Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Gift of Healing

Going to the lost with the gift of healing is very important. Over the last decades God has been restoring the gift of healing to the church. This is great, but we have tended to keep it in the church and only prayed for Christians. This is a mistake.

Praying for Christians is a good way to learn about healing, but we need to go on to praying for the lost. If we do not, we will often lose the gift. The Holy Spirit loves the world and is always moving out towards it to draw people to the Father (John 7:37,38). If we don’t go with him, he will go on without us.

Jesus blessed us so we could bless others. If we are just seeking our own healing, we are missing the point. We should be seeking healing for the lost who are in pain. When sending out the disciples to heal the sick, Jesus said,

Go the lost sheep… (Matt 10:6).
We should do the same.

1 comment:

Gene said...

Actually, as much as I vary from your earlier observations which I won't go into here, your notation here is on the money.

This is something to expand upon.

I want to see this in our own church environment. Going to the community with the healing power of Jesus is the strongest form of evangelism.

People in our community are as my friend Barry Kolb defined:

Not long ago—Chuck Colson reported that columnist Jonathan Rauch—an avowed atheist—coined the word: apatheism [apathetic theism]. “It’s not that people don’t believe in God anymore,” Rauch says, “the majority will still say they believe.” On the whole, the people Rauch describes haven’t been putting much thought or effort into their faith. They’re looking for comfort & reassurance—and not for a God who asks anything of them. Hence the rise of what Rauch described as “a disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion & an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s religion.” Apatheism!

Colson went on to talk about writer David Brooks who coined the term flexidoxy [flexible beliefs]. Flexidoxy describes the form of religion practiced by many educated young Americans today. Basically, it means that people have become flexible in their belief system & look at religion as a giant buffet from which they can pick & choose the beliefs that most suit them. They become the center of their own faith & adapt it to what they see as important.

People who are apathetic or flexible are stunned when set free by the power of the Living God.