We are still in the midst of our sermon series on the vision which the Lord has given to us for Trinity– we are called to be whole-hearted followers of Christ, who worship the Lord in Spirit and in truth, those who are healed and delivered, who are being equipped for every good work the Lord has in mind for us to do, and those who are sent out with the gospel.  Today we are focusing on healing and how God chooses to heal us as His people, according to His own sovereign timing and purposes.

I. The reality of healing which God does.
In our text this morning, Jesus has just healed the servant of the Centurion, who had faith which had been commended by Jesus.  Jesus goes with his small band of disciples to Peter’s house in Capernaum.  When they arrive at Peter’s house, they find Peter’s mother-in-law sick in bed with a fever.  Remember, that in these days, they did not have access to antibiotics.   When people got sick, they had to go to bed for a long time, hoping that their bodies would be able to fight off the disease.  Many more people died from diseases in this day than they do today.  In Jesus’s day, the mother of the house would be responsible for serving the needs of guests.  Hospitality was critically important in these cultures, so this was a very important task.  The fact that Peter’s mother-in-law was sick would mean that she was unable to perform the task she was expected to do.  As soon as Jesus arrives at the house and hears that she is sick, He went into her room with His disciples, and touched her hand as a means of delivering healing to her; and the fever left her immediately.  She got up and began to fulfill the important role she had in this home.

Ann and I have been to Capernaum.  They have excavated the home sites in this village, so we know that the homes were very, very close together.  In a village of this size, news traveled very quickly through the village grapevine.  When people heard that one who was in the village had the power to physically heal people, they came in droves to receive healing from Jesus.  The text here is very specific in stating that Jesus healed all the sick, and drove out every demonic spirit.  Every person who came to Jesus in faith, received healing and freedom from demonic spirits.  I do not think we are supposed to conclude from this passage that every sickness is caused by demonic spirits; but clearly some are and some are not.  Jesus had the power to both discern what the root causes of the physical illness was and to deliver or heal, whatever a person needed.

In our culture, we place a tremendous emphasis on hospitals, on doctors and on medicines for our healing. There is no doubt that God has given us greater medical knowledge and technology that any culture before us. These are God-given gifts which should be used.  We have watched God use medical means to heal people, even as we have prayed over them.  At the same time, we counsel people to ask of the Lord how He wants to bring healing in a person’s life.  Doctors do not have the final word on a sickness.  They may give the exact right diagnosis, but because of differences between people and factors they do not understand, doctors may have insight to heal a sickness in one person but not in another.  My brother and his wife are both medical doctors.  I asked Doug one time how much doctors actually knew about medical conditions or problems.  His response was interesting.  He said, “we know a lot more than we used to know, and our technological capabilities are increasing all the time.  But the truth is that we can do everything correctly as doctors, and a person may still die.  And we can do many things incorrectly, and a person may still get well.  Even though some doctors do not like to admit it, we are still dependent upon the Lord to show us what needs to be done.”  Praise the Lord for doctors and medicine!  But ultimately, our trust as followers of Christ needs to be in the Lord.
The Lord our God is still in the healing business.  His character and nature have not changed from Jesus’s day until this day.  Many Christians look at what Jesus did and think to themselves, “Jesus healed people like this but we could never do the same things.”  To make this kind of statement ignores Jesus’s own statement in John 14:11‑12, “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.  I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”  Does Jesus even hint at the idea that we will not be able to do the kinds of miracles that Jesus did when He walked the earth, or does Jesus declare that we will do the same sorts of miracles that He did, and even do greater miracles than the ones Jesus did when He walked the earth?  Clearly, it was Jesus’s expectation that His followers, which means us, would pray in faith as we talked about last week, and miracles of healing would happen because of the work of God.  Make no mistake, God is a God who heals people.  He has not changed His mind, nor has His character of compassion towards His people changed.

II. Healing is accomplished because of the cross.
Don’t miss verse 17 in this passage, which sheds much light on what Jesus accomplished at the cross.  It says, the healing of sickness and deliverance from demons which Jesus was doing fulfilled what was written through the prophet Isaiah, "He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases."  Matthew is quoting from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 53.  In this chapter of Isaiah, it speaks about what the Messiah would accomplish at the cross.  Let me read the verses which surround the verse quoted in Matthew so you have a flavor for the context of what is being said.  Isaiah says,

53:4 “Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.”

Do you see in this passage how the wounds which Jesus received for us in His suffering as he went to the cross not only took away our iniquity, all our sin, but also brought us healing?  Matthew quotes from verse four, but look at verse five to embrace the whole thought contained in the passage.  The punishment or chastisement that brought us peace was upon Jesus.  The word translated ‘peace’ is a word many of you have heard of – ‘shalom’.  It literally means “wholeness”.  The punishment which Jesus took upon Himself at the cross was received so that we might be the whole – spiritually forgiven and made right in our relationship with the Lord our God, and physically and emotionally healed.  The next phrase tells us that through His wounds we are cured or made whole.  Clearly Matthew is applying the cross to physical healing in the context in which he is writing.  You cannot get from this passage that healing was only intended for Jesus’s day or for the New Testament church.  Healing by the wounds of Jesus is for us today just as it was for the people in Jesus’s day.  Do you see this from the text?

How then should the church of Jesus Christ respond to sickness today?  Like everything else we do and think, we need to take our orders from our Lord and Master.  Christians have been given the authority to pray in faith, as we have talked about over the last 3 sermons, so that God works on behalf of His children as we use the authority He has given to us.  Jesus has already payed the price for our healing.  Now, how God wants to bring that about is up to Him, which we will look at in a moment.  I do find that God resists every human attempt to place Him in a box, so that we cannot trust in a method or in ourselves on any level, but are forced to completely trust in Christ for our healing.  We believe that often God chooses to use medical means for healing, but God is not limited to medical means, nor should our trust be completely in our doctors.  Our trust is in the Lord.  We bless our doctors, and want for them to experience God’s grace as they do what they have been trained to do.  But God is the only One who is ultimately able to heal.
Many years ago, I shared this story with you about a miraculous healing the Lord did in my life, but it bears repeating here.  I was a sophomore at Wake Forest, and was attending a church near the campus, which is now an EPC church.  One Sunday evening, I didn’t feel that good, because I had a terrible cold and couldn’t breathe at all through my nose, but I felt compelled to go to the service they were having.  There was an excellent time of worship.  Towards the end of that time, the pastor stood up and said, “The Lords wants to heal some of you tonight and he received several Words of Knowledge from the Lord about various healing the Lord was doing.  In the middle of this list, he said, “Someone’s nasal passages are being cleared.”  Before those words left his mouth, I felt the Spirit of God fall on me and what sounded like a tornado in my nasal passages.  I had to sit down before I fell down, and 15 seconds later, I could breathe perfectly.  More than that, I had experienced a powerful encounter with the Lord which I have never forgotten.  I sensed that the Lord had wanted to do something, but God worked in ways I didn’t even fully understand– I simply knew God loved me and had healed me in that moment.  Jesus heals us as we wait upon Him in faith, believing His Word and using the authority He has given to us to pray.  Even so, the Lord heals in His own time and own way.

III. Healing is one of the evidences of the Kingdom of God which has come in our midst.

As we move to our last point this morning, I want you to see that God is sovereign over all things, including healing.  To look at this, read with me from Luke 5:17, “One day as he was teaching, Pharisees and teachers of the law, who had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem, were sitting there. And the power of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick.”  Do you see what the text says about Jesus– the power of the Lord was present for Jesus to heal the sick.  This implies that God has other agendas at other times.  In one place we are told that Jesus couldn’t do many miracles in his own home town because the people there had so little faith.  Does that mean there was a lack of power in Jesus, the Son of God?  No!  It means Jesus was dependent on the work the Father desired to do through Him, the same way we are utterly dependent upon the Lord to both lead us in what He wants to do, and then, as we listen and discern what is on our Father’s heart, to follow and obey Him in what He is doing!!  This passage gives us insight into why we never see Jesus walking into a hospital in his day and healing everyone there.  Certainly, there were cities where many healings occurred; but this was not true in every city, nor did Jesus see this as His primary ministry.  Healing was simply a means to a greater end– bringing God glory by revealing His work through Jesus His Son to redeem the world from their sin.

One of the people God has used in the last few decades to heal many people is Katherine Kuhlmann.  A person we know very well said he had taken his son to a Katherine Kulhmann crusade in the hope that God would use her to pray over their son Mark, who was suffering with a childhood disease.  He watched as Katherine asked twin sisters to come up on the stage.  These twin girls were both deaf and mute from birth, because of genetic defects.  As Katherine prayed over them both, the Lord chose to heal one of them.  Katherine wept on stage because of this.  She couldn’t understand why the Lord had only chosen to heal one and not the other.  I don’t always understand all of God’s purposes– why He does some things and not others.  But I know this– God has in mind a higher agenda than you and I do.  He is always working to bring glory to His Name in and through His work on the earth.  He knows what will ultimately bring Him the greatest glory.  Even the apostle Paul sought the Lord to take away the thorn in his flesh three times, until he became convinced that it was the Lord’s will for him to bear the thorn, so that he would not become conceited.  Then Paul tells us he will boast all the more in his weaknesses, because when he is weak, Christ is all the stronger.  When he cannot depend on self, he must depend on the Lord alone.  This truth still applies to us today.  God is God.  He doesn’t always do things the way I would like them done, that is for sure.  But ultimately, I have to trust that God is able to save, to protect, to change a heart, to move mountains as we discussed last week.  He is able to heal, but does so in His own perfect and sovereign way!!

So then, how do we respond to this sovereign, sometimes mysterious God of the Bible?  First, we enter into this dynamic relationship He has asked us to have with Himself.  This is to our joy, our blessing!  We acknowledge who God is in worship, who we are as His children who have been redeemed and who can come boldly into His presence, at His request!  This is the crucial role of prayer as we talked about last week.  When you are engaging in a relationship, you listen and respond to that person.  God is always the initiator in our relationship with Him, so we place our hearts in a position to listen to what He has to say to us!  There is no substitute for this.  “Father, I know beyond a shadow of doubt that what You have in mind for me is what is best for me, so I would ask You to show me Your heart– let me know Your mind and will for me so I can be involved with You in doing the things You have asked me to do.”  This is where blessing is found!! 
When applied to healing, it looks something like this: a person comes to us and asks for us to pray over them for healing of some kind.  I usually ask questions like, “What is it you believe the Lord is going to do in this situation?”  I listen to what the person says, and I also try to listen to what the Lord might be saying, so we will know how to pray.  Then we ask in faith for healing, especially as the Lord gives us either assurance of His work in the situation through a Word from someone or a conviction in our hearts.  We pray in faith, believing that God will work, until or unless the Lord gives us something else for which we are to pray.  Remember, God has a greater agenda than we do– this is always true because He knows the future and how He will work to bless His children the most in a manner which brings Him the most glory.

We do not pray like this, “Lord, if it be Your will, please, I hope that You might heal this person...”  There is no faith in that prayer.  Jesus is the only person in the Scriptures to pray, “If it be Your will Father...” when He was in the garden of Gesthemane.  And Jesus did not pray this way because He did not know what he will of His Father was– He knew, but was struggling with the will of His Father!  We are to pray in faith, believing that Jesus has already taken the stripes on His back and body for our wholeness– again this applies to every part of our being!!  We are to believe God for what we sense He wants to do!!
I have to confess to you that I am constantly amazed at how few people take advantage of the opportunities we give to you every week to be healed.  Often, we need to bathe a person in prayer and God works through our persistent faith.  Other times, the Lord works powerfully and immediately.  This is all up to Him, but we are to participate with Him in healing He desires to do!!  Why do many of you hesitate to ask for prayer for healing as we offer it to you each Sunday?  Don’t you believe that God is able to heal you?  Are you afraid that He might not heal you and so your faith will be hindered?  I am not worried about God not doing His part!  He will work.  Are you afraid about what other people might think if they see you coming up to be prayed over?  You have to get your eyes off of yourself and onto the Lord anyway– it is for His glory, not your benefit that He will ultimately work a wonderful miracle.  We simply need to do what He tells us to do and watch to see how He powerfully works.  What does He tell us to do?  Look at James 5: 14ff– “Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.”