Purified By the Word

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Living Hope SDA Church

Battles to Fight and Win

Chad Kreuzer

Fadia Kreuzer

Media, Addiction and Victory

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this opportunity to study science and scripture, the 2 books that you've given to us, nature and revelation.

We're seeking your spirit, and I pray that you would convict us and transform us into the image of your dear Son.

So we're talking about 4 different subjects today.

I'm sorry, 2 today, 2 tomorrow, and they are going to be on 4 battles to fight and win through Jesus Christ.

The first 1 is media addiction and victory.

You can kind of come over here if you'd like.

So we're going to begin in Deuteronomy chapter 6 and verse 24.

And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes for our good always that we might that he might preserve us alive as it is this day.

So God gave all of all of the commandments every single commandment in scripture the Bible says is for our what?

But it also has a life-preserving benefit or a health benefit where it says that he might preserve us alive as it is this day.

And notice we're told that man's strongest impulse, that means humanity's strongest desire, this is every single human being's greatest desire.

So if you don't know what your greatest desire is yet, you're gonna know right now.

Man's strongest impulse urges him to seek his own happiness.

And the Bible recognizes this desire and shows us that all heaven will unite with man in his efforts to gain true happiness.

Meaning your greatest desire, every single 1 of us, is to be happy.

And we are told that all heaven is uniting, conspiring together to try to make you happy.

That's what all the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, all of the angels of heaven are uniting together to try to make you happy, but the trouble is we sometimes either get in the way or we let the devil get in the way or we let the things of this world get in the way, and we want to learn how to allow God to make us happy.

We're going to be talking about the frontal lobe, the seat of spirituality, morality, and the will, the decision-making center.

Now the first 3 years of life are called the critical period.

That's a very important time in the growing brain.

So especially for children, we're talking about media, the first 3 years are 1 of the most important times to help them avoid media.

And when I say media, we're talking about screen time specifically in this sense.

Avoiding those can be very important to help teach them to have delayed gratification.

We're gonna talk more about that as we go forward.

We're gonna start off by talking about media and the incredible shrinking brain.

Scientists wanted to find the effect of internet addiction on the brain.

They looked at 18 internet addicted 15 year olds and 15 non-addicted 15 year olds and gave them MRI scans.

They discovered that those who were internet addicted had shrinkage of their gray matter.

The fact that an addiction to something that doesn't seem like a substance, right?

Because we always just think substance is drugs.

But something as little as like looking at some object can literally shrink the gray matter.

And the gray matter is the outer portion of the brain and this is the higher reasoning powers of your brain that are actually getting shrunk.

Doesn't that sound like a conspiracy right there?

It's not like the world is thinking how they can do it.

But like, if there were a devil, wouldn't he love for us to be literally destroying some of the most important portions of our brain?

Now, 1 of the portions that shrunk is known as the left anterior cingulate cortex.

Now the anterior cingulate in general is 1 of the regions of the brain that may have to do with love.

Now thinking about this, going further portions of the brain negatively affected by large amounts of screen time have to do with healthy relationships and empathy.

Now empathy is the ability to actually, so sympathy is to feel bad for somebody.

Empathy is basically the ability to enter into the kind of thoughts and feelings of another person.

And so large amounts of screen time can make it harder for people to empathize with other people.

Now thinking about that, that reminds me, the Bible says in prophecy, Matthew 24 verse 12, and because iniquity shall abound the love of many shall what?

Meaning that at the end of time people's love is going to grow cold.

Now it says because iniquity abound and that is happening but we may also actually be lacking love because of the things that we are doing like large amounts of screen time and the Bible also says in 1st John chapter 4 verse 8, he that loves not knows not God for God is love and if we're shrinking our ability to love could we also be shrinking the portion of the brain that has to do with even maybe even love for God?

So it could be that many young people today who are less inclined to be spiritual, many parents might think, well the church just doesn't have enough enough things for my kids.

And sometimes that may be true, but many of the times it actually may be that their brain doesn't actually have as much capacity for the love of God because we may be shrinking portions of the brain that have to do with love.

And so you can see where this could potentially go.

Because sometimes we're tempted to think I'm different.

And so then you beat yourself up and you think, it's me.

I just don't have an appreciation for God and loving and I don't care about my family like I should.

And so then you tend to beat yourself up and think, there's something wrong with me.

Just throw everything out and say forget this, skip it, because I don't fit in.

All the while you're not realizing that this innocent thing that we all think is innocent, right, is damaging our brain and making us not love each other like we should, right?

And this is not to say that you throw it all out.

We want to have a balance in how to use it.

But If you find yourself in that situation, realize don't beat yourself up.

It's just what's happening to us and our brains are getting hijacked by the enemy.

And we'll talk about that as we go forward.

Now, shrinking the frontal lobe, a major portion of the brain that is damaged by large amounts of screen time is the frontal lobe.

Researchers have discovered that those who are addicted to internet or gaming have decreased the volumes of their frontal lobes.

So once again, this is the decision-making center, the part of the brain where you're, when you're making a decision between right and wrong, you're actually shrinking that portion of the brain.

I don't believe this is the only factor, but it is 1 of the primary factors.

Obviously, there's drugs, there's alcohol, there's all kinds of things out there, but 1 of them is excessive amounts of screen time and also video games.

And I want to talk a little bit about dopamine receptors.

You've probably heard about dopamine being like the pleasure molecule of the brain.

And it has probably more to do with anticipation than present pleasure.

But looking at this, scientists discovered that a portion of the brain of internet addicted men revealed that these men had less dopamine receptors.

Doubt vs Faith. How To Stand Firm and Know the Truth?

Heavenly Father, thank you that we could gather together this morning.

I pray that your Holy Spirit would rain down.

Lord, I know that right now we see the trends taking place, at least from surveys, seeing that young people, less and less are interested in spirituality and religion.

We know there's a number of reasons for that.

But Lord, I pray that you would help us to hold firm until Jesus comes.

Jesus asked that question, When the Son of Man returns, shall he find faith?

Lord, and I pray that you will find that in us and that we will be lights to help others also have the faith.

Now, this is not the primary thing we're talking about, but we did see in the research yesterday, we looked at pornography consumption, and researchers found that those who consumed it would progressively be less and less interested in spirituality, less and less interested in prayer, and we saw that this made them more likely to simply walk away from the truth, or I shouldn't say the truth, from spirituality or religion, but this makes perfect sense from a biblical standpoint.

But I also think of this, and this is not part of the presentation, but 1 of the things that can cause us to fall away is if we never share what we believe.

If we never share what we believe, it doesn't really mean very much to us, and so if you've never shared, I would challenge you to pray about it Lord give me an opportunity to be a witness give me an opportunity because when you are witnessing and trying to help others it actually builds you up it builds you up Many times you may work with people and they don't make it.

They fall away, but actually you seeking to help them, even if they fall away, we're told that we will gain warmth from the coldness of those around us.

Like, it doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense, but it's true that as we're seeking to help others, it stirs our own soul and it warms us up.

But I want to begin by starting talking about ancient Judaism.

Now the Jewish people were, well the Bible even says it, a peculiar people, right?

And part of it was that they had some strange beliefs.

Number 1, they lived in an area of the world that was basically filled with polytheists, meaning people that believed in many different deities and gods.

And yet here was this strange group of people, the Hebrews, that were monotheists.

They believed in 1 God, and they believed in a loving, personal God that would communicate with humanity.

But they also had this very strange belief that the universe had a beginning.

That there was a time where there was no universe and then boom, the universe began.

Now this is in contradistinction to the cultures around them.

I mean, think about, we look back to the Babylonians.

Obviously, they were in captivity to Babylon for some time, you know, roughly 2, 500 years ago.

And we're told, looking at the Babylonian genesis, the story of creation from the Babylonian perspective, it is apparent that for the Babylonians, matter was eternal, meaning something about the universe always existed in many of the pagan cultures of the world through history.

And yet here was this strange group of people that believed in 1 God and that the universe actually had a beginning.

There was a time where there was nothing other than God.

And the Bible tells us in Psalms 33, 6 and 9, by the word of the Lord where the heavens made and all the host of them, by the breath of his mouth, for he spake and it was done, he commanded and it stood fast.

The Bible tells us that God spoke the world into existence.

Now remember the cultures of that time believed that the universe had some elements to it that were actually eternal, contrary to what the Bible teaches.

And then you come down to the time of Jesus, who obviously was also Jewish, and he brought this strange idea into Christianity.

The strange idea that the universe had a beginning.

And we look back to Aristotle, you know, back to roughly, you know, 384 BC to 322 BC, Aristotle basically brought down that teaching that many of the pagan groups across the world had that the universe was eternal.

And so this idea was brought down to Western culture from Aristotle until, well until the 20th century basically, where it was continued to believe by many that the universe always had this these eternal elements to it.

So the universe had some form of eternality to it.

And then Einstein, believing the same idea, he began to espouse something called the general theory of relativity.

But as he was beginning to make his mathematical equation, it actually looked like maybe it wasn't true that the universe wasn't eternal, but he couldn't accept it had to be eternal.

And so when he was doing his mathematics, he put in something, they called it like the fudge factor.

He kind of twisted the math a little bit to make it look like the universe was eternal.

And he ended up saying later in his life that that was the greatest blunder of his life.

This was the greatest blunder of his life, messing with the math.

We are, if you went to any general education as I did, you were probably taught that scientists are unbiased human beings.

You know we're taught a lot of things when we're children like scientists are unbiased and many of us were also taught that Santa Claus was real and we were taught a lot of things that are just simply not true.

Are scientists all unbiased human beings simply looking for the truth?

And if anybody thinks they're unbiased and have no bias, they're the most biased human being that exists.

We all should acknowledge that everything about life is presupposed as a former experience.

Now we should hopefully within science actually be able to open our minds and be open to the data.

But the fact is data changes all the time.

I mean, we look back through COVID, we were told in the beginning by Fauci that, and I'm not debating any of this, it's just Fauci initially said masks do not work.

Then he said masks do work and that we should all wear them and then even 2 or 3 masks would be superior.

And then finally it came out in a Cochran Review which is probably the highest standard of medical reviews that there is that exists, the Cochrane Review.

It is an international body of scientists and researchers looking at it, and they finally came to the conclusion in the end, it looks like masks were not beneficial at all, and secondarily, they even said the N95 mask didn't seem to make a benefit.

Now my point in saying that isn't to put anybody down, is to simply say that science changes over and over and over.

The perspectives of science change over and over and over, but the idea is that whatever we know about science today is truth, but it could change tomorrow.

That is what we actually see, and that's why the idea that science is this unchanging, and they would even say, no, no, no, science is always getting us closer to the truth, but when you go back and forth and back and forth, Science is a, it is to a degree, a faith-based initiative.

Because number 1, you're trusting the scientist did the work accurately.

Number 2, you're trusting he was not biased.

They even did, they did research not too long ago where they took the exact same data.

So all they had was numbers, but they didn't come to a conclusion.

And they gave that data set to multiple mathematicians to actually quantify, basically, does A cause B?

And so then they give it to multiple scientists to find out.

Another group said, no, the data shows that A does not cause B.

And a third group, and that was another about 25%, and another 25% said there's not enough data to know whether A causes B.

This is the exact same research, exact same information, But the information was given to multiple mathematicians in the field of science.

And they all came to different conclusions.

So who looks at the data also can conclude what the data tells us at the end of the research.

Now, I'm not putting down scientists for saying this.

It's just that humans are humans and humans have opinion.

And if you don't believe that, well, you need to study a little further because this is what scientists are discovering.

And so, but back to our point here, Edwin Hubble, he pointed his massive 100-inch telescope out into the cosmos and they noticed something fascinating.

They noticed that certain stellar bodies in the heavens would have a red shift coming off of them, which seemed to indicate that they were either further or closer to the person who was looking at them and they also seem to give evidence through something called the Doppler effect that that things would give off a redshift depending on their position and their movement.

So things that were further away might have more or less depending on where they were in the sky or in space, rather, I should say.

And they came to the conclusion because of this that the universe actually was expanding, expanding instead of in a steady state.

And so what ended up happening was this gave, if the universe was expanding, like if you had a videotape and something was going out, and then you were to put the videotape in reverse, that same thing that's going out, if you put it in reverse, it would look like it was going back, right?

And if you did that long enough, things that were moving in this, if the universe has 2 directions that are coming together, if you put it in reverse, sooner or later the universe would get to a central point, and that point would get smaller and smaller and smaller until it disappeared.

And so scientists have now come to the conclusion, like Stephen Hawking, He says almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.

He says almost every scientist believed that the universe had a beginning in time itself, right?

And looking at, this is Robert Jastrow, PhD agnostic astrophysicist, he says a sound explanation may exist for the explosive birth of our universe, but if it does, science cannot find out what the explanation is.

The scientist's pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation.

He says we have no idea how the universe could have begun.

Now we used to believe, not we, but you know Christians believed the Bible, but secular scientists and many people from the Western world believed that the universe had no beginning but now they came to the conclusion well it had to have had a beginning but we have no idea how that could have happened and he goes on to say for the scientist who has lived by notice his these are his words this is a this is an agnostic this is not a Christian creation is saying this he says for the scientist who has lived by his, what's that next word?

Now, do scientists have faith, yes or no?

And he says, for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, even to believe that reason makes sense and that we can trust in reason, takes some faith.

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