Divine Healing In The Age Of Corona- Part 8

Review

• This series has two objectives:

1. To demonstrate that developing faith for divine healing is biblical, practical and beneficial.
2. To foster reasonable expectations for divine intervention in the healing and recovery of your physical body.

• Big Idea: Receiving divine healing has everything to do with seeing Jesus clearly.
• Key Insight: We see Jesus and develop faith in Him from the Scripture.
• Vital Practice: Scriptural Meditation

What does scriptural meditation look like?

Reading, Talking, Listening, Pondering, Reflecting Day and Night

Lessons from the Woman with the Issue of Blood

• What the woman with the issue of blood did physically, we do spiritually.
• We touch Jesus through the Scripture.
• Scriptural meditation is not a tactic to get things, but a practice we adopt to see Him.
• Once we can see Him as a healer through the Scripture, faith to be healed is not far away.
• Mark 5:25-34
• In this passage we see a woman resembling people who have suffered from Corona:
  • Urgent physical condition
  • Persistent confidence in medical professionals
  • Worsening symptoms
• Most people would not think twice about people in this scenario other than to have pity and to root for their recovery.
• Except for the most skeptical of us, their situations would not generate cynicism, doubt or criticism about health care professionals.
• On the other hand, there are countless others who would be quick to criticize, doubt or become cynical about people who sought God for healing without seeing a result.

Trusting God vs. Trusting Man

• The scripture has stern warnings for people who abandon their trust in the Lord to turn to humans:
  • Jeremiah 17:5 (NLT)
  • Jeremiah 17:7 (NLT)

• Trusting God does not mean that we abandon everything that’s natural. It just means that our trust is ultimately in the Creator, not the creation:
  • I Timothy 6:17 (NLT) 
  • I Timothy 4:8 (NLT)

• God can heal us through natural and supernatural means; we don’t want to abandon either one.
• Our trust should remain in the Lord.
• However, this means that we must remain open to however He chooses to heal us, whether it be natural, spiritual or both.
• When we close ourselves off either from God’s spiritual provision or His natural provision, we are abandoning our trust in the Lord.
• By predetermining how God heals us, we are putting our trust in man.

The You Factor

• On the other hand, while it is not our place to determine how God heals us, we do play a role in whether He heals us.
• There is a “You” factor.
• However, by “You” factor, I’m not blaming sick or dead people for not having enough faith. Nor am I blaming the loved ones of sick or dead people for not having enough faith.
• For starters, quantity of faith is not the emphasis of Scripture (Luke 17:5)
• The size of your faith doesn’t matter if you don’t use it.
• Persistence of faith is far more important than size.
• It is our responsibility to use the faith we have.
• Hence by “You” Factor I mean two things:

1. God does not believe for us.
2. God does not persist for us.

• Mark 5:27-34  
• The woman was clearly as committed to the supernatural as she was to the natural:
  • Enduring pain and fatigue from the bleeding
  • Bundling herself up to minimize or prevent bleeding in the streets
  • Pressing through a crowd that was thronging Jesus
  • Violating laws that required her not to be out in public
  • Enduring public embarrassment
• The woman’s pursuit of Jesus represents our pursuit of Jesus through the Word.
• We don’t fight physical barriers to Jesus.
• We fight mental, emotional and spiritual barriers to Jesus.
• We fight
  • fear
  • worry
  • anxiety
  • cynicism
  • doubt
  • unbelief
  • bad reports from the doctor
  • bad reports from the news
  • discouraging words from friends and family
  • unanswered prayers from last year
  • reports about other people who did not make it
• All of these barriers are tools by the enemy to challenge God’s credibility.

• However, like Jesus, when the enemy taunts us with lies, we must respond with the Word.
• That means say it out loud.
• When the woman with the issue of blood talks, it is her faith speaking.
• Mark 5:29-30
• Jesus did not decide to heal her.
• She simply accessed what was available to her as a daughter of Abraham.
• Hence, this healing was clearly not designed by Jesus to be demonstrative.
• The healing was just a natural extension of who He was.
• Mark 5:31-34
• The faith that healed the woman was not the faith of Jesus, but the faith of the woman.

© Joshua D. Smith, Ph.D., 2020