October 9 - Psalm 38

There is not much worse than feeling as if you are never going to be healthy again.  Everything you do, every move you make reminds you that your humanity is stronger than your will.  We do everything we can to remain healthy. We take drugs, we listen to holistic healers, we spend millions of dollars in our medical system, we pay for insurance so we don’t have to pay millions of dollars to doctors, we chew up vitamins and spend more millions of dollars doing anything possible to keep ourselves healthy.

But, then, something attacks us and we recognize that we no longer have control over the simplest things with regards to our bodies.

The Psalmist in Psalm 38 believes that God is punishing him by allowing whatever illness has taken over.  He is guilty for the sin he has committed and begs the Lord to cease the discipline.  The guilt is overwhelming.

He has open, festering wounds. He is bowed down. His back hurts and he groans and moans because things have gotten so bad.  His heart pounds, he has lost his strength and even his eyesight is failing.  His friends and neighbors have done all they can and things have gotten so bad they are finally just staying away from him.  No one listens to him and he has nothing left to say.

We worry sometimes that God is punishing us, just like the Psalmist does, but psychologists would tell us that our own guilt will eat us up from the inside out and we find the truth of that in these words as well.  In Psalm 38:4, we read “My guilt has overwhelmed me.”  By Psalm 38:18, we finally read, ‘I confess my iniquity; I am troubled by my sin.”  It is time to release the guilt and deal with the sin that got us there in the first place.  The only way we can be clear of everything is to lay it out before the Lord.  Then, we can say, “Lord, do not forsake me.  Lord, be close to me.  Lord, come quickly to help me.  You are my Lord. You are my Savior.”

The Lord will never be far away.  We just have to let go of the things that separate us from Him.

1 John 1:9 says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness."  When the paralytic was lowered through the roof by his friends to see Jesus in Mark 2; the healing began when Jesus said "Son, your sins are forgiven."

Yes, sin and guilt and sickness are sometimes all tied up together.  Stress, anxiety and tension fill our souls and our bodies when we can't resolve the things we've done and wreck the tenuous control we hold over ourselves.

Let go of the guilt.  Hand it off to the One who can care for you more than anyone else and begin the journey back to wholeness.