The Gospel of Renewal - Romans 12:1-2 | Laura Harris Sermon

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 · chapter mention

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.

Deuteronomy 7 · chapter mention

Again, it's on the screen. If you don't Deuteronomy Chapter

Deuteronomy 7 · chapter mention

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.