Your Brain: The Gateway to Your Spiritual Future – Part 1

08 Jun Your Brain: The Gateway to Your Spiritual Future – Part 1

 Blog Series:

Renew Your Mind ~ Transform Your Life

There are three parts to renewing your mind and transforming your life:

1. Abandon yourself to an eternal perspective
2. Rise to your true spiritual nature
3. Become your own brain surgeon.

We have finished 1 & 2, and we now transition to #3, Become Your Own Brain Surgeon.

As we look more closely at how to become your own brain surgeon, we start with the observation that the brain is the gateway to your spiritual future. As a Christian, everything you hope to know, be and do will be determined by how well you steward your brain.

Let’s look more closely at this reality.

The brain is a marvelous mental machine

There are 100,000 miles of electrical wiring in the brain, with an almost incalculable number of neurons that connect the wiring. The options for neurological activity among these wires and connections make the brain perhaps the most complex and wondrous thing in all the universe.

A National Geographic (February 2014) cover article titled The New Science of the Brain, describes recent “stunning advances in the understanding of the workings of the human brain.”

We used to think the brain was fixed, a hardwired biological machine. Now we know that that is not true. Neuroscience now talks about neuroplasticity, which means that the brain is malleable and adaptable. Not only can the brain change, it does change – constantly – and always changes in the direction of what is put into it.

This has staggering implications for Christians.

It means that we can change our brain in the direction we want it to change simply by thinking the right thoughts often enough and long enough. We can actually rewire our brain so that old toxic thought patterns degenerate, and a new healthy thought patterns replace them. And as the term implies, this creates a physical change in the brain.

It’s not just a change in how the brain operates, but is a physical change. New proteins are created to store new memories. New electrical circuits are created. Those circuits can be rewired with old circuits, and old circuits can be rewired with other old circuits. This allows us to understand and to perceive things we didn’t before, to connect dots, to see creative relationships – to be smarter!

Through our thoughts we can become our own brain surgeons, carefully choosing and guiding our thoughts to change the actual physical, chemical, and structural makeup of the brain, dramatically impacting how it functions.

Having said that, it is necessary to distinguish between the brain and the mind.

The brain is different from the mind

Scientists disagree on this point. Some contend that the brain and the mind are the same, while others insist that they are different. But this disagreement is championed by scientists who are materialists, secularists, who do not believe in God or the spiritual world, or anything that cannot be explained by swirling atoms.

So, when we bring a Christian perspective into the discussion, we must agree that the brain and the mind are two different things.

The brain is part of the physical body. It is never going make it to heaven. When the body dies, the brain dies with it, and returns to the dust of the ground. The mind, however, makes it to heaven.

When you take your last breath on earth and get to heaven and look around and say, “Is this great, or what?!?”, it is the mind saying that. Not the brain.

Concerning the difference between the brain and the mind, Christian neuroscientist Dr. Caroline Leaf says, “Your mind (soul) has one foot in the door of the spirit and one foot in the door of the body; you can change your brain with your mind…  Your body is not in control of your mind – your mind is in control of your body, and your mind is stronger than your body. *

 Conclusion

The difference between the brain and the mind is one of the reasons we spent so much time in earlier blogs talking about the difference between the inner man and the outer man… and why we emphasized the fact that the inner man of the Christian is holy and righteous, while the outer man is still contaminated and corrupted by sin.

The mind (part of the inner man) is holy and righteous (Ephesians 4:24). The brain (part of the outer man) is sinful and unrighteous (Romans 7:18). What a triumphant cause for celebration it is, that the unrighteous brain is not in control of the righteous mind. Rather, it is the other way around.

And, since the mind can control the brain, we can use our mind to transform our brain, so that in the living of our everyday lives, we increasingly become more and more like Jesus.

As we said, this has staggering implications for the Christian. It means that we do not have to remain where we are in our spiritual maturation process. We can become more than we are. And we can do so more quickly than most Christians do, if we will be strategic in how we feed our brain and how we use our mind to control our brain.

Stay with me as we continue to unpack this transforming truth. Next week, in Part 2 of Your Brain: The Gateway to Your Spiritual Future, we will look at:

• The brain has both a conscious and a nonconscious part
• The brain is constantly changing, based on what is put into it

I look forward to seeing you then.

*Switch On Your Brain, p. 25

In case you’re new here

This blog post is part of a series titled “Renew Your Mind, Transform Your Life”, introduced on January 5, 2021. As the series continues, each succeeding post will be added to and available in the blog archives at www.maxanders.com.

If you know anyone who you think might enjoy joining us in this study, please forward this blog to them and encourage them to sign up for my mailing list here. In addition to receiving my weekly blogs on this subject, they’ll also receive my free video Master The Bible so Well That The Bible Masters You.

I look forward to going through this life-changing journey with you.

UPDATE: We are moving from this blog to a YouTube channel in early 2024. I’ll keep you posted regarding the transition. If you’re not already on my email list, subscribe here so you don’t miss any updates – you’ll also receive my free video, Master the Bible So Well That the Bible Masters You.

In the meantime, while I’m getting the YouTube channel ready, all of the past blog posts are still available – and you know that “repetition is the key to mental ownership!” 

We recently finished a series titled “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ 5 Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective,”  in which I “connected all the dots” from posts over the years and combined them into a “spiritual game plan.” That series is a great place to start.

I look forward to seeing all of you on my new YouTube channel in 2024 to further discuss how to walk closer with God and live better in life.

Two resources I’ve created to help build your biblical base for a closer walk with God:

Share this Blog