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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 hope you're doing well. I'm Doctor. Lee Warren and I am here with you on the very first
Dr. Lee Warren:episode of the spiritual brain surgery podcast. I'm so grateful to have you listening. We are starting a brand new thing. I've been podcasting since 2014. Always just the Doctor.
Dr. Lee Warren:Lee Warren podcast or actually right at the very first I called it you start today with Doctor. Lee Warren. And we're branching off. We're gonna break spiritual brain surgery into its very own podcast. And today is the first episode.
Dr. Lee Warren:On Tuesday, you'll get the first full length episode with Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett to talk about their incredible new book, The Deconstruction of Christianity. But today, I just wanna give you a high level overview of what we're here for and what we're about. I've spent a lot of time in my life thinking about what I believe and investigating what I believe. And I think it's a valuable practice to take a hard look at the things that we think we know, the things that we think we believe. Be prepared to give a defense of them to have a good idea of the moving parts of our belief system, whether that's spiritual for you or not.
Dr. Lee Warren:Understanding that you operate under a worldview because everybody does and understand you operate under a belief system, things that you think you know and things that you think you believe will help you to be prepared when life gets hard because it always does to be able to know where you're gonna land and how those things that you think you know and the things that you think you believe hold up under pressure because there's going to be pressure. And so we're gonna take a look at those kinds of things. I wanna give you a few scriptures that are kind of our foundational scriptures for spiritual brain surgery. We will be bringing back all of the Tuesdays with Tata episodes as archived material for the paid subscribers. If you are a paid subscriber to my work, then you'll have access to all of that through the Substack app very soon.
Dr. Lee Warren:And if you're not consider joining us, there's multiple ways to support this work. One of which is to pray for us, share, like, subscribe. It's really important with a brand new podcast to subscribe wherever you listen to the podcast. Make sure that you are out there punching that subscribe button so that the algorithms of these podcast providers know that there are people listening. That'll help other people find the show.
Dr. Lee Warren:The more you like it, review it, rate it, follow it, subscribe to it, the more it'll help other people find it. And we're gonna do some work that will change the arc of people's eternal destinies and improve their abundance and resilience while we're here in this life. That's the mission here. Okay? We're trying to pull the dual nature of our spiritual walk.
Dr. Lee Warren:Number one is make sure we know where we're going, that we get there, that with our Christian hope is based on something true and real. And number two, believe what Jesus said in John ten ten that the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy, but he came that might have abundance in our lives now. That's what we're after. So spiritual brains are just going to be a high level and a deep granular look at the things we believe, the things we think we know, the worldview that we have, and we're gonna do some hopefully incredible and also pretty fun work to help ourselves become healthier and feel better and be happier by changing our minds about the things that we believe and understanding them. So we're gonna get after that in just a second.
Dr. Lee Warren:We have had a little debate over the intro. Now, it sounds like, it wasn't really a contest of how we're gonna have the intro, but we did have, request for listener feedback. And the people have spoken. And there's some people that liked the softer, quieter music, but the people have resoundingly spoken that the new intro that Lisa and I wrote together is the winner. And, you know, if you're not into upbeat music, just hit that fast forward button twice and get one minute into this, and you'll be past the intro music.
Dr. Lee Warren:So everybody else ready for some spiritual brain surgery. Let's get after it.
Dr. Lee Warren: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, doctor 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 gonna do the hard work to find the answers.
Dr. Lee Warren: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.
Dr. Lee Warren:Let's get after it. Hey. In 1865, a physicist named James Clerk Maxwell wrote a bunch of equations that turned out to be the unifying equations that united the understanding of electricity and magnetism. Now, what does it have to do with spiritual brain surgery? Not directly anything, but I just wanna give you an idea.
Dr. Lee Warren:Maxwell wrote those equations that later on became the inspiration for Einstein's general and special theories of relativity that really were some of the founding ideas behind quantum physics and cosmology and the understanding of gravity and time and space and how the universe is physically constructed. And Maxwell was the guy that inspired Einstein. In fact, there's a famous letter that Einstein wrote when someone asked him, hey, do you stand on the shoulders of Newton? Because Isaac Newton was the original guy that came up with the equations that describe gravity and Einstein's work with relativity really overturned Newton for the first time in several hundred years. Newton was sort of dethroned by Einstein.
Dr. Lee Warren:And Einstein said, no, I don't stand on Newton's shoulders. I stand on Maxwell's shoulders. Maxwell was the guy that inspired Einstein with his incredible work on magnetism and electricity. Why am I telling you that? Well, because this is a little known secret.
Dr. Lee Warren:It's not that little known, but nobody's ever gonna talk about it in the media. The fact is science, the actual academic pursuit of science actually started as a way to investigate the things that God has made. And guys like Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler and Maxwell and all these guys that were starting out as experimental scientists. The idea originally was to try to investigate creation and bring honor and glory to God by helping people understand what God has done. Maxwell was the first professor of the Cavendish experimental physics laboratory at Cambridge, which has gone on to produce some of the world's great breakthroughs in physics.
Dr. Lee Warren:And over the door of the Cavendish lab, Maxwell inscribed Psalm one eleven two. Great are the works of the Lord. They are pondered by all who delight in them. He actually carved it. It was carved in the door in King James, which is the works of the Lord are great, sought out of them all that have pleasure therein.
Dr. Lee Warren:I like the NIV. Great are the works of the Lord. They are pondered by all who delight in them. And my friend, here on Spiritual Brain Surgery, we are going to ponder the works of the Lord. We're gonna look at the amazing things that God has done and we're gonna tear into what we believe so that we can make sure we understand it well enough to explain it to somebody else who might be asking some big questions like we are.
Dr. Lee Warren:Okay? So we're gonna look at things like theology, which is the study of the nature of God. I I grew up in the church. I was baptized at age 11, raised by incredibly strong Christian parents, my my mom and dad, and Lisa and I. In fact, just last week, sat on my parents' couch in Dallas and had an amazing conversation about the Bible and scripture, beliefs, and all all kinds of doctrinal things.
Dr. Lee Warren:It was just a wonderful, wonderful conversation. And I'm so grateful for the way I was raised. I can still remember I would get up in the morning and wake up early and walk down the hall and my mom and dad's bedroom was to the right of the hallway from my bedroom that I shared with my older brother Rob. And then I would walk down the hall and my my mother would always be awake with a cup of coffee. She liked to she would make her bed and then she would sit on her bed and read her Bible and drink a cup of coffee.
Dr. Lee Warren:And the first thing I would see is my mom sitting on her bed. I'd go in and give her a hug and say good morning. Then I walked down the hall and it passed my sister Laura's room on the left, my sister Michelle's room on the right, and up at the end of the hall, there was a staircase going down. It's a nineteen seventies kind of split level home. And there was another staircase going up and up those stairs with my dad's office.
Dr. Lee Warren:And my dad would always be without fail, no matter what time I got up, he would already be up. And he'd be at his desk reading his Bible and drinking a cup of coffee. And on his desk, he would have numerous books. Some of those books were things like Strong's Concordance of Bible words, which was basically like a thesaurus. You could look up every word in the Bible and you could research and see where the Greek and Hebrew origins of that word were and where other places in the Bible where where that word or similar words were found.
Dr. Lee Warren:And so you could use it to sort of chain your way through the scripture and learn what a word really means and really pull out of it the understanding and depth of what you were trying to study. So it's fascinating. Strong's Concordance. He had another book called Vaughn's Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words. There's just incredible resources that my dad had and he did that because he was trying to make sure that he knew what he was reading and he understood the text at a deep level.
Dr. Lee Warren:So that's theology, but it's also exegesis. So theology is studying how God is, who God is, what your beliefs are. Exegesis is this critical explanation or interpretation of a text. We you're digging into the word. What does it mean when God said let there be light?
Dr. Lee Warren:What does that mean? What does it mean when he says whatever he says? What does it mean when he says you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength? What does that mean? That's exegesis.
Dr. Lee Warren:Okay. What's it mean? What's it for? How do I understand it? How do I extract the meaning from the text?
Dr. Lee Warren:And exegesis is different than hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation. So you have a philosophical way that you approach the text. So exegesis is explaining, interpreting, trying to critically examine it and not bring any bias to it. Hermeneutics is related to another word called eisegesis e I s e g e s I s.
Dr. Lee Warren:Eisegesis is this idea that we all bring something to something that we read. We we read the Bible, but we also interpret the Bible and the interpretation is based on our history, our upbringing, our biases, our fears, our concerns, our our philosophy. That's hermeneutics and isages. And we need to understand that when we read something, we have to be careful not to filter it through a set of biases or agendas or politics or anything else. We're trying to read the word for what it actually says.
Dr. Lee Warren:Okay. There's also something called a heuristic, which is these little rules of thumb that we all have. Oh, when I see this, I do that. I think this, I behave that way. Heuristics are little rules that we all carry around in our worldview and we have to be aware of them so that we make sure that we're not interpreting scripture according to some rules that we put on how we arrive at decisions about that scripture.
Dr. Lee Warren:So in spiritual brain surgery, we're gonna look at all those things and moving parts, and we'll have guests to help us understand things like apologetics as we're gonna do on Tuesday, where Alyssa Childers and Tim Barnett are gonna help us look at this movement called deconstruction. And they're gonna help us develop a faithful defense of the gospel against some things that we're hearing in culture now. Has your faith been colonized? Is it is it wrong that the Europeans took the gospel to certain parts of the world? All those kinds of things that you hear now in this deconstruction movement.
Dr. Lee Warren:And Alicia Childers and Tim Barnett are gonna help us talk about deconstruction. That's the the service, the the science, the movement, the the discipline of apologetics is this argument or writing and justification of something. So you need to have some apologetics tools in your heart. If you're gonna say that you're a Christian and you believe that the hope of Christ is the only hope that people have to avoid, you know, being lost, but also to have an abundant life and have a hope the hope of a future. If you believe that, then you need to be able to defend it and you need to be able to help other people see that it's true and that there's a reason and a valid, belief system that you have.
Dr. Lee Warren:There's a reason for it and then it's legitimate and then you can argue for it. If somebody says, why do you believe the Bible is true and you don't have a way to explain it, then you're not gonna be in a very effective witness. Right? So those are the targets that we're getting at. We're gonna look deeply at theology and apologetics and exegesis and hermeneutics and isegesis and heuristics and we're gonna do all that in a really fun way and we're gonna try to become less self directed when we get into the Bible and more spirit directed and I believe that neuroscience plays into that.
Dr. Lee Warren:The way our brains are constructed in the way that our minds direct our brains influences and has everything to do with how we read and interpret scripture and how we believe and what we feel and whom we're challenged, what we fall back to. The neuroscience is all related and relevant to that. So I don't believe that happiness makes people happy. If happiness is this pursuit of things in your life that you think will make you feel good or give you value or make you feel respected. The problem is that if you don't have the power source, which is I believe the creator, the great physician, the designer, he gives us the things that can actually make us happy, satisfies, heal us, make lasting change in our lives.
Dr. Lee Warren:That's what's gonna really make people happy. So understanding your belief system because there are no second generation Christians. I can't do work to change your mind. I can't make you be saved. Your parents' faith won't get you to heaven and your parents' faith won't give you tools to live a life of abundance.
Dr. Lee Warren:You have to do it. God doesn't have grandchildren, the saying goes. He only has children. So each of us have a responsibility then to understand what we believe, be able to explain it and defend it, and to be able to draw out of the word what God wants us to see in the word. Because the word of God, my friend, is the only book that you don't just read, it reads you too.
Dr. Lee Warren:And so, when you're going things like suffering, you want to be able to find meaning and purpose and scripture will help you get there. When you're having doubt, you want to be able to find faith and hope again. Scripture will help you get there. You want to understand when you're hurting that science and scripture and reason can reinforce your faith. And we can actually have a valid reason to believe the things that we say that we believe.
Dr. Lee Warren:So here's some scripture for you. Hebrews four twelve. The word of God is living and active. It's sharper than any two edged sword, pierces to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and of marrow, of discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. The word of God is living and active.
Dr. Lee Warren:It's an MRI scanner that scans you back when you read it. You think you're reading it, it's reading you too. And the weird thing about the Bible is it's gonna start nudging you when you read the word. It's gonna start saying, hey, Beth. Hey, Joe.
Dr. Lee Warren:Hey, Dan. Don't you think you ought to change the way you think about this? As you're reading the word, it's gonna say, hey, you're reading that about what these guys did to those guys and haven't you done that too? Or don't you hold that attitude? Don't you need to investigate?
Dr. Lee Warren:Don't you need to do a little brain surgery and get rid of that thought process? The Bible will do that to you and in you and for you. There's a practice called Lectio Divina. It's an ancient practice of a way to interpret and read scripture where you you don't just read words, but you meditate on them. You chew on them.
Dr. Lee Warren:You hold them in your heart all day. You kind of like a cow works to cud. You just constantly keep a particular scripture in mind. Memorize it. Toss it around.
Dr. Lee Warren:Think about it as a scripture from Deuteronomy that says, hey, these things I'm writing to you today, write them down, put them on your forehead, write them on a wristband, put them on your doorframe, teach them to your kids, talk about them when you're in the city and when you're in the country and when you're walking down the road. Talk about them, think about them, feel. That's like your divinity. It's just keeping the word in your mind, in your mouth. These words will always be on my lips, the scripture says.
Dr. Lee Warren:And the idea is you can get into a story in the Bible and you can pretend like in your mind, like zoom out like you have a camera and then see yourself in every different position, every character in the story. So when Jesus has given the Sermon on the Mount, think about it from his perspective. Like if you were him and you were teaching these people and you needed them to understand how how he used the words to try to influence and help people. And then zoom back out and be one of the disciples hearing Jesus as rabbi, this teacher that's so different from all the other teachers that you've never heard anything like this. You've never heard anybody talk like that and and listen to the words fresh fall on you in a new way.
Dr. Lee Warren:You've never heard anybody speak like that before. Now zoom out and be part of a person in the crowd. And you've just seen this miracle happen in the bread and fish have fed this entire group. And what would you think? And what would it sound like to hear these words that are so different and understand that Jesus is raising the bar?
Dr. Lee Warren:Like, wow. He's not just saying I can't kill somebody. He's saying I can't hate anybody either or I'm I'm just as guilty. Like, the the sin in my mind is as bad as the sin in my heart of my hands. Like, what I think about becomes what I do and what I think about is just as evil as actually doing it in my head.
Dr. Lee Warren:If you hear that for the first time when Jesus says it, then you start to understand holy cow. He's telling me that I need to control my mind. I need to think different thoughts. If I wanna have a better life, if I wanna be a more holy, more acceptable person to God, I have to clean up my brain and my mind and as much or more than I need to wash my hands. Does that make sense?
Dr. Lee Warren:So that's Lake Tio Divina. This multiple perspectives type of Bible study. Okay. Now, here's a few scriptures for you. Second Timothy one seven says this, God didn't give you a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
Dr. Lee Warren:We're going to develop sound minds. We're going to understand how our minds and our brains work. We're gonna apply that stuff to our understanding of scripture and our belief systems. Okay? Jesus is Matthew twenty two thirty seven.
Dr. Lee Warren:Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. And Mark adds that Jesus said and your strength. So we're going to learn how to wholeheartedly and with a sound mind love our Lord our God and what that looks like. How do we get our thinking right And how we use our mind to build better brains so our brains become more like Jesus's brain because your mind changes your brain structurally. So if you think about Jesus having a life where he never committed a thought sin, where he never let himself go down a negative rabbit hole, where he never let himself become overwhelmed with emotion, but he always was in charge and control of his thinking and his responses, then that means he had structural changes in his brain because he made better synapses than we do.
Dr. Lee Warren:What you're doing, you're getting better at it. He was always getting better at thinking properly. So his brain looked different than our brains did. His brain looked different than Einstein's brain did. So if we get our thinking better, our brains will progressively become more structurally like the brain of Jesus and more wired to be successful in having a sound thought life, which leads to a better actual life because thoughts become things.
Dr. Lee Warren:So those are kind of baseline scriptures. Okay. Psalm one eleven one eleven two is this idea that great is the things that that God has done. Greater the works of the Lord. They are pondered by all who delight in them.
Dr. Lee Warren:Mark twenty two thirty and thirty one, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. Second Timothy one six through eight to remember this idea. God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. And then my favorite, so Romans 12 is kind of our self brain surgery chapter and we always talk about Romans twelve two. Don't allow the world to mold you in its own image but be transformed from the inside out by renewing your mind.
Dr. Lee Warren:That's twelve two. But what's twelve one? Check this out. I love the voice translation here. Brothers and sisters, in light of all I have shared with you about God's mercies, I urge you to offer your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice to God, a sacred offering that brings him pleasure.
Dr. Lee Warren:This is your reasonable essential worship. Your reasonable essential worship. Offer your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice. I hope I've demonstrated to you that your body includes your brain and it includes your mind and you are to offer that as a reasonable essential act of worship to your creator. That then he leads into verse two, transform your mind, renew your mind.
Dr. Lee Warren:That's an act of worship, my friend. We get our thinking under control. We're giving God glory and we're looking at the things that he has made and delighting in them. That science is faith. It's all smashed together and that my friend is what we're gonna do in spiritual brain surgery.
Dr. Lee Warren:I didn't make a new outro for spiritual brain surgery because the one that we have for the regular Doctor. Lee Warren podcast is so appropriate here. I just want to remind you as we get into spiritual brain surgery that you can't change your life until you change your mind. And my friend, the good news is you can start today.
Dr. Lee Warren:Hey. Thanks for listening. The Doctor 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 audiobooks.
Dr. Lee Warren: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/prayer, w lee warren m d Com / prayer. And go to my website and sign up for the newsletter, self brain surgery, every Sunday since 02/2014, helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus countries around the world.
Dr. Lee Warren:I'm doctor Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, Freddie, you can't change your life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.