“Healing: What About It?”
Scripture Reading: Mark 10:46-52
Sermon Transcript for October 29, 2006
By Pastor Bob Coleman
The question which you must remember is the question that Jesus gave to Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?” Could you answer that question if Jesus stood before you now or came up and sat beside you in the pew? Could you answer that question, not the obvious, but the most important response to that question?
Channing Lee Rucker was born a week ago this morning. A week tomorrow, Monday morning, Dorothy Cross died. Channing Lee Rucker was expected, joyfully anticipated, well received. There was no surprise. You can’t hide pregnancy like that. Dorothy Cross, it wasn’t a surprise. It was somewhat anticipated. It was expected. She was 90. But yet it was quick. Somewhere between Channing Lee Rucker and Dorothy Cross is life. Life filled with joys and sorrows and anticipations and disappointments and so much more. Yesterday morning at 4:00 a.m., 4:02 a.m. to be exact, Jacob Cole Wise was born on his own time a week earlier than we expected. Last night at 4:45 p.m., Dick Armstrong died. Both were greatly expected. No real surprises. Dick had gone to the hospital to help with the last part of the comfort of his dying. He was 80; he had cancer. But we are still sad. Death always brings that to us.
This last week a member of this church shared with me that a nephew had overdosed at the age of 22. It was accidental yet not; not in the sense that he had gotten into a lifestyle that was leading him toward this or some other sad ending if he had not changed his ways. And he did not. And the news had to be shared with his 19-year old brother who was sitting in jail waiting for a sentence of 5 to 20 years on felony charges. A third brother finely apparently had seen the light and made decisions leading a more normal life. But they are all sad at the death, disappointed, heartaches.
Were they prayed for in each of these cases, every one of them? Yes, they were. Were their prayers answered in their first hope? In some cases, yes; in some cases not. The church has a power within its grasp--the power of prayer and hope and anticipation that relates to healing. And sometimes we use it well and sometimes we have not. The world is recognizing the power of that healing and prayer and spiritual life.
Harald Koenig in his book, The Healing Power of Faith, says the following: “Religious people have stronger marriages and families. They cope better with stress. Religious people have healthier lifestyles. They generally have a greater protection from depression. And those who are afflicted recover more quickly. Religious people live longer, healthier lives. ‘Religion may protect people from serious cardiovascular disease’, Dr. Koenig says. These religious people may have a stronger immune system and probably have fewer expenses in our hospital services.”
Philip Yancy in his book about prayer says, “A person who is at peace, surrounded by loving support, will quite literally heal better drawing on the resources of body, mind, and spirit. Such healing is not inferior to a direct intervention by God that reverses physical loss.” Here that clearly, it is not inferior. You see, the magicians of the world would like for us to think that prayer and healing, divine healing, is supernatural and unexplainable always. And that is what we hope for and that is what we pray for. And in a sense your faith isn’t strong enough or you haven’t prayed enough or we haven’t gotten the right combination or the right people together to make it possible. We want the supernatural more than we want the natural and the reality of the natural.
It’s a puzzlement that some Christians who accept natural laws in some part of their life do not do so when it comes to prayer and healing. For example, why would we make the “stupid” decision to go and plant a rice field in the Sahara Desert? To go against the laws of nature; to go against what makes good common sense? But we will do so when we pray in some ways for healing. A child may pray for a dead cat to be brought back to life and it doesn’t happen. We may pray for a test to be canceled because we didn’t study for it or a team to win because we believe God is on our side. Or that our eyes would be blue and not green. But that kind of magical approach to changes within our lives is not the way God works for most of us. Yes, Bartimaeus was healed clearly, straight-forwardly. He had been blind and now he could see. The difficulty comes in that we as Christians have given over the power of a relationship with God and traded it in for something magical and mysterious and unexplainable.
Let me share with you a checklist for healing because there are some of you here today who are carrying great burdens of difficulties. And you may be wondering, “Why me?” One of the difficulties of a checklist for healing is as Christians, do we begin to build a list of entitlements? If I am good enough, if I worship regularly at church, if I give regularly to the church even my tithe and beyond will not God bless me with the bounties of heaven and give me good health all of my life? That’s an entitlement. It is our filling in the expectations well above what we need to face. For you see God neither protects Christians with a shield of health nor provides quick and dependable solutions to all suffering. If you’ll check the hospital list, many Christians are there, or mental wards, or asylums, or hospices. Yes, Christians suffer apparently equally in those areas as much as those who are not Christians. We can not expect entitlement simply because we have a connection with God.
A year ago this next November 6th, we were that close to die. The tornado tore through Newburgh and Evansville area. I don’t know how many people wanting to say the right thing and didn’t know quite what else to say would say, “God was really with you. God protected you. God saved you.” And I just could not handle the 24 people who died. Including one family that was a well-known, vital Christian family in their church. All of them, the kids included, all four of them. Was not God with them? So rather than bid unto some theological “pin you against the wall, you are wrong” kind of a statement, Joyce and I finally decided to say that we give God the thanks, that the Lord promises to be with us whether we live or whether we die. That’s the power that comes first. That’s the gift of healing that will be with you at all times and in all circumstances. Not the wholeness of the body but the wholeness of the soul. Reality check is—do you want God to fill your wills or do you wish to be a part of God’s will as God wills, not you?
There was a faith healer that went to Cambodia. He was going to perform all of these wonderful miracles or God was going to perform the miracles. It gets a little confusing at times when you listen to what they say. And the posters were put up all around town, “All of your ailments will be healed. Come to this victory celebration, this healing service.” So people sold their cows, raised whatever money they could get to get to this healing place. Unbeknownst to the faith healer, Cambodia was part of the Southeast Asian war. There were land mines all over the place and people came with vacant limbs—legs and arms—expecting because they believed what the poster said that God would heal them; that their legs would be restored and that their arms would be replaced. And do you know what happened? They came, they prayed hard and long. It didn’t happen and a riot broke out. They had to evacuate the faith healer by helicopter because, as the leader of the church said, a small struggling Christian community in Cambodia said, “This will set us back 50 years because it challenges the integrity of what we say.” The promise of something that a faith healer can not promise.
Jesus did not heal every one in the Scripture. Why? It’s divine intervention that we can’t always explain. There are true and marvelous unexplainable healings, yes. God chooses to do so because it’s according to God’s will. It’s not a capricious type of a thing. And I believe a second rule for our faith healing is to say, “We need to take much more account of the common grace, not the supernatural grace, the common grace that says, “First we need to praise God for the wonderful mechanisms of healing and recovery that God has designed in each of our bodies when they don’t become overpowered by diseases.” And pray that God’s special grace will take hold of each person regardless of their circumstances to give them the ability to use the full resources of their body, mind, and spirit. Pray for the wholeness to work that is there.
But ultimately and above all, that we as the church should surround each person with the laying on of hands, the prayers for support, faith, hope, and love above all. Not as the nice extra benefit but the first level of healing that we all need. Are we instruments of healing in people’s lives or do we get in the way of God’s healing of what’s most important—the heart? We heard a beautiful anthem, “Healer of the heart; lover of the soul.” What else do we have to take with us forever and ever for eternity--our body in perfect form and physical? Dick Armstrong could have been healed from that cancer. He could have come back knowing he would eventually die. Paul prayed for a part of his flesh. It was never taken from him. He prayed for release of captivity from one jail and that worked. He ended up being executed. Did God fail Paul or Dick Armstrong? No, they are natural course of events. There is a part of God’s creation. But Dick said very clearly well before most of us recognized it was not going to be overcome. He said, “I’m ready. I’m ready to go when. I want to live as long as I can, but I am ready. I’m at peace.” Jesus said to blind man, Bartimaeus, as he says to us, “What do you want me to do for you? Is it just the physical healing only or is there a deeper need? Because Bartimaeus got up and followed Jesus, a spiritual healing and a relationship was made to him.
A third point we need to be careful of is that we don’t blame God for causing suffering because that’s the flip side too. “You’re not good enough. You must have sinned. You did something wrong.” That was the same statement that was said about smallpox when smallpox vaccinations were being developed. Christians in good faith said, “You can’t stop that because it’s God’s will. God wants that smallpox to be out there. Five hundred million people died of it in the 19th century alone. Is that God’s will?--No more than those who went through the streets in London a thousand years ago proclaiming as prophets they said that God was bringing on this plague upon this city and upon the countryside because of the evilness of this generation. A third were dead, a third had left the city because they had enough money to get out of there, and a third were hidden inside the doors for fear of this bubonic plague. When it wasn’t God’s will, it was finally finding the correct pesticide to kill the rats that carried the plague.
Be careful that if God doesn’t answer the prayer the way you want, you blame God for things instead of saying, “Lord, what do you wish for me to know and learn?” Are you prepared for the possibility physical healing may not take place but in place of that spiritual healing is the greatest gift God can give to us? We can not predict when and how God will touch a person’s life. There was a young lady that we prayed for in this church and she was scared about the disease that had been diagnosed. And then she got a clear bill of health. I don’t know why. I haven’t seen her much since. Every church has that. We don’t know what will be important within the life of that family in the future. There are people who will suffer under ALS. There has been no miraculous cure of ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. It is 100% terminal no matter who gets it. There was one family who had a brother and a mother and a grandfather and an aunt and a cousin all of them who had that. And they prayed hard and diligently and none of them were healed of that. So they began to use the two psalms of scripture in their funeral services. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.” Anything from Psalm 23. And parallel to it from Psalm 22 Jesus spoke, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
We do not have the answers. It is not a matter of faith on our part. It’s the mystery of the things greater than what we know. But ultimately it comes down to us providing comfort and understanding and prayerful support for each one and every one who needs it at the time that they request it. We are going to have a time of prayer this morning. In fact, concluding the service with it. The opportunity will be done in this way. You don’t have to say a statement by coming forward or not coming forward but we will provide an opportunity for prayer here at the conclusion of this service for what it is that you need. Pastor Nancy and myself and other pastors who would like to, come and pray with those who come forward to maybe seek physical healing or spiritual healing or for someone else. You see, healing isn’t so much the end result of what we pray for, it’s how we become closer to God and how God offers God’s help to us. Yes, some of us pray both prayers. “The Lord is my shepherd and I do not like anything. But my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The least that you will receive if you chose to come forward this morning is that you will be surrounded by God’s flow and the prayers of people who love you regardless of the circumstance that you need. If you do not come forward now and would like to have prayer at a later time, we would be honored to do that for you and with you or with a friend and do so. That’s as important as anything. Do we look forward to a possibility of physical healing? Yes! Can we guarantee who and when and how? No! But in faith, Jesus asks us, “What do you want me to do?” And maybe our honest answer is the most important thing that we can give.
So we want to conclude the service in this way. Not with a closing hymn, but simply with a benediction and an opportunity to come forward here to pray. To have a prayer for healing, if that’s what is on your mind. Or someone last night came and prayed for a loved one and needed help with that. It’s between you and God, we are just intermediaries. It’s not because Nancy or myself has some special gift. We’re not healing pastors. We don’t believe just because we look right or stand right or pray right, great things are going to happen. It’s a mystery to us. But I want to offer to you that you will be surrounded by love and what greater gift does God give us than to be the healer of our hearts and the lover of our souls?
Let’s have a moment of prayer. “Gracious and loving God, there are things we can not explain. So much so that we have to, in faith and trust, come to you. At one point the desires of our heart ask for healing and protection of our loved ones. And yet we are still prone to sickness and heartache and difficulties. But we turn to you as the only one who can heal our hearts and love our souls. We pray, Gracious God, that we will come first to you and seek your wisdom and your guidance and that we will pray for one another in faith and hope. And now we are dismissed in your peace. In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
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