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When life gets hard, does what we think we believe hold us up, or does it crumble under the weight of doubt? I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren- I'm a brain surgeon, author, and a person who's seen some stuff and wondered where God is in all this mess. This is The Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast, where we'll take a hard look at what we believe, why we believe it, and the neuroscience behind how our minds and our brains can smash together with faith to help us become healthier, feel better, and be happier so we can find the hope to withstand anything life throws at us. You've got questions, and we're going to do the hard work to find the answers, but you can't change your life until you change your mind, and it's gonna take some spiritual-brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
Good morning, my friend. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and I'm grateful to be with you
here today on Theology Thursday on spiritual brain surgery.
We've had a good week here. We had the Jenny Allen interview on Tuesday.
I hope you got to hear that. If you didn't, please go back and check it out.
That was a great talk about Jenny Allen's new book, Untangle Your Emotions.
She's going to be on the Today Show today, so praise God we're getting an overtly
Christian Christian author,
not a progressive Christian author, not a watered-down version of Christianity,
but an actual biblically faithful Christian author getting some major attention
for her new book today, and hopefully that'll help people untangle their emotions.
So pray for her and the success of this new book, and go check out that interview.
I'm going to be on Jenny Allen's show pretty soon.
I don't have the exact air date of that yet, but I'll let you know when it's time.
Today we're going to get after one idea. There's a Theology Thursday idea that
I want you to have. It's kind of a tool that I use for Bible study.
And I just want you to work through Ephesians 4 with me, a passage in Ephesians
4 that's about mind change.
And I want to give you some math equations for how you can work through Scripture,
a method of taking notes, a method of seeing things in Scripture that become
an easy way to apply them to your life.
And we're going to just let God search us and know us and untangle our emotions
and change our minds to help us remember that we have the mind of Christ.
And we gotta remember that we can't change our lives until we actually start
living like the way that he's made us.
He's created our minds and given us a brain that will respond to the direction of our mind.
And that's why I'm always telling you, you gotta become a self brain surgeon
because you can change your life, but you have to change your mind first.
And on Theology Thursday today, we're gonna get into the mathematics of mind
change. And we're gonna start today.
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 going to
take some spiritual brain surgery to get it done. So let's get after it.
All right, let's get after it. Hey, Ephesians 4 is the math textbook for how you change your mind.
And this is going to sound weird, but sometimes when I study scripture,
I try to find little ways to remember things.
And sometimes I make these little abbreviations that almost look like math equations.
Like in John 10, 10, when Jesus says, the thief comes to steal and kill and
destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.
I see that as a math equation. A, abundance, is greater than S,
K, D, steal, kill, and destroy.
Abundance is greater than steal, kill, and destroy. So I'd write that in the
margin. or make a note on my phone.
Abundance is greater than steal, kill, and destroy. That's a little math equation
that helps me remember John 10.10 and the power that's there to give us hope when life gets hard.
So I see the same thing in Ephesians 4. There's a whole bunch of math in Ephesians 4.
And if you want to know how to move your mind from what you've been fooled into
to believing you're stuck with, right?
Your brain that you got from your parents that's formed by your experiences
and your traumas and tragedies and massive things and habits and hardships and
hindrances and all those things, and you think you can't stop thinking this
way, you can't stop feeling this way, you can't stop being broken,
you can't stop being such a loser or whatever label you've accepted.
You just can't. But Jesus says, the Bible says plainly in 1 Corinthians,
that you have the mind of Christ.
1 Corinthians 2, 15 and 16, those who are spiritual can evaluate all things,
but they themselves cannot be evaluated by others.
Now, this is the first part of this important verse. I haven't really caught
it before, but it jumped out this morning.
Those who are spiritual can evaluate all things. So if you've got the mind of Christ,
you can look objectively at everything that's happening in the world,
and you can put it in the context of what your Savior, your Creator,
your great physician, your friend wants you to know about it,
and you can evaluate it properly and think about it correctly.
You can think about it correctly, but it says they themselves cannot be evaluated by others.
In other words, if you have the mind of Christ, you don't make sense to the world.
It doesn't make sense to somebody who doesn't have the mind of Christ.
It doesn't make sense that you can absorb the blows of life and still have hope.
It doesn't make sense that they can punch you and you can turn the other cheek.
It doesn't make sense that they can do all the things they did to Jesus,
and he can still say, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
It doesn't make sense that we can have a living hope in spite of the hard things
that we go through because they don't have the mind of Christ.
When you have the mind of Christ, you can think about things correctly without
the emotional overlay, without all the nonsense that life makes us believe that we're stuck with.
And that's why, by the way, Romans 12 says, don't conform anymore.
You've got the mind of Christ, so don't conform to the world as if you have
to think like like they do, but rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind, okay?
All these verses, if you start thinking about it in terms of mind change, start to make sense.
So let's finish. 1 Corinthians 2, 15 and 16, those who are spiritual can evaluate
all things, but they themselves cannot be evaluated by others for who can know the Lord's thoughts,
who knows enough to teach him, but we understand these things for we have the mind of Christ.
So I just want to remind you, as we get into the math of Ephesians 4 here on
Theology Thursday, the mathematics of mind change, I want you to remember that
you have the mind of Christ.
The big lie is that you have abundance, but the enemy wants to steal and kill and destroy it.
So you have this life that you can live, and you're on the way to this hopeful
place. You've got a future in front of you.
That's good. But sometimes we get stuck living as if that's not true.
We get the steal, kill, and destroy part, even though we actually have the abundance part.
We get the confused mind of the world, even though we actually have the mind of Christ.
So check out Ephesians 4.
We're going to read 12 through 19. I'm going to read it first.
This is New Living Translation. Any of the translations are great.
I just picked this one because of the way it words a couple of things. So check it out.
Ephesians 4.12, their responsibility is to equip God's people to do His work
and build up the church, the body of Christ.
This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge
of God's Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the fruit,
I'm sorry, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ,
measuring up to to the full and complete standard of Christ.
Then we will no longer be immature like children.
We won't be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching.
We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth.
Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more
like Christ, who is the head of His body, the church.
He makes the whole body fit together perfectly, As each part does its own special
work, it helps the other parts grow so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.
With the Lord's authority, I say this, live no longer. In NIV, he says, I insist on it.
Okay, so with the Lord's authority, I say this and I insist on it.
So Paul's basically snapping his fingers here and saying, look in my eyes, I insist on this.
With the Lord's authority, I say this, live no longer as the Gentiles do,
for they are hopelessly confused.
NIV says they are in the futility of their thinking.
Don't live like the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking,
for they are hopelessly confused. Their minds are full of darkness.
They wander far from the life God gives because they have closed their minds
and hardened their hearts against Him.
They have no sense of shame. They live for lustful pleasure and eagerly practice
every kind of impurity. Now, don't make a mistake here.
This is not saying that people who don't know the Lord are inherently evil and
horrible and we should hate them and all of that. That's not what it's saying.
Their hearts are darkened. Their minds are full of futile thinking.
And they have been tricked by the steal, kill, and destroy part of John 10.10.
And they don't have the mind of Christ. So they don't even know that they are missing something.
And that, my friend, is where you come in.
Your job in this world, and in addition to finding your way to heaven,
is to shine a light on the path and show people the difference between how a resilient,
robust person who knows how to operate on their own mind, who knows how to connect
their mind to their spirit, who knows how to connect the spirit to their body,
that person lives a life of hope that becomes a beacon of hope for other people.
The opposite is to have your mind confused, to be blown around,
to be tossed about by every time a new thing comes along.
You're told you're supposed to believe this or follow that or do this or accept
that or okay that or wear this on your T-shirt.
Or you're supposed to sign up for this or believe that or stop believing that
or hate this person or love that person.
Whatever it is that culture tells you, you're blown around every time the wind
changes because you don't remember that you have the mind of Christ.
And if you don't have Him, you can have Him. You can say yes to Him,
and He'll give you a new mind.
So let's look at some math equations, okay?
Ephesians 4, F plus K equals M. If you're taking notes in your Bible,
write F plus K equals M, okay?
Verse 13, this will continue until we come to such unity in our faith and knowledge
of God's Son so that we will be mature. So, F, faith, K, knowledge, equals M, maturity.
He says he wants to continue to grow and build up and connect and create a church
and a body of people who are mature because they have faith and they have knowledge.
I'm always trying to help you see the ways that science and faith smash together.
Why? Because science is how we acquire knowledge.
I'm talking about knowledge of the world, knowledge of how things work.
Knowledge of how God created us, knowledge of how God made these things when
he said, Fiat lus, and let there be light, and when he created and crafted us,
and all of that, and how he put the galaxy together.
I want you to have knowledge, and I also want you to have faith.
And when you smash those two things together, Jesus says, Paul says here in
Ephesians 4, you get maturity.
And when you have maturity, he says in the next verse down, Now,
when you have maturity, then you can measure up to the complete standard of Christ.
So M, maturity, equals SOC, standard of Christ.
What does Jesus want for you in your life? Does he want you to have millions of dollars?
No, not unless he's called you to be a financial steward to help other people.
Does he want you to have a life that's pain-free? No, he told you in John 16,
33 that you're going to have trouble in this world. Does he want you to have abundance?
Yes. Yes. And how do you get there? How do you get to an abundant place in your
life where you're bulletproof, where you're not a crasher anymore,
where you're able to stand firm when life gets hard?
How? By becoming mature in faith and knowledge.
And that's His standard for you. He wants you to
grow up and mature and become solid and resilient and hopeful and helpful So
they can develop this desire to have his mind and call him into their own life
and have another person find the way out of the steal and kill and destroy part.
So the standard of Christ is that you grow up. He says it just like this,
the complete standard of Christ. Then we will no longer be immature.
So what's the opposite of immaturity? Maturity. We won't be tossed and blown
about by every wind of new teaching.
Why? Because we're going to be grown up, right?
So the standard of Christ is maturity, to grow up, to be stable,
to be able to handle hard things.
So SOC equals G plus S. Yes, the standard of Christ is grown up and stable instead
of immature and infantile and unstable and blown around every time society changes
or tells us we need to think or feel or do something different.
We're grown up. We have the standard of Christ and we're mature and we're resilient and we're solid.
Okay, does that mean that we never hurt? No, of course not. It means that when
the pressure's on, we know how far we're going to fall. We're going to fall
to the preparation to how far we built the treatment plan of prehab into our
heart so that we're ready to handle the hard things that we know are going to come along.
So the standard of Christ is that you grow up and you mature and you're stable.
So we're growing up and stable. In my work as a neurosurgeon,
I see a lot of people, and it's very sad,
who have a child that's afflicted by something like juvenile hydrocephalus or
cerebral palsy or cerebral anoxic injury or something that has caused their
brain not to be able to develop.
And these poor people have a child that's never going to grow up,
that's never going to be able to develop and mature and have the mind of an
adult and become independent. and these people know that someday they're going
to die and their child is going to still require care.
And it's really hard and really sad. And if you're in that situation,
I'm sorry, and we'll pray for you.
That's a difficult situation because it breaks your heart that your child's
not going to get to grow and mature and fall in love and get married and all
those things because their mind is unable to mature.
And I'm just telling you, Ephesians 4 here would suggest that Jesus' heart is
broken when we fail to grow up and mature.
He wants us to grow into His standard, which is mature and solid and connected
to truth and connected to faith and full of knowledge so that we don't get blown around.
And so growing up in stable, G plus S equals that we have an ability to speak
the truth in love. Listen to this.
Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won't be tossed and blown
about by every wind of new teaching.
You get that? We won't be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching.
We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth.
Instead, we will speak the truth in love.
What does Jesus want Christians to do when culture calls us to something that's
not in accordance with His will?
He wants us to speak the truth in love.
To not hold our tongues, to stand up for what's right, to stand up for what's
true, to stand up for the unborn, to stand up for those who are overlooked and abused and cast aside.
Not to accept behaviors that are harmful or sinful, but to point people towards
the truth because that, as we're going to learn in a minute,
is where real happiness and real joy comes from.
Not from being accepted, not from having everybody say, okay,
yeah, I accept your way of looking looking at things and I'll honor you and
accept you and all of that.
No, we don't. We accept people, but we don't accept sin and we don't accept
faulty ideology and harmful thinking because that's not love.
Love is to help people find their way to the mind of Christ because that is
where you develop abundance. That's where you develop maturity.
That's where you develop true happiness and joy is by being connected to Him.
The Bible says, delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Not pray that he'll give you what you want, but become like him.
Get your mind like his, and he'll give you the desires of your heart because
your heart will be like his heart.
And he'll show you what really matters. So being able to speak the truth in
love is what it means to be grown up and stable.
And speaking the truth in love equals MLC, more like Christ,
plus HGL, healthy, growing in love.
It says that we're supposed to be able to make the whole body fit together perfectly.
That's what he's trying to do as the great physician. He's building a body that
will work perfectly in spite of all the hard things that life throws at us.
And listen to this in 16. As each part does its own special work,
it helps the other parts grow so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love.
So you got F plus K equals M. Faith plus knowledge equals maturity.
And maturity equals SOC, the standard of Christ. What does he want for us?
To grow up, to become mature, to become solid, to become resilient.
So standard of Christ equals G plus S, grown up and stable. And when we're grown
up and stable, G plus S equals STL, the ability to speak the truth in love.
And STL equals MLC plus HGL, more like Christ and healthy, growing in love.
And that is how we avoid the counterpoint, which is found in 17.
With the Lord's authority, I say this, I insist on it. Look in my eyes,
friend. Look in my eyes, Paul says. I insist on this.
Don't live anymore like the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking.
Remember here, Gentile means, in this context, it's not Jewish,
but what Paul means is not Christian, not saved, people who don't have the mind of Christ.
So there's people that have Christ's mind, that's you, if you believe Him.
And if you don't, I'm begging you, friend, this is how you change your mind.
This is how you change your life.
This is how you do spiritual brain surgery and become healthier and feel better and be happier.
This is it, right here. Here, "...live no longer as the Gentiles do,
for they are hopelessly confused.".
You don't want to be hopelessly confused. What happens when you become hopelessly
confused, when you have futile thinking,
he goes on to say, is that you start chasing things that you think will make
you happy that have no power to make you happy.
And you become more and more convinced that, well, that didn't happen.
Sleeping with that person didn't help me.
Having that drug didn't help me. Drinking alcohol didn't help me.
Gambling didn't help me. Shopping didn't help me. following the latest fashion
trend, spending all this money didn't help me.
And I keep trying different things and I don't feel happy.
Why don't I feel happy? And then what happens? The SKD starts to happen.
The enemy steals and kills and destroys your abundance because he keeps telling
you, you need to chase after things that cannot ever make you happy.
And Jesus comes along and gives us the whole sermon on the Mount about the Beatitudes.
All the things that he says will will make you happy. The blessed are statements
in Matthew 5, go read them.
They actually translate, blessed actually translates makarios,
the word in Greek, makarios actually means happy.
Jesus says, what will make you happy is to live like me.
What will make you happy is to think about what I think about.
What will make you happy is to get your mind like mine.
And by the way, you already have it. You just have been tricked into thinking
that you don't, and you keep forgetting that you do.
So he doesn't say in 17, he doesn't say stop being a Gentile because you're already saved.
You're already not a Gentile and you already have the mind of Christ.
He says, stop living like you're hopelessly confused.
Stop living like you have futile thinking because you don't have to anymore
because you've done spiritual brain surgery.
I've swapped out your old mind and I've given you mine and you can live like
you have my mind and that will change everything for you, friend.
He says stop thinking that things or people or better circumstances or more
money in your bank account or a better biopsy result will make you happy because it won't.
What will make you happy is changing your mind to think like he does.
To live like he does, to smash faith and knowledge together in that super collider
like we talked about yesterday.
And the energy release is your ability to move your mind back towards the mind
of Christ because you already have it.
So that's a little spiritual brain surgery today on the mathematics of mind change.
And I love to study the Bible like that. I like to pick out little memorization
tools and little math equations and little things to write down that are easy to to remember.
So that's the set for today. They're in the show notes, by the way.
And you can make your own.
And if you're reading in a different translation from not the New Living Translation,
if you're reading in NIV or ESV or King James or whatever, then you'll have
to make your own equations because the words might not be exactly the same.
But these ideas are just there. I'm just telling you there's a way to study
the Bible where you say, this is that Lectio Divina idea. idea.
Chew on it. Think about it. Memorize it. Write stuff down. Talk about it.
Listen to podcasts about it.
Find a worship song that reminds you to think about it, to take it deeper.
Do your abide practice and get in there and approach him and breathe with him
and invite him in and depend on him and experience him and then stop contemplating
and start operating and take it to the next level.
Assess honestly where you are and where you think he wants you to be and believe
that he can get you you there and then pick up the knife and make an incision.
Like, look, we're in Lent now, right?
We're in the 40 days leading up to the resurrection.
Get in there and cut some stuff out of your life. Make an incision, start the operation.
And then over the next 40 days, go deeper, deepen that exposure,
find those tumors and find those problems in your thinking and find those areas
where you have futility in your thoughts and in your behavior and find places
where you're numbing yourself and find places where you're not living in abundance
and get after changing them and then expect a good outcome.
Believe that if you apply good principles and good truth and prayer and meditation
and faith and Bible study and good things to think about that God will come
through and he'll keep his promises to you because my friend, he will.
And today, I just wanted to give you some math so you can get in there and be
a nerd like me and chew on these scriptures and find a way to change your mind
and find a way to change your life here on Theology Thursday,
because I've got good news for you, friend. You can start today.
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, or 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.