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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.
Music.
Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, your host,
as we examine what we believe, why we believe it, how we can defend it,
live it, and share it with others.
We use faith and science to smash together to release the incredible power of
learning how we're designed, operate our brains, manage our minds,
communicate with our creator, and help other people find hope. Let's get after it.
Music.
Well, friend, we're back and it is Saturday afternoon here on the Riverbank.
It's not Sunday, but it's still Tuesdays with Tata. How are you doing, Tata?
I am well. How are you today? Good. It's good to see your face back in the studio.
Thank you. Good to be here. Been a little while. It has.
We had trambles all over the place. We had two eye surgeries for Tata.
We had We've got all kinds of stuff.
We're back. Yes. You're all the way back to 100%. Absolutely.
That's good. You played golf like it today.
This man is 85 years old, and he's still beating me at golf almost every time
we play. It's pretty impressive.
It happens to be just a luck. I don't know. Luck applied over a long period
of time starts to look like skill.
Well, hey, it's Tuesdays with Tata, but it's also the first Tuesday of all in August.
So we're going to tie that together with whatever Tata's got for us today.
If you haven't started yet, over on the main podcast, we're doing All In August.
We have frequent episodes over there, including last Monday,
we had All In, the author of the book All In, Mark Batterson.
That was a great talk, wasn't it? It was. It was excellent.
I learned a great deal from him. Yeah, Mark, just tremendous.
And my favorite thing he said, I think the thing that kind of struck the most
fear in my heart was when he said, Jesus is not going to say,
well-planned, my good and faithful servant.
That's right. He's going to say well done. Well done. Not well planned or well
thought or even well said. Absolutely right. Wow. That was heavy.
Hey, we hope you're joining us for All in August. It's the time to draw a line
in the sand and say, hey, what got me here won't get me there.
We're ready to move. We're ready to go forward. We're ready to change our minds,
ready to change our lives. And with all that said, Tata's got something for us today.
Well, what I want to do is revisit what we talked about before.
We talked about Zacchaeus and we talked about the rich young ruler.
And for me, the question is, what does it look like to be all in?
That's the perfect question. What does it look like? What do we have to do?
And if you can remember, if you think back, Zacchaeus was a man of small stature.
So he was a little guy. So he climbed a tree because he wanted to see Jesus.
But Jesus saw him up the tree and said, come down.
I need you to come down. I need to see you. And he came down joyfully.
That's right. Now, who was Zacchaeus?
Zacchaeus was a, apparently he was a Hebrew, but he was also a tax collector.
Right. But he was also a chief tax collector. That's right.
So he was working for the Roman government. That's right.
And so the crowd, when Jesus said to him, I need to go to your house tonight
for dinner, Jesus invited himself.
Yeah. But he, Zacchaeus was happy about it, but the people in the crowd,
and I'm assuming it was probably the scribes and the Pharisees were not happy.
That's right. because they said, see what he's going to go eat with sinners.
That's right. They were judging him. That's right.
So they were catching him in
what they thought to be something that he was doing wrong. That's right.
And that's what they hoped to do. But anyway, Zacchaeus was very happy.
And one of the things that after he heard, and no doubt he heard this,
the people in the crowd saying this, look what Jesus is doing.
He's going to go have dinner with a sinner. That's right. But-
Zacchaeus stood in front of Jesus and said, I'll give half of everything I have to the poor.
And if I've defrauded anyone, I'll repay them four times. That's pretty all in.
That's right. He was all in. And it happened quickly.
It doesn't seem to me that Zacchaeus had to do a lot of thinking about what
he wanted to do. That's right.
Because no doubt he had heard about Jesus, and he wanted to see Jesus,
and he climbed a tree just so he could see him. That's right.
But he wasn't just interested in seeing him. He wanted to talk to him.
That's right. Now, can you imagine the conversation they had when they were
reclining at dinner that night? No.
But look at what Jesus said about Zacchaeus' household.
Salvation has come to his house. That's right. So he was saved. And what did he do?
He just proclaimed what he would do. That's right.
And he made a statement. He took a stand, and that's what he did.
This is what I'm going to do. This is what it looks like for me to follow Jesus. That's right.
And to compare Zacchaeus, compare the rich young ruler to Zacchaeus.
The rich young ruler came to Jesus, knelt down, called him good teacher.
That's right. and said, what do I have to do to inherit eternal life?
Think about the question.
What do I have to do to inherit eternal life? As if it were up to him. That's right. Yeah.
He was not willing to, and we know, because in the event, what Jesus told him,
that he had told him that he'd kept all the commandments under the law,
and he said he'd done that since his youth.
But Jesus said to him, you lack one thing.
Go sell everything you have and give it to the poor. That's right.
And what did the man do? He went away sorrowfully. Yep.
And Madison said, I haven't met very many people possessed by a demon,
but I've met a lot of people possessed by their possessions.
He couldn't let go. That's right. He could not.
It was something that he had to hold on to.
He came to Jesus and asked Jesus a question. That's right.
Couldn't he have asked Jesus, help me understand, What do you mean by that? That's right.
Do I have to give everything I own? Don't I have something that I can call my own?
That's right. But you look at Zacchaeus.
Zacchaeus did not ask Jesus that. He said what he would do. That's right.
Well, it's the perfect contrast here to faith versus works, really.
Jesus said to Zacchaeus, follow me, and he followed him. That's right.
To the rich young ruler, the guy's question was, what do I need to do? That's right.
What do I need to do? How can I wrangle this with my own hands? That's right.
That's right. But he was not willing to do it. That's right.
Because he had to know that he had to give up something, but he did not.
But the whole thing, the question, I guess it's really not a question.
I guess I'm awed by it. The fact that, and in Mark it says, Mark records, I think it's in Mark.
Mark, yes, Mark 10, where he records that Jesus loved the rich young man.
That's right. He loved him.
So that said to me that probably the man was sincere in his heart,
but he was looking at what he needed to do.
What one thing did he need other than rely on Jesus? That's right.
He wanted to rely on himself. That's right.
Zacchaeus did not. That's right.
That's what Batterson wrote, that whole passage about the rich young ruler,
the punchline is sort of he was following the rules, but he wasn't following Jesus. That's right.
Yeah, that's a slippery slope of legalism, isn't it? Like we want to put our
hands on rules and things we can do and things we can control.
That's right. But we don't really want Jesus to be Lord because when he calls
us to someplace that's uncomfortable for us, we don't want to go. That's right.
That's right. And it was very uncomfortable for this man because he was very wealthy.
And when Jesus told him that he had to give it up. That's right.
He left downhearted. He was downcast. He was sorrowful.
That's right. He could not do that. He could not part with his possessions.
That's right. Now, think about Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus had gained his possessions probably unlawfully.
That's right.
But he was willing to part with them. That's right.
It's amazing how the perspective shifts. It's interesting that they call him the rich young ruler.
Because I think most of us, as we get older, we get to a place where we realize
that experiences are more valuable than possessions.
That's right. And what he had was an opportunity to have experiences with Jesus.
That's right. He could have walked with him and listened to him preach and followed
him and camped with him and fished with him and been one of his people.
But he was more concerned about what he had than who he had.
Yeah. Well, and also, for me, it's a question of a rich, young ruler.
How could he be? I could see he'd be rich, but being young and being a ruler,
unless he inherited the job. His family, yeah.
He was the son of somebody important, probably. Yeah.
But he could not make that transition. That's right. But yet,
at the same time, he was sincere.
He wanted to do something so he could inherit eternal life. That's right.
The sad part is the story of scripture really is when we give all to God,
he usually gives us back more than we could imagine. That's right.
And so that was sort of like Solomon, you know, he said, what do you want?
And he said, I want wisdom. And God said, okay, how about I give you all the money too? Yeah.
Give him more than he could ask
for. That's right. And that is what is so ironic about the whole thing.
If we think more highly of ourselves than we do of anything,
anybody else or anything else, then we're going to fail. That's right.
And Jesus made it very clear.
Everything that he said was upside down to the people of that time.
That's right. And it's upside down to us today. That's right.
Because we don't want to do that.
I bet if you think about those two guys on their deathbeds at the end of their
lives, I bet Zacchaeus didn't regret one moment of what he gave up to follow Jesus.
And I bet the rich young ruler said, man, I really missed out.
I missed something important in my life that day.
So the whole point for me is this.
Make the decision now and just do it. Go all in. Go all in and do it today.
That's right. Because we don't know. We don't know what life's going to look like.
30 days or six months or 10 years. We don't know what it's going to look like tonight.
That's right. We don't know. But what we do know is that if you follow the story
of people that we can see throughout scripture, the things that really matter
in life, the things that really hold you up when times get hard,
they're never material things.
They're never these habits and numbing agents and wealth and the things that
the world clamors after.
Those aren't the things that you hold on to, you reach for when you fall,
like that old Guy Clark song, things that work, stuff that works.
The kinds of things you reach for when you fall. Like when we're hurting,
we don't reach for our money. We reach for our Savior.
That's right. That's right. And that's what Zacchaeus did.
And he wanted so badly to see Jesus that he climbed a tree. That's right.
Do you have that picture?
He climbed up a tree. I do. Just to see what Jesus, just to see him. But Jesus saw him.
And so Jesus recognized right away that when he saw Zacchaeus,
was sincere in his heart and he wanted to do what was
right that's right and he wanted to
be he wanted to be close to jesus he already
tried his way and their
way everybody else's way and they'd fail because look at the reputation that
he had that's right he was judged to be a center by his contemporaries other
people and by the crowd then and who knows what the crowd really looked like, I don't know.
They were following Jesus for some reason because Jesus was walking down the street.
So, it was a very profound picture to me to see the posture of both of these people.
From Zacchaeus saying, here's what I will do, because I know I'm wrong,
to the rich, strong ruler saying, what can I do to be justified?
And he was sincere in what he was asking. He was. But he wasn't willing to pay
the price. That's right.
What was your all-in moment in your life, Dad?
Well, probably there's many. And periodically, when I talked to the Lord,
I said, I understand that if this is a test, I probably failed it.
And most of them I did. But some of those moments were, I'm thinking that it's
probably Probably when James was killed, our son, I said to God then,
I think I've said this before, but I said to him, OK, I get it. I understand.
It's your plan. It's your watch. Have your way with me, period. End of discussion.
And we've not had to talk again because what I was doing, I was faulting myself.
I was thinking of all, I had a long litany of eras that I had made,
as opposed to the things that were positive that I should have been thinking about.
And I think that, and maybe what happened to me also at that same time is that
I became aware of my own humanity and my own mortality even more clearly than I,
because that I had in the past, that I had in the past,
or even currently at that time.
And when you lose a child, it really brings it home that life is short.
And I'd seen, I had seen death. I'd looked death in the face before.
Not, I wasn't in peril myself, but I've seen where people were died and had been killed. old.
But it was a moment in time where I finally had to admit to myself, I cannot do this.
That's right. Just cry out loud and clear.
The fact is, my wife dug me, Patty Sue dug me out of a closet one morning,
I don't know, some three or four o'clock in the morning, and they're screaming.
So we all have those kind of moments in life.
But when we finally say to ourselves, I can't do this.
It's beyond me. I need help. That's when we make a choice. Yeah.
And I think I made a choice that time. I don't know.
And then there's been so much tragedy that we've lived through that the children
were, you know, they didn't have a full chance that we had.
That's right. They did not. They wanted to be somebody. They wanted to do something.
But it was snatched away from them. But I realized that all,
we can't do everything. That's right. I know that. Yeah.
But I do know this, clearly I know this.
I can't beat myself up,
for the things that I didn't do. That's right. Because that's over.
That's right. If it was an opportunity, I missed it.
That's right. And that's a good word for people who are hurting too.
I think right now is, and we've talked about it before, that the neurobiology of memory is tricky.
Because when you're thinking of something in the past, an opportunity that you
missed at the time you were too hard on James, or you didn't say something you
should have said, or you said something you wish you hadn't said.
When you think of those moments in the past, friend, what
you're doing is you're not actually replaying a tape of
the event as it occurred what happens is your
brain triggers that memory and it's
presented to you in the context of everything
you know and understand now that's right so how mature you are how much you've
grown how much you've changed the person you are now is viewing that tape as
if you were the same person then and the contrast is sometimes staggering like
well of course if i knew now what i didn't know then i would have made a different decisions.
So, the depth of how far off that is from what was the right decision is an
unfair fight that you can't win.
And so, I think that's why God tells us, like, don't worry about the past.
Look to the future. Don't think about then.
Think about now and think about what we're going to do in the future,
where he's taking us in the future.
And unfortunately, if you think about those negative things, you will live them.
That's right. You will. And you will live them over and over again.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I've had two all in moments. So talk to us twice what I am.
Sometimes I think that you've lived through the loss of two children. I've lost one.
You you've stood up to multiple careers. I've had one like you've done lots
of different things in your life.
And and so when I think about you and all you've been through,
I think about how you made that conversation with God one time.
I've had it with him twice.
It wasn't as sticky for me. The first time was I was in Iraq.
And if you've read my book, No Place to Hide, you've heard this story.
But there was a day when it had been a few days since we'd gotten mortared.
And it was really hot. And it was uncomfortable to wear your body armor and
your helmet everywhere.
And I needed to go to the PX, which is like a little Walmart type store that
was a long way across base.
And I didn't feel like wearing my body armor so i just went i was wearing workout
clothes t-shirt and shorts.
And I took a shortcut across base, but it goes across this long stretch where
there's not much going on. There's not a lot of buildings. There's no cover, no structure.
Of course, right in the middle of that walk, we had an alarm red.
The sirens went off and we were having a mortar attack.
And I started hearing explosions and they're not very far away.
And I'm caught in the open and I don't have my protection, my armor.
And so I look and I notice there's a concrete barrier. It's just this random wall of concrete.
And I just ran over and huddled up against it for an hour or so.
Multiple explosions happened around the base. And I was essentially just,
if one of those rockets or mortars landed close to me, it was going to kill me. I had no cover.
So if it landed on the wrong side of the wall, I was going to die.
And I had one of those talks with God during that time where I realized I was
a young neurosurgeon. I was sort of a control freak.
I was definitely what must I do to be saved kind of guy. Not much,
not what do you have for me, but what I need to do.
Give me a checklist and I'll take care of it, you know, kind of thing.
And that sort of got blown away from me, literally bombed out of me.
And I became a different kind of person.
But then I sort of had a little bit of recidivism. You know,
Lisa and I got married after the war, a while after the war.
And we started our own business and we're raising our kids.
And I was hard in the levers of running business and running practice and controlling everything.
Thing and and when mitch died that stripped away
from me any sort of sense of that
my work was really super important in my life relative to
my family that's right mark maddison said his wife got cancer
and he said when you go through something like that it unimportant things become
profoundly unimportant no and important things become profoundly important and
that was this that was the real all-in moment for me dad was i was like okay
one of my children has died and I've got a mission.
I've got four other kids and I've got grandkids, a wife and a family.
And yeah, work is important and you got to pay the bills and all that.
Boy, I need to take care of my family.
And that was clarifying for me.
Well, those kinds of moments, unfortunately.
Sometimes we have a tendency to ignore them, but also we have a tendency to
exacerbate them. We We make them bigger than they really are.
And that's not what God is asking us to do. No.
God is asking us to be ourselves, yes. And the thing that we tend to forget,
we're his child also. That's right.
We're his creation. That's right.
And that is so hard to assimilate.
It's hard to even comprehend. him. How he could love us because,
unless you do it, you don't really understand it. Adopted child,
And when we do, when we finally, when we let our own guard down and say,
okay, I want you to be my son, that's what God has done. That's right.
He's called us into his family. He's called us to be his.
And the question of what it boils down for me, we don't have the right to beat ourselves up. Wow.
We don't have the right to call ourselves stupid.
We don't. Negative self-talk is, we're talking about somebody's kid when we do that. That's right.
That's exactly right. That's the whole point right there. Yeah.
And so, when we decide that we don't belong to ourselves, answer that question for ourselves.
I don't belong to myself.
Wow. What am I? Yeah. Lisa said something today that blew me away.
She read, I don't know where she heard this. It might have been her original idea.
She said, if you won't forgive yourself, then you're telling God that his standard
of forgiveness is lower than yours.
That stopped me in my track. Like, you're telling God he's got it wrong and
you've got it right. He needs to raise his standard.
And that, my friend, is a good example of where we are with all in.
Like, we're all carrying something.
We're carrying a habit. We're carrying a grief. We're carrying a pain.
We're carrying a grudge. We're carrying hate for somebody.
We're carrying something that's keeping us from living the life where Jesus
says, I need you to do this and follow me. That's right.
And we're saying, okay, I'll follow you as long as you don't make me forgive that guy.
Yeah. Or you don't make me have this person be my president. Then you're not all in.
Then you're not all in. That's right. And that's the point. As I said the other
day, we come to this place where you recognize that what got you here won't
get you there. You say, I need to be in a different place in my life.
I need to be in better shape. I need to be financially more sound.
I need to be closer to Jesus.
I need to be in my marriage needs to tighten up. But I have to then have to
acknowledge that if I'm not where I need to be, then something in my life has
not been going the way it should be going.
And I can't get where I need to go unless I change that.
So something's got to change. There comes a moment when you have to change.
And I heard it the other day. I said it the other day, the difference between
where we are and where God's calling us to be really comes down to our mindset,
how we think about it, our level of commitment to his plan over ours.
And then it comes down to our habits and our discipline.
It comes down to your habits and your discipline. And that all says that we have to make a choice.
You have to make a choice. It's either him or us. That's right.
It's him or us. If we make the choice of us, what does that get you?
That's right. Do you walk away sad or do you have dinner with Jesus? That's right.
I want to have dinner with Jesus. I do too. And I don't want to get to the end
of my life and say, man, I really missed that.
Yeah. I wish I had followed him. I wish I had committed. I wish I had less tied
to my possessions or less whatever.
Well, but also that we have to do this as well. We have to forgive ourselves. That's right. We can't.
We can't punish ourselves. That's right.
What could we do? If we would go out beside the river in the wintertime in a
snowstorm and sit out there and wait to die, would that solve the problem? No.
We still have a choice. We have to live our lives. And I'm not talking about trying to live happily.
You may not be happy. You may be content.
You may be satisfied. That's right.
And that may be all there is.
But at the same time, it has to do with you.
And friends, that's what we're talking about now. It has to do with you and
me. That's right. We have to decide. It's a choice. That's right.
And so here on this first Tuesday of August of 2024, we're calling people to
make that all-in decision.
Like it's time to change your mind, and it's time to change your life.
And if we're going to do that, Tata, when do we start? Start today. We'll start today.
Yesterday. yesterday. But if this episode was helpful to you,
text message the link to a friend and say, hey, please listen to this today.
Please download and listen to this today.
What if we could double the number of people that heard this message today and
committed them with us to go all in?
What if you had five friends, 10 friends that you could say,
hey, let's do this together.
Let's listen to this podcast every day. Let's go all in.
How much would that change our culture, our society, our churches,
our families, if we all committed together, praying, working hard,
going all in, changing our approaches.
Talk to your friends, share it. Take a second right now and share this episode
with somebody and say, hey, commit with me to go all in with my friend, Dr.
Lee Warren, and let's get after it. Hey, I'll talk to you tomorrow. God bless.