November 07, 2013
Contamination
On a recent hospital
visit Bill took a step back when he was told he couldn’t enter the room unless
he put on a gown, mask and gloves. Our friend Judy, a fellow believer, had a
staph infection that was resistant to antibiotics. Speaking loudly from across
the room she laughed, “It’s for your protection, not mine.” Even though she is
not yet cured, the antibiotics finally started working and she is no longer
contagious. I find it interesting that medical community understands infectious
disease and they respond quickly with treatment and precautions. However, we in
the church don’t even want to acknowledge the existence of spiritual diseases,
much less try to protect ourselves and others.
Paul reminds us, “Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us
purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting
holiness out of reverence for God.” (2 Cor 7:1 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----I got up this morning thinking about the word “relevant”. It was yesterday’s word consuming my mind, and it‘s come back for seconds. I find your blog exactly about that word injecting God’s prescribed anti-biotic into our diseased souls. It isn’t that diseases are immune to His prescriptions. Nothing is. It is that prescriptions are not created by our own hands. We get them at drugstores. To make us go to the drugstores, something has got to have become relevant.
-----As full of debilitating symptoms as people are from spiritual diseases, you would think they would want cures. But you are so right, they won’t even acknowledge spiritual disease. So why would they even seek a spiritual prescription?
-----I think it is so hard for consciousness to separate the physical world from the inner world. We all run around with our eyes always open, fortunately. We spend a very tiny portion of our conscious time with our eyes closed, unless we are asleep. Hearing is similar. But outside of earplugs, we never close our ears. We might counter-think about what we are hearing and call that “closing our ears.” But we still hear. The physical world’s impressions upon our consciousness overshadow the relevancy of intangible impressions. Nothing is more intangible than the spiritual.
-----That doesn’t mean nothing unseen is relevant. Your thoughts and feelings and perceptions are more relevant than the physical things around you. That’s why we misplace, break, steal, and in general goof up so many things. Yet relevant blame remains so haltered to the cause-and-effect facts of the physical world, that our concepts of sickness and disease naturally relate to bugs and viruses and fungi and other gross things instead of what makes us such goof ups. Sure, we all acknowledge mental and emotional illness, but not about ourselves!
-----I was emotionally ill at one time. Very, very ill. Fortunately, I was not as much mentally ill. And I was more spiritually healthy than ill. So I asked God to use whatever road-signs He needed to direct me along logical pathways mapped by His Word to shop for conceptual anti-biotics. The very first stop He led me to were the truths that nobody is completely mentally or emotionally healthy until Jesus receives them Home. Just as our bodies continuously house e coli, pneumonia, tuberculosis, cancer cells, and probably a host of other microscopic bogeymen, our minds and emotions host ideas and feelings and even processes that are also mental, emotional bogeymen distorting the expressions of even our cured-by-Jesus spirits unto some amount of spiritual illness.
-----I believe that our spirits are perfected at our acceptance of Jesus. We are spiritually healthy at that level. But the only means of expression into this world our spirits have is through our minds and emotions into our speech and actions. Perfect spirits can not make perfect expressions through ill minds, emotions, and bodies. Fortunately, most of the time our illness is practically irrelevant to the expressions we must make. But there are times when passions multiply relevancy exponentially. And, Oh My, when they do! The contagious bogeymen that spew forth!
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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