Monday: The Power of the Lord Was with Him to Heal
WEEK 43
MONDAY
THE POWER OF THE LORD WAS WITH HIM TO HEAL
James 4:3-6
We pause to gather up today the lessons we have learned about prayer.
Prayer in the Acts is psychologically sound. I quoted in another book the saying of Adler the psychiatrist, “I suppose all the ills of human personality can be traced back to not understanding the meaning of the phrase ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”* Also the statement of Karl Menninger that if one feels a nervous breakdown coming on, he should go across the tracks and find someone who needs him and do something for him. Both are saying that breakdowns come from self-absorption; health-mindedness comes from other-absorption.
Then prayer in the Acts is absolutely sound. Instead of leaving them absorbed in their own mental and physical and spiritual states, it was continually pushing them out and making them absorbed in others.
That made them healthy-minded. Moreover, it made it possible for God to guarantee their needs. God cannot guarantee the needs of the self-absorbed, for that would fix them in their self-absorption; they would be God-guaranteed in their self-absorption. That would cut across the whole meaning of the gospel, which is self-release.
But prayer, which is often advocated today as a means of curing oneself of one’s own ills, can be wholly wrong. It can add to one’s self-preoccupation, using prayer for one’s own purposes. Prayer has therapeutic, or healing, value only if it loosens you from self-preoccupation and gets you interested in something beyond yourself.
When Jesus spent all night in prayer to the Lord, the next morning the “power of the Lord was with him to heal” (Luke 5:17 RSV).
The all-night prayer meant the all-morning power and power to heal in two directions. It kept him whole and made others whole. Our needs are automatically guaranteed if we let prayer carry us beyond ourselves. The self is lost in others and found in itself.
All this prayer and personal soundness in the Acts is perfectly unselfconscious. They knew no psychology as such; but they knew the Person, and the Perfect Person made them whole.
O Jesus, I do thank you that the soundest psychology comes from knowing you, for you are mental soundness itself. Then let me take your attitudes, and I shall be every whit whole. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I shall be perfectly unselfconscious in my praying for others; it will be natural.
*See E. Stanley Jones, Abundant Living (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014).