Years ago, when I went to seminary, I was taught a ton of amazing things… I learned a great deal about the ancient languages that the Bible was originally written in… I studied theology and church history in great depth, and I did all of this under the teaching of some of the greatest minds in Christendom. It was an exciting and invigorating time! But I must tell you in all honesty, and this is not a reflection on either of the fine institutions I attended at all, but almost nothing I learned in my seminary days prepared me for being a pastor. Yes, I took the requisite ‘Pastoral Duties and Responsibilities’ courses, but those classes mostly centered around things like overseeing church budgets, leading board meetings and strategies for church growth. Nothing truly prepared me for being a shepherd to a local flock. So… I showed up here at Grace those many years ago thinking that you all were here because you were interested in hearing my thoughts on parsing Greek verbs and what I knew of the latest developments in socio-rhetorical, text criticism. It didn’t take me long to realize otherwise! And two things I specifically wasn’t prepared for at all were, first, every relationship within a church is voluntary… you don’t have to come here! You come and are involved and help support what this church is doing by choice. The relationships within a church body strengthen or end purely on your decision. A pastor can work to give you reasons to be a part of this community, but something I’ve had to get used to hearing from people just about everywhere I go, is, ‘Hey, Tim, you may not remember me, but I used to go to Grace.’ No one at seminary prepared me for that. And the second thing I wasn’t prepared for was the vast variety of people I would be called to pastor. I’m talking every imaginable sort of person: people who are very rich and people who are very poor… people from every imaginable background and circumstance… and, in this church, since we’re an independent church, that includes every conceivable denominational background as well! For some reason I assumed that everyone in a congregation would essentially be a similar sort of person. How wrong I was! Truth is, my seminary training really prepared me be more of a college professor than someone who is called to care for anyone and everyone that chooses to be a part of this community. But, I will say this, once I took on the mantel of a pastor I soon came to realized that there was something that everyone does have in common… whether a person is rich or poor… boisterous or quiet… famous or just a regular person… the one thing that everyone shares in life is this: everyone’s life is in some way affected by pain… whether that be pain of body, pain of the mind or pain of the soul, as you heard in the video. pain is universal. And it takes a myriad of forms: there is the pain of the loss of a loved one… there is the pain of anxiety and depression that so often clouds people’s minds… there is the pain of chronic illness and the physical pain that can overwhelm our bodies. Pain is everywhere and a part of everyone’s story. And as Tyler said earlier, we are taking the entire month of September to look at why we can have Hope that the pain in our world can be healed. We know it’s a big challenge because pain is everywhere, but it is our contention that there is Hope that healing is possible. So, before we start this year’s Hope Month series, I would like to pray.
Now, I don’t want to start this series off by getting too theological, but I must start by saying that I firmly believe that the Bible is God’s way of telling us about himself. You see, in these days when we can’t see God or talk to him face-to-face like I am talking to you right now, one of the primary ways that God reveals his character and his heart to us is through the Bible. And I have also come to believe that one of the more powerful ways that God tells us who he is in the Bible is through the names He allows us to use when we speak to him. Now, generally, the names for God we find in the Bible are names that people have given to God after having an overwhelming experience with him. When people experienced God’s power… they called him El Shaddai: The God of all Power! Or when they experienced his majesty, they called him El Elyon: The God Most High! Or when they realized that God is a personal God, they called him in El Roi: The God who sees ME! But did you know that God gave himself a name? He did… right at the beginning of the story of the Exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. Listen to what God said to the Jewish people in Exodus 15:26. ‘And He said, “If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his sight, obeying his commands and keeping all his decrees, then I will not make you suffer any of the diseases I sent on the Egyptians; for I am the Lord who heals you.” Right at the end of this verse God gave himself this name: Jehovah Rapha… ‘the Lord Who Heals.’ And not to get too technical, but in the Greek version of the Old Testament the word that gives us ‘heals’ here, is the word iaomai (ee-ya-ma), and this word (ee-ya-ma) is used over 50 times in the Old Testament to speak of every imaginable sort of healing; it is used to talk about everything from healing a rash on your skin to healing the heart of a person who has suffered a great loss. Why, even one of the Psalms, Psalm 147, was written to praise the many ways that God heals! Now, this psalm starts out praising God for bringing ‘healing’ to Jerusalem after Jerusalem had been destroyed by an enemy. But if you read that entire Psalm, you’ll soon see that it also speaks of more types of healing than just the rebuilding of a city. Listen to how it begins: Praise the Lord! How good to sing praises to our God! How delightful and how fitting! The Lord is rebuilding Jerusalem and bringing the exiles back to Israel. But then the psalmist says this, He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds. Brokenhearted is a word that means ‘the crushed,’ ‘the hurt,’ ‘the torn down.’ And I am certain that many of us have experienced moments of being crushed and hurt and torn down and longing for healing. And when the psalmist writes, ‘God bandages their wounds’ or more literally, he ‘binds up their wounds,’ he is speaking of giving care to whatever it might have been that has hurt them. You see, the Hebrew word that gives us ‘wounds’ (at-se-beth) is a word that can mean either ‘sorrow’… as in ‘the Lord bandages, or cares, for our sorrows,’ or at-se-beth can also mean an actual, physical injury, as in ‘the Lord bandages our cuts and broken bones.’ And to be honest, we can’t be 100% certain whether the writer of this Psalm meant to say, ‘The Lord bandages our sorrows’ or if he meant to say, ‘The Lord bandages our injuries.’ And to my thinking when we’re not sure about translating something one way or another, I think the best thing to do is to just go with both… So, my bet is that the writer of this psalm would be fine with us saying, ‘Let’s praise God because he bandages every kind of wound we can possibly have!’ That works for me! We don’t have time today to go into all that this Psalm says, but the bottom line is that Psalm 147 praises God because He is a healer of every imaginable sort of pain! Read it carefully sometime and you’ll see what I mean! And this is just one of many places in the Old Testament where we find God being praised for being a healer… in fact, it’s everywhere in the Old Testament! God wasn’t kidding when he said, ‘When you are talking to me, you can call me Jehovah Rapha, because I am the God who heals!’
And when we get to the New Testament, especially when we read about the life of Jesus, we see this truth of God being the one who heals in spades! Jesus was God in human form, and he had a stake in showing the world that he is Jehovah Rapha... The God who Heals. And boy, did Jesus show that to be true! We could look at all sorts of passages to see Jesus being ‘the one who heals!’ In fact, one of the primary reasons that we find Jesus continually surrounded by huge crowds was because he was a healer. Yes, his teachings were important, and yes, people were excited about him being a prophet who might even be the long-awaited Messiah, but the reason so many sought him out was because he had the power to heal. Let’s look at one short passage that shows us this: Luke 6:17-19. Page ???? Now before we read this, I want to set up the context a bit. Jesus had just stayed up all night praying on a mountaintop asking his father to give him the wisdom he needed to choose the 12 men out of his many followers who would be the closest to him. And after praying all night, when daybreak came Jesus gathered all of his many his followers together and he called out the names of the 12 that would be in his inner circle… and then all these people climbed back down the mountain… and we aren’t told if Jesus wanted to get some rest after being up all night or if the followers of Jesus wanted to celebrate Jesus choosing his 12 disciples or what… no, but what we read next is this, ‘When they came down from the mountain, the disciples stood with Jesus on a large, level area, surrounded by many of his followers and by the crowds. (The Greek here says ‘a great multitude’) There were people from all over Judea and from Jerusalem and from as far north as the seacoasts of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those troubled by evil spirits were healed. Everyone tried to touch him, because healing power went out from him, and he healed everyone.’ Luke 6:17-19. We could spend a lot of time talking about this passage, but I want to point out 2 things that make these 3 verses so significant. First, is this: in verse 17 Luke gives us a list of some of the places people had come from to get to Jesus…. this is an important list! Jesus was in Galilee in the farthest northern region of Jewish life. To say that people came from all over Judea and Jerusalem said these people, people, I must add, who tended to think of themselves as far more sophisticated and religious than the backwater rubes that lived up north in Galilee, had traveled 3 difficult days northward to get to Jesus, such was his draw among all the Jewish people. And Luke adding that people had come from Tyre and Sidon is even more telling. Tyre and Sidon were both Gentile cities northwest of Galilee. Some Jews probably lived there, but most folks from Tyre and Sidon were Gentiles and they, too had made a long, difficult trip into the highly Jewish region of Galilee, mind you, to get to Jesus. One thing to keep in mind related to these verses is this: Luke purposefully wrote his gospel to convince Gentiles who had put their faith in Jesus that Jesus had come for everyone: Jews and Gentiles… you see, in the early days of the church there were lots of Jewish Christians who were saying that Jesus had only come to save Jews and many Gentile Christians were doubting whether Jesus cared about them … and right here Luke tells us that Jesus was greeted by ‘a huge crowd,’ ‘a great multitude’ made up of both Jews and Gentiles! And the last words of verse 19 says it all: ‘And he healed everyone.’ Literally this verse reads ‘He healed them all’ and guess what word Luke uses here to say ‘healed?’ It is ee-ya-ma… the same Greek word that is used in the Greek version of the Old Testament back in Exodus when God says, “My name is, ‘I am the Lord who Heals you.’” I don’t think this is a coincidence… and it shows that Jesus cares for everyone’s pain!
And one other thing, and I really wish we had the time to flesh this out today, but in the time of Jesus most Jewish people believed that all physical issues were caused by sin of some kind, either your sin or someone in your family’s sin… Now, just to be clear we don’t believe this at all today, but then there was actually a vast list that told the rabbis what someone must have done to have this or that illness or physical issue. So, if, say, you had a stomach ulcer, you didn’t go to a doctor, you’d go to the rabbi, and he would get out the list and tell you that stomach ulcers were either the result of immorality or drunkenness. Can you imagine that? Or if, heaven forbid, someone in the family had leprosy, it was assumed that someone in the family had neglected to pay their tithes? Or if your child was having seizures, the list said it was due to your, or your spouse’s, or possibly even one of your parent’s marital unfaithfulness? Can you imagine living under that system? Just imagine for a moment all the guilt, shame and confusion that people must have carried with them due to their physical circumstances. But when Jesus healed someone of a physical malady of any sort, he was also healing all of this emotional pain… he was getting rid of the guilt and the gossip and the shame that so often came with physical pain. And beyond that, when Jesus healed a person physically, he not only removed their emotional pain he also healed their spiritual pain… first Century Jews also believed that when a person was physical healed it was a public declaration that the sin that caused their problem in the first place had been forgiven. Physical healing proclaimed to the world that ‘This person is right with God!’ And so, every time you read that Jesus healed someone physically, in that moment, in that culture, yes, he was healing that person’s body, but he was also healing their mind and their spirit. Every Time! Every time he healed everything…
And our hope is in the one who said, I am the Lord God who heals you!’ Our hope is in the one who healed them all… in every way! This is the why behind Hope Month 2024! We’re praying that it will be a month not only for increasing our faith, but also for looking for ways that we, too, can be engaged in the healing of others pain as well. Pain is all around us. It is our lives and in the lives of our family members and our friends and our neighbors… and yet in the face of all of this pain we are not people who have no hope. Our faith is in Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals! Now, I know this raises a lot of questions. I am an uber- realist. I know that saying these things doesn’t make it so… I have done far too many funerals following a long time of much prayer and hoped-for-healing that didn’t come… and I have walked alongside many of you as you are waiting for a healing that hasn’t happened. We need to wrestle with all the disappointment and difficulty that pain brings… But again, we of all people, should have hope. And something else we should have: the realization that we have a calling… a calling to be a part of bringing hope into our broken, pain-filled world. So, we have an important month ahead of us… a month of seeing what it means for God to be Jehovah Rapha… a month of coming to a deeper understanding of what it meant for Jesus to bear our pain… a month of wrestling with God’s promises related to bringing healing to our pain… and a month of seeing how we as a community can work alongside of the Holy Spirit and bring healing to this ever-present broken place.
It is evident to me that Jesus fully expects his people to be actively attacking this broken place on every front. I don’t think that it is any coincidence that the very first time Jesus sent his disciples out on their own, his marching orders were, ‘Heal the sick and tell them the kingdom of God is near you now!’ Such was Jesus’ heart towards those in pain. And so, in the weeks to come we will be looking at ways that we can be engaged in seeing God’s Kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in Heaven… by becoming a community of Healers… for you see, no matter what sort of healing you may bring into someone’s life… whether healing is an aspect of your profession, or if you are simply willing to listen and sit with someone in deep pain… you are walking in the footsteps of Jesus. It is a difficult place, I know. But what I have learned over the years of being a pastor is this… it is also a sacred place.
And for those of you who are suffering in pain… whether that be physical, emotional or spiritual pain... our pray is that over the next month we will become a community that better walks with you, better comforts you, better prays for you and works with you to find the healing that we are confident that Jesus wants for you.
And so, Hope Month 2024 begins with this purpose: to guide Grace Church into being the healing hands of our savior in every sort of pain that plagues your life and the lives of those around us… Our prayer is that we will, together, become a community of powerful representatives of the one who called himself Jehovah Rapha… the Lord God who Heals!