Sam Rohrer: Well welcome today to Stand In The Gap Today. This is Sam Rohrer and you are listening to a program that is here for you every day.
According to the headline news, in just the past several months there are reports of cases of mad cow disease; believe it or not, in Tennessee and in Florida. But there are also cases of malaria. In the past weeks, cases of the flu have spiked in many states.
But a most intriguing virus that prompted a headline yesterday in the news article sites the Center for Disease Control for failure to grab ahold of a disease described as a “Polio like” paralysis virus that some are describing as a monster virus. And it’s being reported all across the country. Well what should we make of these reports and others that report on strange, new diseases? Or plagues or sickness or other similar descriptions?
Today we’re gonna discuss these issues with an expert on these matters, and all matters of health care freedom. Her name is Dr. Jane Orient. She is the executive director of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons. Our theme for the day is, Diseases In America; Are We Really This Sick?
With that, I welcome you to the program officially. I’m Sam Rohrer, joined by Dr. Gary Dull, and evangelist Dave Kistler, and of course our special guest, Dr. Jane Orient.
Jane, thank you for being with us today. This is your first time, but you and I go back quite a number of years, but it’s your first time on the program. Thank you for making time to be with us today.
Dr. Jane Orient: Well it’s a pleasure.
Sam Rohrer: I’m gonna call you Jane, but it’s Dr. Orient. You’re a practicing physician. You’ve been with AAPS now for, I think you said 1983 or whatever? You are President of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, you are the editor of AAPN News, you are managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, and frankly that’s a whole lot more … I have a whole lot more here I could read. I’m gonna skip that. But you are imminently qualified.
Before we get into the substance of the focus today, I’d like to get your comments before we get into this area on your comments of this Polio like virus that seems to be expanding quickly, I’d like you to share with us just a little bit about the primary focus of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons and the importance of your goal. Which Jane, if I can, I’m going to read what’s on your website.
“Since 1943 the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons has been dedicated to the highest ethical standards of the Oath of Hippocrates and to preserving the sanctity of the patient/physician relationship and the practice of private medicine.”
Now my question to you, to start right out, why is the doctor/patient so important? And does it even exist anymore in our healthcare system in America?
Dr. Jane Orient: It does exist, but you might have to look for it. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and people frequently get those two words reversed, it’s easier to look us up if you look for Association first. We believe that the patient/physician relationship is sacred and that the patient comes first.
Our motto is omnia pro aegroto, everything for the patient. And from the patients standpoint, it really is important to have a physician who is working for you. Who you can trust to give you the best advice he can for your condition. Rather than one who is working for population health or for the government or for some insurance company where his primary job is to maximize the bottom line or to do what the health bureaucrats want.
Dave Kistler: Jane, let me ask you this. Obviously in the United States of America some would say we are the most technologically advanced from the standpoint of medicine and medical procedures that we’ve ever been. Yet sometimes that does not equate with America necessarily the healthiest it’s ever been.
When, can you tell us, was the healthiest time for the United States and the citizenry of the country? Is it now or was it sometime prior to this?
Dr. Jane Orient: I think it’d be easier to answer the question, when has things been worse? And I’m not sure you could find a time it’s been worse then now. I mean, I’ve read that 71% of men would not qualify to join the military if we had the draft. Either because they’re too fat, they’re too sick, or they cannot meet the mental requirements.
Back when I was in school, back in the 1950’s, we did not have to have Epi Pens or the equivalent for kids having life threatening allergy attacks even though peanut butter sandwiches were everywhere. We did not have that much severe asthma. We did not have neurodevelopmental disorders. We did not have 1/10th of the class on Ritalin or some other drug.
So all of these things are very disturbing.
Gary Dull: They are disturbing and we see … It just seems like these things are coming at us like a flood. In a general sense, it seems that the world is being plagued with increasing occurrences of diseases, like Ebola and other ones that we could name, that have become immune to drug treatments.
And my question to you, Jane, is how significant is the increase of drug resistant diseases these days?
Dr. Jane Orient: A lot of our antibiotics are becoming unable to cure diseases that they previously did. I think Ebola has always been with us, we just hadn’t heard about it as much and it never was sensitive to drugs. The big worry that I think we have now is tuberculosis. It is one of the major killers on the world scene; both historically and even now. It is becoming resistant to most, or all, of the drugs we use in some places in the world.
The United States previously had this pretty much under control because of good public health surveillance and effective drugs. But now, especially with the influx and uncontrolled influx of people who are harboring latent TB or who haven’t even been screened so we don’t whether they have TB, this could break down at any time. And this disease is very, very contagious. You can catch it on the bus.
When we had one case of active TB identified in our labor and delivery suite, we ended up screening hundreds of people because all the visitors, all the staff, all the mothers, all the babies had potentially been exposed. But obviously if you get exposed on the bus, you’re not gonna be able to track down all the contacts.
And this is one of the things that I think, where the CDC I think, is really failing us. I mean, they’re not warning us against the danger to our whole public health infrastructure if we overload it with things that are not diagnosed timely.
Sam Rohrer: Well, boy Jane that’s a great way to start the program off. Ladies and gentleman you’re listening today Stand In The Gap Today, our theme Diseases in America; Are We Really This Sick?
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Our special guest, Dr. Jane Orient. She’s an MD, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and President of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness.
Dave just asked Dr. Orient a question, when have we been more healthy? She rephrased the question and said perhaps when have we been more sick then we are right now? Very significant comment.
If you’re just joining us this is Sam Rohrer accompanied today by Dr. Gary Dull and evangelist Dave Kistler. Our special guest, Dr. Jane Orient. Our theme for the day is this, Diseases In America; Are We Really This Sick?
Well the media driven threat of potential disease, it has been with us for a long time. Remember the bird flu scare of many years ago? I recall sitting in private meetings with healthcare officials when I was in the Pennsylvania General Assembly as this fear of this so called potential plague was being discussed. Personally, I must say that I didn’t buy most of what I was hearing at that point, and thankfully the threat never materialized.
Yet I will say that laws were passed, government became bigger, and the public was at least temporarily intimidated with many people making lots of money. Yet we do know that there have been plagues, such as the 1918 flu epidemic that in 15 months, according to the history, killed between 50 and 100 million people. Get that, between 50 and 100 million people worldwide and over 670,000 here in the United States alone.
Well we’ve been blessed in the last several generations here in the United States to have avoided disease of this type. So how do we respond to headlines that scream dire predictions of potential new diseases and viruses? Should we take note or should we ignore them? Are they real or are they imagined? A modern version of medical fake news?
Well we’ll discuss the latest news headline that’s appearing just recently here in this segment. Our focus, the polio like virus, as it’s being described. Is it real or imagined?
Dr. Jane Orient, as the Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and President of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, you’ve lead the fight a great deal on all matters of healthcare. So I’m coming to you as a practicing physician, and being involved and editors of journals and that kind of thing for a long time, what’s your comment here? ‘Cause I’ve been noticing increasing incidents of reports, what’s called a “mysterious polio like” virus afflicting increasing numbers of Americans.
One headline news yesterday was prompted by some mothers of afflicted children who lambasted the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, for doing nothing in their opinion to contain this virus. Now here’s the exact headline, as reported in one source, “This disease is a monster! Furious moms blast the CDC for failing to act on mystery polio like virus, which has left hundreds of kids paralyzed since 2012, killed at least two, and is now expected to hit unprecedented levels in 2020.” Which is just next year.
Jane, I wanna start here with this question to you, what is this mysterious virus that in this article is referred to as acute flaccid myelitis, AFM, and are the reports and projections real? Or are they imagined?
Dr. Jane Orient: Well as you say, there can be a lot of fake news about medicine and the media frequently has its priorities sort of backwards. This acute flaccid myelitis is not imaginary, it is real. There were 182 cases, approximately, reported in 2018. They seem to peak at two year intervals. There was some attention paid to it in 2014 when, at that time, there were hundreds of children who were extremely sick with a respiratory virus. They were in ICU’s on ventilators, maybe about 11 of them died, and some of them got a polio like paralysis.
Then it was believed it was caused by internal virus D68, which hadn’t really been seen much in this country before, but is endemic in Central America. The 2014 outbreaks seemed to coincide with resettling a lot of Central American children in American schools. So they had … may have been carrying a virus to which they had some immunity, but the American children did not.
And it’s possible that political correctness kept the CDC from really doing a good investigation on the origins of this. I mean, it’s not like sweeping the country like the 1918 influenza pandemic and we’re not having things like closing all the swimming pools and closing schools and that sort of thing. But it is sort of disturbing that the CDC really has not determined the cause.
It’s internal virus D68 is one the viruses been found, they’re pretty sure it’s not polio because they haven’t been able to isolate polio from the specimens they’ve gotten. It acts a lot like polio in that it effects the gray matter of the spinal cord and causes paralysis. Sometimes paralyzing the breathing muscles. The children don’t end up in an iron lung because we use different kind of ventilators these days, but some of them get better and some of them don’t.
So it is a serious concern. We don’t really have, apparently … Or the CDC has not published maps of the outbreaks so that we can tell exactly how it’s progressing. There’s no good advice. Just wash your hands and the usual things that they put out about anything.
Dave Kistler: Jane let me ask you this, it sounds like from what you’re saying the CDC is, maybe in your opinion, not doing such a good job dealing with this. Whose responsibility is it to deal with a potential outbreak from something like this? Is it primarily the CDC or is it some other entity? Is it the American people taking the protocols you mentioned by appropriate washing of hands? I mean, what’s the answer?
Dr. Jane Orient: The CDC at least has assumed the responsibility, or at least they’ve assumed the authority, to speak to these things. And if you have a case of this suspected illness, you’re supposed to send specimens to the CDC for them to analyze.
The state public health departments are supposed to have a role in this, but a lot of times they defer to the CDC and all of the laboratory testing is done in Atlanta. So a lot … Like our public health department, if you ask it a question, it goes to the CDC website.
Gary Dull: Jane, you know, again this is great information. My question is this though, to you, in your opinion when it comes to matters of health in this nation, in the United States of America, other impacts exist, such as the opioid addiction. We’ve done programs on that. We have crack, we have the heroine addiction, and the one keeping more young men out of the military than any other is obesity. You’ve talked about that a little bit ago, the lack of exercise. I’ve just recently heard that they are considering extending the six week basic training period into the military up to 12 weeks in order to try to get these young men prepared.
But if you would please for our listeners, put these various health afflictions into perspective and rank them according to the greatest concern. I think that our listeners would appreciate that very much.
Dr. Jane Orient: Personally I think the greatest concern is the attack on our traditional Western values. A whole generation of alienated children, they don’t know why they’re here, they don’t know where they came from, they don’t know anything about their history, a lot of them don’t even know who that baby is in the manger in the nativity scenes. A lot of them just feel hopeless, they have no future, that they might as well just spend their time texting or taking drugs. They take drugs to anesthetize themselves from the chaotic surrounding that they’re in.
The breakdown of the family values, all of these things … Exposure to pornography and all types of sex that little children don’t really need to know about, I think all of this is damaging our children’s mind and spirit. Which is a very important part of their health.
I think a lot of our public health efforts are misdirected. We get excited about the wrong things. We’re very concerned about this AFM, but we don’t hear much about the Autism epidemic, which is effecting maybe more than one in 50 boys in the United States. Which is neurologically devastating. Many of these children function to some extent, but many of them do not and they’re just not able to take care of themselves.
Sam Rohrer: Jane, I didn’t know where you were gonna go and when Gary asked you that question, but you did not go right to the naming of specific diseases. You went directly to the fact of values. And you did not say it, but we talk on this program a lot about Biblical world view, or world view aspects. You used the word Western values, Judaeo-Christian Western values.
How does the elimination or the subversion of Judaeo-Christian values and having purpose in life and value, all of that that you were talking about, describe again from your perspective as a physician, how does that kind of illness or disease, attack, however you wanna look at that, how does that in your mind rank higher than the disease of a polio like virus we’re seeing about? Or Ebola? Or something of that type? Why did you go there first?
Dr. Jane Orient: Well because I think the very essential part of your health happens to be your spiritual values. And your resistance to diseases has a lot to do with that.
I mean, we have a lot of suicides in our young people today. Unprecedented levels of suicides in teenagers, or slow suicides by abusing drugs, or ignoring just sensible hygienic advice. So the kids are getting infected with sexually transmitted diseases at a very young age. Or they’re just getting involved in relationships. There’s no protective measure against a broken heart. Their fractured relationship, fractured friendships, there’s nothing to hold onto. So your mental health is a very important part, mental and spiritual health is a very important part, of all of your health.
These other things are disease, you may get it and most of the time you recover or maybe get treated and get well, but other problems are pervasive in [inaudible 00:18:43] life.
Sam Rohrer: Yes, yes indeed, Dr. Jane Orient.
Disease and plagues have occurred in history all the way since the fall, which was right there after creation. They are real. They’re going to increase in the latter years from a Biblical perspective.
In many cases disease and the spread of diseases are very closely related to lifestyle, cleanliness, diet, following God designed sexual practices, using latest medical advances. Some of those things we just talked about with our guest in the last segment.
Biblically God has designed our bodies in most cases to heal itself. A rather miraculous fact. However, God has given humankind the ability to more greatly understand the miracle of the human body and the advances of diseases. And such is the case for vaccines and from a natural perspective, the understanding of prevention.
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Now in this segment we’re going to deal with these two approaches just briefly as it relates to these new diseases.
Jane Orient, just very quickly, give your website here real quickly and if there’s a publication that people can pick up from you, mention that just briefly. Then I’ll get right into the questions here.
Dr. Jane Orient: Our website is aapsonline.org or the Doctor’s for Disaster Preparedness website is ddponline.org and everything on there is freely available, including our journal and our newsletters. There are a number of journal articles about things of great public interest, including vaccines.
Sam Rohrer: Excellent! And ladies and gentleman I advise you to go there, and encourage you to do so. Great site, a lot of information.
So Jane let’s go right here first off, I’d like your opinion on vaccines generally here in this first response. I know we can spend days talking about it, so this will be tough, but you can do tough things. So, in a general perspective, our listeners, how should they view vaccine usage? In other words, do vaccines work? Do they always work? Do they don’t work? When don’t they work? Should people generally be cautious when entering into vaccines or just really open arms, just rush after them, and get the first one that comes down the pike? How would you answer that?
Dr. Jane Orient: I would give you a heretical answer, I guess. I think vaccines are over emphasized. That prevention, of course, is important and the best prevention you can do, you do yourself without paying the doctor. Like you follow your grandmothers good advice.
But to say we’re going to eradicate disease if we could just find a vaccine for everything, and we give kids 50 shots or more before they’re allowed to go to school, I think that we’ve forgotten that like every other medical intervention, vaccines are a trade off. Every medical intervention has potential adverse effects. And depending on your risk of getting the disease or getting a bad effect from it, like chicken pox, the risk of vaccinating tens of millions of people or hundreds of millions of people maybe greater than the risk of any one of them would have died of chicken pox if he happened to get it.
Sam Rohrer: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Gary Dull: You know, that’s very interesting Jane, and I have known people … Or people living around here, actually attend my church, who have avoided getting these vaccines from time to time. And you know, you talk about a vaccine, I remember as a child growing up that we had to take the polio vaccine. I don’t remember how many shots it was. And then a little bit later on we had to get a booster.
But you know, in recent years there has been developed a new polio like virus that is breaking out in certain areas. What about a vaccine for that? I mean, do you think that there is a vaccine to control that? Supposedly the vaccine that we took when we were children, at least it was accredited to controlling or eliminating polio in the United States, what about his current particular situation that’s before us these days?
Dr. Jane Orient: Oh I suppose somebody will manage to develop a vaccine for it, if they figure out what the virus is. But like all vaccines, there are problems.
I think one problem is that they are grown in tissue culture. And tissue, cells, from any animal may have all kinds of viruses hidden in the cells. We never did really get to the bottom of the story about the simian virus, sv40 virus, that contaminated the early polio vaccines. And hypothetically might have been responsible for cancers later on. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I do think the investigation was inadequate.
So then it turned out that the oral polio vaccine was causing paralytic polio in adults because it’s a live virus. It’s excreted in the stool, it’s an internal virus, and people were catching paralytic polio from it. So then they stopped using that in the US and now only go with a killed polio vaccine, but there are just always questions.
The safety testing for vaccines is, in my opinion, pretty lax. Much laxer than for drugs. One reason might be that there was a law passed that it is impossible to sue the manufacture of a vaccine for any adverse side effects.
Dave Kistler: Jane, Sam, Gary, and I, none of us of course are physicians. We have no medical background, we don’t play doctors on TV or radio either, but I do appreciate your incredibly balanced perspective with respect to vaccines because this is becoming a huge topic of discussion in the United States of America.
You mentioned something that I found very, very interesting. You talked about doing what your grandmother used to teach you to do with respect to prevention. Can you lay out for us here, I guess what I would call a prevention protocol that every American ought to be operating by that can prevent some of these things from happening so that we don’t have to rely on drugs, vaccines, and all that kind of thing?
Dr. Jane Orient: Well, don’t drink to excess, don’t smoke, don’t run around like the kids are encouraged to do in these sex education classes, eat your vegetables, get some fresh air and exercise, wash your hands, don’t share your eating utensils or your towels. I mean, just plain common sense things.
Then it’s also been shown statistically that people who go to church and live a virtuous life are not only healthier, but happier and live longer. So [inaudible 00:25:12] more lives by requiring people to go to church than by all of these preventive measures, but you’re not allowed to say that.
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Sam Rohrer: Well you are on this program! [crosstalk 0:25:21] Because Jane, we talk about walking the Christian life and putting into effect Biblical principals is really a 24 hour thing. It should effect all of our lives and that’s what you’re talking about, if we follow moral absolutes and live that way, there are benefits to it. Just like there is if the opposite, if we violate certain principals and never wash our hands and all that kind of thing, we’re going to get results from that.
The last couple of minutes we have before us, let me just talk to you about flu vaccines right now because we’re in the flu season. There were some evidences a week ago of a spike in all of this, but I always wonder, how in the world can they choose which flu strain that they’re going to vaccinate against and so forth? And now a couple of people have actually died from the vaccine, so there’s an evidence that some people are not taking it. That concerns a lot of folks.
Should people have flu vaccines? Do they help? They don’t help?
Dr. Jane Orient: Well I don’t take one and I’m not going to. I know too many people who have gotten [inaudible 00:26:21] syndrome with ascending paralysis and ended up on a ventilator after taking the flu vaccine. It’s a rare complication, but what is the benefit of having a flu vaccine? They’re guessing at what strains to include. You may be worse off if it’s a different strain that hits you.
And all this thing on prevention is sometimes backwards. Well, you’ve got to prevent the flu. So if you get the flu and die of it, it’s your own fault if you didn’t have the vaccine. But we are not allowed to even talk about some methods of treating these viral diseases, such as intravenous vitamin C that were described a long time ago in polio victims in North Carolina and been used on a lot of other things.
We’ve had stories that would appear to be miraculous cures in people who were dying of influenza. There was one rancher in Australia, for example. They were gonna take him off his life saving apparatus, people gave him some intravenous vitamin C, and he got well. But they were still resistant to even continue low doses of vitamin C. If a physician gave you that, he might be in deadly terror of losing his license or losing his hospital privileges for doing something that the CDC did not approve of.
But I think that by putting all of our eggs in the prevention basket, and just completely forgetting about better methods of treatment that might be non-toxic and inexpensive, and even miraculously life saving in some circumstances, I think we’re just really misdirected.
Sam Rohrer: Yes indeed. So it’s a balance. Dr. Jane Orient, the Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, our special guest today. Thanks for being with us today. Go to their website ladies and gentleman, lots of information there.
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While it’s been the goal of many groups, including the World Health Organization, to eliminate all infectious diseases, none as far as I could do my research and talking with folks, none have been totally eliminated. As the World Health Organization said a year ago or so, at the end of 2017, they take credit for, in their words, “almost” eliminating seven of the most deadly diseases, starting with small pox.
From a Biblical world view perspective, there is much to say about disease and plagues and pestilences and health generally. In this last segment we generally call our solution segment, try to bring the broad discussion that we have, a little bit to some finality and summary.
I’d like to do that here right now with Gary and Dave.
Gary let me go to you first, if I can. ‘Cause I’d like for you to identify just a few basic principals, Biblical principals, relative to the reality of disease, what God says about disease and health. Just a little bit of that. I don’t know whether you’ve ever preached a sermon on this or not, but this is a big area. I have never heard on, to tell you truth, but you’ve preached on a lot of things that a lot of other pastors don’t preach on.
But give me some thoughts that you would have on some basic summary points about this concept of disease, infectious disease, health, that kind of thing? If you could do that please?
Gary Dull: You know Sam, that’s a very interesting question and actually I do have a sermon on disease.
Sam Rohrer: That doesn’t surprise me, Gary.
Gary Dull: It’s entitled Why Do We Get Sick? And you know what, I didn’t think of that even as we’ve been going throughout this program until you asked that question. I’m gonna go look it up.
But you know it’s interesting to note when we study the whole concept of sickness and disease in the word of God, we need to recognize that it is the result of fallen mankind. The result of sin back in Genesis, chapter three. But also, you know, you need to recognize that God has the ability to keep diseases from us.
I’m reminded of the occasion back in Exodus, chapter 15, when God was dealing with Egypt to the Pharaoh and encouraging him to allow the children of Israel to leave Egypt. He was basically speaking to the children of Israel and he says this, he says, “I will put none of these diseases upon you, which I have brought upon the Egyptians, for I am the Lord that health thee.”
In other words what we find Sam, is that sometimes God can and will prevent us from getting diseases. And I could share a lot of missionary stories about that. Where there were missionaries working right in the midst of great disease stricken areas and God prevented them from getting disease.
However, beyond that we know that the Bible teaches us that God can heal our disease. Psalm 103 in verse three says, “God is the healer of all of our diseases.” Christ, when he was on the earth, healed diseases consistently. On the other hand, we know that God will use diseases and plagues to bring judgment just as he did with the plagues back there in the days of Israel coming out of the land of Egypt.
But you know, why … Or let me phrase it this way, how should we as Christians respond to certain diseases or sicknesses that we may get? First of all, I believe that God will use certain diseases to get our attention and to get us to depend upon him. The Apostle Paul, as you recall Sam, asked the Lord three times to remove his thorn in the flesh, whatever it was. I believe it was a physical infirmity. And God said, no I’m not going to remove the thorn, but I’m going to give you something greater. I’m going to give you my grace so that you can get through that. And Paul rejoiced in that because he realized God’s power was going to be working in him and on him and through him.
Then on the other hand, sometimes I have seen where God has used certain diseases as a witness in a testimony to others. I remember one particular husband and wife, a number of years ago at my church who got ill. It was amazing how God used that illness, used that disease as it were, to be a testimony to others. Others even came to the Lord Jesus Christ.
So you know, the study of disease and sickness in the word of God is a tremendous study and I think we’d do well to conduct such a study one of these days.
Sam Rohrer: I think we could spend an entire program just on that part, Gary.
Dave, let me go to you. Just from a practical perspective we’ve talked about things today on the program that are very practical, not generally talked about, but we did talk about prevention. And from you as an individual, or as a family or whatever, how have you dealt with this in your family? Raising your children? You personally, what do you do? Can you share a few things that you do to prevent and keep yourself healthy?
Dave Kistler: Well Sam I want to go back to what Dr. Jane said, she talked about some very practical things. Don’t do certain things. Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do these things that are gonna be detrimental to your health. Those things should be a given, but on the flip side of it Sam, let me just say this from a personal perspective, diabetes runs in my family. My grandfather had it and died of complications related to it. My mom had diabetes and died of complications related to.
So it typically goes father, daughter, daughter to son, so my twin brother and I are in direct line genetically, I guess, in some ways predisposed toward diabetes. Now I do not have diabetes, I’m thankful I don’t, but a doctor told me years ago, he said, “Dave, as important as is diet,” he said, “exercise is equally, if not more, important.” So what I’ve tried to do, Sam, down through the years is maintain a very rigorous exercise routine which involves a lot of walking, a lot of weight lifting, and things like that.
The reason I do it is a couple of reasons. Number one, in 1 Timothy 4:8 Paul told Timothy, “For bodily exercise profiteth little.” And a lot of people have used that verse to say well, it profits little so there’s no point in being a participant in it. But what it means is this, bodily exercise profits for a little while. The rest of the verse goes on and says, “But Godliness is profitable in all things. Having promise of the life that now is and that which is to come.”
So Godliness, if we exercise ourself to that, we get benefit now. We get benefit in eternity. The physical exercise is beneficial only in this life, but it doesn’t say it’s not beneficial. It is. So what I would encourage people to do is follow the protocol that Jane gave, but on top of that, and this is a great time of the year to talk about it and to stat it, it’s the third day of the new year. Take care of your physical body. The body is God’s temple. They didn’t worship, or shouldn’t worship, the temple in the Old Testament, but they sure did take great care of it.
This body is described as God’s temple in the New Testament, the book of Corinthians. So we ought to maintain it from an appearance perspective, from a health perspective, so that God can be most glorified.
And Sam one final statement. I realized this a number of years ago, my voice which is my calling, my preaching, my voice goes nowhere unless my physical body takes it. So it’s imperative that the vehicle be healthy so that the voice can communicate.
Sam Rohrer: Excellent advice Dave and Gary; both of you! And ladies and gentlemen, I’m thinking as I’m listening to both these men talk, and in context of our discussion, healing is important for all of us. Don’t we all want to be healed? I mean, go to the doctor in order to be healed, right? The World Health Organization thinks they want to eliminate all kind of disease, they won’t. We talked about that. But we all want to be healed.
But Dr. Orient did mention a question. There’s a spiritual ideological component first. When we’re born, we’re born sinners. That’s a Biblical world view. We are in bad shape, but we can be healed. That’s where Jesus Christ comes in and he can heal us by redemption. By trusting in Jesus Christ, be healed spiritually.
We are concerned about our bodies. Our bodies are gonna get sick. We’re all gonna die at some point. We’re gonna come down with something, we know that. But in this life, we can do certain things. We can live like the Bible tells us to live. You don’t drink, you don’t smoke, you don’t go out and carouse around sexually, you do the things that God lays out. It puts us in the best condition for physical health. Then when we do get sick, and we will, then choose to use that to glorify God as Dr. Gary just talked about.
We put these things in balance, we can address all of these issues as they come down. Don’t get carried away by the news. Accept it, understand what God says, and live accordingly, and God will bless you.
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