Saturday, May 5, 2018
Kingdom near you
Luke 10:9
And heal the sick there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’
Yesterday we got to talking about sickness in reference to Jesus’ instruction that we must engage the world, heal sickness, and then declare the arrival of the Kingdom near them.
We also established that today, we have an understanding that sickness is more than physical. As a matter of fact, with the current advances in science and technology in general, and medical research in particular, many physical diseases have been eliminated or at least brought under control. We have found cures for many things that used to quickly or easily kill people. And more cures are being aggressively pursued for other sicknesses. People will eventually be living longer and healthier lives.
Doctors knowledge along with pharmaceuticals and other treatments like prosthetics and connected electronic devices have all contributed to changing the way we view and respond to sickness.
I normally use eyesight as an example. There was a time, a very long time ago, when people would come to church and ask for prayer for their sight, when their eyesight was failing. Healing for eyesight was a staple request for the church. After all, when Jesus read the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue to launch His ministry, the healing of the blind was a big aspect, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He has anointed Me To preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives And recovery of sight to the blind.” Luke 4:18
Also, when John the Baptist sent his disciples to Jesus to determine that He was indeed the Messiah, the response included the fact that the blind could now see. “Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them.” Luke 7:22. And we could go on and mention all of the dramatic scenes and stories that accompanied Jesus restoring sight to formerly blind persons.
Today, however, when people start getting vision problems, the first thing they do is head down to an eye-care specialist to get an examination. There are many eye-care professionals of many types, opticians, optometrists, ophthalmologists and so on. When I first got spectacles, over four decades ago, I went to one of the city’s premier specialists. You stated proudly who your eye-care professional was. Right now, you could get out at the roadside near a retail outlet, walk in and be examined by one of the many young people running around in scrubs and get an advanced pair of spectacles in no time flat.
I hope that you see the point of this digression into a discourse on eye-care. Long before we come looking for a miracle of sight we go to an eye-care professional downtown. We get eye-drops, spectacles, or fancy laser treatments depending on what the problem is. It is rare that we come to the church requesting prayer because we can’t read the book or tablet before us. The miracle now is modern medicine itself, not the individual cures that people need. You could get technologically advanced examinations and treatments over the counter the way you buy aspirins.
The point here is that to bring the Kingdom near to people is to tackle the sicknesses that now affect and afflict the individual and the society at levels that are way deeper than the physical. Don’t be mistaken, sickness will always be with us and the poor will be disproportionately affected. We will always be praying for people with physical ailments. But more and more, when we, ministers, come to the prayer line nearly all of the person with vision problems would be wearing spectacles and would be focused on different issues.
So, we have to tackle sickness frontally on the new frontiers of mental health, emotional and spiritual trauma, domestic and sexual abuse and violence, addictions and the like. We also have to tackle the behavioural and spiritual dysfunctions of the bloodline. When ministers talked about bloodline sins a few years ago we were scoffed at. Now science is arguing more vociferously than we preachers ever could, that what is brought down in the DNA is more than just physical characteristics, more than just a pre-disposition to certain diseases, we are also bringing forward behaviour, spiritual characteristics, and even experiences and learned behaviour.
Jesus made this point, that the real sickness is spiritual, not physical when He was in an argument with the religious leaders after healing a man of physical blindness. “Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind.” Then some of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these words, and said to Him, “Are we blind also?” John 9:39,40.
As we started saying yesterday, it is when we bring the transformative power of the Gospel of Jesus to bear on the sicknesses and diseases that affect and afflict people, at the level of the spirit, that we can declare today that the Kingdom of God has come near. Individual people, and society as a whole, are under siege to new philosophies and worldviews and advances in science and technology. There is a chicken and egg situation as each of those affects the other. Then together they influence arts and culture, style and fashion, and sex, gender and related issues.
The Kingdom urgently needs to get near to the teenager in your house, the youths down the street, and a society that is replete with afflictions that overwhelm our judicial and medical systems that are not designed for these sicknesses in the first place.
Think on these things:
- Do you call the doctor and not think of the minister when you are physical unwell?
- What evidence have you seen that non-physical afflictions around you are increasing?
- Are you being prepared in church to detect or minister to spiritual maladies?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that we would see sickness of every kind and be able to take the Kingdom near.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex