Health
HEALTH
Empty Futility amid Plenty
Luke 12:22-31
Many people “spend the first half of their lives expending health to gain wealth and the second half of their lives expending wealth to gain health.”
The Way
(Week 23, Saturday)
Steps to Abounding Energy
Psalms 40:1-3; 41:3; 56:12-13
The Africans have a saying, “Don’t be tired tomorrow.” Don’t anticipate tiredness. Affirm health and adequacy. Autosuggestion? Yes, and good autosuggestion. Far better to suggest health than suggest sickness.
The Way
(Week 37, Saturday)
Acid in Her, Not in the Peaches
1 Thessalonians 4:3-8
The Spirit of God is health. When the Spirit indwells us, then life is poured into every fiber of our being. We become alive, to our finger tips. The diseased portions tend to become well; the normal portions become better; all becomes quickened. A health tendency takes possession of us. We think health; we breathe health; we are health, and we give health. When I was going through a physical crisis about thirty years ago, I heard a Spirit-filled Indian person say, “When the Spirit of God dwells in you, then you can preach five and six times a day without being tired.” I wondered at it then, for I was spiritually and physically floundering, but today I do not wonder at it. It is a fact. There is a physical rejuvenation taking place constantly when we are in tune with the Spirit “so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor 4:11). Christian bodies are healthier and more rhythmical than any others.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 22, Thursday)
To Home Ourselves in God
Philippians 4:11-13
Think faith, talk faith, act faith. Someone has suggested this for a good model of suggestion to yourself: “Every day, in every way, God is giving me health.” That emphasizes the fact that God is giving, and you are receiving; the source of health is in God. That relaxes you before God, opens every pore of your being to the health of God. For where God is, there is health, if we can receive it. Be on the receiving end, and you will be on the giving end.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 51, Saturday)
Psalm 139:23; Isaiah 55:7
I do not believe that you affirm out of existence all evil and all sickness by mere affirmation. Some diseases are structural, and changing your mind about them will not change the facts. But the mind does have a tremendous influence upon the body and its health. . . .
If you are always talking about your illnesses, you’ll have a lot of illnesses to talk about. As someone has put it, “When a woman thinks she is ill when she is not, then she is very ill.” If you have a mental image of yourself as ill and depressed, then you’ll be made in the likeness of that “wanted” illness. But if you think health and affirm health, then you are health. I have sometimes played the game with myself—as I walk from a train carrying suitcases that are far too heavy for me to carry, and no porter in sight—of imagining myself raising those suitcases above my head and carrying them along in that triumphant fashion. The actual carrying then seems easier. Autosuggestion? Yes, of course. You’re always suggesting something to yourself: victory or defeat, health or sickness. Why not suggest the constructive instead of the destructive? Your very organs will respond if you talk health to them instead of sickness. They will blush with pride, and the very blushing will send the health-giving blood coursing through them. But if you think sickness to your organs, they will blush with fear and the bloodless organs will turn sick for want of blood.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 20, Friday)
Growth in Bodily Health
Exodus 15:26; 23, 25
The Christian faith is not a success cult, a happiness cult, or a healing cult. Its central purpose is to redeem humanity primarily from sin and evil; as a byproduct of that redemption, it brings true success, true happiness, and true healing. If we seek health first, we will lose it; it will evade us. But if we seek first the kingdom of God, then all these things, including health, will be added to us.
For God wills health. Disease is not the will of God. Disease of the body is no more the will of God than disease of the soul. God is out to get rid of evil in all its ugly forms. The evil of the mind is error; the evil of the emotion is suffering; the evil of the body is disease; the evil of the soul is sin. And God is out to root out all evil from all of life, including the evil of the body, disease. “However disease may be brought about and in whatever way it may be ruled for good, it is in itself an evil” (reportedly from the 1920 Lambeth Conference of the Church of England). And Jesus came to banish evil in all its forms.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 33, Sunday)
James 5:13-16
So if you are going to be a healthy person, you cannot hold emotions of anger and resentment. The metabolism is allergic to them. They do not fit, so they fight! Our metabolism is made for love and good will, not for hate and fear. Love sets up the system, and hate upsets it. Therefore you must choose. You cannot have hate and health, or fear and fitness.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 34, Tuesday)
Self-Preoccupation Produces Ill Health
Proverbs 17:22; Isaiah 58:8
If you are to be healthy, you must give up all self-preoccupation. You must get interests outside of yourself. You must love others.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 34, Wednesday)
Overboard with a Lot of Impedimenta
John 5:5-9
Health is not a vacuum, an absence of disease; it is a something that we can have and that we can give. Jesus speaks of “a soul . . . breathing peace” (Luke 10:6 Moffatt), a lovely phrase! So we can be people breathing health. In breathing we take in and give out. So we can breathe in health from God and breathe out health upon others. We can be the centers of health and of health-giving influences.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 35, Sunday)
Steps to Health
John 9:1-7
We come now to the steps we can take in having and giving health. First, think health, not disease. If our thoughts penetrate to the marrow of our very bones, then let those thoughts be thoughts of health and not of disease. You can think health or think disease into your very inmost cells. So think health.
Is this autosuggestion? Yes, of course it is. We are always suggesting to ourselves something. Then let that something be health. That is not self-deception. The thinking of health opens the channels of your being to the permeation of health through your being. The thinking of disease ties up those channels through fear and blocks the permeation of health through you. The body in its inner structure is made for health, not disease. . . . The body was conceived by God in health, made for health, and provided with almost every contrivance possible for the warding off of disease. So when we think health, we are not moonshining; we are sunshining. We are thinking along the lines that God laid down in the structure of our beings, so we are thinking according to the grain of the facts concerned and not against them.
But when we think disease, we are thinking contrary to nature, therefore unnaturally. When we think health, we are thinking naturally; and when we think disease, we are thinking unnaturally. When you think health, you are aligning yourself with the natural, healing forces of the universe.
But when you think disease, you are alien to the natural healing forces of the universe. You are running counter to God’s intention; therefore you are resistant to redemption, the redemption of the total person.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 35, Monday)
Glance at Disease, Gaze at Health
John 9:18-25
I know it is not possible always to see health, for you may be constantly confronted with disease in yourself and others. But it depends on where your gaze is fixed. Glance at disease, but gaze at health. In the office of a doctor who was constantly dealing with people who had trouble with their hearts, real or imaginary, there was a model of a healthy heart right in front of the doctor as he talked to these ailing people. He constantly reminded himself of a healthy heart instead of a diseased one. It kept his vision clear.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 35, Tuesday)
Be Receptive to Health
Matthew 9:19-22
We come now to the last step in growth in bodily health.
Learn to accept the healing grace of God through receptive faith. God heals in many ways: through the physician and the surgeon; through climate; through mental suggestion; through deliverance from underlying fears, resentments, self-preoccupation, and guilts that can produce disease. Then God heals by the direct touch of the Spirit of God upon our bodies. This is not faith healing; it is divine healing through receptive faith. The faith does not heal, but faith opens the channels so God can heal.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 35, Saturday)
The Main Emphasis on Redemption from Sin
Psalm 73:23-26
The healing of disease is a part of the application of the gospel to life. Jesus came to banish evil—all evil. The evil of the mind is error; the evil of the emotions is suffering; the evil of the body is disease; the evil of the soul is sin. Disease is not the will of God; it is an enemy to be banished.
Mastery
(Week 31, Saturday)
His Religion Is Producing Tension
Romans 7:22-25
We have seen that there is a truth in karma, the law of sowing and reaping. There is also a truth in salvation and health through affirmation, through being positive. Negative attitudes bring negative results. If you affirm disease—the negative of health—you’ll probably have disease. Our lives, like the hands of a dyer, are colored by that with which we work. If the atmosphere of your mind is pessimistic, fearful, and negative; your body, mind, and spirit will be affected by it. You, as a person, will become negative.
Christian Maturity
(Week 13, Tuesday)
Bodily Health and Healing
Daniel 8:27; 10:8
[What about] the art of receiving bodily health and healing. Many are mature at the place of receiving spiritual life for their souls, but don’t know how to receive physical life for their bodies. They have compartmentalized the power of their faith, confining it to the spiritual, allowing it to function only faintly in the material. Our faith should function in the total person. Jesus said to a sick man: “Wilt thou be made whole?” (John 5:6 KJV). One would have expected him to say: “Wilt thou be healed of thy sickness?” But Jesus was interested in something more than healing disease. He wanted people to be “whole,” of which the healing of sickness was a part. The fact is that sickness cannot be cured unless the total person is cured. For if there is sickness in any portion of the person—in spirit, mind, emotion, or body—it will pass over to the other portions (of the body) and infect them.
Christian Maturity
(Week 47, Sunday)
Some Ideas We Must Give Up
Psalm 32:3-4
[What are the] wrong mental attitudes that we must change if we are to be healthy. . . . We must give up the notion that God will pass a miracle over us and heal us without our cooperation in giving up thinking and emotions that produce disease. The promising of healing to people, regardless of whether they give up wrong thinking and emotions, has left behind a lot of disillusionment and wreckage of faith. . . . We must give up the notion that healing can only be sudden, on-the spot healing. It does sometimes work that way, but more often it works gradually as we cooperate with God in eliminating the causes of the disease. . . . We must renounce the attitude that we can skip the healing of spirit and take the healing of the body. . . . The healing starts from the mind in letting go of wrong thinking, passes on to the spirit where wrong attitudes and emotions are changed with the change of the mind, and finally it gets to the body. . . . We must give up the idea of trying to deal with symptoms and go down to the disease. For instance, we are told that enough sleeping pills were sold last year [1956] in the United States to put every man, woman, and child to sleep for twenty-three days. And all those sleeping pills did not do a bit of permanent good. For underneath this sleeplessness, except in the case for the physically ill, was a conflict within that caused the inability to sleep.
If these are some examples of the wrong thinking we must let go, what are some right mental attitudes we must take on if we are to be well? Someone asked me, “What is the secret of your amazing health?” It has been amazing, for I’ve been speaking from two to five times a day for forty years, with no vacations except to work on a book, and yet I seem to be in perfect health. I replied, “Well, I suppose it is because I have learned the art of receptivity. I take grace not only for my spirit, but for my mind and body as well.”
Christian Maturity
(Week 47, Wednesday)
Crutches
Psalm 38:5, 8, 10
The next thing I would suggest in order to maintain health is right habits of rest. In a National Preaching Mission, a prominent member of the team, after two weeks, came down to breakfast and announced that he was “across the ropes” and would have to quit and go home. Why? He would stay up until midnight talking over problems with ministers and others. At ten o’clock, I would excuse myself and go to bed. For I’ve found that “he who talks and runs away may live to talk another day.” Right habits of rest and recuperation are necessary. Prolonged periods of rest and recuperation are not necessary if you have right thinking, right emotions, right habits that enable you to receive grace continuously. Those who know, say that if you give nature twenty-four hours of complete rest and relaxation it will balance the accounts, throwing off all fatigue toxins within that period. If, after twenty-four hours, you are still tired it is a tiredness of the mind and spirit, not of the body. Of course, if there is a structural disease the matter is different.
Christian Maturity
(Week 47, Friday)
By All the Stimulus of Christ
Here is a meaningful verse: “So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any incentive of love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” (Phil 2:1-2). . . .
This portion, “if there is any encouragement in Christ,” is translated by Moffatt, “By all the stimulus of Christ.” . . .
A woman confronted with many diseases said to her doctor, “With all the germs and diseases around us everywhere, I don’t see how we can ever be well.” The wise doctor replied, “Knowing the human body as I do, I wonder why anyone should ever be sick.” The resources for health are laid up in the body. In view of the stimulus of Christ, I refuse to accept my tiredness, my age, my retirement, my slow-down. In him I am well and whole. I am as strong as my strength to receive, as able as my ability to appropriate, as alive as my receptivity to his stimulus. Note [the verse] says all the stimulus of Christ; his “all” is sufficient for my all, and then some!
In Christ
(Week 35, Saturday)
Can the Flesh Be Redeemed?
Matthew 8:16-17
I have often imagined a convention of bodies talking about the people who inhabit them. A body stands up and says, “Oh my, the man who inhabits me doesn’t know how to live. He is full of fears, resentments, self-centeredness, and guilts. He ties me in knots, and then doses me with all sorts of medicines that have no relationship with what is wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with me. He upsets my functioning. I wish he knew how to live.”
Another body stands up and says, “It’s wonderful to live with the woman I live with. She is rhythmical, harmonious, and adjusted. We get along famously together, and I do prodigious things for her. It’s a joy to do it.”
Suppose your body would stand up and speak about you; would you enjoy hearing what was said? The doctors tell us that at least 75 percent of all diseases are homegrown ills, and patients will never be well unless they change their attitudes toward life. Their life climate is wrong for health.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 42, Sunday)