The Missionary and His Health — Bud Elford

Isn't that a great chorus? Zezus kenia duhum hesahah. You should hear some of the Chippewans sing that. That's a blessing. Do you know why the Lord blesses you and titillates your emotions? It isn't that those emotions are a valid basis to stand on to keep the world behind you and the cross before you, but the blessings of your emotions and the thrilling of your bodily senses are to enable you and help you and to crystallize in your thinking your decision to stand upon truth and principle that will be a basis to keep the world behind you and the cross before you.

If we keep the emotions that God has given us in the right perspective, they'll always be a blessing. They'll be like icing on top of a cake. But if we take them and stand on them and use them as a basis, then you won't stand.

We can feel how wonderful, just keep the world behind us and the cross before us. But if that's all we have to go on, it'll run out, just like you can't live on icing. But the principles and the truths of God, when we make our choice to stand on them and then we let the emotions give us the joy and the hallelujah, then we will with joy keep the world behind us and the cross before us.

The Missionary and His Spiritual Health

This morning the title of our study is The Missionary and His Health. Now I don't really intend to talk about getting healed, although we will touch on that. The lecture is more along the line of keeping healthy.

From the spiritual standpoint, now I'm not a nurse like Joanne, and I really don't even know what a calorie is, you know that? I don't know, I've never seen one, I don't think. I wouldn't know one if I saw one.

But I do know when I enjoy my food, and when somebody says how many calories it has, all I know is how it tastes and how it feels. But I'm not going to be talking about the nutritious value of food, different foods, and how we should arrange our diet, but I'm going to talk about what a missionary can do from a spiritual standpoint to keep healthy on the field.

The Lord's Supper and Discerning the Body

I want to read you the scripture this morning in 1 Corinthians 11, verse 23 to verse 31. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you, or broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim or evangelize the Lord's death until he comes. Whoever therefore eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and the blood of the Lord.

Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and sick, and some have already died.

Shall we have a word of prayer? Our Father, as we turn our minds to what your idea is about keeping our bodies in a sinful world where men are defiling their bodies, we ask for your help. We are ordinary human beings, and we ask to quicken our mental processes and the ability to make decisions and choices that are going to keep us going through the years of service that you have given us.

Bless each one here. Draw near unto us with thy spirit. For Jesus' sake, amen. I want to read you the lesson this morning. Once there was a little old man and a little old woman, and they lived in a little old house.

The Gingerbread Boy and the Danger of Self-Reliance

And the old woman made gingerbread cakes. One day she made a cake in the shape of a boy. She put it in the oven to bake. When she opened the oven door, out jumped the gingerbread boy, and he ran away.

The old man ran after him, but he couldn't catch him. The gingerbread boy met a big man on the road. He said, I have run away from that little old man and little old woman, and I can run away from you too.

The big man ran after him, but he couldn't catch him. The gingerbread boy met a cow, and he said, I have run away from the little old man and the big man, and I can run away from you too. Yes, I can. And the cow ran after him, but she couldn't catch him.

Soon the gingerbread boy met a dog. He said, I've run away from that little old woman, from that big man, and from a cow. And I can run away from you too. Yes, I can. Then the dog ran after him, and the dog ran very fast, and the dog caught the gingerbread boy.

And he began to eat him. And the gingerbread boy said, Oh dear, my legs are gone. Oh dear, my arms are gone. Oh dear, my body's gone. Oh dear, I'm all gone. And the gingerbread boy never spoke again. The first mistake the gingerbread boy made was to remember, was to forget that he was made out of edible material.

Something that could be consumed. The second mistake he made was to run away from his maker in rebellion. The third mistake he made was to glory in his own strength and to stand on that strength alone.

And the last mistake he made was to think he could run away and overcome in his own strength all things all the time. And a logical scripture that would really fit this story of the gingerbread boy would be, beware of dogs.

The Bible says that the dust is the serpent's meat. And it also says, he knoweth our frame and he remembers that we are dust. And it also says, the devil goes around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

And Satan is out to devour your body. To a place where you will cry someday on some field, Oh dear, my hands are gone. I have misused my body to such a degree and neglected it that I have no hands left to serve Jesus Christ.

My legs are gone. My body is gone. I'm all gone. Without a body, you are little use to God in the world. You do not stay in the world. The body is an instrument for interpreting heavenly truth into readable actions that souls around you can read.

I am little use to God dead. I'm no use to God dead and I'm little use to God sick as a missionary. I'm not talking about those stalwart souls that God uses in affliction. I'm talking about the ordinary missionary that does need a fairly healthy body.

We have an earthen vessel in which we live. And that earthen vessel is intended in God's plan to be the repository of heavenly treasure. I have another verse of scripture that I want to read to you in 1 Corinthians chapter 6.

The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord. And the Lord for the body. And verse 15. Do you not know that your bodies are the members of Christ? Now, you hear sometimes preached about the invisible church in the world.

And really, I don't know what they're talking about because the Bible says that it's our bodies that are the members of Christ. Not our souls or our spirits, but our bodies. We comprise Christ's body in the world today.

And it's visible. And there really isn't an invisible church other than that which is, I suppose, in the heavenlies doing warfare with the devil. But that which is on the earth is a visible, as many visible members of Christ's body, a very physical thing.

And somebody says you can get too spiritual minded so you're no earthly good. And the other way around, you can get so earthly minded that you're no heavenly good. And we have to remember that the Bible puts a great deal of emphasis and a lot of weight on our human bodies.

It's through these bodies that we do the work of God on the earth. So remember that it's your bodies that are members of Christ. These things that God has given us. Point one, keeping yourself healthy.

The Lord as the Strength of the Body

I'm not talking about getting healed, although I do believe in healing. I believe the Lord heals. I've experienced His healing. My wife and I have both. And I have, from time to time, I've experienced His quickening.

But I'm talking about the spiritual principles involved with staying healthy and being able to do what is God's will for you to do. I think that God intends to give me enough strength to do His will. And anything less than that, I believe, is of the devil.

And I'll reject it. Keeping yourself healthy. First of all, Psalm 73, 26, The Lord is the strength of my heart. We need that strength. You know, you want to remember, back in my introduction, I said that you are dust.

And you know, when the Bible says the devil, the dust is the serpent's meat, he can consume you. That's just what he eats. He consumes us in our bodies. He'll take you and use some appetite to consume you.

Because dust shall be the serpent's meat. And if you don't believe you're dust, all you have to do is visit a cemetery or a mausoleum. Why, even the world believes they're dust. Haven't you heard that truck driver's prayer that they sing?

I don't know, maybe they don't sing it in the States. They do in Canada. Truck driver's prayer that says, And Lord, I ask you once again, before I turn to dust, let me run the wheels right off a Greyhound bus.

But the world, they know they go to dust. They even have it in their ceremonies. And so remember that you can be devoured. You can be eaten up. And so you need to return to your Maker and not exult in your own strength.

And I'll say something about that later. The Lord is the strength of my heart. And that means both spiritual and physical. I thought I had heart trouble all the time I was in my 30s on the mission field.

And I was afraid I was going to die young. And it was such a waste. But I just found out that I was drinking too much coffee. And there's some things like that you have to take into account too. Thirteen cups a day is too many.

The first thing I want to say after remembering that the Lord is the strength of your heart, He is the one that's made your body and sustains your body, is that you need to give your body back to Him.

Romans 12, 1 and 6, 13. Romans 12, 1 says, present your body a living sacrifice. You see, in 1 Corinthians 13, 27, our text, our scripture for today, it says that our body is for the Lord. The Lord was for our body.

It says in chapter 6 and verse 13 that our body is for the Lord. You do not own yourself. The body that you have does not belong to you. It's loaned to you. It's given to you for a certain brief period on this earth.

And you need to recognize that. You need to recognize as a Christian, being blood-bought, you do not have the right to do with your body what you want to do with it. And that means either enjoying to excess the appetites of the body or using your mental processes of the brain to enjoy fantasies that you do not have that right.

And when you do that, you transgress the primal law of the body. The body is for the Lord. It's not meant for immorality. He's given us some wonderful appetites to enjoy but not to misuse. All right. Now, in John 6, 52.

John 6, 52, I would like to read to you. Jesus says something amazing here. The Jews were disputed among themselves. How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Now, here's another statement of eating of flesh.

I referred to the fact that your flesh could be consumed by the devil. And you see it in the world. If you have anything to do with people who have misused their bodies, whether an alcoholic or a whoremonger or a person who has consumed it with drugs, you'll see it can be consumed.

But here on the other side of the coin, on the good side, is the part where Jesus said that we should eat his flesh. We should partake of him. Now, that, I would like to state, is not simply just a spiritual thing.

It is spiritual. But there is a way in which we can partake of the health of Jesus Christ. We can use his body for our bodies. Before I say that, I want to go back to the statement I said about the body being given to you.

God has prepared a body. Jesus said that a body thou hast prepared for me. If he prepared Jesus the kind of a body that he wanted Jesus to use in the days when he was on the earth, the body that you're sitting in right now is the one he prepared for you.

He suited it for your spirit. He suited it for your soul. He suited it for you to live in. Now, therefore, it becomes wrong for you to complain about the kind of a body God has given you. The first thing you need to do is thank him for your body.

I thank you for the kind of body you gave me. Instead of saying, oh boy, I wish my hair was curly. And I wish it was a different color. And look at the color of my eyes. And you know, I really don't have the kind of a figure I wished I had.

But rather than that, say, thank you, Lord, for the kind of body you've given me. Now I want to use it to do the kind of work you had in mind when you gave me this kind of a body. Now, he'll give you the kind of a body that will suit even the mission field that you're going to.

When I was in Bible school, I thought, like some of you freshmen did, that as soon as I got into Bible school, I should know the mission field I'm going to go to, the mission board I'm going to go onto, and start learning the language of that field right away.

Well, Joanne pointed out that there is that waiting period in between. And you don't always know that. But, when I was in Bible school with my wife, first of all I was going to India, and then I was going to China, and of course I was going to every mission field that every missionary described when they came.

And that was all right. I got to learn a lot about a lot of different mission fields. And then, towards the end, we applied to and were accepted by the Unevangelized Field Mission to go to New Guinea.

And I'd read a lot about New Guinea and knew a lot of missionaries there. And then we found out New Guinea was closed to North American missionaries. They were just open to Dutch and to Australians, unless you were with a denomination like the Christian Missionary Alliance, in which at that time I'd have had to have taken extra years of schooling before I could join the Alliance.

So, that didn't seem practical. So, while we were waiting, I took linguistics, and during the same week, the Lord impressed upon my mind, through missionaries from Alaska, and upon my wife's mind through a radio broadcast, that we should go to the North, to the Indians.

And we applied to the Northern Canada Evangelical Mission, were accepted the next year, and after we were accepted, then the Unevangelized Field Mission wrote and said the door was open, and we thanked the Lord how He worked, just right in time.

But, we found out, after we'd been in the North for a number of years, that my wife's body had been so constructed that she can't perspire. And she can't stand heat. So that, if she's in a warm climate and a humid climate, she just gets redder and redder and redder, till I have to find a bathtub someplace, or a lake, and put her in and cool her off.

And, I've had, on furlough, through the United States, when it gets very warm here in the summer, I've had to stop beside the road and lay her down under a tree, until she cooled off. Or, stopped and got some paper towels that we could soak and put artificial perspiration on.

Because the Lord had given her a body that really suits the North. And she just is at home up there. So, you don't know what God has in mind for you, so today, why don't you begin by thanking Him and being grateful for the kind of a body He's given, because nobody else has got a body just like yours.

Individual it is, like a snowflake. And isn't that wonderful? You can say, well, be what I am, nobody else is just like me. Nobody. And nobody has a body just like my body. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of you have not been grateful for the kind of a body you had.

Wouldn't it be nice if I was six feet one inch tall and was broad-shouldered and narrow at the hip and strong of muscle and wavy hair? No, you don't. You know, there's going to be a day coming, in glory, when you can then transform your body into just what kind of a body you want.

Jesus could do it with His new body. And there's going to be some great hairdos in heaven, I suppose. But begin down here by being grateful for that body. That's the starting place of having a body that you can keep healthy.

I don't think the Lord is going to be happy with blessing you if you're always complaining about your body. So let's be grateful for the body He's given us. Then, in Romans 8 and 11, the Bible says that the Spirit will quicken your mortal body.

Now, that may have a final reference to resurrection. But it certainly does have a very present reference to the help you need. Jessie Penn Lewis, I hope you've read some of her writings. You have them here, particularly on the line of Christian warfare and deeper life and victory and joy.

She knew what it was to have the Spirit of God quicken her mortal body every day. She said, my body is no better than a corpse. She only had half a lung towards the end of her life. And yet with that half a lung, quickened and helped by the Holy Spirit, she could mount the steps of great platforms and speak to large gatherings of people, quickened in her mortal body.

And particularly when you get older, you'll know the quickening of God in your body. So He can quicken your mortal body. This body that He has prepared for you. Read Hebrews 10 and 5 and see that, hey, Jesus gave you that body.

He loaned it to you and expects you to use it. And you can take that body, like Jesus did, to do His will. A body has thou prepared for me? And Jesus said, lo, I come to do thy will. And you can take that body all over this world to do His will.

And you can say every time you come to a new situation, lo, I come to do thy will, O God, with this body that you have given me. Now, I would like to point out a mistake that we make sometimes in regards to our human body.

Rejecting Trust in Natural Health

And the mistake is this. Trusting in your natural health. You see, you're young and your blood is flowing strong and you've got lots of energy and you say, well, I'll be a missionary. And you go to the mission field and you get out there and the first thing you know, you're flat on your back with some disease, some germ, some little bug.

And you wonder, why is it, Lord, that you let me get sick when I'm out here doing your will? And there's been hundreds of missionaries whose bodies have been planted in foreign sods because they've transgressed a simple rule in the scripture that you cannot trust in anything that came from Adam.

You see, we deny our self-life because the self-life came from Adam. And we deny many of the things in the spirit because they came from Adam. But we have forgotten that our bodies came from Adam too.

And your body that you are sitting in this morning, the health that you have and the very molecules that make up your body came from your parents and they came back till you got to Adam. And so it's necessary that you have yourself a little prayer meeting and say, Lord, I not only am I going to trust in myself, I'm not going to trust in my natural health.

I can remember the time my wife and I had a prayer meeting and we renounced, not only we renounced the gods of our fathers and the gods of our mothers because things that are not physical are not inherited and I don't have to take sins and fears and nervous conditions that come from my parents.

That represents the gods of your fathers and you can renounce them and be free of them. But then we found that we couldn't trust in health that came from our parents because the body is weakened through sin and it's about to die.

So we had a prayer meeting in which we renounced the health of Adam, the normal health of the body that came through our parents and we exchanged it for his health, the healthy body of Jesus Christ that was never sick.

And it says here that this man can give us his flesh to eat. And that's what that part in the communion service is all about where he says his body was broken for you. The Lord is for the body and the body for the Lord.

The blood is to cleanse us, but his body was broken for that particular physical need that we have day by day to stay healthy. So start claiming his body for your body. This became very specific in our case.

My wife had to leave the mission field in our second station because she had sugar diabetes. And the doctor said, you'll have to leave the field. We said, Lord, we don't want to leave the field. We don't think you want to leave the field.

So while we were out there in the bush, we said, you must have something in the atonement for our bodies. So we read this, that his body was broken for you. And it was broken, not that it was broken up in pieces physically, but it was dispersed and broken so that you could take part of his body for part of your body.

So there wasn't anybody to tell us we shouldn't do this. So we had a prayer meeting and we started taking the Lord's pancreas for my wife's pancreas. And we said, we're just going to make an exchange here because if your body was broken for us, this is the part we need out of your body at the moment.

And we started standing on that. And the next time we went home on furlough and when she went for her checkup, there wasn't anything wrong with her. Now she still watches her diet and is careful. There's always a little steak left in to remember from when she came.

But you can exchange that. A .B. Simpson learned that truth. He could hardly prepare two messages for Sunday in his weakened condition before he learned the truth of the exchanged body of the Lord Jesus.

And you're going to find a body that has weaknesses in it. Maybe you feel strong now, but you get out in the Lord's work and the devil will devour natural health. Borden of Yale went to China and he was a wonderful Christian.

He loved the Lord. He exuded love. But he went out there, he said, and one of his statements were, I'm strong, I have a healthy body, I'm going to the mission field. And he went out there and within a year he was dead.

You can't trust in natural health. The arm of flesh will fail you. You dare not trust your own. That's what the gingerbread boy did, didn't he? He trusted in his strength and ran. I can outrun an old woman and I can outrun a big man.

But watch the dogs. They'll devour you. Exchange your body. Now, I don't belong to the cult of the perfect body. I don't think that we should chase around the country after healers. I met a man one time when I was in Churchill.

He was working on the dew line, way up north of the Arctic Circle. And he was on his way through, coming back. He was a Christian. I said, where are you going? He said, I'm going back to California to get revived.

And I said, well, why do you have to go to California to get revived? Isn't the Lord here? Well, he says, down there they'll pray for your body. I said, I'll pray for your body. Well, he had to go to a man who was a healer.

Now, I don't mean that there aren't some people who God does give the gifts of healing to. And there are. And there are healing meetings that are good. But, when I say I do not belong to the cult of the perfect body, I mean that I do not insist that God cannot allow me to have some imperfection in my body.

Something that maybe isn't like it should. Like I would rather not wear glasses. And I would wish that I wouldn't have a nervous stomach and things like that. But they don't keep me back from doing God's will.

It's those things that keep me from doing His will that I'm going to deal with. Sure, I would like to have a perfect body. But I don't belong to that cult that goes chasing around from healer to healer so that I can be perfect.

That isn't the purpose for me having a body or being on earth. The purpose for me having a body and keeping a fairly healthy body is to do God's will. Lo, I come to do Thy will. And so be careful of that.

Because that has an earthly end. It has to be more than just the healing of the body. There has to be a purpose in it. I've known people who have spent a lot of money and gone to a lot of places to get healing for their body only so they could enjoy their body.

And that isn't the purpose. Certainly we enjoy our body. And certainly all the pleasures of life come through the body and through the faculties of the body and the appetites of the body. But that is by the way while you're doing God's will.

Then be careful in getting in bondage to things like diets. They're great. But watch the bondage. That's what I'm talking about. There's no easier place to get in bondage than in the realm of the physical body.

And be careful in your attitude about fasting. And I believe fasting is necessary. But fasting isn't to be used as a force to make God do what you want him to do. Fasting isn't to be used to get God over a barrel.

I read one time in a book about fasting a man was saying, Now if you will fast in this way you can get God to do anything you want. You know, that scared me. Fasting is used... It gives you control over your appetites.

It's great. We should deny ourselves just to show who's boss, who's in control. Not like the man that my mother tells me about who said to the bottle of liquor, He said, I'll show you who's boss. He said, I don't have to drink you.

I'll put you right there. And he looked at it and said, No sir, I don't have to drink you. And he looked at it and said, Maybe you don't think I'm boss. Maybe you think I can't drink you. And he said, I'll show you who's boss.

I don't mean that way. I mean, you're the one that should be in charge of your appetites. You should say to your body once in a while, Well, you could use sleep, but for this particular need, you're not going to sleep for a while.

And you should be able to say to your body, You're crying for food, but just go on hungering for a while. And you should know how to fast in your sexual life too, and particularly those who aren't married, even if you are married.

You are to be in control of your appetites and your body. And this is one of the purposes I had a man tell me, right here, Bethany, that fasting didn't do much for him except gave him control over his body.

And there is times to fast in prayer when particularly burdenous things are upon you, and maybe cases of working with demons. But it shouldn't be used as a thing to get your own way, like a little kid who holds his breath so that his mother will let him have his own way, or bangs his head against the wall.

It's just about the same, you know. And you know what Jesus did with his body when it got hungry? At a time when he didn't intend to feed it, he just let it hunger. And any time you get near suffering and near the cross, you're going to find out the body's always thirsting.

And when Jesus was on the cross, he cried, I thirst, and he just let it thirst. And there are times when you're just going to have to let your body thirst, and let your body hunger, and let your body desire, and just said, I'm sorry, this isn't the time to feed you.

You must be in control and command of the body Jesus gave you. And then you can use it for his glory. Then, in regards to health, you need to be sensible, and remember that the body does have limitations.

It is a limited body, and it is an earthen vessel, and it can't do certain things. You cannot do everything that everybody else can do. So you need to be sensible in that. And you need to be sensible in regards to medicine.

God did ordain medicine. There is nothing spiritual about always going without medicine. Listen, do you realize that before the pilgrims came across here, which established life to a large degree on this continent, that God gave George Fox marvelous openings in England about the medicinal quality of roots and herbs and plant life in this country.

And he wrote it down. And it was that that kept the pilgrims alive during those years when they didn't have a lot of the things that they'd left over there. And so you can be wise in regards to medicine.

Not that you'd be in bondage to it. And I think that that word in James 5 and 16, let him be anointed with oil, that isn't the ordinary word for anoint, you know, in the Greek. There's two words for anoint.

One is to pour on, but this one is to rub on, which gave it a medicinal quality. Not that there isn't the anointing too, and the spiritual value in the anointing, in which we trust the Lord and the Holy Spirit's anointing, but it also has to do with taking medicine.

And I don't even take an aspirin unless I take it in Jesus' name, or anything like that. How wonderful to do everything you do with the Lord! And when you are obliged to go to the hospital, and sometimes He will put you there, maybe for chastening, or maybe just to speak to somebody in there.

I can remember a person saying to me, well, I would never go to the hospital. I trust the Lord for my health. I said, even if the Lord wanted you to go in and He had a ministry for you there? Oh, He'd never give you ministry in the hospital.

How can you be so sure? And so, when you take medicine, take it in the Lord's name, and trust Him to bless it. And if you have to be under the hands of a doctor or a nurse, trust God to bless their hands.

And remember that this whole business of maintaining health in a mortal body is to do His will. Alright, and one more thing about medicine, or going without medicine. There are times to go without it, and times not to.

It's never either or. Number two, praying for others. Now, the reason I said praying for others, it's not that I'm interested here about praying for others for their health so that they can be healed.

Praying for the Sick Without Trusting in the Flesh

I'm talking about keeping yourself when you are praying to others. You're going to go to places where you're going to have to pray for the sick. Now, those of us who have had no medical training and background, we go into the villages and there are sick people.

We don't know much about medicine, and if you do, you're going to have to administer it in Jesus' name. Bernard Fredlund is a missionary among the Eskimos, and his wife has been dispensing medicine there.

She knows anything about medicine. And not very long ago, some sick Eskimos came in and she didn't know what medicine to give them. She prayed about it and said, Lord, I have this medicine and I don't know which one to give.

And she said, show me. And she chose one and gave it to that patient in Jesus' name. And when the patient got to the hospital in Churchill, the Christian doctors who were there at the time said, if you give them the other one, you'll kill them.

And so, you need to be trusting in the Lord, even in your administration of things like that, and praying for others. In anointing, and I believe in anointing, either with medicine or with oil, and I like to keep them separate, you don't always have to have olive oil.

I think I mentioned to you that we used aviation oil at one time, and the Lord healed them. So, the Lord didn't mind, and we couldn't always get some oil, and even some nice smelling, well, cosmetics at times.

Anyway, it's the thing that, Lord, this, by this, we're symbolizing what you do for people's healing. Then, that's just by the way, but a very important point is, when you are praying for sick people, be careful that you remember that usually wicked spirits are involved with illness.

You see, in the Old Testament it tells us that fallen angels and wicked spirits decimated disease. They still do. And you need to be careful. And I was praying for some Indians one time. They were Indian Christians, and they had had a bad case of the flu for a long time, and they weren't getting better.

So, I went down to pray for them, and I was careless. I was learning, and I was careless. And I don't remember exactly what I said, but I said something like, Satan, in Jesus' name, leave these people alone and depart.

And I named the flu germ, I thought, that the Lord had given me. And I said, I stand between you, and you have to come between me to get to them. And boy, while I was praying, I was hit right in the throat.