I opened my eyes to find myself lying on my back in a strange bed. Because my head was raised, I could see into the semidarkness beyond the bed. My first thought was that I was in New York’s Grand Central railroad station at night. Then I saw, sitting on the left-hand side of the bed, my mother. She was wearing the big, flowered overall and dusting cap in which she used to clean the house. Afterward they told me that I went straight back to sleep.
As I learned when I woke, I was nowhere near Grand Central station. I was in a hospital in my English hometown, having had surgery for a depressed fracture of the skull, which was thought to have damaged my brain. What I saw was partly a delusion. The ward did not really look like the photos of Grand Central station I had recently seen. The person keeping vigil by my bed had been a nurse in uniform.
I saw what I saw (if I shut my eyes I can see it now), but I was not seeing what was there. My shocked and battered brain was playing tricks on me. Reality was different from what I thought it was.
All of that happened in 1933, when I was seven years old. Why do I now hark back to it? Because it illustrates two truths that I find I have to stress over and over again when talking to Christians today.
In God’s Hospital
The first truth is that we are all invalids in God’s hospital. In moral and spiritual terms, we are all sick and damaged, diseased and deformed, scarred and sore, lame and lopsided, to a far, far greater extent than we realize.
Under God’s care we are getting better, but we are not yet well. Modern Christians egg each other on to testify that where once we were blind, deaf, and indeed dead so far as God was concerned, now through Christ we have been brought to life, radically transformed, and blessed with spiritual health. Thank God, there is real truth in that. But spiritual health means being holy and whole. To the extent that we fall short of being holy and whole, we are not fully healthy, either.
We need to realize that the spiritual health we testify to is only partial and relative, a matter of being less sick and less incapacitated now than we were before. Measured by the absolute standard of spiritual health that we see in Jesus Christ, we are all of us no more, just as we are no less, than invalids in process of being cured.
The old saying that the church is God’s hospital remains true. Our spiritual life is at best a fragile convalescence, easily disrupted. When there are tensions, strains, perversities, and disappointments in the Christian fellowship, it helps to remember that no Christian, and no church, ever has the clean bill of spiritual health that would match the total physical well-being for which today’s fitness seekers labor. To long for total spiritual well-being is right and natural, but to believe that one is anywhere near it is to be utterly self-deceived.
It is not always easy to grasp that one is ill. In the hospital in 1933 I was, so to speak, kept in cotton wool for several days by doctor’s orders. I remember how hard it was to think of myself as sick, since at no stage did I feel any ill effects. For slipping out of bed to wander round, I was tongue-lashed, I recall, by the ward sister who upbraided me with Welsh eloquence for, in effect, putting my life at risk. After this I remained dutifully bedbound, according to instructions—but still without any conviction inside me that it needed to be that way.
In the same way, Christians today can imagine themselves to be strong, healthy, and holy when, in fact, they are still weak, sick, and sinful. Pride and complacency, however, blind us to this reality. We decline to be told when we are slipping; thinking we stand, we set ourselves up to fall, and predictably, alas, we do fall.
In God’s hospital, the course of treatment that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the permanent medical staff (if I dare so speak), are administering to us is called sanctification, which has as its goal our final restoration to the fullness of the divine image. It is a process that includes, on the one hand, medication and diet (in the form of biblical instruction and admonition coming in various ways to the heart) and, on the other hand, tests and exercises (in the form of internal and external pressures, providentially ordered, to which we have to make active response). The process goes on as long as we are in this world, which is something that God determines in each case. Like patients in any hospital, we are impatient for recovery. But God knows what he is doing; sometimes, for reasons connected with the maturity and ministry that he has in view for us, he makes haste slowly. That is something we have to learn humbly to accept. We are in a hurry; he is not.
Humble Self-Suspicion
Second truth: We are all prone to damaging delusions. On my first night in the hospital, the place was not where I thought it was, and the person by my bed was not who I thought it was: I was in a state of delusion. Next day I felt well and could not think of myself as ill, but that was delusion, too. In the same way, believers are often deluded about Christian faith and living.
There are the delusions of direct theological error about God’s nature and character and ways and purposes. In liberal and modernist and process theology, to look no further, these abound.
There are the delusions of doubt and unbelief. Something horrible happens, and at once we conclude that God must have forgotten us or turned against us, or perhaps gone out of existence.
There are the delusions of self-confidence. We think we have finally licked some particular sin or weakness by which we were previously dragged down. We relax, and a sense of well-being, security, and triumph creeps over us. Then comes the double whammy of fresh external pressure and a renewed inner urge, and down we go.
There are also the delusions that disrupt relationships. We misunderstand each other’s motives and purposes. We blame others for generating the hostility and are blind to our own part in provoking the difficulties.
There are delusions, too, resulting from failure to distinguish things that differ—for example, equating the biblical gospel with Jesus-centered legalism, Jesus-centered lawlessness, Jesus-centered socialism, or Jesus-centered racism; equating secular psychological counseling with biblical pastoral direction; or equating inner passivity as a formula for holiness with the biblical call to disciplined moral effort in the power of the Holy Spirit. All such delusions spell disaster.
Then there are delusions about the Christian life—that it will ordinarily be easy, successful, healthy, and wealthy, excitingly punctuated by miracles; that such acts as fornication and tax evasion will not matter as long as nobody finds out; that God always wants you to do what you feel like doing; and so on, and so on. Satan, the father of lies and a past master at deluding, labors constantly to mislead and muddle God’s people. Thus humble self-suspicion and the commonsensical hard-headedness that used to be called prudence, and the habit of testing by Scripture things hitherto taken for granted, become virtues of great importance.
Our Physician’s Bedside Manner
The sort of physician I appreciate takes the patient into his or her confidence and explains his or her diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Not all physicians behave this way, but the best do—and so does the Great Physician of our souls, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Our Lord’s therapeutic style, if I may express it this way, is communicative from first to last. The Bible, heard and read, preached and taught, interpreted and applied, is both the channel and the content of his communication. It is as if Jesus hands us the canonical Scriptures directly, telling us that they are the authoritative and all-sufficient source from which we must learn both what we are to do to be his followers and also what he has done, is doing, and will do to save us from the fatal sickness of sin.
Think of your Bible, then, as Jesus Christ’s gift to you; think of it as a letter to you from your Lord. Think of your name, written in front of it, as if Jesus himself had written it there. Think of Jesus each time you read your Bible. Think of him asking you, page by page and chapter by chapter, what you have just learned about the need, nature, method, and effect of the grace that he brings, and about the path of loyal discipleship that he calls you to tread. That is the way to profit from the Bible. Only when your reading of the written word feeds into your relationship with the living Word (Jesus) does the Bible operate as the channel of light and life that God means it to be.
In Scripture is revealed the whole work of divine grace in the individual, first to last. When we see what God through Christ and the Spirit has done for us and is doing in us, we shall be better placed for realism about our present spiritual condition and cooperation with God’s purposes for our lives.
J. I. Packer is the author of several books, including Rediscovering Holiness (Servant), from which this was adapted.
