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Anchor Point Films

Chad Kreuzer

Fadia Kreuzer

The NATURE of Happiness

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your love.

We thank you for the Son that was here today outside, and what a blessing it is this time of year to have that.

We just pray that your Holy Spirit would guide us as we look at some of the blessings that you've given us.

May your Holy Spirit rain down to work on each and every heart, in Jesus' name, Amen.

Natural healing and the brain, natural healing in the brain.

Now, could it be that some things like this, and if someone's hearing the recording, you can see it on the screen, but we have a cell phone, we have the video game controller, Could it be that this is keeping many young children away from this?

We talked about this a little bit last night that, you know, kids used to, it just used to be part of life that you played outside and I shared with you last night that researchers have found that the average child spends about 8 minutes outside a day, 8 minutes, and they have found that the average prisoner in a maximum security prison spends about an average of 2 hours outside a day.

So the question is who's really in prison these days?

And I might argue it's the children, right?

I mean, if 8 minutes, I don't even understand, it seems criminal that schools wouldn't let kids out more than 8 minutes a day.

When I was a kid, I mean, surely even a short break was more than 8 minutes and it was outside.

That was part of life, unless it was really raining or something like that.

But once again, just by way of review, we looked at God gave us all of his statutes.

It says in Deuteronomy 6, 24, And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God for our good always.

God gave His commandments for our good always, that He might preserve us alive as it is this day.

Meaning that the commandments also have a longevity benefit, that He might preserve our lives, right?

We saw that man's strongest impulse urges him to seek his own happiness, and the Bible recognizes this desire and shows us that all of heaven will unite with man in his efforts to gain true happiness.

Now this is another interesting thought here.

So God gave us His commandments for our happiness.

And notice this, God made nature also for our happiness.

God, who made the Eden home of our first parents so surpassingly lovely, has given the noble trees, the beautiful flowers, and everything lovely in nature for our what?

If God gave us all the beautiful things that are in nature and he gave them specifically to make us happy and if we're spending 8 minutes a day outside could it be that we're missing some of the things that God actually created to make us happy.

And I'm guessing in those 8 minutes that your average child is spending outside a day, they're not actually spending time thinking about nature or even looking at nature, right?

It's literally 8 minutes, as I said, I'm guessing, I'm just thinking about it, would probably be about the time that it would take to get from the car, from the house to the car, and then from the car to school, and then from, you know, school to the car, and then from the car to their home.

So, meaning, they're spending almost 0 amount of time outside.

And so, could it be that we're missing the things, the simple things that God gave us to bring happiness?

We might be totally like, you know, just kind of lost as to what God's actually trying to use to make us happy.

In the Bible, speaking of Jesus, our perfect example, in Mark chapter 1 and verse 35, the Word of God says, and in the morning, speaking of Jesus, rising up a great while before day, he went out and departed into a solitary place and there prayed.

We know that because partly how much he walked, right?

I mean the mode of transportation for Jesus, now yes he rode a donkey 1 time that we know of, but in general it was what?

And some people actually estimate, and I think this is probably an exaggeration, some estimate that Jesus walked 20 miles a day.

We know where he went, and we can actually say, okay, he went from this city, this town to that town, we know how long that is.

And so he walked a significant amount of time outside.

And not only that, he spent time praying outdoors.

And any of you know that you've spent any time out in the great outdoors and you have devotions out there, you have time to pray out there, there's something special about that, isn't there?

There really is something special about spending time in nature, especially prayer time.

Now, we already looked at the fact that too much, you know, time on devices and so forth.

We looked at the fact that people were addicted to the Internet and video games.

They've actually found a research that it shrinks their frontal lobes specifically, the spiritual portion of the brain.

So here's some of the negative, but we're gonna get to the real positives tonight about this, but I wanna share a study with you that we haven't shared yet on nature, technology, and memory, and actually, Fadi is gonna come up and she is going to share with us about this.

All right, so nature, technology, and memory.

So what it says is they took test subjects, and they were to walk through an arboretum, that's a natural setting, to see how nature and technology would affect their memory.

So what they did is they took 1 group and they would walk for 30 minutes through the arboretum talking on their phone.

The second group would have to hand over their cell phone before the walk, and another group would take the memory test before going on the walk, okay?

So 1 group didn't go on a walk at all, they just had to take the memory test.

1 group went on the walk with their cell phone and then took the memory test, and then 1 group went on a walk in nature without their cell phone and then took the test.

Now those of you in school, listen up, this is good, good information.

The result was while taking a memory test, those who were on the cell phone scored about 30%.

The results were about the same for those who took the test before the walk.

So whether you, those that just went in and took the test and didn't take a walk and those that took the walk with their cell phones scored the same.

But look at the ones that went on a walk in nature without their cell phones.

Those who walked for a half hour in nature scored an average of 80%.

There's something about nature that God created that makes our minds work well.

Our minds just work better when we're out in nature.

I can't explain it to you completely, but God said to do it and he said it brings us happiness.

Hey, it brings us happiness in scoring better on tests too, right?

So as a student it'll make life easier, won't it?

So thumbs up to going out and walks in nature, right?

Last night we talked a little bit about delayed gratification and how important it is in later life.

We talked about the marshmallow experiment.

And for those of you that don't know, it was just a study in the 60s and 70s that they did where they tried to see how children who had the ability to delay gratification, how it ended up predicting how successful they would be later in life.

And, because they followed them for like 40 years and they saw if they were able to delay gratification as a child, it predicted how they would be successful as adults.

So huge thing, but what about phone time and delayed gratification?

What does that do to a child's ability to delay gratification?

Researchers compared young children who are mobile media users with those who did not use mobile media devices.

Children who use mobile media were substantially worse than non-mobile media users when it came to being able to delay gratification.

This is huge for people who are trying to teach their kids to be successful in life, right?

You want to instill that ability of delaying gratification because it will mean success later in life for them, right?

They showed that you would have higher SAT scores if you learned how to delay gratification.

1 of the great, or I said it, 1 of the greatest predictors of success in later life is a child's ability to have strength in the area of delayed gratification.

A study was conducted to discover if looking at nature could help increase the power of delayed gratification.

Subjects were to look at pictures of nature.

Now mind you, this is not even being in nature, but just looking at pictures of nature.

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The NATURE of Happiness

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