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Christians don’t need more health trends; we need Biblical clarity. Bible Health isn’t about perfect diets or complicated protocols. It’s about honoring God with the spirit, soul and body He gave you. If that feels right to you, come join us.

Hey y’all, and welcome to Monday Manna!

This one is bittersweet.

Today starts the final week of our 7-week affirmations series, and we have loved every part of it, especially reading your comments and seeing which areas landed hardest for you.

We’re closing where we probably should have started, with Spiritual Health, because it isn’t the last item on the list. It’s the floor the other six stand on.

Before we tell you why we saved this one for last, we want to tell you what it cost us to learn it.

We didn’t come to Biblical health through a book, a podcast, or a diagnosis. We came to it through two prayers prayed thirteen months apart by two people who hadn’t met each other yet, and neither prayer had a thing to do with health.

Dr. Z here.

March 16, 2003. I was 22, on my knees in the living room of a man named Enoch, who was 60 at the time and could run circles around me. I had failed to quit smoking and drugs more times than I could count. That night I prayed ten words: “Lord Jesus, I accept you as my Lord and Savior.”

God delivered me overnight. No withdrawals. No detoxing. Nothing. It was like I was literally born again.

A few days later, sitting at Enoch’s house reading the Gospel of John in a brand new Bible, I hit John 10:10 and prayed, “Lord, what’s the abundant life?”

What He showed me was seven interconnected areas, and that prayer is the reason Bible Health exists at all.

But here’s the part nobody puts on a testimony card. Not every symptom evaporated. The gut issues, the aches and pains, the cystic acne, all of it lingered for years. And what the Lord eventually made plain to me was the question I’d been avoiding, which is how could He heal me of the physical while I kept right on doing the very things that were hurting me?

Mama Z here.

Easter 2004. I was raised Lutheran and I loved the church I grew up in, but the first time a friend invited me to a non-denominational church, I felt the presence of God as I never had before. His Spirit was alive and on fire, and I was born again that morning.

I was on 10 prescriptions in my twenties for IBS, digestive issues, allergies, dysmenorrhea, and ADD. Not long after I got saved I read Isaiah 58, and it completely changed what I thought fasting even was. I fasted 10 days on water, prayed for God’s help, and weaned myself off all ten. No withdrawals.

Then I learned the same thing he did, which is that deliverance and healing aren’t always the same event. The bulimia stayed. The food sensitivities stayed. It took years of praying over my own hands in the kitchen, “Lord, I know not what I’m doing, but I know You will guide my hands,” before I understood what my body could and couldn’t handle.

Here’s why we’re putting both stories in the same letter.

Neither of us was irreligious beforehand. Religion wasn’t the missing piece, and church attendance wasn’t the missing piece. The new heart was.

“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” — Ezekiel 36:26-27

Notice what God promises to give and what He promises to cause.

He gives the new heart, and then He causes the walking, which means the promise was never that we’d read about obedience or sit in a weekly meeting where obedience gets discussed, but that we would actually walk it out in the body, in the kitchen, in the schedule, and in the checkbook.

That’s why Spiritual Health is the foundation and not the finale of our Affirmation Series. Every other area we’ve walked through in this series is downstream of a heart that’s been made new and is being led. Take the spiritual out and you’re left managing symptoms with better vocabulary.

Can you relate?

Need to get caught up on the Biblical Affirmation series? It’s all here…

Here’s a word for your Monday before we get into everything we’ve published since Manna #14…

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.” — Matthew 7:24-25

Jesus isn’t contrasting two kinds of sermons here. He’s contrasting a hearer who does with a hearer who doesn’t, and both of them sat through the same teaching.

That should stop us, because most of us have heard far more truth than we’ve obeyed. We can quote the verse about the body being a temple of the Holy Spirit and still eat in a way that argues with it, and we can amen a whole message on rest and then go home to a calendar with no margin anywhere in it.

The foundation isn’t what you agreed with. It’s what you built on.

And a foundation stays invisible until weather arrives. Nobody admires it, nobody photographs it, and nobody gives it a thought on a clear day. Then the rain comes, and it turns out to be the only thing that mattered.

So take one thing you already know is true, one thing you’ve heard taught and nodded along to and never actually built on, and build on it this week. Not seven things. One.

Then let the foundation do what foundations do, quietly, until the day you need it.

Find this helpful? Spread the love…

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Everything we’ve published since Manna #14, both pieces, right here.

This week we close the series out with Spiritual Health, which is the capstone and the foundation at the same time.

Bible Health is where we teach the why. Over on Natural Living Family this week we taught the how: back-to-school remedies, cleaner floors and faces, and the metabolic side of getting back into a routine. Four favorites worth your five minutes.

DIY Deodorant + Allergy Roll-On + Lemon Tea Bread — Spotlight: When Pollen, Dust, and School Germs Hit at Once
Allergy Drink Mix + Garden Whys + DIY Calendula Oil + Healing Infused Water — Spotlight: The Allergy Solution Mama Z Keeps Handy
Sugar Scrub Printable + DIY Floor Cleaner + HIIT Exercises + Metabolic Flexibility — Spotlight: Your coffee...
DIY Honey Facial Cleanser + Geranium Oil + Mold Remediation + 4-Bean Salad — Spotlight: Stop Paying Premium Prices for Mediocre Skin Care

Seven weeks, seven areas, one line each…

Spiritual: God gave me a new heart, and He is causing me to walk.
Physical: My body is His temple, and I’ll treat it like it.
Mental: I won’t rehearse what God has already answered.
Emotional: God is near to the brokenhearted, and He is near to me.
Financial: God is my Provider, and I am His steward.
Occupational: My work is worship before it’s ever income.
Social: I was never meant to do this alone.

Which of the seven did God press on hardest these last seven weeks?

Monday Manna #15

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