Topics:<\/b> Freedom; Free Will; God\u2019s Love; Goodness of God; Obedience; Physicians; Sin; Ten Commandments<\/p>\n
References:<\/b> Exodus 20:1\u201317; Psalm 19:7\u201311; Ephesians 6:1\u20133<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
On one visit I tried to talk him into letting me play golf. \u201cSome friends get together once a year. It\u2019s important to me. I\u2019ve been practicing my swing, and if I use only my upper body and keep my legs and hips very still, could I join them?\u201d<\/p>\n
Without a flicker of hesitation, my doctor replied, \u201cIt would make me very unhappy if you played golf within the next two months.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought you were a golfer,\u201d I said, appealing to his sympathies.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am. That\u2019s how I know you can\u2019t swing without rolling that foot inward and putting weight on the parts that are trying to heal.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
As we talked, I began to appreciate my doctor\u2019s odd choice of words. If he had issued an edict\u2014\u201cNo golf!\u201d\u2014I 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.<\/p>\n
What a doctor does for me physically\u2014guide me toward health\u2014God 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\u2014for our own sakes.<\/p>\n
\u2014Philip Yancey, \u201cDoctor\u2019s Orders,\u201d Christianity Today<\/i> (December 6, 1999)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Topics: Freedom; Free Will; God\u2019s Love; Goodness of God; Obedience; Physicians; Sin; Ten Commandments References: Exodus 20:1\u201317; Psalm 19:7\u201311; Ephesians 6:1\u20133 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. … Continue reading “NO
\n GOLF REMEDY”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}