Don’t Play Doctor
Unless you are trained to practice natural medicine, don’t do it! If you know some things about nutrition and medicine, it can be tempting as a preacher to try to help people along natural lines if you think you can. However, you could get sued or prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license, and the courts will side against you! If you stick to preaching the Word and laying hands on the sick in the name of Jesus, that is free exercise of religion and not practicing medicine without a license – at least based on court decisions at this writing in the United States.
Jesus never gave anyone instructions to cut their carbs, trans fats, cholesterol or anything else. That is not your business. Lay hands on people in faith and stay out of their personal affairs.
If you feel that you have a great personal regimen, it is still best not to preach to others that they should do whatever you do. Personally, I don’t drink coffee, tea or caffeinated sodas because I want to be Holy Spirit-powered, not caffeine-powered. But if you want to drink caffeine, I’m not going to try to talk you out of it. I eat things like lobster that some diet experts claim you should never eat, and they may have good reasons for their advice. I’m sure that we all do something that someone out there thinks isn’t healthy. I don’t get caught up with the latest trends that tell us that eggs are good, no wait, they’re bad, no wait, they’re good again, and so on.
You may see someone in front of you and be tempted to say, “Lady, if you’d lose about 100 pounds, you probably wouldn’t have the three problems you just cited,” but I doubt that such advice would be appreciated. Jesus never gave out that kind of advice. He is our model. Such comments could get you into legal trouble for prescribing a non-spiritual cure. Besides, that person might have been 200 pounds overweight a year ago and be doing her best to lose more weight with God’s help. Beware of condemning others! You can only look at the outside, but God sees the heart.
I think it’s best to abstain from any remarks about a person’s body. I learned this the hard way a long time ago when I congratulated a woman in the church I attended on her pregnancy. The problem was, she had just gained a large amount of weight in a short time and she wasn’t pregnant. Oops! Now I always wait for people to tell ME of their pregnancies.
Remember that Jesus never said that we have to diagnose the sick. If you’re not a doctor, don’t play doctor. Don’t tell a person with certain symptoms that they look like diabetic issues. Don’t give natural advice that someone should try iodine pills, cod liver oil, or “nutraceutical” supplements. You don’t have to know what’s wrong with someone and you don’t need to offer medical advice. Believe the Word and lay your hands on the person in faith in the name of Jesus. This will keep you from having a new prison ministry (from the inside).
To me, it is even worse to have a minister sell nutraceuticals on the side at his book table to supplement his income so that he can afford to eat after the umpteenth church in a row gave him a chintzy offering. I don’t see Jesus or His disciples doing that, but I do see where Jesus went on a table-turning rampage because people were making God’s house a house of merchandise. I think it would send the wrong message for me to preach divine healing and then offer Mark Ituyu’s Power Powder to boost people’s immune systems while boosting my income (and the incomes of those in my “upline” in my multi-level marketing organization). My rule as a pastor has been that no one can push multi-level marketing products to people at church. The sheep are not potential customers or “downline” fillers. I’ve seen too much potential for abuse as ministers use their influence to try to get others to enrich them by getting “under” them in a multilevel scheme. I’m not saying that anyone involved in such things is evil; someone I respect does it and he makes quite a bit of money that way. But I’ve seen a lot of abuse over the years where there was an unwritten expectation that people would support the pastor by being in his sales organization, and he ended up with most or all of the church “under” him. That’s not for me, because I always hated the implicit pressure when someone in the church, which has included a pastor and associate pastor over the years, tried to get me into his multi-level “downline.” I try to NOT do to others what I want them to NOT do to me.
I knew a minister personally who sold various nutraceuticals on the side. I suppose his idea was, “If one is good, more is better.” So he took a whole bunch of them one night and he almost died. He told me that he honestly didn’t think he’d be around to see the sun rise the next morning. He was facing some physical issues, but he should have been the first to believe God and receive healing rather than trying to play doctor on himself. If you decide that you need medical help through natural means, you should go see a real doctor.
I find it hard to believe that God, who made man and everything else “very good” (Genesis 1:31), designed us so that we can never be in optimum health unless we take some kind of new pill that costs a fortune with ingredients that were only discovered in the last decade or two. While I don’t like all those “Ask your doctor if Zyzzyxa is right for you” ads, it would make sense to ask your doctor about a certain supplement that is pitched to you before you blindly accept the claims about it, especially when the pill bottle says that the product has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. (I always ask myself, “If it doesn’t diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease, what good is it?”)
Finally, if you were to ever tell someone that he doesn’t need his medicine anymore because he’s healed (which you should NEVER do anyway), that IS practicing medicine without a license, which is ILLEGAL. Leave any decisions related to medicine to REAL doctors and preach the gospel!