Pastor Jeff and Cheryl Orluck
Jeff: Happy to be back. We are talking about the ministry of healing. Children, you can go. Have a wonderful time. Have a lot of fun. Be nice to each other.
I felt like it probably would be really beneficial to just lay or relay some of the biblical foundations for healing that if you have spent any time in the Pentecostal or charismatic world, that part of our faith community, then these scriptures won't be new to you. They are things that we pretty much all have said and quoted and understood for a long, long time, but it doesn't hurt for us to just reestablish the foundation for why we even pray for each other to be healed and to look at the realities of that. But then what ends up happening is because of these truths, we end up with questions that can't help but come to us when things don't work the way they are supposed to. I just think it's really good for us to just ask the questions and talk about the whys. I think that's really, really important if, if we are going to be healthy in our faith and in, in our walk of faith. So that's what we are going to do today. We'll see how far we get. I feel like I have too much, so we will see how it goes.
We are going to start out with some basic biblical promises about healing that many of us understand if it's new to you, then I'm trusting that the Lord is going to help, you to come to some understanding of who he is and, and what he did in the atonement because one of the first things we want to build a case for is that healing of all kind was provided for in the atonement, in the death and resurrection of Jesus in the work of redemption. Everything that Jesus did, we are going to see was intended to bring, as Brian's been alluding to and Robert has been talking about, is intended to bring health, wholeness, and wellbeing to us. That is what redemption is for on this earth. We don't have to wait for heaven for that. Jesus brought his kingdom here so that we could experience the benefits of his kingdom here and now in this life. And so that, as he said to Abraham, you will be blessed and you'll be a blessing. And that's who we are as children of God. We are blessed because we are his children and we become a blessing to the rest of the world. That's the place we want to find. That's a place we want to be in.
We are going to start with a few scriptures in the Old Testament. There are two or three scriptures that really focus on the crucifixion. One of them is Psalm 22 and one of them is Isaiah 53. We are going to start in Isaiah 53. We are in verses four and five. We are reading this out of the NIV. And we will take that away from there.
Cheryl: Surely he took up our pain, our sickness, and bore our sufferings or pains. Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted, but he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him. And by his wounds, we are healed.
Jeff: Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God. Jesus did that for us. Jesus reconciled us to God. And in his death, in that crushing, in the shedding of his blood, in the brokenness that he experienced in that whole thing. There were things that were purchased or things that were won for us. And as it says here, he took up our pains. Another word for that, an Hebrew word that translated pains in the NIV is sickness, or it says he bore our suffering. And another word in the Hebrew for that is pain. So Jesus, he did the whole package, his healing that he purchased on the cross affects our soul. It affects our emotions. It affects our overall wellbeing and it also affects our bodily health. What he did was for us to have whole and healthy lives.
I don't know how many of you watched. I'm sure most of us saw the Mel Gibson movie, the Passion of the Christ. So that last sentence there by his wounds we are healed. In the New American Standard it's by his scourging we are healed. In King James, it's by his stripes we are healed. If you watch the passion of the Christ, you cringe through that scene that seemed to never end, where the Roman soldier was beating him with that cat of nine tails and shredding his back. That is the experience that brought about our healing. That's what it's saying here: by his stripes, by his scourging, we are healed. He bore our sicknesses in his body in that experience. That was an amazing movie. I'll never forget standing in line to get into the theater with Cheryl and friends and everyone is talking and laughing. And then the doors that open and the group that just saw the movie would come out and they would be deadly silent, crying, walking out of the theater. You look at them coming out and you'd think, oh my goodness, what are we in for?
Let's do a Psalm 103 Here's another one.
Cheryl: Let all that I am praise the Lord. With my whole heart, I will praise his holy name. Let all that I am praise the Lord. May I never forget the good things he does for me or forget not his benefits.
Jeff: That's at NIV.
Cheryl: He forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases. He redeems me from death and crowns me with love and tender mercies. He fills my life with good things. My youth is renewed like the eagles.
Jeff: I say that a lot now, I say that a lot. My youth is renewed like the eagles.
Cheryl: Yeah, me too.
Jeff: Amen. So I really love the NIV, the whole concept of benefits for getting, not all his benefits, because benefits are something that are granted to you. Typically, as a result of membership. Most of us who have worked, we had benefits, we received at work. They are not things you pay for. They are things that are granted to you as a result of belonging to some organization. In this case, when we belong to Jesus, there are benefits that are granted to us as a result of belonging. And then Isaiah or the Psalmist list, these benefits. He says he forgives all my sins. That's a good benefit. But in the next breath, he says, he heals all my diseases. So we have, he forgives all my sins and he heals all my diseases, just like that. Boom, boom. He forgives all my sins and he heals all my diseases. And then it goes on. He redeems me from death. He crowns me with love and tender mercy. He fills my life with good things. What a great benefit! My youth is renewed like the Eagles. What a great benefit! These are all things that just come to us because we belong to him.
What we are focusing on here is those first two phrases: He forgives all my sins. He heals all my diseases. He forgives all my sins. He heals all my diseases. These are benefits of the Lord. Jesus actually kind of tied him together. Do you remember when they brought the paralytic to him and when they brought the paralytic— in fact, Cheryl, you can just read this. We'll just read it. And then I won't tell the story.
Cheryl: Jesus climbed into a boat and went bad across the lake to his own town. Some people brought to him a paralyzed man on a mat. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralyzed man, be encouraged, my child, your sins are forgiven. But some of the teachers of religious law said to themselves, that's blasphemy. Does he think he is God? Jesus knew what they were thinking. So he asked them, why do you have such evil thoughts in your hearts? Is it easier to say your sins are forgiven or stand up and walk? So I'll prove to you that the son of man has the authority on earth to forgive sins. Then Jesus turned to the paralyzed man and said, stand up, pick up your mat and go home. The man jumped up and went home. Fear swept through the crowd as they saw this happen. They praised God for giving humans such authority. That's you That's us.
Jeff: That's us, the humans. So it seems like almost Jesus melded the two together. What's easier, to forgive sins or to heal?. Well, I can do both. What is easier for us, to be forgiven of our sins are to be healed? Based on what we are reading, they should be both about the same. It should be just as easy to get healed as it is to get forgiven. It's a packaged deal. The problem, of course, is it doesn't always work that way. It should work that way. It seems like what we are reading tells us it should work that way. But it doesn't always seem as easy to see healing happen as it does to see forgiveness of sins happen. I'm very confident that my sins are forgiven. I feel like when I pray for healing, I'm trusting God to do something. It doesn't seem quite as automatic. We'll talk more about that as we go on.
The problem that we struggle with doesn't negate the reality of God, of who God is and what he says and what he wants to do. We tend to need it to be either/or. What we are pursuing here is to understand what's true and live in what's real and let the truth be the truth right in the face of what we are living. I should probably say that everything that we are sharing today, what I'm really hoping we do is Cheryl and I will help you see how we've learned how to live. We live this. We've been living this for decades now. We've been living in these truths. We practice them. We speak them. We pray them. We expect them because we believe it's true.
Yet we've seen a lot of friends that we've prayed for die, and it wasn't supposed to be that way. Just like you, just like all of us, we have to work through the disappointment. We have to come to some type of understanding Why, what seems like it should be just automatic isn't. It's part of what this morning is about because it's real life.
Cheryl: This is where you keep bringing your hope through the storms, through what you don't understand is so important. Just pull through with your hope, that word, hope. Insist you are going to hope. You are just going to keep hoping. In the Lord, we can do that. It's such a powerful, powerful, powerful hope that we have.
Jeff: So those two Old Testament scriptures are foundational to the whole concept of healing, being in the atonement, purchased by Jesus for us today to experience in our lives. You already understand it, but the next thing I wanted to touch on is, is just this concept of salvation and how salvation is an all encompassing concept. It's not limited to going to heaven. It's so much more than that. I think we all understand Jesus is actually from the Hebrew word, Yahshua. The Hebrew word Yahshua means— anybody? Savior. The story is when Joseph was pondering whether or not to marry Mary, because now she was pregnant out of wedlock and he was thinking of quietly, in a way that wouldn't dishonor her too badly, stopping the marriage and an angel came to him. The angel says, actually, Joseph, the child she has was conceded by the holy spirit, and you are to call his name Jesus, because he will save people from their sins. You will name him what he is. Jesus' name is who he was. He was savior. So his very name embodies everything that he came to do for us.
But if we look at the Greek word for salvation, the Greek word is Sozo. And that also it's an all-encompassing word. It means to be saved. It means to be healed. It means to be delivered. It means all of those things all at once. It's all encompassing. It's not limited to the forgiveness of your sins or to going to heaven. It means that he is there to meet you in whatever place you are and with whatever needs you have. Salvation meets you wherever you happen to be. That's where salvation meets us. I don't have any money. I need to buy groceries. That's where we need salvation. I don't have a job. I need employment. That's where we need salvation. I'm sick. I have cancer. I broke my leg, whatever. That's where we need salvation. Wherever we need salvation is where it comes to us. Because what Jesus did was for our whole being, for the whole man, internal and external, all of us here. None of it has to wait until heaven. It's for now. Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We all know that. I'm preaching to the choir. I know that. It's all good. Just sing it.
That word Sozo is used over a hundred times in the New Testament. It is translated as forgiveness of sins. It is translated as healing. It is translated as deliverance. It is translated a lot of times as being made whole. What a great concept: being made whole. We all need to get whole in different ways, but it's for all of us. Being whole: that's what redemption is all about.
The last thing Jesus said on the cross: it is finished. When Jesus said those words, he wasn't talking about his life. He was talking about his mission. When he said it's finished, what he was saying is I've accomplished everything that I came here to do. It's all done. When Jesus said it finished, it means that salvation, the work of salvation was done. The work of forgiveness for sins was done. The work of healing was done. The work of deliverance was done. The work of making us whole was done. It was all done, sign sealed, delivered, finished. There was nothing left for Jesus to do. He did it all.
Cheryl: And he did it for every person coming.
Jeff: Everyone coming, everyone who has been born since. Actually, he did it for everyone who had been born previously. That's a cool thing about God. The third thing I just want to touch on is, is the fact that healing was a very central part of Jesus ministry in the three years that he was in ministry on the earth. One of the scriptures we would quote often in my years, learning about healing was Matthew 4:24. Why don't you read that one, Cheryl?
Cheryl: News about him spread as far as Syria and people soon began bringing him to him, all who were sick. And whatever their sickness or disease, or if they were demon possessed or epileptic or paralyzed, he healed them all.
Jeff: He healed them all. Just what he did, just who he was. The next scripture is Luke 5:12, where he heals the leper Lord. If you are willing. I told Cheryl, I said before Sunday, I've got to see that episode on the chosen. So we watched it last night and I cried all through it again. We can't show it on the live stream because it's copyright. Otherwise, I'd play it for you, but we can read it because it's so cool.
Cheryl: I was thinking we should act it out.
Jeff: We should act it out.
Cheryl: It wouldn't be quite the same. It was beautiful. In one of the villages, Jesus met a man with an advanced cake of leprosy. When the man saw Jesus, he bowed with his face to the ground begging to be healed. He said if you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean. Jesus reached out and touched him. I am willing, he said. Be healed. And instantly the leprosy disappeared.
Jeff: Those are such powerful words. I am willing. I am willing. What do you need? What do you go to Jesus with? Those are such powerful words. I am willing. But not only is he willing; he is able. He has all the power to do it. Everything that we need is there for us and we don't need to wonder. What Jesus did when he was on earth— and Brian has spent the last two years, Pastor Brian, teaching in the gospels because Jesus said, if you've seen me, you've seen the father and in his whole life, everything he did— He spoke how he lived was a demonstration of the goodness and the generosity and the mercy and the love and the power of our heavenly father. He displayed the God that we have all come to know. He displayed a God that a lot of us still need to get to know because we have different views of God that aren't quite the same. But the God that Jesus came to display was a God who is generous and loving and willing.
What I put in my notes or I highlighted it so I wouldn't forget it, he said he showed us when it comes to God's goodness, we have no reason to doubt. He showed us when it comes to God's love for us, there is no reason to doubt. He showed us when it comes to God's willingness to intervene in our lives, there is no reason to doubt. When it comes to his village to save us, however, we might need it, there is absolutely no reason to doubt. Jesus established for us in everything that he did and everything that he said that our God is willing and generous and able to meet us in our deepest place of need. That's the good news. That's the gospel that we want to be. Pastor Robert, that's the gospel we want to be.
But then where we end up is, well, that's all well and good, but what about the times that we weren't saved? What about the times that the healing didn't happen? What about the times when we had a funeral instead of a celebration? What about those times? Because in my life, I'm assuming yours has been similar. Sometimes people haven't been healed. Sometimes people we pray for, die. Sometimes we don't get the miracle that we were wanting, praying for, trusting for, believing God for. Sometimes unexpected tragedy strikes, things we never would've expected, and then our life has changed forever. Sometimes, those things happen.
I remember this simple little thing. I'm driving an old car and my tires are all worn out and winter is coming and I don't have any money to buy tires and I'm trusting the Lord for money to buy tires. I'm driving home from someplace and I'm thinking, I know Lord that you are never late. I know you are never late. And then the thought came to me and said, oh, he was, once. Jesus died. He was once. There really are meaningful answers to these questions. Unfortunately, most of the answers that the churches tried to provide have been really bad. We are trying to sort things out. We are trying to defend God. We are trying to justify all the things that we've taught. We are trying to defend the fact that they have to be true, because it's the word of God and we've staked our reputation on it. And we end up giving people really dumb answers.
How many people have been told, well, you didn't get your healing because you don't have enough faith. Really? Is that really what you need to hear when you just lost somebody that you love? Is that the best answer the church has? It's not God's answer. That's not God's answer. Faith is a core part of healing, our friend Ian Andrews, some of you know him; he is a good friend of ours. He has been in the healing ministry for 50 years. Ian says in any healing, faith has to be someplace in the equation. But if it didn't happen, then let's not just decide, well, it's your fault. So many times it comes down to this. The miracle didn't happen and the person I love died. So one of a few things is wrong here. Either God isn't real or God isn't good or there is something horribly wrong with me that he would do this for somebody else, but he wouldn't do it for me or these words just can't be true. We have to go somewhere with it. Right. I'm hoping in the next few minutes together, what we can come to understand is that the place we have to go with this is into the arms of our father. Because when there are no answers, that's the only place to go, and whether there are answers or not, it's the only place that really gives us what we need.
Cheryl: I have many question marks that hang over my head about things that have happened, and I see that you do too. Those are good. Those question marks are good. It's okay for them to be there and let them draw you to and carry them within the hope that we have. We don't have the answer, but we know where to get it in the time that we need it. The question marks are okay.
Jeff: That's probably the most important thing that I think we could say: It's okay not to know.
Cheryl: Absolutely.
Jeff: God doesn't need our defense. It's not his problem
Cheryl: It's faith.
Jeff: If we don't understand why it's okay to just not understand why yet. We will. God makes lots of provisions for us to go forward together. We'll talk about that. It seems like we've been in the Pentecostal world since we were teenagers, just many years for us. It seems like these truths— I believe that the scriptures, we read that they are true, but it seems like the way that they've been taught and the way that they've been used so often in the church is that we use them in such a way that we back ourselves into a corner where it has to happen or somebody did something wrong.
If you remember two weeks ago, we talked about how the scriptures, the word of God is not a legal document. Jesus said, "My words are spirit and they are life." Every time he speaks, something happens inside of us, life comes inside of us because of his words. But the church, we turn it into a legal document; we turn it into things we can argue about. We turn it into something we have to defend. And when we turn even these wonderful truths into just a legal thing, it becomes something we have to defend. We get our backs up against the wall. We box ourselves into a place where we have to come up with an answer, and when we do that, we end up with the wrong answers. How many of you have heard of Voltaire, the French philosopher? He wrote the play Candid. I saw that when I was in high school at the Guthrie, and it was a powerful stage performance. Voltaire is mostly famous for standing on a hill to Paris, with a bunch of his followers and challenging God that if he is real, to strike him dead with a lightning bolt.
Of course, God in his mercy didn't do that, and of course Voltaire said, see. You know why Voltaire was so angry at God, at least from what I've understood, the reading I've done about his life? There had been a horrible natural disaster in France that year and tens of thousands of people died, and the Catholic church announced that the reason that that tragedy happened was because it was God's judgment against the sins of the people. How many atheists do we have in this world who are atheists because that's the message that they've heard from the church? We are responsible for the fact that they don't believe.
Anyways, so much for boxing ourselves in the corner. We end up in trouble, when we end up with a legal document. Let's just talk for a second about the difference between covenant and contract. God's word, the scriptures, everything that he speaks to us is, is in the context of a covenant. It's a covenant relationship. It's the same relationship as Cheryl has said, as we've been talking about this, as marriage. A covenant is based on relationship. A contract requires no relationship at all. A covenant is based on love. In a contract, there is no love. there is no need for love. You can be enemies. A covenant is based on trust. The reason we have contracts is because there is no trust.
Most of you signed a mortgage document or a car loan. How many pages long is it? 500 pages long to make sure that every little caveat is covered, to make sure that the most crooked person in the world couldn't steal from them, to make sure that they can take advantage of you. If anybody's going to take advantage of anybody, they are going to take advantage of you. And so you wrangle over the contract to see who gets the one up manship in it. If we treat the word of God, that way, that's where we end up. We end up with no relationship, no love and no trust. It's all just something that is a performance thing.
Cheryl: It's professional.
Jeff: It's professional.
Cheryl: The other thing is a covenant is based on truth. A contract is based on facts. You might have to ponder this for a second to get it, but facts are the enemies of truth. I'll pose that one or you again. Facts are the enemies of truth. Why am I saying that? When we want to win an argument, what do we do? We pile up our facts,
Cheryl: But I know it's true. It's like when we are arguing; you have the facts and I have feelings. And I can't explain my feeling to him, but he knows I've got it.
Jeff: So I must win because I have the facts.
Cheryl: The facts just come on down and squash.
Jeff: We learned that early on. It was quite a few years ago that I figured out that that doesn't make me win. Just because I have facts and she has intuition.
Cheryl: I named him crafty.
Jeff: You can pile facts up to make anything true that you want to. That's how facts work. As they say in the accounting world: figures don't lie, but liars figure. How many of you saw Bowling for Columbine? How many of you saw Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore documentaries? Piled up all the facts. Did it state the truth? You see every documentary you watch. Every infomercial you watch, every argument you hear, uses facts to establish their truth. But what's true is true. You don't make it true with facts. You don't make it wrong with facts. Something that is true is true whether you believe it or not. Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it not true. What's true is true. What Jesus said is true. If it doesn't line up with good facts, then you probably don't understand it. And that happens a lot.
The thing with truth is we all have an understanding of what's true. We read the scriptures and we have a certain filter that they get read through and that becomes our truth. The filter is usually composed of a variety of things that's composed in our growing up, what we learned as children. It has to do with what we learned in the church, what we were taught in the church. It has to do with the church culture that we belong to and what they believe and what we've been assimilated into. All those things play into how we filter Jesus' words when we read them. So every single one of us has a different take on those words. His words are true. Our understanding may be off a little bit.
Unfortunately, just like what's happening now with all the whole science argument, we are doing this according to science and then the opponents of that posture say, oh no, we are doing this according to science. My son in law found a t-shirt: everybody is a f-ing scientist. So it ends up being, whoever can pile up the highest table, the highest pile of facts, they win. But that has nothing to do with truth. What's true is true. Jesus' words are true. We embrace them the best we understand them. We live them the best we understand them and we trust him to continue to teach us so that we understand them better every day.
So these words on healing that we've read out of Isaiah and the Psalms and out of the gospels, these are words that I believe are true. I believe them. We live them. We practice them. We pray them. We speak them. It doesn't mean I understand it a hundred percent, but I'm in covenant with the God who spoke those words. I'm in a relationship with him. What that does is it allows room for me to go to him, for him to come to me, for us to talk together, for him to teach me for him, to carry me when I need him to, when I don't understand, when I'm broken. That's when things don't line up the way that we think they should. That's why covenant is so valuable because now we are in a relationship, we have someone to go to. And not only do we have a covenant relationship with God, we have a covenant relationship with each other. And so when we are praying earnestly for a good friend not to die, and then they die, then as a community, we come around the people who have lost that husband and that father, and we love them and we support them and we walk through their sorrow with them. We walk through it together. That is what the faith community is about.
We love it when we get miracles. We pray for miracles. We know that Jesus wants us to pray for miracles. We trust him for miracles, but we live life together no matter what the result is. There is such a tremendous value in the fact that we get to live life together through the greatest joys and the greatest sorrows, through the greatest gains and the greatest losses. It is our privilege to share these things together. Funerals are one of the greatest experiences we will ever know in our lifetime. I come to funerals, I livestream funerals for people I've never known and I walk away in tears, so touched by the memories and the life that they lived and who they were and what they left behind and their legacy and what God has done. Those are rich things. It's rich.
There is a wealth in your soul that comes when you walk with your friends through sorrow. It's not what we want. It's not what we expect you. I don't expect when I pray for somebody to have to walk through sorrow. I'm surprised when they die. I'm disappointed. But I still get to go to my father and crawl into his arms and say, what is up with this? And I still get to hang out with you guys and together we walk through it. What can be better? What can be better than a community of faith where we carry each other? There are other options. Personally, you may be know people too. I know one man who his stepmother died of cancer. She had a very agonizing death and for his entire life, from that time forward, he hated God. If you even approached him about Jesus, he would turn on a walk away from, he wouldn't hear it. He refused you to ever hear anything about God. And that's how he died, a tragic life.
There are lots of different places we can end up with questions like this, but the place that Cheryl and I have discovered is a place, as she said, of hope. It's a place of hope. We crawl into the arms of our father and we let him hold us. If we need to. Sometimes he just has to carry us. I don't know how many of you watch Call the Midwife. Anybody fans of Call the Midwife? Cheryl and I are. There was this one scene where a woman that lost her child, I think it was. She is with one of the nuns who was working as a midwife and she says, "How do I go on? How, what do I do? How do I go on?" She said, "I don't know. All I know is that you have to just live one day at a time until you start to feel alive again." I just thought, wow. there is a truth. Many of you have experienced a lot more loss. We have not had a lot of deep losses in our life, so I'm not an expert on this. But I understand that Jesus, the lover of my soul Is the best person to trust, no matter what happens. He really is. One last thing about praying, how we pray and then we will wrap her up.
I don't know about you, but having been in this doctrine of healing for many, many years, we all learned the words to pray: In the name of Jesus, by the blood of Jesus, by the stripes of Jesus. We all know the words; by his stripes, you are healed. We end up having these, I call them, boilerplate prayers. We just know all the right words. We just say all the right words. Every time someone needs healing, we say the same prayer, because it's a scripture, because it's true. It's actually good to pray the word of God, but not the legal word of God. It has to be the Covenant word of God. It has to be the living word of God. We will talk more about it in the future. That's where we talked about this whole issue of healing as an issue of partnership. It's an issue of relationship.
We don't pray our mantra. So many times with healing prayers, I feel like we are just reciting a mantra. Jesus said it's not because there are many words that God hears them. You don't need all the perfect words. What you need is communion with a holy spirit and you do what he tells you to do and you say what he tells you to say. That can be very different every time you pray. Jesus did it differently every time. To one guy he said, take up your mat. To the Leper he said be cleansed. There was one guy, he spit in his eyes and he had to pray twice. Imagine that; God had to pray twice for a guy to be healed. Jesus did what he saw his father doing. We want to be the same.
We want to do what the father's doing. We want to say what the father is saying. We want to partner with the holy spirit. We want to be in agreement with him. A really cool story with our friend Ian, when it comes to the stripes of Jesus. One day, the Lord reminded him about the crown of thorns, how Jesus wore this crown of thorns. And they were beating them and the thorns were pushing into his head and he was bleeding from his head. The Lord spoke to him and he said that blood that flowed because of that crown of thorns is for the healing of people's minds. He said if you will teach us, I will heal problems of mind. So Ian started to teach this the way the holy spirit showed him and he started seeing autistic children healed and dyslexic people healed, because it was a covenant word. It was a living word that God breathed to him and then he responded to it in faith. This is our wonderful God. We get to do it together with him. Amen. That's how he wants to do it. He chooses to do it through us. Hallelujah.
Cheryl, when we were talking about this, she said, you know what? We really need to offer it. If anybody here has a problem with dyslexia or other head issues, we want to pray for your healing today. In fact, we don't want to end this without praying for healing. Do we? Because we believe it's true. I can't explain why it doesn't always work. But we believe it's true. there is no better place to walk this out than us. We were actually talking about that scripture where it says in all these lame and these people came to Jesus and he healed them all, and Cheryl said, "How did all those people know to come to him?" I said, "Well, I guess the word got out." And she said that should be how it is with us. I said, "Yeah, that's what we want." We want it to be that way with us. We want the word to get out. So let's stand together. If you have a physical need for healing, we are going to pray for you right now. You can just put your hand up, whatever you might need. Hallelujah.
Cheryl: You can stand in as a proxy for someone too. People get healed that way.
Jeff: Thank you Lord, for being here. Thank you for your wonderful word, your truth. We live in that place with you. We love to be there with you. No place we would rather be. And because your words are true, father, We just come to you right now asking for healing. We understand Lord, we don't even have to ask; it has already been finished, and yet we know we can just come to you because you are our father and we can trust you because you are our savior we can ask you to come and meet us exactly where we are at. So we do. For all of our health issues, every hand that's raised at home, those of you in your living rooms, put up your hands, if you need a touch from God, if you are here— And we just continue to expect that everything that Jesus did, we will possess, healing in our bones, our joints, our blood, our organs, our lungs, our eyes, our ears, every part of our body. You quicken our mortal bodies and you make them alive. You renew our strength like the eagles, our youth. That's who you are. We trust you for it. We believe you for it. We love you for it.
Holy spirit, come. Just release your power, release your touch, release your love. We just receive it now. We receive it now. I receive it now. Just tell him, I receive your healing. I receive your salvation. I receive your forgiveness. I receive your love. I open my heart to you. Just receive all that you have for me. Thank you for making me whole.
Of course, the greatest healing of all is the healing that comes when you give your heart to Jesus for the very first time. If you haven't yet, that's where you want to start. Jesus, I open my heart to you; wash me and make me whole. Those are magical words. They result in a transformed life like nothing else does. Pastor Brian.
Brian: Pastor Jeff, I was just thinking, as you were speaking, you talked about the movie, the Passion of Christ and that word pat actually means sufferings, the sufferings of Jesus. But then you have the word compassion, which really means that we, as people, enter into the sufferings of others, that's what we do when we have compassion. I think one of the great gifts that the Lord has given to us here at Hope Is to walk with people through loss. We pray all the time. It will be 20 years ago, this April, that one of our friends, and he was a servant council member here at Hope, and he was diagnosed with a terminal disease and we prayed and the Lord decided to take him home instead of answering our prayers for a miracle. I remember clearly that next Sunday coming to church after his memorial service and the Lord asked me, well, what are you going to do about healing now, Brian, What are you going to do? Are you going to quit praying? And I said no, I'm going to keep praying even though I don't understand.
There are more things about God that I don't know, than I do know. How many know that? There are more things about God that we don't know than what we do. So I'm going to continue to take God's word at his word. I'm not going to point the finger at others or myself when the prayer that I pray doesn't get answered in the way that I prayed it, but I am going to continue to go before my father in heaven. I'm going to not just ask in a minuscule way, but I'm going to ask largely. I want to ask largely of our God because he is a big God. So today I just appreciate this message. So oftentimes in the church we pretend that we have all the answers. We just have one answer. His name is Jesus.
He has a covenant relationship with us and we've been able to come into a relationship with our father in heaven, through him. And so father, we come before you again in the name that's above every other name, the name of Jesus. We thank you that you have redeemed us. I thank you that there is such a thing of sins being forgiven, that shame being washed away from our minds and our hearts. We thank you, Lord, that there is joy and peace that comes from you in spite of circumstances at times not being changed.
We thank you that you are real, that you aren't just a figment of our imaginations, that you came to this world to this earth to reconcile us to your father in heaven, and on the cross, the world was reconciled to you father. We know that Lord, there is so much more When we are in you. We want to be in you and live in you and have our in you, and we want to bring your kingdom to this world. We want your kingdom to come and your will to be done in us as it is being done in heaven. So we give ourselves to you today again for that. Let's raise our hands together. Shall we?
Now may the Lord bless you and may the Lord keep you. May the Lord make his face to smile upon you and may the Lord turn his face towards you and give you his peace. This we pray the wonderful name of Jesus, our lord and savior. For those of you who would like to have communion aid, Dave and Deb will be serving communion. What a wonderful day to have communion, talking about the sufferings of our Lord and what he has provided for us. God bless you. Thank you for being here today. Stay safe. Hopefully we will see you again next week and Saturday for a game day in person.
Jeff: Noon to three here; lunch provided.
Brian: Starting at noon. God bless you. Have a wonderful day.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 2-13-22. If you would like to watch the full service, click the link below.