires of your heart. Why?
Because your heart changes, your
mind changes, and you figure out what it really is that he's offering.
That story in John of the woman at the well, he says, hey, you're thirsty and
you're hungry and you keep drinking and you keep eating and you find yourself
so thirstier and hungrier because you're eating and drinking the wrong stuff.
So let me give you the water and the bread that actually fills you up and satisfies you, right?
Now understand this, I'm not picking on the people that say we're supposed to
seek this sort of internal peace and balance and joy.
But what I'll tell you is that if you're trying to show somebody why they should
want to be a Christian, why they should want to pin their hopes on Jesus Christ,
it's really to answer the question.
I know something that will actually make you happy that's different than the
things that you've been chasing after that you think will make you happy,
because how's that working for you?
And the bottom line, the truth is the things we seek and chase after in the
world never make us happy.
And once we get them, we either lose them, they die, they get cancer,
the inflation goes up and they don't have the purchasing power that we thought they did it anymore.
Something changes and the thing that we thought we needed to have to be happy
doesn't work anymore and doesn't make us happy anymore or we lose it and then
we can't be happy because we thought we had to have it and now we don't have it, right?
The difference is when God says you drink this water, you will never be thirsty
again. You eat this bread, you'll never be hungry again.
You change what you identify as the things that make you happy and I'll give you all those
things too in a better state where they won't decay and they won't go away and
you won't lose them and they won't cheat on you and the diagnosis won't come
back bad and you're going to have a life with me that never decays or fades. How's that sound?
Now, let's talk about content for a second. Philippians 4.11 is where this idea comes from.
Not that I speak in respect of want, for I have learned in whatever state I
am, therefore, to be content, therewith to be content, okay?
That's the King James. Not that I speak in respect of want, for I have learned
in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.
Well, let's look at the Greek, okay? In the Greek, the word that's translated
into English as content in the King James, this idea that we're just supposed
to sort of be okay with whatever happens and that's how we can define our own happiness.
That idea in Philippians 4.11, that word content actually would translate better
probably as self-sufficient. Okay.
It's a verb, archaeo, and this is from the interlinear, Aberram production,
Aberram publication, interlinear Greek New Testament.
It says the verb archaeo describes structural resistance to an outside pressure.
Okay. Remember Chesterton said, hope is this idea that you can be cheerful in
a desperate situation. Okay, that's sort of the connotation that this archaeo
content or self-sufficient idea is trying to connote here.
The English word arc, arc and arch, the latter of which describes a construction
designed to resist gravity caused by the weight of stones atop the arch.
Think about a stone archway, okay?
What's the physics of a stone archway? is that each stone puts some pressure
on the others and that the combined structure of all that pressure pushing together
creates resistance to any of them falling individually.
And that's the idea that this archaeo is trying to get at, that I can push back
on the pressure that I'm getting from the outside world and I won't collapse.
I've learned that whatever situation I find myself in, I can be sufficient in that.
I can hold up to that pressure and I'm not gonna collapse.
That's what content, that's what
the idea is that's being translated as content in Philippians 4.11 is.
So back to the Iberian publication, this word appears to derive from a really
old proto-Germanic word for bow or more specifically something that has the
quality of a bow or pertaining to a bow.
And our word arrow derives from this word.
These roots also provide architheos, which is a noun that describes certain
plants and trees that have resilient or bendable branches like juniper trees
and the famous cedars in Phoenicia.
And then more generally, this verb, archaeo, means to ward off or support against
collapse brought on by outside forces.
And so the noun then, archesis, means to help. And the adverb,
arcanutos, means strong enough or sufficiently supportive.
The adjective, archaeos, means to be relied on.
Sure enough, in the noun, archos means defense. So basically what you're getting
with this word in Philippians 4.11 is not anything to do with an emotional state like joy or happiness,
but rather a structural state of being able to resist external pressure and
not collapse. That's what content means.
So it's being able to bear, to be docile, but also wildly strong if you need
to be so that you don't get crushed by outside forces. Okay.
And so that's kind of a long winded winding way to say,
I want you, I want us to be careful when we accept outside ideas that indicate
that we're not supposed to want to be happy because Jesus Christ said the thief
comes to steal and kill and destroy.
But I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.
Okay. I have come that you might have abundant life.
And in the Beatitudes, when he says the way that we've translated it,
blessed are those, blessed are they, blessed are those.
That word blessed, blessed is a made up word.
It was a German translation that's trying to get at something more than what
the scripture actually says.
The word is makarios in the Greek. And every time it shows up in the Old Testament,
it's Asher. And that word means happy.
So what Jesus is trying to say is if you live your life in this way, you'll be happy.
It's counterintuitive, but you'll be happy by becoming meek.
You'll be happy by becoming poor in spirit.
You'll be happy by becoming mournful. You learn to overcome the world,
and therefore you can have a happiness that doesn't match up with anybody on the earth's idea.
And that's why what Jesus is selling, if you will, is so compelling and why
it's lasted so long, because when you try the world's way of finding happiness, it doesn't work out.
And you beat yourself over the head and you spend your whole life chasing after
the next thing and it just doesn't work out and you're not happy and you don't know why.
But when you try Jesus' way, you say, wait a minute, that doesn't seem to make
any sense, but let me just try it. And lo and behold, guess what?
You don't find yourself so thirsty anymore, do you? You don't find yourself so hungry.
And yes, you find yourself more content and more able to bear up, but that's different.
And I just want to tell you, and we're going to get to it in a minute with the third book.
I want to tell you that the idea that joy and happiness are two different things
is not a biblical concept,
and it didn't exist in literature or anywhere else in the world in any sort
of context other than them being perfect synonyms until sometime in the 20th century.
So this concept that joy and happiness are different is not a biblical concept.
And I might be a little bit off.
It might be a late 19th century idea, but really it shows up first in the Christian
world in the writings of Oswald Chambers, who lived from 1874 to 1917.
Did most of his work in the early 20th century.
So forgive me if the decades are perhaps a little bit off, but I'm trying to
drive home a point here that content is different than joy and happiness,
but happiness and joy are the same thing.
And so if we want to convince people that
their way isn't helping them and get them
to open their eyes and look at what's happening in their lives and
what their secular worldview is doing for them and it's not working but that
our way has something to offer them we won't be successful if we lead with oh
don't worry about being happy you're not supposed to be happy you're supposed
to just knuckle out your life and look forward to some eternal place down the
road when things will work out for you.
But don't be concerned about being happy now. That just doesn't sell very well.
And it doesn't sell very well because your nervous system is wired to seek reward.
And joy and happiness are part of that reward pathway, okay?
God made you that way. Why? Because Jesus said it. I came that you might have an abundant life.
He wants things to taste good for you. He wants them to smell good for you.
He wants you to laugh and have fun and enjoy your life.
It doesn't mean that when hard things happen, you don't get knocked off your
feet. It doesn't mean that. You will, okay?
And you might not find your way back to the kind of humor and happiness and
general well-being that you had before. but you can find a way to have a life
that looks like an abundant life again.
It looks like a life that does have happy moments and does have hopefulness again.
You can, I'm telling you because I did it. I found my way there and I found my way there.
Really through writing and through getting to know what Jesus really meant when
he told me that he came for me to have an abundant life because I couldn't square
up how my life could feel so hard but it was also supposed to be happy again.
I couldn't square it up. And I found it in the Gospel of John,
as I've told you a million times, and I found it through writing.
And I found writing as a way to unpack all the things I'd gone through and be
able to articulate them in a way that made sense to me.
And then by extension, it turned
out to make sense to Lisa and our family and then you, other people.
So I found Bird by Bird, to go all the way back to where we started,
I found Bird by Bird as this book by Anne Lamott to help me understand how to put together words,
in a way that made sense now I made a
great mistake and I think all authors do is that
I had thought that writing this book was going
to produce some sort of inherent reward for me in the sense that I would be
so proud that I had done it or that lots of people would line up and pat me
on the back and tell me how great it was and all those things I fell into this
idea that but it was the getting a book published that was going to help me
find my way forward again.
That doesn't really make sense, but it's true. And here in Anne Lamott's book,
Bird by Bird, she gave me this understanding that all writers think that.
In fact, all people think that on some level, that when they accomplish this
thing, that this is going to be the thing that finally helps me get everything together.
Anne wrote this. She said, I believe before I sold my first book that publication
would be instantly and automatically gratifying,
an affirming and romantic experience a hallmark
commercial where one runs and leaps in slow motion across
a meadow filled with wildflowers into the arms of
acclaim and self-esteem this did not happen
for me the months before a book comes out of the
shoot are for most writers right up there with the worst life has to offer pretty
much like the first 20 minutes of apocalypse now the waiting and the fantasies
both happy and grim wear you down plus there's the matter of the early reviews
that come out about two months before publication.
I had secretly believed that trumpets would blare, major reviewers would proclaim
that not since Moby Dick had an American novel so captured life in all its dizzying complexity.
And this is what I thought when my second book came out and my third and my fourth and my fifth.
And each time I was wrong, but I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled
to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that
publication is not all what's cracked up to be, but writing is.
Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.
That thing you had to force yourself to do, the actual act of writing,
turns out to be the best part.
You get that? So it's not the having written a book that makes you happy or
gives you satisfaction. It's the act of.
Performing the writing of the book, the learning, the growing,
the healing, the finding community of people who are willing to read books written
by this weird neurosurgeon and get up in the morning with me and listen to me
talk about all this random stuff that somehow has to do with how our lives get better, right?
So what I've learned is it's not the, I get to have written a book that gets
out in the store and I get so much praise and pats on the back and feedback
from the the book. It's not that.
It's the fact that I learned so much about myself and my characters and the
story, and ultimately for you as well, how we engage in this process.
And really that's the point of Christian happiness.
That's the point of the abundant life that Jesus gave us. It's not that we get
to the end and we say, Hey, we finally have this thing that we were shooting at.
It's that God gave us the ability to enjoy and have quality in that life while
we were engaging aging in it.
And the last thing I learned from bird by bird, well, not the last thing I've
learned many things, but the third thing I'm going to share with you today is
she tells a story about her brother.
When they were little kids, her brother was assigned a report at school and
his report was to be about birds.
He was supposed to write a report about birds and he had all these bird books
spread out on the table in front of him. And he was overwhelmed.
It was so many birds and so much information. He couldn't get started.
He was stuck. He was overwhelmed.
And she tells this story, Anne Lamott tells this story about her brother being
so frustrated and stuck, and her dad came along and said, it's okay,
buddy, just take it bird by bird.
And that, my friend, turns out to be an incredibly powerful life lesson for us.
Trauma and tragedy and massive things are going to strike, and sometimes you
are just completely overwhelmed with the idea of how in the world am I going
to be able to move forward in my life?
How in the world am I going to find hope again? How in the world can I find
anything that resembles meaning and purpose and the happiness and hope that I used to have?
How can I find it again? I'm completely knocked off kilter by this thing.
And you might hear the Lord come alongside you and say, it's okay.
Just take it bird by bird.
My dad always said, if you want to eat an elephant, you have to do it one bite at a time.
Like it's a massive undertaking and you can get overwhelmed in it,
but just take it bird by bird.
And that turns out to be a really good paradigm for life. If God doesn't give
you a problem that can't be solved, he'll give you a problem that's bigger than
you can handle, but he won't give you a problem that you can't solve with his help.
And he'll help you take it bird by bird. You can just break the world's massive
thing that it throws at you down into the bite of, how can I get my brain under
control for the next moment?
Even if it's just, can I take a breath again?
And God will come alongside you and help you take it bird by bird.
Now, let me be very careful to say, when I said a second ago,
that he won't give you a problem that can't be solved.
You understand what I'm saying. There are some things, glioblastoma usually.
Some of the things that happen to us in our life, these traumas and tragedies, you lose a son.
God's not going to just bring your son back, okay?
I wish he would, but he doesn't usually do that.
What I mean to say when I say he'll give you a way to solve the problems that
come along is he'll give you a paradigm and a strategy and a process by which
you can learn to move forward again.
And you learn to live and sit with these things that happen,
these massive things, since they don't go away.
And since they have a nasty habit of keeping on happening, then we have to be
able to live and work and survive and find peace and hope and purpose again
in spite of the fact that our lives are hard, right?
So when I say he won't give you a problem that can't be solved,
what I mean to say, I hope it's obvious, is that there is a path whereby you
can find hope and purpose and move forward again, no matter what comes along in your life.
And in order to do that, you have to be able to learn to get your mind under
control, which sort of stop the crazy train of being overwhelmed and take it
bird by bird. Does that make sense?
So three things I learned from this incredible book so far.
A working definition of hope from Chesterton. The idea that writing or anything
that we set our mind to isn't actually going to lead us to a place where all
of a sudden everything's magically fine and fixed,
but rather gives us a process and a paradigm of the fact that it is working
through these things in our lives that actually produces the peace and the happiness and the purpose.
And it's the going through them, writing or problem
solving or whatever it is that you do to unpack
your brain that's that's the journey
and it's the journey that actually
creates the value okay we're on this long narrative
arc have you ever sighted in a rifle when you're
gonna deer hunt or go shoot a target you
have a scope on your rifle and there's a crosshair in the scope okay and when
you first get a rifle and mount a scope to it it will be wildly inaccurate because
you have to sight the the scope to where the bullet's actually going so that
then you can reliably shoot at the target.
And one thing about bullets is they don't travel on a flat line,
they travel in arcs, that the bullet actually goes up and then begins to fall down.
And if you want to learn how to hit the target, you've got to account for the
arc that that projectile is going to travel in, and you have to dial the scope
up to actually be aiming at the target downstream.
Now, if you don't sighted in properly, you might hit something that's in the
path of that bullet, but it won't actually be the target at which you are aiming
unless you properly sight in the scope.
Okay. And that's what I want you to get at with this idea that your life is a journey.
It's a pathway and there will be many traumas and tragedies and massive things,
but there also will be many other things.
And the target you're shooting at isn't the fleeting momentary pleasures and happiness of this life.
That's not what I mean when I say that we're supposed to want to be happy.
That's not what I mean when Jesus says, I came here to give you an abundant life.
That's not the right target. And if you set your sight on that target,
you might hit something.
You might find somebody to sleep with or something to buy that makes you feel
good or something to put in your body that alters your mindset for a little while.
You might find a thrill from gambling or something else. You might pursue work
as your ultimate passion and it might feel good for a a while.
But guess what? There will come a time when you can't perform like that anymore
or when the economy changes and your job is replaced by a robot or something else happens.
The person leaves, the diagnosis comes back. And if your happiness is defined
by a target that you were shooting at, that you could actually lose or it could
be taken away from you or that they might change their mind about you or any of those other things,
then you'll find that this site that you set your intention of being happy on
is unhittable or that when you do hit it, it wasn't the right target.
And so this concept of learning to enjoy the process, learning to live in the
moment of where God has you right now, because remember, you can't have the
past and the future is not guaranteed.
So you've got to learn how to be at this place where you're pursuing hope and
happiness and meaning and purpose right now.
But you do that by fixing your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of your faith.
That's how he comes down and gets in the story with you. Okay.
You redefine not what the fleeting pleasures of life are going to give you that
you can define as happiness, but what actually produces that stuff that when
you drink it, you don't get thirsty anymore that we talked about earlier.
So the last book I want to talk about this week is Happiness by Randy Alcorn.
We've already covered most of what I learned from Randy. The idea that in the
Old Testament, the word Asher shows up and it's translated as happy. It means happy.
In the New Testament, the word makarios shows up. The problem with makarios
is it's often translated as something that means this sort of spiritualized
idea of blessedness or joy or some kind of a sanguine state where you're not
stressed out about anything and you can just be at peace. But that's not what it means.
That's a translation error. It's a process error.
And what the word makarios actually means is the same word that in other places
shows up and is the root of things like the macarena, which is a really happy,
fun dance, or macaroni, which is
there any food more fun than macaroni and cheese, really, if you're a kid?
The word makarios simply means happy.
And the idea that joy and happiness are different things is not a biblical concept.
It actually came from late 19th and early 20th century writers like Oswald Chambers
that somehow Christians aren't supposed to be concerned about happiness.
But the problem is the world is looking for something that will make them happy.
And if you tell them they're not even supposed to be happy, you even in your
own mind, you know there's a cognitive dissonance there that God didn't create you to be miserable.
Now, the problem is we have what's called in philosophical circles a process
error, a category error.
A category error is where we're both talking about something,
but one of us thinks it means one thing, and the other one thinks it means something else.
And we can't really come to any sort of agreement because we have a category error.
We are arguing philosophically, but we don't understand what we're actually talking about.
And in the case of the word happiness, Christians think it means some sort of
spiritualized thing where we say, well, it doesn't really matter how miserable
and terrible we are now because we know we're saved and someday God's gonna make all this right.
And the world says, I don't understand all that stuff. I just know that this
is going to make me happier. She's going to make me happier.
That's going to make me happy. And I can't feel happy unless I have this,
that, or the other thing. And we're both wrong, okay?
What Jesus said is I came here when the world is full of what the thief is doing
to steal and kill and destroy your life. I came here that you can have an abundant life.
Anyway, abundance means peace, hope, happiness, purpose, meaning,
all those things in the midst of the steal, kill, and destroy part.
And the abundance is greater than the steal, kill, and destroy, okay?
Jesus gave us a whole list of things in the Sermon on the Mount of,
if you live this way, you will be happy.
He's not talking about some close your eyes and meditate and say,
and you can find some way to make peace out of this painful moment.
He's not talking about that. He's saying it's counterintuitive,
but I can give you water that won't leave you thirsty.
I can give you bread that won't make you hungry ever again.
You will never feel hunger and thirst again if you learn how to eat and drink the right stuff.
Changing your mind about what happiness is is what Randy Alcorn's book is all
about. and this book changed my mindset so much and changed my life so much and it's so powerful.
Let me just give you one little comment that he makes.
Randy Alcorn says, this is why Psalm 32 one, which uses the Hebrew word Asher,
a very common word that means happy, says happy is the man whose sins are forgiven.
And then in verse two, happy is the one whose transgressions are not counted
against him. Now you are made right with God.
You have a deep reality-based happiness. It's based upon the truth that you
are made right with the happy God of Scripture who created you and wired your brain to be happy.
But up until now, until your sins are forgiven, you've been trying to satisfy
your happiness and find it in all of these cul-de-sacs and dead-end streets.
But now you truly found it in God. And when you find it in God,
then you can look at nature and have greater pleasure in it.
It is what Lewis, C.S. Lewis talked about when the first things and the second things.
Lewis said, if you put the second things first, then you lose in many ways the
value of the second things.
But if you put the first things first and the first thing is really the first
person who is God, then everything else falls in place.
So here's the deal. C.S. Lewis said it succinctly.
If you aim at heaven, you get heaven with the earth thrown in.
If you aim at the earth, you get neither.
That's why people find themselves chasing after this thing or that thing or
that person or this feeling or
that drug or that moment or that amount of income or that new possession.
That's why they chase after all this stuff is because they think that things
or people or circumstances can make them happy. All the research I did that
turned into I've seen the end of you and hope is the first dose.
All of that research showed me that the secret to finding hope again is to separate
your circumstance from your emotional state.
If you can learn the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery that we're always
talking about, then you can set your target.
You can set the crosshairs of your scope at the right stuff. And guess what?
All of a sudden, you get all the other things too.
All those second things that Lewis was talking about. All those second things
that Randy Alcorn is talking about.
You get your sights set right on the Lord, you get relationships that don't
fade and erode over time because they're built on the right stuff, right?
You find things like intimacy and meaning and purpose and value in your work and all of that stuff.
You find how to manage yourself financially properly, and all of a sudden you've
got peace around things that have always brought you stress.
You find how to manage relationships properly based on giving and sacrificial
love, And you find all of a sudden after many unhappy relationships or divorces
or all the things that you've been through in the past.
All of a sudden, you have a relationship that works because it's centered on
the third person who's actually the first person.
And both of you revolve your lives around how to serve him and serve your partner well.
Then your life can actually look like relationships that make sense and produce
that lasting happiness.
You aim at the first things, you get all the second stuff too.
I learned that from Randy Alcorn. I learned that Asher and Makarios,
those two words that are often wrangled into meaning something that doesn't mean what it means.
They actually just mean happy. God wants you, friend, to be happy.
And as much as I knew about neuroscience, I never thought about it properly
until I read Randy Alcorn's book, and he's exactly right.
Your nervous system is wired to produce a sense of happiness when you operate it properly.
Why is it wired that way? because your creator built it that way.
You have an entire reward circuit, a system in your brain trying to search out
and automate things that produce safety and security and peace and wholeness
and happiness and opportunities for you to find those things.
The problem is we hack them and we try to just take the easy way out to get
some dopamine and we think that's what is happiness, but dopamine in and of
itself isn't the happiness chemical, it's the reward circuit chemical.
Dopamine is telling you that you're
on the right path to something that's going to be good for you. Okay?
And that's why it's so easily misunderstood when you get it from cocaine or
alcohol or sex or gambling or something else.
You define in your brain that this thing has produced this good feeling in my
head and in my heart and in my brain and in my mind.
And the truth is it's not that. You're just hacking the chemical route to the
feeling that it produces and you're attaching the reward to it in your mind.
The truth is, real happiness comes from setting your mind on things that you
can't lose, from developing relationships that won't erode and change over time,
because they're built on something that really lasts.
And that, my friend, is the mind shift that I want you to have.
Content, yes, I want you to be content in all circumstances.
That's what Paul was talking about. But that state of being content is about
building stuff in your life that's going to hold up under pressure.
Okay it's different than the emotional
state and the spiritual state of happiness
that you can build where you know that nothing's
going to happen no trauma and no tragedy and
no massive thing is going to come along in this life and be able to take that
from you because it's built on something that's eternal that's built to last
that will never fade and never fall and never crumble no matter what happens
that's how you can survive the phone call when you find out your Your 19-year-old
son's been stabbed to death.
That's how you can survive it when you find that number on your husband's phone.
That's how you can survive it when you have to go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings
for the rest of your life and you're struggling in your recovery.
You know you're going to make it because you've replaced what you thought you
were thirsty for and you found something that really leaves you truly satisfied.
That's how, okay? You take it bird by bird. You learn what hope really means,
that you can actually maintain a cheerful state in the midst of extreme pressure.
That's being content, okay?
You learn that the writing and the journey and the unraveling of the problem
is actually the place that you're trying to get to.
All along. It's not the end, the book on the shelf. It's the process of writing it.
It's learning how to take your
life bird by bird and letting God be enough in this moment to help you.
It's learning that macaroni is really fun.
The word Macarios means happy. The word Asher means happy.
When God's trying over and over and over and over in scripture to say,
I want you to learn how to be happy.
He really means it. Don't try to make an operation out of convincing yourself
that but it doesn't mean what it says.
He's saying, I came here because somebody's trying to steal and kill and destroy your life.
And I came here that you can have an abundant life in the face of that at the
same time because of the same God that's telling you he wants you to be happy
also invented quantum physics.
And you know, my friend, I've told you many times in quantum physics,
we learned that two things can be true at the same time.
And that's how you can live in a world full of massive things.
And you can also live in a world that's beautiful and abundant and you can find
hope and peace and purpose and passion and power and all those things again in your life.
And yes, even happiness, my friend, even happiness.
You know why? Because you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And these two books have helped me unpack that.
I've learned so much from Anne Lamott and Randy Alcorn and Mark Rogab.
I gave you him earlier this week.
And I just want you to have a little piece of that. And that's why I unpack
all all these books. That's why we talk about all this stuff.
The most important thing, though, is you can't do any of this until you change
your mind. And the good news is 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 wleewarrantmd.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.