LITMIR.BIZ

       Introduction

       Jesus the Healer

      Jesus Christ came to heal. He announced it himself when he stood up to read the lesson as he began his ministry in the synagogue in his hometown.

      And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the synagogue, as his custom was, on the Sabbath day. And he stood up to read; and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written,

      “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

      because he has anointed me to preach good

      news to the poor.

      He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

      and recovering of sight to the blind,

      to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

      to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

      Luke 4:16–19

      Jesus proved it throughout his ministry. Wherever he went, he healed people and set them free.

      Jesus wasn’t the only healer the world has seen. There have always been wonderworkers. There have always been men and women who have a natural gift to understand people and help them get better. There have always been doctors and wise people who have exercised healing gifts. There have also been shamans and showmen who would “heal” people through the power of suggestion and hypnosis. Others have healed through the power of demons, and their healing has always come at a price.

      Jesus’ healing power is different from all of these. The healing power of Jesus is unique. Jesus is the only one who heals by going to the root of illness and disease. Jesus understands that the root cause of all disease and distress is sin. As soon as we hear the word “sin,” the red flag of guilt flies, and we get defensive. We don’t need to be ashamed of the word “sin.” Sin is simply the word we use for what has gone wrong with humanity. Sin is the twist in our godlike nature. It’s the glitch in the system. It’s the blemish on the faces of the beautiful sons and daughters of God that we were all created to be.

      There’s no point trying to deny the fact of sin. Sin is as ancient as the Garden of Eden and as fresh as today’s headlines. Sin is a fact of life. It’s the one Christian belief that no one can deny, because we all experience it firsthand every day.

       Sin’s Curse

      Sin includes all of the things we do that we are ashamed of — but sin is bigger and simpler than that. The Bible puts it simply when it says that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). This is the basic definition of sin: We were created to share in the fullness of God’s power, beauty, and glory, but we don’t. We miss the mark. We are not all we can be — and left on our own, our condition gets worse, not better.

      Missing the fullness of God’s glory is bad enough, but the side effect of sin is that it causes pain and suffering. When there is something missing, we feel hunger, longing, and grief. When our lives go haywire because of sin, pain is the result; and when things continue to go wrong with no remedy, an inner illness develops. Eventually, we become numb to sin — and as we become numb to sin, we also become numb to the goodness of life. The joyful, hopeful, and youthful part of us starts to die. We become confused, the emptiness of our lives leads to despair, and eventually this inner illness causes spiritual death. That’s why the Bible puts it quite simply when it says that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23).

      It’s easy to blame ourselves for the sin that causes illness, disease, and death, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. We suffer from the wrong things we do, but we’re caught up in more than just the individual sins we ourselves commit. We live with other people who are also sinful, and we live in a world that is shot through with evil — like a nasty virus. All of us are caught in a sticky spider’s web of sin — and the more we struggle, the more entangled we become.

      All of us suffer from four categories of sin.

      The simplest sins are the things we do wrong. All of us miss the mark. We do things that seem pleasurable or good, but these actions injure ourselves or others in some way — even if we can’t see it.

      The second type of sin is the good things we have left undone. We all have fantastic potential that we have failed to realize. We’re naturally lazy, and we avoid the effort of doing positive good, and this absence of good is a very insidious kind of evil.

      Many people are totally unaware of the third type of sin. This is the bad things that are done to us. Other people do us harm — sometimes intentionally, but very often unintentionally. These sins wound us deeply and cause our inner sin-illness to get worse.

      Finally, we all suffer what might be called general sin. We get infected, harmed, depressed, and weighed down by the everyday sin that is all around us and shot through this wicked world.

      Worst of all, there is nothing we can do about this curse on our own. We can try very hard to be good, but that doesn’t put right the inner wound. In the face of the sin problem, being good is like putting a Band-Aid on your belly to cure cancer. The illness of sin is deep and terminal, and it needs a cure far deeper and more costly than we can provide ourselves.

       God’s Cure

      God saw mankind’s sinful condition and provided the cure. Two thousand years ago, a baby girl was conceived by the union of a devout Jewish couple named Joachim and Anne. As she was conceived, God touched her life and preserved her from the stain of original sin. The little girl was named Mary. By a miracle, Mary was brought into the world in the same pure condition as the first woman, Eve. Mary didn’t suffer from sin’s curse. This privilege was won for her by the terrible death her Son would eventually go through.

      One of the effects of our sinful condition is that we are naturally biased toward the wrong choice. We are drawn toward sin more strongly than we are drawn toward the good. Because Mary was unsoiled by original sin, she did not have this inclination toward evil. She was able to see clearly and choose freely. She was able to say “yes” or “no” to God with a totally free choice. When the angel Gabriel brought God’s message to her, she said “yes” to God, and God’s Son was conceived in her womb. This miraculous conception was God’s way of coming into the world to deal with the curse of sin once and for all.

      The whole point of Jesus coming into the world was to solve the sin problem. Jesus was the antidote to sin’s poison. He was the cure to sin’s sickness and the warrior who defeated the dark Lord of hell. It was natural, therefore, for him to confront the symptoms of sin in his ministry. That’s why he healed people, and that’s why his healing was different from any others the world had ever seen — because he not only healed their physical illnesses, but in every case the healing was also linked with the forgiveness of sins.

      When Mary’s Son died on the cross, he took on the final battle with humanity’s sin. Sin rose up and killed the one who was sinless. In this sacrifice, Jesus Christ took on himself the cancer of sin, and he suffered its result. But the Evil One overestimated himself. He forgot that evil cannot extinguish the good. What is essentially empty, negative, and false cannot overcome all that is abundant, positive, and true. The darkness cannot put out the light. It is simply impossible for evil to defeat goodness. That’s why Jesus rose from the dead: because you cannot kill the one who is Life

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