Breaches will be healed

Finally, I have the opportunity to return and finish my thoughts on imperfect vessels and healing ministers.

Studying the lives of many of those who, over the centuries, have been used greatly by God in healing reveals many flawed lives – divorce, infidelity, straying from sound doctrine, sins of the flesh, the heart and the mind.

If you know little about their lives, then look at Moses – who said no to God multiple times; David, who killed a man and took his wife; Peter, who betrayed Jesus not once, but three times; Solomon, the man blessed with the most wisdom who strayed to idols; Peter again, who drew back from the Gentiles until Paul had harsh words with him.

Jars of clay.  That all it is.  Jars of clay.  Imperfect vessels.  Yet, time and time again, our Heavenly Father uses imperfect vessels, not letting the perfect become an enemy of the good or an enemy of saving souls or healing the sick.  If He had to wait for perfect ministers, no one would ever be sent to work in ministry. Peter wouldn’t get to write a chunk of the Bible and neither would Solomon.

Yet also, it is this paradox that perplexes us, doesn’t it?  It disappoints us when we see imperfect men and women (we must include ourselves) in ministry, and hurts us when we have unpleasant encounters with Christians – our close brothers and sisters in Christ.  Sometimes, in truth, it leads to bonds that are irretrievably broken…on earth.

Have you ever lost close friendships with other Christians? I think we all have.  So it gets me to thinking….

How will we be in heaven?

What will happen to all the pettiness in the church?  What will happen to all the awkwardness of broken friendships, broken trust, hurts, differences, separations and the like?  How much awkwardness will there be when Paul meets Barnabas?  Remember they had such an argument that they went their separate ways, despite the bond between them forged in the challenges of ministry.

Yes, Paul had charitable things to say about Mark later – Barnabas’ nephew who they disagreed about – and there was certainly forgiveness.  Yes.  However, we never see Paul and Barnabas together on the mission field again.  That bond is changed, things probably became awkward. Same with the fellow who cheated with his father’s wife in Corinth. Just awkward. Not sure how they look each other in the eye after that, even though he repented.

Will similar moments exist when the Grecian widows meet the Hebrew widows in heaven? Or when you meet that cousin whom you love but cannot stand his tactlessness or the broken trust from the past?

The answer of course in scripture, is No – there will be no awkwardness in heaven.  There will nothing to cause hurt or embarrassment or pain or shame. We lose the old flesh and that is part of it.  In that, we are set free from sins of the flesh and the soul.   We get a new resurrection body that is unblemished and spirit-ruled, not soul/mind ruled.

I believe the other part is a work God does when we go on to be with Him.  Remember, like Lazarus and the rich man, we will keep our memories.  We don’t lose memories.  However, they will lose their power to hurt or harm or shame us.  Thus all the awkwardness, pain, shame will be also gone- rendered powerless also.

So back to the imperfect vessels.  You see, that’s why God says love as He loved you.  Forgive as he forgave you.  Not “to the best of you ability” or “because they deserve it”. Can’t understand how God forgave you?  Right, forgive others the same way.

You can’t understand why God didn’t strike down that arrogant or racist or sinful minister?  Well, he didn’t strike you down, did he?  So we invent the canard that the minster lost his salvation. It makes us feel better.  Most likely, he did not, no more than you did when you lied yesterday or watched that ungodly film.

Jars of clay. Imperfect vessels. That’s why Christianity is so different from any other religion. Pure grace. Unfathomable grace.  Grace yesterday. Grace today and tomorrow.  Grace in life.  A mysterious grace in death.  A grace that sets things right, cleanses, purifies.  Why don’t you see the end from the beginning?  Then you can love without real reason.  Then you can also “love sincerely, from the heart.”

May God’s grace be upon you who offended and the ones who offended you.  May His grace work to restore broken trust in THIS life, not only the next.  May He bring reconciliation where it is possible and where it is impossible.  May He help you understand and love even when distance must be kept in this life due to the memories and awkwardness. Amen.

A Predictable Beating

An issue many Christians think about, especially those seeking to become more involved in healing, is that of ‘clean vessels‘.

Often, many believers avoid healing ministry and especially deliverance ministry because they feel that they are unclean vessels.

They may be wrestling with some sin, some hurt, an impure thought life and unconfessed sin.

It is advisable that people wrestling with strongholds of sin should be cautious about involvement in ministry, especially healing and deliverance.

I’m not even referring to the Sons of Sceva, who were given a thorough beating in the Book of Acts (Chapter 19) when they tried to mimic Paul in deliverance.  They were not believers afterall and their beating was predictable.

^19:11 God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, ¹² so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.

¹³ Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon-possessed. They would say, “In the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out.” ¹⁴ Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this. ¹⁵ One day the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?” ¹⁶ Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding.

Instead I refer to Christians seeking to be used by God in healing and deliverance.  Here’s how I understand it from the Word.  We operate in vessels of clay and can sin on a daily basis.  When we do, simply lean on 1 John 1:9, confess your sin, receive forgiveness, and then you can minister with all confidence.

However, if you are bound by a stronghold of sin – anger, ongoing spousal conflict, hate, alcoholism, sexual impurity, it is best to sort out your issues before you go forward. Why?  Because you generally will be less effective in ministry than if you were a pure vessel.

I say ‘generally’, because sometimes God will work through impure vessels, just out of His compassion for the sick. However, the thing is that when He does this, many are deceived that He is OK with their current lifestyle and they continue in sin.  That is the tragedy of mortgaging truth.

In deliverance,  it is more dangerous, because if for example, you are having an affair and attempt to perform deliverance, the demons may actually call you out on it.  Both embarrassing and faith destroying for you and your congregation.

So what to do – continue your affair and don’t attempt deliverance?  Lord no!  Stop the affair, the flirting with pornography, unforgiveness and THEN continue with deliverance ministry.  There are many sadly, with godly callings on their compromised lives who run away from their callings for this obvious reason.

It is a very dangerous way to live, because you are unhooked from God’s purpose for your life.  If you need help to become free, seek help and don’t be prideful.  Sometimes, folks cannot get free without help and we are called to help each other.

I have more to share about this, but I’ll hold it for the next post.

What about mercy? Let’s talk about mercy for a while. If you sin, you seek forgiveness, which is available through grace. Grace is unmerited favor. If you are sick, you desire healing – you are not looking for forgiveness unless sin was involved.

Actually, what you desire is mercy. Mercy is different from forgiveness. I’ll give an example. You hit a person’s car and you’re in the wrong. He tells you, “I forgive you”, but holds you liable and takes you to court to recover the damages to his car. He forgave you, but did not have mercy on you. It was the same with David, after his sin with Bathsheba. God forgave him, but the child died anyway.

To put it another way, forgiveness washes your sins away – a spiritual action with spiritual outcomes; mercy is a tangible action with physical outcomes. Not convinced? Let’s take a look at what Bartimaeus cried out in Mark 10,

46…a blind man, Bartimaeus (that is, the Son of Timaeus), was sitting by the roadside begging. 47When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

This is similar to the man with the epileptic son in Matthew 17:15:

“Lord, have mercy on my son,” he said. “He has seizures and is suffering greatly. He often falls into the fire or into the water.

Do a word search of “mercy” in the gospels and you’ll see it used many times in the context of healing. The healings of the Canaanite’s daughter (Matthew 15:22), Elizabeth’s barrenness (Luke 1:58) and of the madman of Gadara (Mark 5:19) were all described as acts of mercy. The Good Samaritan was also described as the one who had mercy, when Jesus asked in Luke 10;

36″Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

What’s my point? When we ask God for healing, it is important to know what we are really asking for. We are really asking for mercy, regardless of whether we have sinned or not.

If your illness has resulted from sin (e.g., poor lifestyle choices), you need forgiveness of sins, but more than that, you need mercy. This not limited to healing, even though that is our focus here. Many enter financial or relationship ruin because of bad decisions. They often ask for forgiveness, but not mercy. They receive forgiveness, but not mercy. Is that possible? Yes, it is, just look again at King David. He actually had it happen not only with Bathsheba, but when he performed an unauthorized census of Israel.

Moses had the same thing happen when he struck the rock twice. He received forgiveness, but mercy was unavailable in regard to his entering the Promised Land. God was merciful enough to let him go up on the mountain and see it, but he never entered it. The deeper your experiences and maturity with God, and the more you partake of the Holy Spirit and of the powers of the coming age, it seems to me that mercy is less available if you play the fool. This writ is not for everyone; those at that stage in their walk know who they are. A scripture that underlines this is James 3:1:

Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.

To conclude, ask for mercy in addition to forgiveness when you seek healing for sickness that may be partially or wholly due to sin. Ask for mercy even if there is no sin involved. Realize, as many did in Jesus’ day, that healing is a mercy of God. Grace gets us into right standing or favor with God, but mercy obtains for us healing and other interventions in our lives. This is really what you are asking for when you ask for healing—you are asking for mercy.

God is rich in mercy (Ephesians 2:4). May you be recipients of God’s mercy today and for the rest of your life, through Jesus Christ. Amen.

John 5:14 Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

From this, we saw that sin can lead to sickness. Worry or drugs or sexual sin, among other sins, can lead to sickness of the body and mind. In case you were wondering, worry is a sin, as in Philippians 4:6;

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

Note that this is not a suggestion, it is a command—primarily for our own good. Physiologically, worry and stress raise cortisol levels in the body and can affect blood pressure, sleep patterns and so on. Anxiety and worry cannot coexist with faith.  Once they arrive, trust and faith in God departs.

So then, is all sickness the result of sin? Thank God, it is not, or some would be sick every day or week. In Jesus’ day, many believed that sickness was the result of a person’s sin or that of his parents, but Jesus debunked that very quickly:

John 9:1-3 As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.

So this sickness was not the result of sin by either the man or his parents. Some sickness comes from our being in a fallen world, others from our unwise choices and lifestyles, and yet others by demonic attack. Also, the actions of sinful or malicious people can cause sickness in others, such as parents who smoke.

Note that I didn’t mention God here. He is not the source of sickness. I find it strange that the obituaries of worldly people state that “after a yearlong fight against cancer….”, whereas Christians point to God or “God’s will” for their sickness. Many non-Christians recognize sickness as an enemy of all that is good, an evil that must be fought, while many Christians go on about God’s supposed will ‘permitting’ or causing them to be sick.

If you think this way, tell me this: If it was God’s will for you to be sick, why do you visit the doctor to escape “God’s will”? If it was His desire that your character be perfected in sickness, why do you ask for your name to be placed on the prayer chain to avoid this perfecting? If God wanted you ravaged by illness, why not ask the brethren to pray for you to become more sick, so as to enter His will more deeply? The faith-sapping myths we propagate in the church today are a tragedy.

Why is it that wise Christians cannot tell God’s will until after the event? The person died of sickness, ergo, it was God’s will that they died. The person recovered from sickness, thus it was God’s will that they recover. This is a “que sera, sera” Christianity, a lazy spirituality that tries to infer God’s will after the fact. It has more in common with fatalistic Mid-Eastern and Eastern religions than Christianity. If you know God’s will, tell me before we pray, so if it is not His will, we won’t bother. However, not one of these wise ones ever knows until afterwards—going by sight and not by faith.

I can tell you God’s will for the very sick young man with a heartbroken wife and three young children all crying out to Him. It is for him to be healed, period. That is His will before I pray and that is His will after I pray, whether he gets up or stays down. God’s will for that sick child? The same, of course. Why? Because healing is in His Word and His Word is His will.

Why do tragedies occur then, you ask? There are many reasons, but why on earth wouldn’t they occur when we continue teaching unbelief throughout our churches….because we, as a church do not believe all of the Atonement. As a pastor, you doth protest too much that you believe. It doesn’t matter what you profess in conversation. Do you preach healing? Do you regularly pray for the sick? No? Why not? Because you don’t believe it. I learned a long time ago that people do what they believe and avoid what they don’t believe. Most pastor/teachers don’t believe in the full Atonement. If they want to argue about healing being in the Atonement, fine, we don’t have to bring that up.  They just don’t believe in the many healing promises in the Word or in doing the works Jesus said we would do.

Finally, some will argue “why the undue focus on healing?  There are other things to preach about, aren’t there?” Yes there are.  But let’s look at Jesus, in Matthew 4:23:

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.

Jesus focused on healing quite a bit, didn’t He?  He didn’t have other things to preach about?  Somehow though, our gospel has been transformed into a shadow of that which Jesus and the Apostles preached.  It has changed from the Full Gospel to the “Part-Gospel”.

If you are one of few who preach and minister healing regularly, God bless you. May He strengthen you, embolden you, impart spiritual gifts to you, infuse you with the power of the Holy Spirit and may signs and wonders accompany your ministry. Amen.

…to be concluded…

The first question is whether there is a connection between sin and sickness. The answer is “yes” to the general question. By the general question, I mean that there was no sickness before Adam’s fall. The entrance of sin brought sickness in tow. Notice also that in the Atonement, God introduced the solution to sin and sickness, i.e.,

Isaiah 53:5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.

Psalm 103:2-3 Praise the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits- who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases

So that shows the link between sin and sickness in the general causative sense. The fallen state of humanity is the background to all sickness. However, we see that healing and the forgiveness of sins became available through the second Adam—Jesus Christ. I say “became available”, because they are not automatic. The new currency of exchange with God has become faith, and forgiveness and healing are available through faith.

Now, let’s look at the individual level. Can sin bring about sickness? Yes it can. The sin of worry can bring about many stress-related diseases. Fornication can lead to sexual diseases. Anger and violence can lead to physical harm. Illegal drugs destroy the whole person. Thus, many types of sin can lead to sickness and harm to the mind and body. The best authority here is Jesus, who, after healing the disabled man at the Pool of Bethesda, found him and said;

John 5:14  Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

Jesus warns the man that further sin can lead to sickness.  Some may then conclude that all sin leads to sickness or that all sickness is the result of the sick person’s sin. However, these would be erroneous assumptions. I’ll explain why in the next post…stay tuned…