[The following is the manuscript of my sermon delivered on Sunday, the 18th of January, 2015.]
A few minutes ago I told the kids that miracles are signs pointing to God. And that Jesus performed many miracles while He walked this earth, as much as a way to highlight God’s power as to show His love. Today I’d like to look at a few of those miracles, starting with what Matthew recorded in the 9th chapter of his Gospel, verses 18 through 26…
18 While He spoke these things to them, behold, a ruler came and worshiped Him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay Your hand on her and she will live.” 19 So Jesus arose and followed him, and so did His disciples.
20 And suddenly, a woman who had a flow of blood for twelve years came from behind and touched the hem of His garment. 21 For she said to herself, “If only I may touch His garment, I shall be made well.” 22 But Jesus turned around, and when He saw her He said, “Be of good cheer, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And the woman was made well from that hour.
23 When Jesus came into the ruler’s house, and saw the flute players and the noisy crowd wailing, 24 He said to them, “Make room, for the girl is not dead, but sleeping.” And they ridiculed Him. 25 But when the crowd was put outside, He went in and took her by the hand, and the girl arose. 26 And the report of this went out into all that land.
--Matthew 9:18-26 (NKJV)
Let us pray... Lord God, we bow our heads in Your presence. You are an awesome God, a loving God, a wonderful God and we adore You. Speak to us now, Lord, the message You have for us this day as we worship and praise You. In the blessed name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
Some of you know that I lost my first wife to cancer. It started in her lymph nodes and took her breasts. She fought it, through surgery and chemo and radiation treatments. And she suffered so much. With cancer, the treatment seems almost worse than the disease. It left her weak, beaten, and demoralized, but she went into remission.
Then the cancer came back, in her liver. This time she was too weak to fight, too tired to withstand the sickness and pain again. She only wanted it to end, so she declined further treatment. And cancer took her from my daughter and me, way too early.
I had a good friend I worked with who developed lung cancer. Like my first wife, he agreed to suffer through the treatments for the sake of his family. One day, while he was still trying to recover from the body-wracking effects of chemo, he came by and we talked a bit.
He told me, “Richard, why would I want to prolong all this pain and discomfort when I know there is such a better place I can go to? Why would I want to stay here and suffer, when I can see heaven just a little ways ahead?” And you know, I had to agree with him.
My own experience of watching my wife go through what he was enduring led me to believe, like him, that it just wasn’t worth all the mess and suffering for a few more weeks or months or even years here on earth. If you believed in heaven, in God’s love and grace, why would you want to stay around?
Well, my friend’s cancer returned also, and he passed shortly afterwards. By that point, I had firmly resolved that if anything like this ever happened to me, I would not fight even once. Especially after I knew I was saved and heaven bound, I could see no reason to fight just to hang around for a little while longer on this miserable earth.
And then just last week, the Holy Spirit of my most loving God showed me this passage in Matthew’s Gospel and spoke to me simply, “Your Father wants you to live until it is time for Him to bring you home.” I believe most of us feel that when it’s our time, when God is ready to take us back to Him, we will go, no matter what our circumstance.
But the thing is, at least from what the Spirit told me, that it must be in His time, not ours. To me that says we have no choice but to accept whatever treatments or lifesaving attempts are available to us to prolong our lives until God is ready to call us home.
In our Gospel reading, this woman had experienced a severe health problem for 12 years! But she had heard about Jesus and she had faith in His miraculous healing touch, so she went to Him. She approached Him and according to the Gospel of Mark, she reached out and touched His robe.
Jesus said she was made well because of her faith, and that is indeed true. But if she had not taken the time, gone to the trouble, of approaching Jesus in the first place, she would have had no chance to put that faith into motion, to reach out and touch the Master’s robe.
And then there’s the “ruler”, the father whose daughter had died. He showed great faith in Jesus’ healing touch too! His daughter was dead but he knew – he knew – that Jesus could restore her life! So he too went to Jesus. He too did whatever it took to approach Jesus to ask Him to prolong his daughter’s life. And like the woman, his faith and effort were also rewarded.
Can’t we say in both cases that they prayed to Jesus by approaching Him in person? Well, we can approach Him in the Spirit through prayer. More to the point, though, in both cases these two took an active role in the healing process.
I’d like to quickly look at one more example from our scripture, this time from the Gospel of John, the beloved disciple, the 11th chapter, verses 32 through 44…
Some of you know that I lost my first wife to cancer. It started in her lymph nodes and took her breasts. She fought it, through surgery and chemo and radiation treatments. And she suffered so much. With cancer, the treatment seems almost worse than the disease. It left her weak, beaten, and demoralized, but she went into remission.
Then the cancer came back, in her liver. This time she was too weak to fight, too tired to withstand the sickness and pain again. She only wanted it to end, so she declined further treatment. And cancer took her from my daughter and me, way too early.
I had a good friend I worked with who developed lung cancer. Like my first wife, he agreed to suffer through the treatments for the sake of his family. One day, while he was still trying to recover from the body-wracking effects of chemo, he came by and we talked a bit.
He told me, “Richard, why would I want to prolong all this pain and discomfort when I know there is such a better place I can go to? Why would I want to stay here and suffer, when I can see heaven just a little ways ahead?” And you know, I had to agree with him.
My own experience of watching my wife go through what he was enduring led me to believe, like him, that it just wasn’t worth all the mess and suffering for a few more weeks or months or even years here on earth. If you believed in heaven, in God’s love and grace, why would you want to stay around?
Well, my friend’s cancer returned also, and he passed shortly afterwards. By that point, I had firmly resolved that if anything like this ever happened to me, I would not fight even once. Especially after I knew I was saved and heaven bound, I could see no reason to fight just to hang around for a little while longer on this miserable earth.
And then just last week, the Holy Spirit of my most loving God showed me this passage in Matthew’s Gospel and spoke to me simply, “Your Father wants you to live until it is time for Him to bring you home.” I believe most of us feel that when it’s our time, when God is ready to take us back to Him, we will go, no matter what our circumstance.
But the thing is, at least from what the Spirit told me, that it must be in His time, not ours. To me that says we have no choice but to accept whatever treatments or lifesaving attempts are available to us to prolong our lives until God is ready to call us home.
In our Gospel reading, this woman had experienced a severe health problem for 12 years! But she had heard about Jesus and she had faith in His miraculous healing touch, so she went to Him. She approached Him and according to the Gospel of Mark, she reached out and touched His robe.
Jesus said she was made well because of her faith, and that is indeed true. But if she had not taken the time, gone to the trouble, of approaching Jesus in the first place, she would have had no chance to put that faith into motion, to reach out and touch the Master’s robe.
And then there’s the “ruler”, the father whose daughter had died. He showed great faith in Jesus’ healing touch too! His daughter was dead but he knew – he knew – that Jesus could restore her life! So he too went to Jesus. He too did whatever it took to approach Jesus to ask Him to prolong his daughter’s life. And like the woman, his faith and effort were also rewarded.
Can’t we say in both cases that they prayed to Jesus by approaching Him in person? Well, we can approach Him in the Spirit through prayer. More to the point, though, in both cases these two took an active role in the healing process.
I’d like to quickly look at one more example from our scripture, this time from the Gospel of John, the beloved disciple, the 11th chapter, verses 32 through 44…
32 Then, when Mary came where Jesus was, and saw Him, she fell down at His feet, saying to Him, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.”
33 Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, He groaned in the spirit and was troubled. 34 And He said, “Where have you laid him?”
They said to Him, “Lord, come and see.”
35 Jesus wept. 36 Then the Jews said, “See how He loved him!”
37 And some of them said, “Could not this Man, who opened the eyes of the blind, also have kept this man from dying?”
38 Then Jesus, again groaning in Himself, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. 39 Jesus said, “Take away the stone.”
Martha, the sister of him who was dead, said to Him, “Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days.”
40 Jesus said to her, “Did I not say to you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?” 41 Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying. And Jesus lifted up His eyes and said, “Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. 42 And I know that You always hear Me, but because of the people who are standing by I said this, that they may believe that You sent Me.” 43 Now when He had said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” 44 And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loose him, and let him go.”
--John 11:32-44 (NKJV)
Lazarus was very ill so his sisters sent for Jesus, knowing He could heal their brother. But He delayed His departure and Lazarus was already dead and buried before Jesus arrived. Jesus wasn’t through, though – He wasn’t finished with this family just yet.
He prayed to God. Jesus stood there in front of everyone and prayed, “Father, thank You for always listening to my prayers. But just to show these people how powerful You are and that You indeed sent Me to them, I say this: Lazarus, come forth!”
At this point there was nothing Lazarus or his sisters could do to participate in his healing. Jesus could, and did participate! But He did it in His own time - in God’s time – and Lazarus came forth from the tomb.
The woman had faith that Jesus could heal her so she went to Him – she actively participated in her own healing and He made it happen. The “ruler” came to Jesus and worshiped Him! He had faith and trusted that Jesus could restore his daughter to life. When everyone else thought the girl was dead and gone, with nothing left to do but to bury her, the ruler knew otherwise. And Jesus showed otherwise, just like He did for Lazarus.
God wants us to be actively involved in our own healing. And that includes having tests run even if they return bad news. That includes taking medicines and procedures even if the cure seems more hurtful than the disease. That includes seeing all kinds of doctors and specialists even if none of them seem to agree on or even know what to do. That includes doing whatever it takes, even if we don’t want to.
The ruler came to Jesus and worshiped Him, the woman came to Jesus and touched His robe, Martha and Mary sent for Jesus and He prayed – they all actively participated in some way. And God responded to each one – immediately for two, later for the other. He will respond to each of us – immediately for some, later for others. God will heal us, Jesus will raise us from the dead, but only in His timing, not ours.
I usually open my message with some sort of illustration, either humorous or poignant. This time I’d like to close with one, and leave you with something to chew on.
There was a special on TV 3 or 4 years ago, where CNN correspondent Lisa Ling went to a meeting of a renowned faith healer. There she interviewed a man named Steve who was left with a brain injury and speech impediment after a terrible car crash at the age of 18. To make matters worse, he fell off a roof some years later and was paralyzed from the waist down.
Doctors told Steve he would never walk again, but Steve said that God told him he would, that this was his time to be healed! He did what it took to get to that meeting where he was completely convinced he would leave walking and pushing his wheelchair. His faith was absolute, with not a single doubt that God was about to heal him.
On the last day of the meeting, Steve’s turn came. He made his way forward to the row of people awaiting the healer’s touch. The faith healer placed his hand on Steve’s forehead and said “Bam!”. A group of the healer’s assistants quickly came over to Steve, prayed over him, and held him up under his arms waiting for the healing to take effect… But after a couple of minutes, they set him back in his wheelchair, his condition unchanged.
Ms. Ling became concerned for Steve, worried about what would happen to his faith because he had been so completely convinced he would be healed. When she found him, though, she was amazed. He was disappointed, sure, but not despondent – his faith was not shaken in the least.
In his halting voice, Steve told her, “It wasn’t my time to be healed. But one day I will walk and run – when I get to heaven God will give me a new body.” Then Steve laid his hand on Lisa… and prayed for her.
Steve did everything he could to actively participate in his own healing, but it just wasn’t the right time yet. It wasn’t God’s time yet. He knew it would come though, one day.
And this is a miracle, too. Not a miracle of healed legs or a healed brain or any other body part. This is a miracle of the soul, of this man’s spirit, and the light of Jesus shining out of his heart.
After all, a physical healing is always temporary, even if it holds good for years and years. But a spiritual healing, a healing of one’s faith – that lasts for eternity.
Amen.
Let us pray… O Father, we thank You for Your grace and Your mercy. We acknowledge all the many times You touch us, all the mighty wonders You bring into our lives. We know we are unworthy of Your great love and compassion, and that makes us all the more thankful.
Forgive us, Lord, when we try to rush things, when we try to take things in our own hands rather than leave it all to You in Your timing. Forgive us when we would prefer to take the easy way out rather than to trust in Your grace and mercy. Help us realize as Paul finally did that Your grace is sufficient, that when we are weakest, then we are strong.
Hear us, please Lord, as we take just a moment to speak to You silently from our hearts, giving our thanks, asking for Your help…
Father God, You promise all things will work to the good for those who love You and follow Your voice. Please give us the courage to face our darkest hour, the strength to withstand pain and suffering, until that beautiful moment when You take us home. In the most glorious name of Jesus Christ our Redeemer we pray. Amen.
He prayed to God. Jesus stood there in front of everyone and prayed, “Father, thank You for always listening to my prayers. But just to show these people how powerful You are and that You indeed sent Me to them, I say this: Lazarus, come forth!”
At this point there was nothing Lazarus or his sisters could do to participate in his healing. Jesus could, and did participate! But He did it in His own time - in God’s time – and Lazarus came forth from the tomb.
The woman had faith that Jesus could heal her so she went to Him – she actively participated in her own healing and He made it happen. The “ruler” came to Jesus and worshiped Him! He had faith and trusted that Jesus could restore his daughter to life. When everyone else thought the girl was dead and gone, with nothing left to do but to bury her, the ruler knew otherwise. And Jesus showed otherwise, just like He did for Lazarus.
God wants us to be actively involved in our own healing. And that includes having tests run even if they return bad news. That includes taking medicines and procedures even if the cure seems more hurtful than the disease. That includes seeing all kinds of doctors and specialists even if none of them seem to agree on or even know what to do. That includes doing whatever it takes, even if we don’t want to.
The ruler came to Jesus and worshiped Him, the woman came to Jesus and touched His robe, Martha and Mary sent for Jesus and He prayed – they all actively participated in some way. And God responded to each one – immediately for two, later for the other. He will respond to each of us – immediately for some, later for others. God will heal us, Jesus will raise us from the dead, but only in His timing, not ours.
I usually open my message with some sort of illustration, either humorous or poignant. This time I’d like to close with one, and leave you with something to chew on.
There was a special on TV 3 or 4 years ago, where CNN correspondent Lisa Ling went to a meeting of a renowned faith healer. There she interviewed a man named Steve who was left with a brain injury and speech impediment after a terrible car crash at the age of 18. To make matters worse, he fell off a roof some years later and was paralyzed from the waist down.
Doctors told Steve he would never walk again, but Steve said that God told him he would, that this was his time to be healed! He did what it took to get to that meeting where he was completely convinced he would leave walking and pushing his wheelchair. His faith was absolute, with not a single doubt that God was about to heal him.
On the last day of the meeting, Steve’s turn came. He made his way forward to the row of people awaiting the healer’s touch. The faith healer placed his hand on Steve’s forehead and said “Bam!”. A group of the healer’s assistants quickly came over to Steve, prayed over him, and held him up under his arms waiting for the healing to take effect… But after a couple of minutes, they set him back in his wheelchair, his condition unchanged.
Ms. Ling became concerned for Steve, worried about what would happen to his faith because he had been so completely convinced he would be healed. When she found him, though, she was amazed. He was disappointed, sure, but not despondent – his faith was not shaken in the least.
In his halting voice, Steve told her, “It wasn’t my time to be healed. But one day I will walk and run – when I get to heaven God will give me a new body.” Then Steve laid his hand on Lisa… and prayed for her.
Steve did everything he could to actively participate in his own healing, but it just wasn’t the right time yet. It wasn’t God’s time yet. He knew it would come though, one day.
And this is a miracle, too. Not a miracle of healed legs or a healed brain or any other body part. This is a miracle of the soul, of this man’s spirit, and the light of Jesus shining out of his heart.
After all, a physical healing is always temporary, even if it holds good for years and years. But a spiritual healing, a healing of one’s faith – that lasts for eternity.
Amen.
Let us pray… O Father, we thank You for Your grace and Your mercy. We acknowledge all the many times You touch us, all the mighty wonders You bring into our lives. We know we are unworthy of Your great love and compassion, and that makes us all the more thankful.
Forgive us, Lord, when we try to rush things, when we try to take things in our own hands rather than leave it all to You in Your timing. Forgive us when we would prefer to take the easy way out rather than to trust in Your grace and mercy. Help us realize as Paul finally did that Your grace is sufficient, that when we are weakest, then we are strong.
Hear us, please Lord, as we take just a moment to speak to You silently from our hearts, giving our thanks, asking for Your help…
Father God, You promise all things will work to the good for those who love You and follow Your voice. Please give us the courage to face our darkest hour, the strength to withstand pain and suffering, until that beautiful moment when You take us home. In the most glorious name of Jesus Christ our Redeemer we pray. Amen.
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