Every morning I line up about fifteen pill boxes on the kitchen counter preparing for my daily medication. These include vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidant pills, anti-inflammatory pills, pills for hypertension , pills for cholesterol control, pills for joint pain, and they are all considered necessary to maintain health and a comfortable lifestyle. This was not always so, but we have become a highly medicated society. There seems to be a pill for just about every human malady. Even the progress of so-called incurable diseases can be slowed and sometimes temporarily stalled by modern drugs. Of course, when medication fails, we must resort to surgery or radiation. A multi-million dollar pharmaceutical industry and research have resulted from the demand for ever more effective drugs. A federal agency, the FDA, has been established to monitor and certify the safety of these drugs.
Many of these modern medications are arrived at by meticulous research in large modern laboratories, but some have been discovered seemingly by accident, or, as some would say, divine providence. The story of the discovery of penicillin is one such case. Winston Churchill was saved from drowning as a teenager by a classmate named Alexander Fleming. Churchill's parents were so grateful that they paid for Fleming's expenses to attend medical college. In 1928, while working in a laboratory, Fleming left a petri dish containing a bacterial culture on the counter overnight. The next morning he discovered that a mold had killed all the bacteria. He named the mold penicillin after the bacteria it had killed. By 1941 penicillin had become a miracle drug used to cure many bacterial infections. About that time Winston Churchill had become the prime minister of Britain and was attending an important meeting in Gibraltar. While there he became seriously ill with pneumonia. An emergency supply of penicillin was sent and administered, and Churchill's life was saved a second time by Alexander Fleming and his miracle drug.
Are we as careful and diligent to preserve our spiritual health as we are our physical? What precautions and what medications are we using to this end? Do we guard the avenues to the soul, the five senses, against infection that would contaminate our moral fiber? Do we harbor anti-social thoughts and feelings such as greed, envy, hate, or anger that would cause us to be spiritually ill? Or do we feed our minds with things that are true, noble, just, pure, and lovely (Phil 4:8)? As we medicate for good physical health, we also need to medicate for our spiritual well-being. This spiritual well-being depends on our faith in God's existence, His promises, and His provision for our salvation. This "faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (Rom. 10:17). Daily reading and meditation on God's word is what I choose to call "spiritual medication."
