Ephesians chapter 5, this will be part 2 of a study we began earlier. It says, Proving what is acceptable unto the Lord, have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. See that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise. So we are to have this complete discernment. We are to watch all around us. There is no time for intoxication on any substance. Wherefore, be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is. And be not drunk with wine wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord. I want you to see that it is not God's will for you to be bitter, irritable. The Bible says, grudge not one against another. The Bible talks about Jesus coming quickly as a judge. We better make sure that we respond properly to one another in Christ and also to the world. And so as we continue, we gave a long study on this earlier. This one will not be quite as long, but we do want to go through some things that we were not able to fit in to this morning's message. And also, there's so much more here. But what we want to do is simply go over some highlights of why Christians should not be drunk on caffeine. Part two. I want you to notice our first topic today is caffeine and anger, irritability, etc. It is not God's will for you to walk with this irritation in your spirit. It is not God's will that you fall in to sinful anger. And we are not to make provision for the flesh. But I want to show you what the Bible talks about in the last days. It says in 2 Timothy 3, verse 1, This know also that in the last days perilous times shall come. Perilous times. You're living in the last days now. Israel is a nation. There's great earthquakes in diverse places. We have the fulfillment of everything just about that God predicts, other than the coming of Antichrist himself and the building of the temple. And we are living in days when it is no time. There never was a time to relax. This is not your rest. But it's certainly not your rest at midnight hour, right before it looks as if the Lord's going to come. And it says in the last days, men shall be lovers of their own self. There's going to be a great selfishness. This means if they like it, they want to eat it. If it feels good, do it. They just want to please themselves. They don't want to please God. I say you ought to live and preserve your life for the sake of God, for the sake of your children. I don't care about my children. I don't care about my grandchildren. I don't care about anything. And we need to get rid of this self-focus, this selfishness that says, I don't care what I do with my body, I'm just going to kill myself. If it's slowly, at least I'll die of indulging in whatever I want to indulge in. Well, notice verse 3, it says incontinent. That means unable to control themselves. One of the reasons they're probably incontinent is they're high on drugs. Notice fierce is the second thing. Fierce. Just shoot you. It doesn't mean they're manly at all. It means you're a barbarian. It means you don't think about the consequences of your actions. You just do something. Well, if I go to prison, I go to prison. If I get executed, I get executed. And you might not kill somebody, but when you drive down the road and you're high on caffeine, I'll tell you what, it causes problems. And I can't repeat everything we preached this morning about this subject, so please listen to part one. Notice despises of those that are good. As I was studying the testimonies over the years of men that had first discovered the coffee and the tea, and they were talking about their experiences with caffeine. Back in the 1800s, one man writes that he had to apologize the next day because he blew up with somebody. in one of these coffee houses, and he realized that it was the coffee that caused him to blow up, and he had to apologize. He said, it's a great power, this caffeine, and it's a different, in some ways, it's a different drug than alcohol, but in many ways, it's an intoxication that sometimes you're not aware that what you're saying and how you're acting is due to the drug. Again, Steven Chernasky in Caffeine Blues, nutritionist, biochemist, says, by the time they get to work, these coffee inhaling employees are wired and ready to fly off the handle. Relationships depend on harmony, which is destroyed by anxiety, irritability, tension. Caffeine not only intensifies the stress in our lives, but makes us less able to cope. This is important. You might have stress, but the difference between a caffeinated person and a person that's not on that type of drug is the ability to cope with the stress. Our bodies are in a constant state of emergency alert when you're on caffeine, and the results can be devastating. Really, all caffeine is this. All caffeine is, is this. They found a way through drugs to tap in to your emergency response system. The emergency response system is there in case you need to pull something off a child. Grab your child in the case of a fire. But you can't go day to day thinking like that. You understand. There are times in your life, all the time of your life that's not in an emergency state where you need a different type of thinking. And sure, you get an initial high when you tap in to your emergency reserves. But those emergency reserves are for emergencies. They're not for driving to work. It's not for talking to your wife, talking to your children, talking to your husband. It's not for your day-to-day business with people. And believe me, God knows how to put your emergency reserves in action when you have an emergency. But to tap into reserves that are there for emergencies so you can get through your daily life is the height of insanity. It really is. One client who kicked the caffeine habit recently told me, it's as though a cloud has been lifted from my body and mind. I had no idea that I was such an angry and frustrated person. And you're not going to have any idea until you get off of it, see. Because a person can be high on caffeine and say, I think I'm totally fine. And a lot of people might think that you're being normal because they might think you're like that all the time. But we need to get off drugs so we can find who we really are. In other words, so we can figure out what it's like to live without the extra temptations and weights that are on top of us. I believe it's sin on top of you. But the Bible says cast aside every weight, cast aside everything that makes it harder to be a good Christian. And believe me, in this generation of fierce, irritable, bitter, complaining, murmuring people, You don't need anything else whatsoever to make you more irritable. Neither do I. I had no idea that I was such an angry frustrated person. That's because cortisol has a powerful effect on personality. You will never know the full effect the drug is having on you until you experience what life is like caffeine free. Getting off caffeine also tended to reduce feelings of anger and hostility in various studies. In 1977, a government report linked irritability in youth to caffeine and candy bar. And this is quite insane, really. You've got an entire youth, as we said this morning, that has been put while they're children. I mean, even the savages made sure that only the men, once a week or so, got around to meditate on their caffeine. And they wouldn't let the women come anywhere near it. And God forbid they would let a child come near it. But a foolish American is so barbaric that he gives drugs to children Has the child walk all around shaking and hyper? And then they say, I can't control these children on the soda pop. And so they put them on psycho psychiatric drugs. They put them on these Ritalin and all of these tranquilizers and various things like that. And really, they're just adding fire to the whole problem. But you know what? Somebody's making money off of it. Drug companies are making money off of it. They'd love to see everybody. They'd love to see your child high on chocolate and high on caffeine and high on whatever else. They'd love to see it because then your child's running around going crazy and either you learn to live with crazy children hyperactive, crazy children, and you just block it out and get in your own little world. But normal Americans, I mean, maybe it's becoming normal for children to run around and go crazy like that. I think children ought to be energetic, but they ought not be stoned. You understand that? Children should be energetic, but they ought not be wired on drugs. We got enough discipline problems in America today. What type of children do they make when they grow up wired like this? I think it's a sad, sad thing. Sir T. Clifford Albert and Dr. Walter Ernest Dixon in 1909 in A System of Medicine tell us, on caffeine the sufferer is tremulous. He loses his self-command. He is subject to fits of agitation and depression. A renewed dose of the poison gives temporary relief, but at the cost of future misery. By misery such as these, the best years of life may be spoiled. Isn't it sad going up and down, up and down, up and down on caffeine cycle, burning out these years of your life? There was. Interesting about the time. That I'm thinking about reading various books for the sermons, Ebi said on her mommy's email list where you have these mothers that have lots of children and they are pretty experienced mothers. And they are giving testimonies about various things. There were quite a few testimonies about Coca-Cola and chocolate. And aside from any, they were bringing these testimonies on their own, basically saying, have you noticed when I do chocolate, when I eat chocolate, the next day I have a major blow up. In other words, I'm just so angry. I have an emotional fit in my home. And these women are wise enough, experienced mothers enough to start noticing what is the connection between me eating chocolate and the next day blowing up at my husband? What's going on here? And they were just questioning the link between these types of things. Well, it's an easy link. It's the fact that you're on drugs. And when you do drugs, you're going to have all types of strange things happening to your emotions. You're a ticking time bomb when you are on drugs. And some of you might have done harder drugs, more powerful drugs. And it's the same type of thing on a different level. But the fact that it's a different level doesn't mean that it's good. You understand that? The fact that you don't walk around in a miniskirt anymore doesn't mean that you don't have some growth. You understand that? It's time to start growing in the Lord. Praise God you're not a drunkard on alcohol anymore. But let's not switch to some other drug. Let's get off drugs. Let's be modest. Let's grow in the Lord. Let's finish this thing. The Lord talks about beginning and finishing. I'm glad you're not on crack cocaine, but let's get off all drugs. Let's grow. In the world's most popular drug, it says caffeine is generally recognized as a substance that is productive of anxiety. Of course it is. It's where much of the irritability is coming from. What would our life be like? What would marriages be like? What would churches be like? What would our society be like without everybody doing speed? I wonder what life would be like. It might be a different America. I mean, we're like a rubber band that's been stretched. I mean, it's just insane the tension that everybody's already adding to their life right before the Lord comes. When you've got tension anyway, there's unrest in the world. You don't need all this extra tension. Leonard Holmes in 2005, mentalhealth.about.com says coffee breaks can make stress worse. The British researchers found that caffeine heightened feelings of stress while performing stressful tasks, especially in men. What's so funny is that they throw out all these caffeine news articles like every couple of weeks and it's stuff that they've already found out centuries ago. But they act like it's such new information. They act like it's just outstanding, astounding information that can you believe it? We actually found out when people take a coffee break and take their coffee, they get more stressful. Well, in one sense, you are getting your drug. So in that sense, you are alleviating stress, but you're only getting more speed that's going to produce more stress. They found out with animals and with humans as well, that if you go through a stressful time, your body, your emotions, stays in a state of stress, even after the event is over. So, if there was an emergency out here and you needed to rescue somebody, or there was some great devastating event, the next couple of days you might still show signs of the event that you went through. If you are going to drug yourself into an emergency state, you are going to continue to show signs of the stress that you put your body through even after the event is over, even after your intoxication on coffee has finished, which means you're going to have problems in your body, problems in your emotions. And as we said over and over, People cannot relax anymore because of caffeine. They are filled with anxiety. And now we have more than one out of five adults in America taking tranquilizers and antidepressants. I believe it's even more than that now. What does that mean? It means you've got a lot of rich drug companies and you've got a lot of strange things going on in the news, a lot of strange murders, a lot of strange, crazy people. And instead of taking people off of the antidepressants, they put them on more drugs. Steven Chernesky again says this behavior is equivalent to driving with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. No wonder so many people are falling apart. Habitual and light caffeine consumers had basically the same increase in stress hormones. People simply become accustomed to the feelings of stress, irritability and aggressiveness produced by the drug. I don't want to feel accustomed to that type of lifestyle. This is an ad for an anti-anxiety drug. Does your life have signs of persistent anxiety, sleep disturbance, irritability, muscle tension, restlessness and fatigue? Stop coffee. Is that what they say? No. Come buy our drug. In other words, is coffee making you all of these things? We got a drug that'll fix that. That way you can keep your other drug and just add our drug onto the list. Now, I call that madness. And the Bible says in the last days, the nations are what? Mad. You're insane. Now, if you need energy. And you say, I'm tired. You need energy. Exercise. Sleep. Eat real food and avoid caffeine. That's how you get energy. Caffeine messes up your sleep. It gives you no nourishment. It destroys all of the nourishment that you had in your body and causes fatigue and adrenal stress. Proverbs chapter 19, verse 15 says, slothfulness catheth into a deep sleep. So these people that say, oh, I'm just so tired, I can't concentrate. Well, maybe you need to get to work. Maybe you need to do work and quit sitting around. The answer to overcoming this cloudy feeling of sloth is get moving. Not take a drug. So what if the slothful man, who's wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason, what if the slothful man says, well, I just feel like, I just, I don't know, it grieves me to even lift my fork to my mouth, and I'm depressed, and I'm grieved, and the door's going back and forth, and I'm just, oh, I just depressed. I know what I'll do, I'll just take a drug. Is that the answer? Or has the answer quit being slothful? Exercise. Do some push-ups. Do something. Run around the block. Go find some work somewhere. Work! That's always been the answer. Paul one time didn't go with Luke and he says, I'll walk. And he walked 12 miles or some say 20 miles to get to his next place. Walk! But I admit there's times when you have been at war all day. Or longer. And like Jonathan, you now need nourishment. So if you've been working and working and working and you need nourishment, you don't need caffeine, which is not nourishment. You need to learn to go get you some raw honey, raw unfiltered honey, and get you a little spoon, and when you are sitting there at your desk, reach over and grab that spoon and stick that spoonful of honey in your mouth, and guess what? You get revitalized. You get what Jonathan says here. It says he dipped it in a honeycomb and put his hand to his mouth and his eyes were what? Enlightened. Something happened. B vitamins started working. All kinds of things started working that should be working because he nourished himself. But what do people do today? Instead of the honey, instead of the nourishing greens and nourishing food and nourishing nuts and the things that that people for centuries have used to stay awake and do major work. We now do drugs in America today. It's foolishness. It's foolishness. As sure as there's a Holy Spirit and as sure as this Bible is true, when you take a spoonful of honey, your eyes will be enlightened too. And if you need them enlightened in some other way, then you're messing with something you don't want to mess with. Okay? If that honey's not good enough for you, then you've got problems. You're not wanting to be energized, you're wanting to be intoxicated. Robert Burton in 1621 says, the Turks have a drink called coffee, for they use no wine. so named of a berry as black as soot and as bitter. They spend much time in those coffee houses, which are somewhat like our L houses or taverns. And there they sit chatting and drinking to drive away time. Some of them take opium to this purpose. So what were the coffee houses becoming over there in the Muslim world? A place to sit and talk, a place to sit and chat, you know. J.I. Rodale in The Complete Book of Food and Nutrition tells us the first London coffee house was opened in 1652, but coffee houses became almost a grade of nuisances later saloons. Employers in London in the 17th century were complaining because nobody will do any work. Many a promising gentleman and merchant who had previously been a trustworthy person will spend three or four hours in a coffee house. Just sitting there, talking, chatting. Got to go down to Starbucks. See, we're entering into this same generation today. People began to condemn the coffeehouse because they said, you know what? When I listen to all that politics and all the stuff they're saying, they're like the Athenians, but only worse. They just want to tell news. They're not talking about anything really edifying. They're just sitting there high on coffee, talking about their news experience, and they're saying, The colleges were getting afraid. They're saying, what's happening to our students? They're not scholars anymore. They're not men of learning like the men who translated the King James Bible. They had become men that just want to talk about some news and it was a way of interacting high on coffee that was not productive. It did not pay the bills. It does not make you a better Christian. In fact, Starbucks district manager Nancy Orsolini says we have identified a third place. And I really believe that sets us apart. The third place is that place that's not work or home. It's the place our customers come for refuge. Well, guess what, Miss Nancy Orsolini? That used to be called the church. So Starbucks now, which is not work and it's not home, It's your little refuge where people go to get stoned on their coffee. It's the new church in America, just like those Muslims. So they weren't attending the churches anymore. Those Muslim churches, even in their messed up religion, they at least realize what drugs do to even a Muslim. How much more to a Christian that's supposed to have a sound mind? Here's a headline. Those who crave Starbucks can now step over to a kiosk at Grace Capital Church in Timbrook, New Hampshire. Visitors say the building that houses it feels more like a Starbucks than a church. You know, these seeker friendly pastors, they say, well, my people are just going to run off to Starbucks, and if we bring Starbucks in the church and give them the band and the entertainment and let them sit around and do their coffee high, then, hey, maybe they'll come here. What's the point? I threw that trash out ten years ago. And I know how necessary it is for some folks. I know what it's like to be addicted to caffeine. I was never addicted to cigarettes, but I do know what caffeine addiction is like. And I do know it's hard to come and listen to sermons and things like that when you haven't learned to use honey and grape juice and things like that to enlighten your eyes. But I'm calling you to a better way, folks. I'm calling you to a better way. Prestonwood Baptist is not a simple church. There's a food court complete with a Starbucks. The king of England in 1675 banned coffee houses. And I don't know whether he should have done that. I'm not going to get into the politics of the situation. I just want to show you that the king said they had become places of idleness. Labor was hurting in the nation. Now, there was such an outcry that he later rescinded. And we know not long after that, they became a place for pimps and prostitutes anyway. It totally degenerated. Because coffee always leads to harder drugs and things like that, nine times out of ten, at least. These coffee houses were revived by the beat generation. That's not a good beat, that's the bad beat. The flower children of the 50s and 60s that believed in the free love and experience everything and taste everything, doesn't matter what it is. And that whole spirit is back today. See, it's a hippie spirit. Gary Noll in Complete Encyclopedia of Natural Healing says caffeine and nicotine overstimulate the adrenal glands. Pat Goody in The Unofficial Guide to Beating Stress says caffeine doesn't add energy to your system. It just burns up your reserves at a faster pace. If you want energy, go to sleep, exercise, eat some honey. Just don't eat too much of it. That's God's way. You get a short term boost at the expense of long term jitters and fatigues. And I know what I'm talking about on this thing, because there was a time in my life when I didn't think it was possible to sit down for hours and hours and hours and do work without caffeine. But you know what? I wasn't giving God the glory he needs. It's wrong to rely on some other power. Steven Chernesky again says caffeine gives you energy. Wrong. Caffeine does not provide energy, only chemical stimulation. The perceived energy comes from the body's struggle to adapt to increased blood levels of stress hormones. This induced emergency state leads to the well-defined side effects, including fatigue. No, but caffeine gives you a lift. Wrong! While the initial adrenal stimulation may provide a transient anti-fatigue lift, caffeine's ultimate mood effect is let down. Caffeine is positively linked to panic attacks. Let me state this clearly. A substance that purports to give you energy by stimulating your nervous system isn't giving you anything. It's harming you. My goal was to find substances that nourish the body, not stress the adrenals. It's ironic that all the things you thought you could get from caffeine can in fact be obtained only by getting off it. All the things that you say you need on caffeine, oh, all of those are available. But you've got it backwards. It's by not taking caffeine. But I just feel cloudy. I know, that's from caffeine. Well, I feel tired all the time. Well, that's from caffeine. Get rid of all that stuff. Learn how to eat and it's amazing. How better you feel? The most common response is, but I need the energy. The irony is that caffeine is a major cause of fatigue. It creates tension and the ultimate result of tension is always fatigue. I tell you what, they had to hold Moses' hands up. Somebody had to come hold him up because you get fatigued. If I ask you to please hold your hands up this whole time while I pray and keep them up above your head, I'll tell you when to put them down. When I get done with my sermon, you're going to get tired. See, you're going to get tired. And some of you might sit here and shake, see. But you get off coffee and all that will go away, see. Hopefully. This is something not good for this generation of men especially. Caffeine is linked to effeminacy. It always has been and still is today. French doctors toward the end of the 17th century advised against coffee as a dangerous drug. Coffee was linked to infertility and effeminacy. In 1674, the women condemned coffee houses. They said, since it's coming, the offspring of our mighty forefathers are on the way to disappear. They said it was bringing infertility. And not only that, but the men were becoming effeminate in many ways. In the world's most popular drug, German physicians in the 18th century argued that coffee caused effeminacy in men and sterility in women. Joseph Chamberlain in 1682 wrote The Natural History of Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, Tobacco, Juniper Berries. He said coffee is said to be a sort of Arabian bean. It often makes men paralytic. They become unfit for sports. They become infertile. In fact, the Persians say they drink it to keep from having many children. They know that. The Muslims say that's why we drink it. We don't want a whole bunch of children. We can't afford them. One Persian king was so accustomed to drinking coffee that he had an unconceivable aversion to women. This king left a son called Mahomet, Muhammad. True or not, I don't know. But it's very interesting that it seems that it was a common report in those days, just by observation. And what makes these so-called psychological studies today any smarter than men looking and observing, what makes this more scientific? In fact, do you know the modern scientific studies, most of them that are funded by these big corporations, they're all ridiculous anyway, because they say, well, you fill out this questionnaire and tell me whether you drink coffee. That's what it is. And they don't say, is it decaf? Do you smoke also? I mean, it's just, hey, fill out this questionnaire. Well, let's fast forward now to 2001. Fertility and Sterility Journal. It says coffee drinking boosts estrogen levels. According to the researchers, women who drink the most had higher levels of estradiol, a naturally occurring form of estrogen. And here's Asian Journal of Andrology. It might as well be androgyny. It says green tea polyphenols inhibit testosterone production in rat cells. So that's good to know, isn't it? Isn't it good to know that likely what people have always known to be true is true now? And they're having even reports now to show that caffeine causes testosterone to be lowered in men and it produces effeminacy and infertility and things that are not good. Things that are not good in a generation where what we need is more leadership, more manliness, people standing up and taking authority and getting some things done and overcoming their battles. That's what we need today. But we got stressed out folks that are not ready for war. We got a generation of American Christians that aren't ready for the battles that lie ahead. You understand that? If we're going to be ready for the battles that lie ahead, we need to get off the dope. Of course, caffeine disorders the mind. Oh, but I can play darts for hours. Yeah, you can with cocaine, too. What does that matter? Does it make you smart? You still have your mind disordered, as we showed earlier today. All of the folks that were into meditation and Eastern mysticism and non rational thinking use tea and caffeine to disorder the mind and put them in a meditative state. But Let's go from the savages and the barbarians. Let's fast forward to 1995. NASA's Dr. David Noever and his fellow researchers at the Marshall Space Flight Center studied the web spun by common house spiders dosed with several drugs including LSD, marijuana, benzadrine, chlorohydrate, and caffeine. The more toxic the drug, the less organized the spider, the less organized the web the spider created. Well, interesting. Look up here at the spiderweb. These are the pictures. No chemical. OK, there's a perfect spiderweb. That looks nice. The spider on marijuana drifted off before finishing the job, so he started pretty good, you know, but he's he's a dope head and they never finish anything. I'm going to look for a job, but you're a dope head and you don't go look for a job. Yeah, I'm gonna get that project done. Yeah, I'm sure you are dopehead. That's what you do on marijuana. Because marijuana, you don't get anything done. It takes away all motivation to do anything. So there's our dopehead spider right there on marijuana. Okay, let's see the spider dose with chlorohydrate a sedative soon fell asleep. So look at a boy he just barely got started and he had to go to sleep. But to the surprise of Dr. Noever and everyone else, caffeine did the most damage of all the substances tested. The spider dosed with it proved incapable of creating even a single organized cell and its web showed no sign of the hub and spokes pattern fundamental to conventional web design. We're talking serious stuff here. Conventional web design. Notice the caffeine spider. Wow. Oh, I bet he thought he was smart. I bet he was saying, you don't understand. He probably started crying once you got on to him. You know, he got really emotional about it. I worked really hard on this little rectangle up here, see, and if you look closely and see what I'm talking about here, see, and yeah, caffeine head spider. There he is. There he is. His was worse of all. Bible says go to the ant. We ought to go to the spider, too. Amen. We ought to learn something today. We ought to learn something. Well, how do you know spiders are the same as men? Well, you put him on marijuana and look what he did. Looks pretty close to me. Steven Chernesky says, caffeine sharpens your mind? Wrong. While caffeine users may feel more alert, the experience is simply one of increased sensory motor activity, dilated pupils, increased heart rate, and higher blood pressure. Caffeine actually decreases overall mental activity. The undeniable fact is that caffeine is a psychoactive drug affecting the mind, mood, and behavior. Caffeine disturbs normal decision-making processes. Caffeine reduces the brain's problem-solving ability. You tend to lose the big picture because you can't step back from what you're involved in. Now, they have taken people that are addicted to coffee and said, let me take you two or three weeks here without coffee and then let's see you do a task and then let's see you do a task when you're on coffee. Well, certainly if you're addicted to a drug and can't cope without it and then you're going to go try to perform some mental task, then suddenly you get your coffee. Now you're able to do it. Of course, that's not a true study. But what they found out is when you put people high on coffee, they can go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and for a little while, they can count pretty good. But if you ask them to count backwards, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, then all of a sudden they have trouble seeing. So, as you get to these higher numbers and they're counting backward, the more caffeine you take, the harder it is to count backward. So, when you look at bigger picture things, when you look at more complex, harder to solve, things that aren't just habit and rote, things that you actually have to think to process, caffeine deteriorates the person. It degenerates their thinking process. You lose the big picture. And that's just what we need to lose today, right? Yeah, that's what we need. In fact, that's the problem in America. That's what I've seen the problem to be with most Christians today. You miss the big picture. You miss the big picture of why we're here in church. You miss the big picture of what's really important in your family. We miss all the big picture thing. But everybody's concentrating on these intricate things because you're high on Coca-Cola. It's like the cocaine girl sitting there playing darts for four hours. What are you doing playing darts? Folks, it's not right. It's not right. You can't step back from what you're involved in. Coffee even cuts you off from the brain's higher centers of reason and evaluation because you are forcing your brain into defensive emergency overdrive. So you lose the higher centers of computation, of evaluation, which is exactly why this morning we showed the natives wanting to get in a meditative trance. We showed the warriors in Japan meditating. We showed Buddha. Why do they love caffeine? Because the very centers of thinking and rational, that's what they don't want anything to do with. They want to lose that center of evaluation. But you think God wants you to lose that when he says walk circumspectly, be not unwise, prove all things. God doesn't want you to lose any of that higher thinking. That's what we need more of. DrYourself.com says caffeine may jeopardize math skills, detailed projects, which require additional thought. And then he quotes the documentation. Most persons have remained stimulated since childhood. A toxic adult loses natural insight and can't recognize caffeine-induced intellect and personality changes. And then he gives you the documentation. I'll give you just a rundown. Oh, there's so much that you could talk about on this here. But I'll give you just a quick rundown on how caffeine poisons your physical health. British Medical Journal survey finds 40% of hospital patients are caffeine intoxicated. I wonder how much better folks would do if they just got off the caffeine. Research shows that caffeine is much more damaging to women. 75% of human research on caffeine has been conducted on men. Women detoxify caffeine much more slowly than men. Women have a much greater stress response compared to men. Three times the level of heart attacks over women who drank the least amount of caffeine. And the risk of miscarriage related to caffeine in coffee, teas and sodas and chocolate was more significant than the risk related to alcohol or smoking. Isn't that horrible? Isn't it horrible? They are finding out now that you just barely drink a little bit of caffeine and it goes straight to every cell of your body and it goes straight to that baby and he's not able to handle it. He's not able to deal with it. And I'll tell you what, it's a horrible thing. They found out that even doing caffeine before you conceive can risk miscarriages. You see now why those Indians said, I don't even want you making it for the men. I want you to stay away from it. directly and powerfully related to caffeine consumption. before pregnancy. Many of our physical experiences of tension and pain are directly related to the level of stress hormones in our bodies. People say, my neck hurts, my back hurts, this hurts. Well, if you walked around high in an emergency situation all the time, and then when you should be relaxing, you took more caffeine, I guess your back does hurt. I guess every part of your body hurts because you're walking around with tension. And you say, well, why don't you get off coffee? No, that's not what I need. I need something else. It seems that every year, even more noxious ingredients are isolated from coffee. And that's just the stuff that's supposed to be there. Coffee often contains a raft of pesticide residues. Caffeine is a biological poison used by plants as a pesticide. But coffee is the most heavily sprayed so-called food or beverage on the face of the earth. The only one that has more toxic chemicals sprayed on it is tobacco. It can take up to 12 hours to detoxify a single cup of coffee. In my clinical nutrition practice, I've counseled more than 9,000 patients and kept careful records. Of all my recommendations, including weight loss, stress management, etc., no single factor matched the impact of caffeine reduction. Not that all those other things are unimportant. Can you imagine that? And 9,000 people said the number one life-changing thing that improved their health was getting off of all caffeine in all forms. Why is that? Because drug addicts don't have good health. They never have and never will. And you can deceive yourself all you want and say, well, this isn't related to that. Get off caffeine. Oh, but I have this problem and that problem. Well, get off caffeine. Well, I hardly ever do it. I know don't do any of it. Get off your caffeine. But no, I really do. I have this problem. Get off drugs. Get off drugs. Don't do any drugs. Don't do any. I have seen firsthand with thousands of clients that caffeine is a health hazard. Anxiety, muscle aches, TMS, headaches, heartburn, insomnia, irritability, ulcers. There's a popular notion that coffee before three can't disturb your sleep. In fact, caffeine at any time of the day can cause sleep problems. Researchers at the Institute of Pharmacology in Zurich, Switzerland gave a moderate amount of caffeine to healthy subjects at 7 a.m. By 11 p.m., blood levels of caffeine had fallen more than 80% and still the subjects experienced significant sleep disturbance. And so there's people walking around that can't get to sleep. And you say, why don't you quit drinking coffee? Oh, we don't drink very much coffee. Do you drink any during the day? Why don't you get rid of all soda, all tea, all coffee, period. And continue doing that for the next six months and see what happens to your sleep at night. When you do drugs, you're not going to be able to sleep at night. And you're going to wake up feeling terrible. And even if you don't wake up at night, the REM, the deep sleep is still disturbed. Malnutrition is one of the most well-defined effects of habitual caffeine intake. And this is incredible. Basically, caffeine goes in your body. You're already not eating the greens and dandelions and good foods that we need to eat 9 times out of 10 in America today. But to add on top of it, whatever B vitamins you had, and most people don't have any because they don't eat the food that has them. Most people at least are deprived of these B vitamins. which affect your morale and outlook on life. And so, what happens is, they take this caffeine, which goes through, circulating throughout the body, looking for any nourishment that might be there, and if it finds any of the nourishment, it deletes it from the body. Since B vitamin status of many Americans is borderline to begin with, and don't go take toxic, synthetic B vitamins, that's like a drug in itself. Because God has put all the B vitamins in one package in food, the way it's supposed to be. And man can't duplicate it. See, it's very complex. So they have this neurological damage. Then there is the loss of calcium and other minerals. As little as 150 milligrams of caffeine cause increased loss of calcium, magnesium, etc. in drinkers. Caffeine increased potassium loss by nearly one third. Such mineral loss appears to be accelerated when the caffeine is mixed with sugar. Whoever would have thought of such a thing? So, as you take the soda, here little girl, here little boy, I want to give you some sugar, and some chocolate, and some caffeine. Here, take it! God forbid, God forbid. Caffeine impairs the kidneys ability to hold on to nutrients. So your body just continues to excrete all of your nutrients. Most recently zinc was added to the list of nutrients depleted by caffeine. So therefore we have links to osteoporosis, hypertension, anemia, thyroid problems. I don't have time to get into all the thyroid issues where people think they got thyroid issues and it's caffeine. Studies show that a single cup of coffee can reduce iron absorption from a meal by as much as 75%. Isn't that great? You're hardly getting iron anyway. You sit down, you eat your meal, and then you drink one cup of coffee and 75% of the iron is not absorbed in your body now. That's just what people need today. That's what women need most of all, right? No. They found out this is true even if it's consumed an hour later. There go all your nutrients. How much raw food, dandelion drink mixed with some good raw honey and all of the other nutrient things that you have? How much did you drink today? Oh, I didn't drink any. So you take a soda. You take a caffeine. Man, that just leached whatever vitamins you did have. Coffee and tea both reduce the effectiveness of iron supplements. So people say, well, I'll just go take iron supplements, you know. Well, sure, caffeine keeps you from processing all of that. The exposure of tea leaves to pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides is actually frightening. Unlike coffee, which is the worst of all, other than tobacco, tea leaves are directly sprayed with these chemicals right before their harvest. And not only that, people say, well, tea's less than caffeine. Well, tea plants fed nitrogen fertilizers, which almost all of them are, have higher caffeine contents by up to 40%. Only one decaf method for tea do we have, and it's very cancerous. Barnett Meltzer in Food Swing says men suffer from caffeine-induced prostate problems. Nutrition Almanac says coffee uses up the B vitamins. Craig, The Complete Book of Alternative Nutrition says caffeine presents iron absorption. I'll tell you what, that's just the tip of the iceberg. After hours and hours and hours, almost 12 hours of writing that all up, I realized that the other 30 or 40 pages, and this was important stuff, stuff that's very important that I think every Christian ought to know is still out there. Stuff about women, stuff about the miscarriage problem, stuff about how it messes your life up. And the sister today. handed me some excellent information about how it lowers the IQs of babies and causes miscarriages and all these things. And so the end result, folks, make not provision for the flesh. Let's not be under the power of anything. You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you. You are well able to overcome this addiction. And I promise you it is worth it. Let's not be drunk with anything. Let's give our bodies a rest. Let's experience the health, emotional and physical that God wants you to experience. Let's keep our minds alert. And I promise you, I didn't think it was possible to ever function without caffeine. As I sat down teaching guitar for years, and I would see guitar students come in, I'd say, what do you want to drink? They would say a drink of water. I would be so amazed as I sit and wonder how a person could actually live just by drinking water when I needed my crutch. But now I know That if you nourish your body, you can go way beyond anything you could ever do on caffeine. Way beyond. And the King James Bible you have in your lap is the proof of it. It's the proof of it. It's a generation protected from TV, from evolution, from psychology, and all of the various forms of caffeine. God protected them from all of that and gave you a Bible. Amen. I tell you what, that's the spirit I want right there. Spirit of the man that wrote that Bible, that's what I want. And that's what I hope you want as well. Let's pray, dear holy God, thank you for the saints today. We do pray, Lord, that you deliver. Wonderfully. And God, we can hear some wonderful testimonies about the health, the emotional well-being, the peace that comes in the heart, the ability to see the big picture now. Oh, Lord, I pray you'll be with the Saints, Lord, your people, as they believe you by faith and fight the good fight and put away these drugs. In the name of Jesus. Amen.