Healthy

 A few years back, my little brother talked me into getting a physical. It took him a while, and he had to employ my wife as his co-conspirator until I finally relented and went in. It’s irksome hearing two people nag at you in stereo about how you’re getting to a certain age, and it would be good to know if something was amiss. I understood they were coming from a good place. I understood it was out of love, so I didn’t push back too hard; I just ignored them for a season.

It’s not as though their concern was unfounded. I’m a bit on the husky side; my mom died of a heart attack in her mid-forties, my grandmother on my mom’s side was diabetic, and my dad thinks he has diabetes, so you know, no one mistakes our family for being descendants of Adonis.

Even so, I’ve always been one of those rub some dirt on it and drink more water sort of people, so the idea of voluntarily surrendering my own blood was not something I looked forward to. I’d been sickly as a child and played at being a human pincushion for the better part of seven years, so I have a particular aversion to anything pointy that looks like a needle attached to something that looks like a syringe.

I finally went in because getting stabbed at by a nurse with pink hair and shaky hands was a better prospect than the nagging. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but getting stuck again wasn’t pleasant either. Once my test results came in, my doctor said something that both vindicated me and made me chuckle heartily: “You’re healthier than you look to be!”

Sure, there was the standard you could stand to lose a couple of pounds and watch your sugar intake, but if I was looking to go to astronaut school besides the girth and flat feet, I was good to go.

Most of us are self-aware enough to know when something’s off. We are self-aware enough to know when something isn’t right or isn’t as it should be. This is valid for our physical man as well as our spiritual man. That we tend to ignore the telltale signs, both spiritually and physically, is also a general truth that is so common it is undeniable.

If you are feeling physically unwell, the first thing one does is try to figure out what’s causing it. If you’re feeling queasy, you think back to what you ate. If you’re coming down with a fever, you try to remember who you were around and if they sneezed spittle in your face. More often than not, if you can figure out why you’re feeling like you went twelve rounds with a kickboxer, you’ll be able to remedy the situation by eliminating what made you sick from your life.

Although there are a multitude of reasons why we might feel physically unwell, when it comes to spiritual malaise, there is only one reason: disobedience! You’re welcome. If you are spiritually stunted, dry, cold, unwell, indifferent, or lethargic, it is always due to the disobedience of God and His word on your part.

That sounds a bit harsh there, butterball. So does when a doctor tells a patient that they’ve got six months to live, but it’s just the reality of the situation. The doctor isn’t trying to be mean, condescending, unfeeling, or cruel. He has to give you the bad news because it’s his duty. The same goes for individuals who still hold to the truth of Scripture and deliver it unabashedly.

Spiritual illness is the direct result of disobedience. When we do not heed the Word of God, when we ignore the counsel of God, our spiritual man inevitably suffers. The remedy is well known but requires humility, brokenness, and repentance on our part. Men can choose to return to obedience, but more often than we would like, the flesh wins the tug of war, and repentance is not forthcoming.

You can have a healthy body but a withered spiritual man. Some try to put on a brave face, insisting they are on top of the world, but no matter how much they gain, amass, and squirrel away, they feel empty and hopeless because their spiritual man is on life support, barely breathing, ready to expire.

There are also those who, by all accounts, should be pitied by the world yet have joy and peace because their spiritual man is strong and vibrant, and their hope is tethered in something other than the things of this world.

The bulk of James’s writing concerns the spiritual man, his well-being, maturing, and nourishment. He understood, as did his contemporaries, that if the spiritual man is suffering, you can have the world itself, and it would still profit nothing. We’ve seen it play out in our modern era time and again, yet somehow fail to learn the lesson. We tell ourselves we’ll beat the odds. We’ll be happy if we nab that brass ring, buy that McMansion, or get that dream car. It’ll all be worth it once we get what we want, and once we get it, the shine wears off faster than Joel Osteen at a sound doctrine conference.

True peace comes from God. True joy is found in Him. Everything else is an illusion, a forgery, and a cheap one at that. When was it that the church strayed from this truth? When did we shift our focus from the things above to the things of this earth? Inquiring minds want to know.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.