When Health Becomes an Idol: A Preview from Yes to Jesus, No to Pharma

I am sharing this excerpt from my upcoming book, Yes to Jesus, No to Pharma: Finding Peace in Christ with Chronic Illness. I had hoped to publish it sooner, but the Lord has brought me through another trial—one I did not originally plan to include, but one that now feels too important to leave out. Sometimes God does not let us finish a testimony when we think we are ready, because He is still writing it.

Most of us have heard someone say that if the devil walked around with a pitchfork, horns, a scaly tail, and a vicious, ugly face, fewer people would be tempted by what he offered. Instead, he often comes as something beautiful, polished, sensible, or even good. That is part of what makes idolatry so difficult to recognize. It does not always come looking dark. Sometimes it looks wise. Sometimes it looks responsible. Sometimes it even looks biblical.

That is what I had to learn when it came to my health.

For a long time, I thought that if I rejected one thing, I must be safe from it. I thought that if I said no to the medical world in all the ways that troubled my conscience, then I must be standing on firmer ground. But I learned that it is entirely possible to reject one idol and build another one out of different materials. You can swing hard in the other direction and begin idolizing the natural, the herbal, the organic, the alternative, or simply your own way of doing things. And because those things often come dressed in cleaner language—more ethical, more thoughtful, more spiritually serious—they can be even harder to recognize for what they are.

What made this painfully clear to me was the day I ended up in the hospital with a double kidney infection after spending days trying to manage it on my own. I told myself I was being careful. I told myself I was being discerning. But looking back, I can say it more plainly now: I was being stubborn. I was trying to prove that I could get better on my own terms, without having to surrender, without having to receive help I did not want to need. And the Lord used that moment to show me something I had been missing for a long time—that the issue was never only medicine, or natural remedies, or the medical system, but the heart’s constant temptation to look for peace, safety, and control in something created rather than in Him.

And maybe that is what this book is really about in the end: not just chronic illness, not just medicine, not just suffering, but the slow and often painful uncovering of the things we trust more than Christ. The things we run to for comfort. The things we want to save us. The things we keep trying to place on the throne, even when we know it belongs to Him alone. Yes to Jesus, No to Pharma was born out of that struggle, and it is being finished in the middle of it too. If the Lord has delayed this book, then I want that delay to serve the testimony—not weaken it. Because I would rather publish it later with more truth in it than sooner with less surrender.