"Healthy people don't need a doctor -- sick people do." Jesus healed great numbers of sick people who had many different kinds of diseases. (Mark 2:17; Mark 1:34 NLT)
There were a great number of sick people around Jesus, and a great deal of healing was taking place wherever he preached. He healed physical ailments, he healed mental illnesses, he healed thought disorders, he healed religious misunderstandings, and he healed spiritual rebellions. No distinctions, no discriminations, no disqualifications in this broadly based healing ministry. The disciples related certain salient features of some particularly memorable healing events for us their posterity in loving instruction, unable to document the many thousands of diseases cast aside by the hands of Jesus in those three short years. The early disciples themselves were marvelling most of the time at the healing power flowing so effortlessly from their own fingertips, leaving little time or energy to understand the mystery of it all.
We might wonder why Jesus the Great Physician did not institute some fundamental healing procedures, or some elementary scientific knowledge, or some basic biophysiological insights to launch the disciples quickly into a more modern healing regiment. Instead, he seemed to have left them with some primitive notions more akin to religious philosophy than scientific knowledge. Indeed, he left all the wonderful scientific discoveries to the toil and labor of generations of thinkers, many of them secular and profane atheists, scarcely any devout believers, in the centuries to come. Christians and their establishments, in fact, began to make enemies of scientific thought, rational discourse, evidence based knowledge, humanistic endeavors, tolerance of diversity, respect for life and pursuit of happiness.
Today, we live in a world filled with ever more sick people, caught between a very dogmatic enterprise of modern medical science on the one hand, and a very prosperous explosion of alternative/folk/naturalistic/popular/spiritual therapeutic experimentations on the other. We all pay our money and take our choices. If we are healed, then our money is well spent. If not, that's just life and fortune for us.
Where is our Lord Jesus today, who offers to heal our sicknesses for free; to forgive our sins for free; to liberate our bondages for free; who offers to decimate our miseries for free; to mend our heartbreaks for free; and to transform our mortality for free?
What do we make of the young man in perfect health dying a sudden death on a roller coaster ride? What do we make of the robust 40-year-old woman who dies of a heart attack after getting a clean bill of health from her week-long excecutive checkup last week? What do we make of a well-adjusted college honor student who mysteriously commits suicide? What about a perfectly wonderful Christian youngster who ends up prostituting for drugs? And then there is the senseless millionaire executive who takes a few drinks and drives into a carful of high school kids making brain-damaged/dismembered/pain-ridden messes of them all.
We preach miracle healing because that is the last resort, the last appeal, the last promise of a loving God who has given his first and only Son a ransom for our sins, a remedy for our infirmities, a mediation for our death. "Yet it was our sicknesses he carried; it was our diseases that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God for his own sins! But he was wounded and crushed for our sins. He was beaten that we might have peace. He was whipped, and we were healed!" (Isaiah 53:4-5 NLT)
Science is not the final answer. Religion does not offered the ultimate path. Medicine of all kinds, from brain-surgery to witch-doctoring, can only temporarily stay the final execution of death. Only Jesus can bring healing of the lasting order, lasting from now to eternity. What we preach is that when Jesus heals the sick, he makes them well for ever. Believe it or not, he has come to heal the sick -- to put right what is wrong, to revive what is decaying, to rejuvenate what has fossilized, and to breathe life into what is dying.
We preach a crucified, resurrected, and everliving Jesus who is here to save us from our sins and heal us of our diseases, that we may become servants of hope, deliverers of immortality, and givers of life extraordinary.
There were a great number of sick people around Jesus, and a great deal of healing was taking place wherever he preached. He healed physical ailments, he healed mental illnesses, he healed thought disorders, he healed religious misunderstandings, and he healed spiritual rebellions. No distinctions, no discriminations, no disqualifications in this broadly based healing ministry. The disciples related certain salient features of some particularly memorable healing events for us their posterity in loving instruction, unable to document the many thousands of diseases cast aside by the hands of Jesus in those three short years. The early disciples themselves were marvelling most of the time at the healing power flowing so effortlessly from their own fingertips, leaving little time or energy to understand the mystery of it all.
We might wonder why Jesus the Great Physician did not institute some fundamental healing procedures, or some elementary scientific knowledge, or some basic biophysiological insights to launch the disciples quickly into a more modern healing regiment. Instead, he seemed to have left them with some primitive notions more akin to religious philosophy than scientific knowledge. Indeed, he left all the wonderful scientific discoveries to the toil and labor of generations of thinkers, many of them secular and profane atheists, scarcely any devout believers, in the centuries to come. Christians and their establishments, in fact, began to make enemies of scientific thought, rational discourse, evidence based knowledge, humanistic endeavors, tolerance of diversity, respect for life and pursuit of happiness.
Today, we live in a world filled with ever more sick people, caught between a very dogmatic enterprise of modern medical science on the one hand, and a very prosperous explosion of alternative/folk/naturalistic/popular/spiritual therapeutic experimentations on the other. We all pay our money and take our choices. If we are healed, then our money is well spent. If not, that's just life and fortune for us.
Where is our Lord Jesus today, who offers to heal our sicknesses for free; to forgive our sins for free; to liberate our bondages for free; who offers to decimate our miseries for free; to mend our heartbreaks for free; and to transform our mortality for free?
What do we make of the young man in perfect health dying a sudden death on a roller coaster ride? What do we make of the robust 40-year-old woman who dies of a heart attack after getting a clean bill of health from her week-long excecutive checkup last week? What do we make of a well-adjusted college honor student who mysteriously commits suicide? What about a perfectly wonderful Christian youngster who ends up prostituting for drugs? And then there is the senseless millionaire executive who takes a few drinks and drives into a carful of high school kids making brain-damaged/dismembered/pain-ridden messes of them all.
We preach miracle healing because that is the last resort, the last appeal, the last promise of a loving God who has given his first and only Son a ransom for our sins, a remedy for our infirmities, a mediation for our death. "Yet it was our sicknesses he carried; it was our diseases that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God for his own sins! But he was wounded and crushed for our sins. He was beaten that we might have peace. He was whipped, and we were healed!" (Isaiah 53:4-5 NLT)
Science is not the final answer. Religion does not offered the ultimate path. Medicine of all kinds, from brain-surgery to witch-doctoring, can only temporarily stay the final execution of death. Only Jesus can bring healing of the lasting order, lasting from now to eternity. What we preach is that when Jesus heals the sick, he makes them well for ever. Believe it or not, he has come to heal the sick -- to put right what is wrong, to revive what is decaying, to rejuvenate what has fossilized, and to breathe life into what is dying.
We preach a crucified, resurrected, and everliving Jesus who is here to save us from our sins and heal us of our diseases, that we may become servants of hope, deliverers of immortality, and givers of life extraordinary.
