How shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word. Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. Jesus prayed to the Father, sanctify them in truth. Thy word is truth. For the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever. So before we get started, we'll have a few moments of silent prayer. This is an opportunity for those who need to get back in fellowship to confess sin. And that allows us the opportunity to refocus our thinking upon the Word of God and the grace of God, and to be spiritually prepared for the study of His Word this evening. So we'll have a few moments of silent prayer, then I will open in prayer. Let's pray. Our Father, we're thankful we can come before your throne of grace this evening. And we can bring the fact that our nation needs a drastic shift. We need new leaders. We need a focus on establishment truth. And we need leaders who are grounded in your word at every level, from the local level all the way up to the national level. We pray that you would continue to raise up men and women who are who are trained in the scriptures and who understand truth and that they will not Not compromise truth and we pray that especially during this election season season that you will raise up Someone who can be elected and can lead us in the right direction as a nation Now father we pray for us that we might recognize that the ultimate issues in life are not political. They're not economic They do not have to do with the details of this life, they have to do with the details of our spiritual life. And that nothing is more critical, nothing is more important than our focus upon you and learning your Word and learning to think as Christ thinks with the Word of God. And that we need to make that the most significant priority in our life. Now, Father, as we study your Word today, help us to think through these critical issues we'll be addressing. Help us to understand how to grow that we may glorify You in Christ's name, Amen. Okay, what I want to talk about tonight as part of a little review in terms of the spiritual skills that I started last week, adding some material that I've not developed before on spiritual focus. Focusing on the Word of God. We talk about occupation with Christ, but if we back things up in terms of our understanding of those spiritual skills to doctrinal orientation. Doctrinal orientation is really a focus on the Word. And that's what I want to talk a little bit about tonight, go back and develop that point just a little bit more, and going into some of the Scriptures related to meditating on Scripture. And when we get there, you'll understand why I'm bringing this out today. But it's trying to understand Phase two of the Christian life, the spiritual life, spiritual advance. And there is a doctrine, and we've come face to face with it several times in 1 Peter. It is a doctrine that is often affirmed by Christians and evangelicals and professors and seminaries and doctrinal statements from churches from one end of the country to the other. But it is rarely understood. And that is the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. And the doctrine of sufficiency of Scripture tells us that God has given us everything we need to grow to spiritual maturity through His Word. And we're all going to face various obstacles, various challenges. Some of them are external circumstances. Some of them are internal. They have to do with the trends and the challenges of our own sin nature. And everybody's sin nature is different, and everybody has a sin nature, and that nasty little corrupt thing that is inside of us starts affecting us, corrupting our thinking, corrupting, I believe it corrupts our brains, it has a, there's a physical as well as a spiritual dimension to it, and it just starts working the moment we come out of the womb. And by the time we become volitionally conscious, which is before we become God conscious, by the time we become volitionally conscious, we've already made a lot of choices. Just because we weren't conscious that we were making volitional decisions doesn't mean we're not making volitional decisions. And those volitional decisions have already, by the time we are two or three years old, have already ingrained in our in our brain, in our mental function, certain pathways that just get reinforced over the rest of our life. But the Word of God tells us that not only can we change, but that's the hope of the Christian life, that's the goal of the Christian life, is that we can truly overcome a lot of things that today people don't think that the Word of God is really, really sufficient to cover. And so I want to talk about that because What we're covering in Peter, as we go through Peter, we may go through portions of Peter later on a lot quicker than I'm going through this section, because this section lays the groundwork to be able to address those things later on. We'll go through the spiritual life, and so in the spiritual life, the means of growth is through testing, through facing certain challenges and then utilizing the skills to meet those challenges so that we grow, as Peter will say at the end of his second epistle in 2 Peter 3, 18, that we grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. And that should be understood as an instrumental phrase in both places. We grow by means of the grace and by means of the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. So what we're looking at here is that period between phase one when we're saved and we're born again and we're a brand new baby, believer, and we have to grow to spiritual maturity, which is when we become usable, truly usable in terms of ministry and serving the Lord. Not that we can't as a spiritual infant or adolescent, but our ministry is maximized when we hit spiritual maturity, and I've said this for years and years and years, and you know this if you're a parent or if you were a kid, which covers everybody. I don't know if there's anybody here that didn't go through childhood. Maybe one or two exceptions, but no, I think everybody here went through childhood. Gene did not, no. But children reach a certain age, you've all seen this, and they say, I want to be treated like an adult. Nobody wants to be treated like a baby when they're not two or three years old. They want to be treated like an adult because we understand that life occurs when we are adults. That's where we have freedom, and you usually don't think about responsibility, but you have responsibility. That's where you can really do things. And you're not under the control of your parents anymore, but you can go and develop yourself and go do things. And as we recognize that, we realize that life is not, but in the spiritual realm what happens is people want to stay spiritual babies and stay in spiritual diapers because they don't, they're afraid of spiritual responsibility. And I think that's really, really true for a lot of people. They don't want to become, or they don't understand it. It's that, that, that picture of spiritual productiveness and maturity is not painted for them in a way where it's a real dynamic that they should be, they should be pursuing. So this is what's going on in this part of 1 Peter. It's parallel to what's going on in the introduction in James. So just reviewing, Peter is talking about the fact that we need to have joy in the midst of these trials, and even though we're grieved by them, even though they're difficult, even though they seem overwhelming, What it does is it refines our faith, our understanding of doctrine, and our application of doctrine so that the result is more precious than gold. There's nothing that we can spend our life on, whether it's entertainment, or the pursuit of academic excellence, or the pursuit of professional excellence, or the pursuit of security, or money, or any of the other things, nothing is more valuable than what transpires in our soul as our faith is tested. And that's just exciting if we can understand that, because this life is not even as much as a drop in the bucket compared to eternity. And what we take with us out of this life into eternity is that which is refined through this testing process. So when we understand it, we can do what Peter talks about, which is rejoicing in the midst of these fiery trials. So we need to understand why the Bible talks about these fiery trials. And last time I talked about the doctrine of suffering for blessing and the time before, but we missed last week because I was up in Preston for their 200th anniversary of Preston City Bible Church. So I just want to hit a few things, a few of the introductory points that I started with. And I'm going to add some things to the second and third point. We all go through tests, first point. Every believer goes through tests. These tests are designed to train us. There's a word that is used in the scripture, we'll get to it a little later, it's called Paiduo. And it's a word related to children, and it has to do with training, with discipline. It is the work that a parent is supposed to do. And parental work is so important, I believe, because those first five years to 10 years in a child's life, you're ingraining in them the ability to be self-disciplined, to control their emotions, to control their behavior, to control their actions, and that becomes a building block for success in life. And it sets, and if you do that as a parent, and you do that wisely, then what that does is, in terms of just normal human viewpoint procedures in life, it prepares them for the discipline that will be developed when they become a believer. And so that's an important foundation. So every believer goes through these tests, and each test for the believer is an opportunity to choose either to obey God or not obey God. And what do we call this? We call this volition. Volition, volition, volition. Ultimately, everything comes down to that first divine institution. D.I. number one is human responsibility. Human responsibility means that we are accountable to God for the decisions that we make. So are you accountable to God for the decisions you made when you were two years old? Are you accountable to God for the decisions you make when you were five years old? Yes, and are the decisions that you made as a two-year-old and as a five-year-old, do they have consequences? And they're going to vary depending on the decisions that we make. And we all made a lot of really bad decisions because guess what dominated our soul when we were two, three, four, five, six, on up? It was our sin nature. Because as unbelievers, the only nature that dominates is a sin nature. The only nature we have is a sin nature. Everything's corrupt. So all we're doing until the moment we're saved is just generating these wrong, carnal, sinful, corrupt habits. That's what we used to call them, and they were called that way out of classical theology, just bad habits. And those bad habits created certain mental pathways that we have to overcome later on. Now, we get tested in all these different areas. People test and authority test, system test, moral test, thought test, emotional test. And we have an option where we either try to handle everything on our own power, which is the bottom cycle in the red there, the sin nature control. And all that does is lead to more and more self-destructive and self-corrupting thinking and behavior. We look around a civilization that is in spiritual regression, which is what we have in America, and we look around and we start saying, well, where in the world did all of this criminality come from? Well, let's take it out of the United States. Let's just say, okay, we're not going to talk about the United States, because the United States still has this residual impact by the grace of God from the focus on Scripture of our forebears two or three hundred years ago. Isn't that remarkable how the Word of God has continued to provide a stability even though the vast majority of the nation has rejected it? But let's look at some wonderful places to live. Nigeria, India, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, especially under Stalin, China after the Mao revolution. Living in those places is just, existence is miserable. You've got to live in some kind of, develop some kind of fantasy escapism to try to deal with it or go into drugs or Lord knows what else, just to try to handle the absolute misery of day-to-day existence, the lack of comforts. And you come to the United States and look at what we've got, all the luxuries, all the comforts, everything that we have, and why do we have those? We have those because of one thing, the Bible. The impact of the Bible on Western civilization made Western civilization great and developed the science and the technology because the founding scientists of modern science were all Bible You go back to the 17th century, the 18th century, 19th century, up until Darwin came along, and about 95% of them were Bible believers. People like Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton wrote more about the Bible than he did about science. He wrote commentaries. He wrote theologies. Those men were true Renaissance men. Now, he had some flaws in his theology, of course, but he was a theist, and he believed in the Bible. He believed in creation. So all of that kind of thinking led to the development and the advance of civilization. And when you had a large number of people who were working and living and thinking within that framework, it created a prosperous civilization that blessed the whole world. But ever since we started rejecting biblical truth, we've pulled the plug on that, and we've gone in the other direction, and now we've become a source of corruption for the world. And it won't be long before we're going to be like every other nation. We're going to be worse than every other nation, because having had what God gave us and rejected it, we're going to compound the misery with divine discipline. And the only thing that's going to help us as believers survive is to really train our minds to focus on the Word of God. And that word training is a word that's used several times in Scripture, and it has to do with discipline, with focus, mental focus and concentration, and being mentally tough. We talk often about a word in Scripture edification. Edification means to be strengthened or to be built up in your soul, and that's so you can withstand the garbage that's going on in the world around you. It makes us tough. It's the Word of God. It builds strength so that it's the difference between a house that's built out of straw and a house that is built out of steel and brick and stone. It's able to withstand the pressures and the adversities of life. So we have this choice. Either we're operating down here in pure self-absorption and fantasy and entertainment, or we're operating up here where the focus is on the Word of God and walking by the Spirit, and our spiritual life becomes more and more the central focus of our life. So under the first point, we recognize that we all go through tests, and tests is how God strengthens us and edifies us and builds us, but he does it through the Spirit of God in conjunction with the Word of God. Second thing I've pointed out is that God's training program utilizes adversity to teach us, to train us. These 10 spiritual skills, which really is not original with me, but it's a great summation and gives you an applicational grid that you can use for just about any Bible story or biblical event is how is somebody handling life at that time? And which one of these skills are they using? And I'm putting this up here. I took the animation out because what I want to focus on right here is these basic ones. We talked about confession and walking by the Holy Spirit the last time. And I tied that together. Remember, we went through John 15, we went through Galatians 5, connected that to Ephesians 5, and connected that to 1 John 1. And that's critical. That answers the question, I need to make sure this is what's on the website in terms of the index, is that answers the question of how is the Holy Spirit, how is the filling of the Spirit connected to confession in the Scripture? I can't tell you how many people stumble and fall and crash on that question. But that answered that question last time. I'm not going to repeat it. And then we get into these next three that are interrelated, faith rest drill. And the faith rest drill is effective because the faith is focused on the Word of God. And that's grace orientation, first of all, and doctrinal orientation, second of all. It's this other aspect, this doctrinal orientation, that is so important. What do we mean by doctrinal orientation? I know that when I've talked about this before, I've talked about doctrinal orientation in the sense that we need to align our thinking with the Word of God. The Word of God gives us truth, and our souls are filled with error. It's a lot more complex than that. Our souls are filled with everything from desires and motivations and lusts, all of which the whole complex of our soul before we're saved is just dominated by evil. And some of that evil is in the form of sin, and some of that evil is in the form of, is in the form of morality. Because there are a lot of false, evil essentially in the Old Testament is always such and such king did evil in the eyes of God. And what did they do? What's the next sentence almost always say? And they worshiped the Baalim and the Ashtoreth. How is evil defined? Evil is always defined at the fundamental level of worshiping something other than God. Evil starts with idolatry. Evil starts with religion. And everybody's religious. Even atheists are religious. Agnostics are religious. They just have a religion that is without God. Their religion is secularism. Their religion is anti-theism. And this is a problem that we have in our culture. And many people may have constructed worldviews that they think will make life work for them that exclude God. They have a false view of reality that is totally materialistic. And I don't mean that they're greedy and they desire material things. What I mean by that is they believe that ultimate reality is matter. You just go back billions and billions and billions of years and what do you have? You have this dense little cloud of matter where that came from nobody wants to talk about. But there's this just uber-dense matter that explodes. And as a result of that explosion, the organized universe came about. Now, let me just suggest to you that if you want to really believe that, I encourage you to find out sometime when the police are dealing with demolitions or just take some firecrackers. Take some firecrackers, take a whole bunch of firecrackers. If you live out in the country, get something that's a little more powerful, like an M80 or something like that, and just take it and put it on, you know, something like a computer printer. And then light it and let it blow up. Does that make it a better printer? Well, maybe sometimes we all feel that way, that that might make it a better printer. But, you know, it's just going to blow it into smithereens and it goes from order to disorder. Explosions do not produce order. How can you get order out of chaos if there's an explosion of the big bang? I mean, this is the most logically uninformed leap. You know, we believe Jesus rose from the dead. That's simple compared to believing that there can be an explosion that'll produce order in the universe. And we're just talking about physical order, not to mention an order that ultimately is going to develop inorganic, go from inorganic life to organic life and intelligent, sentient organic life. I mean, how in the world does that happen when there's no information coming from outside the solar system? Absolutely insane. We have all these systems, but what you need to understand is they look at human beings because we're products of evolution. We're products of purely material processes. Therefore, all we are is a blend of electrical charges and chemicals, and every decision, everything that we do is basically the result of purely physical chemical forces. So all human behavior gets defined in terms of those physical, chemical forces, and so if somebody's behavior isn't what they think it should be, then the solution is always going to be to change those chemical, physical forces in some way. But what the Bible teaches us is that we're composed of a material body and an immaterial soul, as well as, once we're saved, an immaterial spirit. This is how Adam was created. So we're going to start with this little diagram. to show the human soul. Human soul is made up of self-consciousness. You look in the mirror in the morning, you identify with yourself. Some of us who are getting a little older may see one of our parents in the mirror, but that's a different issue. We look in the mirror and we go, okay, I'm still alive. I made it out of bed this morning. It's a good day and I know who I am. That's even better. We have self-consciousness. Your dog or your cat looks in the mirror, and they think it's somebody else, something else. They don't have that kind of self-consciousness. We have a mentality. We can think. We can reason. We have logic. We have a conscience that stores our norms and standards, our value system. And this is something that is distinct. Animals, dogs don't have a conscience. Cats don't have a conscience. Now, I've had dogs. I don't know why that keeps doing that. It was doing that yesterday. What happened? Lost my connectivity. Let's try it again. Another slot. There we go. Okay, we have a conscience. That's our norms and standards. Animals don't have that. Now, I've had dogs, and you've probably had dogs like this too, that they're doing something wrong and they know You think, well, they've got a conscience. No, they just know they're going to get punished. They don't want to be punished, not unlike some of us. They don't have a conscience in the way that you and I have a conscience, and then we have volition. Now, that's the immaterial part. One of the things that medieval theologians slash philosophers spent a lot of time trying to figure out which is not a bad thing to think about. Sometimes they're ridiculed for how they were thinking, but they were trying to work out the implications of scripture in a lot of areas. And that's how this immaterial thing, like a ghost, can run a physical thing. How can the immaterial soul interface and interact with the material, physical, biological brain? I have no idea. That will be one of the first five questions I ask the Lord when I get to heaven. Try to understand that. But it does. And sometimes we see that at the time of physical death. You can see something change in a person when that soul leaves. And you know that that soul is not in that body anymore. That soul has gone and is face to face with the Lord. So we have a human soul that interfaces with a physiological or physical thing called the brain. And they impact one another. Okay? Now what happens is we have something else that mixes into this, and that's called the sin nature. Now this morning, that just sort of sets us up for a little background. This morning I ran across an interesting excerpt from a book. I get this little thing emailed to me every morning from a website called Delancey Place. Some of you get this, I know. And what it does is it sends you an excerpt from a book. Today it's on, you know, sort of medical-based, psychology-based. Yesterday it was on the Mongols. The next day it's on business. I mean, all these different books are different. And I've found several that were really really interesting that I've picked up over the last several years. But the excerpt this morning was from a book called Mind of the Meditator. Now, there were some interesting things in this excerpt that I want to sort of summarize, but I'm converting this over to a biblical Christian application because they're talking about what happens in the human brain. So we're not talking about something distinct or unique to believers. But what happens to the human brain with somebody who has a disciplined mental attitude and they focus their mind in terms of what they're calling meditation. Now they talk, I don't have the whole book, so this was just a five or six paragraph excerpt. So they have different kinds of meditation. So there's, you know, there's a lot of garbage meditation out there that's part of Buddhism and Hinduism and all kinds of mind cults and things like that. But there's a fundamental reality that is true for every human being when you discipline your thinking and discipline your mind. Now, if that's true, and that's true for every human being, then what in the world happens when you're a born-again believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and you have God the Holy Spirit, and what you're meditating on is the infallible Word of God? that God says is being used by the Holy Spirit to transform and change us. So this got me thinking about a number of things, and some of the things that it develops really relates to this second point that I'm making, is that God is teaching us to develop spiritual skills. I pointed out, and I have for years when I've taught this, that skill training is just like any other area of life. You develop skills in music and that causes you to really focus your attention on learning a musical instrument so that you can play it well. Or skill training in a physical activity like athletics or dance or skill in anything. You can take it from from shooting, sharpshooting, to gymnastics, athletics, dance, art, whatever it is, you're focusing your mind, you're bringing the energies of your thought to bear on something. That's what they're talking about. It's just what happens in the everyday realm, not necessarily related to scripture. And what they point out in this little excerpt is that they've been doing these studies for about 15 years with brain scans, scanning the brains of athletes, scanning the brains of artists, scanning the brains of musicians, scanning the brains of people who are bringing their mind to focus on something in terms of what they're going to call meditation. And that in doing so, what it demonstrates is that as a person does that, and it's going to take time, that as they develop the skills in performing a task, there are specific parts of the brain that become retrained, there are new neural pathways that are established. And that these new neural pathways grow and strengthen as that skill is mastered and perfected. Now, we don't need to know all of that. That's just nice confirmation to know that what the Bible says is to practice these things. And that's going to work out. But what this study indicates is that mental exercises such as focus drills reprogram your brain, the physiological part of your brain. Though these studies don't use biblical meditation and memory drills with scripture and rumination on the scriptures as a basis for their studies, these similar activities show that when you transfer to the biblical realm, those results would be even more enhanced. Now, I just want to caution you as I go through this because over the years I've seen two or three doctrinal pastors who have taken a long time developing whole studies based on the current status of neurology at the time that they were teaching. Now, I started reading a lot of stuff about brain, brain activity, and how the brain functioned back in the late 80s. And about every five years, the theories and the hypotheses changed completely, because we were learning so much more data. So I'm not tying the biblical principles to these modern studies in neurology, because they may change a lot over the next 10 or 15 years. I think that's a danger some pastors have have slipped into is if you tie what the Word of God says to contemporary understanding of science, what happens when that contemporary understanding of science changes? See, the Word of God is eternal, and God did not reduce revelation to scientific terminology, but gave it in general terms that are going to be true no matter what. Science isn't going to change that. Science will end up always of validating what the scripture says. So as we look at this, what we're seeing as we make an application from this is that these neural pathways are built, these new neural pathways are built, not from somebody who's just going in and practicing the piano 15 minutes every three or four days as they're learning lessons, but by somebody who is really focused on playing that instrument and excelling at that. Not on somebody who just goes out and plays sandlot football every now and then or runs around the block every now and then for exercise, but somebody who is pursuing excellence, really bringing their brain to focus on the pursuit of excellence in that particular sphere. I've thought for a long time that the reason a lot of Christians don't get anywhere isn't necessarily because of sin in their life. I think that's an unintended or secondary consequence, it's because they just don't focus on spiritual things. It's not a priority in their life. They're too busy with everything else, and what the Word of God demands is exclusivity. You really focus on the Word, and it will change you. But if you just do it once a week, go play golf on Sunday morning. Don't come to church. Don't waste my time, God's time, and your time. Because to be transformed by the renewing of your mind is going to take a whole lot more effort than 45 minutes or an hour or an hour and a half on Sunday morning. You're just playing games with God, and you're fooling yourself, and you're living in a fantasy world. Romans 12 too doesn't happen by chance. It happens because you dedicate yourself in a specific direction. But there are a lot of people who may not be there yet. They're baby believers. They may be showing up in Bible class once a week, and then one day God the Holy Spirit uses whatever is being taught, and they go, this guy's really talking about commitment. He's really talking about making this a priority. He's not kidding. He wants me to wrap my life around the Word of God so that everything I do relates to the Word of God, not to, you know, my personal pleasure and advancement. That's a radical idea. And that's right. Discipleship. You read, as we've gone through Matthew on Sunday morning, Those passages where Jesus talks about what is expected of a disciple, that's radical. That's looking for somebody who is really sold out to God. And that doesn't happen overnight. It's not a one-shot decision. It takes time, and it takes some study in the Word, and we grow gradually. But what I took away from all of this is some of the things that they say at the end. Let's see if I can pull that up. that mental discipline and focus can truly, truly change the situation. And if that's true for anybody who's not a Christian, then certainly if you're a believer and the focal point is on the Word of God, then it's going to be even greater than that. And one of the terms I use to describe this mental focus is mindfulness. And here's a quote that they have from the book. Several studies have documented the benefits of mindfulness on symptoms of anxiety and depression and its ability to improve sleep patterns. By deliberately monitoring and observing the thoughts and emotions when they feel sad or worried, depressed patients can use meditation, what we would say is focus on the word of God, to manage negative thoughts and feelings as they arise spontaneously. And so they lessen the problems and they can get past depression. Isn't that amazing? But I know that when I say that, people are going to say, because I get letters and emails to this effect, you don't understand the biochemical makeup of the brain. That's right. I always get irritated with this. I get people come in and say, Well, I'm leaving the church. I don't understand your theology. I had one person say, well, you need to read this. I said, not only did I read that when it came out, I quoted in it. I'm footnoted in it. I've read it five times before you were even a believer. I wish people would realize that I didn't get a THM and a doctorate because I mailed something in over the internet. But I spent a lot of time studying. In my PhD program, I had to read over 250 volumes like all of Calvin's institutes and other four-volume, six-volume, eight-volume things. And then in five hours, I had to pass a written exam where the questions were coming like, please compare the major thesis in Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee and demonstrate the strengths and weakness of each one's historiography. And you've got to recall all of that. You don't have any notes. I mean, I'm just amazed. And when I get into this particular topic, it's like, well, Dr. Dean, don't you know that this and that? Let me tell you, before you talk to me about it, you go read J. Adams' Competent to Counsel. You go read Dave Hunt's book, The Seduction of Christianity, which pointed out the flaws and failures of psychology and tried to wake up the evangelical church to the problems of psychology. Read Martin Bobgin's book on the seduction, excuse me, on psychoheresy. And then listen to the three talks that he gave in the second Chafer conference that we held at this church. After you have gone through that as basic fundamental information, then we can have an intelligent conversation. But until you get your focus on the principle that we walk by faith and not by sight, that means that our authority is the Word of God, not empiricism. We walk by faith and not by sight. And until you recognize that the truth of God's Word is more real than your experience, the laboratory experience, the doctor's experience, the 15 PhDs you quoted me experience, then you will never understand what spirituality and the Bible is all about. It's the Word of God that has worked to change lives and transform lives and give people joy and peace and happiness and stability. for the last two thousand years in the church and before that in the old testament and they didn't have to know anything about the biochemical makeup of the brain they didn't have to understand anything about how to fix those problems with drugs and prescriptions and all of these other things they understand that the word of god alone was sufficient to handle everything but when it's the word of god alone the word of god is saying this is radical and you have to bury yourself in the word of god Just going along and having a little taste of it every day and a little sample of it every day isn't going to do it. You have to conform yourself to the Word of God, and then you'll see God's wonderful transformation. And part of the problem that we have that comes up in this kind of discussion is related to the relationship of the immaterial soul to the brain. Because fundamentally, we don't deny that there are chemical changes that take place. What we deny is that the chemical changes are the priority. It's the old, what came first, the chicken or the egg? And when we're born, we don't have all these problems, all these emotional problems and all these chemical problems and everything else that comes over time. And I believe that the Bible tells us that it's the result of volition, and it's the result of sin, and that the only solution to that basic core problem is what the Word of God says. One last thing about this article that I read is what it teaches is that—and I'm going to transform what they said to our Christian framework. is what they say is the adult brain can still be profoundly transformed through neuroplasticity. The way I'm going to change that is God created us in such a way that there is flexibility in your brain, in the function of your brain, because the Creator knew that sin was going to enter into your brain and was going to corrupt your brain. And there had to be enough flexibility, their term is neuroplasticity, that there had to be enough flexibility in your brain to be able to recover from the chaos and the garbage that sin brought into your brain. And that's understanding the truth of God's word. Now, when we address this, I've got several assumptions that I want to point out. First of all, we have to assume that God created us and knows every aspect of our biological and psychological function, and he knows exactly how the material and the immaterial parts fit together and interface. He designed it. He knows exactly how that works. It didn't come about because Moses came up with some of these ideas on Mount Sinai, Or because Isaiah or Elijah, I mean, Isaiah or Ezekiel or Paul came up with other ideas. God designed this from the get-go. It was in his mind from eternity past. So that we're dealing with a Creator God who knows what makes, what's wrong with us, what makes us who we are, what corrupted us, and what will fix it. And He provided a salvation and a spiritual life that can do it. Isn't that remarkable? All we have to do is trust Him and do what the Word of God says. Second assumption is that the final causation in our lives is volition. It's not the chemicals that may be there. We make a lot of bad decisions and they can screw up our minds and they can produce a lot of negative chemicals that impact our thinking. There's no denying that. But what's the solution? The solution is that the Word of God takes priority, and it can change things. Even as unbelievers, we make choices, and those choices, as a baby, either open or close doors. They either expand or diminish our options in the future, even as young children. And as we grow older, we still go through those processes. So we have to understand, ultimately, it goes back to volition. Third assumption is that the basic problem that we all face is the corruption of our own sin nature. Now this is where I'm going to get controversial, like I haven't been already. Unless our problem is clearly and unequivocally biologically caused, and by that I mean unless there's clear objective laboratory testing where they can say, look, this is what's here on the slide, therefore you have this problem, okay? Unless it's unequivocally biologically caused, which means we can determine either the bacterial, the viral, or some other specific organic cause determined through specific objectifiable markers, then the cause is very likely not going to be organic. It's going to be spiritual. It's going to be related to carnality. It's going to be related to the impact of sin on your brain. And God says the solution to the problem of sin on your brain is Redemption. Romans chapter 8 says that our body eventually will be redeemed. That's because it's a corrupt little nasty thing right now and that's a problem that we've got. But that principle I just stated is very controversial. That's going to upset a lot of people because they're so influenced by the current scientific theories on human behavior. And in a lot of cases, and here my pastoral concern, is I know that there are people listening to me and they have children, some have adult children that were diagnosed many years ago with adult-onset schizophrenia. And that's a horrible, difficult thing for parents to face. And they have bipolar disorder. They have all these emotional mood swings. Or they've been identified today as having ADHD or something else like that. And the doctors and everybody says, what you need to do is Medicaid them. Now, I'm not advocating just going and taking them off the medication. What I am advocating, and I've said this before, is you've got to do your homework on this. Because there are a lot of studies out there from the book that came out by Peter Bregan back in the 90s called Toxic Psychiatry. And he was one of the top psychiatrists in New York at the time. And he points out the flaws in a lot of these medications and that they do worse damage than they do to health. And recent studies, like the article on the anatomy of an epidemic that was in the book, The State of the American Mind. And that author also wrote a book, came out in 2012, called Anatomy of an Epidemic. But then he's written one since then that is a critique of the whole structure of the psychology industry and how this is a problem. And there's a lot of corruption in these industries because money talks And getting research dollars is the name of the game for a lot of people. And it's not about always doing the right thing that really helps people. Okay? So we have to look at that. But people need to make their decisions on their own. I'm not saying go off your meds tomorrow. But you need to go read up and become informed and have some serious conversations with your doctor over what the long-term benefits are. Okay. So the question that I've pointed out already is what comes first, the chicken or the egg? What comes first? All these chemical imbalances are sin and volition. And the Bible says it's sin and volition. So we have to remember what the Bible teaches, Romans 8, 28, 23, the body is corrupt. We're born corrupt. The brain itself has been corrupted by sin. And because of sin, we have a predilection and an orientation to rebellion, to arrogance, and to self-absorption, which is going to carve a lot of really nasty neural pathways in our brain and in our soul. And that's going to cause a lot of problems. Okay, let's go forward. As we make choices and experience pleasure or pain as we're small and infants, We realize, oh, this is good. I want more of that. That's bad. I don't want any more of that. That impacts certain chemicals in the brain. Some are going to be associated with positive emotions, some with negative emotions. And it's going to be different for different people. But as we make these decisions, we're also developing these neural pathways, which make it more likely to go down that same path the next time. Now, this is just showing how modern science helps validate something we call habits. a long time ago. And what the Bible says, basically, is sin produces bad habits, and God's going to help you break those habits. Now, I was doing some research on habits the other day, and there was an idea that came out, and you'll hear it from motivational speakers, that you can change a habit in 21 days. And that's not true, but that's been popularized by a lot of motivational speakers for quite a while. And the result of some of the latest research on how people establish habit patterns is that depending on the person, depending on the circumstances, depending on the behavior, and depending on a host of other complexities, you can change a habit in anywhere from three weeks to a year. It doesn't happen quickly. That's just normal. But we're talking about changing spiritual bad habits. So that brings in all kinds of nasty things like the angelic conflict and our sin nature. and other things like that. So it's just difficult. But the Word of God says it's sufficient. The Spirit of God is sufficient. The grace of God is sufficient. So we can do it. That's what the Bible says. So this is what we have to look at. Now, another assumption that I think we have to be aware of is that there are a lot of problems with psychology. Psychology, since Freud has produced all these different models of behavior, And there may be as many, I don't know how many there are now, there used to be like 400 or 500 different models of behavior, and about 300 or 400 different therapies. So which one's wrong? Remember, they're all based on empiricism, which means if anybody has both eyes open, they're going to have a lot of empirical truth in their psychological theory. And so it's going to sound good. But it's based on empiricism, which means they don't have all the facts. And if Adam didn't have all the facts, he wouldn't have known what was going to happen when he ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He would have just thought that was like every other tree in the garden. But he had a fact from revelation which helped him or should have helped him interpret that fact correctly. And what I'm saying here is that there's a lot of truth in a lot of modern psychology, but they're missing critical components that come from revelation. Psychology claims to be the study of the soul, and they claim to be the exclusive authority on the soul, but guess what? The Bible says it's the authority on the soul, and so we have to listen to what the Bible says. Psychology encroaches on the authority of Scripture, and psychology tells us that if you really want to change, you have to understand how you got this way and why you're doing these things. The Bible doesn't say that. The Bible says this is what you need to do to change. You don't need to understand why and how. You don't have to understand all the mechanics, all the biochemistry and everything else in order to change. What you need to do is what the Scripture says and it will work. The Bible is exactly right. It doesn't say, it says basically these things, sin produces bad habits and those bad habits become entrenched And they appear to us to be unchangeable. That's why you have this debate between nature and nurture. And that exploded all over again with the vote again, great vote that Houston had voting down that hero ordinance that was just, that whole thing was just designed around the LGBT provision in there, which is clear from the fact that all the people who screamed about how horrible it was, was the LGBT crowd. You didn't hear any veteran scream about, oh, we don't have equal rights, isn't this terrible, even though they ran that commercial with the veteran day in and day out until I wanted to barf. OK? But he didn't come out and say, oh, now I'm going to be so maltreated and discriminated against because I'm a veteran. No, the people who screamed were all the LGBT crowd. It was about 28 pages long and 27 pages were just a smokescreen for the one page dealing with the LGBT equal rights aspect. That tells you everything you need to know about it. So what we say in the Bible is that there's no sin that's unchangeable. You're not born that way. Now you say that today and the world out there is going to say, what do you mean these people are born that way? Well, what happens in our lives is we become so entrenched in bad habits and sinful habits, and we love them so dearly, that we don't want to do what is necessary, what God says is necessary, to change them. And that's that value of this testimony, I keep going back to it, that is so remarkable in this book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, by Rosaria Butterfield, Champagne Butterfield, is that here she is, this radical Marxist lesbian who's totally committed to lesbianism as the right thing, and that marriage, Christianity is all wrong. And she gets saved, but because of her background or training in literature, she realizes that this is a worldview shift, and to trust in Jesus means that if I'm going to go this way, I've got to go 100%. I've got to have a 100% worldview change, and I've got to bury myself in the Bible and let it really live through me. And so she spent five hours a day in the Word of God. Now, a lot of people don't have that kind of time, but I know that in her story, she had a friend who was a male homosexual who had gotten saved and was trying to deal with his male homosexuality. The difference between him and her was he's not immersing himself in the Word of God like she is. And she's just burying herself in the Word of God. And I believe that is what really gave her the power to change things. So sin produces bad habits. Second, God solves the sin problem and he can change the bad habits. He's omnipotent. He's promised us a new life. He can really do it. The issue is, do we really trust Him? Do we really trust Him enough to do what the Word of God says to do? We can conquer drug addiction problems. We can conquer gender identification problems. We can conquer sexual identity and promiscuity problems and pornography problems and problems related to anger and depression if we just apply God's remedy. we need to focus on the Word. So here's some things related to the problems. Proverbs 23, 7 says, For as a man thinks in his soul, so is he. See, from the get-go, as a new baby, you start thinking, and if you're thinking human viewpoint, and you're thinking according to arrogance and self-centeredness, that's what's going to be produced. In regeneration, that can change, but the principle is, as you think in your soul. So if you're giving yourselves over to thinking about things that you shouldn't, dwelling on anger, resentment, bitterness, revenge, lust, all these. If that's what you're focusing on, that's going to work itself out in your brain. That's going to impact your brain chemistry. As a man thinks in his soul, so is he. Another thing related to a problem from Proverbs 12, anxiety in the heart of man causes depression. Notice how the Bible connects anxiety, fear, worry with depression. What do you have to do? Be anxious for nothing, Philippians 4, 6 and 7 says. Be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be made known unto God and the peace of God which surpasses all comprehension shall defend your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. So if you want to deal with anxiety, you've got to focus on the Lord in prayer. And what's it going to do? The side benefit, it's going to flush your depression. This day that I'm talking about, I'm just talking about the fact that if people learn to focus on things and develop excellence in just the everyday human realm, it's going to have a consequent, unintended consequence of getting rid of their depression and anxiety. What the Bible says is you can wipe it out if you'll just focus on the Word and really trust it. Now, that doesn't mean your little nasty sin nature isn't going to throw depressive slings and arrows at you every now and then. but you're going to shoot it down and defend yourself with the Word of God. But it's radical. Look how radical. Sometimes we read this so much we forget how radical this sounds. These words, God says, which I command you today, shall be in your heart, not in your Bible, not in your notebook, not on your MP3 player, not in your library, shall be in your heart. You've got to take it out. Psalms says, Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. Not thy word I put in my doctrinal notebook. And then teach them. Listen to this language. Teach them diligently to your children. Now what does that mean? It means talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down. Think about your day. When are you not sitting, walking, or lying down? So when you're sitting, walking, and lying down, you need to be focusing on God's Word. Now, that doesn't mean you can't work, but that means that whenever you have opportunity to let your mind go to something else, you ought to let it go to the Word of God. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be frontals. This is just language saying you've got to wrap your life up with the Bible, and it's got to be the dominant influence in your life. Psalm 77, 12 says, I will also meditate on all your work and talk of all your deeds. That's mindset. That's focus. Meditate on your work. It's not meditate. It's not emptying your mind. That is one form of meditation. That's Eastern mysticism. You empty your mind. What the Bible talks about as meditation is filling your mind with the Word of God and the works of God. Proverbs 6.21, bind them continually upon your heart. Doesn't that remind you of Deuteronomy 6? Bind them continually on your heart, tie them around your neck. Psalm 1.1, blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the seat of the sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. I can't wait to get to Bible class tonight. Wake up in the morning. I can't wait to read my Bible this morning. I've got to focus on this. It's a delight in the law. And in His law, He meditates day and night. What part of the 24-hour cycle does not fit in the two categories of day and night? All right? That means everything around the clock. God's not kidding. If we immerse ourselves in the Word of God and the Word of God saturates our soul, it changes us. Resets those neural pathways. That word haggah means to meditate, to moan, to speak, to whisper, to murmur. And what it refers to in meditation is a person is memorizing scripture and goes through the day just muttering it to himself, just whispering it, and going through it again and again and again and again. So it really enters into their mind and in their thinking. That's one form of biblical meditation. Psalm 63.6, when I remember you on my bed. You wake up in the middle of the night. I won't have a show of hands. A lot of you are over 50. You have middle-age insomnia. You wake up in the middle of the night. Go through that list of memory verses. If it's one, well, you need to memorize more verses. Okay? Go through that list of memory verses. By the time you get to the 15th or 20th verse, maybe you'll be back to sleep again. That's what David is saying. When I remember you on my bed, I meditate on you in the night watches. When I wake up and I can't go back to sleep, I'm going to think about God. I'm going to think through various doctrines. I'm going to think about the personal work of the Lord Jesus Christ. But you have to be in Bible class long enough to get some doctrine in your soul to be able to do that. Psalm 143.5, I remember the days of old. I meditate, that's this word that we've got so far, haggah. But it says, I'm you, shiach, that's the synonym, on the work of your hands. So I'm thinking about your words and your works. And that's not just thinking, oh, isn't creation beautiful? A biologist, a geologist, a meteorologist are meditating on the works of God. They've got the right mental attitude as a Christian. They're looking at their study of biology as a study of what God created in terms of life. Make it theological. It's not neutral, which is what you get in science classrooms. Psalm 144, may my meditation be sweet to him, which is a different word to muse, to meditate, to think, to complain. Two more verses. I know some people are getting restless. Philippians 4.8, Paul says, finally brethren, this is the end result, the bottom line is meditate on these things, logizomai, which means to think about these things, to reason them through. Logic comes from this word logizomai, logos, logic, they're all related. Thinking it through. Whatever things are true, you wake up, don't think about fantasy things. Think about what's true, not what's false. Don't think about having a good conservative in the White House. That's somebody's attention. Maybe that's a fantasy. Okay, don't live in a dream world. Think about what's true. Whatever things are normal. This word means that which is honorable, that which is consistent with God's character. Whatever things are just, whatever is consistent with God's integrity. Whatever things are pure, that's morally unstained. Whatever things are lovely, that is acceptable and pleasing to God. Whatever things are of good report, if there's any virtue, moral excellence, and if there's anything praiseworthy, meditate on these things, not all that other garbage that you're thinking about that clutters up your mind. Mental discipline and mental focus is what the Scripture is saying is the solution. Romans 8.5, for those who live according to the Spirit do what? They mentally focus on the things of the flesh. Okay? If you're living on the sin, you're going to focus on the things of the sin. But those who live according to the Spirit, see, the verb comes over, they mentally focus on the things of the Spirit. That's exactly what that article is talking about. You develop the skills of mental focus. That's part of doctrinal orientation. Then the Word of God is going to change your life, not in a week, not in a year. It's going to take time. But it's going to be permanent and it's going to be true. It's not going to be the result of taking a pill. And it's not going to be the result of going through some kind of psychological manipulation that only masks the problem. Colossians 3.2, set your mind, that's that same word, phoneo, set your mind on things above and not on the things of the earth. Focus. All that's just doctrinal orientation. I wanted to expand on what I've taught in the past in terms of skill and doctrinal orientation. Next time we'll come back to continue to understand the issues related to suffering. Father, thank you for this opportunity to study these things and to be challenged by your Word, to realize that your Word is transformative. That's what you said. There is real hope, real hope, based upon your Word, understanding truth. and walking by the Spirit. And that's what you've promised us, is that we can have real joy, real peace, real stability that is not overshadowed by anxiety and depression and all of these other things that get in the way. But what we have to do is retrain its volition, focus, refocus, and refocus on Your Word and on our walk with You. And we pray this in Christ's name, amen.