"How then should we live"?

We are not our own, we have been brought with a price. Thus the admonition: "Glorify God in your body and in your spirit which are God’s." Paul was a very practical man, not so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly use. He advised us how to run the Christian race successfully.

"Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self control on all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we are imperishable. Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air; but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others, I myself should be disqualified." The same apostle put self control as the culminating grace in Christian life. See Galatians 5:23.

One in every five people in the world suffers from disease at a given time. Billions more are not actually sick but are infected with potential ailments. In the Western world, three out of every four people die of heart disease or cancer. While genetics play an important role in health and disease, over 90 percent of us were born healthy, and it is our own lifestyle that usually determines our usefulness and physical and mental and spiritual wellbeing. There are natural laws to learn and to keep. Christ refused to cast himself down from the temple at the admonition of the tempter, and we must refuse to suicide by foolish and ignorant lifestyle practices. Remembering that at least 70 percent of diseases are diseases of choice, it is easy to understand the words of a former Surgeon General of the United States C. Everett Koop: "You, the individual, can do more for your own health and wellbeing than any doctor, any hospital and drug, any exotic medical advice."

The acknowledged fact that all the medical system can do for anyone of us contributes an average of 10 percent towards our health is in itself an inspiring truth. It frees the learner from the bondage of irresponsibility, and it demands an exacting enquiry into the nature of one’s habits. To realise that what we don’t know can hurt us, even kill us, brings the healthy hunger for that knowledge which is the condition of quality life. There is a thirty year difference potentially between a good and a bad lifestyle. Linked with the fact that health is that which we must have to do what we want to do, it guarantees (for any sane person) the type of personal reformation which can be like the rising of the sun.

One study that has influenced many in recent years is that of Doctors Breslow and Berkman. It was published by the Oxford University Press some years back under the title Health and Ways of Living; the Alameda County Study. This work showed the impact of well-known risk factors on health -- smoking, obesity, lack of exercise, alcohol abuse, breakfast omission, eating between meals, and lack of sleep. It demonstrated that health is not so much dependent upon professional medical care as upon daily habits. The famous Framingham research has shown conclusively that the main causes of death are smoking, hypertension, elevated serum cholesterol, obesity, lack of exercise, stress and diabetes. Let us cherish the words of our Lord: "I have come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

In simple terms, what is required of us as stewards of life and health? Look at your reflection in a full length mirror for the clue. First we notice the head. What we think is just as important as how we eat and drink. The Bible gives us much counsel here. It tells us for example in Philippians chapter 4 we should be anxious about nothing, prayerful about everything, and thankful for anything. It underlines the fact that "a merry heart does good like a medicine." It reminds us that passion and anger and fear bring sickness. The book of Proverbs, time and again, gives such warnings.

Come now to the chest. The air we breath is even more important then the food we eat. If we spend hours everyday in a polluted environment it will of necessity take its toll.

Next we notice our stomachs. Many of the world’s best physicians have declared that 90 percent of diseases grow out of our wrong habits of eating and drinking. We are what we eat, and what we eat and drink today walks and talks tomorrow. All we know about nutrition can be summed up in a sentence: eat fresh, whole foods, chiefly of vegetable origin. We need fresh foods, for these contain vitamin C, and the human animal can not manufacture its own vitamin C, unlike many other organisms. We need whole food because it is the refining industry which has robbed millions of vibrant health. "What God has joined together let not man put us under" is a principle that applies to many things besides marriage. The Bible does not require us to be vegetarians, but there is overwhelming scientific evidence that the nearer we can get to the diet of Eden, the better for most of us.

We pass from the head, the chest, the stomach, to the legs. Now we are reminded that the body has over six hundred muscles, and we were meant to use them regularly. Walking is probably better then all the medicines that doctors can prescribe for most of us. Remember, "they never bury anything that moves." Waters that are still become stagnant. Exercise, when linked with proper diet, is nature’s chief preventative of disease. In earlier centuries, men had to sweat to earn their daily bread. Today we live a sedentary existence and pay a terrible price for our luxuries and conveniences. We read in Scripture of our Lord’s walk with his disciples from Jerusalem to Samaria in a morning, Paul’s trek from Troas to Assos, and Elijah’s jog after the dramatic test at Carmel.

Above all, the Christian will remember that the possession of a clear conscience, and freedom from guilt invigorates every day’s existence. When William Tyndale declared that the "Gospel is good, glad and merry tidings, that makes the heart to sing and the feet to dance": he was reminding us all that the best news ever is good for the body as well as the soul.

Dr Desmond Ford
Ph.D (Michigan State University, USA)
Ph.D (Manchester University, England)