The Remedy That Was Always Meant to Come

In January 1922, fourteen-year-old Leonard Thompson lay in Toronto General Hospital, weighing just sixty-five pounds. Type 1 diabetes was consuming him. In that era, the only treatment was a starvation diet — doctors kept patients alive by essentially letting them waste away more slowly. The disease was a prison with no door.

Then Frederick Banting and Charles Best arrived with something the world had never seen: insulin extracted from a healthy pancreas. They injected Leonard, and within days his blood sugar dropped. Color returned to his face. Strength returned to his legs. A boy marked for death walked out of that hospital.

Here is what strikes me: Leonard's body had always known what to do with insulin. Every cell had receptors waiting for it. The remedy did not have to teach his body a new language — it spoke the one his body had always been designed to hear.

This is what Paul means when he writes, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free" (Galatians 5:1). Our souls were built for freedom. Sin starves us slowly, and we sometimes mistake that starvation diet for normal life. But when the grace of God enters our bloodstream, something in us recognizes it — not as foreign, but as the thing we were always made for.

You were never designed for the chains. The Remedy has come.