004 CMP - A New Heart - How God can use meditation to change your brain over time.

    Science is not doctrine but, when taken in the context that it is generally available revelation about God’s creation, it can enlighten our minds with additional inspiration to improve.  In recent decades it has been shown that human brain cells continually grow throughout life.  This debunks old school ways of seeing intelligence and mental skills as unchangeable.  It has been demonstrated that the human brain physically rewires itself when we place intention on it.  For example, when you learn to juggle, the parts of your brain that have to do with tracking visual inputs, grow.     This information has been applied to meditation with increasingly motivating results.  If you meditate consistently over months and years the parts of your brain associated with emotional regulation, memory, focus, attention, and happiness grow.  This is amazing to know because it means that they hardware that your mind runs on can be physically upgraded by practice.  By spending time in silence in meditation your brain grows. Although there is not specific research on Christian meditation, I suspect that these benefits would be joined with other spiritual benefits as well such as growth in the feeling that a loving God is watching over you.     Relaxation:  This relaxation is more focused on thinking about the grandeur of creation.  Other episodes have been more of a guided step by step process.  Let me know what you think   You being alive is a miracle.  The air you breath has traveled the world.  You could be breathing air that was in Jerusalem a thousand years ago.  Your body is built from the dust.  Specifically through molecules that were in other plants and animals.  This is thought that can join us to the rest of creation.  God can look across the millions of miles that separate his galaxies and see you, not as a spec on one of billions of rocks, but as someone worth the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.     Ezekiel 36:25-27   25 Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.26 A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.27 And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.   Meditation: Through the waters of Baptism we can be symbolically cleansed as we give up, and he takes our unclean hearts.   He gives us a new heart.  Just as we reviewed in the idea of neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to change and grow) God can change our heart, referring to the emotional and spiritual motivation in us can increase and change as well.  He puts His Spirit into us.  This will purify us.   Prayer: Pray according to the dictates of your heart.    Contemplation:  Imagine yourself standing before the throne of God.    Application: Now visualize the change you feel you need to make based on this experience.   Share this message with someone you know or via feedback on iTunes or other directories.    Blessings