Sunday: The Mastery of Sickness and Disease
WEEK 30
SUNDAY
THE MASTERY OF SICKNESS AND DISEASE
Matthew 4:23; 10:1
The next mastery in the Acts that we will consider is the mastery of sickness and disease. The Christian movement has a message for the body. The body is included in Christian redemption. But it is not the central emphasis. Christianity is not a healing cult. Its main business is not keeping the body in repair. Those who make Christianity a healing cult make God serve them, and they and their physical needs are at the center. They try to organize the universe around them as the center instead of God as the center, and that won’t work. So the healing cults leave a lot of shattered faith and spiritual disaster in their wake, which greatly overbalance the healing results.
The primary purpose of Christian redemption is to save us from sin and evil and get the ransomed self off its own hands and into the hands of God. Self-surrender is the pivot of the process of redemption. But as a result of this redemption from sin and evil—and the transference of life from self-centeredness to God-centeredness—a great many sicknesses and diseases drop off as a by-product of that redemption. This accounts for the amazing health pervading society in the Acts. But it cannot account for all. Apparently health came (1) through the direct healing of God in dramatic cures; (2) through what Paul calls the giving of “life to your human bodies also, through his Spirit that lives in you” (Rom 8:11); (3) through deliverance from underlying fears and worries, resentments, jealousies, guilt, and self-preoccupation; (4) through right thinking and emotions; (5) through the physician. In these five ways health streamed into the mortal bodies of people.
Note that it was not one of these ways—the direct touch of God upon our bodies—that was the sole channel of healing. It was a combination of all of these. Where one way and only one way is selected—the way of faith producing an obvious miracle—and rigidly held to, in its wake there is strewn the wreckage of faith and unhealed bodies. God cannot be straitjacketed.
O Lord, your heart and your purpose envelop many ways of healing. Help us to discover and use your ways. For you are health, and you will health to your children. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I will have the best body I am capable of having to be used for the kingdom.