Week 25 Sunday
Week 25 Sunday
Disease Is Not the Will of God
Psalms 6:2-3, 6-7; 19:7; Matthew 9:1-7
We carry over from last week our consideration of the twelfth enemy of the fifteen major enemies: physical disharmony. If disease and physical disharmony are ours, it is probable that they are from one or more of four causes: (1) actual structural disease, brought about by heredity, accident, contagion, ignorance, or willful abuse; (2) functional disease, which may pass into structural disease, brought about by wrong mental, moral, and spiritual attitudes; (3) lack of, or unbalanced, nutrition, brought about by poverty, ignorance, or willful neglect; (4) environmental factors, which directly produce disease, or wrong mental and spiritual attitudes, which in turn produce disease.
Note that in the four sources of disease and disharmony, I do not mention the will of God. God does not will disease. God wills health. Disease is an enemy that Jesus fought against and healed whenever he could get cooperation. He never once told people to bear disease as the will of God. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). That is the Christian note. It is true that disease comes from breaking the laws of God, which God has written into the constitution of things, but God does not send it; we break the laws and they break us. But that makes us, not God, the author of that disease. God has provided for health, not disease.
A friend once said to W. B. Cannon, the great Harvard physiologist: “When you know all the diseases it is possible to have (something over a hundred twenty-five), you wonder how anyone is ever well.” To which Dr. Cannon replied: “When you know a great deal about the human body, you wonder why anyone is sick.”* The human frame is organized for health and, if the way is cleared by right cooperation with nature, will produce health.
Gracious Lord, you have wrought possibilities for health and rhythm into the structure of my being. Help me cooperate with you so that no crippling disease shall mar the efficiency of my work for the kingdom. Help me keep fit for you. Amen.
*Quoted by Dr. Russell L. Dicks, Religion in Life 10, no. 4 (1941): 515.
Week 25 Monday
Salvation Is Wholeness
Luke 13:11-17; John 10:10; 2 Corinthians 12:7
Yesterday we ended by suggesting that God provides for health and not for disease. The fact is that health is stronger than disease. A cancer expert tells me that cancer cells are more susceptible to being killed by radium than healthy cells; the differential susceptibility is lower in healthy tissue. That difference makes it possible, by the proper use of radium, to kill the cancer cells but not injure the healthy tissues.
Health, then, is written into the constitution of things. God wills it. If we do not have health, then, some law has been broken somewhere, either by our ancestors, ourselves, society, or environmental factors. We cannot be responsible for the body we begin life with, but we are responsible for the one we die with. The body can be improved no matter how disabled it may have been in the beginning. I have lived for thirty-five years in one of the worst climates of the world—India—a land poverty-stricken and disease-ridden. And yet I have come out of it at the end of these years with a better body than I had when I went in. I have missed only about two single engagements in twenty-five years: one from a flu germ—the gift of America, and one by a war regulation in Ceylon. Someone said recently, “You look ten years younger than you did five years ago; that is real religion.”
I was interested in linking real religion with health and vitality. They are linked, and they are going to be increasingly linked. Jesus defined salvation as health. Wherever he uses the phrase “be saved,” translate in the margin “be whole.” Salvation is wholeness and health—in total personality, body, mind, and soul. The time is coming when we shall be ashamed of a lack of health in any part of our being, knowing that some law has been broken by somebody. If through ignorance or carelessness we are unhealthy, still the condition is not hopeless, for both nature and God are redemptive.
My gracious, healing Lord, I come to you with this body of mine. Forgive me for the sins I have committed against it and thus against you, its Creator. Help me work with you to make it the perfect expression of your will. Give me insight into the laws of my body and help me obey them when I see them. Amen.
Week 25 Tuesday
Some Steps toward Physical Health
Matthew 6:32; 1 Corinthians 12:25-26; 2 Corinthians 9:8, 10
If we are not at our best physically, if the physical basis of our abundant living is poor, we can improve it, perhaps perfect it. The following steps may help.
(1) Get a thorough physical examination by a competent doctor, preferably by one who is not a materialist, but one who sees the interlocking of body and spirit. The mere materialist, the one who sees disease as only physical in origin, is as out-of-date in advancing medicine as the medicine man puncturing the patients to let the devils out. Don’t go, however, to a doctor who says that disease is only of mental or spiritual origin. They are equally dangerous and equally liable to write you a pass to a graveyard, or if not as far as that, then to an infirmary.
(2) If there are physical weaknesses, take the next step and ask whether they are of physical or spiritual origin. Some may turn out to be of physical origin, and an operation or medication may correct them. Don’t hesitate to let God heal you through the surgeon or physician. The real surgeon or physician recognizes that he or she does not heal. As one doctor says: “I only clear the way; Nature or God does the healing.” Jesus did not hesitate to use physical remedies; for instance, he made clay and anointed the eyes of the blind man. Don’t be more spiritual than God, who has planted in nature physical remedies for physical disease.
(3) Attend to your nutrition. There is a third important origin of disease or health, which is the newest and yet the oldest branch of science: nutrition. This is the oldest branch, in that people have always been compelled to deal with it, and the newest, in that we are just now beginning to treat nutrition scientifically. One physician, James S. McLester, says, “In the past, science has conferred on those people who have availed themselves of the newer knowledge of infectious diseases better health and a greater average length of life. In the future, it promises to those . . . who will take advantage of the new knowledge of nutrition a larger stature, greater vigor, increased longevity, and a higher level of cultural development.”*
God, my gracious Lord, I want to live frankly and fully. Help me face my physical self with complete honesty and a willingness to know the truth, which alone can make me free. Save me from all self-deception and subterfuges, for I would be your fit instrument. Amen.
* Published source unknown, but see James S. McLester, Nutrition and Diet in Health and Disease (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1927).
Week 25 Wednesday
Lack of Vitamins and Nervous Results
Matthew 6:22-23; 7:9-11; 1 Corinthians 10:31
We are now discussing nutrition as the basis of health. This saying is attributed to Seneca: “Man does not die; he kills himself.” And someone else said, “The two chief causes of death are food and drink.” Dr. R. L. Greene, a professor of chemistry, specializing in nutrition, says, “The deadly weapons used by man in committing suicide are the knife, fork, and spoon.”* That suicide may come from wrong food, or the wrong eating of food. I was once in a restaurant, absorbed in thought and paying no attention to my eating, when a waitress came up to me and said, “Sir, do you know that you are just gulping your food down?” I’ve always been grateful for that motherly soul, and while I’ve not always obeyed her, I often feel her shadow over my shoulder in gentle rebuke when I am wolfing it. Everyone needs a guardian angel to keep him or her from suicide with the weapons of the knife, fork, and spoon.
(4) When eating, start by thinking about your food. While thinking about appetizing food, you are performing a ritual similar to that used by the Hindu who bids the gods attend the feast, except that you are saying, “Come, Gastric Juices, and attend this feast.” For if they don’t come, then the Hindu god, Yama, the god of death, will prematurely attend your funeral.
(5) See that you are getting a minimum vitamin requirement. Dr. Greene says, “Life’s chemical reactions are disturbed more frequently by a deficiency of vitamins than by any other cause.” For instance, “a deficiency of vitamin A gives rise to kidney, skin, and gastrointestinal disorders, diarrhea, poor appetite, bad teeth, chronic colitis, bronchitis, malnutrition followed by a greatly lowered state of general health and a high death rate from infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis and pneumonia.”** Were there space we could show a table of other diseases caused by a deficiency in vitamins B, C, and D. For instance, on a diet deficient in vitamin C, the teeth of guinea pigs or monkeys suffer a progressive mineral loss and soon become soft like rubber. Vitamins are necessary to vitality. A third of all rejections in the draft can be traced to nutritional deficiencies.
Divine Chemist, you have hidden in the heart of food the germs of vitality and health—we thank you for this. Help us now to hunt them out and utilize them to the full. For they are your gift. Amen.
* Published source unknown, but see R. L. Greene, The Chemistry of Health (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University, 1928).
** Ibid.
Week 25 Thursday
Grace, Grass, and Gumption!
Proverbs 30:7-9; Matthew 14:14-21; James 2:15-16
The main facts about vitamins are becoming generally known. What is not so generally known is the relation of lack of vitamins to nervous diseases. Dr. J. S. Hughes, a vitamin authority from Kansas Agricultural College, shows charts of a pig going into severe nervous breakdown, with extreme irritability, as a result of taking away vitamins from the food. A photo of a pig with a nervous breakdown is a pathetic sight. That same pathetic pig is shown in other photos, after adequate vitamins have been fed to it, and now it is a sedate and poised pig!
This same professor said to me at the beginning of the National Christian Mission, in which I was to be speaking from three to five times daily for six solid months: “If you take some grass tablets I will give to you—compressed blades of wheat when it is only about four inches high, at which stage it contains all the vitamins in a concentrated form—I will guarantee that you will come out of this Mission at the end of the six months without nervous exhaustion.” I replied that I was his guinea pig and would try it. It may have been the fallacy in logic of “with, and therefore on account of,” but there is no doubt that I came out at the end of that Mission without any nervous exhaustion; in fact, I was far better than when I began. The grass gave me a minimum vitamin requirement. Someone asked me how I was able to come through such a grind of exhausting engagements, fresh and full of vitality. I replied, “I think my vitality can be accounted for by three things: grace, grass, and gumption.” I seemed half-serious, but in fact I was in dead earnest. That combination will produce health and vitality: grace for the soul to keep it from inner conflict, so that it will be rhythmical and harmonious; grass for the body to provide the physical basis of abundant living with adequate vitamin supply; and gumption for the mind to use the gifts of God intelligently and not overdo.
When I mention these three things in public, people invariably ask me more about the grass than the grace and the gumption!
Gracious Lord, I come to you to be made into a vital person. I shall need grace to keep me from wearing conflicts within. I shall need your stored vitality hidden in nature’s storehouse, and then I shall need a quickened intelligence to save me from foolish mistakes. Help me use all three. Amen.
Week 25 Friday
Go Over Your Mental and Spiritual Attitudes
Exodus 15:26; Psalm 103:3; Matthew 8:7; Acts 5:16
Some of our lack of physical victory may result from actual structural disease; some of it may result from inadequate vitamin supply; but some of it may result from wrong mental and spiritual attitudes. (6) Go over your mental and spiritual attitudes and ask for the answer to the question: “Do you contribute to physical health?” If they do not, then in all probability they contribute to disease and disruption. For, according to one British medical authority, “there is not a tissue or organ in the body not influenced by the attitude of mind and spirit.”
One doctor told a patient that he would remit her fee if she would come and listen to what I was saying on the relationship between mental and spiritual states and health, for the doctor couldn’t find a physical basis for the pains she described. The pains were real; she was not malingering; but their origin was in her mental and spiritual condition. She passed on her mental and spiritual sickness to her body.
One doctor commented on my address on this subject: “You are absolutely right, but you didn’t tell half.” Another comment from a doctor’s wife: “My husband says he would die if he harbored resentments.” Many people do! Or they live on at a half-dying rate. Another doctor said, “You could have added heart disease as caused by worry and anxiety.” Heart disease has increased alarmingly in American life, the death rate rising from one in thirteen during 1900 to one in five in 1926; and this disease now ranks first among the causes of death.* The increased worry and anxiety has been responsible for much of this increase. One able doctor said to me, “Fears are the most disruptive thing we can have.” Stomach ulcers go up and down with the anxieties of the war. Worry is a frequent cause of constipation. The mind does create or destroy disease.
O God, I see I must be healthy-minded if I am to be healthy-bodied. Give me a mind-purge from all fears and worries and resentments, so that my body will be purged from all crippling disease and weakness. For I would be strong—strong for you. Make me the best that I can be. Amen.
* Heart disease is still the number one cause of death for both men and women in the United States, according to the Heart Foundation (http://www.theheartfoundation.org/heart-disease-facts/heart-disease-statistics/, accessed May 8, 2014).
Week 25 Saturday
The Whole Person Becomes Sick
Proverbs 4:20-22; 16:24; Matthew 4:23; 3 John 2
Dr. Frank Hutchins, a nerve specialist at the University of Indiana, said, “Seventy percent of the medical cases need new mental and spiritual attitudes for health.”* The powerful influence of mind over body is illustrated by Dr. Adelaide Woodard, a medical missionary to India, who had a finger amputated after a painful infection. She still has the pain in her finger though the finger is gone.
“How are you today, Marian?” someone asked a girl.
“I’m all right,” she replied, “except that I have a pain in my sister’s shoulder!” The probabilities are that the pain was very real to Marian!
An elderly woman had vomiting spells, and the cause was found to be worry brought on by financial insecurity. The worry threw functional disturbance into her digestive tract. A doctor told me that his brother, a rather wealthy man, had refused to give a special portion of the family estate to a sister who had taken care of the parents during their old age. The portion would be about six hundred dollars. He grew selfish and resentful and refused to consent that this be given to the sister. A stomach ulcer resulted. The doctor called his brother long-distance, spending five dollars on the call, to tell his brother that the stomach ulcer was the result of his resentments and selfishness. The brother was so impressed with the fact that the doctor would spend that amount of money to give him advice, he gave up his resentments, and the stomach ulcer was healed.
A human being is a unit, and cannot be sick in one part without passing on the sickness to the other parts. The entire person must be redeemed. And the gospel provides for that total redemption. It provides healing for the body, cleansing for the mind from all conflicts and divisions, forgiveness and fellowship for the soul—the whole person unified and coordinated and made effective.
This is full salvation!
O God, my God, I thank you that, body and soul, I long for you, and that, body and soul, I need you. Give me radiant health in every part of my being so that I will have no part dark. I yield every part to you for your healing. Amen.
*Published source unknown. Following World War I, Hutchins directed courses in neuropsychiatry for physicians treating veterans. See Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 187 (November 16, 1922): 710.