GYC West 2016: Identity. Who Are We?

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GYC West

Breakout 2- Chad & Fadia Kreuzer

Chad Kreuzer

Fadia Kreuzer

1. Good Stress, Bad Stress, Less Stress

I pray that your Holy Spirit would guide us as we mix together science, the Bible, and health principles.

I pray that you would guide us into victory.

And not only that, I pray that you would help us to be a blessing to others.

That maybe, probably many of these things will not be directly about maybe our personal circumstances, but there are people out there that you could use us to help out and to overcome.

But surely all of us have areas in our lives that we can overcome through your strength.

And we pray for victory through Jesus that we would walk with him.

Talking about identity theft as the theme is identity in the entire seminar here.

And you know, Identity is something that we really don't think about a lot of times because it is who you are.

I mean, what you think of yourself is partially your identity.

The way you see yourself, and it's just, we are who we are.

And so many times we don't think about it and actually step back.

But as was talked about this morning, there really in a way are 2 identities.

There's the natural man the Bible talks about, the man who's not been born again, the man who's not been rejuvenated through Jesus or had this transformation that the Bible talks about.

And then there's what God has called us to be and he's created us to be and that's our goal.

And so in order to become what we've been called to be, we also do need some recognition as where we have been in our identity in the past and God wants to bring us to this recreated state here on earth, but then ultimately for eternity.

And in this seminar, the main thrust, the main statement or the thesis statement of this seminar is this, you've probably heard this before, never forget that thoughts work out actions, repeated actions form habits and habits form what?

And so people don't think about it, but We try to generally change different parts of who we are, but the reality is this right here needs to be changed, the thoughts.

So we're never to forget that thoughts work on actions, repeated actions form habits, and habits form character.

And 1 of the interesting things, I'm always interested in the brain.

And so I just looked at, well, what do scientists think about identity?

I mean, where do you actually recognize your identity?

And wouldn't you know, it's a place that Adventists most often talk about, which is what part of the brain?

And so just yesterday I was reading an article about, you know, they were talking about studies and they were talking about where identity is.

And the scientists simply told them the frontal lobe of the brain.

Now obviously it's not as simplistic as that.

The brain is working you know in depth all over.

It's not as if other portions of the brain are just shutting down when you're thinking about self and so forth.

But the reality is that kind of the central aspect of the identity of humanity takes place in the frontal lobe.

And this is also true of our character in general.

And scientific studies have shown us that the frontal lobe is the seat of spirituality, morality, and the will.

Now, what's interesting is when we think about the brain, the brain that we've been given.

1 of the reasons we know why the frontal lobe is this seat of spirituality, morality, and the world goes all the way back to the old story of Phineas Gage.

How many of you have heard of Phineas Gage?

Now, Phineas lived in the 1800s, mid-1800s.

And so in order to be put in a position like a foreman, you need to have foresight, you need to have diligence, you need to have an organizational skill.

But what happened was, they were working in the state of Vermont, laying down track.

Like here in California, you have obviously mountainous areas, and so it's not easy to just lay down a track.

So they had to literally blow up with things like dynamite or explosive powder something like gunpowder They would have to drill down into the rock, then they would put some explosive powder in there They put sand on top of it And they take a rod called a tamping iron like a ramrod and they would ram it down to pack it in.

They would have this ignition fuse and it would be lit and they'd blow off part of a mountain.

Well 1 day Phineas was doing this and as he was doing it he was tamping down, Maybe they forgot to put the sand on.

We're not exactly sure what happened, but it ignited.

It shot up like a missile under Phineas's cheek, and it literally blew out the top of his skull.

And he lost part of his brain as a result.

So you would have imagined then he would have died rapidly.

But the thing is, somehow within minutes, Phineas was able actually to get up.

And he was able to, he would, anybody who came by, He would tell them, it's crazy.

He would literally tell people just right how did he make it and Somehow some way he didn't die of of getting an infection, you know back in the 1800s I mean, what would you do but he ended up living through the whole circumstance and but what changed about Phineas was not so much his intelligence, but his character.

So here's the, if you can imagine a man laying down, facing upward, this is the top part, this would be right here, this would be the frontal lobe here, this gray area.

And what happened was the rod blew through his skull, and he lost.

Now, before the accident, he was a foreman of a railroad crew, faithful husband and father.

He was a religious man in regular church attendance until he lost part of his brain there in 1848.

Well, what happened after the accident is that Phineas would become very emotional and angry about things.

Now, you might think, well, maybe you'd get angry and emotional if a rod flew through your skull, right?

He lost interest in church and spirituality.

He became irreverent and prone to excessive profanity.

Went from a prized employee to the unemployment rolls, he ended up forsaking his wife and family and joined a traveling circus.

Do you see that this man changed after the accident, yes or no?

What changed about him was his character.

And this study was the beginning, probably, but many other subsequent studies have revealed to us that these scientific studies, as we've said, show that the frontal lobe is the seat of spirituality, morality, and the will.

And what we're going to discover is this brain, we are told, now science shows this, and actually, in Christianity, there is only a small group of people who believe that the brain is fully where the mind is.

Most Christians actually think that the mind is some kind of spiritual entity separate from the body.

But those who actually keenly study the Bible realize that the human body, We are what we are.

God made us, not some separate ghost-like being, but rather this brain is the only thing we have to communicate with God.

The nerves of the brain are the only thing we have on planet Earth to communicate with God.

And the frontal lobes is the seat of spirituality, morality, and will.

So if you're impairing this frontal lobe, you're impairing your decision-making center, your spiritual center.

Largely What we see is that people today are shutting down their frontal lobes and as a result, they're not interested in spirituality.

So we want to learn to strengthen our frontal lobes so that we can be victorious in our spiritual life and even in our decision making.

Now we're going to share with you also later on in this seminar, I'm going to give you just a preview of that, something called the gut-brain connection.

It's actually something that we were told about 100 years ago.

2. The Mind and Body Connection

We shared the beginning of our last 1 and the end, this statement, never forget that thoughts work out actions, repeated actions form habits, and habits form character.

We talked about the frontal lobe, we talked about the frontal lobe being the seat of spirituality, morality, and will.

It's interesting that when you look at animals, and the portion of their brain, the proportion of their brain, that is the frontal lobe.

Now we look at cats and 3.5% of the frontal lobe of a cat, I should say 3.5% of the brain of a cat is the frontal lobe.

What do you think has a larger brain, a cat or a, not a larger brain, a larger proportion of the brain that's a front of lobe, a cat or a dog.

Twice as large, and that's why, have you ever noticed cats, they can make wonderful pets, but they're kind of like a wild animal in the house.

And they just look and just do whatever they want to do.

But most of the time, they're kind of like a wild animal that just does its thing in your house.

But what do you, obviously more than a dog, you have a chimpanzee, which 17% of the frontal lobe of the chimpanzee, or actually I keep saying it wrong, 17% of the brain is the frontal lobe in the chimpanzee.

But when you look at the human brain, nearly a third of the human brain is the frontal lobe.

This is what distinguishes us from other animals, that we have a connection.

Humans can have a love, or animals I should say, can have a love for their master.

But they're not thinking beyond the master to the supernatural, right?

And this frontal lobe is the seat of spirituality, morality, and the will.

Now I'm going to share with you some very amazing things that tie into finding victory.

And having the identity that God intended us to have.

Because he intends for you to have an identity.

And even as he wants you to have a special identity, He's not looking to strip your individuality from you.

He wants you to have the individuality that you were created to have, which is the highest possible attainment that you could ever have.

What God asks you to do, He's not, just like when you were sharing your testimony, He isn't actually trying to strip us away from something, but he's trying to use what he's called us to to make us into something, right?

He's not trying to strip something, now yes he wants to strip away pain and suffering and sin and these kind of things, but he's trying to give us something better in return.

Now, Olds and Milner did a study back in 1953 in Montreal, and what they did, it was actually kind of a mistake, they were taking mice and they were trying to look at the fear center of the brain.

So they implanted some electrodes in the mouse in the brains of a mouse and as they did so typically what would happen is if you give a little electric shock to that portion of the fear center of the brain the mouse would do anything it could to get away from that area and would do anything it could to stay away from that area.

Because it associated wherever you shocked it with this horrendous fear response.

But here this mouse that Olds and Milner had planted an electrode, they were trying to implant it in a fear center, but when they shocked it, it would do anything it could to stay in that area.

So now the question was, was this some kind of masochistic rat?

They had accidentally placed it, what they believed, into the pleasure center of the brain.

It ended up being the center of desire rather than pleasure.

But what they discovered was that they could actually, they set up a little contraption where the mouse could push the lever itself and receive this electric shock.

And it was so exciting to have this experience that what would it do?

It'd push it, and once it realized what it did, it would push it again, and again, and again, and it would just push it over and over and over until it just passed out.

So it just, to get that pleasure, it would do it over and over and over to the point where it would just collapse from exhaustion.

They set up an electrified grid and this grid is just my little illustration of what it would be like.

But basically they would on 1 side on both sides you'd have levers and each lever would only work 1 time.

And then you have to run across a painful electrified grid.

And that would only work once until you went to the other side and you had to go back and forth.

And so they would begin to run back and forth and they would push the lever and it was so exciting to receive that pleasure.

That, just to let you young ladies know, that they planted electrodes in these mice and it would, they could push these levers and it would give them a jolt of electricity to the part of the brain that would have to do with like pleasure or desire.

And so exciting to the mice, they would do anything to push the lever.

But here they would push it but they could only push it once and they would have to go over this electrified grid and go through suffering and pain to get to the other 1 and push that and it would only work once and then they'd have to run back and push it again and push it again and push it again and it was so exciting that they would run back and forth until their feet were literally burned and they could not go any longer.

And 1 of the things they did as they were doing this, they actually figured out, like for instance, they would, if they wanted the mouse in its cage, they have this electrode in the brain, if they wanted it to move to the right, every time it moved just a little bit to the right, they would give it a little shock.

And then it realized, oh, they want me to go this way.

And then it would do it again, and they'd give it another, and then it would do it again.

And they could get it so that they could control it like a video game joystick They could control it like a joystick Now I don't know about you, but to me that sounds a little bit like what the devil can do to us He can get us where we have something on this planet that we love so much, some sin, and it would be different probably for each 1 of us.

But where Hickey literally can control us to get us to go anywhere we'll go to get our little jolt of pleasure in our brains.

The devil can do this and then notice what it is.

But God is saying, listen, I don't want you to be captive to the enemy.

I want you to live to the fullest extent of the freedom that I intended you to have, which is having the greatest joy that you could possibly have and the most fulfillment on planet earth.

And so we're talking about a distinction between the frontal lobe, this blue portion of the brain here in the front left, or here's a mirror image of it, at the center of the brain you have something called the limbic system.

Now the limbic system is kind of the center for your drives and your desires.

It could be for your drive for food, your desire for food.

There's nothing wrong with having a desire for food.

There must have been some kind of hunger in the garden that would cause them to eat.

Now, I don't think it was a painful or a bad kind of hunger, but it was a, oh, it's time to eat.

And there was a drive for things like what married couples are to do, right?

Since we have children, hey, you get the idea.

There's nothing wrong with it in and of itself, but it becomes wrong when it's put in the wrong place, right?

Outside of the marriage covenant, just like food.

There's nothing wrong with a desire for food, but it's what we do with that desire for food.

That can affect us negatively or positively.

And so we want to learn not to live based upon the limbic system.

Yes, we have to live to a degree by our drives.

We have to eat and we, you know, we get married, we have love, and we have these things.

But we want it to be controlled by the frontal lobe.

So the higher region of the brain controls the lower.

It's interesting because it is literally lower within the brain.

So the higher powers of our mental faculties would control the lower.

And Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University, has argued that the main job of the modern prefrontal cortex is to bias the brain and therefore you toward doing the what?

When it's easier to stay on the couch, your prefrontal cortex makes you want to get up and exercise.

And when it's easier to put off that project till tomorrow, it's your prefrontal cortex that helps you open the file and make progress anyway.

So the frontal lobe, the prefrontal cortex specifically, his argument is that it encourages you to do the harder thing.

And when we think about it, in life, do you see that many times the harder thing is actually the more fulfilling thing to do?

3. The Brain and Nutrition

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the time to study your word and science and health principles.

Lord, you're the originator of all truth.

Lord, and we desire to become the people you've called us to be, to be transformed into the image of your dear Son.

Guide us, we pray, in the name of Jesus, Amen.

We're going to begin talking about another person who had frontal lobe damage like we talked about, we talked about Fadia, specifically mentioned Patricia, the nurse who decided to have part of her brain destroyed so that she could, you know, get rid of her depression.

This is the result of frontal lobe damage on a newborn.

So this is someone who, I don't know if the child was dropped or it was in a car accident.

We're not really told that I know of, but the baby was called Baby GK.

Now baby GK suffered bilateral frontal lobe damage in the first 7 days of his life.

From childhood to age 31, he experienced the typical characteristics of someone who had experienced frontal lobe damage.

Number 1, he did not respond to parental discipline.

He always sought gratification of his immediate needs.

He was irresponsible, intended to wander, was easily influenced by other deviant children, and was sexually promiscuous.

Specifically what it tells us about the child that they also did what Ellen White calls secret sin.

This was just something he did regularly.

So very interesting, speaking of this person.

Now what I find interesting about this though, this is what a child with frontal lobe damage acts like.

But doesn't this largely look what a normal American young person acts like?

I mean this literally looks like your standard American child.

Now this is the story of a child with an impaired frontal lobe.

Could it be that young people or people in general in America are living with impaired frontal lobes?

That We are actually living a lifestyle that has impaired our frontal lobes.

It goes on to say the effects of a front compromise frontal lobe is impairment to moral principle, social impairment, or a loss of love for the family, a lack of foresight, abstract reasoning is impaired, mathematical understanding is diminished, and there's a loss of empathy and a lack of restraint.

Now we looked at, you know, some of the things we can do that we, these are just like 4 quick things we've talked about to help us in areas of overcoming.

Number 1, getting adequate exercise, deep breathing, drinking adequate amounts of water daily, and Bible promises and prayer.

And We talked about different things that damage the frontal lobe.

Now, this is a review for us who've been here, but it's drugs, lack of use, certain kinds of music, head injuries, and lack of nutrition can actually impair our frontal lobes.

Now, we're going to talk about some legal drugs that damage the frontal lobe, because if we want to replicate the life of Jesus, if we want to live the life of Christ, having his identity before the world, we want to avoid anything that would impair the frontal lobe, which is the seed of spirituality, morality, and the will.

Now alcohol, now this is obviously just commonly accepted amongst Christianity at large, not amongst those of our faith in general, but what we see here, this is, Dr.

Nedley says that alcohol interferes with dopamine production and decreases activity of the frontal lobe of the brain.

So while you're drunk or drinking, your frontal lobe, your spiritual center is inhibited.

Any resveratrol related benefits obtained through alcohol can also be received by drinking grape juice.

The healthiest course of action is to steer clear of alcoholic beverages.

You know, people say, yeah, but alcohol is good for your heart.

But it's bad for your brain, it's bad for your liver, It's bad for breast cancer.

Any level of alcoholic drinking in women increases breast cancer rates.

So you can get all the benefits of the wine in the grape juice, and then you can get it all in the grape itself, right?

You don't need to get rotten grapes to get the benefit.

So drug experts say that alcohol is worse than crack or heroin.

The World Health Organization estimates that risks linked to alcohol cause 2.5 million deaths a year from heart and liver disease.

Once you get numbers like that, we don't even, 2.5 million, what does that mean?

Well, what that means is this, 2.5 million people die a year from heart and liver disease, road accidents, suicide, and cancer, accounting for 3.8% of all deaths.

Alcohol is the third leading risk factor for premature death and disabilities worldwide.

With just getting rid of alcohol, we could get rid of the third leading risk factor for death and disability worldwide.

So we've talked about alcohol, we talked about caffeine, we saw the study that showed that drinking a large cup of coffee can drop the blood flow to your brain by, does anybody remember how much?

Can drop the blood flow to your brain, and you want the adequate amount of blood flow going to your brain so you can make the best decisions and best represent Christ here on earth.

And so it says a study from John Hopkins University showed that if you drink just 2 cups of coffee a day and quit, you will not only likely get severe withdrawal headaches, but you will feel as wiped out as someone undergoing chemotherapy for 2 to 3 days.

Now, have you ever, you know, you've been eating a lot of greens and vegetables then you went for a day or 2 without broccoli?

Did you ever start getting tension headaches from getting rid of the broccoli?

If something's good for you, your body doesn't start to go through withdrawal symptoms when you get away from it for a day or 2.

Series

Breakout 2- Chad & Fadia Kreuzer

3. The Brain and Nutrition

Transcript

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