©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship
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04/18/04 |
The True Nature of Healing |
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4/18/04 The True Nature of Healing
For the past two weeks
we have taken a break from the series we were in
in order to celebrate Easter and the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now this morning
we are going to return to the study we were involved in.
And, given the fact that we’ve been away from the series for several weeks,
it might help if I reintroduce what we were doing
and why.
For the past several months now
We have pulled out of our study of the New Testament book of Ephesians
so that I can share with you what I have been calling my life’s greatest surprises.
Near the end of last year
while we were visiting our then pregnant daughter and son-in-law in California
I went for a long walk by myself
and on that walk started thinking about how differently I see so many things now
than I did when my Lord first barged into my life in the fall of 1966.
The more I thought about it
the more I realized that nearly every major assumption and expectation
that I then possessed
about the true nature of life with God through Christ
was either incorrect
or at the very least grossly inaccurate.
I started jotting down a list of those things that I considered to be my greatest surprises
and ended up with 18 things on the list before my walk ended.
During the past several months
I’ve been sharing some of the things on that list with you for several reasons.
First of all,
I’ve found it to be a healthy process for me personally
to force myself to put into words
some of the major turning points in my own growing understanding of my Lord.
But more than that,
I have the hope that my own pilgrimage
might help some of you
to avoid the same traps that I fell into.
You see, our responses to God each day
are rarely responses to the God who really exists.
They are responses to the God we think exists,
the God we have created in our minds.
To the degree our mental concept of God
differs from the God who really exists,
to that degree our responses to Him
will rob us of the quality of life He wants us to know.
You see, God has already given us
the perfect picture of Himself
so that we can know exactly what He’s like.
That picture was given to us in Jesus Christ.
If we want to know what our God is like,
all we have to do is to look at Christ.
Do you remember that conversation Jesus had with His disciples
in the hours just preceding his crucifixion?
Even then,
after having lived with this man for more than three years
His men still didn’t understand what they were seeing.
It was at that point
that Philip put into words
what all of them wanted to know.
JOH 14:8 Philip said to Him, "Lord, show us the
Father, and it is enough for us."
Loosely but, I think, accurately paraphrased
Philip is saying, “Look, Jesus! What is God really like?
We see You talking with Him,
and talking about Him
as if He’s more wonderful than life itself.
But, the truth is, we’re scared to death of Him.
So what are we missing here?”
And Jesus’ response becomes the pivotal point
of everything He was trying to communicate to us prior to His crucifixion.
JOH 14:9 Jesus said to him, "Have I been so long
with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has
seen the Father; how can you say, 'Show us the Father'?
God the Father
is exactly like Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ
is exactly like God the Father.
And, when we look at Jesus Christ,
what do we see?
What did His disciples see?
They saw Someone who cared about them,
who cared for them as no one else had ever cared before.
They saw someone who knew not just their external facade,
but someone who knew them on the inside,
someone who knew all of their fears,
and their confusion,
and their failures,
and their stupidity,
and yet loved them,
and lived with them,
and laughed with them,
and claimed them as His friends,
and then died for them,
in their place,
for their sins,
so that He could provide them with a way
in which they could then live in an eternal friendship with their God.
It’s no wonder they didn’t see who He was.
Who would ever have known God was like that?
And even now,
even after we have seen Him as He really is,
even now that we hold in our hands
the perfect portrait of God
in the Person of Jesus Christ,
even now we don’t get it.
We simply don’t put the two together.
Think of your mental concept of GOD,
the all-powerful Creator God of all that is.
Now think of your mental concept of the Man, Jesus.
If, this instant, you could be transported into the physical presence
of either God
or the Man, Jesus,
which would you choose?
Does the thought of standing in the presence God
affect you differently than the thought of standing in the presence of Jesus?
If it does,
then you have not yet understood
what God was saying to us about Himself through Christ.
I will tell you something now
that you may find it hard to believe,
yet I know it is true.
Our concept of God
is far and away the most powerful single concept in our lives.
Though most people rarely even think about it consciously,
our concept of God
is what determines every significant choice we make.
It determines both our concept of morality
and how we how we respond or react to that concept.
It determines how we go about seeking fulfillment in life.
It determines the priorities we bring to each day
and how we choose to invest the limited amount of time and resources allotted to each of us in this life.
Jesus was trying to communicate this truth to us
in one of His parables.
It’s found in Matthew 25:14-29
"For it is just like a man about to go on a journey,
who called his own slaves and entrusted his possessions to them. To one he gave
five talents, to another, two, and to another, one, each according to his own
ability; and he went on his journey. Immediately the one who had received the
five talents went and traded with them, and gained five more talents. In the
same manner the one who had received the two talents gained two more. But he
who received the one talent went away, and dug a hole in the ground and hid his
master's money.
Now after a
long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. The
one who had received the five talents came up and brought five more talents,
saying, 'Master, you entrusted five talents to me. See, I have gained five more
talents.' "His master said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful slave.
You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things;
enter into the joy of your master.'
"Also the one who had received the two
talents came up and said, 'Master, you entrusted two talents to me. See, I have
gained two more talents.' His master said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful
slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many
things; enter into the joy of your master.'
"And the
one also who had received the one talent came up and said, 'Master, I
knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where
you scattered no seed. 'And I was afraid, and went away and hid your talent in
the ground. See, you have what is yours.'
"But his master answered and said to
him, 'You wicked, lazy slave, you knew that I reap where I did not sow and gather
where I scattered no seed. Then you ought to have put my money in the bank, and
on my arrival I would have received my money back with interest. Therefore take
away the talent from him, and give it to the one who has the ten talents.'
"For to
everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from
the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away.”
There is a lot going on in this fascinating parable,
most of which we won’t get into today.
But there is one character in this story I want us to focus on.
It’s the fellow who is entrusted with the one talent.
Jesus is not really talking about money, of course,
He’s talking about the investment of our lives.
Everything we have in life -
our physical bodies,
our mental abilities,
our creative abilities,
our personalities,
the culture and physical surroundings we are born into,
even our health and the number of days we are given on this earth,
all of it is simply loaned to us for a brief period of time by God.
And with this third slave
Jesus wanted to illustrate to us
that what we do with our lives
is a direct result of our concept of God and how we respond to that concept.
And look at that slave’s view of the Master...
'Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you scattered no seed. And I was afraid...
Now, this was the same Master who had placed a talent of silver into this man’s possession.
Do you know how much that was?
In actual value it was $1000.00 in sliver,
but in their culture
it would have been tremendous wealth.
I think we sometimes mistakenly read this parable
and come away seeing the three slaves as representing
the rich,
the middle class,
and the poor.
In reality they represented the wealthy, the wealthier, and the extremely wealthy.
Do you know why this slave created his distorted mental picture of his Master?
He did it because he was looking for an excuse
to avoid submission to his master.
“Any God who would allow this to happen to me
is no God I ever want to serve.”
It’s the same game.
Somehow we all have to deal with the reality of God in our lives.
If we choose not to submit to His authority over us,
then we must find some way of convincing ourselves
that there are very good reasons why submission is simply not necessary,
and in fact a really stupid thing to do.
I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you scattered no seed. And I was afraid...
And this is why our God did what He did
in His supreme effort to allow us to see what He is really like.
JOH 1:1, 14 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among
us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father,
full of grace and truth.
Jesus said to him, "... He who has seen Me has seen the Father...
I mention all of this again this morning
because at the heart of all of my Life’s Greatest Surprises
is my ongoing discovery
that my God really is just exactly like my Lord Jesus Christ.
His love for me
is without limits,
and without end.
And I am taking the time to share these surprises with you
in the hope that my discoveries
may help to shorten the time it takes
for you to make the same discoveries in your own life.
The surprise I want to mention in our remaining time together this morning
is one that I have felt for some time
far more than something I have reasoned through,
at least until I was forced to put it into words for our time together today.
It is the surprise I have discovered
about the true nature of the healing our God brings into our lives.
The commitment of our God to bring healing into the lives of His people is certain.
In fact, with most of us
it is our pain,
our sickness,
our suffering that brings us to Him in the first place.
The Psalmist begins the 30th Psalm with these words:
I will extol You, O Lord, for You have lifted me up, And
have not let my enemies rejoice over me. O Lord my God, I cried to You for
help, and You healed me.
The references throughout Scripture
to both God’s willingness
and His ability to bring healing into our lives are abundant.
From His proclamation to His people in Exodus 15:26 that, “...
I, the Lord, am your healer...",
right up until Christ identifies Himself
as the great Physician who has come
to heal all those who recognize they are sick,
God’s commitment to turning our sickness into health is clear.
And we’re not just talking here about physical healing.
In fact we’re not even talking mostly about physical healing.
The greatest healing we need
is the healing of our spirits,
our minds,
our souls,
our personalities.
Now, I began my walk with the King
viewing the whole business of healing
just as I viewed every other area of life at that time,
through the eyes of the flesh,
based on the values of the flesh,
and the goals of the flesh.
And on that basis
I viewed healing as the goal
and God as the means.
Simply put, I wanted Him to fix what was broken in my life.
And before I share with you where I’ve ended up with this whole thing,
I need to offer just few comments
about the source of sickness in our lives.
All sickness,
whether it is physical, emotional, mental, or psychological
is the direct result of sin.
Some of it is the result of our own personal sins,
but most of it is the result the impact of other people’s sins
either directly or indirectly,
tracing all the way back to Adam and Eve.
During those early days in the Garden of Eden,
before sin entered into the world,
Adam and Eve lived in complete freedom from all forms of sickness.
Adam never woke up with a headache,
Eve never even had a head cold.
And more than that,
they never worried,
they never felt stressed,
they never fought with themselves, with one another, or with their God.
But do you know what it says in the very next verse
following Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God?
GEN 3:8 They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in
the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from
the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
Instantly three huge new ingredients entered into human experience -
a fear of God,
feelings of guilt,
and a deep sense of shame.
Fear...guilt...shame...
do you know what that is?
That’s sickness of the mind,
a sickness that rotted the quality of their lives,
and robbed them of the freedom they had known prior to their sin.
Rather than walking free in the warmth of the sunshine,
they cowered in the shadows,
afraid to be seen,
afraid to enter into the presence of their Creator.
It is certainly true
that their sin also resulted in the introduction
of physical sickness into the world -
viruses,
infections,
deformities,
diseases and physical defects passed on throughout the history of the human race.
And with each new generation
both the physical sickness
and the sicknesses of the mind - the fear, the guilt, and the shame,
has taken on new forms,
new expressions,
bringing about new levels of human pain and bondage.
Now, I think it is certainly understandable
why I began my walk with the King
assuming that healing meant the removal of the sickness.
What else could it mean?
Surely that should be obvious to everyone.
And there are times in our lives
when that is the way in which God expresses His grace to us.
There are times when He chooses to remove the disease from our bodies,
when He sovereignly chooses to deliver us forever from some sickness of the mind.
But in my experience that has been the exception rather than the rule
and gradually I have found a very different definition of healing taking shape within me.
Though I definitely didn’t have any conscious awareness of it at the time,
this new definition began to take shape within me
when I became increasingly aware
of a remarkable and somewhat terrifying discovery.
I discovered that my spirit’s awareness of Christ,
my hunger for Him,
my need for Him,
my evolving discovery of the depth of His love for me
seemed to be motivated far more powerfully by the presence of sickness within me
rather than by it’s removal.
Simply put,
sickness drew me to Him
and made me dependant upon Him
in ways that health never could.
And now, looking back over more than 35 years of life with my Lord,
I realize that in most situations
God has not chosen to remove my sicknesses,
He has chosen, rather, to teach me how to share that sickness with Him
in a way that breaks it’s destructive power in my life.
And after all these years,
here is the definition of healing I have come to.
True healing is not the absence of sickness,
it is the presence of Christ
and the awareness of what His presence really means.
We think healing must mean
that God removes the sickness from our flesh,
that He frees our flesh from its corruption.
But the truth is
the flesh is never freed from corruption.
My flesh was immersed in corruption the day I came to Christ,
and it will be immersed in corruption the day I leave this planet.
My hope in this life
is not that God can redeem my flesh,
my hope is that He can create within me
a new spirit,
a spirit that can then exercise leadership over my flesh
in a way that then forces it to become a temporary tool
through which the life of Christ can be expressed through me.
So, true healing is not the absence of sickness,
it is the presence of Christ
and the awareness of what His presence really means.
And what does His presence really mean?
It means that the sickness of my mind
does not define who I am.
It means that the corruption within my flesh
does not determine my true identity.
It means that my true identity is now determined
by the recreative work of God within me,
a recreative work that has made me holy,
righteous,
pure in spirit forever,
God’s holy one,
His child,
His friend.
And it means that there is no sickness within me -
physical,
mental,
psychological,
or emotional,
that has the power to control my life
or to determine my future.
My future and my effectiveness in life
is determined not by the body I dwell in,
but by the One who dwells within me,
by my Great Physician, Jesus Christ,
the One who has promised me
that not only will I find Him adequate for my sickness,
but that He will actually reshape that sickness into tremendous good in my life.
It is not the absence of sickness within our minds and bodies,
but rather the depth of our dependance upon our God
that is the greatest and most accurate indicator of true health within us.