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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

John Torquato

The Gospel Purpose of Medical Ministry

Father in heaven, I pray for myself this morning that you will be with me and move me out of the way and Help the words that are spoken to be those words that will inspire and direct individuals to you Help Lord the way that we think be altered so that we are like you and so that we are no longer like ourselves but like you.

So we need to be like you, like you, and we pray that you'll help that happen this morning.

I'm gonna share with you a couple of things today.

I'm gonna share with you a divine plan of medical evangelism.

I'm going to share with you a secular plan of medical evangelism.

I'm going to show you how they work together.

I happen to be a family practice physician and my goal in life is to help people to know Jesus.

My purpose for being a physician in the first place, I don't love medicine enough that if I couldn't do ministry, I simply wouldn't continue medicine.

You know, I could be a carpenter, I could be a mechanic, I do whatever I wanted to, but really is to share the love of Jesus.

And honestly, the position I carry as a physician is 1 of the greatest opportunities I could ever ask for, used correctly, but also lead in the wrong direction in a large way.

So I want to be able to share with you the way that I have gone about looking at medical evangelism, medical ministry, and maybe give you some thoughts as to how you might be able to also in the future.

I work with a group of individuals called Total Health Spokane.

These are young people that are volunteers.

I have an office that is actually inside a 7 day dentist church.

And they work for me as volunteers to work in the community.

So when I have like a diabetic who has gotten to the highest dose of their meds and the highest, effort they could make, and they're still failing at the diabetes and their sugars are 450, and they're just not doing.

Well, I would send 1 of these young people to their home And they would be in their home to teach them to cook to teach them how to organize it You know exercise they teach them how to make sure they take their medicines and they work with them for weeks at a time as volunteers, and they're under my guidance and they teach them.

And all the time that they're doing that, they're sharing the love of God.

You see, and so it's kind of a unique opportunity that I've had to be able to share with individuals in medical ministry, because I have a team that I've been working with.

So I'm not gonna talk specifically about that team, but I'm gonna talk about the principles that we use as we interact with our patients in the community.

So if you are interested in, if you're interested in the notes that I'm going to use today, I actually have a copy of the slides on PDF that this evening will be available to me.

And so if you wanted to, you can send an email to amedicalministry at gmail.com.

And this evening, when I get back to the house I'll just blast out a copy of the notes to you if you're interested.

In addition, if you'd like to hear about the volunteers I was just talking about, you can look up the website, phsvolunteer.com.

That's our recruitment website and it talks about the program that we do and there's several short videos.

Most of these made by young people at the very first page and if you're interested you can do those videos really quickly and kind of get a good sense of the kinds of things that we get into.

So the gospel purpose of the medical ministry.

In Colossians 127, it states that to them that God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles.

What is that mystery, the glory of that mystery?

And that is really the focus of medical evangelism.

It's why we do what we do in the first place.

It's not just to make healthy people that don't know Jesus.

It's to help people to understand Jesus with clarity of mind, that there is a God that loves them.

And so, you know, people would wonder why do we have medical ministry in the church anyway?

I mean, I wouldn't think if it was me making up the decision, you know, nobody asked me, you know, should we put gospel and ministry of medicine together?

I wouldn't think, you know, hey if I'm going to preach to you Why do I have to go out and you know heal you too?

I'm going to take care of you as a physician.

Why should I be preaching the gospel to you?

And so you know it occurred to me that maybe there are reasons As I was coming up through school and trying to figure out as a young Seventh-day Adventist newly converted to the message, what was the purpose of medical ministry?

And I came up with a couple of good ideas, and I'll share with you my thought process.

At first I thought maybe it's a good public relations message.

It's a way to draw attention of the world about the beneficent work that we do.

It's a method of kind of gaining popularity, if you will.

Gaining popularity and notoriety for the church.

It's a way for people to look at us as a people and say, hey, they do a good job.

Maybe they have something with the gospel too.

As Seventh-day Adventist, we operate 1 of the largest Protestant healthcare systems in the world.

And in addition, the Seventh-day Adventist Church actually operates more than 560 of these health care institutions, and that's hospitals and sanitariums and clinics, et cetera.

Maybe this is the process that why a church should have interest in medical work.

But I discovered later as I was thinking about it, it doesn't make sense.

It's not really a way to gain popularity.

You see, We as a people actually have special insight into this.

We understand the great controversy and the origin of that in between good and evil and that how that great controversy started by 1 person who wanted notoriety.

They wanted increased influence beyond their sphere and they desired and they took that and because of that we recognize that that has certain problems associated with it when we start thinking that way.

And so with all this background we see 1 principle as Seventh-day Adventist.

This principle states that we as human beings are not created for praise.

We're not created to receive praise and notoriety.

And so the idea that maybe it's just the notoriety that we should have that makes us have this purpose of combined medicine and ministry together, it probably didn't fit so well.

It's really, it's really a good idea to, to draw people to the church, you know, draw them with health, and then we can hit them with the gospel.

I discovered when I was in clinical medicine at the very beginning, bait and switch doesn't work.

If you draw somebody with medicine and you throw upon them the gospel, they're going to get kicked off at you.

You see, and so there's this problem with that whole line of thinking.

And the whole idea of this is not bait and switch.

This is not something that we're trying to switch them into.

Actually, we want to win people with what we win them to.

We want to win them with abundant life because we're winning them to abundant life.

We're trying to win them with the love of Jesus because we're trying to win them to the love of Jesus.

And really the message that we're trying to be able to share with the world is this amazing message.

Come and see, come and see the power of sin has been broken.

When you can share that the power of sin has been broken in an individual life, in their health, they will see the love of God in that.

The health message is integrated very, very closely with the gospel.

And because of that, God wants to give abundant life, both in the process of helping people to understand him as well as in the outcome that he's trying to choose for.

So you see in the apostle John, you see that Jesus said this very clearly.

He says, I pray that you will have a life and have it more abundantly.

And to be in good health and to prosper, even as your soul prospers in 1 John 4.

You see that these things in the scripture tell us that God wants us to put those together.

So it's God's will that we have joy and peace and good health, that's his intention for us and the purpose for the combined medical ministry.

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The Gospel Purpose of Medical Ministry

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