A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. (Proverbs 17:22, NIV)
If you’re old—and by this, I mean not that old—today’s title likely captured your attention. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone pop pills on the first tee, but I’ve had many golfers tell me they need Advil or the like to undo the soreness that comes with swinging a golf club around their stiff frame. And as I roam through my mid-50s, I’m starting to understand. So when we hear the claims of something that will help our aches and pains, our ears perk up.
It may be, though, that your ears perked down when you read the scripture for today. So the good medicine is a cheerful heart? What kind of chemistry is that?
Actually, like Paul’s lament that “I do not do the things I want to do” in Romans 7, Proverbs 17:22 could be a verse revealing an interior understanding of golfers. We all know how bouncy our step gets when we have made a birdie or carded a score several shots below our handicap. And we all know how decrepit we feel when we cannot find the fairway and our putts peel even farther away than our already bad reads.
Wishing leads to expectations, expectations lead to stress, and stress is a recipe for heartburn or heartache or both.The Proverbs are a different lot when it comes to the inspired Word of God. They are more observation than doctrine. Are we only supposed to notice along with the writer, or should we be adopting our best method for achieving the better half of the dichotomy? Maybe the answer is both.
In this case, it’s the cheerful heart and the good medicine we want. If we can put ourselves in the position of cheer, blessing will feed upon blessing. We’ll quite literally feel better in every way. Bitterness and complaint are for those other guys.
But we must beware that we don’t fall into a trap of thinking that good cheer comes from what makes us happy. That’s the golfer’s mistake. If only I can make this putt, if only I can par this hole. Wishing leads to expectations, expectations lead to stress, and stress is a recipe for heartburn or heartache or both.
The heart, then, must come before the happiness. We pray for a cheerful heart. We resolve to receive things in joy.
If medicine is meant to treat the illness and the illnesses of life are the circumstances that threaten our spirit, we must look to build up our immunity. We must ask God to give us “the joy of the Lord [that] is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). We don’t have to wait to be treated after the disease sets in. Joy is a holy inoculation. A cheerful heart is the master preventive regimen against the world’s double bogeys. Seek out and secure the contentment of the Holy Spirit today.
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Jeff Hopper
May 29, 2019
Copyright 2019 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
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