In our society today when a person has problems with his car he usually takes it to the auto mechanic for repair. When a person has problems with his marriage he often sees a marriage counselor. And when a person has problems with his soul and overall mental health he often turns to religion to cure what ails him. But with so many different religions out there the question becomes does anyone of them have a real cure for the hurting soul.
While all religions teach some form of the golden rule only Christianity tells us that we, on our own, can never truly obey this rule. While all religions teach us that the way to find fulfillment is by doing good works, only Christianity tells us that all of our good works will never earn our way into God’s presence. And while all religions tell us that the only way to find God is to reach up to him, only Christianity tells us that we can only know God because He has invaded our universe and reached down to us.
Our soul is in desperate need of repair and according to the Bible all of our human attempts to satisfy its deep yearnings for peace, joy, and meaning will fall short until we make our peace with God through Jesus Christ. You see all religions have left man reaching out to gods that can never deliver because they are but mere inventions of our human intellect. Only the God of the Bible can cure our sin sick soul and restore our hurting mental health through spiritual surgery. Until our sin issue is addressed we will never find the antidote for our hurting souls.
The blueprint, the antidote, and the answer to all of the deepest yearning of our soul can be found in the manual for our human existence – our Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth – the Holy Bible. I have found that if I want to know how to live life to the fullest I need to go to the Creator of my soul – Jesus Christ; and the book that is all about Him. While the golden rule is good only Christianity offers us the total solution for healing our hurting souls and experiencing positive mental health through Jesus’ teaching on the Sermon on the Mount.
American psychiatrist, J. T. Fisher shares some closing insights on this whole question:
“If you were to take the sum total of all authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene, if you were to combine them and refine them and cleave out the excess verbiage, if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley, and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable of living poets, you would have an awkward and an incomplete summary of the Sermon on the Mount. And it would suffer immeasurably through comparison.
“For nearly two thousand years the Christian world has been holding in its hands the complete answer to its restless and fruitless yearning. Here rests the blueprint for successful human life, with optimum mental health and contentment.”[1]