Are You Healthy?
By Spencer Clark
Our world is obsessed with being healthy. Many of us monitor our eating habits and seek to maintain an active lifestyle to preserve some measure of health and prolong our physical lives (or, at least, to get the doctor to leave us alone). Yet, we can become deluded into thinking we are healthier than we actually are. We learn to cope with conditions and delay or ignore the treatment we so desperately need. Jesus remarked similarly, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:17).
Jesus was responding to the scribes and Pharisees who criticized him for associating with tax collectors and sinners. He is not saying that the scribes and Pharisees are spiritually healthy and don’t need Him. Rather, he acknowledges their self-perception: they consider themselves “righteous” and supposedly don’t need healing. It’s difficult to treat a patient who denies they are sick.
The irony of this situation is that the scribes and Pharisees needed Jesus just as much as the tax collectors and sinners. But their prideful assertion of their own “health” prevented them from acknowledging this. Why would Jesus waste time trying to treat people who ignored the sound words of the Great Physician?
Even if they were truly healthy, as they claimed, they would realize their ongoing need for the Physician. Health and wellness does not stop with the treatment of a disease or the forgiveness of our sins. Christians are in a constant process of greater sanctification/holiness as we draw nearer to the coming of our Lord.
For us to become healthy, we must acknowledge our illness and seek treatment from the Great Physician. But spiritual health doesn’t end there. It is a life-long process of continual work to sustain and grow closer to the holiness of our God.
Are you “healthy” or sick? Do you realize and acknowledge your own spiritual condition, or do you continue to pridefully deny there is a problem?