Why You Avoid What Is Killing You (And How to Finally Heal)

How long have you been putting tape over the warning light on your dashboard?

When that check engine light pops up, your first instinct is to cover it. We do the exact same thing with our lives.

We avoid the banking app, swiping the card and praying Jesus makes it work. We stay off the scale, promising to weigh ourselves next week. We refuse to ask our spouse that hard question because we are terrified of the answer.

We think avoidance is just laziness. It’s not. It’s a survival strategy.

But what you avoid, you empower.

Nine out of ten Americans delay medical checkups. Shockingly, a recent study revealed that those who suspect they have cancer delay screenings the most—sixty-two percent compared to forty-two percent who think they are fine.

Human nature dictates that the more certain you are that something is wrong, the less likely you are to look at it.

The more certain you are that something is wrong, the less likely you are to look at it.

Fear calculates the possibilities and tells us the unknown is better than the known. Procrastination buys you a Tuesday of blissful, numb ignorance. But while you are busy buying days, the thing you are avoiding is multiplying.

Why God Keeps You in a Nazareth Season of Wilderness

In Numbers chapter twenty-one, Israel is at the end of their forty-year wilderness journey. Right as they approach the finish line, the route gets longer, not shorter.

If you have ever worked out, you know the last two reps are the hardest. Just when you see the finish line, the road stretches.

Numbers 21:4 says the soul of the people became impatient. In Hebrew, that's ket sar—meaning "cut off" or "out of length," like a rope that is too short. Their souls ran out of rope.

A short soul is not a wicked soul; it’s a tired soul that has lost the ability to hold the long view.

When your soul gets short, two things happen.

First, provision stops registering. Israel had supernatural water and manna, yet called it "worthless food" (Numbers 21:5). This was a soul problem, not a supply problem. How many of us eat manna and call it trash? You begged God for that marriage; now you complain. You pleaded for that job; now you fill out resumes on their clock.

Second, memory rewrites itself backward. Israel romanticized Egypt. Slavery, mud brick pits, and drowned infants suddenly sounded like "home."

A short soul romanticizes the very thing God dragged you out of.

A dog returns to its vomit because its keen smell detects undigested bits of food. It’s trying to salvage the ten percent of good food left. That is what we do when we return to toxic relationships, abusive environments, or dead churches. We go back to ninety percent poison for ten percent good. Stop dating in your history; date in your spiritual bracket.

The Venom in Your Gossip and Conversations

Then the Lord sent fiery serpents (Numbers 21:6).

Soft, modern preaching wants to edit out a God who sends snakes. They want a bumper-sticker Jesus. But the venom did not start in the fangs; it started in their mouths.

Their bickering, gossip, and backbiting spread from tent to tent. They were biting each other verbally long before fangs touched skin. God simply removed the restraint of His grace and let them experience the physical consequence of what they carried spiritually.

If you want to host the seance of all seances, you don’t need chicken blood or pentagrams. Just sit at a table and gossip.

A consequence is not God losing His temper; it is God letting you see the shape of what you have been carrying spiritually.

In Numbers 21:7, the consequences registered. They came to Moses: "We have sinned." For forty years they complained; this is the first time they owned it.

"You cannot be healed of a bite if you keep calling it a scratch," says Pastor Mike Signorelli. "You have to own it."

If you are managing an addiction, a worry problem, or an impure lifestyle, stop calling it a 'rough patch.' It is a bite, and it’s killing you. Healing begins the moment you say one honest sentence.

Why God Puts a Bronze Serpent on a Pole

They begged Moses to take the snakes away. God didn’t. Instead, He told Moses to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole (Numbers 21:8).

Bronze represents judgment because it has been through the fire. The pole (nes) is a military standard, a banner of victory. The cobra was the emblem on Pharaoh’s headdress. God was saying: "Look at Egypt’s god dead, defeated, hung on a pole. It cannot bite you anymore."

Fifteen hundred years later, Jesus reaches back to this exact story when speaking to Nicodemus. He said, "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up" (John 3:14).

The Greek word is hoopsoh, meaning both lifted up on a cross and exalted in glory at the same time. The shape of the cure was the shape of the wound. To redeem us, Jesus took everything that has ever bitten you—every secret habit, generational curse, and lie from hell—and ran it through the fire of God’s judgment on the cross (2 Corinthians 5:21, Galatians 3:13).

You are not healed by looking at your sin; you are healed by looking at what God has already done with your sin.

This is the difference between religion and the Holy Spirit. Religion produces rumination, keeping you staring at your failure until you are paralyzed. But the Holy Spirit produces repentance. He convicts you, heals you, and reminds you that you are a royal priesthood, the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. We are not a church that ruminates; we are a church that repents.

In January 1850, fifteen-year-old Charles Spurgeon was caught in a snowstorm and stumbled into a small church. A lay preacher read Isaiah 45:22: "Look unto me and be saved, all the ends of the earth."

The preacher pointed at him: "Look, young man, look to Jesus Christ! Look, look, look! You have nothing to do but to look and live!"

Spurgeon looked. That look ignited a fire that shook the world for the next forty years.

The cure is never too far away; you are only dying if you are looking in the wrong direction.

So where are your eyes fixed?

Are they glued to CNN, TikTok, or OnlyFans? Are you looking to a political party, a university, or your own willpower to save you?

Open your eyes. If there is fear around finances, open the banking app. If there is trouble in your marriage, look at it. Stop blaming your past or your parents. Break the victim mentality. God has lifted up the cross; now He is waiting on you.

God lifts. You look.

Stop ruminating in the dirt and start gazing at the Savior. Lift your hands. Take the shape of the cross. Let the venom be drawn out of your life. Repent, look, and live.

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