Too Crook For Too Long
Sermon for CLC Nambucca Heads Sunday 20th March 2005 PM
“Too Crook for Too Long”
Subject: Jesus
Theme: Jesus heals the chronically ill
Subject: Do we really believe that Jesus heals the chronically ill?
Scriptures: Luke 13: 10-17; Matthew17:14-21
Point 1 Jesus heals the hard ones
Point 2 Jesus heals the hard ones in the church
Point 3 Jesus shows how to heal the hard ones
Conclusion: He healed them without hesitation. It’s not too hard for Him at all
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Introduction:
Politicians of every persuasion, leaders in every area of Government and education are constantly telling us that we need to be a tolerant society. Now that all sounds well and good; it even sounds vaguely Christian; but I believe that sometimes as Christians we tolerate things that God has told us not only not to tolerate but to go all out to destroy them as works of the enemy straight from the pit of hell. One of these is in particular that we are going to look at tonight is chronic or long term illness & disability.
There are two basic classes of illness; the first is the acute illness. This is a short term thing like the flu or a fever, a gastric wog and so forth.
The second type, and often the most difficult to deal with, are the Chronic or long term illnesses and disabilities. It has been recognised in this church, in fact in many churches that there are a relatively high proportion of chronically ill members of the congregation.
By chronically ill I mean that they have been ill for a long time and the condition does not seem to respond all that well to medication, in fact, often a large proportion of the family budget is consumed just to manage it. Sadly such people often gradually loose contact with friends and family who simply do not understand the condition. Such people are often very lonely.
The title of tonight’s message then is “Too Crook for Too Long”
For some reason in fact for many reasons these unfortunate people, I am one of them, so is Sharon, live their Christian lives battling conditions that just don’t seem to respond to prayer and the only option seems to be a lifelong dependence on medication to at least keep the condition under some kind of control, to maintain some kind of quality of life. This is not what Jesus meant when He said
John 10:10 (NKJV)
10 “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.
The Amplified Bible says it this way
“The thief comes only in order that he may steal and may kill and may destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance- to the full, till it overflows.”
Point 1 Jesus heals the hard ones
I have been through every verse of the New Testament looking at the healing ministry of Jesus. Do you know there is only one detailed account of Jesus healing an acute condition in the whole New Testament?
All four gospels record the account of Jesus visiting Peter’s house and finding Peter’s mother in law ill with a fever reached out and touched her and instantly healed her. There are many references to Jesus healing crowds of sick and diseased people but the detailed accounts of the healing miracles of Jesus, with that one exception, all refer to chronic and terminal illness or disability.
Let’s just try and list a few of them to give you the idea, let’s take a quick flip through Mark’s Gospel:
Ø Mark 1; Jesus heals the man with the unclean spirit(Mk1:23-28); then the leper (Mk1:40-45);
Ø Mark 2; Jesus heals the paralytic (Mk2:1-12);
Ø Mark 3: Jesus heals the man with the withered hand (Mk3:1-5);
Ø Mark 5: Jesus heals the demon possessed man(Mk5:1-20); the leader’s daughter is restored to life (Mk5:35-43); the woman with the issue of blood is instantly healed (Mk5:25-34).
Ø Mark 7: Jesus heals a deaf mute (Mk7:31-37)
Ø Mark 8: Jesus heals a blind man (Mk8:22-26)
Ø Mark 9: Jesus heals the epileptic boy (Mk9:14-29)
Ø Mark 10: Jesus heals Blind Bartimaeus (Mk10:46-42)
There has to be a message in that somewhere doesn’t there. Do you think there is a reason God recorded in precise details all those accounts of healing miracles that were in fact what we would regard today as the too hard basket of the chronically ill. Does it make you want to have another good look at the healing ministry of Jesus? It should do. Remember Mark is the shortest gospel there are three more. Can you feel faith starting to rise up even as you recall these great healings? We haven’t even started reading Scripture yet.
Point 2 Jesus heals the hard ones in the church
Before we look at our main scripture for this evening we need to get it very clear in our heads that it has always been God’s desire that His people walk in divine health. It is not a New Testament thing. It has always been there in the Old Testament as well. Let’s quickly look at just two of the dozens of healing scriptures in the Old Testament just to settle the matter. I don’t want you to think that I am messing with your heads.
Exodus 15:26 (NKJV)
26 and said, “If you diligently heed the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His sight, give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have brought on the Egyptians. For I am the Lord who heals you.”
People that’s an ‘I AM’ statement it is the very name of God that He Heals. It is also a covenant statement. God is committing Himself to heal in a “If you will I will” covenant statement.
Psalm 103:1-5 (NKJV)
1 A Psalm of David. Bless the Lord, O my soul; And all that is within me, bless His holy name!
2 Bless the Lord, O my soul, And forget not all His benefits:
3 Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases,
4 Who redeems your life from destruction, Who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies,
5 Who satisfies your mouth with good things, So that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
Now let’s look at what happened when Jesus interrupted a meeting in the local synagogue on the Sabbath to heal someone. I am going to read through it quickly but I want you to look at what is going on.
Luke 13:10-17 (NKJV)
10 Now He was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath.
11 And behold, there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bent over and could in no way raise herself up.
12 But when Jesus saw her, He called her to Him and said to her, “Woman, you are loosed from your infirmity.”
13 And He laid His hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God.
14 But the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath; and he said to the crowd, “There are six days on which men ought to work; therefore come and be healed on them, and not on the Sabbath day.”
15 The Lord then answered him and said, “Hypocrite! Does not each one of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or donkey from the stall, and lead it away to water it?
16 “So ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound—think of it—for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath?”
17 And when He said these things, all His adversaries were put to shame; and all the multitude rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by Him.
Some quick points:
Ø The first word is NOW. That’s a very important word if you want to get healed isn’t it. It means right here, right now. Not when you die and go to heaven.
Ø It was a normal Sabbath meeting. In our culture this would have been a Sunday morning service. The woman was listening to the word of God spoken by the Son of God, the Living Word Himself. Do you think her faith was rising? She had put herself in a position to receive from God.
Ø Jesus was teaching at the time. He interrupted the meeting to heal the woman as soon as he saw her, he called her to himself. She had to get close to Jesus. He called her and despite what her body was telling her she responded and came to Jesus. The scripture doesn’t tell us if she had any assistance from family or friends.
Ø She had been crippled for 18 years and no one in her assembly understood the will of God for her. We have read the same scriptures that they had available. What was the problem? Maybe it was too hard. Maybe they had tried the rituals but there faith wasn’t in it. It was too hard for too long.
Ø In the end once the will, the power and the love of God had been demonstrated; in spite of the protests of the religious leadership, the crowd rejoiced with her.
I was in the same position as that leader once. Don’t be too hard on him. I can pretty much guarantee there are many of us in this assembly who don’t know what to do about chronic illness and put it in the too hard basket. We go through the motions but after a while is there really any faith in it. A man I knew in a local church near here had attended a series of healing meetings. He had a degenerative condition in his spine and the pain was so severe that it had given him a heart attack. The surgeons had put a steel rod attached to his spine to keep his back rigid to prevent any further deterioration. He could not lie down or even sit comfortably. At the end of the last meeting for the week a couple of his friends called the preacher over and said what can you do for him? I watched from a distance of maybe ten feet as the preacher took the back brace off the man, held his head and started to move it, rotating it every way that he could. In a few moments the man’s neck started to free up. He was then asked to touch his toes. You can’t do that with a steel rod up your back can you? The man started to bend over. I was stunned by what I was seeing. I knew this man, I was a man of faith, but, I knew that this was too hard. He had been incurable for years. Within 20 minutes the man touched his toes. By the end of the week he was withdrawing from morphine. He remains totally healed to this day. I never found out what happened to the steel rod.
At this point in the story I went into shock. Involuntary muscle spasms, twitches, my whole body refused to accept what I had just seen and in a moment I realised that I was just like that ruler in the Synagogue. I was full of unbelief. I had assisted at many of those meetings up close to the action. But deep inside me was a core of unbelief. It took someone else’s miracle to show me, but it was there. Unbelief remains one of the biggest problems in the church today. Those twitchy things lasted for more than two days.
What can we do to address the matter? Wherever Jesus found unbelief He taught. He taught until faith was raised enough to conquer the unbelief. Go to all the meetings you can. Let the word of God build faith in you. Get close to Jesus do what He says and receive your healing.
Point 3 Jesus shows how to heal the hard ones
It would not be fair for God to tell us to heal the sick if he didn’t show us how, would it? It would be unjust, and God is not unjust. You may recall that as Jesus’ ministry began to grow he appointed the 12 to train up as apostles. He gave them power to heal and deliver and sent them out ahead of Him to prepare the local communities to receive Jesus when He passed through their area. It worked for a while and then one day they came upon a chronic condition. A little boy was stricken with epilepsy and was hurting himself when the seizures hit. Let’s look at the passage because there is encouragement for us there.
Matthew 17:14-21 (NKJV)
14 And when they had come to the multitude, a man came to Him, kneeling down to Him and saying,
15 “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and suffers severely; for he often falls into the fire and often into the water.
16 “So I brought him to Your disciples, but they could not cure him.”
17 Then Jesus answered and said, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you? Bring him here to Me.”
18 And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him; and the child was cured from that very hour.
19 Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, “Why could we not cast it out?”
20 So Jesus said to them, “Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.
21 “However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting.”
Just because we minister to someone and nothing seems to happen. That does not mean that it is not God’s will to heal. It is always God’s will to heal. Let me read the same passage from the Message and you will immediately see the point of the scripture.
Read Matt 17: 19-21 in the Message
We need to get serious with God if we want to see healing for the chronically ill. Don’t expect the sick ones to do it all on their own. They have been too crook for too long. It would be nice if a group of people got together and agreed to pray and fast for one individual at a time. Commit to this person until they receive their healing; then move on to the next.
I heard a great remark on this at lunchtime. Sharon had Vision radio on and Pastor Joe Armstrong said this;
“If there is something you want that you currently do not have then you are going to have to do something you are not currently doing to get it.”
Those disciples were called and trained and anointed by Jesus Himself to heal the sick. So are we. So what did they have to start doing to get the results they were looking for? Answer; fast and pray.
Conclusion: He healed them without hesitation. It’s not too hard for Him at all
Ø We have seen how all but one of the healing miracles recorded in the bible related to chronic conditions. Long term conditions.
Ø We saw people got close to Jesus, heard His word, responded and received their healing.
Ø We saw how Jesus responded immediately with compassion and power to heal the sick right there on the spot, often outside but also in meetings
Ø We saw how Jesus explained to the disciples how to deal with the hard ones and then showed them how to do it.
That same Jesus is here now. When we read and preach on the scriptures. When we talk about Him He turns up and gets involved. Will you respond to Him this evening? Will you look at yourself and say ‘I need to do some things that I’m just not doing if I am to see the results that I need’. Will you commit to praying for those sick ones amongst us who seem to struggle from one medical crisis to the next.
Review
Point 1 Jesus heals the hard ones, immediately.
Point 2 Jesus heals the hard ones in the church, and on the spot
Point 3 Jesus shows how to heal the hard ones. He gave us the keys.
Conclusion: He healed them without hesitation. This same Jesus is within each one of us by His Spirit and we have seen it’s not too hard for Him at all.