I don't think that it's so much what we do as it is the kind of people that we become.
So today I want to talk about how to have a maximum impact life.
How to have a life that God can bless, God can use, God can empower and make a difference
in your world.
Whether you're someone who is working in a laboring job in construction or maybe as a
mechanic or maybe as a lawyer or a doctor, whatever your field, that God wants your life
to have an impact.
And I want us to look at 1 Thessalonians 5.23, 1 Thessalonians 5.23 is one of those unique
verses in the Bible.
There's probably only probably seven or eight quite like it where the writer, in this case
Paul is talking about the power that comes through being synergized with God mentally,
emotionally, relationally, and even spiritually.
So here's what 1 Thessalonians 5.23 says.
Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely.
And may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
Sanctify means to be set apart.
So Paul is saying at the end of his letter to the Thessalonians, my prayer for you, my
hope for you is that you would be set apart completely and that your whole spirit, soul,
and body would be preserved blameless.
So this to me reminds me so much of Jesus saying the greatest commandment is to love
me with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
That's in Mark 12.
Because God's given us our heart, God's given us our soul, which is our personality and
our emotions.
God has given us our mind and God has given us our spirit.
And he's also given us a body to encase all of that.
We have tended in the evangelical church over the last few hundred years to really
kind of make kind of a Greek looking church.
And what I mean by that is that there's kind of this dualism of body and spirit that we
hear from the pulpits.
I mean, how many times have you actually heard a sermon about staying in shape, working out,
getting out on the sun, taking good vitamins and supplements for your body?
How many sermons have you heard on becoming mentally proficient and working on your mental
acumen and your IQ?
How many sermons have you heard on EQ, about your emotional quotient, about relating to
people?
It seems like what we've done is kind of a modern version of Gnosticism.
And if you don't know what Gnosticism is, it's basically the idea of the separation
of matter and the spirit, and that matter's bad, that matter's not good, that it has very
little consequence in the spiritual realm, and that everything's about the spirit.
Some even said in Gnosticism in the early first few centuries that Jesus was not really
physically even here.
It was just an apparition of his spirit that we saw, but he wasn't physically here, which
goes completely against the resurrection.
In other words, Jesus literally was physically crucified on a cross and then physically rose
from the grave.
So Gnosticism started to get some momentum in the first few centuries of the church because
there wasn't any clear doctrine yet.
The scriptures were being written in letter form, but the canon, the combination of all
the writings of scripture had not been decided yet to form what would later become the New
Testament.
So there were a number of heresies that were popping up at that time because the church
was still sort of codifying what they believed.
And with the council at Nicaea, there was the beginnings of putting creedal statements
as well as a creedal church together based on the New Testament books that we have today.
What I'm thinking about in communication today is the fact that we've been commanded by God
to live with our whole spirit, soul, and body.
And I'm going to show you this diagram.
On this diagram, you can see with these concentric circles what makes up who you are.
If you look at the middle where the concentric circles all come together, that's who you
are.
You are part mental, part emotional, and relational, and spiritual, and physical, and all those
make up who you are.
And so if any one of those areas of your life is out of kilter with the kingdom of God,
out of kilter in health, it's going to impact all of you.
the others. So just like the four wheels on a car, you can't do very well if one of your
tires is flat. You're going to kind of hobble along. I think that's true in all of our lives.
If you are constantly, let's just take for example, eating junk food, you go out and eat junk food
or tons and tons of processed sugar, you're going to get headaches. And when you get headaches,
it's going to affect your Bible reading. When you're walking with headaches, it's going to
affect you emotionally and relationally. If you jump off a bridge and break a leg,
a broken leg is going to affect all the other areas. By the same token, if you go through a
time in your life of rejecting God and being in rebellion to God, that's the spiritual circle,
that's the spiritual realm of your life. It's going to start affecting your relationships.
That lack of faith in God, that lack of belief in the kingdom of God is going to affect you
in all the other areas. So what I'm advocating right now is that you be healthy and you walk
in kingdom alignment with the Lord and with his kingdom in all four of these areas of your life.
So I'm going to be talking about what this is all about. So I think alignment to the design,
aligned to the design is another way to say this, that if you have a car or vehicle,
you go in for an alignment. Because if you don't, then the treads on your tires are going to wear
thin on particular sides of the car and the front and the back of the car. And so we need alignment.
Well, all of us need that. You know, I go to a chiropractor weekly because I need alignment
on my spine. I need alignment on the center part of my body because that's where all the nerves
go out. That's where the emotions are affected. That's where chemicals and toxins are released
according to whether I'm in adjustment or not. So we get alignment. So another way to think of this
is this is about having the maximum impact by being aligned to God's design for your life,
mentally, physically, emotionally, relationally, spiritually. So here's my thesis. Here's my
thesis today. To have a maximum impact life, we must line up with God's purposes, spiritually,
emotionally, mentally, relationally, and physically. You will become healthier,
more vibrant, and more resilient in hard times if you do this. I challenge you, men and women,
that God wants you to care about all these different areas of your life. And that then
gives you the opportunity to have maximum impact. I've trained with and watched the coaching of
three of my sons in the arena of baseball. In baseball, we talk about being a five-tool player.
And there's these five areas that major league and pro scouts look at in determining a particular
baseball player's potential. And if they see four out of the five, they're pretty interested in that
guy. If they see three out of five less interested, two out of five less interested, et cetera. Well,
I'm talking about four areas of our life, maybe even five areas of our life, that if we will
train ourselves and build habits in those areas of our life, we can have a maximum impact. And so
that's what these circles show. These circles show that. So I want to begin with how do we get sick?
So I'm going to start first of all with sickness because I think this has spiritual implications
too. So here's the caveat. I'm not a health professional. I'm a doctor. I'm Dr. Steve Holt,
but that's a doctor of divinity, not a doctor, medical doctor. Anything that I say here, you
should take to your medical practitioner if you have questions, or you can certainly ask people
you know, but don't do anything that I'm telling you or explaining that I do necessarily based on
me. I'm not a medical practitioner, but over the past 150 years, medical science, health science
has really, really been challenged by the knowledge that we have in the research of science
related to the neurochemicals, the vitamins, the enzymes that make up who we are. And so there's
become, there's more than just two trains of thought, but I'm going to give two trains of
thought to simplify the whole thing. And I think we could argue, I think I could argue that under
these two particular views of how to stay healthy physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually,
relationally, that they fall into two camps. So the first one, and the one that I advocate
are is what I'm gonna call the immune strong healing movement. The immune
strong healing movement. That if we drink clean water, we eat God-made food, organic
food, get the needed rest that we should have, staying in a strong emotional and
spiritual support system, most of the time your body will heal itself. In other
words, most of the time you will be strong. You will be healthy. You'll
have the possibility of having a high-impact life. So that's strengthening
our immune system. That approach is the approach we took during COVID in 2020 and
2021 at our church and in our community here at Colorado Springs. And we were able
to see 3,000 people healed of COVID. We lost no one to death. We didn't wear a
mask. We continued to have fellowship and relationships with everybody that we
were around. We did not follow the rules that the state and even health care gave
us. And we were a super healthy church. We still are today. I would argue we're one
of the healthiest churches in America because of what we, the protocol that
we've developed at the road here at the church. But here's what the bottom line
was for us. And this is the bottom line as I start this series for you, is God
wants you to have a strong immune system. And that strong immune system is through
doing healthy things, eating healthy things, having healthy relationships, and
building up the immune system emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually,
relationally in your life. So that's the first line of defense as I would see it.
The second, which has become very popular since around 1910, it was starting to, at
the turn of the century, there was beginning to be some scientific research
to support this idea of what I'm going to call the pathogen attack health movement.
Pathogen attack health. These are my terms. The idea that pathogen being
a pathogen is a term in reference to bacteria, germs, or other microorganisms
that have the potential to induce disease. Into this arena came a man named
John D. Rockefeller and the rise of oil-based pharmaceuticals. It was a shift
from rest and eating and drinking better, utilizing herbs and plants to take
medicines, pharmaceuticals, and it became a big business. So John D. Rockefeller,
who's most famous for being the founder and CEO of Standard Oil, began to realize
that there was a lot of money to be made by taking oil-based pharmaceuticals and
creating those to block different pathogens that people had. As John D.
Rockefeller got involved, he began to use petroleum to create pharmaceuticals and
oil-based medicines. He gradually took control of 90% of all the oil refineries
through Standard Oil, and beginning in 1910, working with Abraham Flexner, began
research to promote his petrochemical medicines. And this was the birth of Big
Pharma. So this is how pharmaceuticals began to enter into our medical schools.
So the Flexner report, which I'm not going to go into a ton of detail here,
I've done that on my blogs, but the Flexner report that came out subsequently
convinced Congress also such that all the medical schools and all of the
doctors, to get their licensing, had to start working with the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Carnegie Institute of Education to subsequently begin pushing
pharmaceuticals. So that was the beginning of pharmaceuticals, and with that was the
pushing out of all holistic medicine, plant-based medicine, which had
characterized at least half of the medical schools and at least half of the
doctors up to that time. Those are the two avenues that we have today. We have a
petrochemical, pharmaceutical, attack the pathogen view, which by the way, that's
not all bad. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that that's one
particular version of, and this would be where most, probably 90% of all your
medicine in America, the Western Hemisphere, goes. And then there's the
immune strong movement of healing, and that's what I'm advocating because I
believe it has implications even spiritual and emotionally. In other words,
it's not so much attacking things in our lives, it's more about building up the
good things in your life, building up the kingdom of God in your life.
Next episode we'll take you to the next step of understanding how to do that in our lives.