The Health of a Single Cell

The Health of a Single Cell

by Dr. Roger Youmans

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

In 1945, our country spent about $8 billion on medical care. At that time, that was 3.9% of the gross national product. In 1975, our country, the United States, spent $120 billion on health. Now, that’s an increase from 8 to 120. And that’s over a period of just 30 years, a single generation. And the percentage of our gross national product went from 3.9 to 8.9, and now it’s over 9 and moving toward 10% of all of the gross national product going into health services.

And a man who lived to be 60 years old in the days of Caesar, almost 2,000 years ago, had as long a life expectancy as a 60-year-old man does today. You don’t believe that, do you? But it’s true. That if a man in the days of Caesar, almost 2,000 years ago, lived to be 60, his life expectancy was approximately the same as a man who lives to be 60 today. In spite of pinning fractured hips, transurethral resections, coronary revascularization, and all of the other very expensive things we do. That’s a hard figure to believe, isn’t it? It’s thoroughly documented. The hooker is that a man who lived to be 60 in the days of the Roman Empire was an extraordinary person. He was extraordinarily healthy. He had survived all kinds of things. And he was able, because of his natural strength and resistance, to overcome a lot of other things. It’s perhaps not quite a fair comparison, but the facts stand. A 60-year-old man, back in the first century, had the life expectancy of a 60-year-old man today. And yet, look at the money we’re pouring into it. There weren’t very many 60-year-old man then.

There are a number of critics, outside and within allopathic medicine, that point out the shortcomings. How 30 to 50% of the hospitalizations probably are not required. And at $120 a day in the hospital, it’s phenomenal. 30 to 50%, that’s an MD figure. That’s not a chiropractor or somebody else, you know, poking at us. That’s from in-house.

A professor of internal medicine at Stanford uses that figure. He also points out that physicians’ fees increases have exceeded the rise of cost of living by a significant factor. He points out that 90% of the primary health care needs in this country can be met by other than physicians. I think this camp demonstrates that. This is a healing center here.

And 95%, 99% of the health needs at this camp can be met by people who are not trained as physicians or health professionals. And that also can apply every day. Most of us in medicine would agree that at least 80% of the people who come to see the doctor as a primary physician do not have any kind of organic, demonstrable lesion or abnormality.

Drugs are overused. Surgery is excessive. Many of our diagnostic tools are indecisive and therefore of a little real value in making decisions. And tragedy of tragedies, the medical centers, the university medical centers, are the pace setters in this kind of medicine. They’re the standard. That’s where you learn to order 65 tests on every patient that comes in the first time. That’s where you learn to have five people examine the patient, get a consultant for the left eye or the right ear or the left toe. I mean, I’m exaggerating a little bit, obviously. But the medical centers will not provide us a solution to this problem. They are the pace setters in this problem. Now, I say that from my own personal experience, having been assistant professor of surgery at University of Kansas for three years. The solution will not come from the medical centers.

Cancer is an extraordinarily expensive problem. In a study in New York about five years ago, it was found that the average cancer patient, from the time it was diagnosed, it cost $20,000 per patient. Now, who can afford that? That’s five years ago. Now, increase that in terms of cost of living since five years ago, and you have a figure more like $30,000. No wonder that cancer strikes fear in people. It’s not just the pain and death. It’s the financial ruin of the whole family. College educations for kids. All kinds of opportunities are lost.

Strokes. One of the leading causes of death. And yet, of the 500,000 people every year that have strokes in this country, 300,000 of them survive. And that’s where the expense is. Some of you have this in your families. I mention these things not to belittle modern medicine, but to show you the basis, the framework, from which this holistic medicine has sprung. Now, holistic medicine has several posits that I think we would feel very comfortable with. And then I will point out the big danger. Holistic medicine says that the health of a person is the responsibility of that person and not of their professional consultant. The doctor is not responsible for your health. You are.

Holistic medicine posits that preventive medicine is far better than curative medicine. Costs less. Gives more health. More wholeness. Preventive medicine is better than curative medicine. Holistic medicine says there is spiritual reality and you cannot talk about treating the whole person unless you recognize and deal with their spiritual nature and the spiritual nature of the universe.

See, what was the fourth one? Lifestyle is the main cause of most of our epidemics and diseases today. Not infections. Not congenital deformities. Not any of these other things that we are attacking so vigorously, but it’s the lifestyle. If people had changed their lifestyle, as I mentioned last night, quit drinking, quit smoking, quit taking so much medicine, stop driving so fast, stop pushing so hard with so much ambition, stop eating so much, that most of the diseases that are killing us would be eliminated. We all agree with that, don’t we? Now, when you hear of holistic medicine, this is sort of the heart, the essence of what they’re talking about.

But they do not differentiate the spiritual reality. It is all the same to them. Spiritual reality is neither good nor bad, it just is. They do not recognize spiritual warfare. And as a result, they are very easily deceived and led off in tangents of false religions, all kinds of practices that are very destructive. That unless we take the Bible as a basis and keep our eyes on Jesus as we walk through this morass of spiritual reality, we will be in trouble. Now, the problem with spiritual reality is it is very difficult for us to test it in terms of cooperation.

If I tell you that there’s a projector here, you look at it, and your eyes tell you, yeah, it’s there. And if you don’t believe that, you punch your neighbor and you ask them if it’s there, and they look in and say, yeah, it’s there. If you still don’t believe it, you can come up and you can touch it. Yeah, it’s there. You can corroborate the information that it exists from three or four different angles. In spiritual reality, beware of the person who perceives spiritual reality and says, this is the way it is because the spirit tells me and refuses to have it tested. Beware of that. You can test it. The Bible tells us how to test spirits. We have the body of Christ, so you can ask other people. It’s essential that we stay in a body and that we stay grounded. Now, I mention this strongly in terms of holistic medicine because, believe me, holistic medicine will increase in its impact in the United States, and it will deceive many, many people at this very point of what is spiritual reality.

Now, I didn’t come to give you a talk about holistic medicine. I didn’t come to give you a talk about the bad things of allopathic medicine, which I’ve been trained. I came to talk to you about how you can be healthier. And I want to share a few things that are very obvious about healing and wholeness. And I think that by doing this, I can help you understand some mechanisms by which you can be more healthy. In fact, if you listen to what I say this morning, a 45-year-old man can increase his life expectancy by 11 years by doing just a few simple things. And I can show you this morning how a certain kind of a lifestyle that has actually been practiced here in Southern California can reduce the chances of cancer to about one half the next-door neighbors. Now, that’s impressive, isn’t it? All right. Let’s look at the American lifestyle.

Basically, we believe that the purpose of life is to avoid pain. So we put comfort and pleasure on a day-by-day basis as extremely important. And we think that freedom and liberty is very important, so we emphasize that. That’s our American lifestyle. And it’s out of these kinds of assumptions at the very heart of it that we find our excessive speed, our overeating, our drinking, our indulgence, and our sexual breakdown, our family destruction, because we want to do our own thing. We want to do what’s comfortable now.

And we find the leading causes of death in this country are these four in order, and then the others right behind. Now, just read them off. Your heart disease, cancer, strokes, accidents, diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, bronchitis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

All of these, all eight of them, are a result of lifestyle. And the factors in the lifestyle that really hit these are right there. Obesity, smoking, drunkenness, rich, fat foods, no strenuous exercise, and the tensions of always trying to hurry up.

Now, you live that way. You’ve lived that way for 30 years or 40. I live that way. My next-door neighbor lives this way. And unless we are willing to change our lifestyle, we will continue the same sequence of diseases. Well, now, in looking at this, it seems very obvious and straightforward that if we would change some of the health factors, perhaps we could improve our life expectancy. It has been scientifically studied and proven that these seven factors are significant in our health and longevity. No smoking, minimal use of alcohol, weight within 10% of the normal for the height, sleep seven hours per night, eat breakfast daily, eat regular meals daily, and strenuous physical exercise daily. Seven factors.

Well, probably a lot of you qualified for three or four of those already. Some of you maybe for five or six. There won’t be very many that can hit all seven. Maybe you can’t. Oh, is that too fast? All right. All right. Those are the seven factors, and they are very critical. It’s been shown by studies of people, prospective studies, where you start out with these factors and watch what happens over the next few years. And the results of such a study show that if you have six out of those seven factors for a man who’s 45 years old, statistically, he will live 11 years longer than a man 45 who has only three of those seven factors. Now, those aren’t hard things, are they? You don’t have to buy any drugs. You don’t have to go to the doctor. There’s no fees involved. It’s all free for 11 years. Statistics across the board. Take all comers. Fantastic, isn’t it? Why haven’t we heard of that before? Well, I don’t know. You hear of it now. Now you have the responsibility that these seven factors are very critical. Now, I must admit that for me to eat meals regularly is very difficult. Isn’t that right, Joy? I don’t do it very often. I miss lunch lots of times.

Even breakfast is hard. All depends on whether 11 years is important to you or not. And so that leads us to a lifestyle where you take a long-range view of pleasure. Instead of just trying to get pleasure for today or tomorrow or next week, you think about the 11 years, the long run, the way you feel. And you will feel better if you do those seven items.

But you see, it really isn’t a basically different life pattern than what I was talking about before. What I’m talking to you now is wisdom that comes out of humanism. And I want to be very clear on this, that it works whether you’re a Christian or not a Christian, that these patterns will increase your longevity. Don’t make any mistake about it. Don’t pretend that it doesn’t, that Christians somehow by following these things will do better and non-Christians can’t. The critical issue here, where the Christian has such an overwhelming gift of God, is motivation. How many times I’ve tried to motivate an obese person to go on a diet? Or tried to motivate somebody who’s a heavy drinker to quit drinking? Or somebody who smokes to quit smoking? You ever try that? Sure. How do you motivate them? That’s the problem. You can give them the information, but information will not cure them. Information will not change the basic problem. You have to be motivated to apply it.

And we as Christians know that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and that we should therefore reverence the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit, and do what God leads us to do to enable us to worship Him more effectively in that temple. We have a responsibility. Now, some people have bodies that have enormous strength and energy and reserve. To whom much is given, much will be required. Others have bodies that by birth, by nature, are frail and easily injured. The Lord knows this. Some of us are subject to accidents that are not our fault and are therefore limited. The Lord knows. But to whom much is given, much is required. And your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

I’ll leave that on a while longer in case you didn’t get it all written off. Now, that’s humanism. That’s medicine that applies across the board where the Christian has the gift of motivation. And that is not enough. This will let you down.

Let me share with you some scriptures so that as we move into the spiritual reality here, as we move into the overall view, we understand what God’s definition of health is. You remember, at the first slide I had up, there was the definition of health. And we want to see this from God’s point of view, not from ours. Could I have the lights back on a minute and I’ll share some scripture now. We’ll move into a second phase here.

First, let’s look in Genesis chapter 2, verse 16. And we find out how God started the things off in the very beginning. He gave Adam and Eve the Garden of Eden. And verse 16, it says, “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest eat freely, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it. For in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” And man, Adam, you and me, verse 6, “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eye and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and she did eat and gave it also unto her husband with her and he did eat.” Just like today. God tells us not to do something, so we do it. And as a result, we find in Genesis 3, verse 17 and following, “And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife and hast eaten of the tree which I commanded thee.” Now the problem isn’t hearkening to the voice of your wife. The problem is in doing that which the Lord commanded you not to do.

“Thou shalt not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for thy sake. In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. And thou shalt eat of the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground. For out of it wast thou taken. For dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.” The very beginning of the Bible sets forth that man rebelled against God’s instruction and that God let him know that the results are going to be suffering, work, sweat, tears, and death. Don’t let anybody mislead you with idealistic hopes and panaceas that somehow you will not have any more pain, any more struggle, any more suffering if you do such and such a thing. In this world, this is what it will be. Like it or not. If you spend your life trying to avoid pain and suffering, trying to live comfortably, I can absolutely guarantee you you will live miserably. Most miserably. If you take the men who have been the most wealthy in the world, or the women who have been the most famous and most popular, you see tragedy written across them, just terribly. All right, so we skip over.

That’s God’s initial instructions to us and what will happen. If you don’t believe it there in the Old Testament, you can read Romans 6:23 where it says that the wages of sin is death. Physical death will occur and apart from the grace of God and Jesus Christ, spiritual death also.

That’s the first point. The second point of the overview of biblical healing, we look in Colossians chapter 1, verse 26 and 27. “Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to His saints. What is this mystery? to whom God would make known what is the riches of His glory of this mystery among the Gentiles which is Christ in you the hope of glory.” God has a solution for this terrible dilemma in which we find ourselves. And Ephesians chapter 1 verses 9 and 10.

“Having made known unto us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure which He hath purposed in Himself that in the dispensation of the fullness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ both which are in heaven and which are on earth even in Him.” To draw all things together in Christ. So I’d warn you again do not get deluded and led away into other aspects of healing that do not center in Christ. It is God’s ordained way to deal with suffering death misery of life by centering all things in Christ.

Make no mistake about it. You can’t separate religion from medicine. You can’t do it. Really you can’t separate it from our state or our government either. Don’t blind yourself and don’t impose dogma religious dogma onto medicine or onto the government or so on but don’t think you can really separate them off. Life is a single fabric and all things are going to be centered in Jesus Christ. Not my understanding of Christ. Not my concept or my experience of Christ but in Christ in all of His fullness. If you want to know Christ better meet a new Christian. Each Christian has a revelation experience of Jesus that’s unique and the more Christians you know and fellowship with and experience the broader will be your experience and knowledge of Jesus Christ. It’s the body. You see God almost sort of corners us into trying to let us know that it’s in Jesus that all of this has its culmination.

And then if we look over in Revelations we find out that this solution that God has works out in Revelations 21 verse 4 “and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes and there shall be no more death neither sorrow nor crying neither shall there be any more pain for the former things are passed away.” This will come. We are in the process now. We can’t hurry it up. We can’t slow it down. We are where we are. But ultimately God will have the victory. Well you all knew that beforehand didn’t you? This is the biblical view. It doesn’t help too much when you hurt yourself. But God doesn’t leave it on this very broad sort of transcendent view. He brings it down from the transcendent to the immanent to you. Look back in Exodus chapter 15. God is very specific.

Chapter 15 of Exodus verse 26 verse 26. God’s speaking to Moses and He says “for I am the Lord that healeth thee.” He knows your weakness just as we saw last night. He becomes very personal and He heals you of your particular illness. Your particular problem. He doesn’t always heal it quite the way you want Him to. In 1 Peter 2:24 we find that by Christ’s stripes by His wounds we are healed. We have been healed by His suffering and death already.

And then we find that Jesus when He was here on earth in Luke 4:4 it says that He healed them all. He healed them all. Praise God. Everybody who comes forward can be healed. Not because I heal him or because we got such a fine council ring or any of these others. Jesus heals them all. And we find that in Luke 9:1-4 Jesus gives this authority and responsibility to His disciples and they go out and heal. And in 10 He does it to the 70 and they go out and heal. Very specifically to people one by one. And healing keep in mind is not the relief of pain.

Healing is the proper relationship between the organism and its environment that enables it to achieve its purpose. Keep that in mind. Now why do we have all this suffering? Why do we have the pain? Why do I have this arthritis? Why do I have the bursitis?

John 11:1-4 makes it very clear when Jesus was asked why this man was born blind? Was it the sin of his parents or was it the man sin himself? He says this man was born blind to glorify God. When Lazarus was sick and they sent for Jesus Jesus said this sickness is not unto death but that God would be glorified. That’s the purpose of it. Now can you glorify God if you have one leg shorter than the other? Sure you can. Can you praise God and glorify Him if you got a headache? Sure you can. Can you be healthy then while you have these limitations? These pains and discomforts? Sure you can. And the graciousness is that as you glorify Him the pain and the limitations become insignificant. They fade away. I’m not trying to say that we have arrived at revelations yet where all tears are wiped away. There will be tears. We are in transit. We are passing through. And as we live in the kingdom of light these physical limitations pass away. A woman who’s bearing a child has pain. It hurts. But you don’t hear very many women complaining about it after the child is born because of the significance of that pain. A man doesn’t mind suffering or missing a meal for his family that they might have something to eat.

It’s putting meaning into the suffering that is so critical. Viktor Frankl the Vienna psychiatrist has emphasized this very fundamentally that it is the will to meaning that is at the heart of our psychological being. Freud saw part of this in will to pleasure because people find meaning in pleasure. And Jung talks about the will to power. And each one has his insight. But the heart of the matter is not that power or money or prestige or pleasure or any of these things really is the ultimate. It’s the meaning that this puts into my activity. And there is something that God planted in you and in me that makes us want our lives to make a difference. We want it to be significant. We don’t mind suffering pain if we know it’s really significant and worthwhile. That’s the gift. That’s the grace that God gives us in our sufferings that we see the significance because we are in a spiritual warfare. It does increase the quality of our life. All right. So the… We can take comfort in our personal ailments as we see meaning and significance in them. Sometimes you have to look a little deeper. Sometimes we get resentful toward the pain and discomfort we have and the limitations we have and somebody else doesn’t have.

I can absolutely guarantee and I’ll talk about this later on that as you let this resentment and feeling sorry for yourself take root in you it will destroy you. It’s just as inexorable as these other laws of medicine I’ve been talking about. And on the other hand if you will see it as an opportunity to glorify God and to praise Him these symptoms will fade away and become insignificant in your activities as you glorify God. It’s the way we are made. I’m not imposing some new theory onto the universe. I’m declaring unto you that which God has revealed. It’s there and it’s testable. You don’t have to squint your eyes or have lighted candles or darken the room or whatever else to see it. It’s there. It’s reality. We’re not living in a world of sort of nebulous glow and a lot of religiosity and all this. That’s it. This is hard day. This is real stuff and you can test it and God doesn’t mind if you test it. What He doesn’t like is a double-minded person who wants to pretend to test it when he’s already got his mind made up of what he wants to do anyway and just wants God rubber-stamp it. He didn’t tolerate that. Now, you can fool me.

I can… I’m dumb. You can make me think it’s one way or the other and I can’t tell the difference but you don’t fool God and you don’t fool the very inner self in you either. You may think you do but it works its way through.

And we find that in 1 Corinthians 11 that some are sick because of impurity and hypocrisy. Now, that’s different than being sick because of immorality where we contract some kind of disease as a result of our immorality out of our drunkenness or sexual permissiveness and we get a disease. That happens too. But there are spiritual diseases which have physical manifestations that come right out of our hypocrisy as we lie to ourselves. And God tells us thou shalt not lie.

James 5:13 tells us very specifically that if we’re sick we should repent, pray, confess, and be anointed with oil just like we did last night. This is health and healing under your body. And it was. It is. And it will be tomorrow and next month.

And finally, in 1 Corinthians 12 verses 7-9 we find that healing is a gift of the Holy Spirit. And that is why I cannot talk about wholeness and health either medically or in the Christian sense apart from the power of the Holy Spirit. To me, it is absolutely indispensable. The spiritual perceptivity that the Holy Spirit gives when He indwells you. Now, all of you have the Holy Spirit. If you have Jesus Christ, it’s the Holy Spirit that inspired in you the faith to believe.

But you want more. More! And the Bible tells us to ask. “If we being evil know how to give good gifts, how much more the Father will give us the Holy Spirit to those that ask Him.” Ask for more. And He will give it day by day, week by week, month by month, every year, stronger, more healthy than we were the year before. That’s the life He calls us to.

Now, if all this is true that I’ve been telling you, how come I’m the only kooky doctor that believes it? How come you don’t hear this all the time if this is so true and obvious? I’ve been saying it. It sounds clear, doesn’t it? How come you don’t hear that all the time?

My friends, the reason is that other doctors do perceive this. We are in the latter days. There have never been days that are later than these. I can guarantee that the last days. And God is doing a new thing in pouring out His Spirit into His world. In Tampa, Florida, last October, less than a year ago, I went to a conference on logopsychosomatic medicine. Dr. Bill Reed, some of you may know him, William Standish Reed, has the Christian Medical Foundation there. And there were 120 doctors from mainly from the United States but from other countries also that came together and we talked about the very things I’m sharing with you today. And there were 120 doctors there that believed it.

Last February here in San Diego, we had a conference on approaches to healing. It was co-sponsored by the University of California at San Diego and by the San Diego County Medical Society. There were 97 doctors who paid $100 apiece to come to this weekend conference. And they heard Father Francis MacNutt telling them about Jesus Christ being the healer. They heard Christian psychologists telling them about the Christian life and how Jesus Christ reconciles marriages, homes, and personalities.

Those 97 doctors were touched deeply. I wish you could have been there on a Saturday night and seen about 80 or 100 people in this big room divide up in little groups of 10 or 15 each. Doctors and their wives praying for each other as Reverend MacNutt was leading us.

That’s right here in San Diego this year. It’s happening now. 50 of those doctors were local doctors from San Diego County. And the other 47 were from other parts of the United States. The Medical Society and the University were so pleased with what happened that we’ll have one next year too. Can you imagine that? And they give 12 hours of continuing medical education recognized by the state of California, California Medical Society, AMA, and all the rest for doctors who will come and learn these things that I’m sharing with you. You see, I’m a kooky doctor, but there’s lots more of us. And year by year, day by day, there are more and more companies. I’ll tell you about Chuck Prier. He was a resident at the University of California, San Diego. He was on the trauma service when I first came in touch with him. And I came in touch with him because I had a patient who was severely injured in Chula Vista and he needed to transfer up to the trauma unit at the university. And he was on duty in that service. It so happens that his wife was an airline stewardess and maybe next year or so he can come down here and share some of these with you now. I just want to give you a brief outline of what all happened anyway.

Chuck was having a hard time with the residency and his Christian faith. He was a new Christian. His wife had led him to the Lord on an airplane one night flying from Washington, D.C. to, I think it was from San Diego here. He gave him the four spiritual laws and led him to the Lord. And then they got married after that. And he was having a hard time because the pressures of residency training, I tell you, destroy marriages. I cannot number without sitting down and really figuring how many of my close friends, as we went through internship and residency, had their marriages destroyed. You work, at least in my surgical residence, 120 hours a week. Week after week, month after month, year after year, for five years.

It destroys something very precious in person. And this is after you go through medical school. It is not a healthy thing. And who, my friends, will heal the healers? It’s Jesus. It’s Jesus. So Chuck was having a hard time with this, and he called up and wanted us to have dinner sometime or get together. And his schedule is about as busy as mine. But we finally ended up at Anthony’s on the Wharf down here in San Diego at about 10 o’clock. I think we were supposed to be there at 9 o’clock, but some things came up and we didn’t get there until 10. And we sat there at Anthony’s at 10 o’clock at night and talked about the things we’re sharing here. And Charles said to me, “I need more of this Holy Spirit in my life so that I can minister health and healing to my patients.” And there at Anthony’s on the Wharf, we prayed for him and he received the Holy Spirit. Right there. He was a different man than, the directness of his approach. He left his residency. He figured his family was worth more than that. He’s doing family practice now in Las Vegas.

That’s right. At Las Vegas. And he prays with his patients. He’s a walking testimony. He’s a young doctor. He’s just fresh out of school three or four years ago. A product of all of the humanism of our modern educational system. But Jesus touched him. I can tell you about another associate of mine who graduated number one in his school of medicine here in the University of California. I won’t tell you which one of the schools, but he was number one. And I knew him. I worked with him for a while. And he had a lot of problems. He had some skin problems. He had some problems of other kinds. And it was ruining his practice, literally. He had to be hospitalized for them. He was depressed, despondent, given up, virtually abandoned by his family.

Really depressed. Really deeply depressed. Brilliant man. Going down the tubes. I felt led of the Lord to identify myself with him and to associate with him. Last October, he went with me down to Tampa, Florida. And the chairman of the Department of Medicine at Oral Roberts University School of Medicine prayed with him up in the room with me one night about midnight. And this young doctor was transformed. He’s practicing medicine now. His mind is clear. He’s got a clear cut. He’s staying in Christian association. I tell you this so that you will know that we are in the latter days. Do not throw away your confidence. Do not throw away your faith. Do not be misled by clever reasonings, by fancy theories. Test them. Test them by the scripture. Test the spirits. Do they confess that Jesus Christ came in the flesh and share them in the body?

Let’s just pray a minute. Lord Jesus, You are wisdom. Like it says in Proverbs, the Lord created the whole universe through You, through Your wisdom. And He made it to fit together. Lord, we thank You that all things are drawn together in Jesus Christ because all things were created through Him. And without Him was not anything created that was created.

And He loves me. And He loves you. Oh, the grace. Thank You, Lord. Thank You, Lord. We open ourselves to You today, Lord. God, and ask You to pour more of Your grace into us. More of Your Holy Spirit. More of Your power. That we can glorify You more. Keep our priorities straight. Keep our directions straight, Lord Jesus. And let the illnesses and all the other things and the complexes just drop off behind us. Thank You, Jesus. Bless these people here. Bless their minds and their understandings. Bless their emotions, their feelings.

Bless their bodies, their aches and pains, their strength, their muscles, their bones. Bless their spirits, Lord. We are one in You.