God’s Medicine Bottle

It’s good to be with you again. Yesterday I shared with you how I became sick with a skin condition and had to spend a year in various military hospitals in Egypt. As I lay there week after week and month after month, I went through tremendous inner battles in my mind against doubt and depression. But finally, the Holy Spirit directed me to the answer in God’s Word, Romans 10:17:

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

The words that became so real and vivid to me were “faith cometh.” If I did not have faith, I could acquire it, there was a way to get it. “Faith comes.” How does faith come? “By hearing.” Hearing what? God’s Word. So, if I needed faith, I could acquire it if I would carefully listen to what God was saying to me through His Word, the Bible.

I decided to do that to the best of my ability. I had a particular way that occurred to me. I armed myself with a blue pencil. I decided to read through the entire Bible, from beginning to end, and underline in blue every passage that related to four related themes: healing, health, physical strength, and long life. It took me about three or four months to do that and at the end, when I’d finished and looked back, I had a blue Bible!

I saw that healing was one of the main themes of the Bible. Healing is one of the main provisions of God for His people. My image of God changed. I had always pictured God as a kind of old gentleman who didn’t like to be troubled, who was remote and unapproachable. And although my image had begun to change after I came to know the Lord Jesus, there was a residue of that attitude in me. But now I began to see God as a loving Father, one who cares for His children, one who makes every possible provision for His children, one who always wants the best and is able to provide it.

So I’m going to share with you today the second part of this story. I’m going to share with you how, after faith had come, faith in turn led me to healing.

As I continued studying the Bible and seeking the truth about healing, I had one particular mental problem which was countless due to my background in philosophy. It was hard for me to accept statements in their plain, straightforward meaning. When I look back and remember that we spent one term discussing whether the desk the philosophy professor was speaking from was really there, I can see how in a certain sense, philosophy had trained me to doubt even the simplest things. And this was a kind of mental problem that still troubled me, even while I was reading the Bible and underlining in blue. It seemed to me that there were some things that were so simple they couldn’t mean what they said, especially about physical healing. I still had a sort of residue of what I would call a “religious view” that the body isn’t really very important. God doesn’t care much about the body. God cares about the soul that’s going to go to heaven and be with God, but the body is corruptible, anyhow, and one day it’s going to die. And God isn’t really too concerned, in the meanwhile, whether our body is well or sick or how it gets along.

Now there were many, many statements in the Bible that contradicted that, but I found it hard to take them at their face value. For instance, in Psalm 103, David says:

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases...”

That was so clear, but my philosophic mind said, “Ah, but that’s only diseases of the soul. That doesn’t mean physical diseases, that means mental and emotional diseases.” Subsequently, I have studied the Bible in the original language and I have come to see that is a completely impossible way of representing the meaning of the Hebrew word “soul,” but at that time it was a real problem for me. I said, “Sure, God heals but He’s really interested in spiritual healing. He’s not much interested in our physical bodies.”

But then one day the Holy Spirit directed me to a passage in Proverbs 4:20–22, and this is the passage that got me out of hospital. And I want to emphasize the importance of being directed by the Holy Spirit. He’s the one who directs us to that particular portion of the Word which represents what we need to give us the faith that we need at any given moment. This is the passage in Proverbs 4:20–22. Remember that reference, Proverbs 4:20–22. If you don’t have a Bible with you, remember it and look it up when you get an opportunity. This is what God says:

“My son [He’s talking to His children, to those who know Him personally] My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart. For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh.”

And when I got to those last words, “health to all their flesh,” I said to myself, “That settles it. Not even a philosopher can make “flesh” mean “spirit.” Flesh is flesh, it is my physical body, and God says He’s provided health for all my physical body.”

And then my philosophy helped me because I said to myself, “Logically, if I can have health in all my physical body, there can be no room for sickness anywhere. Sickness and health are opposites. Where there is sickness, there isn’t health. Where there is health, there isn’t sickness.”

And then I looked in the margin of the Bible I was using and the alternative reading there for “health” was “medicine.” So I saw that God had provided “medicine,” which He guaranteed would give me health in my whole physical body. And so I determined to take God’s Word as my medicine. I saw that God said it was His words and His sayings that would be health of medicine to all my flesh.

Now I was a hospital attendant and, of course, one of my jobs had been giving people medicine. And again, I decided to be simple, I decided to be down-to-earth. I said to myself, “How do people take medicine?” The answer used to be in those days, three times daily, after meals. So I said, “That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take God’s Word as my medicine three times daily, after meals.”

So I decided to take God’s Word as my medicine but, as I did that, God spoke very clearly to my mind. He said this. He said, “When the doctor gives you medicine, the directions for taking it are on the bottle.” He said, “If you want Me to be your doctor, this is My medicine bottle and the directions for taking it are on the bottle. You’d better read them.”

So I looked back at the passage and I saw that there were four clear directions for taking God’s Word as my medicine.

The first: Attend to My words. I had to give very careful, undivided attention to what God was saying. This was in line with what I had already seen about how “faith comes.”

Second, incline thine ear unto My sayings. Now I saw that “inclining,” or bowing down my ear meant bowing down my whole head. You cannot bow down your ear without bowing down your head. And I saw that bowing down my head meant taking a respectful and reverent and humble and teachable attitude toward God. Again the problem came up that every time I read God’s Word about God’s goodness and His willingness to heal and provide, I said to myself, “That’s too good to be true.” I really couldn’t be understanding it right. And after I’d done that many times, one day the Lord spoke to me when I took that attitude and He said this. He said, “Now, tell Me this. Who is the teacher and who is the pupil?” I thought it over and I said, “Lord, you are the teacher and I am the pupil.” And the Lord said, “Well, would you mind letting Me teach?” And I saw that’s what it meant to “incline your ear,” to stop arguing, to stop telling God what He ought to have said and to believe what He was saying.

You see, I was like many other people. I approached the Bible with my mind made up in advance, through tradition and background, as to what God ought to have said and if God said something different from what I thought, it was very difficult for me to hear Him at all. So the second instruction is to incline your ear, bow down, be humble, don’t argue with God, be teachable, let Him tell you.

The third was let them not depart from thine eyes. I saw that I had to keep my eyes focused on the promises of God, that if my eyes strayed from God’s promises to other kinds of suggestions or other kinds of teaching that were not in line with the Word of God, then I didn’t receive the healing effect of God’s Word in my body.

And the fourth was keep them in the midst of thine heart. I saw how true that is psychologically. God uses the “eye gate” and the “ear gate.” He says, “Incline your ears, focus your eyes. In that way, through the ear gate and the eye gate combined, My Word will come into your heart and when it is in your heart, it will provide healing and health for all your flesh.”

The very next verse of Proverbs says, “Keep thy heart will all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.” And that is very true. What you get in your heart is going to determine the issue of your life. So I took God’s Word as my medicine, three times daily, after meals faithfully, for about three or four months. And I cannot go into all the details, time is running out, but I received a complete and permanent healing and health and I’ve walked in that health from that day until now. So God’s Word is true! You can trust it! He does provide health to all our flesh!

As I look back now on that situation in which I found myself, I see that I was at a kind of crossroads in my life. I was confronted with the clear truth of God’s Word, but as a philosopher I found it difficult to believe it so simply. And I realized that I had two alternatives:

1. I could go on making things complicated and stay sick; or
2. I could be willing to make things simple and get well.

And looking back, I am so glad that I was willing to make things simple and get well. And let me offer that advice to you. Make things simple. Believe God’s Word and get well.

God bless you.

Our time is up for today. I’ll be back with you again next week at this same time, Monday through Friday. Next week I’ll be dealing with another main theme of God’s Word and showing you in a practical way how to apply it to your own life and situation.