Jesus is: Jesus is Healer

Join us today as Pastor John speaks about the third piece of our Foursquare foundation - Jesus as healer. Jesus fully heals us, more than just physically.

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Alright. Well, we're continuing on in our series called Jesus Is, where we're taking a look at the four different roles that Jesus takes part in and that we identify with in our denomination as Foursquare. So tonight we're part of a denomination called the Foursquare. Um and you see Foursquare is represented by each one of these different symbols that we're looking at. So we're starting in this new place, going back to the basis. You can't get much more basic in the Christian faith than Jesus. Amen? As we look. So we our very first week we looked at Jesus as savior, and we looked at a really powerful passage in Romans chapter five, where it talks about that Jesus just didn't come to improve us. Jesus isn't a self-help guru who came to make our lives 15% better. Jesus came to save us, and that while we were at our worst, when you did the very worst of the worst, the worst thing you've ever done, the darkest you've ever been in your life, it was at that moment that Jesus decided to save you. It was at that moment that Jesus decided to come down from heaven to die for each one of us. And then last week we talked about Jesus is the baptizer of the Holy Spirit. And how Jesus didn't just save us and then leave us to our own devices, but he is a mechanism by which the Holy Spirit comes and rests upon each one of us, that we are given an amazing gift that fills us with his presence. Anytime we experience God or we have a feeling with God, that's the Holy Spirit in our lives. And he's kind of called us to live the life that we actually try to live. Well, today we're taking a look at the third role in this fourfold picture, which is Jesus as healer, Christ as healer in our lives. And as you hear that, it can kind of hit you many different ways, right? You might be in a situation where it brings a lot of hope and joy. Maybe you have prayed and you have had times in your life, even recently, where you prayed for God to heal you and you have been healed. Where God has just worked in your uh, you know, in your life in a powerful way, or you've prayed for people and you've experienced healing, that you've seen that. Or maybe I was thinking about like the younger folk here up on the benches, right? Not a lot of, you know, sometimes you have things for healing, but there's something about like us as we get older that we need healing more than younger people. Am I right? We need our bodies to be touched much more than younger people. We're then thinking if they could napping it healed. For us, it takes a lot longer to give that. But for others, when we talk about Jesus as healer, this also can be a very tender subject. It can be a subject that's really hard. For those who suffer with a chronic disease, for those who, despite years of contending and maybe being prayed for and asking for prayer, and you just haven't experienced that healing yet. Maybe you've carried anxiety or depression, grief, trauma in your life. Stuff that nobody has ever, nobody knows. And you've kind of wondered, where is God in the midst of this pain and why won't he just take it away? Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Maybe you prayed for somebody for healing and they didn't get better, they got worse. They died. Or they've continued to go. And I think it's a normal, natural thing for us to say, okay, so if Christ is our healer, why doesn't He always heal? Why do we live in this world full of pain? Like, why does this still exist? And that's a real question, and something that I think anytime we talk about Jesus as healer, Christ as healer in our lives, that we really need to address. Because sometimes, many times, we may not get the healing that we are hoping for or we expect. And because we as humans, we will try to explain why that is. Anytime we don't understand something, really anything, I mean Christianity, but also just in life, if we don't understand something, we do interesting arguments and things to try to rationalize why something isn't the way you want it. You know what I mean? You ever do something and all of a sudden you begin to rationalize the reason why it didn't work out the way you wanted it to work? And we've also done that in the church where we have tried to explain away why God doesn't work the way that we do. And I've heard it said, maybe you've heard said, that, like, oh, well, it's because you've done something wrong. You have this sin in your life that is presenting the healing. It's maybe it's a sin that you don't even know you're doing, or maybe it's this thing that you have. Your parents were sinful, you have some thing that's there. Maybe you don't have enough faith, right? If only you had you've got 30% faith, but if you have 34%, that's the magic threshold, right? Or maybe it's, well, you've gotten prayed for, but have you gotten prayed for with this specific program, right? Have you you you know what? I know, I know somebody that if you actually drive two and a half hours and go to his thing, then you'll get healed. Right? We get in the all of these things to kind of rationalize why it doesn't always happen. And while some of it may be true, there have been times in life I had I've had more faith, and certainly I think that if you have our burdened with sin, that affects you emotionally and everything else. It can be really difficult to deal with and to learn how that all plays with itself. I mean, I'll skip to the end of the sermon so everyone perk up because this is the main point. Like, we believe that Jesus can heal physical, us physically today. Amen? We believe that he can heal memories, marriages, grief, trauma. We believe that God is actually able to move. We believe that our prayers do something. Many times, amen. I'll take the amen. Many times prayer is us aligning ourselves to God, but we also believe that there are some times that God will answer us when he wouldn't have otherwise, that it matters. And I've experienced that, right? I've seen God move. I have prayed for people and I've seen people get prayed for who get instantaneously healed. I have been part of prayers where you begin to see healing begin to happen. We do that because we believe that Jesus is compassionate, that the stories of healing and miracles aren't just something that happened long ago, that they can happen today. But we also, on the other hand, while we believe that, hold on to this other tension, that there are some times that I have prayed and we have prayed for things that have not happened. There are tensions we carry with that, that while we believe that Jesus is their healer, that we still live in a broken world. And these are tough questions, and I'm gonna give you one promise this morning. Are you ready for my promise that I'm gonna give you? I'm not gonna answer all the questions in 30 minutes. But I can tell you what I think the best thing for you to do with those questions is the best thing to do with those questions are to bring them to Jesus. Something that's amazing about the way that God, I don't understand this and it's entirely, but God considers our questioning, God considers our pain and our anger and frustration when we express it to him as worship. There's entire books of the Bible about this. We did a sermon series years ago. We're gonna readdress it again, look at it again this summer. Years ago in the Book of Lamentations. There's an entire book that just is being angry and frustrated at God about what God has done. I love that, that there's space for those questions and space for that anger. And sometimes we treat those questions as things that should be just kind of stuff that down or kind of make, you know, don't really bring that stuff up. But God receives all of that as worship. When you read the gospels, we see Jesus, he is not indifferent to suffering, but he is close to suffering. He is close to questions. He's not annoyed by hurting people. Sometimes I get annoyed by hurting people. Mostly it's my kids after they skin their knee three times in less 20 minutes. Okay, I'm a dude. Right? Sometimes it can be hard and some of that stuff, but Jesus isn't afraid of broken bodies or broken questions or questions. Well, today I want to take a look at Mark chapter of uh Mark chapter 5. It's a passage that is really powerful that looks at healing. So we're gonna read this is early in Jesus' ministry as he's going around. And we see, so Mark 5, verse 21. It says Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee in a boat. It landed at the other side. There a large crowd gathered around him. Then a man named Jairus came. He was a synagogue leader. When Jesus saw, when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. He begged Jesus, please come. My little daughter is dying. Place your hands on her to heal her, then she will live. So Jesus went with him. Amazing faith that we see in this person, Jairus. Just fully bold, coming up to Jesus. If I saw Jesus, you know what I mean? I don't know. I like to think that I would just go and just ask of my needs, but this guy had just amazing, bold faith to ask for healing. And says, if you do this, I know that she will live. So now Jesus decided to go with Jairus. A large group of people followed. They crowded around him. A woman there who had a sickness that made her bleed. It had lasted for 12 years. She suffered a great deal, even though she had gone to many doctors. She had spent all the money she had, but she was getting worse, not better. Then she heard about Jesus. She came up behind him in the crowd and touched his clothes. She thought, I just need to touch his clothes. Then I will be healed. We see two different people in this. We see Jairus and we see a woman that we don't even know her name. We see the synagogue leader, Jairus, respected leader in the community, someone, you know, the local pastor or the local kind of community leader in those days. I mean, synagogue leader, you're not quite a priest, but you're just below that. You're a respected person that everyone saw. This guy's coming to Jesus with boldness. And we see this woman who's suffering, having a medical condition. She's essentially menstruating for 12 years straight, which is a long time. And she's not physically, only physically suffering, she's financially suffering. Anyone have like a chronic disease and know how much that weighs on your finances? And not only that, the more and more you try, the worse and worse and worse it gets. We also know something about her from the context of what we read. I've heard it said, and I like to say that the Bible was written for us, but not to us. You know what I mean by that? So when we read the Bible, it's written for us that we need, you know, use it for teaching. But it wasn't written, we weren't like the audience. Like the audience was a specific people 2,000 years ago. So the more we understand the context, really helps us understand things better. For any first century Jewish person reading this, would also know something else she's suffering with. Under the Old Testament laws, if you have a someone who is bleeding continuously, you're considered ceremonially unclean. And what that means is that you would have to live apart from everyone else who's a part of the community. And you would, in normal situations, if you were ceremonially unclean, let's say if you know somebody died, a family member of mine died, and I touched a dead body, I would then have to go and just be apart. It was a way of just keeping the holy things holy and not bringing together kind of certain things and having certain rules in place. Well, unfortunately, if a woman is bleeding, she isn't clean until she stops and goes through a purity ritual. She had no opportunity to be clean again. So for 12 years, she's cut off from her community. She can't go to the temple to worship. In fact, if she even is in close proximity to or touches somebody else, they become unclean, and that person is cut off from worship. So we know that she's not just sick, not just poor, not just in pain, but she is cut off from experiencing the same worship and community that everyone else is. How devastating is that? This isn't just a medical condition. This is now her identity. She is this person. She is cut off and she is on the outside. And has tried desperately to get into community and desperately to get to the point where she's no longer in pain and no longer financially struggling. Even the way she approaches Jesus really tells us something about her. We saw Jaris, community leader, very bold in front of every single person, come straight to Jesus and ask. You'll notice that this unnamed woman, how does she come? She kind of goes incognito mode, because remember, anyone she touches becomes ceremonially unclean. So she kind of goes and says, I don't even, I'm not even going to ask Jesus. I'm just going to get close enough just to touch the edge of his cloak. I think her suffering is unfortunately a good picture for us of what it is like when we are suffering. Many of us know through suffering and pain what it is like to carry something with you chronically. Pain, a diagnosis, anxiety, depression, something that causes discord between you and your community. Something that makes you want to isolate. Or even if you don't want to, something that isolates you. A family wound, grief, something you prayed for and never received. And it's hard when we deal with that. I mean, I can imagine this woman, like 12 years. Whenever we suffer with something for a long time and we're asking for healing, at the very beginning, things are different than after you've had it for a while. You know what I mean by that? Like when something happens at the very beginning, you start, you have your community. If you're part of our church, right, we'll get you on a meal train. And then after about six months, people just begin to treat you normally again. And you are still carrying this wound or carrying something that other people we simply forget about. I don't think it's done purposefully. It's just, we just forget what people go through. I can imagine this unnamed woman, like, it's like, oh, whatever, what happened to her? Remember, she was a she was around. Whatever happened, every day did that happen like whatever happened to that person that used to come to church, or whatever happened to that person not knowing what they're going through. Or we forget what they're going through. We, as other people move on, not because we're frustrated or angry, just because life keeps moving. I hear that all the time too from people from church, and it breaks my heart. People be like, I was struggling and no one reached out to me, or I stopped coming to church and I just didn't hear from anybody else. And I'm like, hey, I know it's like I'm really sorry that happened, but just know it we're all struggling with something. Unless you tell me what's going on, I don't know. And you can and and it's it's hard. We're all going through it. We can all do a better job of being more empathetic towards everyone else. Because I know the person who cuts me off on the highway is the worst person I've ever met. But I'll tell you what, if I started walking in their shoes, I think I'd understand them a little bit differently about why they do what they do. All of us need that a little bit more, but I also see her picture of suffering is also the way the pain spreads. Starts physically, then it moves to financially, then it moves to cutting off of community. Isn't the way that the pain spreads too? Like for me, whenever I'm sick or hurt or anything, the worst part isn't the pain, it's the emotional damage that it takes on me. And I'm extra sensitive to that. Shut up.

unknown 17:43

Okay, you're not alone.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

I'll tell you, man, my my when I am sick, like I am the most depressed person you've ever meet in your life. Doesn't have to take much to even just take me down. It just affects, it affects all of us, right? Financially, emotionally, spiritually. Like that was something I had to learn, like preaching every single week. Like, what do you do when you're sick? And I don't feel like preparing anything because it's because life is horrible and miserable. You gotta figure it out. Like the issue is that as we begin in our lives, you know, what something that maybe started out as grief can begin to turn and spread into anger, turn into numbness. What maybe starts as pain and wounding turns into isolation, turns into financial, whatever it is. This we know this woman had stopped her ability to worship Yahweh, her ability to be part of the Jewish festivals and part of the taking practice and what was going on. And this had become her whole life. And I imagine she's probably not only wondering, can my body become healed again, but can I ever be clean again? Will I ever be accepted again? Will I ever be welcome? Can I ever be known by anything else than this thing? And after a while, that sickness can become your name. We don't know her name. We know what she struggled with. I can have enough. So Mark says that when she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him and just thought in the crowd. If only I'd just touch his cloak. She didn't come with the boldness that Jaris did. Just enough. And let's keep reading. Mark 5.29 here, what happened? It says right away, as soon as she touched his cloak, right away her bleeding stopped. She felt in her body that her suffering was over. When she touched Jesus, Jesus did not become unclean. She became clean. His healing and power made her whole. Immediately it stopped. Right away it stopped. And she felt immediately that healing. 12 years, you can imagine what it would feel like in that moment if somebody had broken in the moment. 12 years of suffering, of doctors, 12 years of it getting worse. Now I can be part of my community again. I can go to a priest and I can go and be part. Sometimes when we read, an amazing thing is that God does heal immediately. For this one, it took 12 years. And sometimes when people pray, we see something change right there. I have prayed for people and I have seen people get prayed for who have a physical condition, who are healed immediately and then never struggle again. I've seen it. Sometimes by someone who is bound by fear or addiction or something, has an immediate touch and it is different. And we need to make sure that we make room for that. We should be willing to pray for that. We have, Gina mentioned it on uh during the announcements. We have a prayer line. And I'll tell you what, we get prayer. I would say about half of the prayers we get are from our people, half of them are from people we've never heard of before. Pray for every single one of them, and we believe for healing for every single one of them. I'm part of a pastor's group that get together, that we text each other and meet once a week for prayer, and we get together, we pray for things. They're praying for you guys. We've been praying for the setup and the teardown every week. They've praying for our new thing and that our church experiences. We have pastors in the community praying for us, and I'm praying for everyone else. We believe that prayer matters. We should make room. Just because We should not lower our expectations just because sometimes it doesn't work out the way we want. But we're about ready to get to my favorite part of this story here. This favorite part that we read actually isn't this miracle of the physical healing. It's there, it's important. But it's not the end of it. And I don't think that that's the important part of the story. I don't think that this is the important thing that we should take from this encounter with Jesus. So we'll read it here, Mark 5.30. So he touched, she touched his cloak, and immediately she was healed. And it says, Once Jesus knew that the power had gone out from him, or at once Jesus knew that power had gone out from him, he turned around in the crowd and asked, Who touched my clothes? And I love the like disciples' response, super sarcastic as they would have to be. It's like, you see the people, they're cracking against you, and still you ask who touched me? Like, this is full of Jesus, like rocks that you think of like the paparazzi photos where the people are going, and then they're like, What are you talking about, Jesus? Like, you are being like throbbed with people. Like, what kind of question is that? But Jesus kept looking around. He's like, No, this is important. He wanted to see who had touched him. Then the woman came and fell at his feet. She knew what had happened to her. She was shaking with fear, but she told him the whole truth. How much, as a side note, would our lives be better if we just simply told Jesus the whole truth? He said to her, Dear woman, your faith has healed you. Go in peace. You are free from your suffering. The only thing Jesus wanted to do was heal her body. The story could end right there, right? She touches his cloak, she is healed, and she disappears into the crowd. But Jesus doesn't do that. He didn't heal her the way that she wanted to be healed, like incognito, just off on the sides. He healed her in a much different way, in a public way. She spent 12 years trying not to be noticed. But in the moment, Jesus saw something else that she needed, that she needed to be noticed. She's terrified now, thinking that she's in trouble, right? This word, even as it says here, when it says, and once Jesus knew that power, there's this word there in the Greek dunamis, which is kind of the similar uh congotation we get the word dynamite from. Dunamis, dynamite, like this power. It's you have a different type of power. Like a police officer has power, but they don't have dunamis power. They have like the authority power. Dunamis is like the Hulk stopping a car, right? The Hulk doesn't have authority, but if the Hulk were to stop a car, it's done by like power. You know what I mean? It's this miraculous power that left. And in the moment here, he responds with the most tender words in the whole passage. Actually, here, it says dear woman, the Greek word that he actually calls her is daughter. He looks at her and he calls her daughter. The only time in the entire gospels that Jesus calls somebody daughter. We now know what her name is. Jesus gave her the name daughter. In the middle of this identity crisis, he sees something in her deeper than her illness, deeper than her shame, deeper than her being cut off. He doesn't just say, You are healed and I have healed you. He gives her an identity. The best identity you could have. To be a daughter of Jesus. Jesus doesn't just heal her body, he restores her belonging. She came to Jesus hoping that she would be healed without notice, but Jesus loved her enough to do more than what she asked for, and different than what she asked for. Because Jesus knew something that she needed to be seen and she needed to have something else healed, deeper than the physical problem. I think this is what all of us need to hear. Because I know we come to Jesus with a lot of different things. I have quite a laundry list of the things I pray and ask to Jesus for. But you know what? I'll be honest. I really hope that Jesus gives me the things that I don't even know that I need. Many times we come to Jesus asking for one thing and he gives us something else that we didn't ask for, but that's the thing we really need. I always come to Jesus asking him to the amount of times I come to Jesus asking him to fix a circumstance of mine is a lie. Fisk this circumstance. As if the circumstance, if that were to go away, I would become better. I will until the next circumstance happens. The problem is I'm still me. Right? This is what right here healing looks like in the kingdom of God. It's not only the removal of symptoms, it's the restoration of something else that you had lost. The restoration of dignity, the restoration from shame. It's being called by a new name that you didn't even think you were worthy of. And given this encounter, I find it fascinating that Jesus even says here, he says, daughter, your faith has healed you. And I think that this is something that is true, but we also need to be careful of the application of this. Because it can misunderstood. But Jesus isn't saying, it's like, hey, you've had such impressive faith that I've chosen to heal you. We know the power came from Jesus. What her faith was, what she did was just reaching out and touching the edge of his cloak that was here. And faith, I think sometimes that we in our trying to explain away why things don't always happen the way they happen, or why sometimes somebody else gets what it seems like they want, but we don't get what we want, we can kind of come up with these things, and sometimes it's almost like faith can be something of like controlling God. Like, okay, great, if you have more of it, you kind of can put the cosmic handcuffs on God and make him do things for you that he wouldn't do for other people. I actually don't even like the term faith, which as a pastor, probably not something that you should say. Because it has taken on this extra meaning that sometimes can be hard to explain. When you boil down what the word faith is to its simplest, the word is trust. I think that trust is a much better picture of what faith actually is. In the Bible, if I have like a wallet here, and if you know, I've got some cash and I've got all my things. Anyone ever lose a wallet? How hard it is, right? You know what I mean? If I give this to you, I'm gonna give it to you, if I give it to you, right, I'm entrusting it to her, right? It's like, okay, you're a trustworthy person. I trust you and I entrust it. If I were to use the Greek term for entrusting someone with something, it's enfaithing. Pistis is the word for faith. You are having faith, but you're trusting and putting your faith in someone. So literally, like I enfaced it to you. If I'm lifting something, we have this TV that we actually have here that is stinking heavy. If I I was lifting it with Andrew earlier, right? I am faithing that he will not drop it on my foot. All right, give me my wallet before I forget. I faith you, but just a bit. I like this idea of trust because there are certainly levels of trust that you have for people, right? But what I love about this word trust is that Jesus is saying, right, the trust that you've had in me is has what has actually healed you. And I'll tell you what, sometimes trust looks strong and confident. I think of Jairus, which by the way, his daughter did get healed. I think of Jairus, whose trust was bold, and he wasn't afraid to get up in Jesus' face and ask him for what he wanted. But you know what also looks like trust? The person who is trembling with fear, who just said, I'm just I'm not even worthy to look Jesus in the face and ask for this. I'm just gonna just try to grab the edge of his cloak. That's also trust. That's also faith. That's helpful for me because many times I feel like faith has to be so fearless. That if somehow I'm afraid in my faith to God or I have fear or trepidation, that somehow God won't listen to that prayer as much as somebody's else. I'm thankful that even in the middle of trembling and shaking and shame, and I'm just gonna sneak and just grab the last little bit, that Jesus looks at that and still says, it's because of that trust that you had, that's enough that I can work through that and heal you. It doesn't mean you can't come, it simply means that we give Jesus just enough to work with us. So we read this story, an amazing encounter with Jesus, where you had an immediate healing that happened. In this case, there was a greater healing that she needed outside of this, but we also saw her physical issue get healed. But what do we do with this tension that I mentioned at the very beginning, right? The tension about how we do believe that Jesus heals. But what do we do when we're not seeing the healing that we prayed for? And I tried, man, I would try to come up with like a line for this. Sometimes like an, you know, sometimes you get like that Instagram post or that thing you can crochet in a pillow that's like, oh, that's so good. You know what I mean? But this tension is not something that can be easily fixed with like a line or a quote. The Bible gives us real stories of healing, and we need to believe them, we need to preach them, we should pray for them. But the Bible also shows us of this oddness between that the kingdom of God is here, but yet there is still more to come down the road in the future. It's this tension that we live in. That's we're gonna be talking about this the very next thing next week. We're talking about Jesus' healer next week, spoiler alert, it's Jesus' coming king. That one day there will be a fullness to the healing. We're now, but we're not yet. But we live in bodies that get sick and we live in a world that is dark and we groan for the day that it's not there. I believe that healing comes instantly, we should contend for that. But if it doesn't happen and healing comes a different way, through doctors, therapists, medicine, through time, through community. Sometimes even the healing that we're asking for reveals something else deeper. You go to therapy for one thing and you go to prayer for one thing, and after a while you're like, oh, I didn't know I needed help with that. But also, the Bible tells us that there are certain things that we just simply do not understand. And I think some of it comes like we don't have a great theology for suffering. Like you might ask people, like, theology for like, all right, what do you believe about Jesus and the Trinity and the end times and like all this other theology? But if you ask somebody, like, what is your theology on suffering? It gets uncomfortable. And we don't always do a great job of what that is. I think sometimes in our theology of suffering, we have to like, well, if God loves us, then I shouldn't suffer. God loves us. The Bible doesn't tell us or promise us that if we follow Jesus, we won't suffer. Instead, it's something else that is far more unique is that Jesus will meet us in the midst of that suffering. That he will enter the suffering, and he has entered into the suffering. Rather than pulling us out, he jumped in. Paul says this verse in 1 Corinthians 13. It says, Right now we see things only in part. It's actually another biblical language, like a nerd thing. He actually says, Right now we see things as if looking into a mirror. Well, nowadays our mirrors are made of glass, and a mirror is actually really great, right? You can look into a mirror if you go to the bathroom, you can see things very well. In those days, they had a polished thing of metal. If you look in the back where Bob is, everyone back, you know, see how you can kind of see a little bit of reflection in that metal back there, right? That's what mirrors were in those days. They were like dark. You can see yourself, and you can see if you had a big thing of hair, your beard was a different way, but you couldn't see things specifically there. You're like, I see something in front of me, and it's good enough. So it's interesting to see how language changes. Right now, life is like looking into a mirror. But that wouldn't work today because our mirrors are great. So he's saying that right now it's like a dim, we translate this as like a dimly lit mirror or like a dark mirror or something. But the point is this, and you can imagine walk up to that and try to see it. Right now we can see things in part. We can see certain things that we know. Jesus is loving and compassionate, God is just, but yet there are things that we just simply don't get yet. The Bible doesn't always give me the answers that I want. I think it gives us the answers that we need. The Bible doesn't always give us the answers we want because I really want to know, like, why? Why don't we know that? Why does Paul, who is like written the third of the New Testament, not understand everything? Right? Isn't that odd? That like even Paul, like the apostle, he is saying, Yeah, I don't get it. There are things that he doesn't, he can't answer, and somehow we expect that we will have all the answers. We know that the kingdom is coming to fullness, but there's part of it that we're like, I just don't get it. As far as your healing and your pain and stuff, there's things that we I just don't get. I don't get why I prayed and you didn't immediately get healed, or I didn't immediately get healed, or we have to work through it. We also see Paul again as he as he goes. He knows what it's like to ask God for something. It says somewhere else that there is uh something that's afflicting him. Most people think it's uh some type of uh degenerative illness or disease or something. He calls it a thorn in the flesh, like a great again, picture of like suffering, you know, anyone else? He says he prayed over and over and over again, God, heal me of this. This is somebody who has who the Bible says has healed other people. He Paul literally like raised a dead somebody in the New Testament, and yet for whatever reason, like he's not healed. And he's like, and he's pleading with God, like, God, what is up? And God goes to them, he says, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness. So, even here for Paul doesn't get the healing that he wants when he wants it. Because for Paul, there was something that God saw in his affliction that God was doing something greater inside of Paul's heart through his illness and through his suffering. Because there was something else that God wanted to work out. There was something deeper in Paul's heart that needed to be worked on. And God said, No, because if I do this for you, you're not gonna be the person I want you to be. And that's so hard. As parents, many times we make, ask my kids, right? Gunner, many times, D we make decisions that don't seem to make sense in the moment. Decisions that are made. You remember growing up, and there are times in your life where your parents said no to something, and you're like, this is so unfair and makes no sense. And all of a sudden you become a parent, and you're like, oh, I'm so thankful they told me no. I wanted to sleep over in that person's house. Thank you for saying no. Whatever it is. Thank you for not letting me go to that concert when I was 11 with that 30-year-old or whatever it was, whatever it is, right? There are things as parents that we know that when you're in that moment, you're like, you just don't understand, you don't get it. And I don't mean to make trite or light of chronic illness, right? Because I can also understand if you're dealing with something that's really hard and you're saying, so you're telling me that somehow God says that it's better that I suffer here, or it's better that this horrible thing that happened to me that I just have no relief from, that's better that I stay here. And it could be it's really hard. And I hope you hear the heart of what I'm saying, that I believe in a good God, and we believe in a good God. But what we're saying is that for God, there are some things that we know, but we don't quite know. And the important thing for us is in the middle of that space to ask that question, okay, God, what is it that you're trying to do? That's what Paul did. Rather than God just saying, nope, not gonna heal you, he gave them the reason why. Sometimes asking for that, bringing that question to God and say, okay, so what is through this healing that's not happening that you're wanting to do in me? I want to take space for us. Pat, if you can can you come up. I want to take a moment and to make space for this. So I'm gonna actually ask that we do this and pray together. So in a moment, I'm gonna ask people to actually stand up and to get in groups of like three or four. This is the extrovert's dream and the introvert's nightmare. I get it. I get it. But I also believe in the power of prayer. And I want us to circle up and to pray for healing. It could be something that you're physically going through, emotionally going through, spiritually going through. And if it's nothing or you don't think that you have anything, I'm sure you know somebody who's who is suffering or is struggling and can pray. We're simply gonna pray, we're not gonna spend a couple of minutes and asking for prayer. I just I can't in a good conscious like talk about prayer and not have a time where we can respond and actually pray for each other. If we believe that it actually works, we believe that it actually makes a difference. So let's go ahead and stand right now as we begin to move. I'll start us off in prayer, then I'll end us in prayer too. So, Lord, I just pray right now as we are about ready to enter into this holy space, I pray that you would just make the space red very thin. That you would make the space between the real world and the spiritual world, or maybe a better way of saying it, the world that we see and the world we don't see very thin in this place and make us aware of your presence. And I just pray as we spend just a bit of time praying that we would shoot for the moon, that we would have that trust, that I pray that there would be people who have been suffering for 12 years or longer, that we would have an amazing thing happen at this time. Let's go ahead and circle up.

SPEAKER_01 43:37

There's nothing worth more. The class Nothing can compare. Have tasted and seen of the sweetest of loves where my heart becomes free and my shame is your present Holy Spirit. You are welcome here. Come flood this place and feel the endless fear. Your glory God is what a hearts long for to be overcome by your presence Your presence Let us become overwhelm of your presence. Let us experience the glory of your goodness. Let us become overware of your presence. Let us experience the glory of your goodness. Let us become moreware of your presence. Let us experience the glory of your goodness. Let us become overware of your presence. Let us experience the glory of your goodness. Your presence, Holy Spirit, you are welcome here. Comfort this place and fear thee and must fear your glory, God is what a heart long for to be overcome by your presence. Your presence Let us become more aware of your presence. The glory of your goodness. Let us become more aware of your presence. Let us experience the glory of your goodness. Let us become overware of your presence. Let us experience the glory of your goodness. Come from this place and feel the street. Your glory God is water to be overcome by your presence for your presence name is for name is healing, your name is life. So bring every strong hole you send through the shadows, but like God Your name is Power, your name is Heleni, your name is Len. So break every straw in shadow the shadows Your name is Pablo, your name is he land, your name is love Shine through the shadows unlike a speech. I speak Jesus. I speak Jesus, I speak Jesus. I speak Jesus. I speak Jesus. I speak Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 51:04

And just pray, Lord, that you will heal us in the way you want us to heal us. Help our emotions and help our anxieties around this topic. But also I pray that our trust for you would increase.