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Today's episode is going to be a high level, 35,000 foot view of what embracing a natural and holistic lifestyle actually looks like. I want to explain what we're doing here. I share the mission statement for the show at the top of every episode. The mission statement has four components to it. Navigate natural health, stay out of the doctor's office, age gracefully, and live a more purpose driven life. Now I didn't arrive at that mission statement lightly.
A lot of thought, study, and training went into that. Now my approach to health is very different than what you're likely to get from your family practice doctor. Medical doctors treat the illness that has the person. A natural practitioner treats the person that has the illness. The two approaches are very, very different. Now in this episode, I want to make sure you, the natural nation, are crystal clear on my approach to health.
I want you to clearly understand how to use medical care or allopathic medicine appropriately. And I want you to be perfectly clear on what naturopathy or naturopathic health care is all about. Also, I wanted to spell the myth that Christians should steer clear of natural and holistic health because it's not biblical. I can assure you that natural and holistic health is absolutely biblical and
I won't explain why in this episode. Let's talk about it.
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Welcome to the Christian Healthy Lifestyle Podcast where I help you navigate natural health so you can stay out of the doctor's office, age gracefully, and live a more purpose-driven life. So let's start off with navigating natural health. If we're going to navigate natural health, we've first got to believe that it's worth pursuing. You know, from talking with a lot of my Christian friends, it's quite obvious to me that there's this idea out there that natural holistic health is godless.
and Bible-believing Christians should steer clear. After all, the Bible teaches that we should test the spirits, and a lot of what's promoted in natural health world has not been tested with the scientific methods, so therefore, we should be skeptical. We should have a healthy dose of skepticism. I believe this very idea is what pushes a lot of Christians away from embracing natural and holistic health.
There are practitioners that call themselves natural and holistic who embrace New Age thought, Eastern mysticism, shamanism, and even voodoo. As Bible-believing Christians, obviously, we should stay far away from anything like that. In fact, the Bible clearly states that if we steer clear of godless practices and embrace righteousness in God's way of doing things, we set ourselves up for better health outcomes.
Proverbs 3, 7, and 8 says, Do not be wise in your own eyes, fear the Lord and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your body and refreshment to your bones. Now God's concerned with the whole person. 1 Thessalonians 5, 23 says, Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. It's God's desire
that we embrace whole person health. means natural and holistic health is absolutely biblical. 3 John 1-2 says, beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health. Now, we could do a whole episode on this one concept, but here's the 35,000 foot view. Here in the U.S., we've been conditioned to believe that pursuing health is seeing your doctor on a regular basis and
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Better health can be found in a bottle of pills. Now there's a time and a place for drugs and surgery, but I recommend turning to the Word of God first. Proverbs chapter 4, verses 20 through 22 says, My son, give attention to my words, incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your sight, keep them in the midst of your heart, for they are life to those who find them, and health to all their body.
So this passage is saying that God's words and his sayings found in the Bible, if applied to our lives, are a source of health and well-being. Now, I'm going to have more to say on this in a little bit, but God created us in his image. God exists in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we're created as three apart beings as well. We are a spirit, we have a mind, and we live in a body. And as I just shared from the book of Proverbs,
When we embrace righteous living, things tend to work out better. By aligning our lives more fully with God's natural design for spirit, mind, and body, it produces better health outcomes for us. Now, before you say, there he goes again with that name it and claim it stuff, wish he wouldn't do that, let me ask you a question. If I take my marriage vows seriously and I love my wife as Christ loves the church,
And I follow the commandment to not commit adultery. Would that increase the chances of being more connected to my wife and staying married to my spouse for a lifetime? And by not committing adultery, wouldn't I avoid the pain of betrayal and guilt? You bet it would. That's not name it and claim it. Because God's the author of marriage. He knows how things are supposed to work. And if we listen to Him and apply His teaching to our lives, we can expect
better outcomes. It's God giving us couple of admonitions with our best interest in mind. Here's how it works. God's not a cosmic killjoy that wants to keep us from enjoying any fun, but we've got to understand when he tells us to avoid something, it's for our protection. When he gives us a prohibition, what he's saying is, don't hurt yourself. God's the one that created everything. He even knows the future.
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He knows the outcomes our choices are going to have before we even make them. When God tells us to do something, when He gives us some type of an admonition, it's for our benefit. He's saying, help yourself. That's not name it and claim it. That's putting on humility and surrendering to God's loving kindness and His wisdom. It's us saying, I don't have all of life figured out. I'm going to trust you, God.
Even if I don't understand, I choose to do things your way and I'm leaving the outcome up to you. And since God's desire for us is abundant life and we know He's trustworthy, we know that His instructions are given with our best interest in mind. That doesn't mean that we'll never go through hardship. Romans 8.28 is true, and we know that God causes all things to work together for good for those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.
So this passage is saying that we will have hardships from time to time, but in the end, things are going to work out because God is in control. When we choose God's way of doing things, and we align our lives more fully with His natural design for spirit, mind, and body, we set ourselves up for better health outcomes. No guarantees, but the chances are far greater that we're going to enjoy the outcome. Okay, enough on good Christians shouldn't embrace natural and holistic health.
Let's talk about the difference between natural health and medical care. Here in the US, there's two types of health care. The medical model, which we call allopathic medicine. Allo means opposite. Empathic means suffering or symptoms. So MDs and DOs are trained to relieve your symptoms by opposing your disease. The focus is on the disease, not the person. As I said earlier, a medical doctor
wants to treat the illness that has the person, a natural practitioner wants to treat the person that has the illness. It's a very different approach. The natural holistic model or naturopathy is not focused on your disease or your symptoms. Naturopathy is focused on building health from the inside out. The medical world has a reductionist view of who and what we are. Medical training is completely devoted to Newtonian physics.
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Matter is all there is. If we can't see it, touch it, or feel it, it doesn't exist. Now with that worldview, there's no room for wholism, no room for wholistic view. Human beings are just a body and nothing more. A good example of this is the psychiatric profession. If human beings are nothing more than a random collection of atoms and molecules, then our thoughts have to be the result of chemical reactions in our brains.
If you've got a problem with your thought life, you must have some type of a chemical imbalance. Therefore, the obvious conclusion is we need to correct your imbalances with pharmaceuticals. That's a reductionist view of the human condition, and my assertion is it's woefully inadequate and incomplete. Maybe those unproductive thoughts that are plaguing us are due to some lie we believe from a bully on the playground in grade school.
It's time to challenge those beliefs as an adult Thoughts are not simply chemical reactions in our brains thoughts come from the mind of an intelligent being Natureopathy embraces the idea that human beings are more than just a body The Bible teaches that we are a spirit. We have a mind and we live in a body Now I've been a follower of Jesus Christ for the last 33 years and I've been a naturopath for the last 20
When I started studying naturopathy, it wasn't very long until I realized this approach to health is solidly biblical. Naturopathy leans on the God-given wisdom of the body to heal itself. It's called vitalism. Vitalism means life force. If I plant a seed in the ground and it sprouts and starts to grow, it has life in it. That seed is said to be vital. It has life. The same is true with us.
God has placed in us a life force or an animating energy. There's an intelligent life force inside of us that can't be explained with Newtonian physics. This concept is solidly biblical. Colossians 1.29 says, For this purpose also I labor, striving according to his power, which mightily works within me. In naturopathy, that power or that life force is our God-given innate
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built in intelligence. Our bodies know how to do their jobs and our default setting is health. I believe the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2 is literal. Genesis 2, 7 says, then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being. The dust of the ground makes up our bodies. There's the atoms and molecules or the physical part.
The breath of life is God animating our bodies with the spirit. After Adam's body was formed and given a spirit, he became a living being. Now the word translated as being in the original language is nephesh, which means soul or mind. For the most part, the words soul and mind in the Bible are synonymous. They mean the same thing. It's our thought lives. It's that inner voice that we have inside our heads.
That's our mind or our soul You see from a biblical worldview Thoughts don't have their origin in chemical reactions thoughts have their origin in the mind of an intelligent being So from Genesis 2 7 we can conclude that human beings are a spirit. We have a mind and we live in a body and We have agency or free will We need to use that agency to make wise choices
If we're going to pursue health effectively, we can't look at any part of who and what we are in isolation. We've got to consider all three parts together. So the next part of the mission statement is stay out of the doctor's office. Now let me say that there's a time and a place for drugs and surgery. And my criticism of the healthcare industry is towards the system, not towards any individual practitioner. There's a lot of very intelligent, compassionate,
hardworking people with the right motives working in the medical field. They're not the problem. The problem is the broken system. Allopathic medicine is great with emergencies and acute conditions. If I get busted up in a car accident, man, roll me into the nearest emergency room, give me all the drugs and surgery you need to save my life. That's a perfectly appropriate use of allopathic healthcare. I once busted my collarbone in a snow skiing accident.
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And my fracture was a complete displaced fracture, which means the bone wasn't just cracked. It was severed into two pieces. At that point, I didn't need a massage and some soothing music. I needed surgery to put that bone back in place where it could heal properly without my shoulder being all out of whack. That's a perfectly appropriate use of allopathic medicine. That's a big part of what I mean by navigating natural health.
We need to know when and how to use medical care. Allopathic medicine is great with emergencies and acute conditions. Our emergency rooms here in the US are second to none. When the emergency is over though, we're better served with natural and holistic healing methods. Outside of the emergency room, the other big part of Western-style medicine is the doctor's office. Now the first thing I want to point out is doctors have to work within the confines of the health insurance industry.
That payment model requires doctors to see an awful lot of people every day, maybe 50 or more patients. They have to do that in order to keep their doors open. That's the medical model. That's the health insurance model. That payment model requires doctors to see an awful lot of patients every day, maybe 50 patients or more every day. The average doctor visit lasts less than seven minutes. Now the next time you go see your doctor, if he gives you a seven minute visit,
and doesn't ask you one question about your nutrition, your sleep, or your relationships, you don't have a doctor, you have a dealer. Not only that, doctors are trained to take that emergency care model and apply it to the way they practice medicine. The problem is the medical mindset doesn't transfer into building health. Doctors don't help you build health, they manage your disease. I'm a naturopathic doctor.
and that term doctor in my credential means teacher. So being a naturopathic doctor means I'm a teacher of natural health and everything I share with you is filtered through a biblical worldview. If we're going to address our health from a biblical perspective, naturally, holistically, we've got to think differently. We've got to escape the medical matrix. The medical matrix is made up of a complex web of health insurance companies, big pharma,
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and a whole bunch of corrupted three-letter government agencies. There's a concept in Washington, DC that's called agency takeover. That's where the unelected bureaucrats are a little too friendly with the high paid industry lobbyists, and they put their own pursuit of prestige, power, and profit ahead of the best interests of the people. The medical matrix has a profit motive. Now they want to keep you alive.
but they want you to get on their drugs for the rest of your life because that's where their consistent revenue comes from. Think about it. If someone were to discover a magic pill that could put an end to all sickness and disease, imagine a world where everyone aged gracefully, everyone remained physically active and mentally sharp to well over 100 years old and died peacefully in their sleep at 120.
Would the health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies be happy about that? No, they'd be very unhappy about that. Now, I'm not making the case for socialized medicine or single payer healthcare. The profit motive paves the way for ingenuity, hard work, effectiveness and efficiency. What I am saying is the system is not likely to change anytime soon. And we've got to know when to pursue medical care.
and when it's appropriate to pursue natural and holistic methods instead. So the next part of the mission statement is age gracefully. When we embrace a natural health lifestyle, aging gracefully happens by default. This is in rocket science. We've simply got to get back to the basics. We can look to our physiology and learn something about how we should treat our bodies. And we can look around and see what's working and what isn't and start making lifestyle changes that promote health.
and don't hinder it. In our nation here in the U.S., we've done a really good job at combating communicable diseases. Diseases like smallpox, polio, measles have been nearly eradicated, but we're failing miserably at combating chronic degenerative diseases. Diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, diseases of the colon like Crohn's disease,
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macular degeneration in the eyes, heart disease and stroke, neurodegenerative diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's. All of those conditions are shockingly higher than they were 100 years ago. The United States spends by far more money than any other nation in the world on healthcare, yet our health outcomes are not commensurate with the cost. Frankly, it's shameful. Another term for chronic degenerative disease is lifestyle diseases.
It's my contention that our genetics have less to do with our health outcomes than we've been led to Genetics will determine things like height, hair color, eye color, how big our bones are, but it's lifestyle choices that have a far greater influence over our health outcomes than our genetics. That's the reason I changed the name of the show from Natural Health Matters to Christian Healthy Lifestyle.
By making the right lifestyle choices, we reduce our total body load by eliminating health blocking factors and adding in health enhancing factors. When we reduce a total body load, we have increased vigor and we'll have more health margin and we'll automatically age more gracefully. When we adopt a Christian healthy lifestyle, we decrease the chances of coming down with any of the long list of chronic degenerative diseases I just mentioned. It's my contention.
we can thrive well into our later years, and I contend that that's part of our God-given design. Genesis 6 says this, Then the Lord said, My spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal. Their days will be a hundred and twenty years. I believe our physical capabilities and our mental clarity can be maintained well into our eighties and even nineties. One of the best ways of looking at this is the candle metaphor.
We've been conditioned to believe that our vitality or our vigor behaves like a flashlight. When the batteries are fresh and new, the flashlight is nice and bright, but slowly over time, those batteries weaken and then we suffer with a very dim flashlight for a long period of time. And then it finally goes out and dies. I believe our vitality should be more like a candle where we light that candle and it burns bright.
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And it continues to burn bright all the way down to the very end when that candle is really short and then it flickers a couple times and goes out. That's the way I think we should look at our vitality and our vigor as we age. Now, I'm not saying that we should all be living to 120. Our world is way too toxic. Our food supply is too compromised. And our lives are far too stressful for that. But what I am saying is we're not supposed to be suffering from chronic disease for the last 10 or 15 years of our lives.
We're capable of living vibrant, active lives well into our nineties. So what kind of lifestyle choices should we make? Again, I want to make this episode a high level show, but we should be focusing on the basics. The basics are what I call the nine pillars of health. There's three parts to a human being, and I suggest having three focus areas in each part that brings us a total of nine focus areas. For the spirit,
It's all about loving relationships, love for God, love for others and love for ourselves. For the mind, it's mental toughness, victory over limiting beliefs and practicing emotional intelligence. For the body, it's nutrition, movement and sleep. Now let me expand on just a couple of the most important pillars. When it comes to nutrition, there is a lot of conflicting information out there and it's easy to get overwhelmed.
Some say raw food vegan is the ideal diet. Some say carnivore. Some say no, it's keto or no, they're all wrong. It's paleo or the Mediterranean diet is what works best. Here's the challenging part. With all of those very different styles of eating, we find success stories in every one of them. We see people that are doing very well eating that way. But what's the one thing they all have in common? They get away from processed foods.
Eating non-processed food that you prepare at home in your own kitchen is far and away the most important part of understanding good nutrition. Another really important pillar of health is embracing loving relationships. It starts with God, but it also extends to friends and family and loving ourselves well enough to take care of ourselves. When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, he quoted from, I believe it was Deuteronomy chapter 6, and he said,
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The foremost commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. That part about loving ourselves often gets overlooked and glossed over. If we don't love ourselves well, we'll have a hard time loving others. Now self-care isn't selfish. It's the most selfless thing we can do because we can't give what we don't.
Love for self helps us set appropriate boundaries. It enables us to say no to good things in order to do the best things. We've got to do the things that recharge our batteries once in a while. Jesus often pulled back from the crowds and withdrew to the wilderness to recharge his batteries. We all get tired, we get worn out, and we've got to recharge our batteries now and then because we can't give what we don't have.
Love for others is supposed to act like a reservoir. A reservoir gets filled from an underground water source. And when the water reaches the brim, the water spills over the sides of the reservoir. This way, the reservoir can give its water without being depleted itself. That's the way love for others is supposed to work. We're supposed to be so filled up with the love of God and animated by His Spirit and have enough energy and vigor
to have the desire to serve others because we can't give what we don't have. Which brings us to the idea that we are created to be in close, connected, loving relationships. When we look at the Blue Zones around the world, those different parts of the world where they have a high percentage of people living to over 100 years old, one of the things they all have in common is they live in close, connected community.
God wired us for relationships. We aren't supposed to be islands living in isolation. In fact, loneliness and isolation are massive risk factors for early dementia and premature death from all causes. So living in community and having loving, close, connected relationships is absolutely a biblical part of building natural and holistic health. Now, lastly, I want to talk about living a more purpose-driven life.
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We're going to have an easier time walking in our callings and fulfilling our purpose when we have more spiritual strength, mental-emotional fortitude, and more physical vitality. Life is hard enough. Throw in a chronic health challenges and the chances of us finding the abundant life Jesus promised become very diminished. God put us here for a purpose. Our lives have meaning. I've never met anyone that doesn't desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
The Westminster Confession of Faith says the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. We bring glory to God by putting His majesty on display. God created us in His image, and His desire for each and every one of us is that we become more and more like Him every day. We should be reflecting the heart of God, His love, His compassion, and His goodness to the people within our sphere of influence. Let's consider Ephesians 2.10.
Let's consider Ephesians 2, 10, for we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. God has a plan for our lives, and He wants to remove the roadblocks to us finding and walking in those plans. Not only that, God wants to thoroughly equip us for those good works. 2 Timothy 3, 16, and 17 says, all scriptures God breathed and is useful for teaching,
rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. It's God's desire to thoroughly equip us for those good works that he had in mind and fulfill our purpose. God doesn't want us to make bricks without straw. God wants to partner with us in life. And he's going to absolutely help us to remove some of those roadblocks that are getting in the way of us fulfilling our purpose.
God has assignments for us. Those assignments are designed to bring us joy by serving others and therefore put His majesty on display. That's His will for each and every one of us. The Lord's Prayer says, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Surrendering to God's way of doing things and aligning our lives more fully with His natural design for spirit, mind and body brings us more joy. It brings us more spiritual strength.
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It increases our mental, emotional fortitude, and we have more physical vitality. Those qualities will help us live out Ephesians 2.10 and help us walk in our purpose by discovering and doing the good works that God had in mind when he created us. So that's the 35,000 foot view of what this podcast is about. I hope this brings some clarity to what we're really doing here, and I hope you're a little more motivated to embrace the Christian healthy lifestyle after listening.
This is what I try to embrace in my own life, and I encourage you, the natural nation, to embrace it as well. I hope you found this episode encouraging, and if you're finding value here, I encourage you to subscribe to the show, and would you tell a like-minded friend about the show? The number one way someone finds a podcast is a friend tells them about it. So would you join me in getting this life-giving message out to more of our brothers and sisters in Christ? Share the show with somebody. Sharing is caring.
I think they'll thank you for it. You can also support the show by leaving me a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. That's it for now. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you. Go out there and live abundantly. Be blessed.
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