Two years ago I was performing my EMT clinicals.  One of the EMTs gave me a word I haven’t forgotten.  When we waited in the break area between calls, I skimmed a medical book and commented that the hardest part of the job for me would be to see the more grotesque injuries.  I’m ok seeing my own blood, but wince at someone else’s injuries- avulsions, contusions, open fractures, lacerations, etc.  The EMT answered me, but I didn’t think he’d heard.  He said, “The patient is the one with the problem.” 

The pateint has the trauma.  You treat them.  You are not the one with the overdose or trauma at the end of the day.  It is someone else.

The praticality comes when applying this to theology.  As I’ve put my ear to the culture and listened to doctrines, more influenced by the spirit of the age than the Spirit of Christ, I’ve come away feeling the maladies.  Denial of Hell, diplomacy on the virgin birth, denial on the penal substitutionary atonement, mitigation sin, mitigation of the deity of Christ, etc.  I’ve come away feeling queasy myself.  Then I remembered, at the end of the day, the patient has the problem.  I remembered, you don’t defend a lion, you turn it loose; you loose the cure for all maladies of theological traumas, the Word of God, and let it speak itself.  God’s breath cuts and pierces and treats these maladies better than any surgeon’s scalpel.  I don’t need to address every scoffer that comes around, but I need to be ready to turn the scalpel loose on those who would here and be quickened under its power.