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Post Falls SDA Church

Battles in the Brain

Willard Santee

Battles in the Brain, Part 1

Why did Jesus tell Nicodemus that unless he was born again or from above he could not see the kingdom of God.

During our next 2 presentations, I'm going to attempt to answer, by God's grace, that question by looking at modern science and also this old book we call the Bible.

Before we begin today's study or part 1 I want you to pray with me right now.

Father please, please do that for us that we're incapable of doing for ourselves.

I'd like to say right at the beginning of today's presentation that I'm not an expert on the human brain.

I've used 1 for most of my life, but I still don't comprehend or understand how it works, nor do I understand the various parts and all of its interconnectivity to the human body.

However, I've discovered that there are some individuals who have spent much of their lives studying this incredible little three-pound mass of gray and white matter, they call it.

In fact, there's 1 thing that they all agree on, those who have studied the brain, and that is that the human brain is a masterpiece of construction.

The brain is so incredible and complex that 1 could spend a lifetime focusing on just 1 area and its relationship to the whole, and yet still never fully understand everything that there is to know about it.

And that's exactly what 1 neuroscientist has done.

Some of you may have read some of his works or have heard of him.

He's focused a great deal of his life on a special part of the brain known as the amygdala.

Ledoux probably knows more about the amygdala than any other person alive from what I understand, and he's yet quick to make an admission.

He said he cannot control that little part of his brain.

Let me explain what I understand about the amygdala.

It consists of 2 almond-shaped structures represented by these 2 little eggs that I have in this little clear glass bowl representing our brain, okay?

These 2 little round masses of gray matter located deep within the temporal lobes of the brain are responsible for something, believe it or not.

They're about half the size of these eggs.

As far as length goes, they're about an inch long.

Ledoux, the amygdala has a lot to do with our emotions, especially anger and fear.

Those are the emotions he spent most of his life studying in reference to the human brain.

In my personal reading about the amygdala, I've come to conclude that these 2 little almond-shaped structures are like a control center, if you please, in our brain.

As an example, when I was in college, I remember coming out of 1 of my science classes and I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake.

A number of them had gotten out of the lab and were slithering down the hallway, believe it or not, when the bell rang and the door opened and I was 1 of the first fellas out.

And I remember seeing the snake just as someone yelled, snakes!

I don't know what that would do to you, but I know what it did to me.

Even though I didn't know it at the time, my visual Thalamus in the brain picked up the signal from what was coming through my eyes and transferred the image of the snake back to my visual cortex, which in turn shot a message to my amygdala deep inside that I was about to step on a snake.

That information was processed throughout my little brain at a top speed of 268 miles an hour, making my reaction immediate.

My amygdala instantly secreted hormones throughout my body, which caused my heart to begin beating faster, my muscles to become energized, causing me to go airborne just enough to avoid stepping on 1 of those little rattlers.

This physical reaction of fight or flight was caused by my amygdala.

Because of this little control center and its reaction to the message of my visual cortex, I was not only able to experience a moment of flight, but an extended period of fright.

In other words, my heart continued to race for some time even after I was out of striking distance of the snakes, and it became evident that I had no control over my emotion of fear.

In fact, if you had your foot caught in a railroad track and you heard the sound of a train whistle blowing, You would have an emotional reaction and you would have an experience of fear.

In fact, it would be impossible not to because that's the way the brain works.

But what about our other emotions, which don't seem to be so extreme, such as our daily cares?

You know, like frustrations we experience, the stress on the job or anxiety over our children or worry about our future?

And what about our emotions which are not so socially acceptable, such as eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, uncontrolled anger, hatred, bitterness, envy, jealousy or sexual perversion?

Let me try and answer these questions by sharing some more information I've discovered about our little brain.

Today we know that the thinking part, that's this part up here, the thinking part of our brain where our choices and decisions are made is called the prefrontal cortex, that frontal lobe, That's where we think.

According to many scientists, for those who study the brain in particular, it is believed that our minds have 2 basic parts.

It has an old brain, which is our emotional brain, and it has a new brain which is our rational brain.

In short, the amygdala is part of our old emotional brain, and our frontal lobe is the new brain or our rational brain.

1 of the reasons this is thought to be true is because there seems to be no major connectivity going from the frontal lobe of our brain to the amygdala while there is a major superhighway if you please going from our amygdala to the prefrontal cortex.

In other words, when the emotional part of our brain sends a major feeling or a rush, if you please, to the rational part of our brain, our reasoning is overpowered by the emotion that is created, and we have no way to get a strong enough message back to our amygdala to tell it to calm down and behave itself.

Thus the conclusion, the frontal part of the brain is still developing, while the amygdala has obviously been around since our primitive brain was first developed.

Now this is why modern science would have us believe it was our primitive brain which enabled our pre-human ancestors or the so-called hominid forms of life to survive through the fight or flight syndrome.

But now that the new part of our brain seems to be evolving according to science, they believe that it may 1 day be able to control the amygdala.

To have our thoughts actually control our feelings, instead of our feelings overpowering our thoughts.

But until then, scientists sort of throw up their little hands and say we have to accept the fact that even though our new brain can do fantastic things cognitively, it is still not capable of having complete control over our emotions.

When you look at society, as I do, I'm sure you would have to agree as I do with science today that everywhere we look our whole world seems to be filled with the unfortunate consequences of uncontrolled emotional behavior.

That's why modern man today, may I suggest, beloved, is searching for effective ways to modify or diminish our unacceptable emotions.

As an example, when people demonstrate a lack of control over their anger, oftentimes a judge will insist that that individual experience what we call anger therapy.

If that fails, we can then send them to try another type of therapy called cognitive emotion regulation.

And if that doesn't work, we turn to cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, which simply means if you can learn to change the way you think, then you can change the way you feel down inside.

Today, we're trying new therapies such as prolonged exposure therapy for those who have been through major trauma or are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which – follow me – which often comes as a result of having an emotion or picture burned into the mind.

In cases of severe depression, today we're resorting to a more modern use of an old technique we used to call shock treatments.

Today, we call it electroconvulsive therapy or ECT.

And of course, there are dozens of drugs that are being used and more on their way, each 1 seeking to suppress our emotions or bring them under some semblance of order and control.

When I think about our so-called modern science and its search for effective ways to modify or diminish our unacceptable emotions and behaviors, I can't help but think about the Apostle Paul and what he wrote about himself in Romans 7, verse 15.

Listen to what he says about the battle in the brain.

I'm reading from the Revised Standard Version and it says this, I do not, Paul speaking, I do not understand my own actions.

For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

Does that sound familiar to anybody besides this old preacher man?

Thank you, there were 2 of you that agreed with me.

I can relate, beloved, what Paul is saying here because most of my life I've experienced that very thing.

Now listen to Paul's frustration as he sort of cries out in verses 21 through 24 concerning this battle in his brain.

And let me paraphrase this, if I may, this morning, in light of how modern science would probably relate to this.

I find, he says, it's a law that evil emotions and feelings are present within me, even though I choose to do good in my thoughts and my actions.

For I delight in the law of God within my heart or within my thoughts, but I see another law in my emotions and feelings, which wars against my will or my choice to do good.

This law within my emotions holds me captive to its law of sin which is within me.

O wretched, he cries out, O wretched and miserable man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of deadly emotions and feelings which I am powerless to control.

Now notice his answer to this crying out in verse 25 and also the first part of chapter 8, he says, I thank God, deliverance comes through Jesus Christ our Lord, for life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.

Now if Paul were alive today, I personally believe he would give us the exact same answer to the battle in the brain that he gave to the church at Rome in AD 58.

I can hear him saying, thanks be to God who gives us the victory.

There's no way beloved, at least in my mind, there is no way I can even imagine Paul crying out today saying, ìThanks be to God for psychotherapy and drug medications which give us the victory over our inherited and cultivated tendencies to evil.

The biblical bottom line is this, Either victory over our sinful nature comes through Jesus Christ, or it comes through modern science.

In short, beloved, It doesn't matter if you're a religious person or not.

The battle is the same for every 1 of us.

And no person on earth can win that battle over their inner emotions unless they have been born again.

Now let me share a few more facts about this interesting little amygdala or our emotional control center, if you please, in our brain.

I've discovered that our little amygdala has been implicated, or found to be responsible, for aggressive states that we find ourselves in such as anger and fear, intense sexual emotion and eating and drinking behaviors.

In fact, are you aware that some folks only have to look at a can of beer or a glass of wine and their emotions immediately take charge?

Feelings, warm, fuzzy, aggressive, emotional feelings literally well up inside of them to the point that they have no control over their will or their choice not to drink.

Battles in the Brain, Part 2

Today is part 2 in the study of battle in the brain.

In our first study, we discovered that when our first parents were created, they had a perfect balance between their thoughts and their feelings.

And because everything they saw and heard and touched and tasted and smelled stimulated only good thoughts, their emotional control center or that amygdala that we've talked about, actually produced only good feelings.

The more Adam and Eve matured and grew in their personal trust relationship with God, the more their characters developed in harmony with Him.

In other words, as they communed with God and beheld His creative power and the constant beauty that surrounded them, their thoughts impacted their amygdalas, which in turn responded by bringing forth good feelings and emotions which were in perfect harmony with their thoughts.

In time, this cycle would have formed a mature character after the divine pattern.

In other words, the character of Christ would have been perfectly reproduced in Adam and Eve.

Had their 5 senses continued working to stimulate good thoughts, and had their good thoughts continued working to impact good emotions, such as love and joy and peace and so on, something else would have happened.

Their godly emotions within their amygdalas would have worked to produce physical reactions and responses which if repeated again and again would have actually developed good habits of behavior.

Thus their habitual thoughts and feelings combined would have formed godly characters making them eternally secure in an earthly paradise where God's presence and his voice would have always been welcomed.

But 1 day, and you know the story, Eve heard a different voice.

She looked and there in the tree of knowledge she saw a winged serpent Which seemed to have the power of speech?

She not only smelled the fresh fruit of the tree.

She touched the fruit and then she tasted the fruit All of her senses were telling her this fruit was not only good, it had the ability to exalt her into a higher sphere than she had ever experienced before.

But the moment Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, something happened in their brain which has affected every child that has ever been born except for 1.

In short, the human mind experienced evil or sin.

It knew for the very first time what disobedience felt like.

He had chosen another leader whose total focus was self.

When Eve stood before the tree of knowledge, her perfect human thoughts were influenced by the thoughts of an evil angel who used a snake, if you please, as his medium.

Once Eve's mind chose to act on those thoughts, her emotional control center was impacted with feelings and emotions never before experienced.

For the very first time in human existence, both Adam and Eve understood that evil had the power to separate and destroy.

God's original plan, may I suggest, was to keep them from ever experiencing evil.

For according to the Bible, evil had already broken out in heaven where God's first created beings or angels lived.

And you can read about that in Revelation chapter 12.

It was Lucifer, the 1 whom God had placed over all the angelic beings that first experienced this evil.

According to Isaiah chapter 14 verses 12 through 15, rather than loving or honoring and worshipping his creator, Lucifer used his God-given freedom of choice to try and overthrow God's government.

Now even though Lucifer was unsuccessful in his attempt to take over God's kingdom, which by the way was founded on the principle of an eternal law of loving obedience, he did manage to take one-third of the heavenly angels with him in his rebellion against God.

In order to maintain God's heavenly gift of free choice, God created in man the same right that He had given to the angels.

And in order to provide Adam and Eve with the opportunity to exercise their freedom of choice, God placed a special tree in the midst of the garden and told them not to eat of it.

That, beloved, was the only restriction He ever gave them.

It was a simple request by their Creator God.

By choosing not to eat of the tree, they could actually demonstrate their love and trust in God.

On the other hand, by choosing to eat of the tree, they could show their lack of love for Him, their distrust in Him, and their personal desire to live independent of Him.

And thus the tree of knowledge of good and evil was put in the garden as an opportunity for Adam and Eve to demonstrate their personal freedom of choice and as a constant reminder that God does not force any of his created beings to love him.

For true love, beloved, can never be won by force or authority.

It must be a choice of free will on the part of 1 person toward another.

On that foundation, God's eternal kingdom has always existed and always will exist.

Unfortunately, the very day that Adam and Eve chose to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was the day they began to die.

For in that single act they chose not only to demonstrate their lack of love for God, but their distrust in Him as well.

And by choosing to separate themselves from the giver and sustainer of all life, they inadvertently chose to die.

Had it not been for the fact that God had already devised a substitutionary plan to save man should he fall, Adam and Eve would have died that very day in the garden.

But thank God he intervened or you wouldn't be hearing this message and I wouldn't be giving it.

According to the Bible, God was not willing to let Adam and Eve go without giving them another opportunity to demonstrate their love for their Creator.

God is not willing to let us go without giving us an opportunity to demonstrate our love for Him.

And that, really, beloved, is why the Bible was written.

It was given to let us know where we came from, why we're here, and what our future holds depending on the choices that we make and are free to make.

I'd like for us to go back for a moment to Adam and Eve, our first parents.

As they left their garden home and entered the vast wonders of their new world, they wore the skins of animals that had died in order that they might be covered.

The skins not only covered their nakedness and shame, but kept them from the chill that pervaded the very atmosphere which surrounded them.

They knew that life would never be the same again, for the first time the different seasons were actually experienced.

As the leaves began to turn color and die, Adam and Eve wept, for they realized It was their choice to eat of the tree that had caused all living things to experience separation and death.

But when the life of their son Abel was taken from them by the hand of their oldest boy, it broke their hearts beyond expression.

The emotional trauma of that day was never forgotten as long as they lived.

As they buried the lifeless form of their youngest son, a whole new understanding of God's promise flooded their minds.

When God said in Genesis 3, 15 that he would put enmity or a fixed and rooted hatred between the serpent and the woman and between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.

Hot tears, I can imagine, of hatred and bitterness fell to the ground that day from the half-blinded eyes of Adam and Eve, where they were confirmed that those who resist God would ultimately die.

And in that open field, they found the confirmation of man's growing hatred towards sin and rebellion.

In the smoldering altar which stood nearby the broken body of Abel, it also was a confirmation to Lucifer that his days were numbered, For he too remembered well the promise of God when he cursed the serpent and said God would bruise his head or crush out his life, even though he the serpent would 1 day bruise the heel of God or give him a temporary wound after which God would rise again.

Having used the snake as his medium, Lucifer would now forever be known as the old serpent, or the devil, or Satan, the deceiver of mankind.

As the lifeless form of Abel was buried in the earth, the reality of the battle between good and evil became a fixed reality in the brain of mankind.

Adam not only hated the enemy of God or Satan the serpent, he also hated himself and what he had done by eating the fruit.

There were even moments like in the garden where he found himself angry at God, for if God had not made the woman right.

And Eve also experienced the same emotions for she had implied if God had not made the serpent.

And so the battle in the brain raged on between good and evil.

Their new thoughts and feelings were expressed openly and experienced in a way that made them afraid.

They realized there was now a conflict deep within them which they were powerless to control.

While a part of them wanted to love God and obey Him, their new nature which was now fallen stood in opposition to such love and spiritual things.

In fact this new fallen nature was so opposed to God that it was not even subject to His law of love, nor could it ever be.

And that's why Adam and Eve had to be born again.

They needed God to recreate within them a brand new heart that would bring a spiritual balance once again within their thoughts and feelings.

For the next 2000 years, the battle in the brain continued to be played out in the lives of Adam and Eve's descendants.

It was a battle between good and evil, or between God and Satan over the minds of men and women and boys and little girls.

And then in Genesis chapter 6 verses 5 and 7 we read these words, �And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was evil, only evil continually.

This passage I discovered was rather interesting.

It says the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Modern science would tell us that our thoughts are generated in the frontal lobe of our brain while our emotions are seated largely in the amygdala.

What I see here in the Genesis story is that after 2000 years of moral degeneration, mankind had come to the place where both the thoughts and feelings or the emotions of the human heart were in perfect harmony with each other.

In other words, their thoughts and feelings were only evil continually.

What God had originally created in the garden had become totally reversed.

Where only good thoughts and good emotions were once in perfect balance, now only evil thoughts and evil emotions were in total control.

And thus the Bible says in verse 6, that it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth and it grieved him in his heart.

And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air for it repent of me that I have made them in quote, how thankful beloved we should be for verse 8, which says, but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

What that means is Satan was almost successful in taking control of every mind in that last generation of the antediluvian world.

But there was 1 mind he could not control, and that was the mind of Noah.

For Noah had discovered the life-giving power of God's grace and had lived the new life of holiness and purity in an unholy and impure world.

All through the centuries of our old world, we find Adam and Eve and their son Seth and many of his descendants, including Enoch and his son Methuselah, all having experienced the life-giving power of God's grace in their lives.

In short, God had His living representatives in every generation since the day of Adam and Eve until the flood.

And according to God's word, beloved, the Bible says that Satan will never be able to claim this world as his.

Even though he may capture the attention and eventually even control the great majority of human minds just as he did before the flood, there will be a great multitude which no man can number from all nations and tribes and peoples and tongues, who will stand before the throne of God and before this vast universe clothed with white robes and palms of victory in their hands.

Today Satan is working to capture every mind that he can.

He works in a thousand ways and in a thousand forms to snare us, to deceive us, to entice us, to manipulate us and even use us as pawns to draw others into His kingdom of darkness.

Let me share with you again what He did with Eve at the tree, because what He did with Eve, He does with you and me today.

He turns our God-given natural senses against us.

Battles in the Brain, Part 3

Today, our study is basically an addendum or a little addition, if you please, to our two-part study that we've enjoyed on the battle in the brain.

You may recall that we ended our second study or our last study talking about the servants of God or His special chosen ones or the 144, 000.

Today I want to go into a little more detail about this special company of individuals who will not only live through the final events of earth's history, but will come off more than conquerors through Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior.

In a recent midweek service, Brother Jim, our head elder, shared some thoughts that I'd like to use as sort of a framework, if you please, for today's presentation.

His comments had to do with cycles of history, and I think you'll find this rather interesting in light of what we've talked about in our last 2 presentations.

Actually Jim broke down the battle in the brain that we've been doing into 3 major sections of people groups.

The first group covered the period of the fall to the flood.

This period was around 2, 000 years of time.

In the garden you may recall Adam and Eve lived in a perfect environment as our world began and because everything they saw and heard and touched and tasted and smelled stimulated only good thoughts, their emotional control center, or the amygdala we've talked about, produced only good feelings.

By the time we come to Noah's day, the good thoughts and the good feelings had been completely reversed or replaced with bad thoughts and bad feelings.

In other words, by that time Satan actually claimed the old world as his, but Noah, you'll remember, found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Now the second people group that he mentioned to us at our midweek service covered the history from the flood up to the cross.

Again this was a period of around 2, 000 years, taking us from Noah to the days of Jesus and his disciples.

Now the point that we need to keep in mind is that even after Jesus started over again by the time he was born in Bethlehem, the new world, if you please, was also being claimed by Satan.

Listen to this commentary from the book, Desire of Ages, pages 36 through 37.

It talks about the world at the time Jesus was born.

It says, and I quote, Satanic agencies were incorporated with men.

The bodies of human beings made for the dwelling place of God had become the habitation of demons.

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Battles in the Brain

Battles in the Brain, Part 2

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