Rewiring the Mind: Faith, Neuroscience, and Breaking Free from Temptation

In this Paideia group discussion from late 2022 and early 2023, Joanne explores the relationship between neuroscience, temptation, and biblical wisdom. Drawing from the book You Are Not Your Brain, she discusses how our minds can be shaped by deceptive brain messages—ingrained thoughts that lead us into unhealthy behaviors. Joanne connects this scientific insight to Paul's struggle in Romans 7, where he describes the inner battle between what we desire to do and what we actually do.

She introduces a four-step process—relabel, reframe, refocus, and revalue—which has been shown to reshape the brain and help people break free from harmful thought patterns. The discussion also highlights the role of love, faith, and self-discipline in transforming our minds, emphasizing that true renewal comes from both spiritual and practical efforts. This episode offers a compelling blend of theology and neuroscience, showing how biblical truth aligns with scientific understanding in the fight against temptation.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 1:32 Presentation 1
• 18:01 Presentation 2
• 34:49 Presentation 3

Transcript

This is a book that I bought. I went to chapters with Dave because he wanted to go somewhere to find a book and I said, okay, I'll go in with you, but I'm not buying a book. Couldn't resist. You are not your brain. And I leaped through it and I realized this is what you just said, it excludes the supernatural, but it answers, helps answer the question of how to fight temptation. And everybody deals with temptation in one form or another. So to me, I've only read a third of it, so I'm eager to get to the rest, but it takes years for me to get through a book like this because it's so, I have to be really focused. So,

to me it identifies Romans 7, I'm going to just read this and you probably will be familiar with it, where Paul says, I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but sin living in me. I know nothing good lives in me that is in my sinful nature or my flesh, in some versions, this is NIV. I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do, no, the evil I do not

want to do, this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do It is no longer I who do it, but the sin living in me that does it Clear yeah, like this is part of me that just won't behave and I can't seem to control it And it's so frustrating. It just makes me get hopeless about it. So that's To me what this book answers, it's written by two medical doctors, one is a research psychiatrist of UCLA School of Medicine, the other is a clinical instructor and attending

psychiatrist at UCLA. Neuropsychiatric hospital, like they're really into brain stuff. And what they have in here, to me, answers the question of how to fight temptation. They offer a process to help us do that. And the main thing that they say really is what the scripture says is there is this part of us that is fighting with another part of us. We want to do the good and we don't do it or we want to not do this and we do it anyway. I mean sometimes I think, well, why am I afraid of this? Or

like, why don't I, you know, do this logical thing? I keep saying I'm going to do it and I don't do it. They're automatic behaviors, they're automatic ways of thinking that we have. So Jesus, in his temptations in the wilderness, in the records, he always used, you know, he had this temptation, he says, well it is written and he blasts out some scripture and so therefore I'm not going to do that. So to me the scripture, so what he's saying is the scripture is going to help us fight temptation. We still have so much problem to do it. Which means what we learn from God will help us. We have to know how to use it and what it is that

we're made of that blocks it sometimes or most of the time. So Jesus it says through strong crying and tears was able to successfully accomplish his mission. lot of effort. It took a lot of conviction and faith. And that's what these people are saying too, is it's not easy, it's not a cakewalk, but if you really have a passion, like I'm not living like this anymore, then you know what to do. They have four steps here. They're called, well, they're called the four steps.

are relabel, reframe, refocus, and revalue. And they've done brain research. I wanna just read this part here that I have marked here. Because this isn't just their idea, this is got experimental proof. These four steps teach you how to sharply focus

your attention, to rewire your brain. So you've got a brain and a mind. The brain is the automatic, knee-jerk, natural, impulsive reaction that's bent for survival. Like if a car's coming at you, it's that fight or flight thing. You've got this adrenaline, you run or you have the strength to stop it,

whatever it is. But it's also bad in a sense because, like public speaking for one example with Toastmasters, the first time I went up for a speech, I didn't sleep all night because the adrenaline was just pouring out of me. But you do it enough times and you realize, okay, no one's going to hurt me. You know, it's better.

You can train yourself. You can unlearn bad things and you can learn good things. So your brain, it's there to protect us, but sometimes it gets things messed up because we've been pre-programmed to our past life, our childhood especially. Like if we went across a crosswalk as a kid and the person holding the stop sign, we're going to go, ah! But somebody who hasn't had that experience will never have that feeling.

So it's like that. We can teach our brains, we can teach this natural, impulsive part of ourselves to do

differently.

So what they did here, they had someone, or had a number of people with OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is where they're always cleaning or whatever it is that they do it. It's a real problem that they can get medication for. So we had two groups, and one group took medication, the other one did the four steps. And I think it was 10 weeks or something. But they scanned people's brains before and after.

And with OCD, apparently there's this little part of the brain called the RCD. If you have OCD, this part of the brain is enlarged. And so after the 10 weeks, they re-scan the brains of the people with the medication and the people that did the four steps. And in all cases, the people with both, large part was much smaller and they had, I say they repented, but they had healed quite a bit, so they had improved. So the medication, you know, this one thing, but this other way, which I mean, if I can avoid medication, I'd rather do that. It works. It actually has been

So I thought that was pretty interesting. Okay, yeah, the brain scans. So it's using our understanding of how the brain works as opposed to how the mind works. The brain works on short, momentary, right now, what do I need to survive right now? Don't worry about the future, because I've got to survive now, even though I might not be in danger. I just think I'm in danger.

Because if I think I'm in danger, I'm not going to survive this, whether it's because that's how addictions work, I can't handle these, what do you call it, when you get off of something? Oh, the withdrawal.

The withdrawal, I can't handle it.

I mean, this is going to kill me. So you do it, but then it just strengthens the addiction again. So, now this book is not for people with, okay I wrote that down because that's important, it's not for people with debilitating symptoms that severely limit their ability to focus. Like they might need medication or intensive therapy like schizophrenia, bipolar, they need that help first before they can even hope to put this, but this is what they call, okay, here's a big word, self-directed neuroplasticity,

which means you can teach your brain to change, not your brain, you can teach your brain to change on purpose, but it takes effort.

It can be malleable, it's changeable.

Yeah, it's not stuck there, but it is entrenched.

Yeah.

Right.

So I thought that was pretty cool. Now because this is not a biblical thing, it's not spirit supernatural, they call the mind, which in some versions would call the spirit, the wise advocate. It's the part of you that knows that. So they call it that. So whatever you... Yeah, go

ahead.

So this experiment, I'm curious. So what are the four steps? It's re-freeing...

steps it's uh it's refree actually let me hand this out I didn't want to give it out right at the beginning I'll give you those three so on this is the the back of the book is at the top that black part and the rest is just a page of content you look over you'll see the four the chapters on the four steps, starting at chapter 8. Relabel is the first thing. Becoming aware of the messages, they call them deceptive brain messages, that tell you something that isn't really true. So, becoming aware and relabeling them as deceptive

of brain messages. Then you reframe chapter 9, you change the way you think about it. Verse 11, then you focus on what you do want to do instead. And then chapter 12 is revalue, which I haven't got there yet. So those are the four steps.

That's great.

So I think it's a really interesting book because to me it strengthens my understanding of what the scriptures are telling me. But I love science and I love math and I like to have something that I can see. I like experiments with conclusions. And so that's why this book appeals to me. So, there was something I wanted to read from page 23 here.

Yeah, why does our brain tell us things that are wrong? The purpose is actually the brain is automatic. I told you about that. It ensures momentary survival, even if it just means comfort or relief. We just want relief from something. We need some rest.

Not realizing that what we do to get that rest causes us more grief later, and then we're going to want to do it again to get rest from that, and it just escalates. The brain and the mind, though, must work together as a team. Neither is better than the other. We need the brain is our energy efficient. We don't have to think, we need to know now. But we also have our mind, which is the longer term considered decisions that we must make that we know we have to sacrifice for to get there. So the system goes awry ari when we we start doing something that gives us comfort and we go oh i really like that yeah

you know like eating a bunch of ice cream every night and you know instead of supper or something we know it's gonna it's gonna cause us problems when we get older but we don't care it's the opposite of it's a process that gives me a start yeah and what i would say that religion has religion or spirituality God has over this is love Because with love I mean we love God we love our neighbors as ourselves If there's love there and there's humility and there's patience That goes a long way

Giving people mercy and knowing that will receive mercy when we mess up because we all mess up We all have to rehearse before we get get it, right? even if we never get it completely right, but to me this gives us gives me a start and helps me and and I can identify with it because Or again with the Toastmasters thing I was so afraid of speaking in front of people and singing in front of people and anything like that.

Well after 11 years of practicing, I'm not feeling that way anymore. But still sometimes, like before I do my sermon in a couple weeks, little pitter-patters are going to happen again. But I know what it is. It's like, it's just your adrenaline, Joanne. Just don't worry about it. You've practiced, you're ready, you know, it'll be good. It'll give you energy, but it's nothing. You're not going to faint up there. You'll be okay. Because I know that now, but I didn't know that before. I just thought, what's the matter with me? I know these people aren't going to hurt me, but

why am I so scared? I don't understand. So now this helps me understand a little bit better and gives me some ideas of how to go forward in areas that I haven't conquered yet.

It's so interesting.

It's almost like the mind is separate from your being and that your mind is encouraging you as a being to do it. It's like you're separate, but then we draw the Holy Spirit.

In the nature of addiction or anything like this, if you're battling yourself in something, right?

If you're what, sorry?

In a nature of addiction or anything like that. You're battling yourself.

Oh, battling, okay.

It's what Paul described.

But if you leave the Holy Spirit out of that, it's very difficult. But if you draw the Holy Spirit, you have actual reinforcement. You have a third as a support group

to support you in whatever you're going through.

This is the root of participation, right? It's participation as part, right? Playing as a part to a kind of higher authority. And not having to take the burden on of being, right?

And to go with what Matt was saying about rituals and religious customs and habits. For example, daily prayer. I know it's in lots of Christian traditions, but I'm most familiar with Jewish daily prayer. Well, you have certain prayers you say at certain times each day and morning and evening you declare the Shema. Here O Israel the Lord is our God, the Lord is our Lord. And because you're putting that ideal, He is your God,

you should be submitting to Him and everything that goes along with that. That's important. Yeah and you're right, and you know if somebody, if you're thinking about what relation of theology might have to other fields and other disciplines, a theological critique of modern psychotherapy is that modern psychotherapy can only get you... it's focused on symptom reduction. Okay, you're feeling depressed, how do you make you feel a little bit better every day?

But symptoms reduction is one thing, but what about transformation? Transformation is a theological... That's right. All right, so this modern psychotherapy You can never reach beyond symptom reduction to transformation because it has to be secular There's no as what you said ultimate. Yeah, because that's a theological issue, right? Okay. Well a

couple Weeks ago a month ago. I pulled out this book and it seemed to have hit a nerve or something that most people can identify with. I noticed Dan sprinkled a few things about that in his sermons the last couple of weeks and today he practically took my whole presentation. But just to do a summary if any of you weren't here, this we often find ourselves being forced or inclined to behave in ways that are not good for us,

or we don't do things that are good for us, even though we know we should. We just can't seem to put into practice what we know is best for our overall lives. And why is that? And the scriptures talk about that too. Romans 7 is the tongue twister verses that say, I don't do what I know I should do and the things I don't want to do, that's what I do. And who can, who can, there's, there's something in me. It's a law in me that's fighting against the law of my mind. And this book has been written by two medical doctors to do with the brain science, and they see this as well.

It's not a faith-based book, but I think if we can put this together with other ideas in our lives, especially our faith, we have a really powerful way to improve our lives and to give more glory to God with them. We often live on unwanted autopilot, I guess would be the way of putting it. We have what we call, I think Dan put it once a few weeks ago, monkey brain. It's our animal nature. It's the part of us that is quick and efficient and only focused on immediate survival or relief or comfort. Doesn't matter about the future, we got to survive this moment, because if we don't survive this moment, there's going to be no future.

So this is where addictions come in, because we can't see ourselves getting through the next moments unless we partake of whatever it is we're addicted to, or things that really cause us problems. And what are they and what do we do about them? First of all, we need to be aware of them. And one of the parts of the discussion after I presented last time was very, really insightful. Someone said, you know, this is all great, it sounds good, but it's not enough. Because it doesn't work. Because it all requires self-discipline, and we don't have it. We

don't have enough of it. Well, I found a really interesting quote by someone said, I don't discipline, self and discipline. Yet, we are to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. As a man sinks, so is he. These are all Bible verses. And we are to train our minds, train our bodies. Actually, Apostle Paul says, I make my body my slave. I make myself do what I know should be done or not do what shouldn't be done. How do we do that? Well, it's buried in Scripture, but I love science and so this book resonates with me. So putting them

I think what came up last time was the thing missing from this is love. The power of love is like that lightning bolt that illuminates and empowers everything. Because God is love. So God, or love, is the lightning bolt. Self-discipline, self-control, it's what some people call, it's one of the fruits of the Spirit. Well, I look at that verse about the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, da da da. It's not nine things, it's

not the whole thing. We need the whole thing. And only God is the whole thing, but we have been told to love God wholeheartedly and love our neighbor as ourselves. That's the greatest commandment, but it's really two. But it's one. It's two, but it's one. So love God, love ourselves, so that we can love others. Because we can't love others if we don't love ourselves. The thing about these, what the book calls,

deceptive brain messages, that we believe things that are incorrect about ourselves, and we don't realize it. This is what invisibly directs us to do things that are not healthy for us. Where do they come from? That's what the chapter is about that I'm going to present on tonight. Because when you bring love into the situation, and if love is the empowering, illuminating thing that makes everything work together, that gives us the ability to see what we're doing and to see,

okay, I can remember the rules now if you want to put it that way, but we can't do that if we don't have the ability to step back and look. But if our deceptive brain messages, I prefer to call it the defective brain messages. Deceptive sounds kind of malicious and sneaky, but it's not that. We all believe things that are untrue about ourselves. Not because someone's tried to deceive us, but it's just a natural consequence of living in this world, being parented by imperfect parents, being taught by imperfect teachers, having older siblings who, you know, sometimes they're selfish, dealing with coaches, anyone who, when we were young, they were our caregivers or someone

we looked up to or depended on. And in our young, immature, growing brains, we think, well, they're always right. I mean, we believe Santa Claus comes down the chimney and all the houses and around the whole world in one night. We believe that. I believe that, because this person that I look up to said so. And that's good enough for me. I didn't research it.

As an adult, we can do these things. We can look at things more objectively and holistically. But as a kid, we can't. And so we have all got some messages in our subconscious brains that are steering us wrong. The trick is how do we find out what that message is

and where it came from? And once we know that, we can then start to recognize it when it pops up in our lives. And that gives us power. What gives us even more power is if we bring love into the situation in some way. But the problem is

if we have messages that are telling us we're not lovable, we're not worth the effort of trying to challenge these defective brain messages because it takes energy to combat them, to identify them, and to start turning away from them and forming new habits, new brain neuroplasticity, they call it. If we don't believe that we're lovable, we won't bother with any of it. So together they can help us. So how do we start? We have this distorted view of ourselves because of the past. And it's not because people in our past didn't love us. Some of them maybe didn't love us,

but they had their own things they were dealing with. Our parents had parents of their own who were imperfect, who had parents of their own who were imperfect. I'm just going to read one example in the book. There's a number of them. This one's the shortest.

It's about a guy named Ed. He realized that his mother acted toward him when he was a child with a message that told him he was of no value. She never treated me like I was important, unless I did something that made her look good and the bar was high. For example, excelling in art history meant nothing to her, only as academic grades did. Unless I had A-pluses across the board, she would reprimand me and ask why I had not done better. She never accepted or praised him for his artistic accomplishments, no matter how many parents remarked at how talented he was or how they wish they had a son like him.

Nothing was ever good enough for her, which left me perpetually feeling like a second-class citizen. So as soon as he accepts and internalized that message from his mother, which as a young child, there's really no other option

because you don't have the experience or the objectivity to do otherwise, that he had no inherent value, this devastating, deceptive brain message was formed in him and has plagued him to avoid many things in his life, including auditions, asking women out for dates.

He lived a limited life because he believed that he had no value, until he was able to see that this was my mom's message, not mine. He was able to see that. It's not who I am. Once he realized that for all these years he'd been under the sum of her deceptive message, one he had incorporated into his own sense of self, he felt grief for the last time, but also incredible relief. Seeing the truth,

he was liberated. As Jesus said, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free. He no longer believed he was mandated to follow his brain's erroneous message. He was able to start putting himself out there and creating a new life for himself. As scripture says, we're to become new creations. We have to think differently so that we can be differently. So what this book has was a number of charts.

I put a few of them together and I made this chart. Let's see if I covered everything here. I'll get to the chart in a minute. Let me finish what I've got here. So we need to be seen, it's a human need to be seen, heard, understood, and loved for who we are and to be able to express our emotions and

our needs to the important people in our lives. Many children don't have that opportunity, but as caregivers, as a parent myself, I know I didn't do that 100% for my children because I have my own baggage to deal with. You know, I have my marriage to deal with, I had other things going on, and so I was not perfect for all four of my kids. But the good news is, according to research, even if a caregiver is 50% there for their child, or a teacher, or a coach, or an older sibling, that child will be able to go into adulthood with a lot of good, healthy tools for coping with life. But if it's less than 50% that

kid's got baggage. When they grow up they have a lot of defective brain messages to deal with. So thankfully we don't have to be perfect to be good enough. So the title of this chapter is Ignoring, Minimizing and Neglecting. How Deceptive Brain Messages Distort Your View of Yourself. If we've been ignored, minimized, or neglected during our formative years by people who we could not objectively understand as being, you know, that's them, it's not me, we would just accept that and that it was true and we would take

it personally and apply that to ourselves and treat ourselves as adults the way we were treated as kids, without investigating, without even thinking that we were doing it. It's just an automatic internalization. So from our childhood, even our early adulthood, how we were treated by parents, teachers, coaches, any important person in our lives is the way we learn to treat ourselves. And we think about ourselves that way, but it's so internalized we don't even realize we're doing it. We need to realize we're doing it, then we have the power to step back.

We're going to love ourselves enough to do that, and if we've been neglected and minimized, the message is we're not worth loving. So it's this catch-22, and we have to realize, maybe I'm worth it. Not that I'm something special, but it's okay to question the fact that I think I'm not good enough, or whatever it is. So once we become aware of these defective brain messages, where they originated and the triggers we now have, that kind of stirs them up and causes us to then launch into doing this

unhealthy response, we then have the ability to step back and look. And if we also inject love in there in some way, and I like what Dan put in the sermon this morning, I never heard of it, visualize ourselves in a situation in our past where we were not treated properly and imagine Jesus there with us, with his hand on our shoulder and, you know, loving us through it. And when we're in a situation similar, when this defective brain message is throwing itself at us in the current day, we might automatically think

of Jesus with us now and say, He died for me. I don't have to believe this message that I was wrongly given. It isn't accurate, it's not maliciously given, but I understood it wrongly. And now I want to fix that with God's help. I can pray, God loves me, He is love, and we can't love ourselves or others unless we feel God's love us, because we love because he first loved us. So we have to somehow get love in there, and it sort of opens a window and gives us that breath of fresh air to give us the power. Last fall I presented on a book called You Are Not Your Brain, which talked about some

of understanding temptation and how we can fight temptation. And what it mentioned was that we often have what they call deceptive brain messages, this natural first thought that we get that's wrong. are young, we are so affected by our environments, and we're immature, so we develop these coping mechanisms that work for us at that time, but they're so repeated that they become ingrained when as adults we don't realize it, and it's causing problems. So that's how this book views it. Did you say something, Dan? Oh, okay. So James Allen is talking about the

same idea. Cognitive behavioral therapy, you've probably all heard of that. It's based on Pavlov. Do any of you remember Pavlov from your elementary school? He's the guy that trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell because they knew when a bell rang they'd get something to eat. And then he stopped giving them something to eat and they'd still salivate. So I can make your body do something because of your thought. Even though it doesn't make sense

because there's no food there. Mindfulness is something more recent that's been emphasized, but it's the same idea. Be aware of your thoughts so then you become able to change them if you wish. The 12-step programs began in 1935 with Alcoholics Anonymous, and based on scripture, but also on the same idea of change

your thoughts, and you can overcome addictions, and the bad habits that we all have. And doesn't mean it's going to be easy for the rest of your life, but one day at a time, one thought at a time, it can be done what would seem otherwise impossible. It's all based on scripture. And I'm gonna just read, I'm gonna read something from James Allen as well. But I'm gonna read, this is,

I belong to an Allen group for a number of years, which is to help people who are living with someone with alcoholism. And I found a really good one that lines up with what James Allen wrote. Okay, here's a one-pager. So, at an Al-Anon meeting, we discussed the way our

housekeeping habits reflect the effects of alcoholism. One person shared that his life felt completely unmanageable unless his house was perfectly neat. Tidiness gave him an illusion of control. So, this is your chronic, God keep everything spick and span, because I feel better that way. Others, including me, says the writer, spoke of floors strewn with clothes, books, and papers that we could not cross the room

without stepping on or tripping over. I'd always considered this just a bad habit, until I heard someone share that this clutter was her way of keeping people at a distance and isolating herself. Then I remembered that in the house where I grew up, clutter served this function. I was afraid to

invite friends over because everything was too messy. I was uncomfortable to realize that I was doing the same thing in adulthood that had kept me isolated as a child. So taking a fresh look at what I thought was just a bad habit, I can free my life from some clutter when I consider the hidden motives for that habit, without condemning myself or my family. Clutter doesn't have to be physical, I could also be mental, spiritual, and emotional,

and I can heal without making moral judgments about myself or others. Simply by thinking about it in a different way, she had a new way of dealing with a habit that had been her whole life long. So call out a day of the year, a month and a day, and I will read what James Allen has to say.

So you can get a taste of the type of things he says. Anybody? October 27th, in the perfect chord of music, the single note, though forgotten, is indispensably contained. And the drop of water becomes of supreme usefulness by losing itself in the ocean.

Sink yourself compassionately in the heart of humanity and you shall reproduce the harmonies of heaven. Lose yourself in unlimited love toward all and you shall work enduring works and become one with the eternal ocean of bliss. Man evolves outward to the periphery of complexity and then evolves backward to the central simplicity. When a man discovers that it is mathematically impossible for him to know the

universe before knowing himself, he then starts upon the way which leads to original simplicity. He begins to unfold from within, and as he unfolds himself, he enfolds the universe. Cease to speculate about God and find the all-embracing good within you." That's pretty deep stuff, but this is 1800s, you know. I actually changed some of the words because it's more of these and vows and that old-fashioned language But I find some things I have to put a question mark beside and some things it's like that soul rings a bell with a Bible Verse I know It's it's Jesus talking in the sense

Another one April 8th April 8th. When perfect good is realized and known, then calm vision is acquired. The transcendent life is ruled not by passions, but by principles. It is founded not upon fleeting impulses, but upon abiding laws. In its clear atmosphere, the orderly sequence of all things is revealed

so that there is seen to be no more room for sorrow, anxiety, or regret. While men are involved in the passions of self, they load themselves with cares and trouble over many things, and more than all else, do they trouble over their own little burdened,

pain-stricken personality, being anxious for its fleeting pleasures, for its protection and preservation, and for its eternal safety and continuance. Now in the life that is wise and good, all this is transcended. Personal interests are replaced by universal purposes, and all cares, troubles, and anxieties concerning the pleasure and fate of the personality are dispelled like the feverish dreams of a knight. Universal good is seen. It takes a while to think about some of these, but I find that I can get a lot of good

out of this man's writings, but it's like anything, I can't espouse all of them. Yes.

Okay, I think so much that these ingrained reflexes or these ingrained passions, that they have to be a part of my identity, but they don't. They're something that I've learned in the same way as that dog learns the sound of the

bell.

That identification is so ingrained, and it's so much ingrained into my identity, but it doesn't need to be. It's not something that, as you mentioned, it's a choice that we have. It's a choice that we have to change that. And I really resonated when you mentioned that.

And yet, when it manifests itself in a physical way, it's not going to immediately leave us just because we understand what it is. I was going to mention too, there's a number of Bible verses which tell me this is not a new idea. Dan, today you mentioned Psalm 19, let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you God. So way back when the Psalms were written, God is concerned with our thoughts, the meditations of my heart. The Ten Commandments, number 10, thou shalt not covet.

Nobody can see if you're coveting, but God can. He cares about what we're thinking, because what we think determines how we feel, determines what we do, and only we can change our thoughts. We might not be able to change that first one, but we don't have to stay with it.

And that's the point, is we have to have the confidence to say, this is not the way I want to think. And it's going to be a battle. There's a war going on, but it doesn't mean I have to give in. I want to read this one from November 18th, because I thought it was really good about how Though you are not your brain idea, it's at November 18th. Says there's no more painful bondage

than to be at the mercy of one's inclinations.

The law is that the heart shall be purified, the mind regenerated, and the whole being brought into subjection to love, until self be dead and love is all in all. For the reign of law is the reign of love. And love waits for all, rejecting none. Love may be claimed and entered into now, for it is the heritage

of all. Ah, beautiful truth, to know that now man may accept his divine heritage and enter the kingdom of heaven. Oh, pitiful error to know that man rejects it because of love Love of self. Obedience to one's selfish inclinations means the drawing about one's soul, clouds of pain and sorrow which darken the light of truth,

the shutting out of oneself from all real blessedness. For whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap. There is no greater liberty than utmost obedience to the law of being. So in a very flowery poetic way, he's saying the same things that scripture says. 1 Peter 2 says, Beloved, I urge you to abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul.

Arm yourselves with the mind of Christ. Arming means there's a battle. to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and live sensibly and godly. So that's really all I have to say and I thought I'd introduce this guide to you if you didn't hear of them before.

And certainly open to discussion. I don't know what my time is. Okay, I don't know either, no clock. But there's a lot of good stuff in there for good food for thought. And to know that really James Allen, Norman Vincent Peale,

this guy who wrote Jeff Keller, you can change your attitude, change your life. It's all basically confirming what's already in the scriptures if you really look for it. So our thoughts, we have to be more than our thoughts, but our thoughts are the root of all things

and we control where they grow. and we control where they grow. and we control where they grow.