There are of course many different kinds of symptoms when our bodies are not healthy. Doctors spend years studying these different symptoms and methodologies to suppress or manage them with drugs or surgery. But as Raymond Francis points out in his book, “Never be sick again”, there is basically only one kind of disease – and that is – the malfunction of cells in our body. When enough cells misfunction, one of the body's complex systems will start to perform poorly. Pain and/or fatigue will alert us to the presence of the problem, but we being such clever people, know many ways to shut down pain or drown out fatigue without addressing the root of the problem. With cells malfunctioning and systems breaking down more and more, terrible sicknesses can result.
Just so in the Body of Christ. We can see thousands of defects in the way it is functioning if we look closely, and lots of ways are proposed to help “treat these”. Yet until healthy functioning cells become normative in the Body of Christ, things will not work as intended. All the cells in the Body of Christ must be relationally connected and work together according to the Designer's plan. Otherwise the parts of the Body that need supply will not get it. Cells all have certain core functions, but they have specialised functions also. Brain cells work different to muscle cells. We have to accept that the Body of Christ needs different kinds of cells in order to be what it ought to be, in reproducing the ministry of Jesus Christ on the earth today. These different kinds of cells need to be connected rightly to other cells, and not treated as aliens to be suppressed, if the plan and purpose of God for the Body is to be fulfilled. Because cells are to have different functions, we cannot rely exclusively on “one size fits all” programmes – prepackaged Christian branded formulas to bring us to maturity and completeness in Jesus Christ. Brands such as “Alpha”, “Purpose Driven”, “G12” and so on contain valuable insights and philosophies which have value but cannot bring us all the way to maturity in Jesus Christ. A never ending cycle of infant food cannot equip us for the fullness of God's purposes for our lives.
Raymond Francis also points out in his book that there are two causes for the “one disease”of cell malfunction. Put simply, these are “inadequate nutrition” and “excess toxicity”. The majority of Christian adults in the Western world are sick today with some kind of chronic disease or other for reasons which are natural as well as spiritual. Can we really expect to have healthy bodies without having healthy cells? And can we expect to have healthy cells if the special nutrients the cells need are not delivered? Many of us deliver “calories” to our bodies which lack sufficient quantities of the required minerals, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins and so on. We poison ourselves with sugar and commerical foods loaded with toxins and then wonder why we feel so bad. Would we ask ourselves the same questions if we were continually abusing ourselves with nicotene, alcohol or other substances of abuse? As Christians, hopefully we avoid these latter things but God is calling us to look after our bo
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