12/06/2026
✍️BLOG FRIDAY✍️
Our Current Illness Care Model
Apostle Brandon has been doing a phenomenal series at Church; hard-hitting some massive local narratives that need a fresh biblical context and stance. Last Sunday, we explored “national gods” – the immediate gratification/satisfaction line; the urgent satisfaction humans crave that creates a god, and how business, politics and religion exploit this strongly, especially in the South African context.
The foundational scriptures for this sermon were:
Acts 19:35 – the city clerk was involved
Acts 13:6-7 – the governor was involved
Philippians 3:19 – the diagnostic lens for how to determine personal gods that are used to influence, manipulate, and control people – appetite, shame, and earthly-mindedness.
In the midst of the sermon, the Holy Spirit dropped a conviction into my heart. Apostle was discussing the requirement of Christians to dismantle the system; dismantle the god of the region, as Paul did in Acts 19:8-10. Every day in my practice, I am faced with the god of our current illness care model: chronic issues without supposed solutions. We need to dismantle this system if we are to truly live the health that God requires of us.
I am always drawn to 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 — BSB
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body.”
Paul was confronting sexual immorality and misuse of the body within Corinthian culture, whose belief separated their spirit belonging to God, and their body was just physical, and what they did with their body did not really matter. It seems no different to our current situation; 50% of South Africans are either overweight or obese, and this has significantly increased in the last 50 years. 18% of South Africans above the age of 15 years old (yes 15 years old…) are on chronic medication of some sort or other. Approximately 3.3 million surgical procedures per year are done in South Africa. Medical schemes paid about R36.4 billion for medicines dispensed and R93.2 billion in hospital expenditure in 2024. This is only in the private sector…adding the public, and it is dramatic the expenditure on illness care.
Let’s pause for a moment and discuss it. The term healthcare should only be used when the primary outcome is the restoration, protection, and strengthening of health. If a system financially succeeds because people remain sick, dependent, medicated, and afraid, then we must honestly ask whether it is healthcare — or illness care. The national treasury for South Africa has budgeted R310.4 billion on “health care” in 2026/2027; you have to ask the question – is this making South Africans, you and I, healthier?
Please note this is not an attack on doctors, nurses, emergency medicine, hospitals, surgery, or pharmaceutical intervention where they are genuinely needed. Many lives are saved every day through medical care. The issue is not whether medicine has value. The issue is whether we have built a national system that profits more from managing sickness than from producing health.
It can be argued that a large portion of South Africa’s chronic disease burden is related to modifiable lifestyle and environmental risk factors — including obesity, poor diet, inactivity, alcohol use, smoking, chronic stress, poor sleep, and unmanaged metabolic disease. In lifestyle-related chronic illness, this preventable or modifiable component may be as high as 70–80%.
If even 80% of the chronic illness burden is lifestyle-related, and if much of our public healthcare budget is consumed by managing chronic disease, then the financial implications are staggering. On a R310.4 billion healthcare budget, 80% represents R248.32 billion. Even if the true figure is lower, the point remains: preventable illness is consuming a massive portion of national resources. Not treating God’s temple with the due respect it requires!
This sets up a line for a national god; people who required immediate satisfaction from their symptoms without desiring to change their ways! To paraphrase Apostle Brandon, if you cannot say no to the immediate gratification of your symptoms, then you are under their spell.
Following Apostle’s sermon, the areas of control, the official guardians of a system are:
1) Business; Medical businesses of all sorts, whether being medical aids, pharmaceutical companies, hospital chains and the like, are big businesses and have massive power and control of the narrative. Think for a moment of how much control the reward systems from our medical aids wield in directing our choices in consumerism? Big pharmacies are a one-stop shop for all your needs.
2) Politically, the covid pandemic showed us how healthcare can dictate and control political decisions that influence everyone in society. And for those brave ones who dared speak up against it fell into much persecution.
3) Religion; A subliminal religious message can form under the illness-care model: that God’s design is fundamentally faulty, that organs are disposable (tonsils and appendix etc.), that body parts are replaceable commodities (heart, knees and discs etc.), and that every symptom requires an external product or procedure to stabilize (blood pressure, blood sugar, sleep and mental state etc). Yet Scripture presents the body as fearfully and wonderfully made, a living temple to be stewarded, not a machine to be passively outsourced.
A national god forms when a legitimate need becomes an ultimate master. Health is legitimate. Relief from suffering is legitimate. Medical help is legitimate. But when comfort, symptom suppression, fear of death, and dependence on systems become ultimate, they begin to function as gods.
Following from Philippians 3:19, when “the belly” becomes god, appetite governs behaviour. When shame becomes glory, unhealthy living is defended as identity. When minds are set only on earthly things, the body is either idolised, neglected, medicated, or commodified — but not stewarded before God. Are you subscribed to the illness care god?
In the illness care system, how many chronic medications or surgical interventions are prescribed without considering the natural, conservative and potentially safer means, albeit which take longer and more effort to effect?
Also, we often follow the god of illness care’s prescription without hesitation because the doctor said so. There is a pill for every symptom and for every side-effect; we do not question the ingredients, the harm, the alternatives, or the absolute requirement.
There is an old joke: “What is the difference between God and a specialist? God does not think He is a specialist.” Humour aside, the warning is serious: no human expert should become unquestionable. Wisdom asks questions. Fear obeys blindly.
Apostle Brandon laid out how the Apostle Paul’s teaching in Acts 19:8–10 eventually disrupted the business centre of Ephesus in Acts 19:23–27. Truth taught consistently began to dismantle the god of the region.
1) We have to start with people’s belief in God’s healing ability within the body. If God is a just God, He has to have placed the same healing ability within all of us that allows for the potential of a miracle (as seen so often within the bible!). The miracle is by God’s choice based on that which will further the Kingdom; however, that does not stop each and every one of us from daily maximising the healing potential of the temple by the right lifestyle.
2) Next hit the academics; this is the best part there are already so many different challenges of research that is being done that validate that the body can heal itself with the right environment. Epigenetics is an incredibly exciting study of how lifestyle switches on and switches off genetic expression so we are not even jailed by our genetics (another god developed by illness care system). The problem is with the advent of social media there is no consistency with the message and therefore massive public confusion arises which means people lean back into that which the familiar – illness care system; the doctor knows best.
3) Finally disrupt the business centres; this will be the biggest challenge for a true healthcare system because it will not be a massive money maker, and the economy will take the impact however, savings in the national treasury will surely have better investment. Also, the outcomes would have to be based on the person requiring less care and intervention and relying more on themselves.
None of this will change as long as people want to protect their unhealthy and immediate gratification lifestyle. However, I believe there is a healthcare system that can be based on true health outcomes, fair trade in healthcare, and profit for the people. It will be scary, however, God is for us.
A final thought challenge for you: Moses did not die because his vitality had failed, but because his assignment ended. Deuteronomy 34:7 says that at 120 years old, “his eyes were not weak, and his vitality had not left him.” Before his death, he still climbed Mount Nebo to see the Promised Land. Here is the challenge: would your current health allow you to climb the mountain required for your assignment?
Travis Mitchell
