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I found some of the content of the Saturday article, "Finding faith with fitness, churches helping members connect mind, body and spirit," to be anti-scriptural.
In the article, Liz Coates Isandoro, manager of the Family Life Center at First Baptist Church in Gainesville, stated, "I just think that our minds, our bodies and our spirits are all so very much connected, that when you don't have health in one it effects the other."
I am in full agreement with her observation of a health connection between mind, body and spirit. However, based upon scripture, rightly divide, I am opposed to her misconceived correction sequence.
The apostle Paul recognized and addressed the health issue of a believers tripart make up. Writing to the Thessalonians he stated, "I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved." In his first letter to Timothy, he stated, "For bodily exercise profits little, but Godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come."
The scriptural method of correcting health issues is to work from the inside out. Man's method is to work from the outside in. For ages, Christian men and women have been trying in vain to cure physical and mental maladies from the outside in by such methods as bodily exercise, fasting, yoga, medicine, etc. For whatever reason they refuse to acknowledge that when the maladies of the spirit are corrected, mental and physical maladies will usually take care of themselves.
When all else fails, read the instruction, i.e., scripture. Being ever mindful, "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death." Therefore as Elmer Fudd would say, "Be afraid, be very, very afraid."
William P. Clark
Flowery Branch