P.O. Box 53055    
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CONNIE: Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Well, according to current health statistics, most of us could afford to cut back on the amount of God’s blessings we ingest! Join us as we learn about when God says enough!

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko.

CONNIE: Lonnie, in our series on simple biblical principles we can apply to improve our lives, I’ve noticed that at least three of the topics deal with physical health. Do you think that’s something God is concerned with, or is He just concerned with our spiritual health?

LONNIE: A very good question, Connie. And I think we do tend to separate those two areas in our minds today. If we have a spiritual problem, we go to the pastor or the Christian counselor. If we have a physical problem, well, that fits into the realm of the physician and the hospital. But that wasn’t the way it was in biblical times.

CONNIE: I guess not—and the most obvious example would of course be Jesus, who was a spiritual teacher, but what do we find Him doing most of the time?

LONNIE: Healing people of their physical ills. People in those days equated spiritual power with the ability to cast out demons and to deal with physical illnesses. There wasn’t a separation between the two realms.

CONNIE: Well, today’s topic is called simply “Enough!” And it brings up an issue that actually isn’t dealt with much in the Bible, doesn’t it?

LONNIE: That’s true. The problem of having too much food readily available, just sitting there in the refrigerator calling out to us, “Come and get me!” Is a pretty modern phenomenon. But there are Bible passages that encourage us to be careful about how much we eat AND how much we imbibe, so we’ll be looking at some of those in our message today.

CONNIE: And to help us understand and apply this topic we’ve invited our good friend Dr. Timothy Arnott to join us and share some of the secrets that he finds useful in helping people reclaim their health and take care of their bodies.

LONNIE: Hello, Dr. Timothy Arnott, welcome to the Voice of Prophecy’s broadcast today…

TIMOTHY: Thank you, it’s good to be with you…

LONNIE: Now you’re a family practitioner from the family lifestyle center of America, talk about where that is and what you do.
TIMOTHY: Lifestyles of America is an inpatient facility where individuals come who have diabetes, type 2 or type 1, and have high blood pressure, are overweight, arthritis and such. And they come and spend two or three weeks with us and they learn how to remove the cause of their disease.

LONNIE: I understand that it’s been very effective…

TIMOTHY: Oh, it’s been incredibly effective! The kinds of things that we see here are just absolutely miraculous. I mean, we see individuals weight coming down for us, we see their insulin levels down, which of course takes the stress off of the pancreas. Some of those who have diabetes are put into remission, while others are on the road to tight control so they can avoid complications. We see cholesterol levels coming down, we see blood-pressure coming down, and most of all we see individuals who came without hope leave with something to cling on to.

LONNIE: There’s so much stuff out there about diet, and you’ve got thousands of books on the shelves from, the Atkins diet down to the high-carb, low protein diets. How do we bring all of these in to focus, what works and what doesn’t…

TIMOTHY: Well, I think that one of the first things to realize is that the creator designed us to enjoy food. He gave us food that we could actually eat generously and not gain weight. God designed the food to be 80% water. Think about that for a minute, Protein, fruits, vegetables, and so forth would account for that 80% of water…. You will find that if you can get on to this diet and lifestyle change, you will feel so much happier and a lot better.

LONNIE: So we get into trouble when we start eating preservatives and packaged foods, right?

TIMOTHY: Right! When the food goes through a factory they remove a lot of things that are good for you.

LONNIE: How do you there at your clinic, get people to practice these new techniques, I mean what are some of the secrets that you use?

TIMOTHY: One of the things that we teach them is that they want to eat a good breakfast, because if you don’t eat a good breakfast you are going to be snacking, and snacking is basically going to lead to weight gain, and hurt you’re organs…

LONNIE: Eat like a king for breakfast, like a prince for lunch, and like a pauper for diner…

TIMOTHY: That’s right…Also eating vegetables that grow above the earth such as, leafy things and broccoli, kale, greens; these foods have fewer calories than any other food on this planet. So if you eat these things each day you can help offset some of the other bad stuff you eat, sometimes.

LONNIE: Dr. Arnott thank you for being here with us today.

CONNIE: Amen! We have so much to be thankful for, whether we’re living in times of abundance, or in times when God’s blessings aren’t quite so evident.

LONNIE: In fact, sometimes it’s in the proverbial “lean years” that we most notice God’s blessings in our lives. When we get to times when the things of the world are too abundant, it can sidetrack us from what’s most important, and from being thankful for the way God has provided life and salvation through His Son, Jesus Christ.

CONNIE: Well, we’d like to add to the abundance in all of our listeners’ lives with a special gift today—a book that can keep on giving blessings all through our lives, if we’ll put its good counsels into practice.

LONNIE: The book is Take Charge of Your Health, and it’s written by health professionals who specialize in helping people regain their health, even reversing the effects of bad choices that might have contributed to failing health.

CONNIE: Take Charge of Your Health is our gift to you today, if you’ll just call or write and ask for a free copy. You can contact us 24 / 7 on the phone by calling toll free 1-800-872-0055, and you can write to us any time of day or night, too. Our US address is Voice of Prophecy, Box 53055, Los Angeles, 90053. Again: Box 53055, Los Angeles, 90053, and in Canada you can write to Box 2127, Oshawa, Ontario L1H 7V4.

LONNIE: Do let us hear from you this week, won’t you. We’d love for you to have a free copy of this little book that can do so much to help you regain, maintain, and take charge of your health.

CONNIE: And now let’s listen as Pastor Lonnie shares today’s message, “Enough!”
Memorizing

Well, the results are in. And the answer is, yes! Yes, indeed, America has finally been super-sized! As a nation we’re bigger and flabbier than ever before!

If you were in school during the 1960s, you probably remember all the talk about “The Flabby American” that was going around. In response to reports that his countrymen were growing more rotund and less robust, President John F. Kennedy expanded the role of the President’s Council on Fitness and Sports that Dwight Eisenhower had instituted in 1956. Under Kennedy the program began to focus on adults as well as young people. And then in 1966 Lyndon Johnson established the Presidential Physical Fitness Award. Young people in schools all across the country were encouraged to participate in activities that would strengthen their muscles and increase their cardiovascular fitness and flexibility. Through the years the program has continued to expand. To date, more than 65 million students have received Presidential Fitness awards.

But, despite the expanding Fitness program, Americans’ waistlines have continued expanding even faster.

According to a report released in late 2004, the average weight of American adults has gone up by about 25 pounds since 1960. If we were Flabby Americans back then, what are we now? Marshmallow Americans? Average weights for both men and women now tip the scales firmly in the “overweight” category. In JFK’s day, they were balanced precariously on the line between “normal” and “overweight.”

If the government could do something about this growing problem, it certainly would. But, short of packing up all the empty calories and shipping them off to the starving children in Sudan, what can the people in Washington, DC do? Weight and physical fitness are personal matters that each of us has to deal with on our own.

“Wait a minute, Pastor Lonnie,” some of you may be saying. “What does this have to do with religion, spirituality, our walk with God? Isn’t this radio program supposed to be about spiritual health, not physical health?”

It’s a natural reaction. When the preacher stops talking about spiritual things and addresses the physical, it’s easy to say, “Hold on now pastor, you’ve done quit preaching’ and gone to meddling’!”

Is God really concerned about our physical health, or is He only interested in our spiritual well-being?

It’s interesting to me that when our worldwide prayer circle meets here in our office on Thursday mornings, and we open up the letters that have come in from people requesting special prayers—how many of those prayers are about physical problems. Heart attacks, strokes, cancer, arthritis, you name it. When people are suffering physical pain, they want God to be interested in their physical health.

And rightly so. Jesus spent a lot of His ministry time on earth reaching out and bringing healing to the physically ill.

But if God is interested in healing us, why wouldn’t He also be interested in helping us to preserve our health? Does the Bible, in fact, have any counsels that could help us with the super-sizing problem?

Let’s begin with the fact that God does want us to take good care of our bodies. Writing to the church members at Corinth, the Apostle Paul asked them, “Don't you know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and who was given to you by God?” Then he reminded them, “You do not belong to yourselves but to God” (1 Corinthians 6:19, TEV).

When you borrow a car that belongs to a friend, you don’t pour corn syrup in the gas tank, do you? Of course not. If you’re like most people I know, you take care of a borrowed item even better than your own property, because you want to honor the friend who has entrusted you with his or her property.

So, if God has loaned our bodies to us, we ought to take care of them for Him, shouldn’t we?

And if this is the temple in which God’s Holy Spirit is to shine forth to the world, well, I’d better keep the windows cleaned, the siding painted, and the tables dusted, don’t you think? I ought to take care of it as best I can, with God’s good counsel.

I’ve often quoted the text in 3 John verses 2 as further evidence that God is concerned for our physical health. The apostle John wrote to his good friend Gaius, “Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, just as it is well with your soul” (NRSV). But what I didn’t realize is what we discovered in some of our researches recently, that this was a very common way to begin a personal letter, among pagans as well as Christians, when John was writing. People often began letters by informing their correspondents that they were praying for their health “with all the gods of this place.”

It seems that everyone in those days believed that divinity was interested in humanity’s health.

And they were right.

God does care about our health. And not just from a healing perspective, from a preserving perspective, too.

Remember, when He rescued the Children of Israel from Egyptian bondage, He promised to take them to “a land flowing with milk and honey.” A place where there would be abundance of good food for them to eat. And along the way, as they traveled in the desert, God supplied manna for them so they wouldn’t starve.

The problem today, though, usually isn’t assuring that we get enough to eat. It’s often that we live in a land where too much milk and honey are available—in the form of milkshakes, banana splits, root beer floats . . .
And I have to confess that the Bible really doesn’t have a lot to say about this problem. Because for the most part, throughout the history of the human race, having too much to eat has been a very rare problem! The challenge has usually been on the opposite end of the spectrum. People sought the Lord’s help much more often to solve the problem of hunger than the problem of having too much to eat!

One of the few times when food was probably too abundant for the people’s own good—at least for those who ate at the king’s table—was during the reign of Solomon. The Bible informs us that Solomon’s banquet hall was well supplied. Here’s a list of what his kitchen staff had to deal with each and every day, taken from 1 Kings 4:22-23: “The supplies Solomon needed each day were 150 bushels of fine flour and 300 bushels of meal; 10 stall-fed cattle, 20 pasture-fed cattle, and 100 sheep, besides deer, gazelles, roebucks, and poultry” (TEV).

Sounds to me like there was a whole lot of feasting going on in the king’s court in those days!

But Solomon’s riches eventually led him astray. He turned to other gods and turned his back on the Lord, just as God had predicted would happen in Deuteronomy 31:20: “‘When I have brought them to the land flowing with milk and honey, of which I swore to their fathers, and they have eaten and filled themselves and grown fat, then they will turn to other gods and serve them; and they will provoke Me and break My covenant’ ” (NKJV).

Solomon’s apostasy came as no surprise to the Lord—in times of prosperity, people often turn their backs on God, or relegate Him to some back corner of their lives.

But toward the end of his life, as Solomon looked back over the wreck he had made of himself, and of his kingdom, because of his pride and arrogance, he penned some words of wisdom that have come down to us in the book of Ecclesiastes. Notice what he had learned:

“Happy are you, O land, when your king is a nobleman,”

“And your princes feast at the proper time —

For strength and not for drunkenness!”

(Ecclesiastes 10:17, NRSV).

Similar counsel is found in Proverbs 31:

“It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine, nor for princes intoxicating drink; Lest they drink and forget the law, and pervert the justice of all the afflicted” (Prov 31:4-5, NKJV).

The biblical principle of temperance focuses on not overindulging—even in good things, and prescribes abstinence from harmful, intoxicating substances such as wine, especially for those who hold responsible positions in God’s kingdom. Kings were advised to abstain from wine, and priests were forbidden to imbibe when they were preparing to participate in ceremonies at the temple.

This is especially pertinent for us as Christians living in the last days of earth’s history, for Revelation tells us that Jesus has made us all “kings and priests to His God and Father” (Revelation 1:6, NKJV).

Looking forward to the days just before His second coming, Jesus warned us to “ ‘Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly,’ ” (Luke 21:34, NRSV).

The Bible has excellent counsel for us, because its Author is concerned for our wellbeing. And while the problem of getting too much to eat certainly wasn’t a problem for most people in biblical times, the Good Book does offer some good, practical principles for maintaining our health, and even for getting rid of some of the extra baggage many of us tote around with us.

The most obvious example of this is found in the story of the Garden of Eden, and the simple plant-based diet that God gave to our first parents. Dr. Hans Diehl of the Lifestyle Medicine Institute has dedicated his life to educating people about how they can improve their health and even rid themselves of many of the problems associated with diabetes, hypertension, and overweight, by making a few Eden-based changes in their lifestyle. And Dr. Tim Arnott, whom we spoke with earlier in our program today, is using the same principles at the Lifestyle Center of America, and getting the same results.

You heard me right—by following the simple, biblical-based lifestyle these men advocate, you can actually rid yourself of many of the problems associated with diabetes, overweight, and high blood pressure.

In fact, people who have gone back to a more biblical lifestyle have proven over and over again that it’s possible to eat more than they ever have before, and still lose weight.

Now, that’s one way of getting Enough that I think we all can enjoy! It’s not about dieting, or cutting back. It’s about getting enough of the good stuff!

There’s something very positive about letting the Bible be our guide, not only for spiritual health, but for physical health as well.

If you’ll follow the Creator’s plan, your body will thank you. And when the body is growing stronger, your spirit will be strengthened as well. And that’s what I pray for you, just as John did for his friend Gaius: “Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, just as it is well with your soul” (3 John 2, NRSV).

“It Is Well”, Roxana Pavel and Monica Pavel, from Jus As I Am CD.