right is right and wrong is....right??

Right is right and wrong is…..right??

So it’s clear from reading that bit in Deuteronomy that disease and sickness, in God’s mind, fall on the side of curses…. We agree with this in our natural response to illness. We feel ill, so we go to the doctor and ask “what’s WRONG with me?” We use the word WRONG. We see someone dragging around at work and ask “What’s WRONG?” We never hear the words “Yeahh!!! I’m catching a cold!” or “Hurray, I’ve been diagnosed with cancer!” In our hearts we know it’s WRONG to be sick, as in, not right. Bad, as in, not good. This attitude AGREES with God. Our theology says “ask God to heal you, and if he doesn’t in 5 seconds flat (exaggerated, of course… some people are more patient) then assume that it IS His will that we be sick”. We, in essence, say that God is endorsing the bad, the wrong, the curse. That what is wrong, bad, and a curse is actually, in fact, God’s will. If the same thinking held up for the woman praying for her ugly, violent temper, and God did not deliver in 5 seconds flat, would we then assume that it is God’s will for her to be violent, to repeatedly hurt people with her anger? Of course not. We KNOW it’s God’s will for her to be holy.

Look back at Deuteronomy. What is God’s will? The blessing. What is not God’s will? The curse. Can we then, in light of this, agree without doubt that it IS God’s will to heal, and go on to ask the question “Since it is God’s will to heal, where is the block??” I am now fully convinced. I am fully convinced that it is God’s will to save. I am fully convinced that it is God’s will to redeem. I am fully convinced that it is God’s will to sanctify. I am fully convinced that it is God’s will for me to “Be holy, as I am holy”. I am fully convinced that it is God’s will to heal.

So, are all saved? Are all redeemed? Are all sanctified? Are all holy? Are all healed? Where is the block? Is it on the side of God’s will? Have you ever heard that it is not God’s will to save someone? Not his will to sanctify? Can you hear God saying “It is my strange and mysterious will to allow* this person to live in sin, it is not my will that she be holy”? Yet we say it all the time about healing. We need to stop!

Next question. Are all these words (saved, redeemed, sanctified, holy, healed) just “positional” words? “In Christ I am sanctified, therefore I can go on sinning.” That is “positional” thinking. “As long as it’s true in the spiritual sense, the physical is irrelevant.” Again, “positional” thinking. No one would accept this line of thought in regard to a sinful lifestyle, nor will I accept it in regard to healing. If what I believe does not work itself out in my physical body, then something is wrong.

* Note: God does “allow” us to live in sin, however, it is NOT because it is his will that we do so.

Consistent

I told you I’d write more about the seminar I went to after I had my thoughts sorted out a bit better. But, honestly, since the seminar my mind feels like a big sheaf of paper that’s been thrown up in the air and has fallen all over the floor in random order. I have so many thoughts from so many angles, but I’m trying to put them all in order, I’m trying to find Page 1.

I still really don’t know what to make of this guys teaching. (The seminar leader was a girl, but she was teaching from the work of a guy from Georgia, from a seminar that she went to personally, and from a book that was written from transcripts of his various teaching sessions, as well as testimonials from the many, many who have been healed there.) It’s hard to refute the testimonies, as there are so many of them, but I don’t know what to say about the theology.

I finally finished his book last night. I didn’t want to say much about it until I had read it through, in case further along the line there was some key truth that I hadn’t been hearing. As I said earlier, (I think I did…?) what I was looking for when I went to the seminar was further teaching about the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross, in regard to the healing of the body. I did not hear this from the classes I took, nor did I read about it in his book. So, I spent the whole time listening and looking for how the finished work, the cross work, the “by his stripes we are healed” work of Jesus, could or would fit in with his theology.

Again, I feel like I’ve only been told half the truth. There is truth in this teaching, but it is not (in my opinion) the whole TRUTH. The teaching actually has very little to do with Jesus, and much to do with Old Covenant law. Since Jesus IS the TRUTH, we absolutely can’t leave him out of it. On the other hand, since Jesus said not one stroke or letter of the old covenant would pass away, and since we know that Jesus fulfilled the law of the old covenant, and that the law was put in place to lead us to Christ, and the law was a shadow of the better things to come, would it be wise to leave it out? The Old Covenant was a good covenant, the new one is a better one. Can the New Covenant be better understood in light of the Old??

That said, this man’s foundational basis for teaching is the passage on “blessings and curses” found in Deuteronomy 28 to 30. I don’t know how often you venture into Old Testament reading, but this little bit of scripture is certainly an interesting read. I’ve read it several times before, but was struck overwhelmingly this time through, with the implications for sickness and disease. On the blessing side, there is no mention whatsoever about disease, on the curses side….., YIKES!!!

I have had some, no…, many mini-revelations regarding this, too many to write in one post, so you’ll have to stay tuned, but one thing I can say…. I am more convinced now than ever that it IS God’s will to heal, and not only to heal, but for us to be in health…. ALWAYS.

Are you not sure?? Look back to the garden of Eden… no sickness, no disease, no death…IF we can keep our hands of the apple. God’s will: choose life, health, provision. Not God’s will: choose death, independence, disobedience. Look at the nation of Isreal (here in Deuteronomy)…. God’s will: CHOOSE LIFE. Not God’s will: choose death. All through the prophets…. God’s will: choose life. Not God’s will: choose death, bondage, disease. All through Jesus life on earth… God’s will: heal everyone who came to him. Eternal life?? God’s will: choose LIFE, choose Jesus, it is God’s will that all should be saved. Not God’s will: that any should perish. Look at heaven…. God’s will: no sickness, no disease, no death. Consistent to the end of time. He is the same, yesterday, today and forever……

Some questions to ponder

1. Do I believe that the name of God reveals his heart, his character, his nature, and his will??

Example: God’s name is Redeemer: therefore it is in his heart, it is his character, it is his nature, and it is his WILL to redeem….ALWAYS.

Example two: God’s name is Healer: therefore it is in his heart, it is his character, it is his nature, and it is his WILL to heal….ALWAYS.

If one is true, then the other must be true as well. Is it ever God’s will, character, nature and will NOT to Redeem??

2. Do I believe that the word saved is SOZO, which means saved, redeemed, rescued, preserved, made to do well, healed, delivered, protected, made whole?

3. Do I believe that grace is not a warm fuzzy feeling I get when God ‘overlooks’ my sin, but rather is God’s strength and ability to do, in me, what I am unable to do in my own ability? Ie. Make me righteous, and holy and blameless? God did not, has never, and never will ‘overlook’ my sin. Each and every one of my sins has been paid for by his Son, Jesus Christ.

That said… do I believe that I need to confess my sin? If Jesus has already paid for my sin, and God has already forgiven my sin…then do I still need to confess my sin??

Let me ask it a different way? Do I believe that sin has the power to keep me in bondage, even after I have accepted God’s gift of salvation? Well, my answer is a solid, Yes, and NO! That’s decisive… I don’t believe it actually HAS the power, because we died to sin, according to the word of God. I believe I choose the sin again, through my unbelief, or my wrong belief, and end up again, in bondage.

I choose it for one of two reasons. One, because I believe it is powerful, and I have no power to overcome it, I feel it is inevitable. A defeatist attitude, and a wrong belief. Two, because I want to, because I don’t believe it’s bad, or harmful, or addictive, or wrong, and besides…nobody’s perfect. A rebellious attitude. I will not be delivered of this sin until I ‘come into agreement’ with God about it. When I come into agreement with God, I am confessing that I have been wrong all along, and He has been right. I have repented, I have changed my thinking. My forgiveness occurred at salvation, but my deliverance occurs at my repentance.

So the question remains, do I need to confess my sin? Only if I want to be free of it…. Question is…do I want to be free of the sin, or only of the consequences of the sin? The consequences of sin are many and varied. I know people who pray and pray and pray for their marriage to be healed and restored, all the while never coming into agreement with God about the sin that is causing the tension in the marriage. I want to keep the sin, and lose the consequence. What do you think God should do with this? Will he heal the marriage and leave the sin? Will that same sin not have them in the same horrible place again in a matter of days??

Many people are not delivered of sin, nor of the consequences of sin because they have never come into agreement with God, they have never repented, they have never confessed. They have prayed and prayed about the consequences… More than likely they have come to the (false) conclusion that God does not answer prayer, that God does not care, that somehow, for some mysterious and unknown reason, it is God’s will that there be strife in this home. They will have to learn to live with it.

Jesus’ name is the “Prince of Peace.” Can we believe that it is God’s will to have strife, or is it His will that there be Peace in the home, ALWAYS?

If...

If…

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:14

If…my people (who?) my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves….

A few posts back I wrote about repenting; changing my thinking. Did you know that the root of the word repent has similar connections to the word metamorphosis? Like a caterpillar to a butterfly. Like an earthbound, ordinary creature, to a beautiful, flying, graceful creature. It is also similar to the word transform, which brings in the idea of not conforming any longer to the pattern (of thought?) of this world but being transformed by the renewing (the changing) of my mind. What is being transformed? MY LIFE…my physical here and now! My everything!

The God I believe in is into TRANSFORMATION in the here and now! Beauty for ashes, gladness instead of despair, healing for sickness …forget not ALL his benefits…. Psalm 103

Repentance: bringing my thinking into line with the word, the heart, the will, of God. Do I, in my every day, acknowledge that many, many of my thoughts are perfectly conformed to the pattern (of hopelessness) of this world and desperately in need of transformation? Do I have a teachable spirit…or do I know all that I need to know already? Do I take every thought captive and MAKE it obedient to the knowledge of Christ? Or, when confronted with something that does not line up, do I hide behind the words that “God is sovereign, and I can’t possibly understand or know his will.” If I were a cartoon character, I would bow my head, fold my hands, and twist my toe in the dirt, looking helpless, vulnerable, and insecure, then sigh and say, “This is just the cross I have to bear.” I did say HIDE…

Why is it that, even though God has REVEALED himself in his word, even though all creation DECLARES him, even though he perfectly, and exactly REPRESENTED himself in the life of Jesus Christ, even though he SAID that if we presented our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God and refused to conform any longer to the pattern (of thinking?) of this world, and were transformed by the renewing of our minds that we would (….get this!!) KNOW THE WILL OF GOD, HIS GOOD AND PLEASING AND PERFECT WILL, …why is it that we will still stand, defend, and die on the hill that we “can’t possibly KNOW the will of God on the subject of healing.” Why is it that we cannot (or is it WILL not) say with certainty that it IS God’s will to heal?

Two reasons come to mind…, well, more than that, but…

One: because there are sooooo many sick people
Two: because we do not (contrary to scripture) BELIEVE that physical healing is included in the finished work of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we haven’t been taught it, and we don’t believe it
Three: because of the IF….

We stand on our high horse and say… “God said it, that settles it,” BUT…in the next breath we say, “I know God said ‘he heals ALL my diseases,’ but I look around and I just don’t see it…” “I know He said that “by His stripes we ARE healed,’ but, I just don’t buy it.” We say “I cannot know the will of God”, even though His word says we can. I am choosing, at that point, unbelief. I am choosing sin. (If I say I am without sin I am a liar, and the truth is not in me, but if I confess my sin, He is faithful and just and will forgive my sin, and purify me of all unrighteousness) I am choosing not to humble myself. (God will not humble me. He will oppose me, but he will not humble me. I have to humble myself, by confessing my unbelief.) I am choosing not to renew my mind, I am choosing not to bring my thinking into line with God’s. I am choosing my view and my opinion over the very Word of God. I am choosing to go with what I see and what I feel. Where’s the hope in that?? Where’s the “Good News”??

“Repent, for the kingdom of God is near”

If my people…..

PS… Please…… take this to Jesus and ask him if it’s true…. I know that I’m coming on strong. I don’t know how to water this down…, how to be more gentle. “Beloved, I wish above all things that you may prosper and be in good health, even as your soul prospers.” 3John 2:2 I am not looking to condemn, but to free.

Nov.12.06

The Quest

My poor brain is in an uproar!! I’ve been asking lots of questions, as you know. I’ve been praying and seeking God for wisdom and revelation of the TRUTH. Recently I stumbled across the opportunity to go to a “seminar” on Biblical healing. The slogan went something like this…”are you sick and tired of being sick and tired? Find out how you can never be sick and tired again!” I had, just the week before, been to an evening ‘seminar on healing’ which turned out to be basically a two hour long info-mercial to sign me up on a long term diet and exercise program guaranteed to ‘maintain the temple’ (my body, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit), which would in turn, prevent disease. (That is my exaggerated, sarcastic, synopsis of the seminar. The man’s heart was very genuine, and I do believe that healthy living plays a role in preventing disease) but that is sooooo not what I was hoping for. The teaching had NOTHING to do with Jesus. You could have taught these same principals to an atheist, with the same results.

Needless to say, I was skeptical, then, of this new ‘seminar.’ A friend of mine (on a similar quest) called the church for info. The receptionist there knew very little about the actual course, so gave her the phone number of the lady teaching it. I phoned the lady and asked her point blank if she was going to ask me to sign up for diet and exercise or if this was about Biblical healing. The woman was amazing. She was so full of the joy and excitement of all the things she had been set free of, of the miracles she had seen, that have happened in her own family, all because of understanding simple Biblical principals and the heart of God! I could hardly get her off the phone, nor did I want to get her off the phone…she was pumped! She wasn’t some flashy, razzle-dazzle, preacher person with slogans. She wasn’t a “repeat after me mindlessly and all your problems will be solved.’ She wasn’t a ‘name it and claim it’. She was just a lady, with an ordinary job, and an ordinary life, who was so pumped up about what she’d been learning that she wanted to share it with the world! My friend and I signed up.

Turns out only one other lady signed up…so it was the four of us. Perfect….that means I can ask my many hundreds of questions….

Now my brain is on overload. This will take a long time to sort through, so I’ll write about it in bits…and reserve the right to go back and reprocess. There are a lot of ‘ifs, ands, and buts’ in my thinking right now….

Man of Sorrows

He was a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering… Surely he has bourne our sorrows…Isaiah 53

Did you ever wonder what exactly happened at the Garden of Gethsemane? In Matthew 26 it says “and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death…”” Mark says, “…he began to be deeply distressed and troubled.” Luke says, “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” It seems to me the KJV says he actually sweat drops of blood.

What do you suppose (or what have you commonly thought) he was troubled about? Overwhelmed to the point of death, deeply distressed, in anguish…these are big words. They are deep, core of my being kind of words. My common thoughts (if I ever thought about it) were to do with him anticipating the pain of the cross. Other teachers brought to mind the aspect, the anticipation, of being rejected by his father. But lately I’ve been thinking, and believing something different.

If it was his own pain, and his own rejection that was causing him sorrow, trouble, distress and anguish…it would be the first time in his life that he indulged his own self. I know, that is a sweeping statement, not well researched, but think about it. I don’t think he was feeling sorry for himself and the language used doesn’t indicate he was afraid. Although the sheer weight of it did have him asking if there may be any other way, he never thought of backing out, of saying we weren’t worth it.

Isaiah says ‘he bore our sorrows’. Imagine the amount of sorrow in your own lifetime…now compress that into a span of, say, six hours, then multiply it by, say 10 billion people…now that is overwhelming sorrow…that is deep distress…that is anguish.

We often say that he took all of our sin and guilt and shame. We don’t very often say, or even think about, that he carried all of our sorrows, all of our pain, all of our rejection, all of our dashed hopes.

When we hear that someone is carrying a load of guilt, we are quick to say that they can lay it all down, they don’t need to carry it any longer, because Jesus already handled that on the cross. It is finished.

Do we also, when we see someone lost in their sorrow, or we ourselves are lost in the tragedies of the past, or the fears of the future, say with equal assurance that we can lay our sorrows down, in the Garden of Gethsemane, because ‘surely he has bourne’ them already?

We sing a song (usually with great volume and gusto) that says, “I’m trading my sorrows for the joy of the Lord.” Do we mean it? Are we willing to lay those things down? Sometimes large parts of our identity are wrapped up in the sorrows, the disappointments, the tragedies of our lives. Who would we be without, say, the disapproval of our fathers? (Insert your own personal pain here…) How deep does this go? How much would change if I would truly lay my sorrows at Jesus feet? These are ‘core of my being’ kind of questions…

“He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, release from darkness for the prisoners…. To comfort all who mourn and provide for those who grieve…to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”

Does it sound like a good trade??

Wholeness for broken-ness
Freedom for captivity
Light for darkness
Comfort for mourning
Beauty for ashes
Gladness for mourning
Praise for despair
Abundant life for depression and hopelessness
Love for unlove
Acceptance for rejection
Peace for turmoil
Security for fear

Surely he HAS bourne our sorrows…at Gethsemane.