A brother asked Fred the same question to do with our death in Jesus and the problems we face in our minds and bodies at times. Problems that we may need to seek professional medical help for. Fred’s answer is as always very insightful and full of grace.
Dear Fred,
I want to thank you for your two recent posts, which I enjoyed so much.
You don’t hear from me all the time, but the Lord is really working as me from a deep inner peace, though the Lord largely keeps me away from organized Christianity.
The past few months I begin to experience that I become older and have to surrender relative to my health. However, Paul says not to lose heart (2 Cor. 4:16), because it serves as a preparation (vs. 17). So everything is part of His council and will.
Recently I was reminded about the matter of inner healing. In fact I follow your approach that we ARE healed persons, because we died with Christ and are raised as new persons. That would cover everything when it comes to the soul, our psychic side and what is covered by psychology, though Christians still may have for example borderline. However, when it comes to the physical, we don’t follow that approach. We still go to doctors and hospitals to GET healed and don’t refuse it and say that a dead person doesn’t go to a hospital. Wouldn’t that leave room, in analogy to physical health, to stretch out to psychic health and consult specialists/ therapists to treat for example borderline? Where lies the difference in being dead relative to the psychical and to the physical?
What I do see clearly, is that everything belongs to God, every domain. Everything then is weighed by God as to whether it is of the light and built on the one foundation of Christ. If not, it is wood, hay, and stubble. In that light I would appreciate it if you have some additional thoughts on this difference between the psychical and the physical.
Yours in His grace,
______
Hi ______
I hope all is well with you and your family.
I have several instances in my writings where I talk about this, but I can’t lay hands on them at the moment. I am going to have to catalogue my stuff because there are now so many pieces I can’t remember what’s in them.
But just this and then a piece from that writing I found below – In all cases we live by the Spirit. You mentioned if we get physically sick then we have no problems with our “faith” if we go see the doctor. But then, do we do the same when the problems are soulish?
Of course you know there is no “right procedure” here to follow. We live by the Spirit, not by what we “normally do.” But I have to be honest also, about the dependence on modern psychology or psychiatry. Sometimes they work wonders, but it is less scientific than medical science with differing results. But of course there are times when the only appropriate thing to do with someone who is suffering serious mental or emotional problems, is to first reign them into rest, which is often done with anti-psychotic drugs. Or a rehab program where they are taken completely out of their normal environment for a time while they are healing. So I do see that. I never try to take the place of a mental health professional if it is a clear case that they are just what God prescribes for them at the moment.
This below is that excerpt from the past:
Bottom line, I know a lot about “soul,” and a lot about “spirit,” and that is all well and good. But I have to know how it “works,” so I can work it! In Norman’s model mentioned above, soul being mostly involved in temporal things and reacting temporally, the point of it was not so much to make solid ironclad definitions of these things, but to know the difference first of all between eternal and temporal, and to give us a little bit of knowledge about what these things are and how they work, and finally to bring us into a simplicity of “the Father that dwells within Me, He does the works.” (Jn 14:10)
Earlier I mentioned the chaos of the freeways around big cities, in my case, Atlanta. And then I said that even though it looked like there was enough danger for 1000+ accidents or fatalities a day, still most people make it through every day, month by month and year by year, despite the chaos and the danger.
That’s what “soul” life is like. It is scattered, chaotic (in emotional or intellectual highs and lows), sometimes seemingly self-opposing, and very often looks “wrong” by its reactions or consternations. This is where EVERYBODY cracks up, where soul (reactions, feelings, psychology, intellectual confusion, etc.) is often seen as the enemy within my very own being, since it seems such a wayward part of us, and we do not seem to have much of a tight control over it.
If we think that, and we are in Christ, we are incorrect. God came into the whole of us. It is His house, to do with as He pleases, including the soul. Don’t touch it!* It no longer belongs to us (actually never did), but to Him, and He determines its times and expressions, not the world, not the devil, not the circumstances of our lives. None of those things instigate us whatsoever, because we are not reactors to life, but instigators of life. Soul filters the world back into us by the Spirit, and soul filters Spirit-expression back out into the world.
Just like the unseen higher power at work on the Atlanta freeways that keeps it all going miraculously with little loss of life and property, we have that same unseen “higher power” within us, and the chaotic freeway that is soul life, becomes His perfect expression.
So, to conclude, we are Christ in our form, and because of that, that is what our “soul” expresses – the “divine nature” that is within us! The seeming chaos of soul, stressful though it may be, is the crazy highway leading to all our destinations.
As regarding “control,” let the reader answer!
Once again it is the Lord’s doing, and marvelous in our eyes!
*I will give one caveat to this. I do not mean to make light of soul or psychological or medical issues that may require special attention for some people. The Spirit of the Lord, Who often speaks through normal common sense, lets us know the difference. I am not trying to establish a new law of how to deal with problems, but really just to make the point that the Spirit is in charge, and we live in faith according to the Life that works within us in the whole of our humanity.
