Question 8 - Jesus’ Healing Power

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel Podcast. My name is Jason,

and I am the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In the podcast right now, we are going through a sermon series from 2021 entitled, Questions.

The congregation of Faith Chapel was asked to submit any question they had about

Christianity or the Bible, and the answer to those questions was given in the form of sermons.

Today, the question is, how does Jesus heal?

Thanks for joining us today.

This summer, my son, it was his first year in 4-H, and he took a project that

I thought I could help him with.

It was an electric project, and I was like, if I have the instructions and a

third is expected to do this.

I should be able to figure out how to do this.

But it was way over my head and I needed a lot of help.

And so I got the help needed.

And one of the interesting things I learned in this project was how a battery works and functions.

And so a battery, when it's closed, when it's put into a circuit,

what its job is to do is to have a chemical reaction.

And this chemical reaction produces electrons, which get sent through the negative

side of the battery and attracted to the positive side of the battery.

And so the electron wants to get from one side of the battery to the other,

and it is forced out through the wires and goes and lights up the light bulb as my son's project did.

And then returns to the positive side where it wants to be.

This is where we get the concept of opposites attract. This is where the electron,

the negative, wants to go to the positive side of the battery.

And this flow is called a current, and this current is electricity.

This is how we get electrical light bulbs working. It's through the flow of this current.

And as I was processing this week's question, the battery came to my mind as an example of power.

Came to my mind as an example of an energy source that is utilized to have a desired outcome.

And this question that we have today came, in my knowledge of who asked the

questions, from the youngest person, a preschooler.

And the question is this, how does God heal us?

And for me, I could have gone in a myriad of directions on this,

but I am coupling this one with next week's question, which talks about why does God heal people?

Why does God allow people who are in chronic disease to live,

even though they are really in pain, even though they are really suffering,

when somebody who has what we think are a lot of years left are suddenly taken away?

And when I coupled these two questions together, I really felt the drive to

talk about the battery concept of the power of God.

Because ultimately, Jesus heals us through his power.

There are a myriad of examples in scripture about how Jesus heals people.

It could be a man with leprosy. It could be a blind man.

It could be somebody who hasn't walked for years, who suddenly jumps up,

uses his legs, and walks away carrying a mat.

Jesus heals a plethora of people to give people signs that he is the Messiah, the Son of God.

But he could not do that if he didn't have power.

And so today's scripture lesson is going to take us through a journey of what

I believe we can think about God and his power and who Jesus ultimately is.

We're going to study John chapter 11, which is the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

John 11 · chapter mention

And we're going to see how we can put parameters around Jesus's power.

How we can say, all right, this is what I believe you to be,

Jesus, but he far exceeds that.

It's like assuming Jesus is a triple-A battery, but he's not even able to be

contained in a car battery.

He is so much more profound, so much more powerful than.

But yet we sometimes limit him to just this small battery that we put into our remote controls.

So before I get to John chapter 11, will you pray with me, please?

John 11 · chapter mention

Lord God, the Almighty, we come before you today and we ask you for revelation.

Help us to understand what you're revealing to us through this passage and help

us to be in awe of your wonder and your power and your glory.

Ultimately, Father, we pray that you bring us closer to you.

Jesus, we ask this in your name. Amen.

John chapter 11 starts out with Jesus receiving the news that his friend,

John 11 · chapter mention

a dearly loved friend named Lazarus, has grown gravely ill.

And he is pretty nonchalant about it.

And so he waits a couple of days and then he starts to meander towards Lazarus's

home, who is also the home of his sisters, Mary and Martha.

And before we pick up in scripture, there's an interaction between Martha and

Jesus, where Martha says,

if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

And this is where we pick up in scripture. John chapter 11, we're going to start in verse 25.

John 11 · chapter mention

Jesus told her, Martha, I am the resurrection and the life.

Anyone who believes in me will live even after dying. Everyone who lives in

me and believes in me will never die.

Do you believe this, Martha?

And so what Jesus does is he plain, not plainly, he says who he is.

I am the resurrection and I am the life.

This is why these are part of the seven I am sayings of Jesus in the gospel of John.

Now, John was written much later than the other gospels. We think it was written around 80 or 90 BC.

So about 50 years after Jesus's death and resurrection.

And so John's had time to contemplate it. and he really wants people to know

who Jesus claimed to be, and that is God Almighty.

And he uses these I am statements based upon the burning bush passage in Exodus,

where God reveals himself, his personal name of Yahweh,

saying, I am who I am.

Tell them I am sent you. And so John uses these passages and couples them into

his gospel to declare that Jesus is God, the Messiah.

And so Jesus says, I am the resurrection and I am the life.

These are very powerful words from Jesus. And he's trying to declare his sovereignty,

his deitiness to Mary or to Martha and those that are surrounding her.

He is saying, this is who I am, the resurrection and the life.

And as 21st century readers, we find these words can be confusing and challenging.

Because we don't really know what they mean, but he's basically saying,

I have the power to bring life, vitality, and death cannot stop me.

Death will not stop me. And so Martha responds to him with something I think we all would respond to.

Yes, Lord, she said to the question of do you believe this?

I have always believed you are the Messiah, the son of God, the one who has

come into the world from God.

And she says, yeah, I know who you are. All right. I get it.

You're the son of God. You're the Messiah. You're the one who comes to save us.

I know who you are. And Martha genuinely and authentically believes that she

knows that Jesus is a size D battery.

I get it. This is who you are. You can light.

You can light the filament in my bulb.

I get it. And then she does something really bizarre, in my opinion.

Verse 28 says, Then she returned to Mary.

She called Mary aside from the mourners and told her, The teacher is here and wants to see you.

So Mary immediately went to him.

Jesus had stayed outside the village at the place where Martha met him.

When the people who were at the house consoling Mary saw her leave so hastily,

they assumed she was going to Lazarus' grave to weep. So they followed her there.

When Mary arrived and saw Jesus, she fell at his feet and said,

Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.

And this is why I think it's interesting that she left and why I believe that

she was trying to put parameters on Jesus, calling him a size of battery.

Yes, I get that you have power and that you will raise us at the end of days

because she didn't stay with Jesus.

She didn't know the power that

he had. She was putting him in a box and saying, you need to stay here.

I'm going to go get my sister.

And then when she comes to her sister, they're met with a crowd.

And this was very common in first century Jewish life that when you had lost

somebody that you really genuinely cared about, people would surround you with

themselves and they would prepare their meals for you.

And they would go through all of these different avenues to bring you some sort

of comfort in your grief.

And so these people see Mary run hastily out of the house.

Notice Martha had been in the house prior to this when she heard that Jesus

was there and she slipped out quietly and went to him because no one followed Martha to see Jesus.

But Mary, she ran hastily because I think as I'm reading through this,

she finally gets who Jesus is.

She knows how much power he has.

But that's not what happens. She comes to him and she says, if only you had

been here, my brother would not have died.

And it's this concept of saying, you can't do anything anymore.

You should have come when he was still alive.

Because again, she's putting parameters around Jesus.

She's putting a box saying, he's gone.

I wish you had been here to save him. The story continues.

When Jesus saw her weeping and saw the other people with her,

a deep anger welled up within him, and he was deeply troubled.

Where have you put him? He asked them. They told him, Lord, come and see. Then Jesus wept.

The people who were standing nearby said, See how much he loved him.

But some said, This man healed a blind man. couldn't he have kept Lazarus from dying?

And we get this concept again. First of all, the thing that really stood out

to me is that an anger grew in Jesus.

And so I really wanted to know what that anger was. Why was he so angry at people

who were mourning and weeping?

And the commentators that I read this week declare that it is because he was

upset that death has victory,

was upset and angered that the last that these people knew was death and how

hopeless that really seemed and how angered he was that the adversary of death still reigned supreme.

And then again, these people try to put parameters around Jesus by saying to

him, not to him, but among themselves, this guy healed a blind man. This guy has power.

This guy is some sort of battery.

Why couldn't he have been here to heal and to take away the sickness or whatever

Lazarus was coming across, whatever was taking his life?

Why couldn't he have done this?

Guys, we do this all the time. It's really easy to come to a situation in our

lives where we pray about it, but we don't have much hope about it.

It's easy to come across a situation that seems completely overwhelming to us.

And sometimes even I get overwhelmed to the point where I don't want to pray.

I don't want to ask for God to come and rejuvenate that situation or to take

that disease away because I put parameters around God.

This is not something we should do.

Our God is unlimited in power and he's gonna show us in the next couple of verses,

but it's so easy in our human mind to get wrapped up in the calamities that

happen to us and forget about the all-mightiness,

the all-powerfulness of God.

And this shouldn't be so. It's not that Jesus is as big as a car battery or as powerful as one.

Remember, a car battery needs an alternator if it's going to work for a really long time.

God is so much bigger than that. He is so much more powerful than that.

Jesus shows us his power as we finish out.

Verse 38, Jesus was still angry as he arrived at the tomb.

A cave with a stone rolled across its entrance.

Roll the stone aside, Jesus told them. But Martha, the dead man's sister, protested.

Lord, he has been dead for four days. The smell will be terrible.

Again, she doesn't know what to expect. She doesn't know the power of Jesus.

She is going on her own assumptions of who Jesus is and not letting him be who he is.

Jesus responded to her, Didn't I tell you that you would see God's glory if you believe?

So they rolled the stone aside. Then Jesus looked up to heaven and said,

Father, thank you for hearing me.

You always hear me, but I said it out loud for the sake of all these people

standing here, so that they will believe you sent me.

Then Jesus shouted, Lazarus, come out.

And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound in grave clothes,

his face wrapped in a headcloth.

Jesus told them, unwrap him and let him go.

Jesus does the unthinkable.

Four days gone. There's a Jewish thought in Jesus's day that the spirit stayed

with the body for about three days after the death.

And so John was writing this to prove that the spirit had gone,

that it was a completely lifeless body.

And God, Jesus restored this completely lifeless, rotting body back to health.

That's power that you and I can't even fathom.

That's power that can cause billions of stars to come into existence just by telling them to.

That's power that can split the Red Sea in two so the Israelites can walk right through it.

That's power that by the Israelites shouting and playing the horns,

a huge city wall can crumble down.

That's power beyond you and my imagination.

And that's why we cannot put Jesus in a box.

That's why we cannot limit him and his ability to do things.

But this is exactly what we do. This is exactly what we do.

When Jesus shows his ultimate power, amazing things happen.

And this is why we come to him in prayer. This is why we trust him with all of our concerns.

And this is why we need to really lean into him even when things are good,

even when things are going exactly the way we want them to go.

We need to lean into Jesus and we need to say, you are my king.

You have all power. You know what needs to be done today. and I invite you to work through me.

Ultimately, Jesus is the resurrection and he is the life.

This is exactly what you and

I need because you and I are still battling the last adversary we have because

sin has been taken care of on the cross and the last enemy is death and Jesus

is victorious over death.

He is our victory. He is our power. He is our might. He is our king.

And we surrender to him.

In Revelation, there's a really cool scene where heaven, where there is a marriage

supper between the lamb and his bride, the church.

And in this scene, Jesus is the groom and we as his church are his bride and

we sit down for the wedding supper of the lamb,

this huge feast celebrating the power that God has and how he has overcome our brokenness,

how he has overcome our sin,

how he has overcome every adversary we will ever face.

And before Jesus is betrayed and before Jesus is nailed onto a cross,

he alludes to this wedding supper.

He gathers his followers together and he says to them, I will not eat of the fruit of the vine.

I will not take of the fruit of the vine until that day when I take it with

you anew in my father's kingdom.

And today we are going to participate in a foretaste of that.

We're going to participate in a communion service where we remember that one

day we will take a full feast celebrating God's ultimate power,

celebrating who he is day in and day out.

So I invite you, we have communion cups in the chairs in front of you.

I invite you to take them out.

As a side note, next leadership when we met the last time has decided to go

to a different way of celebrating communion next week, a way where we will come forward.

We're still working all the details out on that, but be looking forward to that,

especially if you think the cracker here is very flavorless.

We will be working on the new way of having communion as we come forward in

a way that we are taking every precaution we can.

And so we invite you to take of the cup.

We invite you to take the bread in your hands.

And I will pray over that. And then we'll go through the rest of the service.

Father, we thank you that you

have all power. You ultimately can do everything according to your will.

There is nothing outside your purview other than changing your perfect,

awesome characteristics.

And so we come humbly before you with all acknowledging all of your power and your might.

And we thank you, Father, that in your power and in your might,

you sent your son to die upon the cross to defeat the enemy of sin.

And Father, we thank you and we praise you for sending your son to come out

of the tomb and to defeat the final enemy, death.

We praise you and we thank you for that. But Father, we remember your sacrifice

and we remember all that you did for us on that weekend.

We pray, Father, that you will make this juice and we pray that you will make this cracker.

Us like the body and blood of Jesus to remember it.

And Father, we pray that it will be a foretaste that we will constantly remember

that we will get to do this with you face to face when we meet each other in

eternity and the wedding feast of the Lamb and his bride come.

Jesus, we praise you and we thank you for this.

Amen. Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of the power of Jesus

and how his healing ability shows us his strength.

This series was designed to promote questions in and amongst followers of Jesus.

Remember, it is good to ask questions. Questions show you want to learn.

Be curious and always ask questions.

In our next episode, we will look at why some people continue living long lives

while having difficult chronic illnesses,

and why some people are taken when they have a lot of life still in them. Have a great week.