<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

CORE Evangelism School

A God Worth Knowing

Dee Casper

01 The God Who Hears and Knows

02 The Problem of Evil: Does God Care?

03 The Faith of Jesus

04 Are We In This Thing Alone?

05 A New Covenant Experience

06 Bad Religion

07 The Reminder of Your Value

09 A Matter of Life or Death

10 Unquenchable Love

12 A God Who is Always on Time

13 The Gospel in Types and Symbols

15 Last Church Standing

16 An Abundant Life

18 Why God Won’t Leave

19 Jesus Understands

17 A Voice of Reason

14 The Coming Crisis

08 Building a House for My Wife

11 A New Birth

Oh God, thank you that you want to bless us, that you want to give us a life that is better than the 1 we currently have, that you've given us good principles and counsel to help us thrive in the midst of a broken and difficult world.

So God, I pray that you would speak to us, that you would be our teacher, And we ask these things in Jesus name.

All right, so that phrase abundant life comes from John chapter 10 in verse 10.

Jesus says, the thief does not come except to steal, to kill and to destroy.

And I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly." Jesus wants us to have an experience not just to have the joys of salvation, but to have an abundant life in the here and now, and that includes our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

He wants to bless us in every 1 of these areas.

So we see in Matthew 4 in verse 23, it says that Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease among the people.

Something that you may not know is that Jesus actually did more healing than teaching and preaching.

Jesus spent more time healing people and meeting their needs than he did in just preaching and teaching.

And so we've got this little acronym that we use here that we think is very helpful that reflects those 8 health principles.

But the basic idea is those health principles found within Scripture that can lead to us having that abundant life, even in the midst of a broken and fallen world.

The first is nutrition, then exercise, then water, proper hydration, sunshine, temperance, air, rest, and trust in God.

We'll touch every 1 of those at some point through the course of this evening's message.

But these are the 8 health principles that we find in Scripture that show us how to function at our best.

We've been hearing about them during our health segments each night in our meetings together, but we'll kind of unpack each 1.

We'll spend more time on a few of them and spend less time on others, but we also have resources we're happy to give you.

We just need to kind of prioritize some for time's sake.

This is found in Genesis chapter 1 beginning of verse 27.

This is how God created Adam and Eve and what he wanted for them.

Now when God created Adam and Eve, was that in the world where there was high cholesterol and high blood pressure and cancer and diabetes?

There is no sin, there is no sickness, there is no disease, and this is what God wanted for people to function optimally.

This is kind of their original plan for their setup.

So in Genesis 1 27, so God created man in his own image in the image of God.

He created him male and female He created them then God blessed them and God said to them be fruitful and multiply fill the earth and subdue it have Dominion over the fish of the sea over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

And God said, See, I have given you every herb that yields seed, which is on the face of all the earth, every tree whose fruit yields seed, to you it shall be for food." So God as our creator designed our bodies to work on certain types of fuel that would lead it to function at its peak performance.

In the same way that putting diesel fuel in a gasoline engine would cause damage and malfunction, Eating improper food leads to damage and malfunction in our bodies.

By the way, I have a friend who did that.

He had a Nissan Maxima that was a diesel and he put gas in the engine.

Diseases like hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and many other lifestyle-related illnesses can largely be reduced and in some cases even cured completely by practicing the principles that we're dealing with this evening and in each of our health segments each night.

Diet has a large role to play in our overall health.

You've heard people say you are what you eat, right?

Many things that we wrestle with in our bodies are largely the result of what we put in our bodies.

So it's largely a fruit-based seed-bearing diet, anything that would bear seeds.

But then we get to Genesis chapter 3 after the fall of mankind and this is what we have in verse 17.

Then to Adam he said, Because you have heeded the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you saying you shall not eat of it, Cursed is the ground for your sake.

In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life, both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field." What eventually gets added to man's diet after the fall is vegetables and roots and stems and other things that we wouldn't have normally eaten before.

Now there's more things added and all of which have medicinal properties that help address the issues that we face in a body that's deteriorating because of sin.

It's very interesting that the things that God added to our diet have remedial properties that help us with the things that have happened to our bodies since the fall.

It's 1 of the reasons why vegetables can be so healthy and good for us now.

So at this stage man was eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, and seeds.

This was the holistic diet they had after the fall that still was for their best interest.

I remember someone was mentioning some time ago, I remember hearing in a presentation that every child instinctively knows that vegetables are a result of the curse Anyone want to vouch for that?

There's certain things like Brussels sprouts.

Actually, I like Brussels sprouts, but celery.

Sorry But then we get to Genesis chapter 9.

This is the diet that was ideal, that was given to man even before the flood, or before the fall, and then after the fall we added some things, but it's still a plant-based diet.

But then we get to Genesis chapter 9 and a cataclysmic flood is about to take over the earth.

The entire world is going to be submerged in water.

So if the entire world is covered in water, do you think you'll be able to get vegetables easily?

So here's where we are, Genesis chapter 9 verse 1.

So God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

Yeah, that was Adam and Eve's call, but once the world has been wiped out, we're starting again.

The fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the Earth on every bird of the air and on all that move on the earth and all the fish of the sea They are given into your hand every moving thing that lives shall be food for you I've given you all things even as the green herbs, but you should not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood." We'll come back to this point in a moment, what it looks like in verse 3.

But what precedes the flood was the pronouncement that men only did evil continually, and that God had regretted making man.

This is the narrative that came before the flood happened.

That literally humanity was going towards destruction at a breakneck pace.

And so when Noah and his family end up being the only people who respond to God's appeal to repent and get in the ark after the flood had ravaged the earth, there's not going to be enough vegetation to feed these people, these 8 individuals.

So God at this point, for the first time in human history, gave permission to eat animals, but with the first condition being that they did not eat the blood in the meat.

Disease is carried through the bloodstream.

So there were health reasons for this, but also because blood is represented as the life of an individual or as an organism.

But when we go to Genesis chapter 7, as Adam is planning on, or not Adam, as Noah is being told what to do to prepare the ark, he's told an interesting set of numbers here.

He says, "...you shall take with you 7 of every clean animal, a male and his female, and 2 each of animals that are unclean, a male and his female.

Also, 7 birds of the air, male and female, to keep all the species alive on the face of all the earth.

Certain things, there's only a small number of them.

2, maybe 4 max if they're counting 2 pairs.

And then when we get to the 7, there's maybe 14 animals of each of the clean, of male and female.

Now we don't know how many animal types got in that ark.

Has anyone ever been to the Ark Encounter, by the way, in Kentucky?

Someone has actually rebuilt, not rebuilt, but someone's actually built a model of what the Ark was like.

It was made by Ken Ham, who's a creationist.

Back to Menu

Series

A God Worth Knowing

16 An Abundant Life

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Breakout Seminars

How to BioHack your Health

42m

Rethinking Mental Health In Evangelism

54m

Mental Health and Emotional Intelligence

Part 2: How To Maintain A Good Mental Health and Stable Emotional Intelligence

1h 34m

GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Health

God’s Power to Live the Health Message

43m

The Strength of Vulnerability

1h 5m

Imagine a Healthy 100

A Healthy 100 Life Changing Choices

48m

Prayer by Gem Castor

Gentle Healer

54m

Do You Want to be Made Well?

1h 2m

Morning Devotional

A Challenge to the Consecrated Physician

1h 28m

Disappointment, Depression, and Deliverance Part 1

44m

Health or Wholeness

58m

The Renewing of Our Minds

4. Treating Worries, Anxieties, and Guilt

1h 13m

Sound Doctrine