Chris, the teenager with cancer, has been given 4 weeks. He's back in the hospital.
Tomorrow night we'll read Matthew 10:8: "Heal the sick, raise the dead...Freely you have received, freely give."
What's that mean? Freely received, freely give tied in to the section on heal the sick and raise the dead. What have we received?
New life in Christ... That's not the answer. We've received more than new life in Christ. We are more than Christians - fellow believers in one body. We received something more, but it is easier to say "your sins are forgiven" than to say "rise up and walk".
Sins forgiven - that's a concept we can own. Rise up and walk - that's going too far. We don't accept it as truth, but as illustration.
It's just an illustration for being reborn spiritually, we say. But Jesus told his apostles, the ones with a wide variety of personalities and character (a doubter, a sinner/tax collector, a zealot, a fisherman, a doctor, etc.) and told them point blank without reservation to go and heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse skin disease, cast out demons as if this were a normal thing. Not just preach that the kingdom is near.
For Chris laying in a hospital with cancer wrapped around his spine and filling his bones, all I can offer is that in Heaven there is no illness. I'm impotent to heal, to carry out what Jesus thought normal, to do greater things than what he did. I can carry my cross, but I come short on the directive to heal the sick. It seems so selective on our human part, to take Jesus at his word for things that seem normal to us, but to doubt him on things that seem normal only to Him, as if those things are reserved just for Him, just for God to do.
And yet he told his human, flawed apostles to Heal the sick. I am human. I am flawed. And I think we are missing something - this thing freely given and we are to freely give, in the same breath as the directive to heal, to raise from the dead, to cleanse and to cast out demons. Something is missing in my concept of what it means to be a Christian. It seems we are more than the body of Christ, members of the kingdom of God, sheep in His pasture, but we just don't believe it could be true of us, not like it is true of Him.
And Chris...he slowly passes towards the gates of hell. Will he enter the gates of Heaven, believing despite my disbelief? [I am not being hard on myself. I am questioning what it is to believe in this Christ.]
Posted by Kevin
