Ultimate Prescription

Physiology of Worship

Three Angels Broadcasting Network

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Series Code: UP

Program Code: UP180115A


00:01 The following program presents principles designed
00:02 to promote good health
00:04 and is not intended to take the place
00:05 of personalized professional care.
00:07 The opinions and ideas expressed
00:09 are those of the speaker.
00:10 Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions
00:13 about the information presented.
00:15 Remember the last particularly moving worship experience
00:18 that you had?
00:19 Maybe it was the music
00:20 or maybe it was someone's testimony.
00:22 Perhaps, it was even an act of service
00:24 that you did for someone else.
00:25 Whatever it was, that act of worship
00:27 provided you with physiologic benefits.
00:29 Discovering how worship benefits us physically
00:32 is the topic of today's program.
00:34 I'll be sharing ideas
00:35 that you can use to improve your health today,
00:38 no matter where you're starting from.
00:39 The Ultimate Prescription starts now.
01:01 Thanks for joining us here today
01:02 for the Ultimate Prescription,
01:04 a program dedicated
01:05 to helping us better understand
01:07 God's design for our lives
01:09 and experience better health by following His plan.
01:12 I'm your host Nick Evenson here with Dr. James Marcum
01:14 for another program on which we'll be discussing
01:16 how worship benefits us physiologically.
01:20 Dr. Marcum, explain that a little bit to us?
01:22 Yeah, well, let's do some background first
01:25 and that will help
01:27 frame the importance of worship
01:29 for our physiology,
01:31 worship for our life, worship forever.
01:34 Okay.
01:36 If you go back to the Bible,
01:38 okay, the Bible's always been about worshiping God.
01:42 We were created in the image of God.
01:45 We were created to be with God
01:48 and be in relationship with God.
01:50 This is built into our DNA, our genetic blueprint.
01:55 Now we found out,
01:57 and we've talked about how we all have damaged genes.
02:01 We all come to the table with damage, okay?
02:04 And that's just been, you know, it's just the way things are
02:07 because of our forefathers.
02:08 You know, sin has damaged us.
02:11 And we've also learned
02:12 that's sort of like our hard drive.
02:15 But we've also added things in our computer brain
02:18 that can accelerate damage,
02:20 that can maybe help repair things.
02:22 And we've talked about the different lifestyle things,
02:25 especially in preventing in nutrition and brain health.
02:28 We've talked a little bit about that.
02:30 We've talked through the programs about nutrition,
02:32 how that can help as well.
02:34 We've actually worked on this with the seven-week Bible study
02:37 that we've developed to help people understand
02:40 that there's biblical prescription,
02:41 things that we can do that God has given us
02:44 to improve our health,
02:46 to see when to use modern medicine,
02:48 to help us along this journey.
02:50 Do you following me so far?
02:52 Yeah. Okay.
02:53 But it doesn't make sense to me
02:56 if we don't plug into the most important thing
02:59 we were designed to do.
03:01 We were designed to be with God in relationship.
03:05 We were designed to worship God in relationship.
03:08 So if we don't do that and make that our priority,
03:13 how's the rest of health,
03:15 the temporary physical health we have
03:18 and the eternal spiritual health
03:19 that we were designed for,
03:21 how does that all work together?
03:23 You know, it's kind of hard to think about
03:25 how your relationship with God,
03:27 you know, without that,
03:29 you're enduring stress you don't need to,
03:30 but when you think about a spouse or a child,
03:32 if you have a strained relationship with them,
03:35 you recognize that it stresses you out,
03:38 and there's physical manifestations
03:39 of that stress.
03:41 So without...
03:42 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense
03:43 that without the relationship with God,
03:45 you're gonna endure lots of unnecessary stress.
03:46 Right.
03:48 So that in itself hurts us, okay?
03:50 But that's way we were designed to be.
03:51 Yeah.
03:53 But the way things are
03:55 that the evil one and there's an evil one
03:57 wants control of our brain.
04:00 And that's where the battle is beginning.
04:02 If the battle is in the brain
04:04 and the battle happens constantly,
04:06 we're on this battle.
04:07 But we have someone
04:09 that's fought the battle and won the battle for us
04:11 that we want to recruit to help us in this battle,
04:14 to save us from our weaknesses that we've inherited.
04:17 Are you following me so far? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
04:19 We were designed for that,
04:20 and God gave us that plan for our physiology,
04:23 both our short term physical and long term.
04:26 However, the enemy wants us to worship things of the enemy.
04:30 And the enemy wants us to worship those things
04:32 which doesn't really help our physiology,
04:34 doesn't really help our brain, put stresses on us.
04:37 When we worship the wrong things,
04:39 they're stressors.
04:40 So we, by our choices,
04:42 choose who we're gonna worship constantly.
04:46 Some people, you know, throughout the world,
04:48 they'd worship idols.
04:49 You know, the idols of old time might be the Baals
04:52 and the different things, you know.
04:53 In Daniel's time, you sit there and worship the thing
04:55 that's built in the field.
04:57 In Christ time,
04:59 it might be you worship some of the institutions
05:01 rather than the true God.
05:03 Well, nowadays, who knows all the things that worship,
05:06 maybe it's different things.
05:07 Maybe some people worship football, I don't know.
05:09 Maybe see people spend some time with
05:11 so much with the internet.
05:12 They worship the internet or cell phones
05:14 or what they can do with their jobs.
05:16 Well, there's many different things
05:18 we can worship.
05:19 And as we worship, it affects our physiology.
05:21 It's our brain.
05:23 Are you following me so far? Yeah.
05:24 And if we don't have that intact,
05:27 even if we do good things,
05:29 like exercise, and get enough rest
05:32 and eat the right foods,
05:34 if we do things for the wrong reason,
05:37 is it really a good thing?
05:39 You see what I'm saying? Yeah.
05:40 It's not so much what we do, it's why we do it.
05:43 That's right.
05:45 So with that framework,
05:47 that's why worship, in my opinion,
05:49 is such a key to both the physical health
05:52 in the short term and eternal health.
05:56 You follow me?
05:57 And it's important that we see the big picture.
06:01 And sometimes, we're so inundated
06:04 by the stress of the world
06:06 that we can't see the big picture.
06:09 Now, I believe we have some case study
06:11 that will help...
06:13 In the Biblical Prescription study videos,
06:15 we have a clip from that video
06:16 where you have a case study of an actual patient
06:18 that you worked with and use biblical prescriptions.
06:21 Let's take a look now and see how that worked out.
06:26 Tom was a successful businessman, father,
06:29 and husband.
06:30 Unfortunately, one day while Tom was at work,
06:34 he felt as if an elephant was sitting on his chest.
06:38 Tom had never experienced this sensation before.
06:42 Well, he was smart enough to seek help,
06:44 and immediately he dialed 911
06:47 and soon found himself in the emergency room.
06:51 In the emergency room,
06:52 a myocardial infarction, a heart attack was diagnosed.
06:56 And eventually,
06:57 he received a stent to the right coronary artery.
07:01 A heart attack in his 30s, can you imagine?
07:04 Well, this literally left him petrified.
07:08 From that point onward,
07:09 every time anything felt off in his chest, Tom panicked.
07:14 He regularly saw doctors, went to the emergency rooms
07:18 and had extensive testing on his heart.
07:21 While he went from doctor to doctor
07:23 as his symptoms were real, Tom definitely needed help.
07:28 His psychologist was doing everything
07:31 in the cognitive therapy world,
07:33 but it was not enough.
07:35 His cardiologist and internist repeated tests
07:38 and offered reassurance,
07:41 but it was not enough.
07:43 He ate well, but it was not enough.
07:47 He exercise and took time off from work,
07:51 but still that was not enough.
07:54 It may be hard for you to believe,
07:57 but worship healed Tom's pain.
08:01 I know you might not think of this,
08:02 but worship is a treatment, a gift.
08:06 And worship is different for each individual.
08:09 I spent time teaching Tom about the part of his brain
08:12 called the anterior cingulate cortex
08:15 and the steps to take when his symptoms occurred.
08:19 Tom learned the difference between the acute stress
08:22 and chronic stress.
08:24 As Tom grew and learned about worship,
08:27 this treatment was added and changed his entire life.
08:32 Tom never dreamed
08:34 that worship would be the key treatment
08:36 for his symptoms.
08:38 Tom had a real problem.
08:40 Unfortunately, modern medicine was not able to quantify,
08:44 label, or treat the problem.
08:46 God's creation is just too complex.
08:51 And it's no surprise to me
08:53 that worship is a key aspect of health.
08:58 You know, it's exciting
08:59 to hear real life stories from patients
09:01 where these biblical prescriptions
09:02 made a huge difference in their life.
09:04 It makes it come alive.
09:05 In our worship study, the seven-week Bible study
09:09 where we focused on,
09:10 you know, how to move one step at a time,
09:13 a lot of people use this as a way to reach out
09:16 to their friends and neighbors
09:17 that might not understand not only health,
09:20 we assume people understand these things,
09:22 but many people do not.
09:24 Like Tom, you know, it took a lot of explaining,
09:28 what we're doing today, to help him understand
09:30 that we were designed to worship God.
09:32 And when we don't do that, that puts some stress
09:35 and some amount of pain on us, whether we recognize it or not.
09:40 And we reach for things to help our pain.
09:44 And there either gonna be things
09:45 that help us or hurt us, the inputs we put in.
09:48 And those inputs accelerate disease or not,
09:52 or they can help prevent this disease
09:54 or aging or whatever you want to solve it.
09:56 Right.
09:57 Well, I want to introduce worship
10:00 as the key aspect of healing in health
10:05 in not only helping us in the short term,
10:07 but in the eternal.
10:09 And when we come into a state of worship,
10:11 there's hope for today,
10:12 no matter what medical condition we might have,
10:15 and there's a hope for eternity.
10:17 You know, whether we're healed in the twinkling of an eye,
10:20 or whether we're healed from a lifestyle change,
10:23 or whether we use modern medicine
10:25 to slow down this inevitable aging of our genes
10:28 that we're getting into.
10:30 That's an important thing for our brains
10:32 and our body to wrap around so we can have peace.
10:35 When Tom started getting to this understanding,
10:39 he started to have some peace with things,
10:42 his body started changing.
10:43 Then he understood
10:45 that there's nothing that he could do.
10:47 He needed a savior. He needed help.
10:50 And he needed the steps that he could get there,
10:52 one step at a time.
10:54 And I think that what we need next is,
10:56 we need to study worship.
10:57 We've had some,
10:59 the ability in science now to quantitate it.
11:02 We've talked about how we can look at the brain
11:04 through functional MRIs, through CAT scans,
11:07 through EEGs,
11:09 through the piece that a person might get.
11:12 Now we have ways to study
11:14 how different types of biblical worship
11:17 can help the brain.
11:18 We have some preliminary studies.
11:20 Yeah.
11:21 Like Andrew Newberg, did you wanna comment here?
11:23 Oh, Andrew Newberg. Yeah.
11:24 Yeah. Let's pick that up.
11:26 Well, he wrote a book, right?
11:27 Yeah. I mean, he wrote a book.
11:28 And it's, you know, how God changes,
11:30 you know, things in your brain.
11:32 And he's actually did some studies of worship
11:34 and how the brain,
11:35 the anterior cingulate cortex grew.
11:38 Others have done preliminary on different types of worship.
11:41 So now as a ministry,
11:42 we want to try to get more data
11:45 because people want evidence.
11:46 We know that the Bible's true,
11:48 now we want to give evidence to people
11:51 to even help them understand this even more.
11:53 My question earlier is,
11:55 I was curious, was Tom already
11:57 a believer of sort,
11:59 or did it take long process to get
12:01 and to consider this as treatment?
12:03 Well, Tom was a believer,
12:06 but he didn't have a relationship.
12:07 Okay.
12:08 You know, you can believe something,
12:10 and you can understand doctrine,
12:12 and you can follow a culture and not have a relationship,
12:16 a saving relationship.
12:17 Right.
12:18 That's what he didn't quite have a grasp on.
12:21 And when God became real and working in his life,
12:24 when he realized that,
12:25 you know, there's nothing he can do,
12:27 he needed a savior.
12:28 And when he learned how to plug
12:29 into that relationship in worship,
12:32 he started to see physiologic changes
12:35 in his body, in his life.
12:37 You know, you look back
12:38 at some of the stories in the Bible.
12:40 Stephen, you know, even as he was getting stoned,
12:43 you know, he thought of other people,
12:45 you know, even during that moment.
12:47 So his worship was able to turn down,
12:49 his closeness with that relationship
12:51 was able to maybe turn down some of the things
12:53 that was going on elsewhere in his body.
12:55 So worship is a very powerful way
12:58 that we can change our physiology
13:00 and give us the power
13:02 to do things for the right reasons
13:03 and get us back to the way we were designed to be.
13:07 Well, we've got to take a short break,
13:08 but there's lots more to this discussion.
13:10 So stay tuned as the Ultimate Prescription
13:11 returns in a moment.


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Revised 2019-03-28