Mental and Spiritual illness
An episode written for Texas Christian Conservative Talk
By: Zach Rippey
2020 was the start of something that will forever be a scar on our hearts. Our leaders were called to lead and often times failed. We were a nation living in fear for months. The leaders shut down schools, closed businesses, and changed the way your face looks when you go get groceries. We were mentally abused by the media with death tickers on the screens constantly. We for the first time in a long time, didn’t know who to trust, didn’t know who to hug, and were confusing hate with love. We were divided, confused, and angry. The mental health in this country certainly took a beating.
We have all struggled in one way or another since March of last year. We are building our minds back up. A lot of us had to learn, re learn, and even unlearn what we thought we knew about life, science, and the mind. The most important thing you can do in this life is to protect your mind from evil. Bad thoughts, bad ideas, and bad self image are the ways to find yourself in the realm of mental illness. Those bad thoughts usually stem from constant lies that are being worked into your brain. Those lies can come from the government, the media, your friends, your family, and in all honestly The Enemy.
You see, once you are spiritually awakened to the Lord Jesus Christ and the true living word of God you start to see how not only God moves, but also how the enemy moves.
The enemy is everywhere in our culture. The Bible confirms is, he is the prince of this world. The devil is influencing a lot of the things that are happening right now. He is attacking people’s identity in ways that I don’t need to explain… You have seen the logos, choir boys, and what Nickelodeon is streaming across their airways right into your Childs impressionable mind.
Spiritual awakening will do wonders for your brain. The moment you discover God and truly accept his son as Lord and Savior, it’s as if the door in the back of your brain swings open and light pierces through. The light of Jesus comes in and gives you more wisdom, clarity, and your thoughts are reigned in nothing but Truth and Love.
Don’t believe me? Go on YouTube one night and just search “powerful Jesus testimonies.” You will quickly learn that the most broken man, the meanest man, and the toughest man have all been transformed radically by the gospel. Suicidal men coming to Jesus. Broken hearted woman falling out for the God that created them. The spiritual health in this country is diminishing, we are led so astray. There is a reason mental health and mental illness is an ongoing problem here. We are taught to love everything except God and His Word. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution. The roots of our hearts have grown down into THINGS, and we dare not pull up one rootlet or we die.
Let me go a little deeper here on that… Our entire lives we have been taught and it’s been truly accepted, pushed, and encouraged to love money and things. If you have both, you are winning in the eyes of society. We have lost touch with who we are as people. We don’t feel the sand beneath our toes unless we first get our instagram beach photo. We don’t breath in the ocean breeze, or dunk our heads underwater and let the waves rock us to shore anymore like we did when we are kids. We have lost touch with our bodies, our minds, and our spirits. We have lost touch with others and we rather scroll the time line - than hang out with someone in real time. We are lost people living in a world of sin.
There’s self help books that sell for twenty dollars that never work. They are a nice pick me up and then we fall back into the same ruts, habits, and destructive mental pathways. The most powerful thing you could do to overcome your own mental health issues is to address it with yourself, and even confess it to God. Giving it to him and then diving deep into His Word is the number one solution we can give anyone on this platform.
We all have to work together in achieving this. Yes it is between you and God but we as his children have to be there for one another better. It’s on us to be intentional about serving one another, helping one another, and being there when times get tough. We are called to love our neighbor and not only that, but to love them as we love ourselves. It’s almost like when Jesus said that, he knew his much we self worship ourselves and selfishly just want to obtain, own things, and be abundant in our worldly possessions.
We are to judge in love. Give grace before we give correction. Give the Gospel without our opinions attached. How can we do this for an issue such as mental health??
A lot of times a person struggling with mental health issues has had some trauma. In those moments we as people can easily ask questions and help the person through hat trauma by just being a supportive and caring friend. Another determining factor is loneliness, we aren’t created to be alone. That’s why Eve was made in the garden. God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone.” In Genesis 2:18!
Being there for someone, spending time with them, and not judging their weakness or sins is how we elevate the mental health in this country. Showing love while pointing someone in the right direction is what the Gospel is all about. It’s how revival happens and how the light of Christ can shine in this dark world.
No matter how old you get, if you stub your toe and start bleeding you wish someone was there with a band aid and a cotton ball. Compassionate care is needed from all of us in our most vulnerable moments. The same moments we all go through, just in different seasons. The same way our body needs a band aid when we scrape it, our mind needs a band aid when we go through something the mind was never supposed to go through.
No matter how much we want to hold our guns up and fight for freedom and truth we must always remember the two most important commandments. Love God and Love your Neighbor. Our neighbors is a fancy way of sayin everyone. Even the people we don’t agree with, or don’t want to hang out with, or have nothing to gain from this person.
A.w Tozier, brilliant writer said, “One of the biggest sins we all struggle with today is the sin of self. Self-righteousness, self pity, self confidence, self sufficiency, self admiration, self love and a host of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention til the light of God is focused upon them.”
Tozier continues “the hyphenated sins of the human spirit are woven of the fine threads of the self-life we are all naturally living. They are not something we do, they are something we are.”
This cuts deep y’all. We have to do better and lower our expectations of other people. Especially their thoughts, and ideas that don’t line up with ours. Yes there are evil people and we stay away from them and can’t support anyone who supports them, I understand that. We must care before we correct. We must give grace before we judge. We must let our lives be the reason why someone turns to Christ, not our words. Let our words be a vessel of speaking all things life. Which is having compassion for people with mental illness and most importantly spiritual illness. Let’s be real here, spiritual illness is sweeping our nation. We aren’t in a pandemic we are in a sindemic and I am here to bring people closer to the Lord.
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