HEALTH AND WHOLENESS

I was blessed to have a massage today that included some cranial-sacral therapy that I had never heard of before . . . God is so good and so faithful. I believe that the Lord always has a way for us to be well and whole, whether it comes through prayer, through diet, through therapies of all the kinds known to people . . . and all wholeness and health comes from Him and is in Him because His will for us is that we have health and enjoy the life each one of us has been given.

As it says in the first chapter of John's Gospel "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

When God became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, He wanted to give human beings a way to know Him in a different way than He had ever revealed Himself before or since. Even though it has been over 2000 years since He was born, we are still able to know Him because He sent His Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, to reveal Jesus to all of us if we are willing to open our hearts to Him. And this Truth is different from a fact that you can verify or than something that you can prove through a scientific experiment that comes out the same way every time so that people come to believe it is true. The Truth that the Spirit of Truth helps us to come to know, is something we believe because we have the experience of it.

Faith is a gift that has to be received and no one has true faith without having experiences that help a person to be sure about what he or she believes. When we come to know the Lord through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, we are able to live the abundant life that Jesus promises us.

One of my favorite passages about how the Holy Spirit works is the one where it says that you will hear the Lord will tell you where to go, whether to the right or to the left (Isaiah 30:21) That goes along with the prophecy that says that God will place His law in people's hearts (Jeremiah 31:33), and the messianic prophecy that says "They will be taught by God." (Isaiah 54:13).

There's so much in the Bible that helps us to know that Jesus is God, and that helps us to be able to know the Truth. The Holy Spirit illuminates Bible passages to answer questions we have, and help us to understand.

The Bible is very important, but sometimes people make it and idol. It is a tool that God has given us, but true Word of God is Jesus, as it says in the first chapter of John's Gospel. The Holy Spirit also uses scripture to answer prayers that we pray, but the words themselves are not some kind of magic. The words of scripture is only be made powerful by God through our faith with the help of the Holy Spirit.

When we go back to the Greek language used to write the New Testament, all this is easier to understand than the way the the word "word" is used for two very different meanings in the Greek. We call the Bible the "Word of God," and it is a book written with words to tell narrate the experiences of the history of many people with the One True God given to us through the lens of people descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- and the traditions of their ancestors and well as others who came to know and believe in the One true God through the Bible.

Every culture has spiritual, and/or religious, and sometimes philosophical traditions that come from the ways that the people of the culture deal with the divine and the spiritual world throughout their history. These traditions are some of the components. that make each culture unique, but that also connect human beings of different cultures to one another.

These days there are a lot of people who try to promulgate the belief that all spiritual paths lead to the same god. But I don't believe that is true. There is only one True God and all the other gods, goddesses and spiritual entities are false gods. Being open to and worshiping false gods and idols is very dangerous because only God is good and every spiritual force that tries to draw us away from God is trying to keep us from being blessed and from receiving the abundant and eternal life that is promised to us in Christ Jesus.

In the Bible when it says that god is a jealous God, I used to think that was strange because it seemed kind of petty and selfish. However, recently I have come to understand it in a different way. I think that the Lord makes clear that He is jealous when people believe in other gods, goddesses and idols because when they do, it robs them of the relationship they can have with God Who is Love.

The Lord created each human being for His own sake, so that He could be in a loving relationship with each person and with each group of people who open their hearts to love Him and to receive His blessings. When we seek something else, we are vulnerable to the principalities and powers that St. Paul writes about in Chapter 6 of his Letter to the Ephesians.

In our world today, so dominated by all that has come down to us from the Age of Reason and the secular humanism that seems so logical and seductive, we do not acknowledge and respect the validity of who we are in spirit and how we fit into and live in the spiritual world. However, we do not truly and completely fulfill who we are as human beings when we neglect our spirituality or when we deny the existence of God Who is Love.

I have been thinking of all this lately as I have been doing some pastoral counseling with a friend who is moving through a time of grief and tragedy. And, I started out trying to describe a bit about my journey to wholeness, and ended up trying to make clear that unless we know who we are in spirit as well as physically and materially, we are not truly whole.  Of course, these are just my ruminations on the subject,with the help of the Holy Spirit. As I have prayed and tried to write what I believe the Lord is asking me to share, a lot of what I have written above has come to me. I offer it up to you trusting that if it is of any value to you, that the Holy Spirit will bless it and make it clearer than I can make it.

May the Lord continue to bless and keep you and yours, today and always.