Wellness Series
Health is relating to troublesome
physical symptoms in ways that bring improvement in condition as well as
increased knowledge about yourself1.
Then the Lord said to Satan,
Have you considered My
servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright
man, one who fears God and shuns evil? And still he holds fast to his integrity . . . . (Job 2:3).
So Satan answered the Lord,
Skin for skin! Yes, all
that a man has he will give for his life.
But stretch out Your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he
will surely curse You to Your face! (Job 2:4).
Do you know yourself? I mean on a real
level. When I explore this question with
young and old, the responses are usually describing personality traits: “I am .
. . intelligent; independent; the quiet-type,” etc. But do you ever stop to think about who the
real you is?
The real you is that person who comes
out in times of crisis, pain, or sickness, especially when your bone
and flesh are touched with affliction; and often displays itself in
ways so ugly we force to keep the sight of that “other me” from public
appearance. We don’t want anyone to see
that “person” in us. Well, guess what?
God sees him or her; and the people who live in the house with you probably see
more of “that person” than they care to.
Integrity is the
quality of being honest and having strong moral principles (a sense of right
and wrong and choosing to do right no matter what it might cost you). Integrity
is also defined as the state, or condition, of being whole and undivided (not
double-minded or broken).
Troublesome physical symptoms bring
pain and frustration to our lives. How
we overcome that pain and fear of loss of control demonstrates just how whole
(well), how healthy, we are. “Can
symptoms of chronic sickness be improved with “happy” thoughts?” “I should think positively; and it all will
go away?” There have been testimonies which confirm the answer to these
questions with a great big resounding: “Yes!”
What results from a life of living in
“happy” thoughts was discussed in the previous blog (#61) talking about enjoying
your body. In today’s conversation, we are
looking at ourselves and how we react in times when parts of our bodies want to
swell, overheat, get hypo or hyper, ache, atrophy, liquefy, cough, stutter, or
shake.
In the Bible, Job was a very wealthy
man, yet used his wealth to serve the Lord.
Satan hates children of God who walk with integrity. Integrity is a quality of being; it is not a
mere description of one’s personality. Integrity encapsulates (sums up) our
emotions—every feeling and every thought, spoken and unspoken—and moves them in
the direction of staying right with God, through good times and bad times,
unwavering, neither doubting nor denying the choice you made to do the right
thing.
Integrity can cost you to lose family,
friends, business deals, property. Read
the story of Job. And his wife said to him as he was sitting in ashes scraping
at boils on his skin from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head , “Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse
God and die!” (Job 2:9). And, after rebuking her, Job did not sin (curse God) with his lips (Job 2:10).
Life is a flow of the spiritual mixed
with the emotional (soulful) and physical.
We have previously discussed our triune nature and concluded that when
one part of our being is affected, it affects the others. Not enjoying your body physically can cause
it to sicken. The body feels that you
are not giving it enough attention perhaps due to mental worrying about the
situations currently going on in your life.
That stress on the mind causes various parts of the body to break down.
If bodily symptoms are genetic, you
didn’t bring it on yourself, but the intensity of those symptoms can fluctuate
based on how you address them or not.
And, spiritually, if you open up your physical body to debauchery by
looking at sinful pictures or by going to sinful spots, or by listening to
sinful words in poetry, jokes or songs, you allow spiritual evil to get inside
your physical temple; and that also causes symptoms of sickness to appear.
It is when these troublesome physical
symptoms appear that we must relate to them with the WORD OF GOD, the King of
Integrity. We’ve got to step outside our
“panic zone” and fight those symptoms off with the balm of Gilead, God’s
promises and blessings for keeping right with Him through the storms of life,
until He rains showers of blessing upon our lives.
Watching loved ones relate to symptoms
of hypertension, diabetes, and various other physical afflictions and dealing
with some myself, it is easy to curse God by blaming Him for doing this and for
letting them die. But I have come to
realize that it is not God who plans evil against our flesh; He’s the
Creator of it.
No, Satan also buffets and tempts us
to break, to lose, or to throw away our integrity. But pain is not always from
Satan. It can also be from the choices we make that go against what is right.
It could also be from how we think: that we have lost faith or don’t have
faith, or belief, that things can get better.
Doubt, or broken-heartedness, also causes bodily breakdown.
Why did God allow Satan to make Job to
go through such terrible affliction? He
knew Job would hold fast to his integrity—hold fast to God—no matter what.
You may be at a point in your life
where you want to give up on God. DO NOT GIVE UP! He’s right there in the midst of your pain. Trials will come in life. Relate, respond, reply to them with
unshakable belief in God’s Word, God’s promises: “By the stripes of Jesus Christ, I am
healed. I am more than a conqueror
through Jesus Christ. No weapon
fashioned against me shall prosper, because the Lord fights for me and destroys
all my enemies for I am His child; and I cling to my Father. So you, devil, you may afflict my body, but
you can’t touch my soul.”
Then snap out of self-pity, get real
honest with yourself, and start eating right, exercising right, resting right,
taking the right medications at the right time; and stop ingesting, injecting,
or inhaling all that is wrong. You will
surely experience improvement; and you will surely describe yourself your real
self as a person of integrity.
And the Lord restored
Job’s losses . . . . Indeed the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before (Job 42:10);
because Job held on to his integrity.
It’s the only thing we got when everything is taken away. It is the life-force of our soul.
© 2020 by Patience
Osei-Anyamesem. All rights reserved.
Published by The Liight In Me Enterprise. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any
other—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in
printed reviews or other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Unless otherwise
stated, all scripture quotations are from The New King James Version. Copyright
© 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
Paintings retrieved
from Black Art search engine.
1. From Travis, J. (1977). The Wellness Workbook. Mill Valley, CA,
USA: Wellness Resource Center.
Take My Hand Inspirations
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