Eric Nelson

Rachel Nelson

East Ridge SDA Church

Child Raising Tips: First Time Obedience

A family of 4, a mother, a father, and a six-year-old girl and a two-year-old girl were out walking 1 autumn afternoon.

The mother and the six-year-old were enjoying playing in the leaves, kicking the leaves, picking them up, letting them fall down.

The two-year-old wandered between the mother and her father, who had just gotten himself a new camera and was enjoying trying to photograph the leaves up close, as well as a few trees and other random objects that he thought were camera worthy.

The mother and six-year-old were wandering up ahead and saw a nice pile of leaves across the road, decided that they would go across the road and see if they could jump in the leaves.

Looked both ways, started across the road.

As sometimes happens in families, the mother thought the two-year-old was with the father and the father thought the two-year-old was with the mother.

In actuality, the two-year-old was sort of somewhere in transit between 2 parents.

She saw the mother and sister cross the road and just as they got to the other side she decided she wanted to catch up to mama.

It would be much more interesting to go play in the leaves than sit and try to bother daddy with the camera.

So she started to toddle across the road.

Dad looks up just as she's getting ready to step across the road and to his horror sees a huge black SUV coming far above the 25 mile per hour speed limit in their neighborhood headed right for the two-year-old where she was going to step across.

He had just seconds to save her life and he yelled for all he was worth, Suzy, sit down!

Is obeying your parents important specifically?

I believe that submitting to authorities in your life is probably 1 of the most important determinants of success or failure.

If you're not able to submit to your parents' authority, will you be able to submit to a boss's authority?

Will teaching your children obedience affect their eternal destiny?

What we'd like to do this evening is, first of all, look at a few Bible passages because it turns out the Bible says a lot about parenting.

And we're going to briefly look at those, and I'll lead out in that section, and then Rachel will talk about some very practical tips on how to implement some of the principles that the Bible outlines.

So first of all, let's look at some of these Bible passages together.

Now, I believe that you will know almost all of these.

If you do have a Bible, feel free to look some of them up.

You all remember what's in Exodus 20, right?

It turns out right in the middle of the 10 Commandments there's something about parenting, isn't there?

The Fifth Commandment says, honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long, etc.

And this is a very important command, in fact it's so important Paul quotes it twice in the New Testament, once word for word and 1 place he paraphrases it.

You all know Ephesians chapter 6 verse 1, Paul interprets the fifth commandment by saying, children obey your parents in the Lord for this is, this is right.

That's what he says the fifth commandment means.

And then he quotes it and then he points out that this is the first commandment with promise.

So, parenting and obedience to parents is so important, it's in the 10 Commandments.

But does honoring your parents go beyond obedience?

Doesn't it seem like it's a word that suggests an attitude of submission.

It's like honoring your parents, not only obeying them, but it's more than obeying them.

Proverbs 22 verse 6, that's train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.

Does the Bible say to tell a child the way he should go?

I don't know what you think when you think of that word, you know, training up a child.

How many of you have ever raised, I don't know, either beans or cucumbers or grapes or any other sort of vine in your garden.

At least in my garden, when you plant a seed and it's gonna be some sort of vine, the vine goes everywhere, doesn't it?

Without training, it climbs this way, that way.

Some of the tendrils will climb up the trellis, but a lot of it will just climb out of your garden and go across your yard, right?

Do you wait until the vine is, I don't know, 3 or 4 feet long and then try to make it stand upright on the trellis like it's supposed to?

You have to start very early and very gently, very consistently, and persistently take these little tiny tendrils and wrap them around the trellis to train the vine where it is you want it to go, right?

It's a very consistent, persistent process that starts very, very early, and I think the same is true for kids.

We don't want our kids just to go everywhere, right?

We don't want them to grow all the other places they might grow.

Genesis 18 verse 19 is talking about Abraham, and it gives us 1 reason that God saw that He could trust Abraham to be the father of the faithful, 1 reason He gave His covenant to Abraham.

God said, I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him.

That's 1 reason, and then he explains, this is why I'm going to give him the covenant.

I will, I know him that he will command his children after him.

Do you kind of sense in that phrase that it wasn't just that Abraham was telling his kids what to do, but he was giving them an example?

He would never ask them to do something that he wasn't doing himself.

And this, I think, is 1 of these keys of parenting that is highly convicting for Rachel and I as we think about it.

It is not possible to ask your children to do something that you're not willing to do yourself.

If you are not surrendered to the authorities in your life, it will not work to ask your children to surrender to your authority as their parent.

Children, especially as they start to get a little older, are very sensitive to hypocrisy, right?

We know teenagers, they just hate hypocrites, right?

Our kids will know it and they will not respect us.

Deuteronomy 6, verses 5 through 9, this is a fascinating passage about parenting.

You know verse 5, this is what Jesus called the greatest commandment, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength.

And then it follows up with advice about parenting.

I'm not going to go off about Bible memorization tonight, although I could, because that's what verse 6 is about.

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and look it up.

It says, these words which I command thee this day shall be in thy heart.

If you love God with all your heart, what do you think you might put in your heart?

You might put his words there, wouldn't you?

And the reason God's Word needs to be in your heart is because of what verse 7 says.

Verse 7 says, and thou shalt teach them diligently unto your children.

And then it lists a whole bunch of times that you're supposed to talk about God's Word.

And these are the words that the children of Israel had memorized, they were in their heart and they're going to talk about them to their children.

And I think it's, I don't even remember it, they're walking by the way, you're sitting down, you're rising up, you're lying down, it's pretty much all the time you're going to talk to your children about the Bible.

And then the next 2 verses, verses 8 and 9, tell you 4 places that God's Word needs to be a controlling influence in your life as a parent if you want to be successful in training your children.

God's Word needs to guide every single thing you do.

God's Word needs to guide everything that you look at and everything that you think about.

MindCure Seattle 2016: In Control- Living Above Your Emotions

Ron Meinhardt

Kirkland SDA Church

Of Bowels, Bacterium, & Brains…

Well, it's my hope and prayer that after the short time that we have together today, that your EQ will be much improved, and your IQ, and your knowledge.

Because we're going to be talking about something that has amazing potential for health that is often overlooked.

In fact, I will submit to you, it's been overlooked so much that it's almost a travesty.

As we look back at our history as a nation, we've overlooked this.

We've kind of thought to ourselves there was really nothing to it, but now within the last 10 years, 12 years or so, we're coming back and realizing, hey, there's really something to this of bowels, bacteria, and brains subject.

There's really something to it after all.

Dear Father in heaven, we ask that you would give us wisdom because we know that ultimately when we study the human body, we need to go to the maker of the human body.

So we pray that you would give us wisdom to understand physiology, understand its application, understand how we can live in harmony with these wonderful little workers that you've placed in our large intestine, these probiotic bacteria, and we pray that you would help us more than ever to be appreciative of the wonderful bounties and blessings you've set before us.

If you look on your schedules tomorrow, we're going to be finishing up this subject with the presentation food and mood.

It's going to be looking at very, very similar aspects of probiotic bacteria, but we're going to be looking at foods that actually promote the growth of proper probiotic bacteria.

You would think, well, we don't need a whole lot of time to talk about that.

But honestly, you could spend months at a seminar looking at all of the recent research.

And this is research that has come out since pretty much 2003.

All this new research that has basically exploded on the field of the medical literature that is showing that there really is something to this concept.

Now, I will preface that with saying that for the last, prior to 2003, for the last 70 years, or prior 70 years before that, as a medical culture we had dismissed the idea that what's in our colon really could affect us.

And I don't really know what brought it about, you can study the historical research and kind of get an idea.

But during the early 1900s, this was the talk of the day.

And in fact, it probably was too much of the talk of the day during that time.

But 1 such physician researcher actually wrote in the journal, the American Journal of Gastronomy or Gastroenterology in 1920, it is probable that future years will show that many of the diseases classed today as of obscure origin will be understood to be directly or indirectly due to states of chronic toxemia from the intestinal canal.

To be directly or indirectly due to states of chronic toxemia from the intestinal canal.

Because there was a war that was raging during this time.

And it was basically raging between 2 different ideologies.

1 thought that there really was something to this wisdom here displayed.

The other said there's nothing to it, it's just hypothetical, it's just too obscure, too unknown, and in fact it just seems like a fanciful theory.

And so you had this warring against this ideology by many individuals.

But there was reason to war against this ideology, because some people took this kind of information and they became fanatical about it.

The study of how the, they used to term it auto-intoxication, auto-intoxication of the colon producing things or the byproducts of putrefaction and fermentation producing things that leached out into the blood and then intoxicated or caused toxemia in the body or toxic type developments.

So some of these doctors said, OK, we see that there seems to be a correlation between depression, between diseases, and between the colon.

So we're going to actually cut the colon out altogether.

And we're going to do a colon resection and take that irritating colon out and the person will be all the better.

And they perform thousands of these operations thinking that they would be a cure to this toxemia or this auto intoxication.

Now when studied, when actually looked, the research was looked upon, we realized that hey this wasn't such a good idea because these people didn't really benefit.

There's a reason why God gave us that organ.

And increasingly we become aware that yes, it plays a very important role, not only in withdrawing fluids from the feces, but also in positively providing nutrition in a kind of obscure but a necessary way.

So there were these 2 classes of medicine that were worrying and I'll tell you which 1 won.

It was the class of medicine that said, this is just ridiculous.

And so from 1930 on until about 2003, Anyone who came up with the idea that something could come out of the colon and cause problems was basically called a fanatic or just uneducated.

Even though there were some studies that were coming out that were saying, hey, maybe this does happen, maybe this does happen over here in the colon.

And even in the 1970s or 1980s, I believe, there was a research article saying that this concept of auto-intoxication really is a thing of the past.

But the amazing thing about that is we have revisited it and we've realized we've been wrong for over 70 years.

And people's lives have suffered because of it.

We're living in a state in which 26.2% of Americans, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, suffer from a diagnosable medical or mental disorder every year.

So 1 out of every 4 Americans every year, according to the National Institutes of Mental Health, will suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder.

Now, we're in a physical health crisis, we're in a health care crisis, but we're also in a mental health crisis as well.

And I'll submit to you, what we're about to discuss today is not a cure-all.

It's not going to solve all of our problems, but I do believe it's important to understand and to make it a part of our lifestyle, a part of our knowledge base.

But it definitely isn't the panacea that some physicians touted it to be in the early 1900s.

However, scientists have realized there is a direct connection between your gut bacteria and your colon.

But to understand this connection, we first need to understand a little bit about physiology.

We could end up going home and spending thousands of dollars on probiotic supplements that may or may not even help us.

I'm not doubting the fact that probiotics are often helpful, but we could, without the proper understanding of physiology, we could place an emphasis on an area that should only be a minor consideration.

Because I'll submit to you, if you want healthy gut bacteria, probiotics are not the ultimate solution.

They're a help, but they're not the ultimate solution.

And you don't have to just take my word for it.

We're going to show that through the evidence.

Now I know the stomach is not a bowel, but it does play a role in protecting the bowels.

The stomach is what we call the gatekeeper of the small intestine.

What is the normal pH of the human stomach?

Lower the pH the more acidic and so a pH of 2 is enough to dissolve many substances And I'm very thankful that we have a protective layer of mucus and a very capable set of cells to produce this mucus to protect our stomach from disintegrating itself.

But that acid also is helpful in destroying some of these bacteria that we may inadvertently put into our mouths.

Now, if you wash your hands before eating, I think that's a great practice.

But chances are you're still going to introduce bacteria into your stomach that you may not necessarily want to be there.

We call these pathogenic bacteria, disease-causing bacteria.

But there are other strains of bacteria that you still may not want to have in your intestines.

They may not cause disease outright, but they may be interfering with things like mental cognition.

So first of all, it's important the stomach is healthy.

The stomach is really being that gatekeeper that it needs to be to prevent unwanted strains of bacteria from entering into the bowels.

Studies are showing that the chronic use of proton pump inhibitors and antacids are causing massive amounts of small bowel intestinal overgrowth, or small intestine bacterial overgrowth.

And we'll talk about the detriments of this as we go on, but suffice it to say, it's basically leaving the gate open and allowing some of these more harmful bacteria to come in.

Let's talk a little bit about the small intestine.

Basically upon leaving the stomach, we have a sphincter muscle that opens up the duodenum.

We have an accessory organ called the gallbladder that contracts.

And bile is poured out on that acidic content that's leaving the stomach, neutralizing it, making it more I guess palatable and less caustic to the tissues further on down the duodenum, the jejunum, and also last but not least the ileum.

Now take note, where does the food pass through from the stomach?

Food and Mood

When we're hungry, we feel better once we eat, correct?

But with the standard American diet, it only takes about an hour for us to feel worse sometimes than when we had first begun, than before we even ate, unfortunately.

So I think that you all have learned, I've been overhearing a lot of things.

You've learned about the ill effects of insulin on cognition.

And I'm not going to get too much into that.

I'm going to go in a little bit different route and hopefully address something you haven't really heard too much about besides my last lecture.

And that is dealing once again with the subject of bacteria and how we interact with them, how they affect us, not only physically but even mentally as well.

And so as everyone's taking their seats, just like to go ahead and pause for a moment of prayer, if we could bow our heads together before we begin.

Dear Father in heaven, we thank you so much for your goodness.

We thank you that you love us, that you mean to do good to us, and that you want us to prosper and be in health and to be happy.

And so I pray that you would give us wisdom to know how we can make these changes in our lives and ultimately help us to know as well that you will give us the strength to succeed in these desires.

So the title for the session at the present time is food and mood.

And this is dealing with the concept, once again, kind of revisiting what we talked about yesterday about that connection between what's in your gut.

It's a nice video, but I didn't intend for it to play.

Does anyone know why that might have went off there?

Maybe we can get 1 of our technical individuals back there, and we can get that slide back up, if at all possible.

Perhaps that little Apple TV device has just been unplugged.

All right, we're not going to pause too much.

If you have to watch this for the rest of the remainder of the time I'm here, at least it's something nice to look at, right?

So we'll talk together even if we don't have the visual.

We talked about, in brief, the interaction between the bacteria and the gut and the brain yesterday.

Now we're going to get into some pretty interesting facts about how this actually can be a practical part of our lives.

Because some of you came up to me and asked me afterward, well, what about this probiotic?

And there are a lot of questions that I do not have all the answers to.

But I hope that I can give you some insight, at least that I have gained in the past couple years that will allow you to make good decisions on all these multitude of options that you have with probiotics.

You would be looking at a picture of a man with a brain and his nervous system, but you're looking at the Golden Gate Bridge.

But I'll tell you, this picture is much more complex than any Golden Gate Bridge.

Our bodies have been fearfully and wonderfully made.

And I want to tell you That sometimes we think of the brain as being in its own section, and it is kind of in its own little space there in the body, but it's not an island.

If it's severed from the body, what happens?

I don't think of any successful case of reattachment of the brain to the body that's ever been accomplished, right?

Once the brain is gone, or once the body is gone from the brain, there's no use, there's no ability to be alive.

What we do, not only in our gut, but what we do with our lives, with our thinking, with our actions, it all affects the brain.

Whether it's a nervous effect or even a hormonal effect, it all affects the brain.

And so we're going to look back again at this concept of bacteria.

You start to have these toxic properties that are actually able to come out of the gut and into the bloodstream.

And they're components of the cell, exterior surface of the bacterial cells.

If you don't remember, we talked about the peripheral administration.

So when LPS or lipopolysaccharides are given intravenously, they cause acute anxiety, depressive symptoms and even cognitive deficits.

They don't quite, they're not quite normal with this increase in LPS.

But it also comes from other things as well.

Okay, it comes from other things that we'll talk about in just a moment.

But moving on here, it doesn't just affect the brain in terms of inflammation and these other issues.

It actually interferes with serotonin production.

It shuts down the cycle of serotonin production so that what happens?

So in more than 1 way, in a direct and indirect way, these bacterial components that leak out into the bloodstream cause depression, anxiety, and mental difficulties.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

Child Raising Tips: First Time Obedience

47m

Of Bowels, Bacterium, & Brains…

48m

Food and Mood

53m

Words of Truth

58m

There Shall Be Time No Longer

26m

Great Awakenings

58m

Our Hardest Lesson

28m

Christ’s Method Alone

28m

The Investigative Judgment

47m

Prophecy Then and Now

58m

He Was the Right Man

27m

Dealing With Fights

58m

Sound Doctrine