(The following was used for an oral presentation that includedextemporaneous and personal remarks not intended for publication. This has not been edited for print.)
Rev. Lonnie A. Richardson
March 18, 2001
Thereare No Hopeless Situations
In Matters of Health
Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are anycheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have thempray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the lord will raisethem up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another,so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. (James5:13-16)
The subject this morning is hope in matters of health. What is its effect? Is there a healing role forspirituality? If so, what is the healing role of hope and how do we have hope in hope?
The contemporary study of medicine on this subject is growing. Harvard trained physician dr. Andrew Weilwrote an intriguing article in the January 2000 issue if self-healing on the increasing interest of spirituality in the healingarts. He wrote that in the mid-1990s, only three medical schools taught courses on religious and spiritual issues; today, morethan 60 offer such courses. Duke university has its own center of religious/spirituality and health, and the university ofMinnesota’s center for spirituality and healing just opened a mind body spirit clinic. The increasing interest from centers ofmedical education is for good reason. Consider the following:
Recent studies have linked religious involvement to lower blood pressure, better immunity, lower rates ofdepression, higher survival rates following cardiac surgery, and greater longevity.
One large study in the American journal of public health in June 1997 followed more than 5,000Californians for 28 years: those who attended religious services at least once a week has a 23 percent lower risk of dying duringthe study period than those who attended less frequently, even after the researchers controlled for lifestyle factors and socialsupport.
Just as there are no hopeless situations concerning human weakness or as we learned about last week, life’sdisappointments, there are no hopeless situations in matters of health! Any intelligent physician would be very slow to talk abouthopeless cases. The cases that were hopeless yesterday are not hopeless today at all. Some cases considered terminal generationsago today are simply cured -- just by medical science. And this does not take into account divine or unexplained healing. Ourdaughter Nastassia was very sick as in infant and then just got well. No one knew why. Of course, all healing is divine. The onlydifference is that part of it is the kind of divine healing that we understand and can cooperate with, and the other divinehealing is that which we do not understand.
Some have been marvelously healed. God does and can do such things. But we do know that some are notimmediately healed. Which forces one to ask, "why does god heal us some times and not other times?" "Are thosehealed "super-Christians"?" Or "do we sin and have no faith in our life?"
There are some things we must understand about God:
• God does not send us trouble.
• We will never understand everything.
• God always hears and answers when we pray.
• The worst thing that could possibly happen to us is to
What does James mean when he says, "is any among you sick...?" He is saying, we cannot have anycontact with the divine without being helped!
When you pray for healing, God answers in at least five ways, all of which declare there are no hopelesssituations in matters of health. God may say when you pray for healing:
I.
That's a nice way of saying god may let you die. And you say and cry, "that's not the kind ofhealing I want." But that may be the healing god gives us -- the miracle of death. Now we don't always practice and believewhat we say in theory about our understanding of death. In a few weeks we sing on Easter morning that Christ has risen from thegrave, and he has but we don't carry that into our understanding of life and death.
We say after a long illness "well, death finally conquered him." As though death was conqueror. Howcan death be a conqueror when Jesus Christ has conquered death? The individual has died but that does not mean they have beenconquered, with our focus on Christ, we are always victors and never victim and we are always conquerors in spite of the fact thatwe may leave this life to enter the larger life god has prepared for us.
Seminars teach us how to come to accept death, what the grief and death process is like, but not many of uslook upon it as some kind of triumph as Christ intended us to when he took the sting out of death and the grave in his marvelousresurrection so that death should not be something we fear.
Let me offer another way god might heal you, and you won't like this one much better.
II. God may say I’m going to give you the my grace is sufficient miracle.
That's the kind god gave to the apostle Paul. I.e. "thorn in the flesh." God said that his gracewas sufficient. God says, "my grace is sufficient for the suffering you are enduring! Wedon't like to get old and hurt. We will do anything to put off getting old. I.e. cosmetic, hair color, arch supports, plasticsurgery, oils "of Olay". We don't like to hurt. I.e. painless dentist, doctor, we say, "is it going to hurt?"We buy ouch-less bandages, and if r-o-l-a-i-d-s spell relief we take Rolaids.
The truth of the matter is that there will be times we can't keep from hurting. So what do we do? We offerour pain to God!
When God answers a prayer for healing with the sufficiency of god's grace to get you through, God does one oftwo things in this hurting situation if we allow it:
1. God will changethe situation.
Or
2. God will makeyou adequate for that situation. We would rather God change the situation but theadequacy of God is no joke.
That's what God does when god says "I hear you when you pray for healing, it’s not hopeless, I’mgoing to let my grace be sufficient for you.
Another miracle he may give you when you pray for healing: God may say:
III. I hear you when you pray,I’m going to lead you to a remedy.
Medicine and pills may be from the goodness of god. Everygood thing that comes to us in life is ultimately from god. If medicine, surgery, seeing a psychiatrist, a pastor, pharmacist,then thank god for it, it is god's particular way of healing you. I say pastor because sometimes what we need, in order to behealed, is simply to understand the forgiveness of god! I believe in medicine even when some die.
IV. Another way in which we maybe healed is by natural healing.
We are made to get better. The body is a wellness machine. We are made to get well when we work at beinghealthy. I am reminded of the story about the 5th grade teacher in the state of Washington finished a unit on the body and gave aquiz over the material. All passed but one boy. Here is his answer: "the human body is composed of three parts. 1. Thebranium, 2. The borax, and 3. The abdonable cavity. The branium contains the brains. The borax contains the liver, the lungs, andthe other living things. The abdonable cavity contains the bowels of which there are five: a, e, i, o and u."
V. Now the one you've beenwaiting for, the miracle. Where God, through Jesus Christ, the great physician, touches your body or that of a loved one, andcauses you to instantly or from that moment progressively begin to be well.
How that's the miracle we want. That's the miracle Jesus used more than any other when he walked on earth.And yet that's not the miracle we get most of the time. And that leads us to ask: "why?"
There are two reasons:
1. God may chooseto help us in one of the other ways named, and may feel, in god's wisdom, regardless of what we may think, that's what's best forus or our loved ones.
Or
2. We have notasked for it. To think that the very hand of God might have touched us had we justchosen to ask for it. As a general rule, we ought to start with asking for it ... God may chose to give us one of the others, butwe must begin with God. Not as the last resort, but God should be the first one we think of in any situation.
There are no hopeless situations; there are only people who have grown hopeless about them.
Hope, is the ability to hear the melody of the future and faith is the courage to dance to its tune today.
Let us pray:
Thank you God, for the options you have which reveal your ultimate good will. May we always grasp hold of,and value, your answers to prayer as nothing less than an act of your magnificence. Amen.