Biblical Obedience leads to Personal Well-being
Deuteronomy 6: 2-3 - If you obey all His decrees and commands, you will enjoy a long life. . . . Then all will go well with you, and you will have many children in the land flowing with milk and honey. NLT
Psalms 139: 23-24 - Search me O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life. NLT
Proverbs 4: 20-23 – My sayings, let them not depart from your eyes. Keep them in the center of your heart. For they are life to those who find them, and health to their whole body. Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it is the wellspring of life. WEB
Lamentations 3: 40 – Let us examine our ways, and test them. NIV
Matthew 7: 15-16 – Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. NIV
Mark 7: 17-22 – What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come -- sexual immorality, theft, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. NIV
Luke 6: 45 – A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart. NLT
John 15: 4, 15 – A branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me…. I appointed you to go and produce lasting fruit. NLT
Romans 12: 1-2 – offer your bodies as a living, sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing, and perfect will. NIV
Galatians 5: 19-23 – When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, … hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division … envy, drunkenness and other sins like these. But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. NLT
Each of the nine devotional guides we offer gives a page containing over 20 Bible passages. Each one includes teachings from King Solomon, Paul, and Jesus Himself. Each page explains what’s in each passage, giving the reader motivations and pathways to the good life.
Our Oldest Model of Wellness (explained in biblical terms)
We are what we eat, and the exercise we get. Or at least our bodies are. We know what foods and lifestyles are good and bad for us physically. But how about for the soul, the person who lives in the body, and takes care of it? What experiences do we take in and put out that make us sick or healthy as caretakers? Common sense and 3000 years of biblical wisdom have identified nine basic needs God has made our souls to crave. These “soul foods” get expressed or “exercised” when our words and deeds pass them on to others. Our actions are most often a hybrid between flesh and spirit motivations, but we all need to discern the difference, to see in ourselves and others which influence is the stronger.
There is one obvious and important difference between the life of God coming through our souls as spiritual fruits, and the life of human beings coming through their bodies as fruits of the flesh. Our self-expressions come from limited supplies of perishable resources, and they eventually drain the natural life out of all involved. By contrast, God’s life pours out blessings from an abundant and endless supply, and they inspire fresh eternal life in both giver and receiver.
WELL pictures this effect as the difference between a wellspring and a whirlpool. Is this Biblical? A Whirlpool symbolizes the aging, decay, disease, and death which are the obvious long-term effects of all selfish, natural forms of giving to get. A Wellspring pictures what is invisible to the nonbeliever, but is experienced by all believers, the abundant fulfillment of God’s blessings in the Bible. In John 10:10, Jesus referred to it as having life abundantly. We are reminded of the overflowing fullness of creation, the tree of life, the river of life, the promise of Abraham’s seed/offspring like the sands of the sea, the gift to Moses of water from a rock in the desert, the gifts to God’s people of milk and honey flowing in the promised land, the water from Jacob’s well, the starving widow’s jar of oil for her and Elisha, David’s cup that overflows in Psalm 23, Jesus’ vats of wine at the wedding in Cana, and Peter’s catches of fish, just to name a few wellsprings. Now in the new covenant, our minds, hearts, and souls are wellsprings of spiritual fruits when we abide in the vine, in Christ.
Jesus told us we will know people by their fruits (Matt 7: 15-20). That was his word for both the soul food experiences we take in, and for the word and deed exercises we give out. The Bible clearly teaches us to distinguish between sick and healthy fruits, ones that poison life in our souls, and ones that inspire it. In Galatians 5: 19-23 and 6: 7-8, the apostle Paul contrasted the fruits of the flesh with the fruits of the spirit. Junk-food experiences feed the dying natural flesh, making us sick in our souls. Whole-foods feed the spirit of the soul, bringing health and well-being to many.
The way of the flesh is natural, visible, and measurable. Just as it was in Eden, we grow something as fruit and then eat it when we pay full attention to it with our hearts and minds. The tree of knowing good and evil fools us into thinking we know what we need most, and what others need most from us. To get more of the soul foods we crave, the physically countable and somewhat controllable stuff, we create more of it with our own little self, our ego. What the Bible calls our flesh (Paul calls it our old nature, our sinful self, and our natural tendency) is the deliberately scheming selfish self that gives to get. The flesh is always at the center of its own pretend universe. The ego is always about getting us more pleasure and less pain, usually just in the short run. The Fruits of the Flesh are corrosive and addictive. The more we give or receive these counterfeit soul foods, the more we want/seek them, because they make our buckets leak. Such natural mindsets are either too selfish or too unselfish (loving others too much, at our own expense).
The life of the spirit is supernatural, invisible, and mysterious. Every soul yearns to belong to someone, to live for something bigger than itself, something or someone to take care of us no matter what. Whatever or whoever we would give up everything else to find, to keep, or to please, that source of strength gives us its spirit. It’s where we believe we can find our security and truth, our worth and power. The choices for our top priority are mainly three: we can worship the life-giving Creator (hopefully indwelling), the death-giving Devil, or by far the most common choice, something natural and spiritually neutral – lesser gods, like a creature, a creation, a career, or some dream we create. Devotedly serving something beyond ourselves breathes into our lives the new energy of a quest, the spiritual dimension of a mission. The Fruits of the Spirit come from a wellspring within: the more we give, the more we have to give. These supernatural mindsets of fullness are balanced, taking care of self, family, friends, and the world. Whether an experience is junk or whole food depends on how and where our basic resources come from, and how we are giving them away. If we give and receive these in healthy ways, we always seem to have enough.
So by this model, every body (and every organization of people) has a soul, a personality that lives in it, and takes care of it. The motivations for most every choice come from both flesh and spirit. Wisdom comes to those who learn to distinguish between these inner voices, and to give and receive increasingly more fruits of the spirit from wellsprings within and without. Wise people and groups come to see how giving and receiving spiritual fruit is the pathway to spiritual vitality.
A useful way to determine how good and healthy we are is to compare ourselves to the commandments, teachings, and role models of the Bible. What we learn about ourselves here, we can then confirm in prayer. Then we can look for further confirmation in several places: moral reasoning, gut-level feelings, the feedback of others, the initial consequences that result from our actions, and how things seem likely to turn out later for all concerned. Over and over the Bible says its guidance and laws for how to live are given for our healthy well-being and so we can bless others, not just now but in the long run. Moses taught this in Deut. 5 and 6, and Solomon did throughout Proverbs. Jesus emphasized long-term consequences in the sermon on the mount (Matt 5: 3-9, 6:25-34, and 7:7-12), and Paul also showed how our choices affect our destinies, most effectively in Colossians 3.
Good history, science, and journalism can give us helpful confirmation and illustration of what we learn from the Bible. All truth is God’s truth, and it is confirmed whenever people honestly look for it. How do we know the difference between the real truth and fake news, fake science, and fake history? The website for explaining the Character Assessment test is mynewlife.com, and it teaches many ways to discern those differences.
What exactly are the “fruits of the flesh and the fruits of the sprit” – is there a list? The Bible doesn’t give just one exhaustive list of fruits in any one place, but they are most clearly described in several passages of the Old and New Testament. Four of the best lists are in Prov 6: 12-19, Gal 5: 19-23, Col 3: 5-17, and James 3: 13-18. From these passages, plus psychology and common sense, the list of fruits used in our flowcharts shows what we measure in our tests. Seven of the bad fruits are variations of the 1500-year-old seven deadly sins, and the Bible seems to warn us about these two (fears and lies) even more than the other seven.
All nine issues have become increasingly prominent themes for the world in the 21st century, often talked about around family tables, as well as newscasters desks on both the left and right. So where do we get this idea that things go better for us on earth if we obey God’s will? And if it’s in the Bible, isn’t this the health and wealth gospel? No, the good life for a human soul is quite different from the good life for the human body, bed, and bank account, when the human mind, heart, and ego see these from the illusion of ownership, not stewardship. So the well-being of the soul, of the person, certainly is presented in the Bible as the natural outcome of a life well lived biblically. Where is that presented?
The basic concept of God's first covenant with his people was that by following his laws, we would be “blessed to be a blessing.” (Genesis 12: 1-3). So actually, we were told 4000 years ago with Abraham that living as God commanded would result in a blessed life on earth [for the soul, not the flesh]. 700 years later God gave us through Moses the purpose of His commandments in Deut. 5: 33 - 6:3, and this passage says it’s mostly for our well-being, and for those we will bless. Moses said the law was given “that you may live long, and that it may go well with you” (5th commandment, Deut. 5:16), “that it might go well with them and their children forever” (5:29), “that you may live and prosper and prolong your days” (5:33), and “that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey” (6:3).
1000 years after Abraham we were given the same motivational purpose by King David in his Psalms (especially his introduction, chapter 1), and even more clearly by his wise son King Solomon, in his Proverbs (see the Devotional Guides linked above). Proverbs are so powerfully practical, contrasting over a hundred times very descriptive differences between the good ways of the wise that bring life, and the bad beliefs and habits of fools which bring them death – death of their good life first, then of their relationships (with God, family, friends), and finally the longed-for and often long-awaited death of their bodies.
1000 years after David came Jesus, the fulfillment of what the prophets foretold. To Jesus and to the believer, wellness concerns the whole person, the “heart, soul, mind, and strength” that Jesus described in His first great commandment (Luke 10: 27). When we’re walking with God, and getting these soul foods from God, when our souls drink from the wellspring of God’s presence within us, the more of God’s Life we give away, the more we have to give. WELL uses the two examples of eating and drinking from invisible and inexhaustible supplies within because they were the two illustrations Jesus used most to describe how His life flows through us. They are the two aspects of experiencing holy communion. Jesus’ first miracle created an inexhaustible supply of wine (John 2: 1-11), and He told the woman at the well He was the living water that would quench her thirst for good (John 4: 1-30). Then Jesus fed the five thousand to show how bountifully He would feed our souls from within and without through His Holy Spirit (John 6: 1-13, 30-59), proclaiming “whoever comes to me will never go hungry” [where it counts most, in the soul] (v. 35). All these passages are illustrations of a most central concept for the WELL and the CAS, the invisible existence of wellsprings.
How can we know people and organizations “by their fruits”?
We can ask these four questions about any person or organization, and we will learn a great deal about their wellness.
2. What do their personal, private lives say about the fruits they give and receive? What do they do to relax, and what do they like to study and learn? How are their relationships with friends and family? We look there first, because the Bible teaches that God wouldn’t put somebody over some public ministry if everything wasn’t right at home (1Tim 3: 1-5). And when Jesus said in Luke 16: 10, “Be faithful in little things, and I’ll put you over much,” the little things are things only they can do, honoring their promises to their inner circle: their health, spouse, and children.
3. What does their public life say about the fruits of their work, worship, recreation, and volunteering – is it more about serving, or being served? Do they go after things like attention, approval, and pleasure, or do people naturally want to give them these things? Look at who they run around with, and how they spend their time in public. “Bad company corrupts good character” warns Paul in I Cor. 15: 33.
4. Where does their money and power come from, and where do they go? Who do they owe, and who owes them? Solomon taught that “the borrower is slave to the lender” (Pr. 22:7). Follow the money, and look who their businesses cater to. Jesus taught us that our hearts will follow our treasure (Matt 6: 21), and no one can love and honor both God and money (6: 24).