My dear friend, Ken Talbott, is in a life and death battle with liver and pancreatic cancer. I have known and walked with Ken for close to 15 years. I respect him and admire him deeply, not just because of how he is navigating this season in his life, but for who he is in Christ.
This recent effort of his has a vitality about it that usually comes from only someone who, in the midst of the struggle, has touched the Spirit. Right-wing evangelicals tend toward manic obsessiveness about certain sexual sins in others, while being criminally indifferent/silent about other sins that are much closer to home!
Perhaps if we would heed someone who is facing his mortality because of lifestyle choices, we might live more abundantly in Christ. Christ may be our healer, but we are responsible for our health. It is a partnership effort. If we are absent in the partnership, many of our illnesses are no mystery.
I pray we might hear the Lord in Ken . . . listen, and live. I pray we would focus on our own sins, sins in the house, before we go pointing the finger at sins in the culture and society. Judgment MUST begin in the house.
Reprinted with permission. This post is not necessarily an endorsement of any of the specific treatments Ken may be pursuing, nor a recommendation for what others should do facing similar diagnosis. Ken’s path is between Ken, Robin (his wife), and the Lord. The point is to hear the Spirit of the Lord in Ken’s testimony, not argue about the medical-pharmaceutical establishment versus alternate holistic treatments. Let him who has an ear, hear._____________________________________________
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. -James 5:16 (New International Version)
In my ‘umble opinion, the Lord has recently helped me identify several stages in the healing process that is helping people like me face down and treat my pancreatic and liver cancer. The first stage is articulate, thorough confessions of sin. I do assert that the evidence suggests most American Christians fiercely resist this confessional stage—often in the name of a sloppy understanding of God’s grace. Unfortunately, in the process, they miss out on it’s absolutely necessary role in the overall healing process.
When they first told me I had stage-four pancreatic cancer and that I was, in effect, dead meat, with less than six months to live, I started exploring what kinds of things people like me have done to, in the words of trauma surgeon, Dr. Lorraine Day, create the conditions favorable to the development of my own type of cancer.
In Dr. Day’s compelling testimony on her website, DrDay.com (a must-see), Dr. Day presents a compelling case for how, through resisting her own professional training and peer pressure, she not only found out what she had done to herself to get her fast-growing cancer, but how she could lick it without the need for immune-system-trashing oncology of her background training.
Now, in my opinion, gluttony and pancreatic cancer go together. Once I made this connection clearly (helped along by my health coach, Ray Gebauer, in this thought-provoking article, “How Does God Feel about Over Eating?”), the Lord helped me go deeper and deeper into healing’s confessional stage, until finally I could see with new eyes Hosea 2’s advice to the children of Israel:
14 [a]Return, Israel, to the Lord your God.
Your sins have been your downfall!
2 Take words with you
and return to the Lord.
Say to him:
“Forgive all our sins
and receive us graciously,
that we may offer the fruit of our lips.[b]
I began to perceive that the sin behind my decades of gluttonous abuse of my body was at its core not acknowledging God in ALL things. Instead, I chose to suppress my consciousness to the “still, small voice” of the Holy Spirit and blotted out the multiple warnings throughout the years (such as a potbelly in what I made into my midlife’s sedentary years) that had whispered to me about my gluttony:
“Whose god is their belly.”. . .
“Whose god is their belly.”. . .
“Whose god is their belly.”
I kept hearing those words whispered to my inner spirit, but it took me decades and my cramming multitudinous gallons of ice cream, fries, and junk food into my gullet and onto my overloaded pancreas before I got around to looking up and finding this Philippians 3: 17-21 passage from where this repeated, Holy Spirit’s warning was drawn.
What I saw was not pretty: Philippians 3: 17 – 21 (NIV):
17 Join together in following my example, brothers and sisters, and just as you have us as a model, keep your eyes on those who live as we do. 18 For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things. 20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.
What Are You Doing with Your Precious Immune-System “Talent”?
The way I now see it is: The Lord presented me my immune system somewhat like a “talent” that is infinitely more valuable than the one, two, or five bags of gold given to the Master’s servants in Jesus’ parable of the “talents”!
At the day of judgment “for deeds done in the body,” I’m not sure about you, but I certainly don’t want to stand before my Master and declare, “Through making my pot belly my “god”, overwhelming my hard-working pancreas, and “setting my mind on earthly things” (cf., Philippians 3: 17-21) in my lifestyle choices, I actually went out and not just hid my valuable “asset/talent” like the servant in Christ’s parable, but I outright, willfully trashed my precious immune system in the process!
Within twenty years: “Hello, pancreatic cancer!”
So, my first step in the healing process was to confess how thoroughly I had worked toward the destruction of my own body.
Sure, as I told you last time, I have long-since blown off the oncologists’ advice to finish the job off by cutting, burning, and drugging my immune responses down to nothing (at the expense of more than my net worth and the building of theirs), but it was my own death-style choices that brought me to the present place I’m in right now.”
I have now confessed and, I believe, been forgiven—with my culinary wickedness being removed from me by the blood sacrifice of Jesus Christ—as far as the East is from the West!
After the well-articulated, in-depth confession can come God’s forgiveness and a wonderful new release into whatever He has for me ahead—whether healing me physically here and now, or bringing me home to Himself. But, when I depart from the earth, all will be well and I will go out clear, because I’m even now being ushered into a new era of cleansed “peace and purity” I have never before known.
Life is great!
Anybody See Dumbo in the Healing Room?
In my humble opinion, the elephant in many of the American Church’s “healing rooms” types of ministries is this: “We have all been asking for release from the consequences of our sins without touching the sins!” Perhaps next time instead we might start with the application of the blood of Jesus upon those carefully articulated, thorough confessions!
Since I started my responses to my current health challenges, I have moved well beyond the necessary, initial confession stage, as I am now starting to plumb the depths of God’s forgiveness and grace that follows the well-articulated confession of our sins.
Anything in here for you and yours?
Pullin’ and prayin’ for and with you, Ken Talbott
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Even this week I thought about “confessing our sins so that you may be healed” verse…so easy to set this one aside.
yea I have Christian friends who spend their time bad-mouthing Obama and homosexuals,etc–but they eat food like its going out of style
Kenneth,
We’re all sinners…it’s just that some sins are more visible to the outside world than others. But God sees our heart. If a person is eating food in a more “holy” way (less gluttonous) but has pride in their heart about it, that’s sin. Sometimes we sinners feel proud that we don’t have trouble with a certain sin that others struggle with–that’s sin too! It’s all about the heart…always has been and that’s what God wants us to see.
We can’t “fix” sin, but we have been given the gift of a sinless Saviour who has imputed His holiness onto our wretched souls; that is, if we have humbled ourselves and turned control of our life over to the one who is “The Way.”
Thank you Ken for your openness and Steve for sharing. This post highlights something that is lost in most of our christian walks and especially lost in the conversation of growing in grace of the Lord Jesus. That is confession of sin. Both articulately before the Lord allowing His cleansing blood to cleanse the guilt of the memory of each sin we can recall before Him in prayer. I know early on the Lord led me through this. I had come across a little pamphlet on personal revival and one main thing was taking the time before the Lord asking Him to search my heart and any sin that came to mind to write it down and then ask Him to forgive me for that specific sin (then tear it up or burn it). Now I already knew I was forgiven in the total sense and saved but this was an important step. Later, I also had the opportunity to confess to another believer a few things that needed to be brought to the light. This brought a level of healing to my inner life and walk with the Lord that I hadn’t experienced before although I was walking in the conscious awareness of His forgiveness. In other words the enemy couldn’t tap those memories anymore to bring me down and try and condemn me. It was night and day difference before and after in that regard never to struggle again with certain memories of past sin.
I know this topic can get convoluted real fast but I believe the Lord can lead us precisely in this both before Him in prayer and openly where needed and applicable.
Sometimes this is the difference between a stable walk in the grace of Christ and an unstable one. This has been my experience and my basic understanding of it.
Yup, seems we either walk in dead-end sin-consciousness, or goofy-loosey “sin doesn’t matter any more” extremes . . .
This is truly excellent and applicable. Thanks for sharing.
Sent from my iPhone
“Whose belly is their god” has come to me a few times in the past couple of months. I have considered it several times–like is this for the Body of Christ? What is the Lord saying? I believe I need to consider this personally for me. I think it’s timely for all of us.
“We have all been asking for release from the consequences of our sins without touching the sins!”
Oh, how many times I have prayed for forgiveness when in fact I was praying to avoid the consequences. Sometimes we are spared and go back like a dog to vomit; sometimes we are disciplined; even yet other times we truly repent. Looks like true confession is more like contending with your sin before you repent…Counting the cost of repentance.
Ken> I hear the voice of the Spirit in you testimony, and it brings new meaning to we are what we eat. It also speaks of how easy it is to replace one addiction for another. Addicts are usually in denial until they are confronted with jail time or intervention. Let’s face it, most of the people in America live by this philosophy. ‘We want what we want, when we want it, and we want it now!’
Ken, I will be praying that during this cleansing process, you will be able to hear the Word of the Spirit for your life and LIVE to finish strong. Blessings!