Beware! A Satanic device is to call a physical problem, a spiritual problem

Dr. David Martyn Lloyd Jones

First let us look at the mistake of regarding the physical or psychological as spiritual.  Sometimes Christian people are in great trouble because they mistake what is nothing but a purely physical condition for a spiritual condition. 
Remember, we are body, soul and spirit.  Christians may be taken ill with some diseased condition and may not even be aware of it.  All that they know is that they do not feel as they used to feel.



  A kind of lethargy overtakes them, they do not enjoy reading the Bible as they used to do, they cannot pray as they used to do, they are in a depressed condition.  They cannot understand themselves, and the devil comes to them and suggest that it is because they are slipping in a spiritual sense.
 
 
 


 Perhaps he even raises the question as to whether they have ever been spiritual at all, and thus torments them and worries them and agitates them.  They are not able to concentrate as they did formerly, and they feel that they cannot be as active as they used to be.  The devil comes in and suggests that God is somehow displeased with them, that they are being punished, and so on.  So they find themselves in an agony of soul. 


An example will help.I remember on one occasion, some twenty five year ago, receiving a letter from a lady, asking me to try to help her, and to listen to her story.  She said that she had been experiencing the kind of thing that I have been describing--this kind of lethargy, her interest  not as it once was, inability to do things.  She was in spiritual agony feeling that things had gone seriously wrong. She had heard of a certain well-known preacher who claimed to be an expert in matters psychological and spiritual, and she had written to him; and for many months he had been treating her by correspondence.  

But the lady, far from getting better, was getting worse.  

 

  When I met her one glance told me that she was suffering from pernicious anemia.  As the result of her anemia she had lost her energy and her power of concentration.  A person cannot have pernicious anemia and still feel bright and energetic and keen and enthusiastic.  Now if you try to help a Christian who is suffering from pernicious anemia. and not being medically treated for it, by merely telling her to pull herself together and to try to think beautiful and positive thoughts, not only are you not helping her, you are being cruel to her, you are aggravating the problem.  All she needed of course, was the recognized treatment for pernicious anemia; and she made a complete recovery in every way.  



 That is an example of confusion as between the physical and the spiritual, and regarding something that is essentially a physical condition and problem as if it were a spiritual problem.  Ignorance underlies this confusion, but the devil take advantage, (Lloyd Jones, D. Martyn, The Christian Warfare, Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, c. 1976, pp.228,229).




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