Several years ago a young woman said to me: “Pastor Jeeva, I’ve been dealing with mental and emotional issues for a number of years now. I’ve seen psychologists and psychiatrists, taken all sorts of medications, even had some sessions with a hypnotist. Every time I do that I stay good for about 90 days, then I hit bottom again. Can you help?”

I began by helping her understand a basic fact of life…that God created us with a body, soul and spirit. The body, of course, is the physical part of our being. The soul refers to our mind and emotions. And the spirit is at the core of our being.

Purely physical problems such as a cut or a fever can be healed by applying or ingesting appropriate medication.

Psychosomatic problems may appear to be physical, but have a root cause that is mental or emotional. (“Psyche” and “Soma” are the Greek words for the soul and the body respectively). So, for example, high blood pressure can be treated with medication, but if it is caused by stress, meds alone are not enough.

Once you identify the source of the stress, you can learn how to reduce it or remove it completely from your life and experience healing.

However, when the root of the problem is spiritual, the best drugs ever produced to treat the body and the best counselling ever discovered to heal the mind and the emotions will not produce lasting results.

It’s a bit like taking painkillers for a broken hip that can only be fixed by surgery. It will work for a while, but the pain will keep on returning until the break is fixed.

I could see the light come on inside her head as she heard this liberating truth. A spiritual problem can only be addressed with the help of the Holy Spirit.

Over the next few weeks as she opened herself up to receive His ministry, her own spirit began to receive healing. What medication, counselling and hypnosis could not do, the Holy Spirit could.

As the apostle Paul says in I Corinthians 2:4, some things need to be “spiritually discerned.”

Can you relate?