When I was reading Younger Next Year, a book about physical health, a particular passage caught my attention. It describes medical doctor Henry S. Lodge’s journey to embracing a new perspective on health care.
I had done what doctors do well in this country, which is to treat people with disease. My patients had had good medical care, but not, I began to think, great health care. For most, their declines, their illnesses, were thirty-year problems of lifestyle, not disease. I, like most doctors in America, had been doing the wrong job well. Modern medicine doesn’t concern itself with lifestyle problems. Doctors don’t treat them, medical schools don’t teach them and insurers don’t pay to solve them. I began to think that this was indefensible.
In other words, this doctor came to recognize that it is a mistake to deal with a disease only when it occurs. Rather, one must address more intentionally the kind of lifestyle that one has—whether it leads to better health or to illness. There is the need to encourage a lifestyle that could prevent any disease from developing in the first place.
His description led me to ponder how his insights are relevant in our approach to spiritual life. Are we also “doing the wrong job well”? There is the tendency to pay more attention to specific actions or failures of sin. We try to “fix” the problem only when we succumb to temptation. How can we recover? Then we try to figure out ways to deal with temptation when it confronts us. But perhaps merely reacting to a failure that has already occurred may not be the best of strategies. What if we develop a lifestyle that establishes in us the ability to resist the temptations before they even appear in our horizon? We do not wait for the temptation to come before we act. Rather, we choose to engage in practices and disciplines that strengthen us against being deceived or overcome by temptations.
The apostle Peter tells us that we have “everything we need for a godly life” so that “you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.” But it’s up to us whether we make use of these God-given resources and strengthen our spirits so that temptation will not have its destructive effect on our spiritual wellbeing. It means developing a disciplined lifestyle that builds the kind of character that “will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 1.3–11 NIV).
The challenge is to do the right job well.
—Keith Y. Jainga