Lifestyle choices, particularly diet, exert the strongest influence on gene expression through epigenetic mechanisms, meaning that simple lifestyle changes can reverse disease by turning on beneficial genes and turning off harmful ones. Research demonstrates that a fasting mimicking diet can reverse type 1 and type 2 diabetes by producing new beta cells in the pancreas, while lifestyle interventions can reverse coronary artery disease and even affect gene expression in cancer cells. The epigenome (the global set of gene switches) is stable but reversible, allowing lifestyle choices to control gene expression throughout life. This represents the future of medicine, where lifestyle medicine becomes an evidence-based treatment for disease rather than a fad-based approach.
Reclaiming Health & Vitality in a World of Disease | Dr John Kelly | Session 2Ajouté :
actually programology.
He is a is the found A person.
Amen. We look forward to Thank you, sir.
>> Thank you very much.
Well, that's sure sounds excuse me sounds like a long time ago to me.
Um I'm way too old for all that. But I want to say one thing as I start and that is um God has blessed me with a lot of uh wonderful academic experience and so forth. But you know the most important reason that I'm here isn't because of that. It's because God revealed himself to me in a very personal way. Completely turned my life around. and uh I've been serving him ever since I was about 26. I'm now 78.
So that's quite a few years and he's still teaching me as I go. Let's start with a word of prayer. Our God and our father, we thank you Lord for grace. We thank you as we were listening to this ministry testimony of how you at work.
We thank you for the story that Julia and Graham were sharing about recovery and all of us are recovering recovering sinners. Bless this talk now that it might be a blessing to those who hear and who share it. Christ's name I pray.
Amen.
So, I'm going to be talking this today about lifestyle medicine, epigenetics, which is those are the switches on your genes.
That's what epigenetics is. And the future of medicine. Tomorrow, part two, I'm going to talk about the lifestyle medicine, simple remedies, and gospel healing. These two pieces go together.
So, let's get a little video I want to show you. It's remarkable.
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So I want you to imagine for a moment.
Imagine that there was a diet, a way of eating, a way that I could feed you that would cause new beta cells to be produced in your pan. Especially if you were a diabetic, this would be a miracle. Well, the fact is that you don't have to imagine this. This has actually been done by two different laboratories in the world. First one, this is called, by the way, a fasting mimicking diet. It's a way of eating feeding yourself or others that has very very low calorie but high nutrient. So it produces the effects of fasting without the danger of nutrient loss.
It's been shown to reverse both type one and type two diabetes.
So studies first done in mice and they showed you with a 4-day uh program of of fasting mimicking diet. And they did this for four days out of the month and three months in a row. And they did studies actually sacrificing the mice looking at the pancreas tissue and proved and showed that there were new beta cells produced by this intermittent fasting mimicking diet. Well, they looked at the same thing in human cells.
Uh we have human pancreatic cells that are in vitro, not not in the body but living in the laboratory and showed very similar effects with them. So then here's what the the researchers say.
They indicate that a fasting mimicking diet promotes the reprogramming of pancreatic cells to restore insulin production in eyelets from the type one and pat diabetes patients and type one and type two phenotypes that these uh physical characteristics and mouse models. So here this was then this is the human. So they did this in humans.
They used a 5-day fasting mimicking diet and they found very similar results. Uh these handouts are available. If you wanted them, you let us know. I can send you a digital copy of the of this uh presentation so you get the more details. That that study published in 2017 was replicated in China. uh and they found very similar uh results. In fact, in this case, it was more interesting in a way. They used one week of this fasting mimicking diet followed by a week of normal feeding back to fasting mimicking. It appears that three iterations is sufficient to induce the production of insulin producing cells in the pancreas.
Um not sure my work. There we go. So they just say here that they their study proves the same thing. They basically evalidated what the previous study had found. So that's just a little background uh for you to I want to show you a couple more studies to show you what the power of the gene switches are.
In other words, what I want to do is my goal today and tomorrow is to help you see that God has revealed to us much of the science that validates the fact that simple lifestyle changes following God's health principles can actually reverse all kinds of disease.
So um let me just uh show you a couple of what I call startling how power of of changing gene switches in our cells.
So this was published in the journal cell the pre premier journal on cell biology. Uh look at that date 2010 16 years ago. We we already knew this and that is they found three particular items that switch switch mechanisms in a cell that could change a skin cell. It's called a fibroblast. A skin cell directly into a heart cell, a functioning heart cell. Imagine that. So they can take we can take a cell from your skin. we can change the gene switches in that cell and it becomes a heart cell, a functioning heart cell.
Now, that ought to seem like almost uh unbelievable magic, but it isn't. And I'm going to show you before we're finished here that you actually know enough that you could have figured that out if you would have put a few of the dots together.
So turns out that aging cell age is not affect a function of time. It is a function of the switching that's on the genes in your cell. A cell is a young cell when it's like a stem cell. It becomes older and mature as it becomes whatever it fibroblast skin cell or be a heart cell.
We now know that that change is all about gene switches. Some of the genes are overexpressed, some are underexpressed.
And the reason this is important to scientists is that means that we could change an older cell into a young cell by ch reversing that process.
Um I think that's a little technical for this uh this is for medical. I'm going to skip that slide and just go right to a couple of case histories. So yes, I am a physician. Uh I do treat patients. uh but mostly what I do is I train medical professionals in lifestyle medicine in God's simple remedies. So let's look here. This is a picture uh of the capital city of the Republic of the Marshall Island in the Pacific and there's three three other pictures imposed on it. This was a study. I want to thank you if you're a taxpayer for your money. spent about 2 million tax dollars in the Marshall Islands where they have a pandemic of type 2 diabetes.
A survey done in 2003 showed that 40% of the citizens who were 18 years of age or older were pre-diabetic or diabetic.
80% of the admissions to the hospital when I was there. This was 12 years ago.
80% were preventable complications of type 2 diabetes. So we spent some money looking to see if we can make that burden less by teaching the people how to make lifestyle change. This was a study just looking at the very first group that we did. There were 16 people in this group. It was a 10day intensive.
That's what this is showing. You can see on the extra the bottom line there's day 1 through 10. And on the y ais you see that's the blood sugar reading that they were we were getting starting off. You can see why they have so many uh amputations and complications type 2 diabetes. These people were running at over 200 blood sugar uh the first day.
But we look at at that that that black line is what we call aggress regression line. And basically what that shows us is that in those 10 days there was 74 milligrams per deciliter drop in their fasting blood sugar. That's 7.4 points per day. I showed this in Honolulu right after we first got our results to a medical conference and a number of the doctors, couple of the doctors came up and said, "What did you do over there?
you put an insulin pump in these people.
They said, "No, we did not." Because the two people in this group that were taking insulin, we had to stop on the third day. They were already uh, you know, having hypoglycemia and feeling sick.
We did something more powerful than insulin called lifestyle changes.
Another So, there's another case I want to show you real quick. This is a lifestyle center that outpatient clinic the Lord uh helped me to open up in Virginia where I'm from. after uh I finished up my work at Lomol Linda and uh we were using the complete health improvement program as our basic curriculum but we were doing lifestyle programs and uh so this is a little image or illustration of an echoc cardiogram. You know an echo cardiogram is where you use ultrasound the same kind of thing you use to look at the baby the unborn baby in the womb. You can actually see it moving right if you've ever seen this. Well, you can actually visualize the heart uh motion and you can see and diagnose things very non-invasively.
So, this is to illustrate this next case. Uh I'll just be right up front.
This is my older brother, Charles Kelly.
Uh he had a he he was retiring. He was going to go on Medicare and he thought, you know, I've got premium insurance here working for the Alaskan Oil Company there. They had premium insurance. So, he got a a complete checkup and I have to give credit to the internist who saw him because even though uh he achieved 11.5 minutes on the treadmill and if you're not acquainted with that, the average American would do good to hit five or six. So, this man was a very physically active but still the internist saw something unusual on the EKG and sent him to a cardiologist.
Cardiologist did an evaluation and said, "Oh, well, you can see it." After reviewing everything, we've recommended he have the androgram with intervention of indicated. In other words, they were going to do a study, put some dye in the in the blood to his heart. If they could find a blockage, they were going to put a stint. But, uh, he was he wasn't he was not a even a high school graduate, but he wasn't dumb. and you started doing some internet searching like a lot of patients do these days and found out that one out of 500 of these operations where you need to put a stint can be uh pretty dangerous to burst the vessel.
That's why they have to be done within 10 minutes of an O. So he called his brother and said, 'Hey, I don't want to do this. And I said, uh, that study shows you have is you have a heart that is not working like it should. And he says, well, I'm I'm serious. I'll become a vegetarian. I said, well, beer and pretzels are vegetarian, so you might not have to make much change. I was teasing him, but but that wasn't far off. My brother did not have a healthy lifestyle, so he did make lifestyle changes. dropped his cholesterol 40 points. He was still over 200. And so he finally came to our program in Virginia.
He and his wife, they spent uh two they stayed for two programs. After that went to another cardiologist in Virginia there, Dr. Austin and look at the PL the echo portion of the test that's the echo cardiogram was negative for eskeeia.
The patient's done well with lifestyle changes. plan continue with diet and exercise and baby aspirin. In fact, what Dr. Austin told me later when we were chatting one time, he says, "You know, I'm not I'm not really sure that your brother actually had heart disease. I think it might have been artifact."
Oh, really? He says, "Yeah, I've never I've never seen it." So, I got a hold of Dr. Spade previous. Oh, no. I got the EKG. I've got the card. I can show you uh your brother had human heart disease.
So I share that little piece to help you realize that if you find this hard to believe, so do the doctors.
The doctors still there are doctors still alive and practicing today that do not believe this can happen. So just stop and think for a moment what that does to their patients because most of us especially in my generation and older we basically whatever the doctor said that's what we thought we should do.
Doctors are consultants. Don't let them tell you what to do with your health.
I want to show you another little illustration. And here's a study that uh was published in the New England Journal of Medicine uh 2009.
This was a study published by cardiothoracic surgeons. These are the surgeons that either take off your heart, put somebody else's in or they actually do bypasses where they uh bypass blockages in your coronary arteries with part of a vein taken out of your leg. Okay, they take the sap from this vein. So what they had discovered or well no actually there was anecdotal evidence that the long the length of time it took for the bypass to clog up had a something to do with the way they took the vein out of your out of your leg. Now if you're wondering about what this is if you remember when uh Bill Clinton in his first uh administration his first term as president he had a heart attack he got bypassed. They actually did a bypass on him. Took the vein, sap his vein out of his leg, bypassed. I think it was a four or five vessel uh bypass. And then his second term, what happened? One of those clogged up. He actually had to have a stent put in the in the vein, the bypass. and and he was interviewed by Wolf Blitly uh and they were talking about this and he said, you know, thank God uh I could take a stent because you know, Bill Clinton's a smart fellow. He says the vein is weaker than the artery and it bursts much more easily. So, thank God I could actually take So, he made changes. Do you remember this? He became he said on on TV, I became a vegetarian.
And he says, I eat most of it. and Wolf Blitz is like looking at him like he's crazy what you know where do you get your protein of course that's the question you always ask well anyway I won't go off into that but what they found here was that they were looking at the 12 to 18 month failure rate in other words how many of these bypass drafts fail in 12 to 18 months and they showed that it's different I don't know if this works oh yeah it's different 38% only if You take this saphinous vein by making an incision all the way up the leg and just take it out versus if you do what's endoscopic. You make a few punch a few holes in the leg and use this device and take it out and the failure rate is considerably more right that and overall it's 43%. Now I'm not a cardiothoracic surgeon so why am I even looking at this thing right? Well here's why 12 to 18 months is the typical 43% of bypasses failed in 12 to 18 months without lifestyle change. Now just to compare that, let's look at another study that was done by a Cargo Elston at the Cleveland Clinic and a colleague who was having here's you can see the blockages.
Blockies are where something ought to look like this. The nice clear margins, but over here you can see there's so many plaques you can't even see the walls of the artery.
So he was allergic to statins. So he had to do this without any cholesterol-lowering medication. In 32 months on a plant-based diet, you can see the difference from here to here.
This looks like a teenager. In fact, many teenagers don't have that nice of a vessel in our modern society, obesity.
But, you know, when I show these kind of things and I illustrate it, people always say or think uh I like it when they think to say, "But Dr. John, I've just got bad genes." So, let me show you. Oh, by the way, wait, one thing. I'm sorry. Sorry, I hit the wrong button. Anyway, did you know that that we don't just inherit jeans from our parents, you know, cookbooks, entertainment centers? We, in other words, we inh we inherit lifestyle habits from childhood. So, the January 2010 issue of Time magazine was the entire issue was on this new science.
Oops, I'm sorry. I keep hitting the wrong button, folks. of just the new science of epigenetics.
Okay, that's about gene switches. And this reveals how the choices we make can change our genes and those of our kids.
When I first read that, I thought that's a little bit of an exaggeration. How is my lifestyle going to change the genes of my kids? Well, I'll show you here in a minute. So, now at this point on, we're just reviewing history. If you if you graduated high school or even got a GED, you probably know everything I'm going to show you. Like right here, you might not know the year, but you know that Watson and Creek were the ones that proved that the DNA molecule, this double stranded uh helix is the molecule of inheritance.
And here they are, a picture of Watson and Crick getting the Nobel Prize for this discovery or proof I would call it.
Then the next thing that you know about you've heard about is uh the human genome project that was completed around 2010. Uh it was led by Dr. Francis Collins who uh famously or infamously during the COVID era um retired from the NIH.
Well, they found that there were three billion of those base pairs. Just to show you what that is, this is a base pair right here. Each one of these little cross links looks to me like a twisted ladder. Those are each a base pair. So, you can imagine three billion of them in human DNA. By the way, that's in every cell.
Someone is that's about 2 mters. It's estimated to be about 2 m long and somehow it's all coiled up in the nucleus of the cell in our body. Someone estimated that if you could put all the DNA together in the in it would reach to the moon back. I have never made that calculation. Uh there's millions of variations, right? You know this. And some of them cause genetic diseases. But what what we hear most about today is the DNA testing. We now know that that at a crime scene, they can get DNA off of almost unbelievable places. I mean, it's easy to get it off of a glass or a cigarette or or a handle, door handle.
And from the DNA, they can identify us with greater accuracy and precision than if they had all 10 of our foot fingerprints. So, they're very powerful way to identify, but some of those uh variations do cause disease such as cickle cell disease. Okay, one illustration.
All right, here's another thing I believe that you've learned in your schooling. Uh, while we're looking at this of these little creatures and you get ready to tell me what they are, let's just think about where do where do mammals come from? Where did these creatures where do you and I come from?
Well, biologically there's an egg. In the case of mammals, we call an OAM that is fertilized by a sperm cell. So the biological mother and father, those two cells come together and they form one cell because each one of them both the oam and the sperm only have 23 chromosomes, not 23 pairs. When they two come together, now you have 23 pairs uh of chromosomes. And so half of your DNA from your biological mother, half from your biological father. All right.
What's the fate of that cell? It's called a zygote. The zygote can either die or it can become two cells. So every cell in our body can divide and make two. And each one of those can divide and become two. And of course in the case of us human beings, oh these are hedgehogs. These are little hedgehogs.
Almost looks like some kind of a nut, a pan or something like that.
Anyway, um, in our case, it's if everything goes normal, it's at 9 months, you were born and with trillions of cells. Now, here's my question.
If every cell in your body has the same DNA because of course it started, right, it just replicated and replicated. So, every cell in your body has the same DNA. How does it make such different tissues?
How is it? Some of it's an ear, some of it's a brain cell, some of it's a a toe toenail. Well, the answer is that most of the genes in your cells are turned off.
Do you realize you got all the genes for a liver in your ear? Aren't you glad those are turned off? So, point is the switches are what are controlling what the cells become.
So, yeah, I want to quote Dr. Whitaw. is an expert on this. She says we do not inherit DNA. We inherit chromosomes.
Chromosomes are half DNA. The other half are proteins and other molecules that actually we now understand are controlling to a large extent which genes are turned on and off. In fact, did you know only about 2% of the DNA that we have is actually contains genes.
the other 98% when I was uh got my degree in 1996 we were told it was junk DNA that was really stupid because we now know that it's part of the switching mechanism the other 98% so so the switches that control my genes many of those are actually inherited so I have different kinds of switches depending on who my parents are nonetheless every every gene in cells as switches that can turn them on or off.
Now, here's a little illustration. Uh hopefully I can make this interesting.
It's a kind of medical or or maybe I should say biochemical. But what they did was they were looking at monozygotic. These are identical twins.
These are this is a case where during the first few days or or weeks at most of embryionic development the zygote who's now developed into a mass of say 64 or 256 cells if those cells get physically separated somehow excuse me then both pieces become a human being. That's where an identical twin comes from. That's how it happens.
So identical twins have the same DNA. So what they were looking at here, they were looking to see what causes the gene switches to be changed in our cells.
Excuse me. So they've got two sets of twins. They've got the three-year-old twins and 50-y old. These are not the same twins at three and and at 50.
There's two different sets. Twin A and twin B were 3 years old. Twin A and twin B were 50 years old. what they're doing is what we call polymer polymerase electrofpharesis. Okay? So they could separate the proteins in the blood of these individuals. And what they show is that they're very similar at 3 years of age, but by the time you're 50, there are big differences between the twins.
So this proves, if you want to call it that, that it's not really genetics that's making the our switches uh the way they go. It's nature not I'm yeah it's our lifestyle. It's what happens to us in our environment. In fact what this showed was that look at the number just the number of differential bands and in three-year-old twins is very low somewhere around 10 or so. 50 year olds are up here in 75 or so. So dramatic difference caused by the lifestyle differences.
So, I've already said this uh the top part anyway that the uh proteins and DNA control the switches. But this is an interesting fact. What it what we eat exerts the strongest effect on our switches.
Interesting, isn't it? And in a minute, I think you're going to appreciate why that is so significant.
It's not the It's not what you think it is.
So nutrition which is genes on and off diet exerts one of the stars. There's a quote from the point is that how much control do you have over your diet?
Near 100%. I mean when you're a child you probably didn't have much uh control. I mean if you were a nurse uh you didn't have much control over what nutrients your mom was giving you in mother's milk. By the way, did you know that in mother's milk, mother can transmit resistance to disease that the child has never been exposed to? Yes. Not only does she have antibodies in her milk, but she can actually, and it's been shown, she can actually bequeath lymphosytes, the the cells in our immune system that recognize disease to produce antibodies.
the baby can get living and functioning lymphosytes through mother's milk.
There's lots of good reasons to nurse the babies rather than give them a bottle.
So, we've already talked about this genes are turned on and off uh by these influences. Uh oh, one little let me Yeah, there was an interesting point there. Sorry, got ahead of myself. Uh we started life with our gene switches that were set by the influences upon our parents, our ancestors. For example, did you know that the OAM that we come from was developed in our mother's ovary while she was about three months or four months in her in our grandmother's womb?
So the egg you came from oval was developed in your mother's ovary while your mother was in your grandmother's womb. And there's been studies that have been able to show that the effects on the grandmother at puberty can have more to do with your propensity for disease than what you or your mother did. Just amazing. all this multiple intergenerational effects. I think that's somewhere in the Bible, isn't it? Like in Exodus 20 and to the third and fourth generations.
It's astounding. The researchers who knew nothing necessarily at all about the Bible have have told us in many papers now we know that it takes three to four generations of a epigenetic switch change for it to become rather uh permanent. Of course, it can be reversed, but I mean, all right, I want to show you now about three or four studies real quick. Um, so the first is this a goody mouse study. The researchers who are working on the gene switches and coming to the conclusion that it ought to be possible to change the gene switches in uterro were looking for a model to to examine this question.
They came up with the goody mouse. The goodie mouse happens to be a mouse that's worth thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands, because they have done elaborate work to give this mouse the propensity for human diseases so they can be studied in mice. These mice get diabetes, they get obesity, they get hypertension, they get all kinds of human disease and that disease is transmitted from generation to generation. So took a lot of work. This is just a regular old house mouse or field mouse, you know, the kind that we catch in the trap every now and then grow away.
Okay. So what they decided they would do is they would take this a goodie mouse.
They would feed it a special diet that would change the gene switches and look and see if that made any difference in their offspring that were born. And when this picture was taken, history was made, this is a goodie mouse. This is her baby.
But that was when the mother was fed a special diet to turn off the genes that had been engineered into her DNA. In fact, if this was a human situation or that's not my kid and there would be a paternity evaluation. Well, they did the paternity evaluation because this is research and they wanted to prove that mouse has the same genes this mouse does. And it does. I'm sorry, fella.
That is yours. Anyway, so the point is that we proved that the way the mother eats during pregnancy can dramatically affect the gene switches. Not the genes.
Yes, he still has the same DNA, but you can see right here a beautiful illustration that the switch settings have everything to do with what your genes are doing. So, it's no longer you can't say, well, you know, you can't pick your parents, you know, it's just this is what I was born with. No, you can make amazing changes by your lifestyle choices. So again, I want to emphasize right here. I'm trying to help you see that lifestyle choices are a major mechanism for how we can reflect the image of God and how we can have the power to influence others to better reflect the image of God. It's not about salvation. You can't you cannot save your soul by the way you eat. But it's the Garden of Eden story tells you you can lose it.
So think about the implications. Oh, there there's this is what the statement that they made in the paper. The effects of this methylan diet were evident three to four generations later. That's where I see the Genesis I'm sorry uh Exodus 20. So, do you now see why they said in Time magazine that you can affect not only your genes but those of your children as well? By the way, guys, we don't get off scot-free. Even though it's true this the sperm that uh is made in males continuously. Uh but what they've shown uh is that the lifestyle habits of the male during the time that the sperm are are produced in the testes that are fertilizing the oam. That lifestyle uh pattern affects the gene switches in the un the unborn or afterbirth uh child. Okay. Okay, another study.
This is in rats. These rats have nothing special. They're just just regular old lab rats. You could buy them pretty uh inexpensively for lab studies. And what they were doing here, by the way, this was uh let's look at this. This is a journal neuroscience in 2008. Maternal highfat diet and fetal programming increased proliferation of hypothalammic peptide producing neurons that increased risk for overeating and obesity. So what they were doing is they're feeding this rat during pregnancy. This is uh a highfat diet. Their researchers uh of course because I love biochemistry and molecular biology. It's amazing study and stuff me. I love it. I think this is cool. But what they did was they found in the developing fetus in the the brain chromosome 3 there was a gene that was turned up in chromosome 3 of the developing neur neurons and it resulted in an increased proliferation of neurons.
Now what did I just say in plain English? The mother's diet changed the baby's brain anatomy.
That's what I just said. Of course, it was all in medical terms, whatever. So, and it turns out that the neurons that were being extra ones being produced were, as it said down here, they they actually went and populated the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is that portion of our brain that gives us sort of our innate instincts. It's these are the non-cognitive uh aspects of our brain function. And look what the profile was u at from weaning to adolescence. Higher blood lipids. So their cholesterol and triglycerides were too were higher a higher food intake. They tended to eat more calories and larger volume of food.
Uh they preferred fat. If they had an option, a choice of what was it the mother was fed? High fat. Mother was fed high fat. The baby preferred fat.
had earlier puberty onset, started having a family earlier and a higher body weight. Now, this the way I learned about this paper was I was reading the Wall Street Journal health reporter back in 2008 and the reporter was talking about this paper that had been published and they had asked the president, acting president at that time of the American Heart Association to comment on this.
And uh I bet she was glad she had read the paper before he asked the question.
But anyway, what she said was, "This study shows there's a lot more to America's obesity epidemic than we have ever realized because it's a positive feedback loop. The mother is fed about a diet of about 55% of calories from fat.
By the way, the American we're approaching that we're get we're in the we're in the mid40s now. So I only have about another 10% we'll be able to do this and the baby preferred fat. So there's a positive feedback loop. It's and what this is saying is that the way that your mother and the rats way the rat's mother ate during pregnancy produced a drive to eat highfat food.
and this baby was born and became an adult.
We see this in many cases, but the good news is because that sounds discouraging. The good news is that if they restricted the fat intake on this oops I'm sorry I did it again wrong but uh on this offspring then this effect would abate you can change the switches but you can also we do inherit okay now moving to men I don't know if I'm going up or down the scale here but anyway we're going to go from rats to men and these uh this study in men published in 2008 eight proceedings of the national academy of science. This is published by Dr. Dean Orish who's of cardiac uh rehab fame etc. And what they did was they took 30 men that were had low risk prostate cancer the most common cancer in men in the world now. Uh they didn't have surgery, didn't have radiation because this was considered an indolent form. In other words, it wasn't real aggressive and fast growing. and they received a comprehensive lifestyle intervention program very similar to what Dean Ornish uh did for his heart patients and now cancer can't patients and and uh oh all kinds of it turns out that that that same basic diet is beneficial for all kinds of conditions.
All right. Um on Yeah. So they donated uh the study participants donated prostate needle bodies. So the at the beginning and at the end of the 90day intervention they put a hopefully a very small needle into the prostate cancer to take some tissue. Now from that tissue they would be able to isolate small quantities of messenger RNA. And if you remember your biology, when a gene is turned on and it's active, it's being transcribed into messenger RNA, which then goes out to the cytoplasm where a ribosome latches onto it and it produces am from the amino acids it produces a protein. So that was a basically a way to a wire tap if you will on the gene expression.
And uh there's a little information about the dietary intervention, but that's not the main point of this uh talk. So let's move on. And here's the the the money. This is the where the money is.
We're looking at what's called a heat map. A heat map is uh works like this.
So there's 30 columns over here before the pro study before the intervention and 30 over here. And you can see a row for each of messenger RNA. Right? So this these me these different messenger RNA some of them that the scientists recognized and some they didn't and what they the color then is dark if there's a lot of messenger RNA it's light if there's not much okay so you can see now over here most of us can see there's a dramatic difference this is much lighter overall over here there was about 450 genes turned down or off went from dark to light 50 that went from light to dark.
And when they looked at the differences, they found out, oh my, that the ones that were turned up were genes, some of them known to be associated with fighting cancer, and some of the ones that they recognized that were turned down were those that were causing cancer. So, isn't it interesting that this same intervention, a dietary and a lifestyle intervention, caused the harmful genes to be turned down, beneficial genes to be turned up.
Now, what was it that these men were being treated for? It was prostate cancer. But wait, wait a minute. Looks like they're in a weight loss program or maybe a blood pressure. No, cholesterol.
That that look at that. that that would take at least one or two medications to get that. My point here is that when you make a lifestyle change that helps whatever condition you're fighting, you will help many other conditions at the same time without even knowing it. I've had that effect. In fact, one that extreme case is a a daughter who was living living with her aged parents and she brought her father into our lifestyle program where they were making changes and and she was changing his diet, you know, at home. Well, it turns out that her mother who was involid was bedridden, but she was also getting the same food. And one night they didn't show up and so the next time they came, I said, "Oh, I'm sorry. We missed you."
He says, "Oh, yeah. We had to take mom to the hospital. I said, "Oh, what happened?" They say, "I don't know, but we took she was feeling faint and the heart weak and we took her to the ER and they tested her and said, "Well, she's over medicated. You know, you got to cut her medications."
We didn't even know she was our patient.
She was living in the same house and her her medications were too much and they had to cut her blood pressure and her blood her sugar medicine.
All right.
I don't have a I'll bet somebody else does. Okay, I've still got a few minutes. So, I want to show you this stud. This is a a kind of a earth shaker. So, they did a a randomized trial. Uh what does it say here?
Randomized control trial to determine whether a stent is as effective as one year of exercise training in patients with stable coronary artery disease.
That means that if they exercise too much, they would get chest pain. But if they stopped exercising, the pain would go away. That's stable. It's when you're sitting in your easy chair and and you're doing nothing and you start getting chest pain. That's called unstable. It's a lot more dangerous. 51 patients got the exercise group. 50 assigned to the stent.
Don't answer the question, but I want you to think, if my relative had been in this study, which group would I hope they got assigned to? And many people would think, well, I hope they got hope they got some treatment because, you know, lifestyle is not through treatment. So, here's what we call uh survival curve. And everybody started off at at at month zero, 12 months. They started off 100% with no symptoms, no heart disease, no stroke, no pain.
But as different ones started having things happen the curve the line comes down. So at 12 months 70% of those who got the stent were still event free.
What was the what was it? How what percentage of these things fog up in 12 to 18 months?
43% combined just to remind you. So, and look at the exercise group. 88% were event free at one year. Now, I know you're not wagering types, but if you were to wait, what would you bet on that before a patient is given a stint, they're told about this study result?
Exactly.
By the way, that is something that patients ought to be talking to the system about. Why are you not giving me really informed consent? But I must move on.
So, this is the guy that uh Dr. Fineberg that really has been leading in the US leading this epigenetic research and so forth. And so, here's the quot this is a quote from him in his paper. Epigenetics is at the epicenter of modern medicine.
he said and look at that was in 2008 that's almost 20 years ago and indeed we don't do any more studies uh uh at the NIH the NIH does not fund studies looking at DNA without looking at epigenetics because just the fact that that the DNA is there doesn't tell us whether it's actually active or not you had to look and then Dr. Kaput he published this the greatest effect is diet.
So this is uh Dr. turtle. He's the one that did the study in the goodie mouse.
And I want to show you uh this is a easy a quick summary. If you look at health, good health as the the outcome we want, what are the drivers?
Okay, your DNA sequence, which you can't do anything about, you got that from mom and dad, is about 8% of the impact on what your health is.
uh medical care can make up to 10%. Uh these are uh estimates or averages but and environment we're talking here environment we're talking about hurricanes weather floods uh Chernobyl and so forth has 7% estimate but lifestyle fully 75%.
Now, that means that this is youth. We can control this. Uh not everybody. I agree. Uh I've uh believe it or not, I spent a few months uh living out of my car. I guess you would have called me homeless. Uh you know, just because uh I'm a doctor and I'm up here with these credentials doesn't mean I haven't lived a life like many people. Uh bad things happen in life. So, I know that my diet is much more I'm much more able to eat healthy, eat well, do a lot of things now as opposed to when I was living out of my car. But the point is the potential is here. And the other thing that we know as Christians, and this is one of the things that we need to help people understand, God wants to help you. God wants to help you make the most of the lifestyle changes that will give you better health, more happiness, more mental power. You know, the our only way to communicate with God is through our brain, our frontal loes by and large.
And healthy lifestyle doesn't just help chest heart, it helps your cranial heart as well. So summary, every cell in our body is a full copy of the genome, right? You know that you you understand that now different genes are turned on and off by the environment diet having the strongest effect that we know of the DNA sequence is fixed meaning it doesn't change but the epigenome is stable but reversible if you're a chemist it's a covealent bond okay so it's stable but there are enzymes and switches that change that that that setting l choices control gene expression via The epipenome that's the name for these the whole global set of switches is called the epipenome.
Now I this is about the future of medicine. Let me just tell you something. Valuebased medicine which is now the big buzzword and this is really where medicine is going. Medicare and most of the large insurers are going on what we call valuebased medicine. That means they're emphasizing the cost effectiveness of care.
And there's some good and some bad to this, okay? But there's nothing more powerful than changing your gene, okay?
Your gene expression. The the genes that are being expressed, right, can change one cell to another, right? It can change it can cause pancreatic cells to change and become beta cells that are producing insulin. Powerful lifestyle medicine treats root causes of disease with therapeutic lifestyle change and money is driving medical care to maximize the power of lifestyle medicine. Um I I would like to tell you in very uh in tandem something that I'm going to have to veil a little bit because it's very important I not spill the beans beforehand. But I want to tell you that some important uh payers of health care are waiting on the American College of Lifestyle Medicine to publish an expert paper that we've been working on for a couple of years that is defining the difference between low dose lifestyle medicine, medium dose lifestyle medicine and highdose lifestyle medicine because some of these payers want to start paying for lifestyle change.
All right, this is my last slide. I believe lifestyle change is therefore essential part of evidence-based medicine. It is evidence-based treatment of disease is that's the thing that that that the American College of Lifestyle Medicine brought to lifestyle change is it it is now making it evidence-based and not fadbased. Okay. One of the weaknesses of this field was for the longest time it was fad based. Every every pioneer had their own uh ideas and some of them were most of them were good but now what we have is evidence-based practices and future of evidence-based value based medicine necessarily includes lifestyle medicine. So tomorrow I will be talking about isome medicine simple remedies and gospel healing. All right may I close with prayer. Father in heaven Lord thank you we are indeed wonderfully fearfully made. It is amazing to me just to conceive of the fact that I am capable of studying and understanding me. Uh we are we human are amazing that we are made in the image of God.
We have the potential that's practically limitless. We're told we will be learning for eternity. So thank you for this little lesson. I pray you'll bless each one here and help us to to make this useful and practical in our lives in Christ's name. Amen. Thank you.
Praise the Lord.
>> I'm sorry.
I'm showing my email this show.
This is me.
They need the other mic.
Yeah.
See Amen.
He will I have good there working. I wish they now working on our site and another one.
They do good work.
Yeah.
>> Yeah.
Yeah, he used to be the head elian church where I grew up.
>> I didn't know Ron.
>> Yeah, I must look over here to the side.
This is >> very good. Thank you.
What?
quieter.
and I couldn't study the Bible because you're just so focused on everything you have to do.
>> Yeah.
>> And so those times when I just could just lay there, I would turn on total transformation and just listen to Walter. So it's I'm very thankful how God orchestrated the whole thing to bring us together to work in ministry.
>> Praise the Lord. This has been a blessing.
>> Thank you so much. And your booth is over in the exhibit area, correct? and they can come and visit you there. We had the chance to talk to uh Walter Vice and it's just like talking to an encyclopedia.
He's like a living encycl biblical encyclopedia. He understands so much.
He's so full of wisdom and and and just such a lovely man to talk to.
And that's important too that part of um why I'm so thankful to be working with Clash of Minds is because we've been to different ministries and I mean we need as a people to be living what we're preaching.
>> Amen. And we need to really search our own hearts and make sure that we are working with the Lord >> and not just trying to work to have a name for our ministry, >> but what's important is that we lift up Christ and that he changes us. And so I see that in Walter and Martin and the rest of the team and I'm very thankful for that.
>> Amen.
>> Praise God. Praise God. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming up and sharing that with us. Now, we get to welcome back Pastor Ron Kelly.
>> Yes.
>> You know, when he said that salvation was in is initiated by Jesus Christ, that stuck with me.
>> It's initiated by God >> and he has a purpose for us and that's by design.
>> I'm excited to see hear what he's going to share with us next. I'm >> looking forward to it. Let's bring to the stage at this time, Pastor Ron Kelly.
What a blessing to have uh listened to the presentations today. Praise the Lord for those. What other communion has such a holistic approach to making your life beautiful and better? And we we want to take full advantage of it. We want to get the word out. Let's pray. Lord, thank you for the opportunity to look at your word again. I pray now that you'll bless us as we do. Please speak as only you could speak. Forgive our sins. Hear our prayer and please through your spirit be our teacher now. In Jesus name I pray. Amen.
The gospel of John is unique in the different people that it engages.
Uh we see in the very beginning claims to Jesus uh creative power that he was the one in creation that brought this world into existence.
Uh John takes us on a journey from the call of John the Baptist to the experience that was really designed to give a little foretaste to the wedding uh celebration that's coming in heaven. Jesus begins his ministry on earth with a wedding celebration and our time together in heaven will be a grand wedding celebration when we are seeing all things come back together and be new. Uh it doesn't seem to me that this was so much the planned part of Christ's life, but it was certainly not beyond and not beyond the the will and understanding of Christ to participate in this experience. When we transition from John chapter 2 to John chapter 3, we have a completely different encounter.
In John chapter 2, we have a celebration designed for probably a whole community, designed for a large group of people. In John chapter 3, we have a one-on-one encounter done in the secrecy of the privacy of darkness. And so, we go from the mass celebration of a marriage to the private encounter of a man that was embarrassed to be seen with Jesus yet was compelled to connect with him. In John 3:1 it says, "Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus who was a ruler of the Jews." Now, we need to understand that Christ's life was an enigma. It was a bit of a riddle. It was backwards from everything the Pharisees had been preaching and Jesus had just cleansed the temple.
So Jesus is not well, let's put it in the negative. Jesus's persona nongrada to the system at the story of John chapter 3.
Um Nicodemus recognizes in Jesus something significant uh the the power the presence the spirit within him. And so Nicodemus a ruler of the Jews too embarrassed to see Jesus by day or to acknowledge some kind of positive affirmation is going to come to him at night. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you have come from God as a teacher, for no one can do these things that you do unless God is with him." Mixed into this initiating dialogue is an acknowledgment that something positive is associated with Christ's life, but there's also a denial of the divinity of Christ. So calling him a good teacher is a it it's a equality statement recognizing that he has something to contribute to the constellation of rabbis and teachers for the culture of Israel. But it's not recognizing what John says about Jesus from the beginning. And it's not recognizing what Jesus says about himself. When we look at the experience in the cleansing of the temple, Jesus says, "Take these things from my father's house." Let's just make sure we remember what precedes this story.
And in in the midst of it all, Jesus makes this claim, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
Now, they're remembering back to the uh rebuilding of the temple. Um actually, we should call it the remodeling.
There was Solomon's temple. There was the temple of Nehemiah and Ezra. And then there is the temple of Herod, which the Jews were afraid to let Herod tear down the temple lest it wouldn't be rebuilt. So the Herodian temple was really kind of remodeled over time. And what you see is it's it's a very long process. Nicodemus does not recognize the statements of Jesus. This is my father's house. Destroy this temple in three days. and I will build it up again. Um, these are things that Nicodemus is is unwilling to acknowledge. Now, when we look at the science of salvation, what we need to understand is there are different approaches for different people. Now, here we have a very elite, well-educated person well-versed in the scriptures and yet he is infected with the understanding of religious nationalism.
And I want us to recognize right now that religious nationalism is again on the rise. The devil used it once to blind the Pharisees and he's going to use it again to blind Protestant, apostate, and general cultural expectations of religion in the days of Christ in the days be before his second return. Nicodemus is blinded by these things. He's not willing to acknowledge the lordship of Jesus just yet.
And it says in verse three, Jesus answered and said to him, truly truly I say unto you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Now, this takes Nicodemus back. Now, tomorrow I'll be looking at the woman at the well. And what I want you to understand is when the atmosphere of heaven fills you, when the spirit of God is leading you, when you're not worried about how it's going to look on you, you might find yourself saying things a lot more startling, a lot more direct than you imagined. Jesus method involved a number of very direct, sometimes contradictory dynamics with people. And to tell the ruler of Israel that unless you're born again, you're not going to see the kingdom of God is a very startling statement to make, especially when you see where we're going to go. Because where we're going to go is into the dynamic of baptism and the rejection of John's call to repentance.
So when you're in when you're dealing with another soul in regards to the introduction of the living Christ, it's very possible if you are truly being led by the spirit that God may prompt you into a much more direct and somewhat contradictory dynamic than you anticipate. This is not going to turn out to be the mutually complimentary experience that Nicodemus thinks it's going to be. Nicodemus is finding him by night, which is kind of a statement of embarrassment. He's not willing to be seen with Christ in the daytime. He's not, unless it's in some kind of negative dispersion that's being placed upon him, which is typically what the Pharisees were already into very early on. And but but Jesus has an encounter with him that's not that like the one in John chapter 4 when he says, "I know you've already got five people. You're living with this one and you know, it's really not working out like you thought it would, would you?" Here Jesus says, "Unless you're converted, you're not going to see the kingdom of heaven."
Imagine he is the prognosticator of finding the path of life. He's the teacher. And Jesus is telling him, "You're very confused. You're very blinded."
Nicodemus said to him, "How can a man be born when he's old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother womb and be born, can he?" And Jesus answered and says, "Unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of God. That which was born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit."
What what Christ uses for a method in the science of salvation is sometimes the startling truth that leaves the person in a position of discomfort, not necessarily comfort. Now, Nicodemus represents the elite of intellectual ability, the elite of probably economic and ex educational status.
and Jesus doesn't have the lack of ability to drive straight to the heart of the issue.
I think it's important for us to kind of stay oriented in what we read about Paul and Acts of the Apostles that there was the atmosphere of heaven. There was nothing condemnatory about Christ, but there was something a bit conflictual about Jesus. He was not afraid of those things that would take the conversation to a much deeper level much more quickly. Now, Nicodemus is thinking in what we'll call kind of a literalistic way. And Christ is effectively saying there are issues of the spirit that are spiritually discerned that are beyond natural understanding.
That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said unto you, you must be born again.
Now, in his reference to being born of water in the spirit, he's referencing to John the Baptist called to repentance, of which Nicodemus did not feel he needed. And there's a lot of people out there today in the same status as Nicodemus. They're not bad people, at least they think they're not. And and they're not really open to the idea of the call to repentance, the call to a searching of their soul. They don't feel any real need. Their life is running fairly well. And I think what we need to be open to when we look at the science of salvation is the concept that there's a risk involved that if I have the conversation with this person I need to have, they may not want to listen to me anymore and they might be offended at what I say. Remember, there is the potential for events in the dynamics of these encounters. But Christ is not afraid of the offense if the offense itself is not born of method, but is born of substance. If it's not born of self, but if it's born of the significance of what needs to be said to get through, the wind blows, verse eight, where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it's going. So is everyone who's born of the spirit. And Nicodemus said to him, "How can these things be?"
Jesus answered him and he said,"Are you the teacher of Israel? How is it that you don't understand these things?" Now, I've asked myself, and I think everybody here today should ask themselves, what could there be in my religious thing, my religious way of thinking that's as off in the return of Christ as they were off in the anticipation of Christ in his first advent?
Am I open to seeing things that I had not maybe seen before? Am I open to a a new understanding of things that maybe I had not thought about before?
Jesus and Nicodemus are in that conversation.
Verse 11, truly, truly, I say unto you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we've seen, and you do not accept our testimony. If I told you earthly things, and you don't believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven, but he who has descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that whoever believes in him will have eternal life. Now, I'm pausing just before the most famous verse in the New Testament on purpose. And what I want you to see is that Jesus is not afraid to challenge his listeners.
Jesus is not afraid to startle the status quo of cultural understanding.
Jesus is willing to basically say something. You don't know what you don't know. Except his question is going to point out that you don't know even what you don't know. Now, it's one thing not to know something and know you don't know it. It's another thing not to know what you don't know. And there must be an elemental humility in God's people that's open to having their horizons, their vistas enlarged and increased. In this case, Jesus is saying, "You don't accept me as divine, even though I came down from heaven. You're not going to believe earthly things, I tell you. But I am here in a similar fashion as when Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness." Now, this is to get this is to get Nicodemus thinking. Nicodemus has now got to ponder this one of these final stories. You know, they're about done wandering in the wilderness.
They've been out there for decades and they go back to murmuring and God allows the snakes, which he's held at bay for all those decades, to come out and bite.
The idea of looking at a bronze snake on on a pole was repulsive and unacceptable to some, and they didn't look and they died.
Now, I want you to think about this.
It's possible that there's things in our tradition of faith that somehow culturally and traditionally we've gotten in our mind are a certain way.
And before we're all done in this uh survey of the book of John, we're going to see people arguing about whether or not Jesus is the Messiah because he makes a man born blind able to see on a Sabbath. And some of them say only a person from heaven could do this. And others them say he's breaking the Sabbath. He can't be from heaven.
There's no doubt before Christ's second return, there's going to be elements of our faith communion in history that are challenged.
Not the pillars of our faith, but some of our concepts are going to be challenged. And the question is going to be, do we have an elemental humility of person that's willing to be taught? Can we change some of our ideas? Or are we locked in not to our pillars of faith because those aren't changing, but perhaps to some other of our ideas that might have morphed into something they shouldn't have been.
Jesus is basically saying, he's giving Nicodemus something to think about, which approximately three years later, the mystery, the the riddle is going to come clear. Nicodemus is not going to respond positely to Jesus witnessing encounter. And I I don't want that to be lost upon anybody. There is no sense from the gospels that Jesus succeeds in this witnessing encounter. In the science of salvation, there'll be moments when you have no sense that you're winning. It may look to you like you went backwards. But if going backwards is what was necessary to get the person to stop and think, then going backwards is the direction that has to be gone in order to get the person reoriented on the path of life. Jesus will give the man the mental image that will take root and it will grow all the way up until the time Jesus is the snake on the pole. And witnessing is like that. There are moments when some of the things you say will be planted in the ground. They may even germinate, but they may not bear fruit until much farther down the way when all of a sudden the the storyline comes together.
Nicodemus is watching Jesus die and all of a sudden it is coming together. His his mind is so wrapped around national greatness and a messiah of splendor and power that he can't accept somebody without education, raised in poverty, blue trade, bluecollar worker.
Now Jesus is going to move into a different scenario. Now it says in verse 16, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
It is completely categorically a God initiated gift. The plan of salvation, the science of salvation.
It is a statement of reality that God initiates, fulfills, re-establishes our right as we enter into a relationship with him, but makes provision for the entire world to be in a right relationship with him. God loves, God gives so that we can believe and not perish. The righteousness by faith of Christ is woven deeply and embedded completely into this most amazing proclamation of not only God as the initiating creator and then God is the initiating redeemer in the garden but it is the God creator who shows up to recreate which will be a much more demanding work. It will cost the heavenly trio much more to redeem this world than it did to make the world. But the good news was is that before the world was made, the decision was made that whatever free choice and liberty of conscience, liberty of will would be that they would pay it. Verse 17, for God did not send his son into the world to judge the world, but the world might be saved through him. Now in the Bible, the word for judge there, my understanding is there's not many words for the word judgment. We're going to read or we read in Matthew chapter 5, six, and seven, the sermon on the mount, judge not that you be not judged. We also read that when there are righteous judges in the land, the people rejoice.
The difference between the kind of judgment that clarifies right from wrong and that which makes a man feel lost is the difference between judgment that gives you an understanding of which way to turn and judgment that tells you all that's left for you is condemnation.
The judging that Christians are not to do is the judgment of condemnation. The judgment that Christians are to do is the delineating of right from wrong. Now you see in the witnessing of Jesus, he's not afraid to delineate right from wrong, but he has the atmosphere of heaven, and he's not afraid to call people to step over to the right. But there's nothing about what Christ does that's designed to make somebody feel bad or hopeless or lost. His his truthtelling is always with grace and it's always to invite somebody into the path that leads to fullness of joy and life. So Jesus is telling us in verse 17, G God did not send his son into the world to judge the world or to condemn the world but that the world through might through him might be saved. Now I want to make a very important point right here in the science of salvation for you to all understand. In the book of Romans, chapter one, Paul explains that the world's going to be judged and that everybody's going to be without excuse.
All right? There's going to be no excuses on the day of judgment. Why is there going to be no excuses on the day of judgment?
It's because when you look at something like Psalm Psalm 19, when we see that the line or the message of God has gone out to all the world, everybody knows there is a Holy Spirit at work in the lives of all people.
They are without excuse because God is talking to all of his children every single day.
Now, if we're going to study the science of salvation, we better remember that the author of salvation is Jesus. The inserter of hope is Jesus. The one who shows up to pay the price is Jesus. The one inviting into a better life is Jesus. But the one who's also speaking to people about their wrong way of living, thinking, and being is the spirit of the Godhead.
There is a God that is at work at all times. And when as Christians, we act like the Holy Spirit's not at work. We get in the way of the work of the science of salvation. Jesus didn't come to condemn. Jesus came to set people free.
But what we see is the power of God to liberate from the condemnation. Verse 18, he who believes in him is not judged. He who does not believe has been judged already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten son of God. Now, we read verse 16 and we forget that verse 16, 17, and 18 really all the way to the end of this segment, which is down through verse 21, is making some pretty powerful statements.
Jesus didn't come into the world to condemn the world. Why? Because according to verse 18, everybody already knows that the world is condemned.
He who believes in him is not judged. He who does not believe has already been judged because he's not believed in the name of the only begotten son of God. Their voice goes out to all the world in their lines unto the end of the age.
In all of creation, animate and inanimate and in the revelation there is a witness to God.
When we look at the science of salvation, we need to remember that God is speaking to all living creatures, that is all human beings, I should say, all people that have agency. He is speaking to them about his reality. And when I sit and watch uh look at the slides like the seminar we just went through, the more we learn, the more condemned we are if we don't believe.
God is speaking. The evidence is all around us. And we need to when we think about the science of salvation, we need to remember God is speaking to everyone, seeking to invite them, but also reminding them that without his provision, their lives are outside the redeeming power. We're living in a state of condemnation. God didn't need to convince the the angels that we were bad. No other living creature in the universe needed to be convinced we were bad. Everybody that looked at this little planet understood it was a cesspool of sin and that we were without hope, hopelessly lost in a environment of condemnation, waiting and wondering to see what God would do.
This is the judgment. Verse 19, that light has come into the world and that men love darkness rather than light for their deeds were evil. Now in the book of Hosea chapter 5, I believe it is, God speaks about a spirit of whoredom or prostitution in the heart of the people of Israel.
And effectively what he says to us in the book of Hosea, I think I'll just look it up while I'm standing here, is that our actions reinforce the way we think. It develops the way we think.
And when we look at the story, it's Hosea 5:3.
He says,"I know Ephraim, and Israel is not hidden from me. For now, O Ephraim, you have played the harlot.
Israel has defiled theirel. Their deeds will not allow them to return to their God. For a spirit of harlotry is within them, and they do not know the Lord."
It's very interesting there that it says, "For their deeds will not allow them to return."
When we look at the experience of what God wants to do in our lives, it's important that we understand the call to repentance, that water baptism, which is supposed to be a water and spirit baptism. Because when we put our lives in certain habits and we refuse to be humble enough to let God speak, when it says men love darkness rather than light for their deeds were evil, I think we need to understand that the momentum of somebody's life, the spiritual inertia of somebody's life is wrapped around the the dopamine dynamics, the the reinforcement that this even though they're temporary short-term pleasure dynamics. I think what we need to recognize is that the devil takes advantage of that short short-term intermittent reinforcement dynamic to keep a person in a wrong way of behaving even if it's destroying them. I mean, I grew up with smokers.
Even I knew as a kid that smoking was going to kill my parents.
Why do people keep doing these things?
because they find the temporary immediate pleasure whether it's stress relief or or or the dynamic that the nicotine brings to the cells of the body, the cells of the brain.
But when we're dealing with people whose deeds are evil and they love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil, I I think we need to be okay with the idea that some of the startling statements of Jesus are designed to kind of wake them up and say, "Where are you going? What are you doing?" Now, if you're a negative, condemning person, this method of witnessing isn't going to work for you.
If you're the kind of person that sees the cup as half empty all the time, if you've always got advice about how it can be done better, please don't use the methods of Jesus when it comes to some of these direct statements because it'll only be part of a a litany, a book as it were, of of your story of life, which is nobody's ever good enough. It won't ever work. What you need to see with Jesus method is that Jesus always held out something better. Jesus always made a statement of hope in the midst of the dialogue that sometimes had the startling awareness that this heaven that you're teaching everybody about, you're not even going to unless you're born again. But before it's all done, he tells them that God so loved the world that he gave and that whoever believes righteousness by faith. This is the judgment that light has come into the world and that men love darkness rather than light for their deeds were evil.
What's going on in Nicodemus's mind?
Jesus has judged what was going on in the temple courts as evil. He's come in with a a court of wimps and he's driven everybody out. Their money scattered on the temple floor. The animals are running all around. The children have come back in in peace and they found pleasure in the company of Jesus, but the rabbis and their economic mafia that was making money off temple sacrifices has been upset. And Jesus has called it a house of thieves.
And and there has to be a certainty that Nicodemus saw some of this, but he didn't seem to have the ability to to address it, to pay the price of standing up to it. For everyone, verse 20, who does evil hates light and does not come to the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
It's impossible for a human mind to enter into an activity that it does not arrange itself mentally to believe is okay over a period of time.
All of those temple sacrifices where they were making you change money and in the money changing was the enriching of the priest. All of those all of that that um as it were temple mafia scheme that was set up to take advantage of the people. Everybody had to get used to it.
How did they get used to it? I don't know if uh Nicodemus's pockets were being patted by it. Wouldn't surprise me if they were. Probably everybody was equally. So, they were kind all equally imshed in the scheme. But Jesus had come and broke it up and he basically said, "I'm here. I'm I'm casting light on the darkness of those deeds, but if you love the darkness, you're not going to love the light. But he who practices the truth comes to the light so that his deeds may be manifested as having wrought in God.
Now if we go to John chapter 7, we see Nicodemus in the next chapter of his encounter and we get the idea that something is going on in his mind that maybe nobody else can see and most people don't know about but John come came to know about.
So in verse 40 of John chapter 7, some of the people therefore when they heard these words were saying this certainly is the prophet. Others were saying this is the Christ. Still others were saying surely the Christ is not going to come from Galilee.
We go just a little bit. Well, I'll keep reading. Has not the scripture said that the Christ comes from the descendants of David and from Bethlehem, the village where David is? So a a div v div v div v div v div v div v div v div v div v div v division occurred in the crowd because of him and some of them wanted to seize him but no one laid a hand on him. The officers came to the chief priests and the Pharisees and they said to him why did you not bring him? So he's teaching in the temple courts and nobody is willing to lay a hand on him. The officers have sent for the temple guard to bring him back.
And the officers in Boris 46 after they don't have a good reason for why they didn't bring him. The officers answered the the temple guard. Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks. The Pharisees then answered them, "You've not also been led astray, have you? No one of the rulers of the Pharisees have believed on him, has he? But this crowd which does not know the law is accursed.
Now Nicodemus is we can we're going to begin to see here and we don't know the timing. I don't believe on this event.
But here we are in chapter 7 and the the group the the speakers for the group say none of us have believed but this crowd which is a cursed. But then Nicodemus stands up. You came to him before being one of them. And he said, "Our law does not judge a man unless it first hears from him and knows what he's doing, does it?"
Then they answered him, "You're not also from Galilee, are you? Search and see that there's no prophet that arises from Galilee." And everyone went to his home.
What I want you to see is that we have no indication in John chapter 3 that when Nicodemus left, he felt terribly good about the visit.
He probably didn't. He probably left with a lot of dissonance, a lot of stress, wondering about everything Jesus said. Jesus effectively said to him, "You're unconverted." Jesus effectively said, "You don't understand the mysteries of conversion." Jesus effectively said to him that everybody's guilty. Uh the world, the universe doesn't look on and say, "Oh, look at those good Pharisees." No, the universe looks on. He says, "Look at that wicked mess of of people. You're going to have to be born again." And the good news is by faith you can believe in God who loves the world and gave himself for it.
But he's calling even Nicodemus to a life of humility, a life of repentance. And when we see that it's our deeds that have the power to keep us stuck in our destruction. Sometimes it's a decision. It's not willpower, but it's the power of the will to say, "Lord, save me from myself. Lord, I believe.
Help my own unbelief. Lord, help me to make a decision to give you the freedom to turn this thing around. And sometimes it's a choice that precedes our feelings. It doesn't precede our desire. But there's a part of us that desires to to continue going the wrong way. And yet, we see here in John chapter 7, Nicodemus willing. We see he's moving in increments. When we go to John chapter 4 tomorrow, we're going to see that this woman changes her mind in minutes. The fastest turnaround of a of a human witnessing event, I believe, in the gospels. But here's Nicodemus who's taking months, if not years. And in the science of salvation, we have to be okay with the idea that we did what we were led to do. Which is why the Holy Spirit becomes so important. If you make witnessing about you either in its successes or its failures, then the storyline remains about you. But if you have the freedom and the grace and the beauty and the fragrance around you to say the things that you need to say, if you are a person who lives what you preach, the fragrance of heaven, this this unconscious, unstudied influence, it was the fact that Paul's own life exemplified the truth that he proclaimed that gave convincing power to his preaching. Here lies the power of truth.
Well, if Paul had it, imagine how Jesus had it. And I think effectively what I would want to end this message on is by saying this. If we make our communion with Jesus and the healing of our life in a daily walk with Christ the center of our of our priority system, then his healing touch comes to us. The story is no longer about us. If we can take out of that encounter the lack of condemnation for us, then it allows us to go into a world with a lack of condemnation for them. Right is still wrong and wrong is still wrong. But Jesus removes the condemnation. What does it say in Romans chapter 8? There is now therefore no condemnation that that are in Christ Jesus that walk according to the spirit.
What I want everybody here to understand is that Christ removes the condemnation that gives us the freedom to be as it were perfumed with the beauty the atmosphere of heaven which allows us to see people through the eyes of hope which takes away the negative con condemnational judgmental negativism which actually opens it up for us to speak the truth more freely sometimes s more startlingly there there are I really believe there are people that can do this and I I'll just end on this story. You might have heard me share it before but it's one that needs to be retold. Bulacrol long dead probably three decades in the ground. 90ome years old when this guy comes into the back of the Monaceel church he doesn't come to church. It's before Sabbath school. He knows Ba is going to be there. He comes in. He know he comes in just to see Bula. There's 70 years of difference between these people. Now, I'm going to tell you, the older you get, the more freedom you have to talk about right and wrong in life.
Especially if you're a beautiful person, especially if you have the fragrance of heaven. Don't mess around worries worrying sometimes that you're going to offend somebody if your relationship is got some tenure, some time, and if your person is sweet and beautiful.
And I can't overemphasize that. But he comes in and he sits down in the back pew talking to Bula. Now I'm in the back of the church. It's a little church. I can hear what's being said. They know I'm there. I'm not eavesdropping out of bounds. I'm only eavesdropping inbounds.
And they talk for a little while. And you can tell it's very warm. And then eventually she reaches over. She looks at him and says, "You know, Johnny, you're not still smoking, are you?"
Well, of course she knows. He knows he is. Smoking hangs on you. And he hangs his head. She reaches over and pats him on the arm, as I recall, and says, "Now, I want to encourage you to stop that."
Listen, that lady could get away with it. She could speak directly to the challenge of his life, which was the the the cellular desire for nicotine every so many minutes that was actually holding him back and weighing him down.
The beauty of Christ's method is that when it's matched up with a fragrant life, we have the power to be, to say, and to do. Now, I do want to say this.
The science of salvation requires you knowing when to be quiet as much or more so than when to speak up. But in our society, we've created this sense that nobody can be offended. I'm appealing to you. Let your profession in your life be infused with the fragrance of Christ.
Take the hope of the absence of condemnation. Yes, you make mistakes.
Yes, you're not perfect. But take the awareness that Christ has lifted the condemnation of judgment off of you. And while you still stumble and fall, while you still do things that are wrong sometimes, you're now feasting under the banqueting table of his love. and his his his banquet, his banner over you is love. When you're living in that reality, when it's not about when it's not about condemning anybody, but when it's actually about calling them to a better life, the words and the method of Christ can be applied. Without that, we ought not to use his methods for fear that we will unnecessarily wound, harm, and hinder.
Christ came to give us hope. Christ came to be infused with fragrance and to show us that infused with fragrance, amazing things can happen. Let's pray. Lord, as we look at the story lines throughout the gospels, I pray help us to sense that sometimes it takes time for people to make decisions. Sometimes it's it's it's a direct encounter that you're calling us to.
Sometimes, Lord, it's silence that you're calling us to. But always, Lord, you're calling us to acknowledge your initiation, your grace and truth, the power that we can live and be different and the invitation of Christ to live under the the banner of of his love. Thank you, Lord, that the stories are are varied that explain how this journey to life changes happens. And may we be heavenly infused with wisdom, heavenly guided with restraint or holy boldness. And may we trust Lord that in you, even if someone leaves like they left that night, probably this nighttime rendevous, certainly Nicodemus had to go away with a lot to think about because he did not openly profess Christ for another three years.
May we be okay, Lord, watching things work and not needing immediate reinforcement.
We love you. We trust you. We want to walk with you. Guide us now, I pray in Jesus name.
Thank you.
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