Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: This is going back over 20 years ago now. I'm trying to remember exactly when that was. I had a blue AMC Spirit. I think that was before your time, Robert. That’s going way back there. Something was wrong with that AMC Spirit. Something was always wrong with that AMC Spirit. It had no air conditioning in it and vinyl seats. You could cook a Thanksgiving turkey in there in the sun. It just roasts up just like a microwave.

One day, something was wrong with it, so I knelt down in front of it. I looked underneath the front end of it trying to figure out whatever it was I was looking for. As I stood up, I realized I had knelt down in an ant pile. I got bit about 15 or 20 times. It hurt. I brushed them off. I'm no stranger to pain; I love pain. Pain is my friend. No, I was just kidding. But it hurt. I was looking for sympathy but didn't find much.

Anyway, I went back to my office and started getting back to work. Then I realized I was feeling a little funny. I've never felt like this my whole life. All of a sudden, my neck glands started swelling up. My armpits and every joint and gland all of a sudden started getting red. Blotches started coming out all over my face. Someone said, "I think you're allergic to ants," and they were very smart because I was.

So, my wife threw me in the car and drove me down to Northside Hospital. They stuck me with a needle and they put a bunch of Benadryl in me. Something like that might have happened to you in the past. You can take Benadryl at night and it helps you go to sleep. When you get shot up with Benadryl, it just makes you very, very sleepy—a very happy sleepy.

So, my wife—God bless her—she's always looking for opportunities to talk with me. She thought, "Here he is, he's lying in bed, and he's just been shot up waiting to see what happens." So she plops a seat next to me in the emergency room and she decides it's a great time to talk. "We can talk, we’re husband and wife." So she's talking, and I'm doing my best to be a good husband. I'm really trying to listen, but if you've never been shot up with Benadryl, you don't realize how incredibly loopy this stuff makes you.

You’re trying to stay awake and stuff like that. That part of the story has nothing to do with anything, except if your husband ever gets shot up with Benadryl, just let him sleep. Don't try to keep him awake. To this day, I'm emotionally scarred over that time. I just so wanted to sleep and I couldn't sleep. Anyway, honey, I love you; I forgave you many years ago for that. The principle I want to get at is these ants made me sick. Ants bit me and they made me sick.

Story number two: Just a few years ago—five or six years ago—I had two big cherry laurel trees back in my yard. Back in the 50s when they built my particular house, cherry laurels were a tree of choice for certain contractors. They planted them small, but 56 years later, those were a couple of big cherry laurel trees. One day I'm mowing my grass and I notice this big pile of ants just running in and out of this tree.

That didn’t look good. If that tree falls over, my house has to be damaged. So I called the tree guy. The tree guy came out and said, "Yeah, this whole tree is compromised. The ants have eaten it away." So I hired him to come out. Sure enough, the tree next to it was eaten up too. So, $900 later, my two cherry laurel trees were gone. The ants compromised my home.

Last ant story: Just a few weeks ago, I'm sitting at the table talking to my wife. As a good husband should, I sit there and talk to my wife with no Benadryl in my system at all. We're talking away and my little eight-year-old goes into our bathroom. There are three bathrooms in the house, but she always uses ours. I don't really know why, but she's in our bathroom and she lets out this blood-curdling scream.

I run into the bathroom. "What's wrong?" "There's an ant! There's an ant!" This big, one ant was crawling across the floor. So I screamed to get my wife in there to take care of it, but she did a good job. She's tough. So not only did the ant make me sick, the ant compromised my home, and the ant caused me unnecessary fear and intimidation. Unnecessary fear and intimidation.

So the ants I want to talk about today, next week, and possibly a third week are not really those pesky insects we have all encountered at one point in our life. I want to use ANTS as an acronym. I'm not the first one to do it; many have used this as an acronym: A-N-T, Automatic Negative Thoughts. One of the biggest challenges we'll face as a Christian—we said Wednesday night, what's our enemy?

Well, we know our primary enemy is the devil (Ephesians 6:10-13). But what's our next enemy? Of course, you can lump these all together, and we're going to actually see this a little bit more next week: Automatic Negative Thoughts, ANTS. Dr. Amen—some of you might have seen him on TV or read his numerous books—is a neurobiologist. He was one of my college professors' video professors.

He works with my wife's training in child-adolescent counseling, trauma, and grief counseling. He's one of the guys they use to teach this. He's done some groundbreaking work. He's taken brain scans and he's looked at different people who have gone through different experiences in their lives and looked at their brain scans. Somebody who came from a war and has post-traumatic stress disorder will have certain things in the brain scan that he can point out.

If you've had a deprived childhood in some way, he can show you by scanning your brain. He can pick out what's happened to you in your life and how it's impacted your brain. He's noticed this is a little off-subject, but I think it's important to know. He has scanned the brains of people with certain addictions. If you're addicted to alcohol and you're addicted to cocaine, your brain scan will be different.

They’ll actually be significant differences. He can look at a brain and say, "Okay, this addiction over here is to alcohol, this addiction over here is to cocaine," and you'll see there's a difference in how the scan comes out. But there are two addictions that will have almost the identical brain scan. I thought this was intriguing. One is cocaine, and the other is pornography. They're almost identical in the human brain.

It makes you think, moms, dads, and parents, when we bring those computers into our home and we have our kids running around, that maybe we need to be more careful exactly what they have access to. The average age that a person is first exposed to pornography is five years old. That was not a problem 30 years ago because there was no internet. But now, it's a problem.

I don't say that because it has no real serious connection to what I'm going to teach this morning, but the information was too pertinent. I thought I should share that with you as a parent myself. Amen said this when they look at the past—this is talking about somebody who suffers from ANTS, Automatic Negative Thoughts—when they look at the past, they feel regret. When they look at the future, they feel anxiety and pessimism.

In the present moment, they're bound to find something unsatisfactory. The lens through which they see themselves, others, and the world has a dim grayness. They are suffering from Automatic Negative Thoughts, or ANTS. ANTS are cynical, gloomy, and complaining thoughts that seem to keep marching in all by themselves. Now, I want to just stop here, and I'll probably do this one more time in the course of the message.

I don't ever want to lump everyone's life experience into one basket. Some people have more tendencies towards things than others. There are different temperaments. Some people are melancholic in their temperament; they’ll have a tendency to have more ANTS, maybe, than somebody phlegmatic like me who sees the glass half full all the time. So I understand that.

My wife, for six or seven years, battled some pretty severe depression and migraine headaches. I couldn't understand how she could be depressed being married to me. So, we didn't have healthcare back then. When we finally got healthcare, she got some blood work done. She realized her hemoglobin level was just below seven. It should be 13. If you're in the medical field, you know that.

That means she was running around with half the red blood cells in her body, which caused incredible anemia and caused the depression. When the iron levels went up in her blood, the depression went away. It was physical; it was not spiritual. So understand that. When folks come to us with mental issues—not in the sense of schizophrenia, but like depression and stuff—the first thing we ask is for a physical.

Sometimes a thyroid can cause it, anemia can cause it, and all sorts of physical things that can manifest themselves in depression. Before we want to just be throwing Bible verses at something, we want to make sure we take care of those things first because—I'm getting ahead of myself—we are made body, soul, and spirit. God does not see the body, the soul, and the spirit as one entity.

He sees the tri-chotomy of man as one being. When the body is sick, it can impact the soul and the spirit. When the soul and the spirit are sick, it can impact the body. I think we all have seen that in life, haven't we? Talk to somebody with chronic pain—back pain or something—you'll find somebody who probably battles with depression too because when the body is sick, the spirit gets sick.

Now, you can adjust it, we can move it, we can do all sorts of different things, but that's just how God made us. When he created us perfect, they worked together in harmony. But now sin has come into the human race and brought a whole bunch of stuff with it. So the first thing we've got to realize is that thoughts are physical, not immaterial. I'm thinking right now what I'm going to say next.

Some of you may not think that's actually happening, but it is. I'm thinking, and that is a physical process. That’s not just some mystical, nebulous thing that just takes place. No, it's a physical process. I'll explain this because I think it's important that we understand in the context of this message what we're trying to get across this morning. Again, I'm quoting Dr. Amen.

Did you know that every negative thought you have sends electrical signals throughout your brain? Thoughts have actual physical properties; they are real. They have significant influence on every cell in your body. So, if that's true, it's physical, and it is. For instance, here's the illustration I've taught this before through the years. If my wife says to order a pizza and I call Pizza Hut's number.

I think, "Where's the closest Pizza Hut?" But Pizza Hut's number is 544-7400 in Tyrone—it used to be that, anyway. So I memorize that. You see how important that number is to me. So if I'm trying to remember a phone number—let's say someone will send me their contact—I've got to put this number over here. I remember, I do acronyms, whatever you're going to do to remember that number so I can put it someplace where I don't have to remember it anymore.

You ask me that number 10 minutes later, and it’s gone because it wasn't that important to me. It’s already in my contacts. Whatever it is, I don't ever have to remember that number again. So my brain thought that number sends these little electrical impulses all through my brain just long enough to get that number. But now, bring something more traumatic in there. Bring something more serious in there, like your anniversary.

Something that could threaten your life if you forget it. But you remember that date. That's burned into your mind because for that date, there's a chemical release that goes on with dendrites and the axons and it creates this little thing called a synapse gap. I’m not going into biology today, but what I'm getting at is very important: our thoughts have a physical process attached to it.

If you lift weights or you exercise—and I want to lift weights and I get my barbells—and it's Sunday morning, I want to lift weights. I get my barbells, I do my shoulders, I do my arms, I do my chest, and I'm done. That's great. Bring me to the next action movie. Bring me to the next bodybuilding contest. I'm ready. I worked out. No, it's not a one-workout process.

You have to continually stack one workout upon the next workout upon the next workout upon the next workout to get the results you want. Same way with our thinking. This message is going to be a process.