Gettin’ Down to the Root of It

For as long as I can remember, my mother-in-law prays for healing “to the root cause.” Before Dennis and I became believers ourselves, we’d almost snicker at that phrase because she seemed to use it so often. After serving the Lord for a while now, I’ve come to understand it and it’s funny that Dennis and I pray that way today. I hope my children, if they find it strange, will also one day catch it!

Without giving a lesson in horticulture, let’s think about a seed. When it’s planted, the first thing that happens is it grows a root. That root grows, searching out nutrients, only then can the seed break through and produce what it is intended to produce. If you want to kill the plant, you have to kill the roots, either with poison or pulling them out of the ground.

So how does this apply to prayer, and asking for healing to the “root cause?” Let’s take a sin like robbery, for example. You didn’t just one day decide to be a thief. Maybe a seed of jealousy or greed got planted in you a long time ago. It got fed with anger, lust, possibly gluttony, and one day you decided you’d take what you thought belonged to you, what you thought you deserved or what you were entitled to. So as a mother might do, instead of asking for her child to stop stealing, maybe if she prayed for his/her anger, or jealousy, she’d be praying to the root cause. For an illness, we don’t want to be relieved of just the symptoms, we want whatever is causing the illness to go away.

A lot of the illnesses we face today – diabetes, cancer, obesity – are because of our own bad life choices – overeating, smoking, drinking, etc. But in order to truly kick those habits, we need to determine WHY we do things to our bodies that we KNOW are bad. When we can determine those issues, like insecurity, we can pray to be healed to the root cause.  So, just like a plant, with proper nutrition, we can thrive and produce that which God created us to produce. The seeds of anger, bitterness and unforgiveness will wither and die because they’ve been plucked from your heart through prayer…to the root cause.