Every Part of You Matters
Your spiritual health, often overlooked, is a vital component of your overall well-being and it has far-reaching effects on your mental and physical health. Although physical exercise and healthy eating are components of wellness, your spiritual self is equally important.
Because the connection between your spiritual, mental, and physical health is so profound, truly understanding their inter-relationship can help you to discover a more balanced and fulfilling life.
Where Does Spiritual Health Come From?
From our worldview, your spiritual health is rooted in personally knowing God and receiving His love and forgiveness. From there, it is growing deeper in your relationship with Him and deeper in your knowledge of His Word. When it comes to these things, there is no such thing as wasted time!
The Scriptures say to seek first the kingdom of God and everything that you need will be added to you.1 Do you know why? Because God is more than your Creator:2 He is also your Shepherd3 and your Healer!4 You can lean on, trust, and confidently rely on Him!5
I am the Lord. I am the Lord who heals you.
Exodus 15:26, ICB
So, although there are different ways that our spirits interact with our health (which I will briefly cover below), you can see how directly your spiritual life affects your health! The question is do you know your Healer?6
If you do know Him and you still need some healing, let’s go a little further and see how are spiritual life can affect our mental and emotional health. The Bible says that people perish for a lack of knowledge.7 That sounds pretty serious… we had better look into it.
How Our Spiritual Health Affects Us
In Ephesians it says we need to be humble, gentle, and patient, keeping unity through peace.8 So it is only logical to consider this from the opposite direction: if we don’t have peace maybe we aren’t being humble, gentle, or patient. Ouch. That stings a little, doesn’t it? Of course, those aren’t the only reasons that we can not feel at peace, but just an illustration as to how our spiritual health can affect our mental/emotional health.
How can the spiritual/mental/emotional connection affect our physical health? Let’s take our illustration a little further: Let’s say that maybe we weren’t as patient as we should of been with someone and sort of lost our temper (just a little, you know), but now there is a slight discomfort when you think about running into them at the grocery store. We could accurately call that discomfort ‘fear’ – fear of their disapproval, fear of feeling judged, fear of needing to apologize… the options are almost endless. The point is, at this point the door is open to fear. The Bible says that fear brings torment.9
Now, we all know that torment can be emotional (anguish), but it can also be physical (as in ‘torture’). What do you feel when you are afraid? A racing heart? Cold feet? Those feelings come from changes in your autonomic nervous system as it turns from parasympathetic function (“rest and digest”) to sympathetic function (“fight or flight”). Parasympathetic function is our normal, healthy anabolic (building up) state while sympathetic is a catabolic (breaking down) state.10
In other words, fear (and other negative emotions) can actually break us down physically.
Unfortunately, the spiral can also spin in the other direction. What do I mean? I mean that your physical health can affect your mental & emotional health and also your spiritual health. Does that sound impossible? Let me explain.
How Our Physical, Mental and Emotional Health Affects Our Spiritual Health
Let’s say, for example, that you have a blood sugar imbalance (pretty common, right?) and that when it starts to dip just a little too low, you feel a little crabby and act or speak impatiently with someone. Oops. Now you are right back where you started before (impatient -> fearful -> tormented). Do you know what the Bible says about that? It says to take care of your relational messes before you bring your gifts to God.11
So, know you have a relational repair job to do before you can develop deeper intimacy with God. That might not be so good for your prayer life (spiritual health)… Ouch. That one hurts too.
So, to sum it all up: your spiritual health affects your mental/emotional/physical health and your physical health/mental/emotional health affect your spiritual health. They are one and the same.
That’s pretty heavy, I know.
What can you do about it? Start improving your health!
How to Improve Your Spiritual Health
Actionable steps:
• If you know about God, but don’t know Him personally, send me an email and I’ll introduce you.
• You do know God personally? Great! Take time to talk to Him every day.
• Read the Bible. (It will help you see the oopses in your life.) If you have never read it before, I suggest starting with the book of John. eBibles are available online for free and print Bibles are available at many stores in town (Hobby Lobby, Mardel, and even Walmart. You can also search a maps app for ‘Christian book stores near me’). Print Bibles are also available online (christianbook.com, amazon.com). If you aren’t embarrassed to read a children’s Bible, the ICB version is particularly understandable without being dumbed down. The Living Bible is also a good, easy read.
•If you don’t attend a church, ask God to help you find one. (He will answer!)
We are here for you!
Be well,
Your Friends at Purely Jubilant
Would you like to Learn More?
Read the related posts:
Would you like some personal help?
You can:
Resources For This Post:
- Matthew 6:33 ↩︎
- Psalm 95:6 ↩︎
- Psalm 23:1 ↩︎
- Psalm 103:3 ↩︎
- Proverbs 3:5 Amplified Bible, Classic Edition ↩︎
- Exodus 15:26 ↩︎
- Hosea 4:6 ↩︎
- Ephesians 4:2-3 ↩︎
- 1 John 4:18 ↩︎
- Pongratz, Georg, and Rainer H Straub. “The sympathetic nervous response in inflammation.” Arthritis research & therapy vol. 16,6 (2014): 504. doi:10.1186/s13075-014-0504-2 ↩︎
- Matthew 5:23-24 ↩︎
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