NO
GOLF REMEDY

Topics: Freedom; Free Will; God’s Love; Goodness of God; Obedience; Physicians; Sin; Ten Commandments

References: Exodus 20:1–17; Psalm 19:7–11; Ephesians 6:1–3

Last summer a surgeon operated on my foot. While rehabilitating from that, I often did exercises that hurt because I knew that working through the soreness would allow my foot to regain its usefulness. On the other hand, the surgeon warned against bicycling, mountain climbing, running, and other activities that might endanger the healing process. Basically, anything that sounded fun, he vetoed.

On one visit I tried to talk him into letting me play golf. “Some friends get together once a year. It’s important to me. I’ve been practicing my swing, and if I use only my upper body and keep my legs and hips very still, could I join them?”

Without a flicker of hesitation, my doctor replied, “It would make me very unhappy if you played golf within the next two months.”

“I thought you were a golfer,” I said, appealing to his sympathies.

“I am. That’s how I know you can’t swing without rolling that foot inward and putting weight on the parts that are trying to heal.”

My doctor has nothing against my playing golf; as a fellow golfer, he sympathizes with me. But he has my best interests at heart. It will indeed make him unhappy if I do something that might damage my long-term recovery. He wants me to play golf next year, and the next, and the rest of my life, and for that reason he could not sanction a match too soon after my surgery.

As we talked, I began to appreciate my doctor’s odd choice of words. If he had issued an edict—“No golf!”—I might have stubbornly rebelled. He left me the free choice and expressed the consequences in a most personal way: Disobedience would grieve him, for his job was to restore my health.

What a doctor does for me physically—guide me toward health—God does for me spiritually. I am learning to view sins not as an arbitrary list of rules drawn up by a cranky Judge, but rather as a list of dangers that must be avoided at all costs—for our own sakes.

—Philip Yancey, “Doctor’s Orders,” Christianity Today (December 6, 1999)