Collegedale Camp Meeting 2023: Expanding His Kingdom

Georgia-Cumberland Conference

Lessons from the Great Physician

Greg Steinke

The Greatest Physician of All Time

His Supporting Medical Staff

Cleansing the Defiled

Healing the Sick and Distressed

Raising the Dead

Lifestyle Medical Ministry Today

All right, well, this has been a fun journey.

It's been a lot of fun establishing the basis of why Jesus came doing miracles.

It's been a lot of fun establishing the characteristics of the issue of healing on the Sabbath, and we'll touch on that again.

The Lord, I believe, is leading me again to talk to you about this.

And then We went through a number of stories and looked at spiritual principles that are so important for helping us to overcome our health struggles, our habits, and so on, as we understand them.

Dear Lord, we're just so grateful for the light that you're shedding to each of us.

I know I've learned a lot in preparing these, and I just pray, Lord, that as we make an effort again to understand the eternal depths of your words, the depths of what you're trying to get across to us, that you would bring your spirit here and do a special work on each heart here today.

All right, so God looks upon those who are sick with pitying tenderness.

I hope we establish that well in your minds, that Jesus is all about pitying tenderness.

He never looks on someone who's sick in any negative way.

He has pity for them, he's tender towards them.

And he wants us to minister to them in love that they may see Jesus' character of love and learn to obey his health principles as a preparation for his second coming.

So what are these guiding principles that we can use if we want to have a ministry of our own right?

You know, I established at previous sessions that God, Jesus, called all his disciples, all his followers, to engage in both sharing the gospel from a preaching side, talking kind of thing, but also to heal, to put your hands on people, so to speak, to do acts of mercy, to acts of kindness.

How can I find a way to love this person and help them through their struggles?

And so that's what we've talked about already, and I'm not gonna go through that already.

But I just wanna, again, but I just wanna touch on a couple things that each of us, I hope, are going through in our lives, that we're learning to love others during the time of the end.

You know, after studying all this material, it seems to me that that's the crux of the issue of why our church is so slow to get going on this.

We are making efforts, but we really need to start accelerating our efforts in terms of making a lifestyle medical ministry or some kind of missionary work process that God is bestowing upon you based on the gifts he's given you.

And so the way I was thinking about this was, we need to take a long, hard look into the face of Jesus.

Because when you do that, immediately, you see his love, and his enormous long suffering for us, That he is love.

You know, when I was a teenager, my house was in total chaos and conflict.

My mom and my dad were really having problems.

We had overextended ourselves financially.

And my mom had some bitterness issues from getting kicked out of a church college.

And she still held onto those, and it was a big part of our lives.

And so, there was 1 conflict that occurred, I don't remember the details, and I got to the point of exasperation.

I don't know if you've ever been in a point of exasperation before in your life.

But when you get to that point, I remember being that point as a teenager, something just breaks inside you.

And I walked out that door, it was a September, late September day, and I grew up in the Vancouver, British Columbia area.

And walked the streets, didn't know what I was gonna do with myself.

I wasn't going to go anywhere where my parents might find me.

But I walked and I walked and blew off steam.

And eventually, it was getting dark, getting late, it was getting cold.

And I remembered that my parents had a pool and they had a pool house that was always warm.

And so I decided to just sneak in the back and I was exhausted and so I went ahead and fell asleep on the little bench that was in there.

We spent a lot of time in hockey arenas and baseball diamonds.

He went there, went by my school, trying to find anywhere that I might be.

Finally, he comes home at like 4 in the morning and comes into the bedroom where my mom is still awake.

And he looks at my mom and he says, I don't know.

And all of a sudden he said that there was some kind of touch that he had on his shoulder, like some kind of feeling he had on his shoulder that sort of tapped him on the shoulder and said, did you check the pool house?

And if you've ever met my dad, you know he's a very soft and gentle man.

And so he makes his way down to the pool house, finds me there sleeping.

And if he had yelled at me, if he had treated me rough in any way, I would have just sat up and walked right out of there again.

But he just gently touched me, woke me up, and he said, Craig, why don't you come home?

And you know, that was a moment in my life where I really finally, I think, got a touch of God's love.

And it began to change my life in a way that I could have never predicted.

And I want to share a little bit more of that in a minute.

So as you get a touch of God's love, you start to feel something of his character, of the beauty of who he is, the beautiful face that he has.

And then as you learn more about him, you realize that, you know, you start to see the moral standard that he has for your life.

That he longs for you to raise your life up into a better way.

And there's scriptures that we know that recognize this in Romans 7.

And we see the utter destitution of our own hearts.

The Bible says In Jeremiah 17, the human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked.

And that seems to be all our struggles at some level.

In Revelation, Jesus is knocking on the door of the man who thinks he's rich, increased with goods, in need of nothing.

And he says to that man, you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked, speaking spiritually.

And so we need to realize how utterly destitute we are in our own experience.

Otherwise we will never be able to minister to others in a way that's a blessing for them.

And we come to Him as we are and cling to Him until He blesses us.

I will not let you go unless you bless me, said Jacob when he wrestled all night with God.

He gives you a new heart and puts His love in you, in me.

Sets us apart for a holy purpose and starts to execute His will in us.

In Ezekiel 36 it says, a new heart also will I give you and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away the stony heart of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statues." He's going to do it in us.

"'For you are a temple of the living God, even as God said, I will dwell in them and walk in them by His Spirit, of course, and I will be their God and they will be my people.

And Therefore, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord.

Touch no unclean thing, I will receive you.

I will be to you a father, you will be to me sons and daughters." You know, just like my father, who was far away from the Lord at that time, had still in his experience somehow, that touch of love for me during that moment when I was running away.

And this is essential to being able to help others.

If you do not have this, you will struggle mightily to be a blessing.

So daily we cling and abide to Him, and he teaches us how to actively seek others.

Number 7, his commandments are the details of his love for us.

And as we begin to learn how to follow his standard, we find there's more and more love in our lives.

This little link here, we can go over that at the end.

Okay, so I wanna talk about the context of lifestyle medical ministry before Christ's coming.

I believe that we are living in very different times than we've lived in before in the history of the world.

Series

Lessons from the Great Physician

Lifestyle Medical Ministry Today

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Confidence in Crisis

Confidence in Crisis - Part 1: When Nature Dies: The Almost Last Supper

1h 7m

The Mount of Blessings

Sins of the Heart

43m

Jesus on Prophecy

01 Prophecy Unfolds Today

48m

Microbacterium Laprae

52m

Power in the Church

55m

How Intimacy Changes the Brain

39m

WYC 2012 Plenary Sessions

The Cross and the Latter Rain

1h

2019: Evening and Sabbath Meetings

The Privilege of Prayer

1h 8m

Being Adventist

The Terrifying Tyranny of Adventist Eschatology

1h 7m

Marriage Heart to Heart

Money Matters

47m

Maintaining Prayer Life When Busy

29m

Dave Fiedler: Core of the Controversy

Omega: Nothing New Here

58m

Sound Doctrine