A friend shared with me some quotes from John Wesley (founder of Methodism) that I found to be pretty amazing considering they were written in 1747. Consider these:
1. The emotions have a greater influence upon health than most people are aware.
2. All violent and sudden emotion dispose to, or actually throw people into acute diseases.
3. Slow and lasting emotion, such as grief and hopeless love, bring on chronic diseases.
4. Until the emotion which caused the disease is calmed, medicine is applied in vain.
5. The love of God is the sovereign remedy of all miseries, so in particular it effectively prevents all the bodily disorders the emotions introduce, but keeping the emotions themselves within bounds. And by the unspeakable joy, and perfect calm, serenity, and tranquility it gives the mind, it becomes the most powerful of all means of health and long life.
This is what medicine is discovering today (or should I say re-discovering!). My cousin, who is a doctor, once told me she knew a man who was in family practice and went back to school to be a psychiatrist or psychologist (I can’t remember which) because he had realized that a great percentage of the people who came into his office had an emotional root to their illness.
Much of my reading material of late speaks to this very issue…..I thought it was ‘new news’ only to discover it’s actually very ‘old news’. Solomon was right, wasn’t he?
Ecc. 1:9 – …there is nothing new under the sun.
