Let’s Get Physical. And Mental. And Spiritual
Today we’re going to touch on the third Heartview Indicator, our health. How does our health point us down to the desires and ideas in our hearts? How can our health help us identify ideas of darkness and ideas of light, remembering that ideas of light lead to beauty, flourishing, love, and life, and ideas of darkness lead to death?
We’re going to reference two visual aids from the website today, so if you have a moment, head over to soilandroots.org and pick up the Heartview picture and the one called On Being Human, both of which we’ve looked at before.
Let’s start with the Heartview picture.
A Brief Review
Back in Episode 5, I quoted a theologian named James K. A. Smith who said that human beings are not primarily thinkers, we aren’t even primarily believers, we are primarily lovers, we are desirers.[1] We obviously think and we have our beliefs, but his point is that our hearts are formed at a deeper level than what most of us assume. We are what we love.
Let’s dig into his point for a second using the Heartview picture. We aren’t primarily thinkers. So where do “thoughts” land on the picture? Our thoughts are an indicator, they’re on the outside of the picture. We also aren’t primarily feelers, we aren’t just our health, our actions, our relationships, our words, or stewards of time and money. We are primarily lovers, and all Eight outward Indicators flow from that inward reality.
Smith claims that most Christian educators today essentially spend their time and resources focused on the outside of the circle, primarily on thoughts. The underlying, unconscious idea or assumption in modern Christianity is that our spiritual formation (the formation of our hearts) is a function of just one thing on the outside of the Heartview picture. If we’re simply told what to think, our hearts will be changed.
And our solution for changing how we think is a somewhat narrow view of instruction. Many Protestant churches put most of their time and resources into a one-hour weekly event, the pinnacle of which is a thirty-minute sermon. The assumption is that the hearts of the people sitting in the congregation are primarily changed and formed into the likeness of Jesus by attending a weekly monologue.
Are corporate worship and the weekly preaching of the Word good? Absolutely. But they are incomplete as a means of forming our hearts into the heart of Jesus.
We’ve compared our spiritual formation to other formations. We’ve talked about early childhood, marriage, the military, college, and the New Testament church.
As parents, do we think that our children will be formed into people of good character if we just meet with them for an hour once a week and lecture them for thirty minutes? Will you and your spouse become formed into the likeness of Christ and His church if you meet once a week and give each other instructions?
Of course not. We intuitively understand that forming a person into anything requires far more than occasional instruction. Yet that’s the unconscious assumption many of us make about the most important formation of our lives, the formation of our hearts.
The modern church spends much of its energy trying to influence our thoughts. If we just think the right things, our hearts will be formed. That’s a lot easier said than done. Is it a part of the formation process? Yes. Is it the entirety of the formation process? Not even close.
Back to the Heartview picture, if we dig under the indicators, we come to beliefs. What sort of things influence our beliefs? Do our feelings influence our beliefs? That’s an interesting question. How about our health? Does our physical, mental, and spiritual health influence our beliefs? How about our relationships? How about money?
All of our indicators interact with our beliefs, and our beliefs influence all of our indicators.
“Beliefs” is the realm of worldview. Worldview studies have become a vital part of Christian education and formation, and they should. It’s essential. Every Christian should be intentionally cultivating a Christian worldview.
Worldview is the set of beliefs through which we see and understand the world. Francis Schaeffer, Chuck Colson, Nancy Pearcy, and many others have made tremendously valuable contributions to the realm of worldview studies. Every adult on the planet is functioning from a worldview whether we know it or not. Developing and solidifying a Christian worldview is essential for us, especially at a time when the West is quickly moving away from ideas of the Kingdom of Light.
But notice that even worldview doesn’t normally sit in the deepest level of our hearts on the Heartview picture. The bedrock of our hearts is the realm of desires and ideas. And the way we uncover that layer is through Heartview.
When Our Beliefs and Desires Don’t Match
Here’s a way we might begin to suspect that our beliefs don’t always align with what’s at the bottom of our hearts: our Eight Indicators often run contrary to what we believe. We often think, say, or do something that contradicts our worldview.
What’s our normal explanation for this contradiction, this disconnection between our beliefs and our Indicators? Sin.
Let’s say I get annoyed with my wife, and I snap at her. I don’t believe that’s how I should speak to her. I believe I should respect her and sacrificially love her. I should relate to her with kindness and gentleness. So why didn’t my indicators (in this case my thoughts, my emotions, and my words) align with my beliefs?
Because I sinned. And this is usually where the Christian conversation stops. Oh bummer, I messed up. “Lord, forgive me and help me not to do that again.” “Jess, forgive me for speaking to you that way. I repent and will try not to do it again.”
Does any of that sound familiar?
But why did I sin? Yes, it’s because I’m a sinner, but we go to the bedrock layer of our hearts to really answer the question, underneath the layer of belief.
I sinned against Jess because my desires and ideas bent towards the kingdom of darkness. I loved myself or something else more than her. I desired something from her I didn’t get, and that made me angry. Maybe she said something to me the day before that I didn’t like, so I punished her by snapping at her. I desired vengeance.
Maybe I wanted her attention and felt I deserved it and was angry because I didn’t get it. I desired power. My corrupted desires trumped my belief.
To be clear, we have many good desires. The desire to be loved, to be secure, to be known, to be embraced. The desire to know our purpose and to live out that purpose. God made us creatures of desire.
Sometimes our desires are good, but we search for their fulfillment in people and things that just don’t work. That causes all sorts of problems.
Just think about a four-year-old who wants his mom to pick him up and hold him. He wants affection, security, and attunement. Those are good desires. But if his mom is in the middle of something and he throws a tantrum and yells and screams because she can’t pick him up, we see his good desire result in bad behavior! His Heartview Indicators point to a heart problem. His desire is good becomes corrupted because of his very normal toddler selfishness.
Our hearts are the source of vice, but they’re also the source of virtue, and our Indicators display that as well. When we think rightly, when we feel justly, when we speak lovingly, when we act biblically, when we steward our time and money honorably, these are the outward indicators of desires that bend towards light, towards God.
Do our beliefs ever influence our desires? Certainly. But this bedrock layer is also the realm of ideas, the fundamental concepts, assumptions, and principles that seep into our hearts. And we don’t normally know they’re there. We generally aren’t aware of how they even got there.
And many of the ideas that so powerfully influence our desires were formed there when we were children. That’s why we seek to understand our story. Remember, we’re talking about the Discipleship Dilemma. To be a deep disciple, we grow to know Jesus more while also knowing ourselves better.
So how do our loves, our desires, form? How are they transformed? Through an intentional combination of time, habit, intimacy, community, and instruction. That’s how any human formation is accomplished.
But since much of modern Christianity is focused either on the outer circle of indicators, (normally our thoughts), or on intellectual agreement with the next layer down of beliefs, we are missing essential components to heart formation at our bedrock layer. We are missing the later stages of deep discipleship.
We aren’t digging enough into the realm of desires and ideas.
Health as an Indicator
With that backdrop, let’s take a look at health as the third indicator that points down to our desires and ideas. How is our health an indicator of our hearts?
There’s a fascinating Bible verse in Proverbs that reads:
“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.”[2]
Proverbs contains several passages that connect our spiritual, invisible, internal condition to physical or mental health:
“A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones.”[3]
“Pleasant words are a honeycomb, Sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.”[4]
“My son, give attention to my words; Incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your sight; Keep them amid your heart. For they are life to those who find them and health to all their body.”[5]
In his 3rd epistle, the Apostle John writes to Gaius and opens with this prayer:
“Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health, just as your soul prospers.”[6]
Paul tells the Corinthians that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, the physical and spiritual existing together.
Certainly, the Bible speaks directly to the health of the body about the spirit. The physical and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible integrated in a unified whole.
Starting Point
Let’s walk through a few points about health as a Heartview Indicator.
- Every cold, sickness, or injury we experience is NOT a sign of the ideas and desires in our hearts.
If you fall off your bike and break your arm, that’s not going to tell you much about what you love or your unconscious ideas. In a sinful and broken world, we’re all susceptible to harm. You may remember when the disciples asked Jesus about a certain blind man, they assumed that the man was born blind because of some sin in his family history and that his physical condition was automatically attached to his or someone else’s spiritual condition. Jesus assured them that wasn’t the case.
Though we do learn a lot about our hearts by how we respond to illness or injury. My wife got a bad case of COVID back in the pandemic and she faced it like a champ. I get a hangnail and I moan and complain like I’ve been afflicted with leprosy.
- At the same time, we need to check our Ideas of Anthropology. We are integrated creatures living in an integrated world.
If you look at the On Being Human picture, remember that our heart/spirit, body, and mind are all integrated and cannot be separated until we die. We are unified beings.
We talk specifically about the heart, the mind, or the body because they are dimensions of being human. Scripture makes these distinctions. But we can’t interact with any of these dimensions independently. You don’t have a thought without an associated feeling. When your body is sick, your mind and heart know it and are influenced by it.
We’ve talked several times on Soil and Roots about how bad Ideas of Anthropology infect all seven mountains of culture including the church.
The culture by and large assumes and promotes the idea that the body is separate from the spirit. So, we can sleep with whomever we want, and it supposedly does not affect the heart or mind.
But it isn’t possible to split ourselves.
When our health is impacted, it impacts our entire being. Whether our health is improving or regressing, it is a holistic experience, not just a condition of the body, the mind, or the spirit. It impacts all three dimensions, and it impacts both the physical and spiritual, the visible and the invisible.
- And this brings up a point about the terms we use to describe our health conditions. Does our terminology align with our biblical view of anthropology?
Let’s just consider the general term, “health.” Biblically, the human being can be described as having three dimensions: physical, mental, and spiritual. Our physical health considers the well-being of our body, our bones, muscles, blood, and so on. Our mental health considers the well-being of our minds. Our spiritual health considers the well-being of our spirits, and our hearts.
And as we just noted, those terms align with the three dimensions on the On Being Human picture. We have a heart or spirit (spiritual health), a mind (mental health), and a body (physical health), all wrapped up in the context of our soul.
But do we, our churches, and the culture always consider our health from this holistic, integrated perspective?
Here’s a common definition of the word, “health.”
Physical and mental well-being; freedom from disease, pain, or defect; normalcy of physical and mental functions; soundness.[7]
We find two branches of health: mental and physical. If we are holistic, integrated beings, where is the mention of “spiritual health?” Where is the heart or spirit?
Did you catch it? The definition itself promotes an idea of anthropology that is incomplete. It ignores the spiritual.
Is it possible to have a physical ailment that doesn’t impact the mind and heart, or a mental illness that doesn’t impact the body or heart? For that matter, doesn’t a broken or wounded heart impact our minds and bodies?
If we’re stricken with a physical ailment such as cancer, are our thoughts and emotions impacted by it? Does it impact our mental health? Does it impact our hearts, our spirits?
If we suffer from depression, a mental health concern, does it impact our physical health? Are we tired more often? Do we suffer from aches and pains?
We need to be careful here. The cultural conversations around “mental health” are generally good and productive. But are we unconsciously using a term that falsely segments the human being?
Let’s next consider the term “mental illness.”
We should celebrate the fact that awareness and understanding of mental illness are increasing today. It’s an enormous problem and continues to grow at an astounding and alarming rate.
Mental illness can be defined in a few ways, but a common one is “health conditions involving changes in emotion, thinking or behavior (or a combination of these). Mental illnesses are associated with distress and/or problems functioning in social, work, or family activities.”[8]
We typically associate mental illness with conditions such as depression, anxiety disorders, OCD, and bipolar disorder. Mental health conditions are often categorized and treated separately from physical health conditions such as cancer, heart disease, or physical injury.
If you have a mental illness, you’ll probably see a counselor, a psychologist, or a psychiatrist. If you have a cold, you’ll go to a general practitioner or some other “physical medicine” doctor.
And by the way, we also hear the term “spiritual health.” If we have a “spiritual problem,” we go to another type of professional – usually a religious leader such as a pastor or priest.
That’s all fine and good – different dimensions of the human being are often treated by specialists in each dimension. I’m not arguing against that. I am proposing that we often treat something in one dimension without considering or acknowledging its impact on and integration with the other dimensions.
School Shootings, Addictions and Mental Health
Let’s look at an unfortunately common example of how this disintegrated view of the mind, body, and spirit plays out in modern life.
Regarding the pattern of young men who commit school shootings, The Heritage Foundation reported, “There is a sobering theme repeated over and over in the biographies of school shooters—the fatherlessness of a broken or never formed family. Among the 25 most-cited school shooters since Columbine, 75 percent were reared in broken homes. Psychologist Dr. Peter Langman, a pre-eminent expert on school shooters, found that most came from incredibly broken homes of not just divorce and separation, but also infidelity, substance abuse, criminal behavior, domestic violence, and child abuse.”
Were these young men only suffering from mental illness, or were their hearts broken, beaten, and wounded? Were their spirits crushed? This in no way justifies or excuses their heinous actions, but if we are looking for an explanation, should we not look down deep into the human heart, and not just the mind as it were?
I spent a short time in the addiction treatment field, which typically falls under “mental health.” There has been a move for years to socially classify addiction as a “disease,” something you catch, or something genetically handed down to you.
Genetics can play a role in someone’s tendency towards addiction, but can we classify all addictions as diseases, something you innocently catch while going about your day?
That removes all moral responsibility from the addicted person, and it ignores their story, their spirit, and their heart.
When I was in that industry, they stopped using the term “addiction” entirely. Someone with a drug or alcohol addiction has a “substance use disorder.” Disorder has a very different tone than the word, “addiction.”
Yet an addiction counselor I was working with told me, more than once, that every single opioid addict she had ever counseled (and there were hundreds of them) all became addicts as the result of…trauma.
In her view, every addict uses substances as a means of coping with a wounded heart. A wounded spirit. But many of these folks are treated with more drugs and only more drugs, physical treatment for a spiritual condition.
I don’t balk at modern medicine or treating physical and mental illnesses with appropriate pharmaceuticals. But is it possible we aren’t thinking about or treating health conditions with the appropriate, holistic, integrated, biblical ideas of anthropology?
It can’t be the norm in a society that continues to reject the existence of the spiritual. If all we are is rational beings who exist only in the physical realm, there is little need to focus on spiritual health, or wounded hearts and broken desires and traumatic, invisible injury.
Health as a Holistic Indicator
What do we make of all of this in terms of our health as an Indicator pointing us to our hearts?
As we noted, few would debate that the three main branches of health (physical, mental, and spiritual) require specialized skills and facilities to treat those specific areas.
Most physical, medical doctors don’t have the skills of a mental health specialist, such as an addiction counselor. And pastors and Christian counselors are uniquely qualified to help us understand our spiritual health. This is why so many pastors visit hospitals. Most people aren’t going to get spiritual care there.
And we also recognize that there is frequent crossover between these three areas. There are addiction counselors who delve into the spiritual and a few medical doctors who also provide mental and spiritual help.
I’m simply noting that we need to be careful that our Ideas of Anthropology remain biblical; that we are integrated creatures even when our three dimensions are often treated separately.
The first step towards understanding how our health can point us down to our hearts is embracing a proper, integrated Idea of Anthropology.
If we receive a tough diagnosis of a physical illness, understand the other two dimensions of us are impacted, so let’s not be shy about asking for help and care from a pastor or close friends. Let’s find a solid Christian counselor and allow them to suffer with us. To be with us.
Several physical and mental illnesses can be traced to spiritual conditions: depression, anxiety, fatigue, headaches, body pains, eating disorders, and the like. The loss of hope in our hearts can have a devastating impact on our mental and physical health. So can grief, loneliness, and betrayal. And some of those conditions stretch far back into our stories.
So, it’s important that we carefully assess our overall health and not neglect our hearts or spirits. What are we addicted to and why? If we’re constantly tired and there’s no good physical explanation, what might our hearts be telling us? Is our heart weighed down and wounded? Is our rage or anxiety seeping out through our bodies, through our physical health?
If we suffer from anxiety or depression and it’s harming us physically, might we consider venturing into the deep waters of our hearts with someone trained to understand and walk with us through our stories?
Could certain challenges with physical or mental health be signs of a spiritual condition, and are we listening carefully to what our hearts may be communicating through the Heartview indicator of our holistic health?
Two types of Heart Disease
I’ll close with a personal story.
When I was in my early 40s, I caught so-called “walking pneumonia”. It’s the only time I’ve had it. It wasn’t a bad case, so I worked and went about my traveling, even though I was dog-tired and spent a good amount of time wheezing. My doctor put me on meds and within a few weeks I was feeling better. I went back to see him near the end of my treatment, and he asked how I was doing. I said I was feeling much better, but that my chest still hurt.
He asked, “From the coughing?”
I said, “No, it hurts when I’m walking upstairs or just moving around. When I’m resting, I don’t feel it, but when I’m active I do.”
He looked at me very seriously and said, “I don’t think that’s the pneumonia. I think it’s your heart.”
I thought he was nuts. I was young, in good health, didn’t do drugs, and had few risk factors for a heart problem.
But he sent me to get a stress test, which I failed miserably. Four days later I had surgery, and they discovered I had a 95% blockage in my LAD artery. That artery is called “the widowmaker” because a blockage there normally kills you.
I’d love to tell you I spent the four days between my diagnosis and my surgery in prayerful worship, singing songs to God and thanking him for my diagnosis. But that was NOT my spiritual condition. I was scared out of my mind and very, very angry. I wasn’t scared to die, but I was scared to leave my wife and kids.
You could accuse me of not trusting God enough in that situation – and you’d be right.
I couldn’t believe God would allow this to happen. There was no rational reason for it. I don’t have a genetic disposition to heart disease and I have lived a fairly healthy life. Not knowing much about how heart disease works, I spent those four days wondering if I was seconds away from a massive heart attack. I barely slept.
My physical condition had a profound impact on my mental and spiritual health.
The surgery was successful, I avoided a heart attack or any damage, and I’ve lived a normal life ever since. But for months afterward, I was still upset with God. It just felt – unfair.
One day I was sitting and pondering the whole series of events. Then it hit me. The fact that I contracted pneumonia probably saved my life. The only reason my chest had been hurting (what we later found out was angina) was because my oxygen levels were low due to the pneumonia. I had no other symptoms, no other indications that I had a massive blockage in my widow maker.
More than likely, I would have had a heart attack sometime later and just died. Instead, the presence of pneumonia and a very attentive general practitioner resulted in proper treatment and a solution that most likely greatly extended my life.
My anger instantly turned to praise and gratitude. God had used pneumonia (did He allow me to get it or cause me to get it?) to save my life. He used an illness to rescue me.
As a result of my physical heart condition, He took me on a journey and showed me some things about my spiritual “heart condition.” He taught me a thing or two about trust, about what I really love, and what I really desire.
My anger and feelings of betrayal didn’t put God off. He allowed me to express them freely, which I certainly did with many interesting words. And He gave me six months to get them out of my system. Then He ever-so-quietly and gently let me peek behind the curtain.
And through the fear, the anxiety, the pain, and the suffering of a physical condition, He drew me closer to Him in both my spirit and my mind. I suffered holistically (in body, mind, and spirit) and God healed me holistically (my body, my mind, and my spirit).
[1] Smith, J.K.A. (2009). Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (p. 31). Baker Academic.
[2] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Pr 3:7–8). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[3] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Pr 17:22). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[4] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Pr 16:24). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[5] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (Pr 4:20–22). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[6] New American Standard Bible: 1995 update (3 Jn 2). (1995). The Lockman Foundation.
[7] Oxford Dictionary, via Google.
[8]www.psychiatry.org
