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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. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren,
and it is time for some self-brain surgery.
It's Theology Thursday here on the podcast, and I'm going to do something a little different.
Last week I did, on the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, a little Bible study
about how God handles bruised and broken people. We have this idea.
I think it came from the enemy. me.
Secular culture tells us that we're not good enough.
We need to keep trying to be better and work harder and improve ourselves and all of that stuff.
But Christianity has a different idea. If you really read what the Bible says,
it's not about making yourself better.
It's about bringing yourself to him and let him healing you.
And so we have this notion that we need to clean ourselves up and perfect ourselves
and work harder and try harder before God will be able to tolerate us.
And that's just not what the word says.
So I know this podcast, we talk a lot about science, we talk a lot about faith,
and we try to smash those together and help you find hope.
But I want to bring you this spiritual brain surgery episode today for really two reasons.
One, the spiritual brain surgery podcast is pretty new. It just launched at the end of January.
And there's only about a third of the number of people subscribed to that show
as there are to the Dr. Lee Warren podcast.
So it's growing rapidly, way faster than my main podcast did.
So I appreciate if you are already listening to it, but I have a suspicion that
there's a group of people listening to this podcast who haven't yet clicked
over and found the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast.
I would like to just invite you today to see what we're doing over there,
to see what it's like, and get a taste of it.
So today on Theology Thursday, since you're used to me bringing you a little
bit more spiritual content on Thursdays, I want to give you this episode about
how God handles people when they're beat up, when they're bruised,
when they're smoldering. And we have this concept that he's going to say,
oh, you're not good enough.
Look how weak you are. Look how pathetic you are and snuff you out.
And the truth is there's incredible hope when you're willing to show up and let God see your wounds.
What he does and how he responds might surprise you, and it will certainly help
you change your mind and change your life and get healthier and feel better and be happier.
God doesn't crush you if you're hurting.
He wants to bandage you up. After all, he's the great physician.
As my friend Tara Lee Cobble says, he's where the joy is.
I just want to tell you, too, in the coming weeks, we have some unbelievable
guests coming up on the show.
We have some incredible stuff happening.
And before I tell you about that, I want to tell you about one listener that
wrote in, and she basically gave a little...
Testimony about how she's using the first commandment of self-brain surgery.
I invited you to write in and say, hey, in what ways have you been committing
malpractice against yourself?
Well, Therese wrote in and she said, I'm so grateful for the podcast.
I'm finding healing from past, present, and generational trauma.
I'm continuing with the Abide Challenge each morning. And here's how I'm using
the first of the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery, which I have taken to heart.
Here it is, friend. Remember the first commandment is relentlessly refuse to
participate in your own demise. No self-malpractice, okay?
So here's what she said. I am avoiding negative self-talk.
Ephesians 1 through 6, I'm bringing past mistakes and failures,
and I remind myself to stop the spiral and ask, how can I bring God glory in this moment?
How can I use my past to bring Him glory?
I do not let feelings dictate my future with relationships. And she quotes John
14.1 and 1 Peter 2.10. She says, let not your heart be troubled.
And you should go look those verses up, John 14.1 and 1 Peter 2.10.
She refuses to believe that there's no hope in specific situations anymore.
Because Psalm 71.14, which is our theme verse for Hope is the First Dose,
says, As for me, I will always have hope. She wrote her name out.
As for me, Therese, I will always have hope.
And friend, that's a great way to study Bible, study the Scripture.
Put your name in there. When God makes a promise, make it be personal.
Remind yourself that he's making that promise to you too.
And then number four, she says, forgive deep wounds that have been inflicted.
Proverbs 14.30 says, a heart at peace gives life to the body,
but any envy or unforgiveness rots the bones.
Proverbs 14.30. Therese has worked through the first commandment and reminded
herself of truth and applied applied the principles of self brain surgery to help God help her.
Bring healing and hope to her
life. Listen, we've got some incredible interviews coming up on the show.
I'm so excited for some of the things that are coming up. There's two that I'm
not going to tell you about right now because I don't want to,
just in case something happens and they don't come through, I don't want to
get you too excited, but there's two guests that are coming to the show
soon that are going to be game changers in your quest to become healthier and
feel better and be happier.
Also coming up very soon, Leanne Ellington, incredible story,
how she turned her her life around.
She had huge body image problems and huge issues with self-esteem and doubt.
And now she's turned her life around. She's got two incredible podcasts on the iHeartRadio network.
She's dedicated her life to empowering women to break free from the chains of
self-doubt and comparison-itis, she calls it, and those relentless inner critics
that have held you back for far too long. Leanne's story is incredible.
I was introduced to her by Maddie Jackson, and we really have got a lot in common.
I'm going to be on her show. She's going to be on mine. We got her coming up.
We got Susie Larson coming back to the show pretty soon. Christopher Cook,
my friend, he's got a really incredible practice of online coaching and helping people.
He's a pastor and he has written an incredible new book called Healing What
You Can't Erase. We're going to have him on the show soon to talk about his incredible book.
Dr. Michael Behe, who's one of the leading molecular biochemists in the world.
And he wrote a book 20 years ago called Darwin's Black Box that that has put
evolutionary biology on its heels, and he's going to come on the show soon to talk to us.
We've got Dawson Church, who you've heard me talk about many times.
We've got Pete Gregg coming back, the founder of Lectio Divina and the founder
of Lectio App and the leader and founder of the 24-7 Prayer Movement.
We have Tara Lee Cobble coming up on the show soon.
We've got Erin Lochner, who's a really well-known leader in the space around
getting your kids off of technology. Her book is incredible.
It's about the idea of learning how to have your family back again and not be
so stuck to your devices that are in your hand. That's going to be helpful.
We have one for the first time, really, a listener of the podcast.
Dana Gage is coming. She lost a child several years ago, and she's going to
come talk about how she managed to put her heart and her hope and her mind and
her faith back together and learn how to get off of what she calls the trauma
superhighway. and I'm so excited about that.
We have J. Warner Wallace, New York Times bestselling writer of Cold Case Christianity
coming soon to talk about his new book.
And we got some other incredible, incredible guests coming up.
I just can't believe that we have the opportunity to have these conversations
with so many amazing people.
Today, I want to sit down and just encourage you to sign up and subscribe to
and listen to the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast as well as this one because it's going to help you.
Today, just in case you're beat up, just in case you feel like your fire is about to go out,
just in case you feel too ashamed to take that broken and trembling heart to
God when you're really hurting, when trauma and tragedy and other massive things
have really beaten you down and you think even God wouldn't be willing to help
you now now because you're just too far gone.
If you're feeling that, I want you to listen to this episode.
Or if you know somebody who's hurting, this will help you.
I just want to give you a taste of what spiritual brain surgery is all about
because it's Theology Thursday, and we're going to get after it.
But before we do, 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 handworks, 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 your podcast. This is your place. This is your time,
my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
Good morning, my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and it is time for a little spiritual brain surgery.
We're going to do just a quick little Bible study prayer time this morning.
We're going to review our abide practice.
We're about four weeks into the 10 to 12 minutes a day of working on learning
how to abide in Him, get our brains and our spirits lined up,
calm our voice, our internal voice, and just get down to that place where we can really hear.
Today I've got a quick little message for you if you're tired of being so tired,
if everything feels so hard and you just don't know what to do.
Today we're gonna address that
just a little bit when God's got some words for you, some things to say.
We're gonna talk about all that in just a minute on Spiritual Brain Surgery.
Music.
Okay, so we've been working on this abide practice for several weeks now.
And the whole idea is that we're trying to get to a place where we approach
meditation and prayer in a different way.
Not just a transaction, not just pulling the handle on the slot machine and
hoping that God will give us what we want.
Not just telling him what we're concerned about. He already knows those things.
But learning how to hear him and interact with him on a deeper level than we ever have before.
That's what it abides about. And yeah, there's lots of different ways to look
at this. It's not Eastern meditation, okay?
When Eastern meditators talk about meditating, they're talking about calming
the inner voice, learning to be quiet.
When Christians meditate, we're talking about learning how to tune our minds
to the right frequency so we can hear what God has to say, to calm our internal
voice so we can hear His voice.
Prayer is talking to God, relating to Him, interacting with him and meditation is part of that.
It's the response part where we're quiet or be still and know that I am God, he says.
Okay. So we have this abide practice. We're going to talk about that again today.
It's been shown clearly from neuroscience that people that learn to meditate
for even as little as 10 to 12 minutes a day for eight weeks,
make significant structural changes in the parts of their brain that are related
to emotional stability,
resilience, Resilience, problem-solving, handling stress, and we want that, right?
And the idea that I had was if we look at Jesus and we understand that Jesus controlled his mind,
that Jesus then therefore would have written the right programs into his brain,
that his brain would have been structurally ideal for living this life of handling
hard things but also finding abundance.
And so we want our minds to be like Christ, and Paul tells us in Corinthians
that we have the mind of Christ. Christ, if you're saved, you've already got
the mind of Christ. The trick is that the enemy...
And life continues to convince us that we're stuck with the same old mind that we've always had.
How do we get to the mind of Christ that we already have? How do we stop living like we don't have it?
The answer is we learn to abide in him. It says in John, if you abide in me,
then you're connected to the vine.
You'll get everything you need. Peter says he gives us everything we need for life and godliness.
We have all that we need from him because we have the mind of Christ.
So getting our mind, our flesh mind aligned with our spirit mind that we actually
have is how we get to that place where we can live in this John 16, 33 hard world.
We can live in this John 10, 10 thief comes to steal and kill and destroy world,
but also have I've overcome the world in John 16, 33 and also have I came that
you might have life and have it abundantly in John 10, 10. We want both, okay?
Because we know that life's going to have trauma and tragedy and massive things,
but we also want to be able to have abundance and meaning and purpose and maybe
even something that looks like happiness again.
That's what we're going to get, hopefully, by learning how to abide in Him.
I got an email from Kathy.
Kathy says, hey, I find my best work, my best ability to communicate is when
I'm moving, when I'm walking on the treadmill, listening to worship music.
I find that moving keeps me able to let my mind become more calm than if I'm trying to sit still.
Some people, this was pointed out to me by Gina Berkmeyer, a therapist that
has written in a few times.
She's written a great book called Generations Deep, by the way,
about generational trauma.
Generations Deep by Gina Berkmeyer is on Amazon. It's a great book.
And she said, you know, some people find that they need to move.
This is the basis of tapping and other forms of movement-related meditation.
And Jesus did it. Look throughout the Gospels. Jesus was always on the move.
He was going up to a mountain.
He was riding in the sand. He was walking.
He was moving around all the time.
And when you move, your brain releases brain-derived neurotrophic factor,
BDNF, which helps calm your brain.
So movement is a perfectly acceptable way to do this.
So if you find that you can't be still and sit, movement is just fine.
Okay, learn how to abide however and wherever and whenever you are.
That's how you're going to connect your mind to your spirit,
to your body and change your mind and change your life.
Okay, now I gave you these words, abide.
Approach. Just get near him, okay? Whether you're sitting, you're standing,
you're driving, you're listening to music.
And I favor, okay, instrumental music is better than music with lyrics because
when you play music with lyrics, you're getting that left hemisphere of your brain involved.
And it's all about taking a snapshot, trying to figure out what this is about,
trying to know it in the, I want to know the facts of God sort of way.
And that's what the left hemisphere fear is all about.
Presenting to your mind a fact-based relationship. I know this, okay?
Like I could say, I know Lisa, my wife, and she's 5'2", and she has the most
incredible sort of tiger-colored hazel eyes, and she's this,
and she's that, and I can know all these things about her, okay?
But those language-related ways of knowing God or Lisa or basketball or whatever
whatever else you want to describe, those things aren't the same as the kind
of right hemisphere of your brain. No.
The canon, as the Germans would say, the idea that you know who God is, you know how he is.
I know the ways of my wife, Lisa. I know how she moves and what she smells like
and what she sounds like.
And that kind of knowledge comes from the right hemisphere.
And that's a deeper, more experiential kind of knowledge and relationship.
And you can't get that with language. You get it from experience.
And so what we want with instrumental music is to have some music that calms
our minds and get some neurotransmitters flowing, but not language that we're
trying to process to sing along, play along. long.
And maybe that's your choice of what kind of music you listen to comes into
it too. Like for me, I'm a guitar player.
So if I play acoustic guitar music, like Carl Minor or something I've given
you before, I don't find myself focusing on the music.
Like, oh, what was that? A cello? Was that a violin?
Was that a viola? What was that? What was that part that he played?
I didn't understand that.
And I can talk myself out of meditating by trying to focus in on the music.
So find some sort of music that you can listen to that you don't have to focus on.
That becomes sort of the soundtrack, this background playing.
So that you don't think about the music and you don't think about lyrics and
get that right hemisphere going, get that knowledge of knowing,
getting to know who God is and feeling his presence and experiencing him, okay?
So this Abad idea is approach him.
Just get close and just be still, he says, and know that I'm God.
And then breathe and just learn to breathe in and breathe out.
Let's get these breath prayers going.
Teach me to see you all around me, through me, around me. Let me experience you.
And then invite him into the moment. Like, God, I don't know what it's like
to hear you. I want to hear your voice more clearly.
Please come in and show yourself to me. Let me get to know you.
Let me get to know you like a friend, like a person who I could experience and
get to know and not just be afraid of or not just wonder about.
I want to know you. So I'm inviting you into this place in this time.
I'm going to give you my mind and give you my heart and give you my everything.
I'm here and I'm inviting you.
And then depend on Him. Just say, hey, this situation I'm facing,
I can't do it without you.
I figured that out. I've been living long enough that this hard life, I just can't do it.
And I seek my truth and I seek what I think is going to make me happy.
And I try and try to change this habit or break that thing or make this relationship
work. And I just can't. I can't do it, God.
And so I depend on you. and just put that out there and listen for him to tell
you what he needs and what he wants and what he wishes for you and then experience him.
So there's this thing that we have where we don't pay the right kind of attention
and we pray for things and then some things happen and we don't recognize that that came from God.
We don't allow us to see, we don't allow our.
We don't allow ourselves to see God in the moment.
And sometimes when He does something we asked Him for, we don't give Him credit
for. We don't recognize that He was the source of it.
The Bible says that God provides the seed for the sower and bread for eating.
So we do all this work. We don't recognize that our ability to do the work came from Him.
We get the harvest. We don't recognize that the magic and the soil and the chemistry
and the biology of how the soil works It's just what made the bread grow.
We think it happened because we planted the seeds, but the seed came from him
and the soil came from him and the wind and the rain and the temperature came
from him and the harvest came from him and the cell germination and the biology
of how that crop reproduced came from him.
So just take a minute in this process of abiding to acknowledge that the entire
experience is in and of and through and because of and for him.
And that will center you and ground you in the right way.
You're depending on him. You're experiencing him. You're telling him that you
want to have him in this moment.
So just spend some time allowing him into that experience.
And we'll take it back to the second
level to stop contemplating and start operating a level another time.
But I just want to remind you what this is about. it's about
approaching him breathing him in
and breathing him out and inviting him into the moment and recognizing that
you completely depend on him and that the entire experience is
because of and for and with and through and from him that's not too stressful
because you're not responsible for creating it he's going to do that you're
just letting the right half of your brain do what he He gave you to do what he made it for,
to intend to experience and know him.
Now, I just want to give you a couple of scriptures here. In Matthew 12,
20, Jesus said, A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.
And Jesus is quoting Isaiah 42, 1 through 4 here when he said that.
A bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.
Right now, some of us are bruised.
Life has beaten you up. You've gone through something hard. You're experiencing a massive thing.
You're grieving. You're hurting. You're stuck. You're addicted.
You're lost. You're cheated on. You've messed up again.
Something's happened and you're bruised and you're smoldering.
You feel like your fire is just about to go out.
And every day you look in the mirror and say, how did I get here with this life?
And why is it always so hard? And I'm tired of being so tired.
And my mind won't stop racing. I've got so much on my mind. there's a million
plates spinning and I don't know what to do.
And you have to say, what am I doing?
And God says, hey, when you feel like that, when you feel like you're on your
last leg, when you're bruised and you're smoldering, don't be afraid to come to me then.
Like we think we ought to clean ourselves up and get ourselves right for him.
And he says, I want you to come here and fall apart and let me nourish you back to health.
I will straighten that reed out and I will prop it up and I will bandage it and I will help you heal.
And I will rekindle that fire in your heart. I'll help you come alive again. it.
He says, I'm not going to snuff you out. I'm not going to snap you down and chop you down.
Yesterday I was out on the riverbank cutting down this tall river grass, the reeds, okay?
These reeds that come up out of the water and they grow so thick that we can't
see the geese and the swans and the cranes and the river.
So I went out there with a hedge trimmer, a long pole trimmer, cut them down.
And it's hard work. I'm out there chopping these reeds down.
And I just just got this strong metaphor of this verse from Jesus saying,
hey, your reed is bruised.
Like some of them, when I cut them, some of them kind of fall over and they're
not all the way cut through.
And I remember from seeing gardeners before, they can take those reeds and they
can straighten them up and bandage them and they'll reconnect and regrow and they won't die.
Like even though they're damaged, you can fix them, right? Right.
So Jesus is saying here, I'm not going to be the guy that when you come to me
and you're bent or broken or you're smoldering and you think you're just about
done for, I'm going to be the guy that puts you back together.
I don't think you have to come to me all perfect and all presentable.
You come to me at your worst moment. So that's the time, friend,
when the bite is really going to help you. When you say, God, I'm bruised here.
I'm smoldering. I need you to keep that promise and not snuff me out.
I need you to help me come back alive.
Does that make sense? So this is the kind of thing that you can talk to him
about when you're practicing this, okay?
And I want to give you one more little scripture, and it's Isaiah 30.
There's two pieces of Isaiah 30. One is in Isaiah 30, 15.
The other one is Isaiah 30, 18. So 30, 15, God says this.
You're at the point where you're bruised and you're smoldering and you're just
about done for and you don't know what to say and you say, God, what now? What can I do?
And he says this, in repentance and rest is your salvation.
In quietness and trust is your strength.
Now, repentance here, obviously, if there's a sin problem,
if you're stuck in some habit that's harming you, if you have a sin issue,
if you're in a relationship you shouldn't be in, if you're addicted to pornography,
if you're drinking and putting yourself into some state where you can't hear from him.
If you're in a situation where your life is not what he or you know it should
be, then repentance means turning away from that, changing your direction, right?
So if you say, I'm tired of being so tired, I'm tired of everything being so
hard all the time. He says, okay, we'll turn away from that.
Change your direction and then rest. And I'll give you some rest and quietness
and trust is your strength.
And maybe it's not even a sin problem. Maybe it's that Hebrews 12 thing where
it's just cast off everything that hinders you.
Maybe you are doing too much work that's not what you're being called to.
Maybe you need to learn the holy no. You're saying yes to too many things.
You don't wanna disappoint people and you're just burned out.
You're burning a candle at both ends and you're just worn out.
And he says, hey, that's why I told you about Sabbath and repentance and rest is your salvation.
There's somebody listening to this today day that needs to hear this.
It's time for you to rest and stop spinning your wheels all the time.
He says, in quietness and trust is your strength.
We think our strength comes from working harder and doing more and going faster
and saying yes to everything and being out there on the front edge of whatever
it is that's going on. And he says, no, stop.
Repentance and rest is your salvation. Quietness and trust is your strength. I'm going to renew you.
And he even says, but you would have none of it. He's talking to people who
aren't listening. He said, hey, the answer is to stop.
And you would have none of it. You're going to keep going and eventually you're
going to crumble because in fact, in the passage here in Isaiah 30,
16, it says, no, you said, no, we will flee on horses. We will ride off on swift horses.
They're basically saying, we're going to pick up the sword and we're going to
fight this battle ourselves. And God's saying, no, you need to stop. You need to rest.
You need to trust. You need to be still and know that I'm God.
And then down in 18, this is the punchline for today of our practice today.
I want you to spend some time in the abide process and think about this first.
The Lord longs to be gracious to you, friend.
You think that you're bruised and you're smoldering and you're worn out.
And how could God possibly want you in that state?
The enemy says, you got to get yourself squared away before you go and talk to God about this.
And he says, no, the Lord longs to be gracious to you. He will rise up to show you compassion.
Do you get that, friend? the Lord of heaven will get up out of his chair to
be compassionate to you that's the message you need to hear today for the Lord
is a God of justice blessed are all who wait for him.
It's interesting that this word longs, when the Lord longs to be gracious to
you and the word at the end, blessed are all those who wait for him,
that longing and waiting, those words are yakal.
They're variants of the word yakal, which really in Hebrew means hope.
It's this idea of waiting and waiting, almost an ambush.
Like you are going to wait for him and you're going to pounce on him when he
comes by and you're going to hold on to him for all that there is.
Is because this word, this word yachal has to do with sort of being so tightly
bound that the rope almost pierces your skin because you're going to tie yourself
to him because he is where your hope is.
Terri Lee Cobble at the end of every one of her devotionals on the Bible Recap
says, he's where the joy is. Friends, that's what it is.
The Lord longs to be gracious. He, yachal, he's holding on to hope that you
will allow him to be gracious to you. And he wants to get up out of his chair to help you.
For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him.
A better translation is happy are those who hope in him, who hope for him,
who won't let go of the rope that will hold them to him.
Okay, this is the message for today. He won't snuff you out.
He won't chop you down. He wants to help you.
He doesn't want to wait for you to be ready. He wants you to stop and rest and
let him come and be the great physician and minister to you.
So it's time to abide in him, okay?
Get you some music, spend 10 or 12 minutes and just abide in him.
Approach him, breathe him in, invite him into the moment, depend on him and
then be willing and ready to experience him and recognize him when he shows up, friend.
That's all there is to it. We're trying to make our hippocampus stronger.
We're trying to make synaptic changes in our brains that make us more resilient
and more hopeful and more untouchable as time goes on.
And the way we do that is we use the mind of Christ to create the brain that's more like Christ.
That's self-brain surgery. And you can do that, my friend. And you can start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship
the Most High God. And if you're interested in learning more,
check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,
WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer.
And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, Self-Brain Surgery,
every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries
around the world. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your
life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
Music.