040904 Ministry of Jesus
The Return of Eden BI: Making upside down world right side up, Eden… KSS
Ministry of Healing M 3 September 5, 2004
Four decades after the world's largest utility company Pacific Gas & Electric started dumping 370 million gallons of cancer-causing chemicals into unlined ponds in Hinkley, California, their actions were uncovered by Erin Brokovich, a formerly unemployed, single mother of three working as a secretary in a California law firm…
As a result of all the chemical dumping by Pacific Gas and Electric, many people in Hinkley, California were experiencing severe respiratory problems, cancer and some had died. The residents were completely dependent on the local groundwater supply for their water needs and it turned out that their illnesses were directly related to the cancer causing chemicals had been dumped into the water supply.
What happens when we are exposed to conditions they were not designed? We experience all kind of disabilities and diseases?
There was a time, many, many years ago in a place called Garden of Eden when our world existed in perfect balance, where God’s sustaining presence was plentiful as oxygen in the Amazon Forrest. In Eden, Adam and Eve experienced no diseases no sicknesses, but when they rebelled against God—they experienced a disconnect from God’s sustaining, health-giving presence and they began to experience sickness and diseases. So it for us who are descend from Adam and Eve, we also expeience disconnect from God’s sustaining, health-giving present and are thus vulnerable to all kinds of sickness and diseases: physical, psychological, spiritual.
When Jesus Christ came to world, He announced that the Kingdom of God was at hand. When he said this, he was saying the presence of God was breaking into the world in a new way. Onne of the implications of this God’s presence breaking into the world in a new way was that we would experience healing…
This morning we’re going to look at how this in breaking healing ministry comes to us through Jesus. If you have your Bibles, please turn to… Matthew 4:2323Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. 24News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them. 25Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.
How does Jesus mediate God’s healing to us?
According our passage part of the way that Jesus heals us is through his teaching. The text tells us that Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in the synagogues and preaching the good news of the Kingdom….
Teaching/preaching can have a powerful healing effect on our lives… because preaching/teaching can effect what we believe… and what we believe can have a powerful impact in our well-being.
In Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, if I recall correctly, at one point Sonya’s alcoholic father in a moment of anger suggests she is a loser and immoral and these words have a powerful impact on her self-image. This coupled her families’ poverty causes her to begin working as a prostitute.
What we believe--either negative or positive--about ourselves has a powerful effect on how we live our lives.
What we believe about others also has a powerful effect on how we treat others.
Miroslav Volf the Croatian theologian who teaches at Yale points out that the reason why Serbs can kill Croatians and Croatians can kill Serbs (and he could also said the reason the reason Chenchans can kill Russians and Russians can kill Chenchans) and so is because each side views the other side as less human than themselves.
If you regard people of different cultures or races, or economic classes, or genders, or sexual orientations as being less human than you, inferior to you, you will treat them in a certain disdain.
Jesus offers us new way to view others that bring healing to our relationships, new ways to view ourselves that bring us healing in our relationship with ourselves. Most powerful of all Jesus gives us vision of God that will lead us in a transforming, healing relationship with the one who alone can sustain us. Through his person and through his teaching Jesus reveals God and his revelation will lead us into a healthy relationship with our life-giving maker, a revelation that will turn us toward Eden.
Some people view Jesus’ commands are restrictive, but they are ultimately freeing and healing. If Jesus’ commands are restrictive, they are only restrictive in the way that guard rails on the side of a freeway running along a cliff are restrictive, they are restrictive in order to serve our well being. They protect the relationship with have we ourselves, our neighbour, and most important they protect our relationship with our life-giving God.
Jesus’ teaching is so organic, so naturally connected to our well-being.
Recently my wife and were I talking with a couple and they given me permission to relate part of the conversation. The husband loves chip, pop, candy, and certain greasy foods, etc (check). (btw, the couple was not Bill and Hillary Clinton)
This couple was talking to a nurse and the nurse said to the husband given your cholesterol count you are at serious risk of having a stroke… No response… then she said…. And if you get a stroke… you will instantly look much older… Boom the idea of instantly aging got his attention… Nurses and doctors don’t encourage people to cut out fatty foods—just because they want to wreck people’s otherwise comfortable lives. They do so because they want people to be healthy and whole…
So, it is with the teaching of Jesus… his teachings are not intended to wreck our lives, but to bring healing to us. Jesus’ teaching brings heath to our relationships with ourselves, with other people—health in our relationship with a life-giving God.
If you ever have any doubt at all about Jesus’ commitment to our well-being, just focus on the cross and remember that Jesus gave his life for us to absorb our spiritual puss, our sins in his own body, that we might be made spiritually clean and whole.
Part of the way we become whole through Jesus is by absorbing his teaching. His teaching shows how to relate to ourselves, others, and most important personal with the life giving, healing God.
How do we absorb Jesus teaching?
Studying the Scriptures in community as part of our worship is a good place to begin.
Jesus was radical, but according to our text where was he teaching? He was teaching in the synagogue, in the official place of public worship in his day. So coming each Sunday (or Saturday) to a public worship service is not only a way to say to God I, honor you on the first day of the week, but it a step toward healing.
But just physical exercising once a week is not enough to catapult enough to catapult us to optimal heath--so studying the Scripture once a week is not enough to catapult optimal into spiritual health. As a minister, I wish I could say listening to a sermon once a week is enough to catapult you in optimal spiritual health, but it’s not.
The experts say that if you want to be in optimal physical condition, ideally you want to get half of hour of exercise at least 3-4 times a week.
I’d say the same is true spiritually speaking… if you want to grow spiritually ideally you want to some mediating on the Scriptures and praying, if not every day at least 3-4 times of week for about 20-30 minutes.
If you want to grow in your relationship with your partner or friend you need to more communication that simply, a one or two minute phone about, who’s pick who’s going to pick up the kids from soccer practice or who’s going to return the video; if you want to grow in your relationship you with someone, you have to have some not-on-the-run, one on one conversations. So it is in our relationship with God. If we want to grow in our relationship with God we need regular one on one time with the word and in the word and prayer.
Let me just take a minute to address some practical issues that may help remove some barriers to regular expose to the Scriptures.
If you are stuck on not knowing WHAT to read, I’d recommend the (outline) ONE YEAR BIBLE. For years, I’ve used this. It will cost you about as much to take a friend to lunch or to a movie. If you don’t margin in your life and really want to get a ONE YEAR Bible, talk to me or our office and we’ll arrange to help you get one (Sandra).
Or you’re having trouble getting what to read, go to a website with a one year Bible reading plan. www.backtotheBible.org
If you’re having trouble understand a book of the Bible. I’d highly recommend the book How to Read the Bible Book by Book by Regent’s College professor Gordon Fee and my former professor Douglas Stuart.
When it comes to understanding the Bible, you need to “see the forest as well as the trees”. I’ve heard of few people who try to get something from the Bible by opening it at random… and picking a verse. God is so incredible gracious that he can use even this kind of method, but it’s not ideal… You could end up at random and so and so committed adultery… and then pick a verse at random “go and do likewise.”
How to read the Bible book by book is the book I use to understand the sweep of a book as I read it for my own personal reading and as I prepare to teach.
If you’re having trouble paying attention to what you read in the Bible. I recommend taking brief, journal notes on what you read.
Have you had to write about a review about a movie, a concert or a book? If you have write about sometime you pay attention.
If you make to discipline to write about what you read in Scripture it will pay attention.
It will help you remember.
Two weeks ago, I was on the phone with the Vice President of Analytic Solutions at the Oracle Corporation. I had set an appointment to talk to John Schoenerr to talk about leadership issues I’m working on. I told John if you hear my key board it’s because I’m taking notes what you’re saying…
When we’re with someone receiving important information, we tend to write it down.
When God is speaking through the word, it is a great idea to write it down: it helps you pay attention and helps you remember.
Finally if you’re really battling with an issue that the Word speaking, you might consider memorizing that part of Scripture.
About 10 days ago I was speaking at event here in the city and someone came up to me afterwards and said, I’m really struggling with an issue you addressed directly in your message. I cited a verse, memorize, sink this in your term memory and I want you meditate on and pray over it for the next several weeks.
This past summer I had a foot blister that got infected. And it began to spread so I so went the doctor and got some topical solution. But it wasn’t enough to arrest the infection. Then the doctor then prescribed me oral medication--something to swallow. The infection started to heal. Sometimes when we are struggling with the word, we have to swallow by memorizing it.
Early in the summer I heard that 2 people in our community had memorized the entire Sermon on Mount. I thought it would be good for my soul to swallow the Sermon on the Mount. Jews have been known to memorize the entire Hebrew Scriptures, Muslims the entire Koran, I thought it possible to memorize Matthew 5, 6, 7.
We are healed through Jesus’ teaching because Jesus teaching is enables us to live a way helps relate to ourselves and each other with health. Most, important it Jesus’ teaching brings us into relationship with the life-Giving God, it turns toward Eden.
As we are healed through the Word as we, we have the privilege of bringing healing to others by bringing the word to them as we share the word as friends, teach the word to our children or we have influence over or as we lead or facilitate the learning of the word in the context of a small group.
Jesus brought a healing ministry through his teaching, and as we continue through the text we see Jesus also brought healing as apparently mediated God’s presence to them through prayer. We read in vs. 23Jesus went throughout Galilee… healing every disease and sickness among the people. 24News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them.
Part of our calling is to be a healing community through Jesus’ teaching; part of our calling is to be healing community by mediating God’s presence to others through prayer.
God is healing people all the time. You break your arm, a doctor may be able to set your bone, but a doctor can’t knit your bone together, only God does that. You cut yourself, a Band Aid may stop the bleeding, but only God cause the skin to grow over the wound. When we pray for someone it’s as though we help open the way for God to move in foster the healing process. When accelerates the natural healing process--we call that kind of healing, a “miracle.” Occasionally, we witness a miraculous healing.
The Vancouver Sun a few weeks ago carried a story about two friends who were swimming in a pool. One was a weak swimmer. He got into trouble in a pool and went under the water. His friend tried to help him but the weak swimmer panicked and pulled her down into the water. By the time help arrived about 4 minutes later, the young man was on the bottom of the pool. The rescuers did CPR, but he didn’t regain consciousness. He was taken to the hospital. . The young man was in a deep coma and appeared to be getting worse. Dr. Alan Meakes chief of the Vancouver Island Health authority and his medical colleagues felt that given the amount time the young man had been underwater he wouldn’t be able to survive.
The young man’s parents were at the hospital and a Chinese pastor approached them saying, I’m a pastor. I’ve just come to pray for you and your son. You might not know who God is or Jesus, but I believe—I trust—that God can do something. It’s not me. I just come to pray.
He prayed, but nothing happened. The pastor left the hospital feeling dejected. The following day Pastor Wan brought some other people to pray for the young man.
That night the young man opened his eyes for the first time since the accident. Then in the following days and weeks, he appeared to defy the doctor’s predications about him by regaining consciousness and being able to sit, speak, write and walk.
The doctor I’ve been said I’ve treating people with these kinds of conditions for 20 years and I have no natural way to explaining how he recovered. Dr. Meakes said that all his vital signs were going down. His temperature, pulse, blood pressure were going down, UNTIL people began praying for him.
Over the last decade there have been many papers coming out of secular medical schools universities that document the correlation with prayer and people’s recovery. I realize there are sceptics who believe that any apparent correlation between health and prayer, health and “God” is purely coincidental. Certainly faith to believe that prayer can effect healing, but the given the findings it also takes faith to believe that prayer has no effect on health. Either way you have faith in a certain paradigm.
Last November you may have noticed Newsweek ran a cover article God & Health.
The article noted, that the National Institute of Health commissioned a series of paper in which scientists attempted to definitively assess the state of the faith-and-health research. Lynda H. Powell, an epidemiologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, reviewed about 150 papers…. She says one nugget, however, "blew my socks off," Powell says. People who regularly attend church have a 25 percent reduction in the mortality rate--that is, they live longer--than people who are not churchgoers. This is true even after controlling for variables intrinsically linked to Sundays in the pew, like social support and healthy lifestyle.
There is something about the Word and prayer that bring health to us because they mediate the wisdom and presence of God.
(I want to add as a disclaimer: As a general rule God’s presence does bring healing, but it’s not a simple one to one correlation. Who was the one person who more had faith in God and who more than any other person was filled with God’s presence? He suffered tremendously—he was nailed to a cross; I could also point you a number of people whose faith was shaky/character was questionable who experienced miraculous healing.)
But having said that, we can say that God’s presence as mediated through the word and prayer, though not always bring what we might “miraculous healing” is healing in nature—it’s what we were made for.
Near the beginning of the movie Grand Canyon there is a scene where Kevin Cline is driving home one night and taking a short cut through a Los Angeles back alley, his Lexus breaks down and a gang approaches him. Just as they are about to mug him, a tall African American truck driver named Simon shows up in a tow truck. Simon has a conversation with the gang leader… and then says, “Man, the world ain't supposed to work like this.”
The world “ain’t supposed to be this way”… and it’s not just in some LA back alley or some back alley in the downtown Eastside or just in Hinckley, California, or in a school in Southern Russia, or the Darfur region of Sudan--that world ain’t the way it’s supposed to be anywhere—because we’ve experienced disconnect from our life-giving maker.
Jesus comes to re-introduce us to something of Eden, something God’s presence through his teaching and his presence.
Jurgen Moltman… German theologian says Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only natural things in a world that is unnatural, demonized, and wounded. 2x
Some people think that to allow Jesus to enter them is something is unnatural and strange, but it’s the most natural thing you can do, it’s the most healing, because you made for Eden, you made for God’s presence. Amen.
On the Jesus last night before going to the cross—he had dinner with some of his closest students. That night he took bread and he broke it and he said this is my body broken for, for your healing. He took the cup and he said this is my blood and he it poured our for your forgiveness. Someone has described what Jesus did on the cross as the “great exchange” he took our sins, so that we could be pure, he bore our infirmities so that we could be healed, he was separated from God so we could be reunited with him, so we could turn toward Eden. If this morning you have or right now deciding to invite Jesus Christ to be your life come and partake… Pray… (Sudan offering, Mardi)
Ministry of Healing M 3 September 5, 2004
Four decades after the world's largest utility company Pacific Gas & Electric started dumping 370 million gallons of cancer-causing chemicals into unlined ponds in Hinkley, California, their actions were uncovered by Erin Brokovich, a formerly unemployed, single mother of three working as a secretary in a California law firm…
As a result of all the chemical dumping by Pacific Gas and Electric, many people in Hinkley, California were experiencing severe respiratory problems, cancer and some had died. The residents were completely dependent on the local groundwater supply for their water needs and it turned out that their illnesses were directly related to the cancer causing chemicals had been dumped into the water supply.
What happens when we are exposed to conditions they were not designed? We experience all kind of disabilities and diseases?
There was a time, many, many years ago in a place called Garden of Eden when our world existed in perfect balance, where God’s sustaining presence was plentiful as oxygen in the Amazon Forrest. In Eden, Adam and Eve experienced no diseases no sicknesses, but when they rebelled against God—they experienced a disconnect from God’s sustaining, health-giving presence and they began to experience sickness and diseases. So it for us who are descend from Adam and Eve, we also expeience disconnect from God’s sustaining, health-giving present and are thus vulnerable to all kinds of sickness and diseases: physical, psychological, spiritual.
When Jesus Christ came to world, He announced that the Kingdom of God was at hand. When he said this, he was saying the presence of God was breaking into the world in a new way. Onne of the implications of this God’s presence breaking into the world in a new way was that we would experience healing…
This morning we’re going to look at how this in breaking healing ministry comes to us through Jesus. If you have your Bibles, please turn to… Matthew 4:2323Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. 24News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them. 25Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him.
How does Jesus mediate God’s healing to us?
According our passage part of the way that Jesus heals us is through his teaching. The text tells us that Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in the synagogues and preaching the good news of the Kingdom….
Teaching/preaching can have a powerful healing effect on our lives… because preaching/teaching can effect what we believe… and what we believe can have a powerful impact in our well-being.
In Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, if I recall correctly, at one point Sonya’s alcoholic father in a moment of anger suggests she is a loser and immoral and these words have a powerful impact on her self-image. This coupled her families’ poverty causes her to begin working as a prostitute.
What we believe--either negative or positive--about ourselves has a powerful effect on how we live our lives.
What we believe about others also has a powerful effect on how we treat others.
Miroslav Volf the Croatian theologian who teaches at Yale points out that the reason why Serbs can kill Croatians and Croatians can kill Serbs (and he could also said the reason the reason Chenchans can kill Russians and Russians can kill Chenchans) and so is because each side views the other side as less human than themselves.
If you regard people of different cultures or races, or economic classes, or genders, or sexual orientations as being less human than you, inferior to you, you will treat them in a certain disdain.
Jesus offers us new way to view others that bring healing to our relationships, new ways to view ourselves that bring us healing in our relationship with ourselves. Most powerful of all Jesus gives us vision of God that will lead us in a transforming, healing relationship with the one who alone can sustain us. Through his person and through his teaching Jesus reveals God and his revelation will lead us into a healthy relationship with our life-giving maker, a revelation that will turn us toward Eden.
Some people view Jesus’ commands are restrictive, but they are ultimately freeing and healing. If Jesus’ commands are restrictive, they are only restrictive in the way that guard rails on the side of a freeway running along a cliff are restrictive, they are restrictive in order to serve our well being. They protect the relationship with have we ourselves, our neighbour, and most important they protect our relationship with our life-giving God.
Jesus’ teaching is so organic, so naturally connected to our well-being.
Recently my wife and were I talking with a couple and they given me permission to relate part of the conversation. The husband loves chip, pop, candy, and certain greasy foods, etc (check). (btw, the couple was not Bill and Hillary Clinton)
This couple was talking to a nurse and the nurse said to the husband given your cholesterol count you are at serious risk of having a stroke… No response… then she said…. And if you get a stroke… you will instantly look much older… Boom the idea of instantly aging got his attention… Nurses and doctors don’t encourage people to cut out fatty foods—just because they want to wreck people’s otherwise comfortable lives. They do so because they want people to be healthy and whole…
So, it is with the teaching of Jesus… his teachings are not intended to wreck our lives, but to bring healing to us. Jesus’ teaching brings heath to our relationships with ourselves, with other people—health in our relationship with a life-giving God.
If you ever have any doubt at all about Jesus’ commitment to our well-being, just focus on the cross and remember that Jesus gave his life for us to absorb our spiritual puss, our sins in his own body, that we might be made spiritually clean and whole.
Part of the way we become whole through Jesus is by absorbing his teaching. His teaching shows how to relate to ourselves, others, and most important personal with the life giving, healing God.
How do we absorb Jesus teaching?
Studying the Scriptures in community as part of our worship is a good place to begin.
Jesus was radical, but according to our text where was he teaching? He was teaching in the synagogue, in the official place of public worship in his day. So coming each Sunday (or Saturday) to a public worship service is not only a way to say to God I, honor you on the first day of the week, but it a step toward healing.
But just physical exercising once a week is not enough to catapult enough to catapult us to optimal heath--so studying the Scripture once a week is not enough to catapult optimal into spiritual health. As a minister, I wish I could say listening to a sermon once a week is enough to catapult you in optimal spiritual health, but it’s not.
The experts say that if you want to be in optimal physical condition, ideally you want to get half of hour of exercise at least 3-4 times a week.
I’d say the same is true spiritually speaking… if you want to grow spiritually ideally you want to some mediating on the Scriptures and praying, if not every day at least 3-4 times of week for about 20-30 minutes.
If you want to grow in your relationship with your partner or friend you need to more communication that simply, a one or two minute phone about, who’s pick who’s going to pick up the kids from soccer practice or who’s going to return the video; if you want to grow in your relationship you with someone, you have to have some not-on-the-run, one on one conversations. So it is in our relationship with God. If we want to grow in our relationship with God we need regular one on one time with the word and in the word and prayer.
Let me just take a minute to address some practical issues that may help remove some barriers to regular expose to the Scriptures.
If you are stuck on not knowing WHAT to read, I’d recommend the (outline) ONE YEAR BIBLE. For years, I’ve used this. It will cost you about as much to take a friend to lunch or to a movie. If you don’t margin in your life and really want to get a ONE YEAR Bible, talk to me or our office and we’ll arrange to help you get one (Sandra).
Or you’re having trouble getting what to read, go to a website with a one year Bible reading plan. www.backtotheBible.org
If you’re having trouble understand a book of the Bible. I’d highly recommend the book How to Read the Bible Book by Book by Regent’s College professor Gordon Fee and my former professor Douglas Stuart.
When it comes to understanding the Bible, you need to “see the forest as well as the trees”. I’ve heard of few people who try to get something from the Bible by opening it at random… and picking a verse. God is so incredible gracious that he can use even this kind of method, but it’s not ideal… You could end up at random and so and so committed adultery… and then pick a verse at random “go and do likewise.”
How to read the Bible book by book is the book I use to understand the sweep of a book as I read it for my own personal reading and as I prepare to teach.
If you’re having trouble paying attention to what you read in the Bible. I recommend taking brief, journal notes on what you read.
Have you had to write about a review about a movie, a concert or a book? If you have write about sometime you pay attention.
If you make to discipline to write about what you read in Scripture it will pay attention.
It will help you remember.
Two weeks ago, I was on the phone with the Vice President of Analytic Solutions at the Oracle Corporation. I had set an appointment to talk to John Schoenerr to talk about leadership issues I’m working on. I told John if you hear my key board it’s because I’m taking notes what you’re saying…
When we’re with someone receiving important information, we tend to write it down.
When God is speaking through the word, it is a great idea to write it down: it helps you pay attention and helps you remember.
Finally if you’re really battling with an issue that the Word speaking, you might consider memorizing that part of Scripture.
About 10 days ago I was speaking at event here in the city and someone came up to me afterwards and said, I’m really struggling with an issue you addressed directly in your message. I cited a verse, memorize, sink this in your term memory and I want you meditate on and pray over it for the next several weeks.
This past summer I had a foot blister that got infected. And it began to spread so I so went the doctor and got some topical solution. But it wasn’t enough to arrest the infection. Then the doctor then prescribed me oral medication--something to swallow. The infection started to heal. Sometimes when we are struggling with the word, we have to swallow by memorizing it.
Early in the summer I heard that 2 people in our community had memorized the entire Sermon on Mount. I thought it would be good for my soul to swallow the Sermon on the Mount. Jews have been known to memorize the entire Hebrew Scriptures, Muslims the entire Koran, I thought it possible to memorize Matthew 5, 6, 7.
We are healed through Jesus’ teaching because Jesus teaching is enables us to live a way helps relate to ourselves and each other with health. Most, important it Jesus’ teaching brings us into relationship with the life-Giving God, it turns toward Eden.
As we are healed through the Word as we, we have the privilege of bringing healing to others by bringing the word to them as we share the word as friends, teach the word to our children or we have influence over or as we lead or facilitate the learning of the word in the context of a small group.
Jesus brought a healing ministry through his teaching, and as we continue through the text we see Jesus also brought healing as apparently mediated God’s presence to them through prayer. We read in vs. 23Jesus went throughout Galilee… healing every disease and sickness among the people. 24News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and he healed them.
Part of our calling is to be a healing community through Jesus’ teaching; part of our calling is to be healing community by mediating God’s presence to others through prayer.
God is healing people all the time. You break your arm, a doctor may be able to set your bone, but a doctor can’t knit your bone together, only God does that. You cut yourself, a Band Aid may stop the bleeding, but only God cause the skin to grow over the wound. When we pray for someone it’s as though we help open the way for God to move in foster the healing process. When accelerates the natural healing process--we call that kind of healing, a “miracle.” Occasionally, we witness a miraculous healing.
The Vancouver Sun a few weeks ago carried a story about two friends who were swimming in a pool. One was a weak swimmer. He got into trouble in a pool and went under the water. His friend tried to help him but the weak swimmer panicked and pulled her down into the water. By the time help arrived about 4 minutes later, the young man was on the bottom of the pool. The rescuers did CPR, but he didn’t regain consciousness. He was taken to the hospital. . The young man was in a deep coma and appeared to be getting worse. Dr. Alan Meakes chief of the Vancouver Island Health authority and his medical colleagues felt that given the amount time the young man had been underwater he wouldn’t be able to survive.
The young man’s parents were at the hospital and a Chinese pastor approached them saying, I’m a pastor. I’ve just come to pray for you and your son. You might not know who God is or Jesus, but I believe—I trust—that God can do something. It’s not me. I just come to pray.
He prayed, but nothing happened. The pastor left the hospital feeling dejected. The following day Pastor Wan brought some other people to pray for the young man.
That night the young man opened his eyes for the first time since the accident. Then in the following days and weeks, he appeared to defy the doctor’s predications about him by regaining consciousness and being able to sit, speak, write and walk.
The doctor I’ve been said I’ve treating people with these kinds of conditions for 20 years and I have no natural way to explaining how he recovered. Dr. Meakes said that all his vital signs were going down. His temperature, pulse, blood pressure were going down, UNTIL people began praying for him.
Over the last decade there have been many papers coming out of secular medical schools universities that document the correlation with prayer and people’s recovery. I realize there are sceptics who believe that any apparent correlation between health and prayer, health and “God” is purely coincidental. Certainly faith to believe that prayer can effect healing, but the given the findings it also takes faith to believe that prayer has no effect on health. Either way you have faith in a certain paradigm.
Last November you may have noticed Newsweek ran a cover article God & Health.
The article noted, that the National Institute of Health commissioned a series of paper in which scientists attempted to definitively assess the state of the faith-and-health research. Lynda H. Powell, an epidemiologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, reviewed about 150 papers…. She says one nugget, however, "blew my socks off," Powell says. People who regularly attend church have a 25 percent reduction in the mortality rate--that is, they live longer--than people who are not churchgoers. This is true even after controlling for variables intrinsically linked to Sundays in the pew, like social support and healthy lifestyle.
There is something about the Word and prayer that bring health to us because they mediate the wisdom and presence of God.
(I want to add as a disclaimer: As a general rule God’s presence does bring healing, but it’s not a simple one to one correlation. Who was the one person who more had faith in God and who more than any other person was filled with God’s presence? He suffered tremendously—he was nailed to a cross; I could also point you a number of people whose faith was shaky/character was questionable who experienced miraculous healing.)
But having said that, we can say that God’s presence as mediated through the word and prayer, though not always bring what we might “miraculous healing” is healing in nature—it’s what we were made for.
Near the beginning of the movie Grand Canyon there is a scene where Kevin Cline is driving home one night and taking a short cut through a Los Angeles back alley, his Lexus breaks down and a gang approaches him. Just as they are about to mug him, a tall African American truck driver named Simon shows up in a tow truck. Simon has a conversation with the gang leader… and then says, “Man, the world ain't supposed to work like this.”
The world “ain’t supposed to be this way”… and it’s not just in some LA back alley or some back alley in the downtown Eastside or just in Hinckley, California, or in a school in Southern Russia, or the Darfur region of Sudan--that world ain’t the way it’s supposed to be anywhere—because we’ve experienced disconnect from our life-giving maker.
Jesus comes to re-introduce us to something of Eden, something God’s presence through his teaching and his presence.
Jurgen Moltman… German theologian says Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only natural things in a world that is unnatural, demonized, and wounded. 2x
Some people think that to allow Jesus to enter them is something is unnatural and strange, but it’s the most natural thing you can do, it’s the most healing, because you made for Eden, you made for God’s presence. Amen.
On the Jesus last night before going to the cross—he had dinner with some of his closest students. That night he took bread and he broke it and he said this is my body broken for, for your healing. He took the cup and he said this is my blood and he it poured our for your forgiveness. Someone has described what Jesus did on the cross as the “great exchange” he took our sins, so that we could be pure, he bore our infirmities so that we could be healed, he was separated from God so we could be reunited with him, so we could turn toward Eden. If this morning you have or right now deciding to invite Jesus Christ to be your life come and partake… Pray… (Sudan offering, Mardi)
posted by Shigematsu at 8:51 PM
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