Today I attended a wholiopathic seminar, a recently trademarked term by the head of New Eden School of Natural Health and Herbal Studies to illustrate how we put God first in our health journey. The last major point I got from today’s seminar, was the question: Who are you bowing to? Has your condition become your identity, title, and idol?
Is the banner over your head “Child of God”, or “name of condition”?
In other words, just as we are what we eat, we can also engage in the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy by verbally declaring what we have unnecessarily resigned ourselves to subconsciously. In some respects, we are what we declare. This isn’t true of everything we say, but we can affect our body’s ability to heal by how we talk and think about what we battle with.
This is where rephrasing or reframing can be useful. We don’t deny a given condition exists, but we tell our body to snap-to in dealing with it by how we talk about it.
A personal example: Whenever I feel something coming on, my go-to phrasing for decades has been, “We are going to stay healthy! We can’t afford to get sick! We are going to stay healthy!”
We know from Scripture that God says words have power. Power to heal, power to destroy, power to make friends, power to separate friends, power to curse, power to bless, etc. These statements come from a variety of Scriptures throughout God’s Word.
I Peter 3:10-12
For he that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile: Let him eschew evil, and do good; let him seek peace, and ensue it. For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil.***
James 3:5-18
Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things. Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell. For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and bitter? Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs? so can no fountain both yield salt water and fresh. Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom. But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace.
Researchers have discovered that people who consistently speak negatively about themselves and their conditions, tend to make those conditions worse in spite of receiving the same treatments as those who consistently speak positively about themselves and their conditions. They’ve come to the conclusion that you can be doing everything right from food to exercise to sleep, etc, but if you consistently engage in negative self-talk, you can literally talk yourself ill! Conversely, consistent positive self-talk aids all those other means and methods to help your body heal itself with the tools God provided for you to give it.
So back to my personal example, I emphatically tell myself that we are going to stay healthy! I chose those words before it was cool to do so, because I wanted my body to understand that good health was the goal. In combination with what I’d do around nutritional angles, sleep etc, whenever illness would hit, it normally wouldn’t last as long.
Researchers have concluded that the body seems to be highly suggestible in the expectations fed it by you as the owner/operator, and by other voices you regularly subject it to. This is a huge reason that the lockdowns combined with damaging mainstream media inundation proved so deadly over the past 3 years. Fear of illness will produce illness. This is because fear produces stress, and consistent, high levels of stress are damaging to all areas of the body, with whichever area of the body least prepared for it, falling ill first. Stress is a known killer. Fear and stress were used to great effect by mainstream media to begin the global depopulation effort that is now in full swing.
The environment we choose to live in (social, natural, audible, visual, spiritual) will help or clash with efforts at the necessary self-talk to spur the body on to good health. So if you feel like you are living in a spiritual battle for the past 3 years, your senses are not lying to you! Today’s seminar mentioned post-pandemic fatigue that many are facing, and that this fatigue has a very strong spiritual component!
So the narrative I gave myself around potential illness, is a good thing to continue with going forward. In addition, being one of various people you may meet with adrenal fatigue or worse, chronic fatigue (they are slightly different conditions), means that I don’t wear it as a label or as a fall-back to not engage in this or that or the next thing. I have to be realistic in how I do life or charging ahead as if it isn’t there clobbers me over the head, swiftly reminding me that I over-did it AGAIN! But it is NOT my identity! My identity is in Christ, not in my condition. In seeking God for wisdom, insight, and understanding, I’ve learned various ways to address this condition and foraging by far, has been the best way to date as it addresses the need for sunshine, exercise, and the nutritional needs for liver, kidney and endocrine support all at once.
There are many people out there who use their conditions as banners of identity and in so doing, not merely turn their condition into an idol they place above God in their lives, but exacerbate the condition as well, making themselves worse off than necessary. The guy doing the talk had been told by his doctor at one point in his early 20’s, that he was addicted to fibromyalgia. The condition had come to define him and how he did life, and he was hiding behind the condition. When that lightbulb hit him over the head, he began to change is own narrative, began making discoveries over what to do, and has been free of the condition ever since.
Changing your self-talk changes how your body responds to things and it can change your outlook and emotional state too. But as Christians, we must do this wisely. I don’t agree with the affirmation movement because they take the concept of reframing to such an extreme that existing conditions are denied and conditions they don’t have are claimed as already existing. Such as, a person claiming they are fully ambulatory while sitting in a wheelchair, unable to get out of it. Now, telling themselves they WILL get out of the wheelchair and taking actions that will strengthen their body would make more sense than claiming they are already ambulatory. Give the body something to work towards, but don’t deny what already exists! There ARE stories out there of kids and adults who have taken the can-do attitude and pulled themselves out of wheelchairs that doctors said they’d never get out of. Denial didn’t get them there, determination and willingness to do what was necessary however, did.
When Christ is King over your life as a believer, He can add to the above reality by issuing you a complete healing, a miracle, or the knowledge necessary to obediently give your body what it needs to heal itself. Does this mean all illness or infirmity will leave? Not necessarily or we wouldn’t have the story of Paul in the New Testament and the thorn in his flesh, whatever that thorn was. God kept that thorn there to keep Paul humble and Paul admitted that in his writings to the churches.
II Corinthians 12:7-10Â
And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong.
Joni Erickson Tada has ministered to more people from her wheelchair than she ever would have on two working legs. But many others, my own mother included, have had God work miracles in their bodies and those miracles have been used to spread the Gospel that way.
When Christ is King and your identity is found in Him, the ability to know when a malady has spiritual causes, emotional causes, social causes, or physical causes is easier to identify, address, and deal with. Wholeness is found in Christ. If the cross He asks you to bear is an infirmity of some kind, don’t let that infirmity become your identity, but instead use it as an outreach point around God’s sustaining power, obediently managing it with the means God reveals to you.
