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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Justin Kim

How to Increase Your Intelligence

Father, we thank you for this Sabbath day.

We thank you for the medium of Zoom and Facebook and streaming technology.

We thank you for the religious liberty that we have in this country.

Father, we ask for a very special blessing on every soul who hears this message, that you may speak to us in a way that only you can speak.

Father we pray that your moving of the Holy Spirit may be strange.

We are reluctant to have another worship experience that is just familiar and another Sabbath routine, we ask for the strange moving upon our hearts that we will know and that we will recognize the profound experience that you have in store for us.

So bless us now, transcend this presentation beyond a PowerPoint presentation, but may we hear words from on high, we pray in Jesus' name.

And if you can see that, give me a thumbs up for some visual confirmation.

Great, excellent, is the presentation I have in store for today.

This is just a little cute thing that I put together.

You can increase your intelligence in different ways.

The studies have showed us that, I just put these 3 shifts, mentorship, penmanship, and scholarship, just to help us kind of get it into our brains.

By mentorship, there are plenty of studies that show that if you want to increase your intelligence, just by merely hanging out with other people who are intelligent, well, without much effort on your end, increase your intelligence as well.

It's not just regarding intelligence, but regarding any talent, any skill, any mood.

Who you hang out with is who you eventually will, who you will become.

So that also goes for negative skills as well.

If you hang out with bitter people, hanging out with superficial people, it just you naturally absorb those qualities of those people around you.

And so you want to find people that you aspire to be like.

And I would say as a pastor, and when it comes to the realm of character and spirituality, find those people that you respect and that you see these qualities that you aspire for and hang out with them as much as you can and in the most unannoying way possible.

I just needed a ship there somewhere, but this is where, if I can find mine, oh, here it is.

And I'll talk about it maybe a little bit later, but I really recommend that you get something like this.

This is a journal, and women call it a diary.

We have captains, logs, we have journals.

I don't know what you call them, but I really recommend you get 1 of these.

And there's something profound, especially in our technological savvy world that we live in the more you don't use your thumbs and just kind of swiping stuff back and forth but actually engaging with pen and paper the neurological studies are coming now coming out now and have been for a while on how this is just a lot more stimulating for brain development than just swiping a screen back and forth.

And so 1 way to increase your intelligence is really reflecting upon your experience, upon your day, upon your week.

And this is something that as Adventists, we have a wonderful opportunity to do this every Friday night, Saturday morning and afternoon and see how the Lord has blessed us and how the Lord has led during the week and the 6 days and maybe even once a month and then throughout the whole year.

And there's different techniques and ways to do this, and that's probably another presentation altogether.

But this is not vertical intelligence, or that's not horizontal intelligence, not more knowing more, but it's more horizontal intelligence and getting deeper and more profounder and what perhaps some people would call wisdom rather than knowledge or intelligence.

The third way is by scholarship and this is for those of you who are in the Advent Hope community.

I have been always enamored with an Advent Hope.

I've been there a couple of times I've been asked to speak many times but our schedules have never been able to match up but I know there are many scholars nearby in the universities near Avento of Loma Linda and La Sierra and the Redlands and whatnot And I know in the particular age group that many of you are a part of, you are all about into scholarship and getting smarter and getting your MDs and DDSs and MRSs and MRs and all that you need to get.

Scholarship is often achieved by books, yes?

And I don't know, maybe Michelle who led out in Sabbath School can help me out, but I don't know of any doctoral program that doesn't use books, right?

That's just Kind of a very dumb thing for me to say.

Maybe I need to listen to this presentation more.

Anyway, so my scholarship is books So readers are leaders and really encourage you in this digital age to read more This is something that 1 of my mentors She she shared with me And she said that we should be seventh day readers, not seventh day Adventists, we should be seventh day Adventists, but also 7 day readers.

And she recommended that we read about 7 books and we should be reading strategically.

I don't know about you, but I have this habit of just buying everything, whether it's on Kindle digital or even on analog actual books and just kind of like, this is interesting.

This is like $32, but it's only $2 for today.

I got to buy it because I'm going to earn 30 bucks and then I never read the book.

So this is kind of the weird way I have in digesting books.

And she said that we need to strategically choose the books that we're going to read for our career development, also our spiritual development, and also our personal development.

And so the 5 books that she recommended, and I added 2 more, and these 7 books, they're not simultaneous, depending on your reading habits.

I usually need to have 2 or 3 books that I'm reading about the same time.

Some people just have 1 book and they focus laser in 1 or others they just go ADD and go all 7 1 day of the week and I don't recommend that but some people do have those reading habits.

But the first she recommended is to read a biography.

A biography of any person that you respect and this is not necessarily I personally go through the American presidents.

I don't like the middle fathers because there was nothing that happened, especially except for Lincoln and also the contemporary leaders.

They don't necessarily have to be good leaders.

They don't even have to be bad leaders, they can just be bad people that by learning and reading their story, we learn of how not to be, if that makes sense.

We don't necessarily have to have that experience ourselves, we can see the experience in others and we can say 1 way of applying the wisdom is say, oh that's what that person did, I want to make sure I don't do that.

And a biography is usually a very fascinating read, it's an easy read, it's something that is not very intellectually difficult, You're just reading about someone's life.

So you want to have a biography that really inspires you or maybe de-inspires you to get you on that boat.

You want to find a topic of which you want to be known as.

She knows like every grape there is on her son and she specializes in grapes.

And this is really the secret to having an undergraduate degree.

A lot of us we pay you know 30 to 80000 dollars a year to get whatever degree, but usually what you see in a syllabus is for you to read about 10 books.

And you find 10 books on this 1 topic and going through these 10 books you will become a specialist on that topic.

Usually by book 7 you will have read at least the generic basics on that topic and then the last 3 books is your analytical skills start coming in because a lot of the information will be repetitive.

And you can say, well, I know that, and then I agree with this author, and then, well, the other 7 said this is about this guy, and you start comparing and contrasting by book 8, 9, and 10, really hones in your analytical skills.

This is 1 way to get a free education without paying for a degree that you'll just put on your wall and never see ever again.

So with all the work that you're doing, you wanna find a book that is just totally off your radar and allows you to make these connections that you would have never been able to before reading a random book.

This really makes you a more interesting person.

As a minister, it really makes me a lot more sermon content, and it makes you a better conversationalist because you know about random things because the most interesting conversationalists are random people.

I have no connections to Iran, never want to go to Iran, never never I don't know anyone from Iran but I read it and it was a thick book and I don't remember much about it except for 1 thing is 1979 is when the United States pulled out because of the political conditions at the time and the revolution that they were going through.

Well years later I was witnessing to a lady she had her husband and she husband was he used to work for the CIA, or the government, I think it was the CIA, I don't know, well, anyway.

And I asked, you know, hey, we're talking, and then he said, what do you know about Iran?

And all I know is I remember hey did you leave in 1979 and he said young man how do you know that and I said well I read it in a book and he said wow you must be very intelligent I'm like I'm not intelligent I just read a random book that doesn't make me smart.

And he said hey I want to go to your prophecy series because if you know about 1979 and about American history then you must know a little bit more than you're coming on to.

And these different random things, whether you're sitting next to someone at the airplane or waiting for your bus to come at a bus stop, just really amplifies your interest level as a human person.

Number 4 is you wanna read a difficult book, you wanna read a really thick book, something to stretch your mind.

You don't even necessarily have to understand this book, you don't even have to complete the book.

As long as you've maybe increased your vocabulary by 5 to 7 words, that's worth the book.

If you've digested some difficult concept or if you've just gotten your feet wet in something, you wanna get into a book that really challenges you.

And lastly, with all the difficult books that are there, you wanna find a book that you enjoy.

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How to Increase Your Intelligence

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