More than medicine

Negative emotions are so rampant. We grow angry, feel insulted, and build resentment. Slowly but surely, grudges fill our hearts and minds. It requires a tremendous amount of emotional energy to keep a grudge going. When we nurse and hold onto grudges, we let bitterness grow within us. Bitterness is like a poison that can impair us physically, mentally and spiritually.

Another powerful negative emotion is guilt. When guilt about what we’ve done threaten to overwhelm us, we need to do something to gain a clear conscience. The apostle Paul stated: “I try with all my strength to always maintain a clear conscience before God and man” (Acts 24:16).

Pride is a big hindrance to getting a clear conscience. Our pride always tells us that we are right and others are wrong. But seldom is the case. 

Sometimes we belittle people. We may not recognize their value and worth. At times we show no concern for other people and their welfare. We may even be party to the exploitation and oppression of the weak. Sometimes, we may be guilty of hatred, ungratefulness, resentment and so forth.

Whatever negativity has taken hold of us, we need to ask forgiveness. “If we confess our sins to him, he can be depended on to forgive us and to cleanse us from every wrong.” (1John 1:9). God is, in fact, waiting for us to approach Him. Similarly, whatever wrongs we have committed against other human beings, we need to ask those persons to forgive us. If we have caused any material damage, we have to make restitution for the same.

I realize, this may sound frightening or difficult. But this is necessary in order to cleanse your conscience. It is important to remember that although God readily forgives us, people may not be so willing. There may be someone who refuses your apology. If this happens, don’t worry; simply concentrate on sincerely and prayerfully doing your part. Leave the rest to the One who can heal all wounds, and melt all hearts. The end result is in God’s hands, not ours. We only need to do our part and leave the rest to Him.

Holding feelings of hurt and bitterness affects our spiritual and physical health. The Bible says: stop being mean, bad tempered and angry. Quarrelling, harsh words, and dislike of others should have no place in your lives. Instead, be kind to each other, tender hearted, forgiving one another, just as God has forgiven you because you belong to Christ (Ephesians 4:31-32).

How can we forgive people? When others do things against us, it is natural to feel offended. We often blame the offender for the problem. But the more we blame others, the more we build anger and dislike against them. Before we know it, we get worked up inside and waste a lot of time and energy.

Our body chemistry often gets upset in that agitated condition, and we become prone to certain kinds of sickness. We unnecessarily invite physical stress when we give in to wrong responses to unpleasant situations. Our muscles, nerves, and body systems are affected. What a price to pay for anger and bitterness!

As Christians, we know that God watches over the affairs of His children. Nothing happens to us that He doesn’t know about or that is out of His control. So what does this mean when we feel offended? Should we suppress our negative feelings when someone wrongs us? No. If you suppress such things, they will not go away; they will just find another outlet, or build up until on one particularly bad day, they explode.

It is much better to try and understand what is happening.

When someone has wronged you, try to find out whether you have contributed to the problem. If you are in the wrong too, the way forward is to take the initiative and do your best to rectify the situation. But let’s assume that you are innocent, that and the other person has wronged you without provocation. How do you forgive in that situation?

When someone has hurt you, especially if that person is 100% in the wrong, you have every reason to feel resentment. But what good will holding anger and bitterness do to you? Such responses only add to the problem, and could possibly cause you emotional or physical stress. Ultimately, you lose.

One way out is to view the offender differently. When we are up in an airplane, even skyscrapers look like matchboxes. The buildings are still tall, but they look tiny because our perspective has changed. You can begin to forgive with a similar change of perspective. Trusting God, you can boldly say that whatever anyone has done against you will be to your own advantage in the long run.

In this way, you can consider the wrongdoers, a tool in God’s hand. Just see the person as someone being used by God to bring blessing on you, even though that individual’s aim may have been to destroy you. If you believe so, you are ultimately going to be blessed through the offender’s action. Therefore there is no need to hold anger or bitterness.

With God’s help, you can turn your bitterness into forgiveness. You can stop being bad-tempered, and angry. You do not know what good may happen to you as a result of someone’s wrongdoings. But you can certainly prevent further harm that will flow from nursing resentment. You can learn how to forgive from the bottom of your heart, how to love the offender, and even how to show him or her, a little kindness.

Be happy when things go wrong

We must do our best to protect ourselves from things that harm us. But we need not be overly concerned. Instead, we need to learn to relax in the sovereignty of God.

I thought I did everything right when I planned a short trip to preach in an evening meeting. I checked the car, started it, and even examined the engine. Satisfied that the car was ready, I went inside for a brief time of prayer. But when I went back to the car, it wouldn’t start. I tried for a few minutes, and it was getting late!

Finally, I had to call a taxi. When it arrived, I discovered that the driver was new to the area. He had just recently started his taxi business after a stint in the army.

Because he was unfamiliar with the roads, he had an assistant with him. As he drove out onto the main road, I thought: “Even a bullock cart can overtake our taxi. He came late and now he is going slow. It’s already time for my speech.” I was tempted to get out of the cab and hire another.

But all I said to the taxi driver was, “Who knows, the one person who is going to listen to my speech may not arrive until we get there”. He looked at me confused, so I went on to explain. “I am going to this place for a meeting. The one person who needs to hear what I have to say and know my God, might be working late somewhere and may get to the meeting only by the time I arrive.”

I told him not to speed just because I was in a hurry. He seemed to relax, and I asked him to tell me about his new business. He told me of his plans for settling his children, renovating his old house, and taking care of other personal matters. Finally, we reached the place, almost an hour late.

I asked the driver to wait for me and straight away went to the dias. Once there, I found that some of the young people had been singing all the songs they knew to keep the audience entertained as they waited for me to arrive. I spoke for about forty-five minutes and went back to the taxi for the trip home. As we drove towards the main road, the driver asked me who that “one person” was. I realized that he was asking about my conversation with him on my way to the meeting. I told him that the person may have been in the crowd.

“I am that one person”, the taxi driver said in a loud voice. “I had the privilege of entering the kingdom of God tonight”. His assistant added, “Two persons entered the kingdom of God tonight, I am the second person.” I told the driver to pull over and park the car on the side of the road for a moment. I wanted them to tell me what they understood from the message I had given.

 “We were listening to you while you were in the taxi”, one of them said. The other one nodded in agreement. It seemed they were observing my reaction to the delay and listening to my tone of voice as we talked. I had every reason to be upset, but God enabled me to talk to them and encourage them even though we were late.

The two men in the taxi heard me speak on that day and in the course of my talk, they met the same Jesus who lives in me. I explained to them the qualities of Christ and the ways for them to grow in Christ. I told them how Christ can strengthen their character and give them the power to react in positive, encouraging ways.

ALL THE PROOF YOU NEED

Questions have played an important part in my life.

I have been asked many different questions by many different people. Some people seek immediate answers. Others hope to learn something from my experiences. A few questioned me simply out of curiosity. My friends often ask me questions are in my area of specialty.

But there was one question that I asked myself for a very long time: “Where does God fit into the system of electronics and nucleus of the atom, or the system of planets and stars and galaxies of the universe?” From this question came my drive to find some kind of proof for the existence of God.

My parents and grandparents brought me up in a godly home. Intense belief in God was expected. We all prayed seriously and participated regularly in spiritual exercises.

Then I became a keen student of science, and suddenly my faith in God was shaken! In my science classes I gained knowledge from lectures. In my lab hours I would experiment to see the proof of my theories. I learned to put my scientific thoughts and theories to the test. Then, I began to feel a need to test my religious beliefs. How could I worship God if I could not prove that He existed?

My parents advised me to read my Bible and pray regularly. But to whom do you pray when you are in doubt? Then I thought, “Suppose there is a God, and I do not pray; perhaps something bad might happen to me. It is best to pray to be on the safe side.” But I knew it was almost intellectual suicide to pray and at the same time deny the existence of God. The best way to pray, therefore, was to say in the beginning. “If after all there is a God, let Him hear.”

I continued praying and reading my Bible every day. One evening I came upon a passage in the Bible: “Unless you are born again, you can never get into the Kingdom of God” (John 3:3). The term “born again” kept coming into my mind, among other things, and I began to concentrate on some math assignments.

But yet the issue of becoming born again kept coming back into my mind-along with various sermons I had heard on this topic in meetings and Sunday School classes, and the advice I received from parents and grandparents! I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I began to wonder if something was wrong with me. Why else would I find it difficult to accept the spiritual reality or God?

The funny thing is that I was right without knowing it. There was something wrong with me: my sins! I was trying to get the approval of my parents, relatives, friends and teachers, that I was leading a clean life.

I was like the pickpocket I had once heard about in a sermon. This pickpocket went to the bus station intending to relieve the travelers of their money. However, once there he found that all of his intended victims were guarding their pockets carefully, and he had no success. So he went home in the evening and said to himself, “At least I did not commit the sin of stealing this day.” True. But he didn’t commit the act of stealing, only because he lacked the opportunity! In his heart, in his intent, he had sinned already.

I, too, had often felt I wasn’t a sinner. After all, I hadn’t really done sinful things. But that night I realized I was a sinner. And I began to see that my inability to believe in God was rooted in my own sins. With this realization came another aspect. I needed someone to take away my guilt feelings.

I remembered learning in Sunday school that Jesus is able to clean up everything because of what He did on the cross. That night I knew I wanted to try Jesus. I decided to subject this offer of forgiveness and cleansing to the test of experience. How wonderful that in my search for proof of God’s existence, the first proof I discovered was the transformation that God produced in my own life. From that point, everything about me began to change.

I wanted to share with my friends what had happened, but I didn’t want anyone to misunderstand me. So I decided to go slow on making any public statement about this transformation.

It wasn’t long, though before I my friends noticed a change in my behavior. I overheard them talking to one another, saying there was something different about me, about my behavior, my attitude, and even the way I talked. I was thrilled! If my friends were seeing a change in me that meant my transformation had been real. After that, I began to share boldly about the entire experiment.

This became another changing point for me, the point at which I began to experience God’s love in my prayer life, my friendships, and attitude towards myself. It was a radical redirection of my motives and interests.

Several years later, I taught classes about the production of nontoxic and short-lived radioisotopes used in medicine. I told my class about the change occurring on a target material bombarded with neutrons in the nuclear reactor. Those who listened to me knew that I actually had first-hand experience with such reactor-produced radioisotopes. They knew that I was telling them something real and tangible. None of them questioned the existence of the radioisotope, because it is real and detectable. I was able to share my experience with confidence.

In the same way, I can also tell about another transformation that is even more lasting and real. The life span of those reactor-produced radioisotopes is small. But when you experience a spiritual transformation, you enter into an eternal relationship with God. This transformation is real, powerful, and never-ending.

Who’s flying the plane?

One morning, as I was having breakfast in a hotel room, the receptionist called to let me know there was a man waiting in the lobby.

I did not expect anyone that morning, since my host already had made all arrangements for my ride to the airport. The receptionist connected me to the visitor using the in-house telephone.

“I came to thank you for your help,” he told me in a grateful voice.

“What for?” I was curious.

“For saving my life!” he said, surprising me. “I was in your audience last night. I thought you were talking about myself in your speech. Thank you for helping me!”

Now I was even more curious! When he asked me to pray with him, I invited him to come up to my room.

While I waited for him, I thought over the previous night. I had spoken at a dinner meeting arranged by some friends who were interested in spiritual things. They had invited some of their colleagues, and they had asked me to speak to the group.

I talked on our relationship with God. I explained how our relationships are affected due to the damage caused by sin and that man was made in the image of God; but due to man’s sin, his image was defaced. Of course, the good news is that our defaced images can be restored in Jesus Christ. And when our relationship with God is restored, other relationships follow-relationships with others, in the sociological dimension, relationships with ourselves, in the psychological dimension and even our relationship with the environment, in the ecological dimension. We can demonstrate this restoration by subjecting our beliefs to the test of experience. This was what I shared with the group.

When my visitor arrived, I showed him to a seat. He began to talk immediately: “Several times I have thought of attempting suicide, but then I thought of others, it prevented me from doing it.” He went on to describe his strained relationships at home and at work.

He told me that he reached the point where he couldn’t even stand the sight of other people talking when he was around them, because he always assumed they were talking about him. He said he almost became psychotic. He did not want to live, and was waiting for an opportunity to take his life. This was disturbing: it became more so when he informed me that he was a commercial airline pilot. He hinted that he had even attempted suicide.

“Then,” he said, a smile lighting up his face, “I heard you speak. And now everything has changed! I do not want to die; I only want to live. And I know God will help me to do so, and He will help restore me and my relationships.”

After we prayed together and he left, I began to think of people like this man in whose hands we place our lives and safety. I was grateful that God had used me to help this man. God also helped me see that when we open ourselves to be used by Him, we may well be helping many other people, too. In this case, those who could have been passengers in an airplane flown by a troubled and suicidal person!