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Village SDA Church

The Healing Presence of Jesus

Ron Kelly

From Curse to Cross and the Smitten Rock

Thank you that we could get a picture of him so close and personal.

Bless us as we look into his power to heal.

Beginning a series of sermons on the healing power of Christ this morning.

I'm going to talk to you about the healing presence of Jesus I'll be speaking on different dynamics of healing physical mental spiritual and social Over the next 4 or 5 6 weeks.

And then when we come to our 10 days of prayer in January, we are going to organize a special prayer service.

I've had a person approach me as of late who shared both a testimony and a request.

The testimony was how a season of prayer provided spiritual strength and a measure of deliverance for them.

With a request that we consider a special prayer experience for this individual.

As God put in my heart this journey about healing, He merged into it as a function of prayer, this idea that we ought to take more seriously the invitation of Jesus to receive the healing touch.

So we're going to go through this series.

We're going to understand what God's plan is.

We're going to understand what the laws that preside over these types of health are.

We're going to seek to bring our lives as far as it's in our power through the Holy Spirit into compliance with that, those modules of healthy living.

Then I'm going to be asking our elders to fast and pray with me before we pray for you.

And on 1 of those 2 weekends, I'm not sure which 1 it'll be.

I have to work out the scheduling, but either the second or third weekend in January, we will have groups of elders and perhaps deacons and deaconesses as long as they're willing to make the journey of spiritual preparation.

And if you know someone, you may be suffering right now with something physically.

I have no guarantee of what deliverance will look like for you, but I do know what peace looks like.

And it could be that mentally you feel like the devil's been harassing you, or spiritually.

It could also be that socially you've found yourself running into a wall, and you sense God's calling you to a greater freedom socially and of course spiritually God wants us all to come to higher ground we can't go there without his power or his leading so I'm inviting you to make this journey with me if you're away for the holidays I encourage you tune in on YouTube and watch the messages and let's see how God's leading.

But I truly do believe God is going to do some miracles, and those miracles may not be known to the rank-and-file public of the village church or the world, but I am inviting you, if something has been on your mind and you can't shake it and you don't want to shake it, you want heaven's peace and a sense of His presence, to consider joining us as we set aside special time for prayer.

Take your Bibles this morning, if you would, and open them up to the gospel of Mark.

I've entitled my message, The Healing Presence of Jesus, From Curse to Cross and the Smitten Rock.

As we celebrate the incarnation, we need to stop and understand what great divine purpose and focus and energy has been placed on this little globe.

Jesus came here when he had no compulsion to come here except the compulsion of love.

It is the heart of Christ that draws the sinners and the sin sick to himself.

And this morning, what humanity gets to celebrate is the fact that Jesus through the merits of a life of suffering and sacrifice becomes our elder brother in a way that he never would have been had he not been a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

I don't know what worries on your heart or mind, but you need to know something.

Jesus had to walk the same walk of uncertainty and potential fear, except for 1 thing, he knew in whom he believed.

And yet to think that Jesus was never tempted to be afraid or to feel insecure would be to remove him at some level from our human experience.

Jesus operated out of the land of Galilee.

He had a special place where he liked to reside.

And as we open the book of Mark to chapter 2, we find him there.

When he came back to Capernaum several days afterward, it was heard that he was at home.

The scriptures do not come out and clearly state this, but as you study it, it becomes more clear.

This was where he resided when he was in this area of Israel.

Many were gathered together there, verse 2, so that there was no longer room not even near the door.

The problem was not everybody could hear.

There were people close up who had privilege, that was the scribes and the Pharisees.

But the rest of the people hoped for a window or a doorway or a corner of a room.

It was exceptionally crowded, a bit bustling.

And in commentating, Ellen White says that Jesus was teaching in the house of Peter, his disciples close about him, and there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, which were come out of every town of Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem.

Outside thronged the multitude, the eager, the reverent, the curious, the unbelieving.

And the power of the Lord was present to heal.

But the Pharisees and the doctors did not discern the Spirit's presence.

They felt no need and the healing was not for them.

Well, you say, Pastor, they weren't there to get healed.

And it's very possible this morning that some of you came thinking, there's nothing wrong with me.

Some of you may have came thinking everything's wrong with me.

And somewhere in that great spectrum of life, all of humanity lines up.

There'll be moments in your life when you say, I am the pit.

I'm not just in the pit, I'm just a black sucking hole for life's problems.

I'm a magnet for everything despicable and detestable.

And others come here, They may not for a moment think that the message was going to really be for them, it'd be for the guy or the gal down the pew.

But this morning we all need to understand that everybody in the room needed a touch from Jesus.

They all needed the healing, some differently.

But there was 1 man who was being born to the house who needed 2 types of healing.

Verse 3, And they came bringing to him a paralytic carried by 4 men.

Being unable to get to him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had dug an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic was lying.

Something had begun to happen in the mind of this hopeless individual.

He had been to the scribes and the Pharisees, and they, like many others of which there is scriptural reference and establishment, had directed that his sin was his own fault.

And because of that, there was no mercy for him.

Now I want all of you parents to do something real quick and ask yourself a question.

How many of the troubles that your children have did they create for themselves?

Is it pegged way over here at almost all?

There's something about this I think we need to stop and understand.

This man did create his own sinful condition, at least physically.

What you need to know in this story is that even when you dig your own hole, there is still divine love to reach in and pull you out.

Now I've mentioned before that my wife at the age of 18 had cancer.

I know that My mother and father-in-law lived very healthy lives, and I know my wife did too before she was my wife.

But most of our sins do lead to problems that we'd like to be free of.

The problem is the sin that was motivated by the desire has created a returning desire.

And some of those things that we loathe, we still kind of like.

From Wound to Wonder

Father, thank You for invading the darkness of this world and bringing light, love, and liberty.

We're here this morning exercising that liberty, And I'm praying, Lord, that it would grow, that our knowledge of You and our encounter with You would both touch us and change us.

So now, Lord, I ask that this journey in Your Word would bring the same hope that Christ brought 2, 000 years ago.

Bless us to that end, I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

A few summers ago, just outside of Aspen, Colorado, a mother was awakened to the screams of her children.

It didn't take long for her to appear in the doorway of the rented house as they were there vacationing.

And when she peered out onto the front lawn a couple of miles outside of Aspen, Colorado, she saw something that required a decision to be made, for there, on the lawn of their Aspen home, was a cougar on top of her five-year-old boy.

It didn't take her long to make up her mind, she burst through the screen door, was racing towards this animal that had the head of her five-year-old son in its jaws.

And as she charged the animal, she pulled off 1 paw and then proceeded to pry the jaws of the lion open.

Grabbing her boy and scooping him up, she raced toward the house where her husband, who had just returned from a run, was there to catch the last chapters of this amazing deliverance.

The problem was the mountain lion had something that did not belong to him, and the mother was determined to get it back.

Now friends, I want to remind you on this Sabbath that precedes our Christmas celebration, that in this little encounter is constituted the plight of the human race.

And as I was anticipating, standing here before you this morning, I could not but help think of David, who in 1 Samuel 17, after he's offered the armor of Saul, says, I can't fight in these.

And Saul has told him, you can't do this.

And he says, listen, when I was a boy keeping my shepherd's flocks, my father's flocks as a shepherd, a bear and a lion at different times came out.

With that encounter, David describes him going out and grabbing the lion by the beard and slaying the animal.

And as I have mentioned before, there's no moral equivalency.

There is no semblance of really sensibility about a man's life for a sheep.

And yet this is 1 of the ways in which David typifies the experience of Christ in that Jesus himself comes after that lion that's looking for someone to devour.

And after 4, 000 years of darkening human history, when it appears in the jaws of the mighty Roman government, which would slay innocent babies in order to maintain its authority and its throneship, Jesus came to deliver you and me, darkened as this place was.

Take your Bibles this morning and open them up to the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis chapter 1.

I wanna talk to you this morning about spiritual healing.

My sermon is entitled, The Healing Presence of Jesus, From Wound to Wonder.

God in 5 days has spoken the world into existence.

On day 6, he's continuing to create and his crowning act of creation, he comes to the monarchy of our planet.

I'll begin with verse 25, Genesis 1, first book of the Bible.

God made the beast of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground after its kind, and God saw that it was good.

I touched on this imagery last week when I talked about social healing.

There is no tighter bond in the universe than the bond of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit making up this triune oneness.

God himself decided to make us a social creature.

Now I want to talk to you this morning about what it means to be made in the image of God.

What does it mean for the people you love, the people you want to reach?

What does it mean to be made in the image of God?

Let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

Let him rule over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the sky, over the cattle and all the earth and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

And God created man in His image, in the image of God created him male and female He created them.

Now it's interesting As we understand this ministry of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we see here not only the pronoun our, but we hear the statement made in our image 3 times.

There's something distinctly focused and purposeful about being made in the image of God.

And while we are inclined to think of that as physical representation, this morning I'm gonna suggest to you it's far more than physical representation.

Being made in the image of God has far more to do with the inner man and the inner woman than it has to do with the outer man and the outer woman.

You were made to reflect the beauty of your creator.

God made you to reflect in a dark world, the rays of light that have not been totally extinguished from the human race.

It's interesting, turn over to chapter 3, when we come to the fall, that we find this phraseology of the fall repeated 3 times as well.

We don't know how many days or decades have separated the creation from this moment.

But we do know that there was a moment of truth for the human race.

It says in verse 6, when the woman saw, I want to place that emphasis early on, when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, another reference to seeing, and that the tree was desirable, 1 more time, To make 1 wise, she took from its fruit and she ate, and she gave it to her husband and he ate.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.

This story taking place some 6, 000 years ago.

2 people, the uncontested monarchs of a fantastic creation called planet Earth, and in this moment, insinuated doubt about the character of God leads them to abandon that internal sense of certainty that God has given them in a relationship, and they look, they look, they look.

And they can't see anything that's wrong.

There was in that moment, no doubt, a divine contest waging in the mind of first Eve and then Adam.

There can be no doubt that the unseen presence of God was there saying to them, don't take this step.

Don't deliver over your inheritance to this deceiver.

And yet the fruit probably dropped into the hand of Eve.

No immediate ill effect, which is the way Satan works.

Hear me friends, no immediate ill effect.

She brings it to her lips and the juice is sweet.

And moments later, she's handed it off to her husband, who without deceit, repeats her action.

What happened in that moment is still happening.

There is in the heart of every human being a battle that is still raging in reference to being made in the image of God.

God's presence in the experience of humanity has not been lessened.

It has only been intensified since that moment.

The power of a convicting voice directing out of an education, whether it's from parents or church or from the scriptures themselves directly, that ever echoing voice of God that is coming as it appears from nowhere, perhaps yet from within.

Take your Bibles and turn over to the little bitty epistle written by John.

Find the book of Revelation and back up through the book of Jude and into the book of 1st John.

In 1st John chapter 5, the author references to this resonance, this sensitivity that the gauge of our heart has for the voice of God.

John is concerned that people should believe on Jesus.

This is what he says, the 1 who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself.

This is what John Wesley would call the inner witness.

On his father's deathbed he appealed to the Wesley brothers, don't forget the inner witness.

Above all things pay attention to the inner witness.

That voice that still responds to the pluck of the Holy Spirit saying, yes, you're doing the right thing.

There's something about being made as a son or a daughter of God that yet responds to the voice of the Holy Spirit.

Take your Bibles and turn to the book of Romans.

After Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John comes the book of Acts and then Romans.

And the book of Romans, looking at chapter 1, Paul references to this as well.

Paul is developing in the first 3 chapters of the book of Romans as a religious legal expert the fact that every single person is bad, lost without God, and yet not without the ability to respond to the divine appeal.

In this first chapter, he says in verse 18, after declaring the glory of the gospel, which is for all, Jew and Gentile.

He says in verse 18, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.

It doesn't say that the wrath of God is revealed against the people.

It is against this disease which has blown out in epidemic proportions to destroy the people themselves, and the wrath of God is against the ungodliness, the unrighteousness.

It's against those things which were never to be encountered by the human race that would drag it down and destroy it.

All ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness.

Dark, Dirty, Delivered

Father, as we kneel or as we bow our heads here before You this afternoon, we've come, Lord, already experiencing a blessing.

Now, Lord, we're asking as we open the Bible that You would open our hearts, that we would be available to be touched, to be taught, to be focused.

And I pray, Lord, meet our needs and prepare us to meet the needs of others.

May we be encouraged through what you've done in the past and what you can do today.

If you've been listening to the news, you realize that there is a mental health crisis that's growing not only in America, but around the world, especially in Western societies.

It appears that having more and having it often, being able to indulge in exercising license is not enough to keep someone happy.

The joy of heaven is very different from the temporary pleasure and fun that we can have.

And while there's nothing wrong with pleasure or fun, this morning I wanna talk with you about mental health and mental well-being.

The crisis of the end will be a mental health crisis.

The Bible tells us that men's hearts will be failing them for fear.

And I'm here to tell you today that God has a solution to make us strong in an age of increasing mental weakness.

So this morning, I wanna go on a journey with you.

Listening to the radio this week, I was cued in to something that is an increasing problem.

I'm holding in my hands here a facsimile of the Wall Street Journal from October of this year.

It says the youth suicide rate increased 56% in a decade.

Thousands and thousands of people who have decided that not going forward is the best way to go.

There's a little town in Utah where they've had 6 people, young people, teenagers commit suicide in the last year.

And I'm looking at a picture here of a bridge across the river with some small mountains in the background from this city in Utah, and someone has scrawled on the oxidized, the rusted top metal piece, the guardrail of the bridge.

It says, when there's nowhere to go, dot, dot, dot, stay!

I don't know if Some have jumped from this bridge to their death or not, but suicide is a terrible thing.

If a family member, it's a sad end to something that could have a brighter future.

And this morning, this time of year, we recognize there is a certain heaviness that builds in.

Short days, in some places very, very cloud-covered, absence of the sun.

We're not the only place this seasonal affective disorder affects a lot of people.

So how is it that God lays his hand on a mind?

But what are we going to do to strengthen the mind and the hope, the heart, the faith, to give us the courage to go on.

Philip Nelson told the story of a Chicago businessman who had decided that life wasn't worth living.

And as he walked down to the Chicago waterfront, he was almost within sight of the icy cold waters of the river when he heard some crying from a street corner.

He looked over and saw a little girl who was there near a light post, tears just streaming down her cheeks.

She had fled the home cold, foodless, sad, empty almost.

And she was there on this Chicago street corner wondering to herself, what am I going to do?

And the businessman who was on the way to ending his own life heard the suffering sounds of this little girl and said, honey, what's wrong?

And mommy was sick, laying in bed with a fever, and she didn't know what to do.

He took the little girl by her hand, walked over to the apartments, went up the stairs, entered the apartment, And sure enough, after opening all the doors on the cupboards, there was nothing.

The frigidness of the apartment met him immediately.

And yes, there, laying in 1 of the rooms, was a mother trying to fight off death.

Well, the man thought to himself, I have to do something about this.

He immediately got a hold of the grocer and filled the cupboards with food.

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The Healing Presence of Jesus

From Curse to Cross and the Smitten Rock

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