The story is told of a man who wakes in the middle of the night with a terrible stomach ache. Intoxicated with sleep, he stumbles out of bed to look for some medicine. In the darkness of the bathroom cabinet, his hand finds a bottle and he drinks down a long swig of the refreshing liquid. As he is returning the bottle to its place, he makes a startling discovery – what he thought was medicine was, in fact, a bottle of concentrated cleaning agent!
In despair, he calls the all-night pharmacy and explains the whole situation: “I am not crazy! I really believed I was drinking Milk of Magnesia! What do I do?”
“Let me see if I understand,” says the pharmacist. “You thought you were drinking medicine?”
“Yes,” the man explains again, “I really thought it was my bottle of medicine.”
“Oh. Well, then everything’s okay,” the pharmacist replies.
“Everything’s okay!?” the man asks, in shock. “So, I am not going to die from drinking this cleaning product?”
“No… of course not,” the pharmacist consoles him, in a calm, measured voice. “If you really believed, with all your heart, that you were drinking the right thing, then everything is going to work out just fine.”
No one would respect the counsel of that pharmacist. However, there are many who make this exact same mistake in their spiritual lives. Motivated by the pains of life or by a guilty conscience, they seek for a church. Groping in the darkness, they swallow whatever their hand happens to find. Many, believing they have stumbled upon the right medicine, may even start to feel better. When they reach out for insight from those who are the religious “experts”, the response is a resounding “just believe with all your heart and everything will work out fine!”
For it all to “work out”, we need much more than just faith – we need the right medicine! Sin is the worst sickness that a person can possibly have, and the right medicine is only found in the gospel (Romans 1:16; 6:23). Do not swallow just any old liquid handed out by lying “pharmacists”. Seek the Great Physician who came to call sinners to the medicine of repentance and forgiveness for the cure of their sins (Luke 5:31-32).
- by Carl D. Ballard