From the book Quiet Talks About The Healing Christ
by S.D. Gordon, first published in 1924.
You can save this page as a text file from your browser (File / Save As) and read it off-line. It is about 32K. | |
Quiet Talks about the Healing Christ 6. The Human Side Of Healing And Health
It is Christ's will that we be pure in heart and motive and life, truly human in character up to the level of His humanness, fired by a noble passion, in the grip of a worthy purpose, in warm touch with Himself and with our fellows, and strong and vigorous in all our bodily functions.
Health? or Healing
Health is more than healing. There's more of it. It calls for more of the Creator's power. It means more to a man. And it will be the means of greater spiritual blessing if things are as they were meant to be.
The task of keeping men in health, even as much health as they have, is immeasurably greater than healing all who need healing, even if they would all come for healing.
Christ is greatest in the unrecognized power He is expending on men all the time. And all this power has the Calvary mark upon it. It is all red-tinged.
Health means rhythm, the smooth working of all parts together. Disease is a break in the rhythm. Rhythm is ease. A break in the rhythm means absence of ease, dis-ease, of some sort.
| |
| | |
When there's full rhythm within your body and with your fellows, and with Christ, and with nature, there's fulness of life flowing in and flooding out.
But, but, there's a break, a bad break in the rhythm of life, within and without and above. Within we call it disease, without friction and strife, strikes and war. Above we call it sin.
But, in spite of the break, Christ continues His touch of creative power on all life, giving health and strength. This becomes less as we hinder.
There is full life only as we let Him do and give all He wants to. There's the added touch, giving healing, where the way is open to Him for that.
The first is the natural thing, the second is supernatural in addition to the natural. The first is for all, the second is for those needing it and who will come where He can give it.
There's one thing better than being healed. And this is being kept in health. Then healing isn't needed. It's the higher level, higher in intelligence and maturity of character.
It is higher in obedience, and in the taking from Christ's hand, day by day, all we need. And it costs Christ more in the continual giving out of power.
Christ's creative power through natural channels is commonplace, blessedly commonplace. It is everywhere. It is in every one, without exception.
His supernatural power is exceptional. Where His natural power is allowed freest hand there is less need of the supernatural.
But that break of sin is so sore, and so much in evidence everywhere, that there is a constant need of the supernatural.
And there would be far more of the super natural if the way were open. For Christ will do anything and everything to overcome the break of sin. He came that we might have life, and have it in uncommon measure.
There is the divine side of health and healing, and there is the human side. The two intermingle so continually that it's difficult to talk about the one without touching on the other.
But, just now, we want to talk a little about the human side. There's so much need of simple, clear teaching.
Living in that touch with Christ's natural laws of life, and in the direct touch with Himself, where health is the common thing and healing is not needed, this, this, is the higher, the highest level of living.
It is striking to find two distinct trails in the Old Testament, a healing trail and a health trail. The two run side by side.
And it is of intense interest to find the health trail greater in the space it takes up, and in the emphasis laid upon it.
It is the more interesting because this little Hebrew nation becomes a model of life in the ideals taught and insisted upon. We traced partially, in an earlier Talk, the healing trail in the Old Testament. It was a trail of teaching and of healing.
There is the plain teaching that God would heal. And it is used as a plea to pull them up to the higher level. And there is the string of incidents where men were actually healed in a positive supernatural way.
The Jew Health Trail
Now, side by side with that, goes this other trail, longer, broader, more marked. It is a teaching about health. There is a remarkable course in personal hygiene here. Instruction is given repeatedly, and obedience is insisted upon.
Some of these items may seem very homely and commonplace. But it is careful attention and obedience to detail that makes perfection in any thing.
Nothing is too common or commonplace if its practice means physical vigour. And physical vigour affects mental alertness and spiritual attainment.
There is particular stress laid upon food. Pains are taken to specify the things they must not eat (Leviticus 11:1-23). And Moses repeats this in much detail (Deuteronomy 14:3-21).... This would cultivate a thoughtfulness about food.
Without any question there is a hygienic principle underlying all these instructions and restrictions. They were an agricultural people, with small exporting facilities, and so the fruits of trees and soil would naturally bulk big in their daily food.
Then the item of physical exercise had a big place. There was plenty of work to be done, in connection with cultivation of fields, orchards, vineyards, and common gardening.
It was a common custom that every Hebrew had some fixed occupation. And every one shared in the daily tasks indoors and out.
The ideal communities that have sprung up here and there, where all share in all tasks, have their truest highest ideal actually practised among these pastoral agricultural Hebrews.
And one is keen to note the other side of this. There was particular attention given to rest, relaxation. There is a rare poise between work and rest aimed at here.
There are four distinct items in the rest or relaxation program, which Moses was careful to mark out for them, at God's direction.
One day in seven was to be kept, sacred from toil, sacred to rest of body. The emphasis upon this is marked and continuous.
Three times a year there were special times of relaxation from their usual occupation, the Passover, the Feast of the First-fruits, and the Harvest-home Festival. Each was for seven days.
The men were to go up to Jerusalem to these feasts. Including travel it must have meant a ten-days' relaxation for most of them, with an absorbing objective.
Every seven years the land must lie fallow. Modern farmers might well note this. The land enriched itself. The land rested, and of course the people rested.
There would be much to attend to, but there was a break in the work schedule. It meant the rest and relaxation of a change.
Every fiftieth year was the time of special jubilation, following the plan of the seventh year. The average man would be likely to go through, at least, two of these jubilee years.
Then, of course, in common with all men, every day had its night. There was the daily alternation of rest and work. And nature itself provides for more sleep in winter and less in summer. A simple pastoral folk follows nature more closely.
So, all told, there were six items in the common Hebrew rest or relaxation program, a day of sleep for every day's work, and a longer time of nightly sleep for half the year.
Then there was one day in seven, three special times each year, one year in seven, and an extra year in every fifty years.
Rather a remarkable program that. Yet the fact of its being provided by Moses, at God's direction, is immensely suggestive.
Physical exercise, and time for the mind to store up and meditate, time for social recreation and enjoyment, time for worship, all this becomes of greatest interest from the health point of view.
And particular directions were given about the ablutions, the frequent all-over bathing by the priests. And the priests were the practical rulers of the people.
The priesthood was the fixed system of national administration through the centuries. They were the leaders. And what the leaders do the people do. Like priest, like people.
There were special directions for special bathing in connection with their sanitary and quarantine codes. They were a bathing people. Cleanliness of person was a fixed habit.
There were careful community sanitation regulations covering the individual tents and the whole encampment in the Wilderness, and after ward when settled in Canaan.
The quarantine regulations were explicit and rigid, inspection by experts, isolation, and segregation. The strictest watch was constantly kept on the people's health, on all suspicious cases, and on the diseased. Quarantine is worthless unless rigid, and rigidly enforced. Their ideals have never been improved upon.
And, of course, their inflexible law of circumcision was rooted down in the physical. Apart from other significance it was a hygienic regulation. It belonged in their scheme of cleanliness and provision against infection.
Now, note keenly, that the Hebrews were essentially an out-of-doors people. They lived in God's open air.
There were the four hundred years in Egypt. Egypt was an open-air country characteristically, and is to this day. The absence of rain, the dryness of the air, and its rare tonic qualities, were marked features, and are. The open air habit had a good start in Egypt.
The forty years in the Wilderness sands simply meant forty years in the open air. Quite likely most of them slept out in the open.
Moses himself was habituated to this open air life through his sheep-tending years in Midian, as well as his earlier Egypt years, and later Wilderness years.
And there's one more item worth mentioning in this health memorandum. Their land laws, their scheme of inheritance, the reversion of land to the original owner every fifty years which entered into all sales and transfers, these, of course, would tend to contentment of mind regarding the future. Fear of the future, mostly groundless, makes a shorter road to the graveyard.
Here are eight items in their national health program to which they were habituated through the centuries. It included food, work or exercise, rest and relaxation and play, personal cleanliness, community sanitary measures, quarantine against disease, open-air living, and a measure of contentment about the future, the rainy day.
This is the health trail that runs all through these Old Testament pages, and clearly ran all through the physical life of this remarkable race of people.
Without doubt it plays a large part in attempting to explain the astonishing physical vigour of the Jews even to-day.
Inheritance persists. They have suffered persecutions, hardships, privations, that would have killed off any ordinary people. Plainly they are not ordinary people. Their health program certainly was not ordinary. It was rather extraordinary. What nation to-day can come near it?
This is the health trail running side by side with that blessed healing trail. It persists through these old pages. It puts a remarkable emphasis on the human side of health and healing.
It was planned by God. It surely becomes a personal model for the thoughtful man to-day, and especially the thoughtful Christian man.
The Eden Health Model
Now, there's another model of life in these older pages. The Hebrew nation, as planned by God, gives one model. Here's another. It's yet earlier. It comes in before the break of sin had set things so askew.
It's the model of the true full human, the human as yet unhurt by sin. It's the Adam-and-Eve-in-Eden model.
It is really God's ideal of human life. And it is put here at the very first where anyone can quickly see it.
Of course, I am a little old-fashioned about man's start on this earth. This other teaching has so befogged all the air that it's quite refreshing to turn back to God's own picture. I am rather fond of some old-fashioned things, water, open air, fresh fruit, natural wheat, the Bible, and the like.
Adam was made the true full normal human, by direct act of God. He stood at the highest point of mature manhood, physically, mentally, and in spirit understanding.
He knew civilization at its highest, in miniature. For civilization does not consist in the culture which the Greeks had, nor the highly organized life of the Roman, nor the organized complexity of modern times.
Civilization is a moral thing. Civilization means harmonious life in contact with others. And the essential thing there is moral ideals and moral conduct. So far as any civilization lacks these it is less than real civilization.
Look at God's picture, His model in Eden. It is simple, delightfully simple, but never crude, and certainly not savage.
Here is a human, fresh from the hand of God. He is on terms of intimacy with God. They talk and walk and are busily occupied with their work together.
This man has an intimate congenial human friend at his side sharing all his life. He has a daily occupation, caring for a garden.
He has before him a great inspiring task, subduing the whole earth. There's the immediate and the distant, the near and the far, something for hands and something for mind.
He lived in the open air, sleeping as well as working and resting there. The second day he lived was marked as a rest day.
He had a daily task, work and exercise combined. He had a fruit diet. His food was all sun-cooked. He had pure water to drink. There was running water to bathe in.
Is it not a winsome picture? One is more than ever insistent on getting away from the modern phrase "the ascent of man," and toward the older phrase "the descent of man."
Certainly it would be a going up to go back to that old Eden standard of civilization and culture and life.
And there is a plain intimation, too, that this first man's bodily vigour hinged on his keeping in touch with his friendly Companion, God.
Do you remember that day they are standing under that tree of opportunity? Through choosing not to eat of it as God wished him not to do, choosing to choose God's choice, Adam would be stepping into a still closer intimacy with God. The highest thing can come only through choice.
There is a gentle but very plain word of warning about that tree. He could misuse the opportunity it gave him. He could break friendship with God if he chose.
And this is the word of warning, "For in the day that thou eatest thereof, dying, thou shalt die" (Genesis 2:17, paraphrase). The dying would come automatically through the break.
There would be a beginning, a continued process, and a final result. The moment he ate was the beginning. The process went on for years. The actual bodily death didn't come till long years after.
Now, that intimation naturally includes the reverse, i.e., if thou keep in touch with me, by thine own voluntary choice, living, thou shalt live.
There would be the same movement in the opposite direction, a beginning, a process, a final result. Choosing God's way would bring him yet closer to God.
That would be the beginning of a new life by his own choice. And that would grow from less to more until a fulness of life would come, such as one simply can't take in.
Touch with God is the basis of full life, bodily, mental, of the spirit. The other word for touch is obedience.
Obedience is a music word. It means the rhythm of God's will and a man's will. No sweeter music was ever made on earth, or heard in heaven.
All this, you notice, has to do simply with the human side of health. This early model gives God 's own thought of the true full natural human man, as He planned him.
This Eden idea says, in effect, that a man should have a noble passion, a human friend, a daily task, and an outreaching purpose that calls for all there is in him.
His immediate bodily needs are open air, simple food, the exercise of a daily task, a time of rest, and running water near by.
This first man's passion was for his Friend, to please Him. To carry out His plan. By his side was his complemental self, his one nearest human friend with whom all his life was shared.
There was a garden of trees and flowers and all growing things to care for, and the cultivation of the whole earth entrusted to him to think about and plan for.
The Christian and the True Human
Now, will you notice keenly that the Christian life means simply the true human life? Sin made the break. Christ mends the break. He renews and restores man. The natural thing native to a man's being is this of living the true, full, Christian life.
Anything that isn't really Christian isn't human. It's lower down. It's less, or a bad more, or a distortion. Sin, selfishness, are lower down than the human level. They hurt the true human. They hurt our health and strength.
The true Christian life is the real key to health, and to healing where healing is needed. The emphasis, of course, is on that word "true."
We are so used to the cheapened, thinned-out meanings, being "saved" from hell and into heaven, church membership, with some attendance, some giving of money and maybe service, more or less, as happens to suit one's ideas; this seems the sum total ofttimes.
It 's a sort of insurance policy. The chief thing is keeping up the premiums. It's a sort of immunity bath, a quarantine measure. Sometimes it is the ticket of admission into certain social circles. So much Christianity has no ethical quality to it. It never hurts anybody's conscience, nor changes his habits.
Of course, in the simple, true meaning the Christian life is a tender passion burning deep, and then deeper. It's a purpose gripping all one's powers.
It means on the inner side spirit fellowship with the Man that died, on the outer side a warm upright human touch with one's fellows.
It means the Jesus passion in control. It's very simple. Some of the simplest unlettered homeliest folks, as well as some of the most scholarly and cultured, quite understand all this. They live it.
Christ enriches everything He touches. The Devil vulgarizes everything he can lay his hands on. Christ makes the commonest thing hallowed. The Devil makes the purest, the hallowed things, vulgarly common and cheap.
The Devil puts the devilish touch into man's life, sometimes foul, sometimes cultured, always devilish. Christ restores the hurt human up to the true human level. Calvary neutralizes the Devil's power, and restores and enriches the Eden ideal. The new Eden has the passion of sacrificial love in it.
Now, it is of the simple real Christian life that I am thinking when I say this: the Christian life is the key to health and to healing. This is the human side of both.
One's Mental Attitude
There are two things that will grow up in such a simple, true, Christian life. They are simple things, but they lie at the very foundation.
They are, a right mental attitude, and an intelligent obedience to the laws of health. And these are the two things to be emphasized in this Quiet Talk.
Let us talk first about that right mental attitude. I do not mean that you are to try to have a right mental attitude, simply. That becomes incidental. The emphasis is on something else. That attitude comes naturally out of that something else.
I mean this: you think about Christ. He died for you. He has won the love of your heart. You trust Him.
You believe Him. You accept what He says in the Book. You follow where He plainly leads. All this is what faith is. It is thinking about Him.
You get filled up with Him, who He is, how He loved and loves, what He did, His plans for you, and His promises to you.
You are full of this, that He is living to-day. He is all absorbed with things down here. He's intensely interested in you, with personal solicitude for your personal need, and with a plan for your life.
This is what faith means; not thinking about your faith, thinking about Him. It isn't looking in; it's looking up -- to Him.
Now, once that gets fixed in some measure, as a habit, a growing habit, it will affect your mental attitude.
Your plans and problems, your difficulties and perplexities, your personal habits and temptation, all will instinctively be affected by this mental attitude.
Christ will loom up in your mind practically as the biggest thing in all your life. You will get into the habit of connecting everything with Him. And that mental attitude will vitally and radically affect your body.
The worst enemy we all have (outside of the Devil himself) is fear. I mean the fear that is a dread of something.
There are three kinds of fear. The fear of reverence grows out of love, and is good. The fear of caution grows out of the presence or possibility of danger, and is only good.
The fear that is afraid of something or some one, a dread, a slavish fear, is bad, only bad, and is a positive injury to one's body.
It may grow out of ignorance. Often it is a result of overwrought nerves. It exerts an in calculable influence on one 's bodily condition. It controls the imagination, and the imagination controls the body.
All diseases and bodily ailments of whatever sort fall into three groups. Those that are imaginary; they have no existence at all except in imagination.
Then there are those ailments which are the result of the imagination's influence on the body. And then there are ailments originating otherwise.
It will seem astonishing if I say that a very large proportion of all bodily ailments is above the ears, or have their origin there, that is, in the imagination. And the smaller proportion is below the ears.
This seems astonishing. It may be honestly questioned by those not familiar with the subject. But increased observation only tends to confirm the truth of the statement.
Job says, "I feared a fear and it came upon me" (Job 3:25 -- free reading). His sense of dread acted so on his imagination that it actually produced in his body the thing he feared.
The Power of Fear
Only a little thinking will remind any one that fear, the slavish fear that dreads, is inbred in most people.
From the cradle up, the whip of fear is the commonest thing known. This fear is instilled, unconsciously, unintentionally, ignorantly, habitually, from earliest years on through school life and long after.
It is inbred further by the very evil abnormal atmosphere of our surroundings. It becomes a habit of mind. And the actual bodily injury done is quite beyond calculation.
An illustration that has become notable of this sort of thing is the story of the man condemned to death for murder. A group of physicians proposed an experiment as a matter of scientific research. The civil authorities concerned agreed.
They proposed to the condemned man that he submit to a serious surgical operation. And if he survived his sentence of death would be remitted and he allowed to go free. He agreed.
He was stretched on the operating table, face down. A thin bit of cold steel was slowly drawn across his back as though a knife cutting.
At the same time it was arranged that water would drip from his back, drop by drop, steadily down, so it could easily be heard.
The physicians talked together in his hearing, giving the impression that he was bleeding from a wound, and would certainly bleed to death.
The man actually expired. Yet his body had not been touched except as described. I am not defending the deceit used.
It is a striking illustration of the slavery of the body to the imagination. He imagined he was surely bleeding to death. And the imagination actually brought death. He feared a fear and it came upon him....
It is a commonplace with the medical fraternity that the mental attitude affects, and affects most seriously, bodily conditions.
It has been demonstrated that anger, fear, and the like, not only check secretions and have a paralyzing effect internally, but actually cause the secretion of poisonous substances within the body.
  
This page Copyright © 1999 Peter Wade. The Bible text in this publication, except where otherwise indicated, is from the King James Version. This article appears on the site: http://www.peterwade.com/
Would you like your own copy of books by Peter Wade and other authors? Go to our Catalog. | |
|
