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WHY RISK A HEALING?

Have you ever seen a healing service on TV that you thought might be fake? We’ve all heard stories where the evangelist in the white silk suit has a little earpiece, and he gets signals from someone in a control booth: “Sister X, sitting in Row 14 with the pink shawl, has a sore right shoulder.” And he lays hands on her, or blows the “Spirit of healing” on her, or puts an anointed prayer cloth on her . . . and sometimes people seem to get well, and sometimes they don’t.

Well, friend, I’d like to move right past that particular discussion — and I admit I’ve harbored such doubts myself — and share a few sentences from a very good book written by a charismatic Christian named Jack Deere. The book is entitled Surprised By the Power of the Spirit, and he has a chapter with the very title we need this week: “Why Does God Heal?” We’re right here in the New Testament, where a man who’s just prostrate with paralysis has been let down through the roof into a crowded house where Jesus is teaching. And we’ve already studied together how Jesus asks the question: “Which is easier? To say, ‘Your sins be forgiven,’ or “Rise, get up and walk’?” And then, to plainly demonstrate that He, Jesus Christ, was indeed the Son of God, and that He could do both — heal the body and forgive the soul, the visible thing and the invisible one — He said to the crowd:

“‘But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . .’ He said to the paralyzed man, ‘I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.’” In the thought-provoking Message paraphrase, it reads: “‘Well, just so it’s clear that I’m the Son of Man and authorized to do either, or both . . .’ He now spoke directly to the paraplegic: ‘Get up. Take your bedroll and go home.’”

Which he immediately proceeded to do.
Clearly, one of the purposes of this particular healing, as the Bible teaches, is to make this all-important point. The healing proved the forgiveness. Jesus’ authority over sickness and death demonstrated His victory over sin as well. He indeed came from the Father; He WAS the Son of God. In his New Testament Commentary for Matthew, Dr. William Hendriksen writes:

“In the realm of the visible Jesus performed a miracle which simultaneously proved that also in the universe of the invisible He had exercised His divine power and love. He had given this man a healthy body but also, and this first of all, a healthy soul (‘Your sins are forgiven’). He had thoroughly refuted the accusations of His enemies. Moreover, as to the charge that it was easy for Him to pronounce absolution, well, He was able indeed to do it and He actually did it, as He here proved; but as to it being easy, was it not exactly this granting of pardon that required all the suffering He endured during His earthly sojourn, climaxed by the bloody sweat of Gethsemane, the scourging of Gabbatha, and the cross of Golgotha?”

We tried to make that point yesterday — that it was actually much easier to heal this sick man than to forgive him. But healing him certainly helped to demonstrate that Jesus was empowered by heaven TO forgive anyone He chose.

I think Jesus Christ knew two things in that hot, sweaty living room that afternoon. He knew that healing this person would help bring on His own demise. I mean, He had to know. The Pharisees and rulers went out of that place livid with rage. They’d just been made to look like fools, and the crowds were obviously enamored with this upstart faith healer and preacher. So Jesus did this healing in the full knowledge that He was knocking on the door of Golgotha.

But He also knew that for the next 2000 years the same, life-in-the-balance question would keep being asked: “Who is this Jesus of Nazareth? Is He the Son of God? Can He forgive sins? Can He still be forgiving them in the year 2004?” He knew you would wonder and that I would wonder. And so His declaration is for now, today, this very Wednesday: “So that you may know that the Son of Man has power to forgive sins, take up your bed and go home.”

But let me take you back to this excellent book by Dr. Jack Deere. As a Christian minister he has had opportunity to participate in faith healings. People have asked him to pray that their sicknesses might be removed. So he, too, has wondered: “Why does Jesus still heal? DOES He still heal? Is He still trying to prove He’s God’s only Son? Should I participate in helping to heal someone?”

He tells the story of a preacher in South Africa named William Duma. He died back in 1977, but for many years he was blessed by God and able to work miracles and heal sick people as an answer to prayer. Each year he would fast and pray for 21 days, hoping to seek direction from God in heaven. Everyone who knew him was amazed by his humility and his holiness. But he never boasted about his holiness, or thought it was a cause of his healing ministry. Instead, he wrote a book which says it all: Take Your Glory, Lord.

“His dominant thought,” Deere writes, “was that the Lord would be glorified. The Lord honored that desire with many notable miracles, including raising a young girl from the dead.”

That’s very interesting, but now how about Deere himself? He had the same fear many Christians do who pray for a healing to happen, especially when it’s a public thing. Will they look foolish if God chooses to say no? Will they look like a failure?

“[God] isn’t going to heal someone,” he writes, “to keep US from looking foolish. He WILL, however, heal someone to bring glory to His Son.” Then he adds: “In those early days the Lord ‘made a deal’ with me. It was as though He said, ‘If you won’t take the credit when someone gets healed, then you won’t have to take the blame when they don’t get healed.’”

Isn’t that a wonderful attitude to adopt? And here in this wonderful Bible story, told by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we find that Jesus heals in order to bring glory and honor to the kingdom of heaven. To demonstrate the power of God. To illustrate the eternal truth that healing of the soul, forgiveness of sins, the applying of Calvary to our lives . . . is infinitely more important than whether you and I get out of a bed and walk or stay in that bed and praise God from there.

Let’s notice that the Bible itself paints the story as succeeding in exactly this way. Here’s Luke 5:25:

“Immediately [the paralytic] stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home PRAISING GOD.” “Giving glory to God all the way,” says the Message paraphrase.

And here’s verse 26:

“EVERYONE was amazed and gave praise to God.” Except for the spies from the CIA — that’s the Caiaphas Intelligence Agency. “[The people] were filled with awe,” Luke writes, “and said, ‘We have seen remarkable things today.’”

I think the lesson for us is a very special one. Certainly we honor God when we’re wise enough to remember to give heaven the glory for the visible blessings that come to us. When we thank Him for His goodness in giving us food. When we praise Him and give Him the credit for the fact that we are gainfully employed and have God-given talents with which to earn a living. When we meet the person we know is the perfect soul-mate, and we think to acknowledge His leading in our lives, His directing of our paths, as it says in Proverbs 3:6.

But how much better it is, how more true to the spirit of discipleship, when we honor heaven by believing in and living out the invisible pillars of God’s kingdom. When we believe in and proclaim forgiveness. When we swim against the tide of lawlessness and gladly live by God’s eternal, changeless law of love. When the post-modern world around us embraces evolution, and we still worship our heavenly Father — whom we can’t see or hear or touch — as our Creator. When terrorists attack and kidnappers break in and snipers kill, and we still drive to the cemetery believing in the resurrection of the dead. When the years go by and others get discouraged and we still believe in the second coming of Jesus.

It really gives us a thrill here at the Voice of Prophecy when we hear from one of our satellite Discover Bible Schools around the country . . . and they describe how people graduate from that curriculum and slowly but steadily learn to be these kinds of believers. Not demanding miracles. Not expecting all-healings-all-the-time. But just faithful, abiding Christians who know that God’s invisible moments, His miracles of forgiveness are just as grand and glorious as the sunsets and the earthquakes. His feeding of their soul through the Bible and the Holy Spirit are just as supernaturally satisfying as when Jesus fed 5,000 people with one sack lunch.

Friend, you may sit in church next weekend and see — with your own eyes — someone get healed. You may sit there next weekend and, even though it’s with eyes of faith, you see someone’s heart healed, someone’s spirit cleansed. Either way, do like it says here in the Bible: “Go home praising God.”