Healing

My mother was living in Sydney and she was limping because she had arthritis in the knee and it was swollen. Christian hands were placed on either side of the knee and the words Peter & John said, when they healed a crippled man, were quoted: “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, be healed”. Well it worked for Peter and John and it also worked for mum’s knee as it was healed instantly as she felt heat flow into her knee. Many people reading this will shake their heads in disbelief, and I can understand that.  Some time ago, in an article titled “God’s Problem”, I mentioned that “my Christian walk” had been somewhat weakened because, as a new Christian, I had read and believed a commentary on the New Testament by a Doctor of Divinity. You see he said that miracles like that don’t happen now, and because of my inexperience and his qualifications I believed his every word. However when I saw that happen to my mother, before my own eyes, it tended to spoil his theory as far as I was concerned, and as a lady asked me recently “Did Jesus heal everybody?” I thought we might have a brief look at this subject just to whet our appetites.

I suggest therefore that we put aside the commentaries of “learned men” for a few minutes and see what the New Testament says. I mean you can always come back to their theories if you want to. Well for starters, Jesus did heal everyone who asked Him for healing (Matthew 12:15 says “Great multitudes followed Him and He healed them all”.) And so it went throughout his ministry; there was not one occasion where He said “no I won’t heal you because your sickness will make you a better person”, and Paul said that his “Thorn in the flesh” problem was “a messenger of Satan” to control his pride because he had visited Heaven (2 Corinthians 12:7). Jesus said we

must have “the faith of a little child” and told his disciples to “teach all nations....to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you and lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20). So you see Jesus is still very much with us. Those disciples have passed on but the end of the world, He referred to, has not yet arrived.  The implication is that the “baton” has now been passed on to other believers like you and me. I say “Baton” because our lives (and Christian lives in particular), are like a relay race; when an athlete has run his leg of the relay he hands the baton to the next athlete who to the best of his ability duplicates or improves on what the athlete before him accomplished and then he too passes the baton to the next in line and this is repeated until the race is completed. Likewise in the Christian “Relay race” the first runners did a remarkable job and “turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6). However many of those who took over from them were ill-equipped because they failed to receive and use the gifting that became available to Jesus followers at Pentecost. Gifts like healing (1 Corinthians 12:9).  Jesus saw this gifting as very important to the extent that although these Apostles had been with Him for a long time and certainly believed in Him, He nevertheless told them to wait for the gifting from the Holy Spirit before they set out to spread the Gospel. (Acts chapter 1)

Paul says in Romans 12:4, that just as our physical bodies have many parts and they don’t all do the same thing but are dependent on each other, so we being many make up the “body of Christ” and “have gifts differing according to the grace given to us”. We should not be satisfied to blindly accept somebody else’s opinion of what the New Testament is saying but should study it ourselves. Information passed on verbally can lose its original meaning. During a battle an officer realised they needed more soldiers so he said “Pass this message down the line: ‘Send reinforcements, we are going to advance’”. However by the time the message had been repeated many times the officers at the rear were told: “Send three and four pence, we are going to a dance”. There is no substitute for the written word being read and acted on with the “faith of a little child”. Jesus said things like: “Your faith hath made you whole” or “According to your faith be it done unto you”. Now “faith comes from hearing and hearing from the word of God,” so we know how to acquire faith. The other requirements are Righteousness and Holiness needed by the person proclaiming the healing: Doctors don’t walk in off the street and start operating without “washing up” and making sure everything is clean, not just “more or less” clean, do they? Likewise, If we want to be fit vessels to convey God’s healing power we must “Present our bodies....Holy” (Romans 12:1). Not just “more or less” Holy, either because this type of healing is a form of “Spiritual Surgery” Jesus said: The works that I do shall ye (believers) do also. (John14:12),    Food for thought?    Regards,   Tom.