My younger son preached last Wednesday night. I always enjoy hearing his perspectives on passages I’ve read a lot of times, and usually I see some little thing in a new way. This time was no different.
In Proverbs 4:20, Solomon says,
My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings . . .
Of course, this is actually God speaking through the pen of Solomon, so it’s like God is saying, “Hey, child, listen to what I’m telling you.” He goes on:
Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart.
Always keep my words before you. Don’t forget them. Constantly remind yourself of them. Keep them right in the middle of all your thinking and your doing and your decision-making. Then verse 22:
For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh.
My words are life. They are more than just alive; they are very life itself. You need them like you need oxygen and water. You can’t live without them. Don’t forget that.
But here’s what struck me: He’s still talking about his words—God’s words—and he says they are “health to all their flesh.”
Have you ever noticed that before? That God’s words are health to your flesh? Your actual physical body? This was a completely new idea for me.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of God’s words as helping me through my days, sort of a holy boost to how I’m already living my life, an add-on. A mental and spiritual support. Sometimes they’re encouraging, sometimes a sharp rebuke. Mostly I think of them as guidance or a supernatural shot in the arm. A little pick-me-up. But in all these things, I think of God’s words as spiritual help, not physical.
Yet God says they are “health to all their flesh.”
He says they help me physically, in my body. That’s a whole new take for me. I know we pray for healing from physical diseases all the time, and I’ve actually seen God heal a child of liver disease so that she was removed from the transplant waitlist. God does still work miracles in bodies.
But when was the last time I saw him do something in my own body? I feel like my spirit is his to take care of, and my body is mine to deal with. I’m the one who needs to feed it well and get enough sleep (ha) and exercise it to keep it functioning well.
When was the last time I saw with my own physical eyes that his words were health to my flesh? That’s like mixing the spiritual with the physical and why does that feel so weird? Is it just because we separate those two things in our minds? That his words would help my flesh just isn’t something I’ve ever considered before.
So how do I make this concept work?
As I always do, I see everything through the eyes of someone who has experienced trauma and its lingering effects, which, as we know, show up in our physical bodies.
We’ve talked before about how our body, mind, and spirit are intricately connected, how we cannot do something that affects one without affecting the other two. In his book Finding Rest, Jonathon Seidl explains how our mental health is like a little stool on three legs: body, mind, and spirit, and how all three are needed to support a healthy mental state. So often, though, our view of this is one-sided.
The secular world sees mental health struggles as purely physical, an imbalance of chemicals in the brain that can only be cured with more chemicals, aka pharmaceuticals. I have no doubt that pharmaceuticals help some with mental health problems, and if you are one of them, I applaud you for making the decision to accept whatever help offers you relief. There is no shame in that. But I don’t think it’s as easy as taking a pill. There is more to the story because you are more than just a body.
Or maybe you, like I did for two years, think your mental health issues are the result of a concussion, a physical injury to the brain itself. That’s still a physical problem that should have a physical answer (rest or therapy). But even when I thought all my struggles were because of a concussion, there was an awful lot of wrestling with God going on. Why did this happen? Will I ever recover? Will I ever be the same? I pray for safety every time I drive and where were you when I was getting hit head-on? As they say, the struggle was real. And so the physical became spiritual and mental.
Then there is the church’s position. Seidl says in Finding Rest that the church largely “treats mental health struggles as purely spiritual problems that only require spiritual answers, dismissing the physical aspects altogether.” They make it a spiritual issue that must be caused by not enough faith, too much worldliness, or outright sin. But God says his words are life to those who find them and health to their flesh. God knows the spirit, mind, and body are so closely intertwined as to be inseparable.
When a person suffers a trauma, that trauma is not stored in the mind as a memory. It is stored in the body as a reaction. The nervous system remembers what happened and will forever be on the lookout for situations that feel similar, and it will launch the fight-or-flight response when it senses one. That’s called a trigger. It is not a thought, not an idea, not in your head. It is a physical response of your physical nervous system, which is made of tangible, physical things: nerves, synapses, muscles, heart and respiration rates, sweat glands, electrical impulses shooting through your body at lightning speed. It is 100% physical. It needs physical help, and God says his words give just that: health to your flesh.
I don’t just need life for my spirit, though that is surely important. When I put God’s words into my mind through reading, study, and mediating on them, they give life to my mind and spirit. But I also need health for my flesh—my physical body—because I still feel the effects of trauma in my body every single day.
When I put good things into my body, it helps my mind. When I put good things into my mind, it helps my spirit. And when I put good things (God’s words) into my spirit, it helps my body. I cannot feed one part well and it not benefit the others.
And this, friend, is how God’s words are health to our flesh.