The doctor thumbed through several photos of the inside of my wife’s stomach. He described how the gastric acid had scalded Linda’s throat but he said that it should heal fine. Then he came across the photo that he wanted me to see.The photo seemed unremarkable to me. It looked like a continuous wall of reddish tissue with no other features. The doctor described his journey of peering into Linda’s stomach with a special scope and camera. He said that he was looking for the damage that was making her so sick. He explained that he photographed the place where Linda’s stomach valve was located and again he pointed at the picture. I saw nothing.
“I went to the place where your wife’s Pyloric sphincter [the drain valve for the stomach] should be,” said the doctor, “But, this is what I found. I believe it is the source of her trouble.”
“Where is the opening?” I questioned. “That is exactly what I kept asking myself!” he said. “It has been scarred over. Your wife has not been getting any nourishment for some time. Linda has been literally starving to death. She needs immediate surgery to reroute her digestive tract and bypass the damaged valve in order to save her life.”
Terror suddenly filled my heart as I continued to stare at the photo in the doctor’s hand. Linda was dying. She was starving to death. We had not known it was so serious.
“How could this happen, doctor?” I asked.
“Aspirin,” he explained. “The habitual use of aspirin initiated a process of ulceration and scarring. As the process repeated itself over a long period of time the scar tissue eventually sealed the opening shut.”
Many people who claim to be Christians are in my wife’s shoes, spiritually speaking, right now and are unaware. Whoever embraces any kind of sin habitually (even sins that seem as harmless as aspirin) are involved in a deadly process of ulceration and scarring. It will harden hearts and render them insensitive to God’s will. We know this process is true when we ask others to take a look into our lives for any sin damage.
In the name of Jesus, I plead with you to repent of the sin that has ensnared you. Submit yourself to the Great Physician’s surgical knife of truth. Only He can reroute your life. Only He can provide you with the nourishment that you need to live forever.
“So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more” (Ephesians 4:17-19).
By Jim Morris
Copyright © 2003-06 Jim Morris. All Rights Reserved.
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