Grateful for Healing

Scripture: Luke 17:11-19

Luke 17:11–19 NIV

11 Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance 13 and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” 14 When he saw them, he said, “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were cleansed. 15 One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. 16 He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan. 17 Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? 18 Has no one returned to give praise to God except this foreigner?” 19 Then he said to him, “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”

10/12/2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Mission Moment

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 2: Mission Moment

Berit sharing about IOP

Opening Prayer:

In your love, O God of hosts,

your people find healing.

Grant that the pains of our journey may not obscure

the presence of Christ among us,

but that we may always give thanks for your healing power

as we travel on the way to your kingdom.

We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Grateful for Healing

Healing

Our prayer team gathers every Monday evening to pray over the prayer requests and concerns of our church family. They have been meeting for years, and the greatest number of prayer requests, by far, are related to healing. That is probably not a surprise to you, because the greatest number of requests made on Sunday mornings are related to healing, most often physical healing specifically. Our church is not unusual in that regard. Requests for physical healing far outnumber most other prayer requests in every church I have ever served, attended, heard about, or read about. This is not just in our culture today, but throughout the world and throughout history.

It is not that praying for other things is bad or even less important than physical healing. It is simply our human nature to focus on the visible needs of our physical bodies. When those things go wrong, everything else gets pushed aside in favor of physical healing and protection. We may even begin to think that God only has time for one request, and those seem to be the most important things we ask for His help with. We might be right.

In the gospel accounts, hundreds, if not thousands, of people came to Jesus asking for healing. I can only recall one story where a disciple came to Jesus with a question about taxes. I do not know of any passages where people ask Jesus for relationship advice. It makes me wonder if we have developed this way naturally, or if the people of God have been trained over the centuries to be fixated on healing. Either way, here we are. We need it, and God provides it in His ways and in His time. His ways and His timing are not the same for every person who comes to Him with a need for healing.

It is not wrong to pray for physical healing. But when that becomes the only kind of healing we seek, we risk missing the deeper restoration Jesus offers. Why do you think that is? Why do we find it easier to pray for a broken leg than a broken heart, or for peace in our souls?

Just like those ten lepers who cried out to Jesus, people today still come to Him first and foremost for healing. Yet Jesus uses healing, our need for it, and His provision of it for purposes deeper than we often see at first. Healing draws us to God’s power, but gratitude draws us into His presence. Faithful disciples recognize the purpose and power of healing in their lives by expressing gratitude.

Misery Loves Company

To understand the power and purpose of healing, we must first understand what it means to be unwell. Being unwell is a general term that encompasses being sick or injured. It can apply to mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical ailments. Sometimes, we like to lump all of those together, but we must be careful not to confuse or overspiritualize what may simply be a physical problem. Sometimes they are connected and sometimes they are not, and we cannot always tell what those connections are.

The Scripture provides examples of various forms of healing offered for different types of ailments. The Apostle Paul had no problem casting a demon out of a fortune-telling girl in Philippi, yet he later advised his disciple Timothy to drink a little wine to help with his stomach problem. He did not even tell Timothy to pray about it. And it is not just Paul. We see this in Jesus Himself, as our Scripture today shows.

One of the things we all face when we are unwell is a sense of separateness that often grows into isolation. When we are healthy, whole, happy, and having a good day, we can lose ourselves in a crowd, a community, a family, or a team. We can pour our tremendous amounts of energy and resources alongside others for a purpose greater than ourselves. At the end of the day, we will feel tired, and our muscles may ache a little, but while we are doing the work or playing the game, we will feel alive. We do not even have to be physically present with others to lose ourselves in that work. We just need a sense of purpose and direction. It is a beautiful thing, and God made us to be this way.

When that God-given flow is interrupted, we feel the loss deeply. It may only be for a moment here and there. Sometimes we know exactly what the problem is and can quickly remedy it. I think it is actually worse when we don't know what is wrong, but we have a strong sense that something is not right. Those interruptions hijack our work, disrupt our productive flow, and continue to draw our focus back to ourselves whether we want it to or not. Those internal interruptions often make us feel like we are missing out on the life we should be living.

To make matters worse, when we are unwell and it becomes visible to others, those around us often reinforce our self-focus. Out of the goodness of their hearts and best intentions, they want to see us better, for their sake and for ours as well. When one member of a family or a team is unwell, it affects everyone. Their care is genuine, but it can unintentionally push us further into isolation.

We see this very clearly in our Scripture today. Ten lepers were living with skin diseases that were sometimes contagious and sometimes not. To be safe, they were not allowed to live in town, shop in the marketplace, or be around healthy people until they were better. Some of them recovered, and others did not. The uncertainty of not knowing only made their suffering more difficult.

But misery loves company. Even if they could not live with their families, people with leprosy often banded together to help one another in ways that only they could understand. They shared the same struggles, the same fears, and the same hopes. That strange contradiction is important for us to consider when we think about the power of healing.

Being unwell pushes us into isolation, both by the expectations of the healthy society around us and by our own inward focus. When we are sick or hurting, we often do not want to be around everyone else, yet we also do not want to be completely alone. Misery loves company because we yearn for the presence of those who truly empathize with us, who have been there, or who are there now, dealing with their own struggles.

So these ten men found community together, a small but significant blessing. Even though they did not know if their condition would ever improve, they still longed to be well. And when Jesus passed by them at a distance, these ten men, who were not allowed to walk through the crowds and approach Him themselves, cried out to Him for mercy, for help, for healing.

Gratitude Beyond the Rules

Luke, the physician who wrote this Gospel, does something remarkable in this story. Seventeen chapters into his account of Jesus, he does not even pause to describe how the healing happened. He assumes that if we have read this far, we already know what Jesus can do. In response to their cry for mercy, Jesus simply tells the ten men to go and show themselves to the priests.

When people had skin diseases, they were not allowed in town, and certainly not near the temple, synagogues, or anyone considered holy until they were declared clean. Yet these ten men, in an act of faith, stood up and began walking toward town. Perhaps they, too, had heard enough about Jesus to assume that if He told them to go, healing would follow. Their obedience became the channel of their faith. Healing did not come before obedience, but through obedience.

Jesus does not always work that way. In many of the Gospel accounts, the healing of one person depends on the faith of another. The most striking example is Lazarus. Lazarus did not rise because of his own faith but because Jesus called him back to life. Yet there are other times when Jesus calls people to act, to believe with both their words and their steps. This is one of those moments.

These men, believing that Jesus could make them whole, began walking back toward the lives they had longed for. Luke, who often recorded stories of healing in great detail, moves quickly here. He gives no description of the moment itself but focuses instead on what happened afterward.

As they walked, one man realized that his body was already restored. He stopped, turned around, and ran back to Jesus, praising God with a loud voice. His joy could not be contained. Gratitude made him forget the rules. He was not supposed to approach anyone until a priest declared him clean, but joy overpowered regulation. I imagine the disciples and others in the crowd stepping back as this man, a leper only moments before, came running toward Jesus.

Jesus was not startled. He was pleased. He received that man’s praise with grace and then used the moment to teach. “Were not ten cleansed?” He asked. “Where are the other nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And then Jesus spoke the most important words of all: “Rise and go; your faith has made you well.”

Luke does not tell us what the healing looked like or how it felt. He wants us to see something greater. The one who returned was not only healed in body but made whole in spirit. The one who had been excluded in every possible way—a Samaritan, a foreigner, born in the wrong place, speaking with the wrong accent, worshiping in the wrong way—was the one who received the fullness of Jesus’ mercy. He was an outsider in every way, yet he was the one made right.

He had faith that Jesus could provide what he needed. As he discovered that Jesus could give even more than he had asked for, that faith grew like a seed planted in good soil. It burst forth in gratitude. This is what Jesus wanted His followers to see: when the power of God meets the faith of the unwell, true healing begins, and gratitude becomes its proof.

Living Into Your Healing

So, we will continue to pray for healing. And we will accompany those prayers for healing with offers of thanks and gratitude for the healing we have already received. Because we know that God heals in His time and in His way. And that does not always line up with our time and the way we desire our lives to be.

Good doctors and medicine are wonderful things. But they will be the first to tell you that there are no guarantees in this life. As followers of Jesus, we remember that He taught us to lay down our old lives, pick up our cross, and follow Him. He taught us to put Him first above all else, including our own personal health and safety.

So when we pray for healing or protection, we will not pray as people who are afraid of losing it. We will pray as faithful followers who recognize that the health and safety we experience are gifts from God. Gratitude turns those gifts into instruments of grace. We want to use them for Him, to be good stewards of those gifts.

In Philippians 4, the Apostle Paul wrote to the early church that he had found the secret to contentment. That man had experienced all kinds of illness and injury in his life, some that he healed from and others that lingered until the end. He had healed others as Jesus guided him and had experienced healing in miraculous ways himself. He had been in more situations than most of us ever will be.

Paul learned that healing and suffering both serve the same purpose: to draw us closer to Jesus. In his secret to contentment, he talked about taking every situation as it came, both the good and the bad, and offering them up to Jesus in service and gratitude. It did not matter whether it was physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. He said the secret was to offer it all to Jesus.

At the very beginning of his relationship with Christ, Jesus struck Paul blind. Perhaps at first, Paul thought that blindness was a punishment for persecuting Jesus and His followers. But after he was humbled, God sent Ananias to heal him and restore his sight. That story reminds us that healing is never an end in itself. When God restored Paul’s sight, it was not just to make him see again, but to send him out. His healing led him to his calling.

God told Ananias that Paul would take the gospel to the Gentiles and that he would do it through suffering. In other words, a poor, blind Paul was not well enough to get into enough trouble and really suffer for Jesus the way God intended. It is easy for us to say that all physical healing we experience in this life is temporary. It will not last, because it is not meant to. Our bodies, like our money, are gifts to be used for God in this life. They do not carry over into eternity. But I’m begging to believe that every kind of healing in this life is temporary, not just the physical kind. Even so, gratitude reminds us that eternal wholeness is coming.

So we pray for healing. We take care of the gifts God gives us to the best of our ability. And we thank Him for those gifts, for that healing, for the restoration we experience, because we know that gratitude moves us beyond merely wanting to have as much health and ability as possible for as long as possible, and it opens our eyes to see greater purpose in it.

We cannot pay God back for healing any more than we can pay Him back for saving our souls. But we can share that gift. We can put our good health, our good minds, and our good hearts to serving Him obediently as we follow Him faithfully. Gratitude is how we live into our healing. It turns what God has done for us into what God can do through us.

We do not know what kind of wonderful deeds those other nine lepers did with their lives, maybe even in Jesus’ name. But we know that the last leper, the foreigner, the Samaritan, came to Jesus in gratitude. Because Jesus healed the skin on his bones, he offered himself as a thank offering to God and poured himself out at Jesus’ feet in gratitude. In doing so, he made himself ready to be the faithful follower that Jesus calls us all to be.

Where are you praying for healing in your life today?

Where have you experienced healing in your life, and how have you offered that up to Jesus?

How is God using your experience of brokenness and His healing love to draw you closer to Him and allow you to serve and share that love with others in ways you would not otherwise be able to do?

Closing Prayer

Lord, we are grateful that you care about us. And you know the suffering we face, from the smallest scratch to the fiercest disease. And you will not waste a moment of it. We thank you for wanting to redeem our suffering. Bring us into a holy relationship with you. And restore us, piece by piece. Until we get to the day when we are truly changed, made whole, sanctified, and bowing our knees in your presence.

Lord, on that day, we want to look back on our broken lives and know that, no matter what we did right or wrong, we offered up those lives to you and lived them, following you to the best of our ability. Help us today to begin to receive the answer to that prayer. Heal us. Make us whole and right, and have your way in our lives as we offer them to you in gratitude. In Jesus' name, Amen.