This is a guest post from Monica Youssef - a first year medical student at the University of Minnesota.  You can follow her on twitter, @msyous, or by checking out her BLOG.  If you too are interested in guest posting on my blog, please visit my Guest Post guidelines for more info.

Being sick is the worst!  I should know because my immune system is like that of a toddler, and being in arctic Minnesota doesn’t really help.  It’s so frustrating and annoying to always be tired.  It affects everything you do!  Always nauseous, and short of breath – at school, at work, even just hanging out with friends.

So what is the solution?  You go to the doctor, get prescribed a medication and get on that ASAP so you can quickly heal and get back to what you’ve been missing out on.

But we don’t always do that, do we?  We know we should, but we instead think we can do it on our own.  We can defeat the sickness without the meds.  Or maybe we start taking the medicine, but then discontinue its use after a few days because we have deemed ourselves to be all better now.

In arrogance/ignorance, we think to ourselves, “The doctor doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t need to take this medicine for two weeks.  It’s been two days and I feel just fine.”

Can you relate?

As a medical student, I am now taking a class in microbiology and immunology: the study of critters that make you sick, and the troops within you that keep up the good fight against them.  One of the topics we’ve discussed is antibiotic resistance.

Basically that means that if an antibiotic isn’t taken as prescribed (say, 2 times/day for 2 weeks) those bacterial bugs that make us sick, get clever and find a way to bypass the medication’s purpose.  The med then thus loses its potency and we are only making our bug stronger. This happens is through LACK OF CONSISTENCY.

See where I’m going here?

We, as humans and as sinners, are constantly fighting an illness. The world is filled with bugs that have the ability to make us sick, to hurt us and to sap our strength. Sometimes, we get infected so badly that we become paralyzed: unable to think straight, depressed, tired, and hopeless. In times when sin has overtaken us to such a degree, we don’t know what else to do but seek our Physician for help.

We pray to Him and tell Him how we’re feeling, what we’re scared of, and ask Him what we should do to feel better and to get stronger. Then God, out of His unfailing love, allows us to start feeling better simply by spending some time talking to Him…praying to Him.  He then tells us: read my Word each day, continue steadfast in prayer, repent and be made clean, go to the hospital (the Church), and try every week at least to become One with Me in receiving My precious Body and Blood through communion.

“If you love Me, keep My commandments.And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever.” John 14:15-16

How merciful is our God! Even after we have fallen, He’ll come and live in us, giving us the power to defeat the devil and to defeat the sin that tries to hurt us. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is our strong immune system and His commandments are our medication. The more we take it—the more we pray earnestly, read our Bible diligently, repent wholeheartedly, confess sincerely, etc — the more we find healing and the stronger we become.

But then we get ambitious: we say, “I feel better, I don’t need the medication anymore” and we forget it. We are not consistent in prayer, in reading, in quiet time, and eventually…the sin is able to attack us again.

“See, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.” John 5:14

I don’t know about you, but something worse? That’s absolutely terrifying.  Consistency is our defense.

It’s not easy doing it on our own either. Have a buddy to hold you accountable, to ask you if you too have taken your medication, each day. There’s absolutely no reason to fight a sickness alone. God has given us these tools ONLY to help and strengthen us.

“If God is for us, who can be against us?...Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written:“For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” Romans 8:31, 35-37

For discussion: what are the things which help you or prevent you from being consistent in your walk with God?