Please stand as I read the script.
You're ready for today's Sabbath and Revelation 12/1 and two a
Roman Roman. I'm sorry receipt you therefore,
brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a
living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your
responsible, responsible service, reasonable, reasonable
service. And do not be conformed to this
world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you
may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of
God. Amen.
Please be seated. Now time for our message.
Our message will be delivered to us by Sister Laura.
And Laura is the, what can I say, is the founder and
president of Wellspring Health Ministry.
And the Lord has been leading in that ministry.
So we look forward to her message today.
She comes to us from our sister church.
You all know her. So we really don't need much of
an introduction. But she holds a doctorate in
natural medicine, in natural medicine.
So if you need natural medicine, you will give her a ring.
So we welcome Doctor Laura to our open thank.
You happy Sabbath. I trust that you're all well
this morning. It is an honor and a privilege
for me to be here. And I pray that the message I
will share with you this morning will be a blessing to you.
I know it's been a blessing to me and it speaks to me just as
much. And we have quite a bit of
information I want to cover and would like to get to lunch at a
reasonable time, and I'm sure you would as well.
So we're going to dive right in and start with the word of
prayer. So if you bow your heads with
me, we'll pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you
for the Sabbath day and we thank you that we can be here together
to study your words. And we invite your angels, your
presence, to be here with us Now that you prepare our hearts,
that you give us understanding, and that each of us will leave
here closer to you and have learning more of your plans for
our lives, we thank you. In Jesus name I pray.
Amen. The gospel of renewal.
We're going to be looking at the Parable of the Talents this
morning. I do have the verses on the
screen, but if you have your Bibles, I encourage you to use
them. We're going to be looking at
Matthew chapter 25 starting in verse 14.
Matthew 25, starting in verse 14.
Give you all moments to find it. It begins, it says.
For the Kingdom of heaven is like a man travelling to a far
country, who called his own servants and delivered his goods
to them. And to 1 He gave 5 talents to
another two, and to another one, to each according to his own
ability. And immediately he went on a
journey. Then he who had received the
five talents went and traded with them, and made another 5
talents. And likewise he who had received
2 gained 2 more also. But he who had received one went
and dug in the ground and hid his Lord's money.
After a long time the Lord of those servants came and settled
accounts with them. So he who had received 5 talents
came and brought how many more? Five other talents, saying,
Lord, you delivered to me 5 talents.
Look, I have gained five more talents besides them.
His Lord said to him, Well done, good and faithful servant, you
were faithful over a few things. I will make you ruler over many
things. Enter into the joy of your Lord.
He also who had received 2 talents, came and said, Lord,
you delivered to me two talents. Look, I have gained 2 more
talents besides them. His Lord said to him, Well done,
good and faithful servant, You have been faithful over a few
things. I will make you ruler over many
things. Enter into the joy of your Lord.
Then he who had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I
knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you have not sown,
and gathering where you have not scattered seed.
And I was afraid and went and hid your talent in the ground.
Look, there you have what is yours.
But as Lord answered and said to him, you wicked and lazy
servant, you knew that I reap where I have not sown.
You gather where I have not scattered seed, and gather where
I have not scattered seed. So you ought to have deposited
my money with the bankers, and at my coming I would have
received back my own with interest.
So take the talent from him, and give it to him who has 10
talents. For to everyone who has more
will be given, and he who will have abundance, but from him who
does not have even what he has will be taken away and cast the
unprofitable servant into the outer darkness, where there will
be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Now this is a parable that we are all familiar with.
Yes, more or less the parable of the talents.
So as we talk about the parable of the talents, it begs the
question, what are the talents? And you can, you can answer.
I like engagement. When we think of talents, what
are the talents? Our skills?
There could be things we're good at, right?
Can anyone think of anything else that may be classified as a
talent? Spiritual gifts.
So what would some of those be? The gift of preaching, The gift
of teaching? There's one of healing, of
prayer, right? Was there another answer?
Time. Yep, time is a talent.
Now, Ellen White, in her book, Christ Object Lessons, she
writes a lot about the talents. It's actually a long chapter and
we'll be taking quite a few quotes from there this morning,
but I encourage you to go home and to read the chapter for
yourself. There are many gems in there,
but she goes through many of the different talents and I put them
in a list here for us to see. The first one is what gifts of
the Holy Spirit. Those would be spiritual gifts,
like the gift of teaching, of preaching, of prayer, of
healing. The next one that she talks
about is mental faculties, our minds, our education, always
seeking to be learning, our speech.
Have you ever thought of the fact that you can talk as being
a talent, kind impulses and affections?
That's not one I had necessarily thought of before, but people
who are inclined like have that really soft heart, you know, we
call them people, people person. You know, you don't like to see
someone suffering, you go out of your way to help them.
She says that people who God is given that talent, who are
especially accountable for what they do with it.
Health, is that a talent? Absolutely.
Our strength, our money feel like that's one of the ones that
we think of often when we think of our talents and our
resources, we think of money and time.
How about influence? Have you ever thought of your
influence as being a talent? Now, why did God give us these
talents? What is their purpose?
To share with others. We are called to use our talents
for service. This is a quote from Christ's
Object Lessons page 3/26. She says Christ's followers have
been redeemed for service. Our Lord teaches that the true
object of life is ministry. You know, oftentimes when we
think of ministry, we think of pastors, of missionaries, of
those who are going to faraway lands.
But each one of us is called to live a life of ministry.
By living to minister for others, man is brought into
connection with Christ. The law of service becomes the
connecting link which binds us to God and to our fellow man.
Isn't that beautiful? That as we work to serve and
benefit others, we are brought into a closer connection with
God? We are Co laborers with Him
couple pages down. On page 329 she says the
talents, however few, are to be put to use.
The question that most concerns us is not how much have I
received, but what am I doing with that which I have.
The development of all of our powers is the first duty we owe
to God and to our fellow men. Have you ever stopped to think
that maybe God hasn't given you a lot of talents?
Has that thought ever crossed your mind?
I had a friend. She's a very dear friend, and
she would get very sad thinking that God hadn't given her any
talents, like when he was dispensing them.
One day he just passed over her, completely forgot.
She wasn't good at playing instruments, she wasn't a great
singer. She didn't have any special
skill set or special jobs. She wasn't a public speaker and
she believed that she didn't have any talents.
Was that true? No.
We have this list again, and I want to encourage you to look at
this list and think of the talents that you have been
given. Have you been given the
opportunity to study? Have you gotten an education?
Are you a good learner? It doesn't even have to mean
that you went to school and got high degrees, but that you are
good at learning, You like to learn.
Does everyone here have the gift of speech?
Can we talk? Can we share Christ with others?
Absolutely. Kind impulses, health, strength,
money, time, influence. We all have something that we
can use for God's service. And when it comes to influence,
is that only referring to those who are popular and public
people? No.
We all have someone who we influence, right?
Doesn't matter if it's someone at your job, if it's in your
family, we all have an influence over somebody.
Well, looking at these talents, those of you who know me and the
introduction I just have, which is talent, you think we're going
to talk about a little bit today.
Yes, the town of health. But I want to reassure you,
we're not going into diet and nutrition and all the little
nitty gritties of health. I'm looking forward to potluck
and even hoping there's a nice dessert to follow, you know, But
I want to get into a different aspect of our health message.
Christ's Object, Object lessons, page 346 says health is a
blessing of which few appreciate the value.
It's one of those things, we don't appreciate it till we lose
it, right? Yet upon it, the efficiency of
our mental and physical powers largely depends.
Our impulses and passions have their seat in the body and it
must be kept in the best condition physically and under
the most spiritual influences in order that our talents may be
put to the highest use. So health determines the
efficiency of our mental and physical powers and through it
can strengthen our other talents.
It talks about this quote you see on the screen.
There's a sentence in bold. Our impulses and passions have
their seat where? In the body?
So have you ever stopped to consider why we were given a
health message? I feel like, you know, most of
us here could be able to say, you know what the health message
entails, right? We're familiar with laws of
health, you know, about having a good diet, about exercising.
We know these things, right? But why did God give it to us?
What is the importance of it? Because it's a lot more than
just what we eat. Page 346 She has this quote.
Anything that lessens physical strength and enfeebles the mind
and makes it less capable of discriminating between right and
wrong. So why is our health important?
Because it strengthens our minds.
And as we have strong minds, we're able to discern the
difference between right and wrong.
Would you say that's important? Absolutely right.
So I actually want to talk a little bit about the minds this
morning. It's something that I find
interesting. I hope you guys do too.
So here we have a diagram of of the brain with divided into 4
sections, 4 lobes. And this is the traditional
breakdown of the brain. Recently they've started
breaking it down into 6, but I just put the four that we may be
most familiar with. We have the frontal lobe, the
temporal lobe, the parietal lobe, and the occipital lobe.
And each one of them you can see there has different functions.
But one of the ones that I want to kind of hone in on this
morning is the frontal lobe. You see that there in in pink.
It's located in the front of our minds and it is responsible for
higher executive functions such as thinking, problem solving,
behavioral control and decision making.
It's a pretty important part of our brain, right?
Have you are you familiar with the story of Phineas Gage?
Has anyone heard of that name before?
I'm sure many. I'm sure a few have.
But he was a real railroad worker back in the 1800s, and he
had an accident while working on the railroads where a spike,
there was an explosion and a spike was sent through his head.
It had entered through his eye socket and came out the top of
his head. And amazingly enough, he
survived. He survived, but he wasn't the
same person anymore. It had disconnected.
It had severed this frontal part of his brain.
And so when he used to be a good family man, a good husband, a
good father to his children, now he became a drinker, he was
promiscuous and he was hot tempered, completely different
person because he didn't have the ability to control and make
decisions anymore. So it's a very important part of
our brain. Our brain weighs about 3 lbs,
relatively small compared to our bodies, right?
You can hold it in your hands and it has, it's made-up one of
the things of these neurons. This is an artist's rendition of
kind of what neurons look like. You can see like a spider web
there, right? This is a closer up of it.
You guys see that? So we have the top part, which
is a cell body that would be the larger, the larger part in the
Topper corner, which houses the genetic material for the cell
and produces energy for it. And then we have dendrites.
Dendrites are like the little arms.
You see the tentacles sticking out from that circle up top.
They're like little tree branches and these receive
messages from other neurons and then deliver them back to the
cell body. And you have the Axon, which is
the tail. Can you guys see that comes
down? I don't have a pointer comes
down from the cell body and that is what sends messages away,
brings messages away from the neuron and then synapses.
You can see in the little corner, there are spaces located
between the neurons where signals are transferred.
So each of us, every moment of every day, we have these little
cells that are firing in our brains is taking messages down
the Axon, and the dendrites of other neurons are picking them
up. OK.
Does that kind of make sense? And there's a lot of them.
So you can kind of see like from this artist's rendition, they
they kind of intertwine themselves and they communicate
with each other well. Maybe.
Oh, I got a laser in case I need it again.
Thank you. So constantly these cells are
communicating with one another and you can kind of get a
picture for that here, kind of dim.
But can you see that picture well enough?
That is a high resolution map, one of the first ones ever made
that scientists put together where they were trying to map
out the neurons in a brain. So this is only 1/3 of a brain.
They didn't finish it. They just wanted to take a
section and start. But this picture that you see
shows 25,000 neurons with 20 million synapses between them
that all communicate with one another.
That's pretty complex, right? But this isn't a human brain.
They they weren't ready to start with humans yet.
Have any of you seen this picture before?
No. Do you want to guess what
creature it is outside of my household who already knows the
answer? A monkey.
OK, Any other ideas? A pig.
Any other ideas? Ricka, you look like you want to
say something. A bird.
Bird brain. OK, those are good guesses.
You know, I but it's not none of the above.
It's, it's actually much smaller than that.
What was that? An Ant?
You're getting closer, but even smaller.
This shows the brain connectivity of 1/3 of a fruit
fly brain. Can you imagine that?
A fruit fly? Have any of you seen a fruit fly
this week? Maybe this morning in your
kitchen. They're small, right?
They've since finished this project.
I wasn't able to get a picture and put it up there, but it is
amazing. They have hundreds of thousands
of neurons functioning in their little tiny brains.
And they have, they discovered they actually have sections of
their brains responsible for decision making.
And I was at a client's house this week and they have a
problem with fruit flies. And they got one of those sticky
traps where where the fruit fly sticks to it and it can't get
away. And there was one fruit fly who
was really working so hard to pull himself off the trap.
And after seeing this, I actually felt bad for him.
It's like they're actually complex little creatures.
But if a fruit fly has this many neurons in their brain, how many
do you think we have? The human brain is estimated to
house 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion synapses between
them. That's a pretty high number,
right? So you think that you have this
many a billion neurons in your in your minds right now, and all
of them are, are working, they're communicating with one
another through those hundred trillion synapses.
That means there are more neurons in your brain and more
connections than there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.
Is that pretty incredible? The Milky Way Galaxy covers a
very large space, does it not? And we have all of these neurons
in a 3 LB mass of muscle that God created in our minds, in our
brains. It's incredible.
And this is something, this topic is something that when,
when I get to heaven, I really want to sit down with Jesus and
be like, explain to me exactly how all of this works because
it's incredible. Science hasn't been able to
really understand consciousness and thought.
In his book Proof Positive, Neil Nedley has this quote says the
crowning wonder of the brain is that it is not static physically
or chemically. For something to be static, it
means it's unchanging. You know it.
It is what it is. But they're finding science is
finding that that is not true. There are two relatively new
fields of study. The first one is called
neuroplasticity, and that talks about the ability of the nervous
system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or
extrinsic stimuli by reorganizing its structure,
functions, and connections. So all these neurons that we
have in our brains actually have the ability to rewire themselves
and structurally alter the form of your brain.
And then there's neurogenesis, which is the even more amazing
ability that the brain can grow new neurons.
So it used to be believed that once you became an adult, like
you were developed, your brain was set in the way it was going
to be. You had all the brain cells that
you were ever going to have, and that was that.
But they're finding out that, no, the brain actually has the
ability to change and to adapt and to rewire.
I read an article recently about, it's not in this this
presentation, but it was a gentleman over in France who was
having back pain and he went for an MRI to to kind of find out
what was going on. They scanned his brain and were
surprised to find that 90% of his brain was missing.
When he was born, he had water in his brain that had been left
untreated and it had actually eroded away 90% of his brain and
he never would have known without that MRI.
The remaining 10% was able to adapt so he could talk.
He was married, he had kids, he had a job.
He wasn't a neuroscientist. He wasn't the brightest person,
but he lived a good life. Amazing, right?
God created this, that we can actually have our brains be
rewired and new brain cells. This is a quote from an article,
a scientific article called Use it or Lose It, and it has to do
with neurons in the brain. It says thousands of new neurons
are added to the adult hippocampus each day.
The hippocampus in our brain is thought to be the center of
emotion and memory and our automatic nervous system.
So thousands of new neurons are added to the adult hippocampus
each day. However, most of the new cells
do not survive. It's kind of exciting.
We get new cells right and then find out more than half of them.
So in fact over half of them, if not more, die within just a few
weeks of their birth. One of the most effective ways
to keep these cells from dying is by what learning.
Effortful and successful learning keeps new neurons alive
so we can actually do things to prevent those new brain cells
from dying. Moreover, once rescue, the new
neurons survive for months at least.
These new cells establish anatomical connections with
other neurons, which not only effects neuronal activity within
the hippocampus, but also presumably effects synaptic and
neuronal activity at afferent locations throughout the brain.
So in other words, once these new brain cells are rescued,
they actually mature into full adult neurons and they stay,
they they help rewire the brain. They alter the structure not
just in that area of the brain, but in other parts of the brain
as well. I think that's incredible.
So the new cells are amazingly, amazingly responsive To what?
To their environment? We produce fewer brain cells in
response to stressful experiences, specific drugs of
abuse, alcohol, and sleep deprivation.
Thus, it would appear that new neurons tend to be produced in
response to experiences that we often consider healthy, whereas
fewer are produced in response to unhealthy behaviors.
Would that make sense? Makes sense.
So I just have a couple articles that talk about some of the
health habits that help promote neurogenesis and neuroplasticity
in our mind. What's this first one?
How exercise affects your brain? Here's a quote that is from the
Scientific American. This is a quote from the article
says exercise affects the brain in many ways.
It increases heart rates, which pumps more oxygen to the brain.
It aids the release of hormones which provide an excellent
environment for the growth of brain cells.
Exercise also promotes brain plasticity by stimulating the
growth of new connections between cells in many important
cortical areas of the brain. Research from UCLA even
demonstrated that exercise increased growth factors in the
brain, which makes it easier for the brain to grow new neuronal
connections. Do you ever think that when you
went out for a walk that you were helping your body produce
new brain cells and new connections in your mind?
No, but it doesn't. Sometimes when we think of
exercise, we think of the fact that we have to go to the gym.
We have to, you know, work out and but something as simple as
walking makes a difference. Sleep restriction.
OK, this is from an article. They took some mice and they
limited how much sleep they could get each night and and
study them to see how easily they could learn a new activity.
So the findings reporting the study reaffirmed the importance
of sufficient sleep to neural and behavioral plasticity and
provide insight into the neural processes that are affected by
sleep loss. And in their study, they chose a
sleep restriction paradigm so they only limited how much sleep
they got each night rather than taking it away completely,
because it was more similar to the type of sleep restriction
that adult humans normally incur in a standard work week as
someone's yawning. Is it true that sometimes we
don't always get the sleep that we should during the week?
Yeah. So they were trying to mimic
that and they found that while cognitive impairment may be
overcome, so the the mice that were sleep deprived did
eventually learn what they were supposed to learn, but it took
them four days to do it versus the other ones who could learn
something in one day. So their findings indicate that
mild chronic sleep restriction may have long term deleterious
effects on neural function. So is sleep important?
Yes, this one has to do with dietary intake, our diet and
here's a quote from the article. While consuming highly palatable
foods, those considered high in salt, sugar and our processed
oils which are most snacks right American junk food.
It can result in neuro adaptations that negatively
influence the brain function and structure.
However, consuming unprocessed, nutrient dense and diverse foods
daily, like fresh or even canned or frozen vegetables, fruits,
high quality proteins and healthy fats, the kinds found in
olive oil, avocados and nuts, can result in the opposite
effect, a process called neurogenesis, which involves the
proliferate of new neurons and other resident brain cells.
So the food that we eat plays a role in whether our brain has
the ability to produce new cells or not.
And you know, this is anyone who knows me knows that I love the
health message. I love to to teach about health.
But I have found that a lot of us, especially as Adventists, we
boil this down to just nutrition, you know, and it's
not, we believe we're supposed to believe in righteousness by
faith, but we adopt A righteousness by diet kind of
thing. Like the healthier food we eat,
the more brownie points we gain with God, right?
But the food that we eat should be healthy.
It should be promoting the health of our body and our
minds. But that is the focus of our
health message. OK, does that make sense?
Absolutely. To grow new brain cells to help
us be more capable, better learning.
This is the last article I'll quote.
This is the adult brain makes new neurons and effortful
learning keeps them alive. So the types of skills that keep
new cells alive are not limited to those that depend on hip on
the hippocampus, but rather include those that are effortful
to learn that require more training, trials or time spent
training. Importantly, training alone is
not sufficient to increase cell survival.
Animals that are trained but do not learn do not retain more
cells than animals that are not trained.
Therefore, it's learning that increases the survival of newly
generated cells, and then once rescued, the vast majority of
these cells differentiate into neurons, thereby forming
synapses and generating action potentials as they become
incorporated into the existing architecture of the adult brain.
Did you ever stop to consider that there's a difference
between training and learning? Because it says here that if the
animals that they were studying, if they were trained to do
something, they didn't retain these new brain cells that they
were creating, that there's a difference between training and
learning. And quite honestly, I've never
really stopped to think about that much.
So the key difference between training and learning is that
training does not aim to change, develop, or expand the learner's
viewpoint or behavior. Training focuses on a specific
task and teaches the learner how to perform it.
Whether the learner absorbs, retains, or acts on what they've
learned depends entirely on how they're able to apply their new
found knowledge and skills in the real world and seek further
development. Now just as a little side note,
how many of us as as Adventists are well trained Adventists?
Could you say we're well trained?
We know that we go to church on Saturdays.
We know that we have a health message.
We know to pay our tithe. We know not to drink, right?
We we know all the rules to be a good Adventist.
But how many of us, I'll make it general, maybe haven't allowed
that to to leave just a head knowledge and let it become part
of our lives and part of our hearts.
Where we learn that Sabbath keeping is more than just going
to church on Saturday, but it's resting in God and being a part
of him seven days in the week and letting it to become a very
real part of who we are. You know, and I thought that was
interesting is when as even as we study God's Word, we
shouldn't be just reading it to see what we can know as far as
information goes. But how can we apply this to our
life? The difference between training
and learning is that learning is very deliberate.
We want to change ourselves, become better people.
Now these things we mentioned, exercise, sleep, diet, learning,
do they sound familiar? Ministry of healing Page 127
pure air, sunlight, abstemiousness, that is
temperance, rest, exercise and proper diet and the use of water
and trust and divine power. These are the true remedies.
Every person should have a knowledge of nature's remedial
agencies and how to apply them. What do we call these?
The 8 laws of health. And it's amazing.
You could pick any one of these and go look up, Google it, the
benefits of sunlight and you're going to find out how good this
is for you. God gave us such a simple plan
here on how to maintain our health.
Pastor shared with me that that you guys have different topics
that you're studying each week and the the topic for this week
was the gospel and I believe this applies to the gospel, does
it not? Our scripture reading was Romans
12/1 through two. I beseech you therefore,
brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a
living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your
reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this
world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you
may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of
God to be renewed, transformed by the renewing of your mind.
You know, for so many years I read this verse and I think we
think of it as an abstract concept that God comes and he
changes us, He changes our minds, He changes our desires.
Actually last night in Vespers, Elder Fred here was talking
about the will and as you were sharing, I was thinking of how
nice that dovetails. I was telling grandma like, hey,
you know, it dovetails into this topic today.
God wants to transform our minds, but he does it very
literally as well. He is recreating us and
recreating our minds into his image.
And the amazing part to me is that we're allowed to be a part
of that, though we actually have a role to play in the
transformation of our minds. If you have your Bibles again,
you can turn to Deuteronomy Chapter 7.
Again, it's on the screen. If you don't Deuteronomy Chapter
7 starting in verse 6, it says for you are a holy people to the
Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you
to be a people for himself, a special treasure above all the
peoples on the face of the earth.
The Lord did not set his love on you nor choose you because you
were more number than any other people, for you were the least
of all peoples. But why?
Because the Lord loves you. Jumping down to verse 12.
So then it shall come to pass, because you listen to these
judgments and keep them, and do them, that the Lord your God
will keep with you the covenant and the mercy which He swore to
your Father's. And jumping down to verse 15 And
the Lord will take away from you all sickness, and will afflict
you with none of the terrible diseases of Egypt which you have
known, but will lay them on all those who hate you.
Did God give laws to the Israelites because He wanted to
control them, because he wanted to restrict them, because he was
mean and harsh and just wanted to make their lives miserable?
So they gave it to him because he loved them.
It was to be a blessing to them. And we see in these this passage
that he promises his love, His protection.
He promises a covenant with us, and He promises to give us
health. Have you ever stopped to
consider what the diseases of Egypt were?
I studied that and I looked it up one time and surprisingly
enough, they are the same diseases in the United States of
America. Atherosclerosis, heart disease,
they had lung disease, kidney disease.
It's very common. Disease is what we would call
diseases of lifestyle that have to affect with the way they
live. So the Lord promised that as we
followed His counsel, He would guide us and protect us.
This is from Councils on Health, page 120 to 121.
As our Heavenly Father sent the light of health reform to guard
against the evils resulting from a debased appetite.
That those who love purity and holiness may know how to use
with discretion the good things that He has provided for them,
and that by exercising temperance in daily life they
may be sanctified by the truth. So the purpose of the health
message is for what? Our Sanctification Review and
Herald, Volume one, page 254. This is true sanctification.
It is not merely a theory, an emotion, or a form of words, but
a living, active principle entering into the everyday life.
It requires that our habits of eating, drinking, and dressing
be such as to secure the preservation of physical, mental
and moral health, that we may present to the Lord our bodies,
not an offering corrupted by wrong habits, but a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God.
Beautiful. This is true sanctification,
that every day our lives are living in a way that is in
harmony with God's principles, that will keep us in the best
health to serve others, that will keep us with clear minds to
discern right and wrong. I believe we all want that
minds. Yes, 1st Corinthians 6 verse 19
and 20 says do you not know that your body is the temple of the
Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are
not your own, for you were bought with a price.
Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which
are gods. We can glorify Him in our health
and in our bodies, counsels and nines, and food.
Page 17 it says The Creator of man has arranged the living
machinery of our bodies. Every function is wonderfully
and wisely made, and God pledged Himself to keep this human
machinery in healthful action. If the human agent will obey His
laws and cooperate with God, we have a part to play.
Every law governing the human machinery is to be considered
just as truly divine in origin, in character, and in importance
as what the Word of God. Every careless, inattentive
action, any abuse put upon the Lord's wonderful mechanism by
disregarding His specified laws in human habitation, is a
violation of God's law. We may behold and admire the
work of God in the natural world, but the human habitation
is the most wonderful humanity. That was the crowning of His
creations. But to disregard the laws of our
human habitation is a violation of God's law.
That is pretty serious, is it not?
But why? Why would it be such a serious
offense to violate the laws of our being?
Comes back to the quote we shared at the beginning on page
346 of Christ's object lessons. Anything that lessens physical
strength and feebles the mind and makes it less capable of
discriminating between right and wrong.
And this quote Testimonies for the Church volume to page 347
says the brain nerves which communicate with the entire
system are the only medium through which heaven can
communicate with man and affect his inmost life.
So those neurons that we were talking about that we can grow
neurons that can rewire themselves and restructure.
Those are the only ways that heaven has to talk to you.
So we should want to keep them in the best health, yes, to want
to be generating and keeping as many of them as we can each day
so that we can have clear minds to hear God.
Ellen White says that we should be so in tuned with with God
that we are moved by the faintest whisper of His Spirit
and we need to have clear minds to do that.
Matthew 2529 going back to the story of the talents says for to
everyone who has more will be given and He will have
abundance, but from him who does not have even what he has will
be taken away. So what is our responsibility in
this? With the talents that God's
given us to work to cultivate them right?
To try and perfect them, to gain as as much as we can.
Christ object Lessons 330 It says God will only accept those
who are determined to aim high. He places every human agent
under obligation to do how much to do his best.
You know there's a saying, you do your best and God makes up
the rest. You heard that moral perfection
is required of all. We need to understand that
imperfection of character is sin, and those who would be
workers together with God must strive for perfection of every
organ of the body and for the quality of the mind.
Next page. But Christ has given us no
assurance that to attain perfection of character is an
easy matter. A noble all around.
Character is not inherited, it does not come to us by accident.
Can we accidentally become perfect people?
Like it just happens? That's like how they say The Big
Bang Theory happened, right? A noble character is earned by
individual effort through the merits and grace of Christ.
God gives the talents, the powers of the mind and who forms
the character. We form the character.
Let no one say I cannot remedy my defects of character.
If you come to this decision, you will certainly fail of
obtaining everlasting life. The impossibility lies where in
your own will and where do we will to do things in our minds
right in the frontal lobe, yes says if you will not, then you
cannot overcome. Remember that you will never
reach a higher standard than you yourself set.
But as we do that, as we seek to to multiply our talents and to
grow them, do we have to be afraid that we're going to fail
as we try to cultivate what God has given us and to use it for
His service? Will we lose in the long run?
With the dispensation of the talent, success is guaranteed.
You know, I was thinking about that foolish servant who buried
his talent and how many of us maybe do similar things with
talents that God has given us if he had tried, because he didn't
even try, right? He just buried it in the ground.
But if he had tried to multiply that one talent, do you think he
would have been successful? I mean, we say that the the
Master, his Lord wouldn't have been mad at him if he lost the
talent, if he tried to multiply it and made a bad business deal
and came back with no talents that his Lord would have been
understanding and accept, accepting the fact that at least
you tried, right? You tried your best.
But as we try our best, we don't have to be afraid that we're
going to fail. God will bless and he will give
us the strength to continue on, continuing to multiply the
talents that he gives us and bringing us farther and farther
along to perfection. I love this following quote.
This is from Manuscript Releases.
Volume 9, page 21 says eternity is before us.
All improvements we make here on earth of our mental powers, all
the high attainments we make in refining and elevating ourselves
by connecting closely with Heaven, will be translated with
us. While if we dwarf our capability
by inaction, if we deteriorate our talents which are
susceptible to the highest cultivation, we cannot in the
better world redeem that past neglect of self culture, that
great loss. We should make improvement in
this life all that we can by the help and grace of God, knowing
that we can take these improvements with us to heaven.
So the choices that we are making here, even when it comes
to how we live our lives and our lifestyle, we'll reverberate
through eternity. Manuscript releases, Volume 9.
Reasoning we must have. And where does the reasoning
take place? And the frontal lobes of our
minds. It is one of the great masterly
talents entrusted to the human agent, and is a great advantage
at every step we advance from earth to heaven.
The faculty of reasoning, trained and cultivated as a
precious and trusted gift, will be taken to heaven, with all its
improvements and sanctified abilities, to be to be perfected
more and more in the heavenly schools above.
Isn't that beautiful? Philippians 3 This is Paul
speaking starting in verse 12. This is not that I have already
attained or I'm already perfected, but I press on that I
may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold
of me. Brethren, I do not count myself
to have apprehended but one thing I do, forgetting those
things which are behind and reaching forward to those things
which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the
upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
It's a journey, right? We don't become perfect
overnight, but every day we lay our will down at the foot of the
cross and every day we make decisions that will bring us
closer to Christ and we press on.
But we have the assurance in Philippians one verse 6 being
confident in this very thing that he who has begun a good
work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.
So who's the one responsible for the perfection who will complete
that work? Jesus says right.
Isn't that relieving? It's not all on us.
God will do that for us, so that one day each of us, when Jesus
comes back and we've used the talents that he's given us here,
we've cultivated them, we've grown them, that one day all of
us will meet our Maker and we will be able to hear the words
ourselves. Well done, good and faithful
servant. You have been faithful over a
few things, and I will make you ruler over many things.
Enter into the joy of your Lord. Do you want to hear that
someday? Amen.
I want to hear that too. And it is my prayer that each of
us will make the efforts needed to learn how to best keep
ourselves close to God, to be making decisions each day
that'll help strengthen our minds so that the mind of Christ
will be recreated literally in US.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you
for the simple messages that you've given us that give us the
promise and assurance that you will do the work in our lives to
bring us to perfection. And we thank you for the
privilege that you've given us to be a part of that work.
And we ask that you will just continue to give us the wisdom
and the guidance to cultivate the talents that you've given
us, that we may be of best service to you and to others, so
that one day we may hear those words.
Well done, good and faithful servants, we look forward to
that day and we ask that you will keep us close to you until
then. In Jesus name I pray.
Amen.