Surrender and Healing: How Resentment, Jealousy, and Self-Centeredness Cause Disease

Description

Speaker: E. Stanley Jones

The speaker delivers a wide-ranging sermon on psychosomatic illness, drawing from dozens of real-life case studies to demonstrate how negative mental and spiritual attitudes manifest as physical disease. Stories include a woman whose resentment toward her husband caused breathing difficulties, a mother whose misplaced sense of prestige over her son's marriage caused needless tension, a missionary in Japan torn between career and marriage, and multiple cases of arthritis, stomach ulcers, headaches, and cancer linked to jealousy, hatred, and unresolved guilt.

The sermon's central thesis is that an un-surrendered self—one centered on its own desires, resentments, and fears—is the root cause of most human illness. The speaker quotes Jesus's teaching that 'it is more blessed to give than to receive' and argues that psychiatrists and physicians alike confirm the need for self-surrender. He cites medical cases where sustained resentment caused visible hemorrhaging in the stomach lining and where jealousy in a child produced psychosomatic deafness.

The speaker then turns to practical guidance: think health, talk health, refuse to reinforce tiredness through negative self-suggestion, and align oneself with God's healing intention. He acknowledges that God heals through physicians and surgeons as well as through spiritual deliverance, and that some diseases may await final cure in the resurrection, referencing Paul's thorn in the flesh.

The sermon concludes with an invitation for a man from Oklahoma City to share his testimony. This man describes developing stomach ulcers from the stress of engineering and sales responsibilities his father pushed on him too quickly. He recounts the diagnostic process, the grueling dietary treatment, his inability to obtain life insurance, and how a hotel owner named Harry Kelly—described as the first genuine Christian he had ever met—began to intervene in his life.