Restoration 2015:  Do You Mind...??

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Restoration Ministry

Sabbath Morning Worship Services

Chad Kreuzer

Overcoming, Victory, and the Brain

Just to let you know, my name is Chad Cruiser.

We have been sharing in this restoration series here, and it's been a real blessing so far.

My wife and I, we have a ministry called Anchor Point Films.

We go around to archeologists, historians, theologians, scholars, health professionals, and we make documentaries both about the Bible, about history, and we're making a health documentary presently, which should be done soon.

And we've been traveling around for years.

I've been traveling around for probably close to 14 years, and we live full-time in a motorhome and it's in here in Loma Linda, so we live in Loma Linda for the next few weeks and then we'll move on to the next place we go.

And it's a real blessing and I've been super blessed to be a part of these meetings here.

We are going to be going on every day this coming week, every weekday that is, Monday through Friday, and we'll be here again next Sabbath, to let you know, Monday we have 1 at noon at the Randall Amphitheater, and that message in particular is called Sexuality, Pornography, and purity.

We're going to look at the science behind some of these things.

We're going to look at some of the spiritual aspects.

We're even going to look at what happens in the brains of individuals as they become addicts of pornography.

It is amazing to see what happens to the human brain.

This is probably the most prominent addiction in society today in the Western world.

Then we're going to come back in the evening right here, so Randall Amphitheatre at noon every day of the week, and then at 7 o'clock right here at the Campus Hill Church, and that evening we're going to be looking at overcoming the temptations we all struggle with.

That'll be right here 07:00 Monday and then this message right now is entitled Victory in the Brain.

We're gonna be talking a bit about the brain this morning but before we do I just ask that you would bow your heads with me for a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, I am thankful for the opportunity to share, Father, and the reality is We desperately need Jesus.

And Father, we need Your Holy Spirit to do that which we cannot do.

We can't make ourselves naturally better in some capacity.

We need a supernatural influence to change us.

And so I'm pleading with you that Your Holy Spirit would rain down just now.

Father, we're living too late in earth's history for us to come to a service like this and just leave the same Person that came.

So I'm praying that Your Spirit would touch my mind and my mouth, that it would only speak that which is glorifying to Jesus, and that You would pierce hearts as You alone can do with Your Holy Spirit.

We plead this and ask for this not because of our worthiness But because of yours and we plead this because of our great need and we pray in Jesus name Amen, I am fascinated with science I Love to look around and learn new things.

And whether it's things in health science I'm fascinating with.

I love to learn about the science of health.

And 1 of the last frontiers of science is really understanding more and more about the brain.

And really, we are just on the edge of discovering.

We really don't know tons about it, but we're learning more and more every year.

Scientists are discovering more and more.

And there was an idea formerly that taught simply that the brain at a certain age, as you would get older, obviously the brain grows and so forth.

But when you got to a certain age, basically your brain became fixed.

It just kind of stopped at that point and that was about the end of it.

If you were born a certain way, that would probably be, well, that's just something you got to live with.

And this idea that the brain was fixed has become the antiquated idea.

Now, we realize through several different, many different experiments, that the brain actually can be changed.

1 experiment that was done was looking at the minds of people, the brains of people who were teachers of blind children in Spain.

They took these teachers and what they did is they did something very interesting.

They wanted to give these teachers an experience of what it is like to be blind.

Now there's different kinds of blindness.

There's legally blind where you can still see a little bit and then there's a, you know, I have a friend who's legally blind and he has extreme tunnel vision.

So he's called blind but he can still see light and he can still actually read a computer screen but his eyes shake and so forth.

That's a form of blindness but when you think of total blindness, somebody who is totally blind has no idea what light or dark is like.

It doesn't even register because they've never experienced that.

And so what they wanted to try to do is give an idea to these teachers of what it is like to be absolutely utterly blind.

And so what they did is they covered their eyes not just with a simple blindfold because now my eyes are closed but I can tell it's brighter up here because there's lights up there and I can tell it's darker down here even though my eyes are closed.

The light's still penetrating my eyelids, making it to the retina and going back to the rear portion of the brain, the occipital lobe.

So they wanted to give them the experience of no light whatsoever So they completely covered their eyes so dense and so dark that no information, no stimuli was coming into the back of the brain.

Well, what ended up happening is very rapidly within days, they began to have a heightened sense of hearing.

Now, the portion of the brain that we typically, it's more complex than this, but to make it simple, typically we think of the information going to the rear portion of the brain, the occipital lobe, or the portion of the brain that we typically, it's more complex than this, but to make it simple, typically we think of the information going to the rear portion of the brain, the occipital lobe, or the portion of the brain that has to do with sight.

And what happened was that portion of the brain wasn't receiving any information, any whatsoever.

So you think, well, then maybe it just went dormant.

But actually what happened is within just a couple days, just within 2 days something happened.

The information that took place from the tactile sense, that means the sense of touch or feeling, began to be relayed to the occipital lobe.

And also the sense of hearing also began to be relayed to the occipital lobe.

And so this idea that the brain was is just stuck as it is, is not true.

They did another study that also gives us some more insight into plasticity and this study was done in London.

How many of you have ever been to London?

Now, London, if you remember, the streets of London are different than places like New York City.

Now, in New York City, the streets are parallel and perpendicular, They're very simple.

I mean, it's not that complex to figure something out.

If you know it's on this street and this street, it's a grid, you can simply figure it out.

But in London, it's different because it's more of an ancient city.

And being that they didn't plan it all out, it just became what it was.

And the streets are curvy, and there's not a lot of logic to them.

I've had an opportunity to be to both cities or to travel to both cities and now what they discovered was in order to become a cab driver in London, a cabbie in London, you have to take a particular test to prove that you can navigate the road system there in London.

They want to make sure that you can do this before you become a cab driver.

So they have to take this test, which they have to be quite proficient with the road workings there in London, in that great city.

In essence, they have to have kind of a mental map.

And in your brain, part of your brain that has to do with memory and spatial ability is something called the hippocampus.

And the hippocampus has different functions, And some of which, like a portion of the left hippocampus, has to do with your linguistic ability, your memory for language and so forth.

A portion of the right side has to do with your ability to remember spatial things, things maybe like maps, and be able to understand a road working, a road system.

And so they ended up doing scans of the brains of London cab drivers.

And what they discovered was very fascinating.

They discovered that London cab drivers had physically larger hippocampi than your average individuals in the world.

Now, we could account for this by 1 of either 2 different things.

Either these individuals were born destined to become cab drivers in London.

Or, what they were thinking about actually changed the physiology, the physical structure of their brain.

And obviously it is the second of those 2 options, right?

What we think about can actually change our brains.

Series

Sabbath Morning Worship Services

Overcoming, Victory, and the Brain

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

How to Grow Spiritually

Light in the Darkness

53m

Fill Me with the Spirit

50m

GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Lessons in Warfare

Special Forces

51m

Plenary

Lightened With His Glory

1h 5m

Confidence in Crisis

Confidence in Crisis - Part 8: Who Moved the Cheese?

53m

Metamorphosis

1h 2m

The Death of Legends - Part 2

45m

Keeping Focus

Keeping Focus Part 3

48m

Personal Spiritual Enrichment

Thriving Mentally: Assimilating the Mind of Christ

1h 33m

All of These and Those Are Mine

50m

The Converting Light

46m

Breakouts

4. Loving Jesus

42m

Sound Doctrine