I read this a couple months ago from Lloyd-Jones book Preaching and Preachers and thought I would share it with you today. This book is probably the best book I have ever read on preaching. I dont have a page number so my bad on that, just read the whole book.
“Let me use a medical illustration. Take a man who is lying on a bed and writhing in agony with abdominal pain. Now a doctor may come along who happens to be a very nice and a very sympathetic man. He does not like to see people suffering, he does not like to see people in pain; so he feels that the one thing to do is to relieve this man of his pain. He is able to do so. He can give him an injection of morphia or various other drugs which would give the man almost immediate relief. ‘Well,’ you say, ‘surely there is nothing wrong in doing that; it is a kind action, it is a good action, the patient is made more comfortable, he is made happier and is no longer suffering.’ The answer to that is that it is well-nigh a criminal act on the part of this doctor. It is criminal because merely to remove a symptom without discovering the cause of the symptom is to do a dis-service to the patient. A symptom after all is a manifestation of a disease, and symptoms are very valuable. It is through tracking the symptoms and following the lead that they give that you should arrive at the disease which has given rise to the symptoms. So if you just remove the symptoms before you have discovered the cause of the symptoms you are actually doing your patient real harm because you are giving him this temporary ease which makes him think that all is well. But all is not well, it is only a temporary relief, and the disease is there, is still continuing. If this happened to have been an acute appendix, or something like that, the sooner it is taken out the better; and if you have merely given the patient ease and relief without dealing with it you are asking for an abscess or something even worse.”
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