Public Service Announcement #1
I have a friend (she doesn’t read my blog) who has a lot of health problems. She goes to doctor after doctor and gets prescribed drug after drug. The drugs cause more problems than they solve, yet she continues to feed them to herself. I suppose she does this because the doctors told her to take them, although the drugs haven’t solved her issues yet (in fact, she continuously gets new and worse problems). She goes through experimental surgeries and spends most of her time trying to find new ways to be able to function in her daily life. There was a time she asked me for advice because we shared some symptoms. I told her she needs to change her diet. She refused. She loves her chemical-filled foods and her disease-causing artificial sweeteners way too much to give them up. She wouldn’t even give it a try – she said that it was too hard and after all, the doctors had told her she didn’t have any problems caused by food (allergies, celiac, etc.). She’d rather listen to the doctors who aren’t actually helping her – they are helping themselves buy a bigger house, and they are helping the pharmaceutical companies who are the ones funding the medical research that the doctors are reading. Their drugs are helping her with some of her symptoms, but are causing new ones, so she has to go back for more drugs and/or surgeries. It’s a vicious cycle she just can’t seem to get herself out of. It’s sad.
A lot of Christians are just like her. They have a lot of problems. They go to psychiatrists, they read self-help books (sometimes even by ‘Christian’ authors), they try this or that or the other. They are so focused on getting rid of the symptoms they don’t like. The Bible suggests that they change their diet, though, and they refuse to listen. They want to fix the obvious problems. They don’t want to make any lifestyle changes. They’re even willing to try experimental surgeries (divorce, [prescribed] psychiatric drugs, etc.), but give their entire life to God? No can do. That would mean giving up some of the things they like. They just try to treat the symptoms, and fix one problem at a time in their own (useless) power, while continuing to indulge in things that taste good, but are essentially harming them. Being a Christian means making changes though. It means giving God all of your life – not just the problem areas that you don’t want to deal with. It’s a constant, daily discipline of surrending all to Jesus. That’s when real healing comes… and trust me, it tastes SO much sweeter and richer and fulfilling than any self-help method known to man.
“And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)
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