Making and Staying with Positive Choices- Dr Neil Nedley

they are unconscious of their need of change and they're incompetent meaning that they could be doing things a lot better but they're not doing it that way often because they don't even know any better sometimes they know better but they just they just think somehow that they'll be able to get by with it the way they're doing it and they like it better and so they're unconscious that they're incompetent if someone's going to change that's unconsciously incompetent what's going to need to happen all right keith says someone needs to tell them that they're wrong at something uh and um that's that's a simple way of putting it what helps people to decide that they need to change what's that well sometimes it's tragedy sometimes it's bad things that start happening as a result of their in unconscious incompetence but eventually what needs to happen is they need to be given truth they need to be given knowledge and the bible says my people are destroyed for what lack of knowledge knowledge is power and you won't change you won't change without good knowledge once you get the knowledge however you're going to go to stage two stage two you can put number two up there no no you don't have to put knowledge you're going to put the next stage which is now to be consciously incompetent no that would be right here so you have unconsciously incompetent now you're going to put consciously incompetent why are you conscious now that you're incompetent because you understand the truth and you understand that it would be better for you to change but you still haven't changed because you've just heard the truth but you haven't put the truth into practice and you know before we go home and into our lives in fact every every message that we hear that is full of truth we ought to ask ourselves the question what do i need to change and so that way we can get ready to implement that change in our life uh and so we become consciously incompetent so that means knowledge is important but it's not everything knowledge that's not put into practice doesn't really help us in fact it can make us even feel more guilty because we now know better and we're not doing it and so stage three let's go to stage three here miguel thank you stage stage three is when you put it into practice you are now consciously competent so first you're consciously incompetent but then if you do change and put the truth into your life and start practicing it you are you now have conscious competence now let me give you an example we had a one of our therapists uh she's um uh actually uh moved away and so she's not able to be with us much anymore but the first time we met she was actually at a training that i was giving and i was talking about the frontal lobe and i was talking about caffeine caffeine actually blocks the adenosine receptors in the frontal lobe by the way if you want to know whether caffeine is good for your brain or not you you need to tune into the eq summit just a few weeks ago we had a researcher one of the top researchers in the world and he did a nice randomized controlled trial in regards to caffeine and memory that was blinded in other words he didn't know which ones were on caffeine and the ones that that were on it didn't know either because it's through placebo it's placebo randomized controlled trial and it just amazed everybody because a lot of people thought it would help their memory help them stay awake but it actually hurt their memory and it hurt other frontal lobe functions his name is ross grant and you could get that tape and go into it but this lady prior to my talk she had had some reflux disease as well and as a gi doctor a lot of gi doctors are telling people no caffeine and no decaf because they both can cause reflux decaf replaces the caffeine with tannins and the tannins can do some of the same things to the gi tract that the caffeine does although the tannins are better for your brain and so um her beverage of choice before she ended up coming and helping us with the program she was already a psychologist but her beverage of choice was pepsi and whenever she got thirsty what do you think she thought of pepsi but then after hearing the talk she was unconsciously incompetent when she got there but when she heard the talk she thought and i gave a lot more information than what i gave you the other day about caffeine there's a lot more information we could give but we were talking about the gi effects as well as well as the headache effects and those sorts of things irritability it can increase your irritability and she was more irritable with her husband than she wanted to be she was experiencing reflux and when she saw the evidence on what it does to the frontal lobe of the brain she said i need to change i need to give up this caffeine and then after making that decision that she was going to give up caffeine when she got thirsty what do you think she thought of she still thought of pepsi but she was consciously competent so what does that mean even though she thought of pepsi she said nope not pepsi it's going to be water and she didn't even like water but she drank the water the next time she got thirsty what do you think she thought of pepsi again not pepsi she'd say it's going to be water and this struggle continued every time she got thirsty she thought of pepsi and then she'd have to remember that conscious competence nope it's not pepsi it's going to be water how long do you think that struggle lasted months a month okay and that's right it lasted 30 days and then she went into stage four stage four is unconsciously competent she noticed something by then she noticed her irritability was better her reflex was gone her headaches were gone and she was able to have some difficult discussions with her husband without losing it emotionally and she was able to be controlled and she was feeling a lot better and now she actually enjoyed the taste of water in fact i know her she wakes up in the morning and she drinks one of those full nedley containers of water when she gets up guzzles it all down and enjoys it because she is unconsciously competent a lot of people think you can put number four there and you can go ahead and sit down thank you very much miguel let's give him a little round of applause uh a lot of people uh think that when you're making these changes you're just gonna be going back and forth between stages two and three and it's gonna be kind of a miserable existence because they think that they're going to like pepsi for the rest of their life and i don't know i've heard many other people i can't remember if it's her or not but i've heard some people occasionally they're so thirsty and there's nothing around butt pepsi after they've given it up and they remember how it tasted and they go back to it and it's like sickening they don't even like it and they certainly don't like the effects of it and they realize wow i used to like this stuff this is nasty because their taste buds have even changed and so this is the good news is that we can eventually get there but i'm just telling you by the time you leave a program in 10 days in most cases it's not enough time you are not unconsciously competent you may be starting the conscious competence in some cases maybe you're you've even gone back and forth between stage two and three here i know some of you were recommending an electronic fast for a month after you get home and then less than one hour a day for those who've had issues on it but maybe because of what you've been doing you've been slipping back to stage two even for your hour or whatever or not giving it back on time or whatever and so you're still having some issues here but you have to stay in conscious competence and it depends on what it is as to how long it takes my father had an issue with sugar when i was growing up he was shorter than i am i got my height from the swedish side of the family which was my mother's side she was half sweet and her um mother's sister was six feet tall her mother wasn't but there was some height in those swedish jeans my father came from more shorter he wasn't that short but he was like five ten but he was now 200 pounds and he was in his 40s and he had a friend of his die from a heart attack at age 48 engineering friend his parents had both died in their early 60s from heart attacks and strokes and he realized he could be next he was overweight wasn't the healthiest eater and he was raised on pork and those sorts of things after reading the bible and and understanding the difference between clean and unclean meat he went into clean meat by the way uh dr er don mcintosh talked about clean and unclean today if people would be just on clean meat and never go unclean meat we never would have had the covet outbreak we never would have had the ebola outbreak we never would have had the aids outbreak we never would have had any of the sars outbreaks and we never would have had the flu all of these epidemics start from eating unclean meat and by the way it would save the economy so much money if we would just make that simple health change world health organization announces you can get rid of your masks if you just eat clean meat and you know you can track track it down just like an arson you know here in california we have the laws against arsonery and sometimes i've heard people say well we don't we don't want to make laws that way because you know no one's going to keep it well that's kind of like saying let's not have laws against murder because there's still going to be murders um or you know let's not have laws against arsonery because someone's still going to light a fire no we track it down we find out who did it and they have to be disciplined for it and that helps to deter others so it'd be very easy we could find out in fact you can find out it's actually known the teenage boy in the chinese market that did the first uh eating of unclean meat that actually spread the sars uh two virus and we even know which one did the sars one virus we know the kid in africa that did the ebola bat and ate that and so you could go back to that and do that sort of thing and it would save so many problems by the way talk about bigotry in the world i actually talked to an infectious disease expert who was high up in the government part of the cdc side of things and i was next to him on an airplane one time and i said why don't you guys do this why don't you guys educate the public on the problems of unclean meat and first of all he wasn't too knowledgeable about it himself till i started to explain it all and he he thought about it and he thought he says you know what you're right you're right i said so why do you why do you think i said you know i'd be glad to give a talk to you guys and show it all out and show the research she said he says no he says i think we could figure that out and i said so why aren't we doing this and he said i can tell you why it wouldn't happen because it will get people to realize that there is good health information in the bible and i don't think we want to do that i said why not it's a great health book it saved israel all sorts of problems it is a great health book he says well in today's today's world now he said it's not going to happen talk about bigotry you mean you'd rather have trillions of dollars wasted you'd rather have 500 000 deaths in this country you'd rather have hospitals fill up to capacity you'd rather have all of this so people don't turn to the bible that's the lowest form of bigotry on planet earth and it's right here in this country the bible is a book that is full of truth and it can help guide the science so that we get on and get into this false science aspect of things and um but nonetheless uh even those type of things much of humanity is unconsciously incompetent there if they could be aware of that there'd be a lot of people even on their own even without laws who would start considering changes in their diet that would be more friendly to the world yes you might die from eating a cow but you're not going to spread that disease to masses of humanity like when you eat a pig which is where the flu virus comes from and that's how the flu epidemic started and all these different strains from eating unclean meat so there's all sorts of different health practices that can help us along this process and i'm back to my my father now sugar he read a book called he's an engineer he wasn't a medical person but he knew he was having some health problems and he knew what could be facing him and you know you don't realize i was just talking to lua before i came down here louis uncle is undergoing bypass surgery on monday in his 50s and a lot of times people don't realize how short life is until they run into a life-threatening situation in their 40s and 50s and life isn't that long and he's facing a very serious life-threatening situation on the typical cultural diet that he grew up with and the consequences of all that in the atherosclerosis and my father i come from a history of short lives one of my grandparents died in his 50s of cirrhosis of the liver an alcoholic and also a philanderer he was on my mother's side and fortunately my mother broke that chain she did not drink and she did not become a philanderer so i'm generation number two we talked about how it takes three generations to have that elevation in in our culture and society and all those sorts of things but on my father's side his parents died in like i mentioned early 60s and so he read this book called sugar blues and he realized he was suffering all the problems of excess sugar but this was a man who loved chocolate covered cherries he loved reese's peanut butter cups he loved ice cream he loved root beer floats he loved lots of desserts with sugar toll house cookies with those chocolate chips but he made the decision and after reading that book he came home i remember being there i was just a young teenager at the time and he said hon i'm through with sugar i'm not gonna eat any more sugar she smiled real big kind of laughed she thought this isn't gonna happen this guy loves the sugar too much and you know she knew he was serious but didn't think it would really amount to anything and i think she'd even somewhat forgotten about it because that very next day when he came home she was baking toll house cookies and you know the smell of toll house cookies when they're baking it's pretty overwhelming it is such a good uh smell even if you're not necessarily into sugar it just has that aroma that makes you want what's in that oven that's coming out and my father said i can't take this and he went outside and he started working with his hands in the garden and he refused the toll house cookies that night and the next night he refused it again and he had gone from conscious incompetence to now conscious competence how long do you think it took him before he got to this stage and you want to guess how long that one takes do you think it's shorter than caffeine or longer than caffeine it's longer than caffeine how much longer [Laughter] all right keith says five years fortunately it's shorter than that four months four months that's why we call our program also a 20-week program because most of these things you can be unconsciously competent in 20 weeks and in four months something happened my mother felt sorry for him so when she makes us he gave us a dessert like blueberry pie she would make another one for him with no sugar the rest of the family had the one with sugar him no sugar and uh she told him this is your pie and she was dishing out the pie to the rest of us and he went into his pie and he said i can't eat this this is a sickening sweet you have got to have the pie switched up she says i know what i'm doing i don't know what's wrong with you that's your pie it's not sickening sweet and then she bet into her pie and her mouth puckered and she says whoa you are right i can't eat this and so they switched the pies and then something happened that was pretty amazing after that my father began to enjoy the natural foods as being quite sweet apples would would be like a you know a very sweet apple pie he used to you know enjoy corn but not to the degree he enjoyed it after no sugar he was just the corn off the cob it was like a dessert he said who would eat corn for that's not a dessert it is so sweet and my uncle used to come up from texas and say it was worth it just to see my father eat because he enjoyed food so much in the natural state he was unconsciously competent and he would in you know he he just had that broad smile on eating you know and harvesting things from the garden we used to grow strawberries from the garden and just eating those strawberries wow what a tremendous smile he would have on his face from just these simple pleasures in life so it's important for us to recognize i think it's psalm 16 11. go ahead keith you have a question did he avoid like honey and maple syrup yes he did yeah did he avoid honey and maple syrup yeah he he avoided it all he wasn't into the um you know because she would sometimes say why don't you use some of these artificial sweeteners he said i'm not interested in that he said i want to overcome my habit you know these artificial sweeteners you're you're always going to have that taste for for sweet things and you're never going to develop that wonderful taste for things that are not sweet and he understood that part of things so let's um i'm going to go ahead and have you erase this miguel and we're going to draw something out in regards to things where we can start getting addictive relationships too unfortunately a lot of what is unhealthy for us has a hook in it and it produces uh an addiction thank you and uh i'll i'll go ahead and take over the uh drawing here i'll have you come back though um here in a little bit so this on the graph here we're going to have on this y-axis dopamine over here and when your dopamine is surging you'll be up here in the euphoria stage and when your dopamine is way down here it's going to be dysphoria in other words you're feeling pretty bad and terrible and so we'll put the neutral line in here and this on the x-axis is time so we'll just choose something that can have a dopamine surge that probably all of us in this room have had first time let's say we'll just put it here the first time you had chocolate what do you think happened to your dopamine levels yeah whoa that really tastes good i mean it shoots up there and it's really up there in the euphoria stage how long do you think it stays up there a few minutes yeah a few minutes not very long and so it'll stay up here for a few minutes and then it kind of comes back down again pretty quickly and when it comes back down it actually doesn't go to neutral it goes a little bit below neutral but that was good can i have some more yeah there's some more and so you do it again what what happens the second time it goes up but not quite as high as it did the first time and then it comes back down and now it comes down just a little bit more and what do you think where we're at now at say a thousand times actually your neutral set point is now down here and so when you have the chocolate you're feeling a lot better but it goes up to neutral it doesn't stay up there long and it comes down to this set point down here and here's where you're at so first we do these things to get a high but the more we do them we actually are lowering our dopamine set point and pretty soon we're doing it just to feel neutral where another person would be that just refuses to eat chocolate because they know about this effect or they know it's unhealthy for them and this is what a lot of people don't realize you know when your dopamine set point is down there and you go on a hike and maybe overlook the sierras up there at the water tower as the sun is coming up it'll come up like this but it doesn't really come up to neutral and then it'll come down here and pretty soon we're down there again but someone who isn't doesn't have a dopamine set point down here when they're going on this walk their dopamine levels come up and it's coming up gradually during the walk then they see the beautiful scenery they see the fresh air and it stays up there a while and it just gradually goes down and it'll take hours before it's down to neutral and so both groups are getting their dopamine this is the addict this is no addictions so a lot of people think well the issue is is dopamine which it is but this group gets their dopamine they get lots of it and the simple pleasures in life produce those high dopamine levels it could be listening to music beautiful music it could be just having a conversation with a friend it could be actually having reading your devotions in the morning and learning something new and profound that happened to me this morning actually in my devotions right now i'm reading through it's not really uh well it does have a little bearing on this but right now i'm reading through the closing scenes of christ's life on this earth and i don't know if you remember the time when he was tried by pilate pilate knew he was an innocent man but he was under tremendous pressure and he knew that he'd be tattled on by to caesar and all that he might lose his job if he doesn't um satisfy the people under his rule and so he takes them over to herod and i hadn't thought about this before because i had always thought christ was the healer when there's someone that needed healing and came to him for healing he healed but did you know there were times when people apparently needed healed that he did not heal it was at that time herod said all right bud i've been wanting to see your miraculous works i hear you raise people from the dead i hear you feed the 5 000. i want to see some of this power you show me some of this power and i'll let you go the book desire of ages says the priests and rulers and the mob were shocked they hadn't thought that far in advance because they realized that if he showed power not only would all their plots go away but that they might lose their life because why are you bringing someone here to have me sentence them to death and they're completely innocent and they do all these wonderful things and so when he wouldn't heal when he wouldn't show those wonderful works of power by the way you might wonder why he didn't but herod then said let's find people that are crippled let's find people that are really diseased let's bring them in here because he likes to heal people and because i want to see this and so they brought in the diseased and the maimed and he would not answer herod nor would he display any of his divine power and herod got pretty angry he got very angry and he started to taunt him and he started to ridicule him and when that happened then the crowd just lighted on him and he actually would have died then had the roman soldiers not you know gotten them away from him and all of that they were abusing him tremendously but he didn't do that because he never did a miracle on his own behalf and he was really representing us there are times when we may be brought in with abuse for doing right things and he was our example in all of that and you know it would be hard enough be hard enough to put up with that if you couldn't exhibit your divine power but the fact that he could have done all of that but yet just totally refrained what self-control what comprehensive self-control and also what love why didn't he say anything to herod by the way if there's anything that he could have done to save herod's salvation he would have done it because he you know anything but the reason why is herod had rejected the prophet john not only had he rejected him he had him executed and when you reject a prophet in that way and even have him wipe it out and executed it's not too much more god can do for you that's why we we don't want to reject the prophets of the bible we want to look at what all of these they have to say and and go forward with that so um he didn't answer him a word in that process but and you know just going through that and contemplating it i got a a spiritual experience out of that what love what self-control what um love for humanity that's going through suffering and pain and so it may not have been dopamine there might have been other things there but there could be another devotion where your dopamine levels will just come up very nice because of what you've learned and then you make a commitment that you're going to follow the lord and those simple things can easily raise that dopamine level and actually if you take a look at it the person with no addictions is going to have dopamine levels far above neutral the vast majority of the time where the people that have addictions they're only going to have dopamine levels up to maybe neutral maybe a little bit above depending if they try some new meth or whatever it is and then it comes back down again and their dopamine you have to feel bad for them because even though there's nothing bad necessarily in their life they feel awful they feel terrible the good news is this dopamine set point can start to go up just like it did in my father it took four months for it to go up and come up to neutral and then just simple food would elevate that dopamine level tremendously so we first need to know we first need to have knowledge about these things the second thing we need to do is put that knowledge into practice that's conscious competence and then the third thing we need to do is practice practice practice yes can you start um yeah so what about the dopamine levels when it comes to drinking how long until those start to go up anyone want to guess on that one okay someone's going to say one year what you'd say about a month or two within a within 30 days the dopamine levels can come up quite a bit but they'll actually they can take up to normally six months some times a year to get up here but within 30 days you'll be more than halfway there be more than halfway there and that's a big difference um and it can continue to improve caffeine is 30 days 30 days so caffeine is a little easier and some of these sex addictions depending upon the type of sex addictions that can take a while might take 90 days might in some cases might take a year before your dopamine set point where you have to you know totally abstain um and but that that dopamine level can come up um significantly uh to that neutral point so the nice thing is these things are not irreversible in regards to all this so uh what i'd like to do i know we're there's actually eight stages of change we've gone through four so miguel i'll have you come up and erase this anyone have any other questions about this curve here does this make sense you guys understand this okay good yes what if you have multiple addictions uh that's a good question as well do you know the studies show you do better if you give up all of your addictions at the same time there's this idea that somehow you just have to do one at a time that's almost like cutting the dog's tail off a little bit at a time the best addiction recovery programs you get rid of all the addictions um and so you know some people you know it's kind of been funny i've been in alcohol rehab treatment programs where these guys on their breaks are just smoking and then i've been in places where they don't do tobacco or alcohol but they have the tv on and they're watching movies all the time which can also be addictive and so the best alcohol re or the best rehab for any addiction is going to get you to the point where you're not having these big shoots it's the big shoots up in the big shoots down in the dopamine level that set your brain up for these these adverse changes and you want much more of that gradual thing like we're getting when we hike here or what we did this afternoon or just listening to the special music today can produce those type of dopamine highs if your dopamine levels aren't down here and those things don't have any hook to them you can continue 30 years later of getting that same nice dopamine high from the same hike that you took before even but yeah it's a good question so that's why we recommend if you're doing it let's get rid of anything that has a hook in it and uh depending it's going to be whatever that worst hook was you know if it's sugar it's going to be four months and you'll be done with if if there's addictions like caffeine and others that are less than that it'll just be whatever that longest one was but you're far less likely you know so much of what we see today in addiction recovery programs is people are trading addictions they're trading one addiction for another addiction and yeah you might say one is the lesser of two evils a little bit some addictions are worse than others there's no question about it but why not get to the place where there's no hooks at all and where you can get your dopamine set point up you'll just naturally have a far more happier existence in the in the regular ways of you know just the normal life activities okay so i'd like somebody to look up i don't know if we have anyone i see a bible over there if someone could look up ii peter chapter 1 uh because second peter goes into the eight stages of change so miguel you can come up here again and we'll do eight uh changes and the first four are pretty much the same although they're named differently so this is sometimes called peter's ladder because you can't get to the top of the ladder by skipping steps you have to do one step after another and peter didn't know how to get to the top of the ladder even after christ was resurrected christ was asking him a question to you agape me and he wouldn't say i agape you he said i fully owe you in english it says do you love me yes or you know that i love you and but and so you're thinking what's this conversation about but it's actually different greek words christ was asking him do you agape me and peter was saying i fully owe you because he wasn't at the top of the ladder but eventually he learned how to get to the top of the ladder and he wanted to tell everyone about it and so that's when he wrote this this second peter and the first step do you see it there what verse does it start out with i don't have it in front of me verse five go ahead and read that key and besides this giving all diligence at your faith virtue okay so we want to be diligent in these steps but add to your the first one is faith now to every the bible says how many people have faith to every man is given a measure of faith so when i'm looking at that every man is given a measure of faith and in order to exercise faith you have to have a frontal lobe how i translate that is every person in humanity that hasn't had it blown away has a frontal lobe they have the potential for faith they have a measure of faith by the way even atheists worship the difference is what they're worshiping who they're worshiping who they're trusting but they have all sorts of faith and confidence in things that have very limited evidence and so that's the frontal lobe aspect of things so when we screen you before we came you came to the program our girls were actually screening you to see whether you had a frontal lobe if you didn't have a frontal lobe there's no use to you coming to the program because you're not going to be able to change and so uh to every person is given that measure of faith so that means you can start that first rung of the ladder so add to your faith what was it virtues let's put virtue virtue is the willingness to do what's right you were also asked another question before you came to the program are you willing to change your lifestyle in ways that might significantly improve your mental health and even to what degree that was if you would have answered no i'm not willing to change my lifestyle at all even if it improved my mental health you wouldn't have been accepted into the program because we want to have you have a willingness to do what's right so these were screened even before you came faith and virtue virtue is the willingness what comes after virtue knowledge [Music] so remember my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge many of you came even though you were willing to do what's right you were still unconsciously incompetent in certain areas but then the knowledge made you consciously incompetent and here in the program you began to put it into practice what do we call that what's after knowledge when we put it into practice temperance there's that word temperance again temperance is moderation in the things that are healthy and abstinence in the things that are unhealthy and so that's putting it into practice if you're living a temperate lifestyle you're putting it into practice but then what stage do you remember what stage is after consciously competent unconsciously competent how are you going to go from conscious competence to unconscious competence there it is number five and the latter is patience and the actual greek word for patience is more closer i think to endurance in other words we have to endure the bible says those that endure to the end shall be saved and so it's going to require more effort when you get home than the effort you you put into here why is that the case you had all the encouragement for this here but at home you're going to have to muster that courage to continue working the change being patient and continuing on and then you will get to number six what is what is six after patience that's a glorious stage it's getting very glorious when it gets to six godliness godliness this is unconscious competence this is where it's not a struggle anymore just like our our pepsi user it was no longer a struggle for her to drink water and to benefit from it this is where psalm 16 11 at thy right hand and i'm missing a part of the the text in thy presence is fullness of joy and at thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore that's the godliness lifestyle and these are people that are not set back by even abuse by even words that are said to them that are untrue or cutting words in regards to this or that or being flipped off by a driver in traffic it doesn't get them down they might feel sorry for the driver that flips them off because they're realizing they've got a mental illness of some sort to get that upset uh but it doesn't get them down they've got this stage six going for them this godliness but it doesn't end there he has two more after godliness is what brotherly kindness anyone know what the greek word was for that that's right phileo phileo is where we get the city of philadelphia and philadelphia is the city of what brotherly love it started out that way i'm not sure it's that way anymore but it started out as the city of brotherly love and this means that after we reach this godliness stage our lives are directed towards others it's not about ourself now because we're healed but we desire to have that healing in everyone around us and it can go as viral as the iphone you know when the iphone first came out it was pretty amazing to see someone with it and so someone else would say i want to get that too but this is far better than an iphone this is where real life begins and so you start directing yourself in kindness to others sharing with them what has happened to you and what god has done to you and that's where peter was when he said i fully owe you to christ but he still wasn't at the top of the ladder we should have actually started from the bottom to the top here that i think about it but it's okay you guys can because you know it starts out with faith and then virtue knowledge temperance keeps going all the way up the ladder number eight is what charity what's the word for charity that's agape that is your self-sacrificing love that we talked about this morning self-sacrificing love for the good of others that means it's not just the people you know that you like that you want to share this with it's even people you don't know it's people that are not even part of your group or ethnicity or whatever group you're in that you have more brotherly affiliation to and this is the pinnacle of the latter and dr prochaska he's a psychiatrist secular psychiatrist who has studied a lot about change he doesn't have as many changes stages as peter he has six stages of change those are named differently but they're along the same line he mentioned that if you want to be the biggest change agent in your family or in your community what will help you to change the world around you is empathy for others it's the number one change agent so we don't criticize others we're not belittling them we're not ridiculing them we're actually showing empathy for them and showing them a better way and when they see the empathy and they hear the better way they want to change they want to do it now after he finishes this after he finishes it it's pretty amazing we ought to have someone come up and read it bailey maybe you can come up and read this after those verses read the next few verses yes that sounds good you can go ahead and sit down thanks miguel for if these things be in you and abound these things are these eight things they make you that you shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our lord jesus christ but he that lacks these things is blind and cannot see afar off and has forgotten that he was purged from his old sins wherefore the rather brethren give diligence to make your calling and election sure for if you do these things you shall never fall wow if you do these things if you're following all of these steps of the ladder you shall what that is a fail safe method a fail-safe method and some of you wonder am i going to be able to do this at home and i'm going to be able to follow through on all these things that help me there's a fail-safe method now where does it say partakers of the divine nature is that verse 11 oh that's where when it that's how it starts so he shows you how you can be partakers of the divine nature why don't you read that one too uh because it's not just us doing this it's us in combination with the divine okay go ahead grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of god and of jesus christ our lord according to his divine power hath he given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises that by these you might be partakers of the divine nature having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust okay and that's when he after that introduction he goes through how we can be those that partaker of the divine nature and then he says if you're on this pathway if you're following this ladder if you're going up round by round this is going to be fail-safe and that's a wonderful promise and i can tell you it's not just a promise it has been carried out in countless lives of people who have gone through this program it is a tremendous experience to go from disappointment to appointment and to be set up for the highest levels of success i can tell you it doesn't get any better in life than when you can see even one person change for the better as a result of your interactions with them and then when there can be two and there can be three and it starts to multiply it's better than winning the lottery it's better than whatever you know some guy is thinking about in regards to momentary gratification this is a euphoric high that is way beyond that and it stays up there for a good long time you have made the world a far better place but it has to start with these steps any questions comments any clarifications all right well i guess it's it's understood so uh take these steps home with you study them out further and god will bless let's pray father in heaven we thank you that through one of your closest followers peter who is with you for that entire three and a half years but even messed up and denied you like many of us have here if not all of us we thank you that you still have a path for us that leads to this glorious life where there are pleasures in your presence and joy at your right hand and that it cannot just be with us but may we be successful in bringing scores of individuals from our lovely and loving family members to the communities around us that we might be change agents for making the world a far better place and we thank you for peter's insight these eight stages of change may we be committed to them that we might all experience that agape love that would rid this world of the conflicts and the sin and the despicable acts of humanity and change them into loving kindness for each other in jesus name we pray amen you

Channel: Weimar Church Media

Views: 1,263

Rating: 4.9166665 out of 5

Keywords: Weimar Campus Church, Sabbath, Seventh Day Adventist, Coming of the Lord, End of time, Pastor Don Mackintosh, Dr Neil Nedley, NEWSTART, Health, education, economy, trial, tribulation

Id: EsK1gdsvvEM

Length: 59min 10sec (3550 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021