In Paris, TN this sermon addressed a church planted largely by MEET Ministry staff and students.

<p>In Paris, TN this sermon addressed a church planted largely by MEET Ministry staff and students.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Eugene Prewitt

Church Plant

The Bible Data on Health

Before I make much progress, I want to talk to you tonight about a resource regarding the intersection of health and Bible data, and that is the website audioverse.org.

Audio, A-U-D-I-O, V-E-R-S-E dot O-R-G, has lectures by nearly 40 physicians on the issue of health and its relation to the spiritual life and to Bible truth.

Lectures from everything from how to overcome depression to issues dealing with diabetes, learning how to face end of life issues sensibly, questions about diet, anyway, what's that resource?

What you have in front of you, this health in a biblical perspective, is a kind of like an outline of ideas that you find in the Bible.

It isn't the ideas themselves, because the Bible has far more information about health than what could be presented in a short lecture.

What the Bible says about health is a strong evidence for the inspiration of the Bible.

I don't know if you're aware of the history of health and science to however much degree you may or may not know, I'm a beneficiary of modern health science.

Louis Pasteur, who invented the vaccine for rabies, that vaccine saved my life.

I was bitten by a rabid bat when I was an infant.

But you go back before Pasteur, back even before the period of the Romans, and you find even the people of Europe and near the Caucasus Mountains, their ideas about health were similar to what you find in the jungles of Borneo today.

That is, in many parts of the world today, you find people that when they get sick, They think it's because a spirit has cursed them.

When they get leprosy, they think it's because someone has put a spell on them.

When they end up having a baby die, they believe that that's because the spirits have attacked them.

And they have no idea about hygiene, no idea about germs, no concept of quarantines, no concept of even how to deal with their excrement.

I've been in India, And in India, I don't know if you know this, some of you here know me a little bit, I like to watch birds.

And the way to see birds in many parts of the world is to go off the beaten path.

Because in India, the people just take 2 or 3 steps off the path, and that is where they use the restroom, beside the roads.

And because that excrement is so close to where they live and walk and breathe, many diseases that we never see here are prevalent in the part of India where I was.

What I'm trying to tell you is that a knowledge about germs, about viral infections, a knowledge about viral infections, a knowledge about hygiene and cleanliness saves us, the 6 of us here, from so much misery.

But go back to the Bible, and you'll find that when God was speaking to ignorant slaves, slaves that were leaving Egypt that had no idea about germs, had no concept of any of these things, He gave them instructions.

He told them, when you need to use the restroom, take a shovel with you.

Go outside of the camp, dig a hole, and bury it.

He told them, when someone gets an infectious illness, put them in a quarantine and watch them for several days to see if it goes away or if it's changing.

If it ends up being something that you can't cure, like Leprosy, keep them outside of the camp.

So that God introduced quarantine into the mobile Israelite camp.

Don't think that this was a knowledge that was extant outside of Israel.

Maybe those of you who've read the Bible remember the story about that little girl, Naaman's servant.

His infectious illness was right there near other people who could be infected.

What I'm trying to tell you, in harmony with what is on your paper, is that there are several evidences regarding hygiene that prove that someone with a knowledge thousands of years beyond Moses' time inspired the writings of Moses.

God made it requisite for his presence that they would take regular baths.

To you, that might sound normal because you have hot water and you take a bath once or twice a day, but there are many parts of the world today where people take baths once a week or once every 3 weeks where people don't have running water that Israelites did not have running water.

And if they had been left to themselves, that would have been a rare experience.

But God required them to take a bath every evening after, if they would have a sexual encounter with their spouse, they had to take a bath.

If they would touch a corpse, they had to take a bath.

If they would be near anyone who had an infectious illness, they had to take a bath and they had to wash their clothes.

I don't know if you can see it, but this is a level of wisdom that you just can't understand until you know what you know about germs.

It was less than 300 years ago that doctors and nurses began washing their hands before they treated patients.

Look at the second line there, evidence of God's design.

The illnesses that hurt people in America and Australia and Europe today, the primary ones are cancers and heart disease, diabetes, arteriosclerosis.

These are the biggies, and growing ones include a number of autoimmune disorders like lupus, and some illnesses like Lyme's that are carried by insects.

Those first 4 I mentioned though, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, I don't know if I even mentioned stroke, but those 4 are entirely preventable.

When I say cancer's entirely preventable, that's an exaggeration.

Cancer cells form in every 1 of our bodies every day.

Cancer cells are not rare developments in humans, they're continuous developments.

But cancer cells are eaten by our large white blood cells.

This is why, even though you develop cancer probably 20 times today, you don't have cancer.

It's because that cancer cell was promptly executed.

But when you practice a certain set of health principles, the likelihood of you developing cancer goes down dramatically.

In this magazine here, you have references.

This show, for example, just eating, excuse me, just having regular physical exercise with a certain level of exertion decreases the likelihood of a man getting prostate cancer by 74%.

For a woman, that same level of exercise reduces her chance of getting breast cancer 37%.

That means where you would have 12 ladies getting it without exercise, you'd only have 8 getting it with exercise.

If 12 ladies exercised, it would save the lives of 4 of them.

When I said 12 ladies exercise, it said the lives of 4 of them.

I mean, if 12 ladies that were doomed to get breast cancer exercised, that, anyway, I think you follow what I'm trying to say.

That original diet, you see there under evidence of God's design, the original diet of fruits, nuts and grains and later vegetables, ready veggies, I hope you don't mind that I say that, that vegetables were added in chapter 3 of Genesis, they weren't in chapter 1 or 2.

But that particular diet all by itself, if you just eat that way, the simple, unrefined diet of fruits, nuts, and grains, the chance of you eating enough to become Obese is almost nil.

To eat enough to become obese, you need refined foods, because whole grains and whole fruits are satiating.

They fill you up, and they make it hard to overeat.

To overeat, you need desserts and processed grains and fatty things.

Can any of you just imagine how hard it would be to overeat the simplest of foods?

I'm not going to ask you to think that through, you probably can't imagine it if you've never tried it for a while.

The original diet matches the needs of the body to such an extent that the person who wrote Genesis either understood how to prevent cancer, diabetes, stroke, and these other things, or else he just randomly hit on the right diet to accomplish that.

Do you understand what I'm trying to say?

That the diet that is in Genesis works in uncanny ways, only being discovered in 2014.

What about the issue of clean and unclean animals?

I'm not gonna ask you if you've seen the movie Noah, or is it called The Flood?

I haven't seen it, But if you have, I guess I am sort of asking you, the animals that went into the ark, did they all go in by 2 or did some of them go in by 7?

But in Genesis, when the animals go into the ark, the clean animals go in by 7, but the unclean animals go in by 2.

And when they come out of the ark, that is when God introduces the idea of eating meat.

Now do you see right away what happens if they decide in their meat eating that they're going to eat 1 of the unclean animals?

You have instant extirpation of the species, instant extinction.

Because if you have 2 and you take 1, you have no more breeding pairs, right?

Very apparently, God made provision so when they got out of the ark and there was no cultivated fields of grain, no mature fruit trees, no vegetable gardens ready to go.

You know, they can't wait 5 years to start eating.

Very apparently, just by what he said about who went in and out of the ark, they were gonna eat the clean meats.

But when you come to the next book of the Bible, it becomes more explicit.

Growing Faith

And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion beseeching him, and saying, Lord, my servant lies at home, sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.

And Jesus said unto him, I will come and heal him.

There is something there about evangelism that's very simple that we ought to gather.

But do you know when Matthew 25 talks about the sheep and the goats, and it mentions that the sheep took an interest in sick people.

Matthew 25 does not say that the sheep healed the sick people.

In Matthew 25, when Jesus separates the sheep from the goats on the basis of whether or not they did something for him, you know about this story, right?

And he talks about when he was sick or when he was in prison, the question is whether or not they visited him.

Or what I'm trying to say to you is that if you've never been to the program in meat ministry and if you're nervous about giving a hot footbath and don't know how to do it, or if you feel like you don't know the difference between diabetes and high blood pressure, you can still be qualified to be a sheep in Matthew 25 if you'll take a personal interest in someone who is sick.

And in visiting them and showing that you care, you make quite an opening for sharing of many different types.

Do you understand what I'm trying to say to you?

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't learn how to do those simple things.

Jesus did offer to come and make a difference and you should too.

But when he made this offer the man did not see fit to invite Jesus to come.

He said in verse 8, Lord I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but speak the word only and my servant will be healed.

I have soldiers under me and I say to this man go and he goes and to another come and he comes and to my servant do this and he does it.

When Jesus heard it he marveled and said to them that followed, Verily I say to you I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.

Do you know that the centurion had a larger faith than anyone Jesus had encountered in the first 30 years of his life?

In 30 years of living where he lived, Jesus did not encounter anyone that had as much faith as the Roman soldier.

And that makes me wonder what was special about the Roman soldier's faith.

Let me just tell you some things I observed in what we read.

I observed that the Roman soldier was earnest when he came to Jesus.

That the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.

And I noticed that when he came to Jesus, that he wasn't asking something for himself, he was asking something for someone else.

Let me make another plug at the fact that someone here should plant a church in McKenzie and someone else should do it in Huntington.

It will make your prayer life much better.

It's when you're doing service that you have content for your prayers.

When you're not doing service, your prayers are either short, redundant, or selfish or dry.

In other words, to pray for an hour, it's Not that you talk about your own sins for 60 minutes in a row.

You ought to have a substantial list of needy people that you care about.

I see Brother Samuel agreeing with me with his eyes, and I know he does because I walked in on him praying yesterday morning.

I thought there was going to be worship at 630 in the morning and when I went into where I thought it was going to be he was praying and I was in there alone enough to hear that he was praying for people.

Well that's how it works with lawn prayers.

Probably even without evangelism you can think of a lot of sick people to pray for.

But if you want to have power in your prayers, you're going to have to do evangelism.

Because most of the people who are sick are sick because of how they've lived.

And your prayers for them don't make much difference at all.

Or maybe I should say it different, they don't do anything like what you're praying for.

Or let me say this another way, I know that you have had special prayer, probably even in this church, in the last, well this church has only been here, what, 14, 15 years?

But you've been going to church longer than that.

So let's say in the last 30 years of your life, those of you who are 50, you've probably prayed, in 30 years you've probably paid for almost a thousand people that have cancer?

Well, maybe not because survival rates are going up.

But what I'm trying to tell you is that if you want to have power in your prayer, you're going to have to do evangelism and have sin issues and needy issues and hungry people that you're praying for, that'll make a difference for you.

He was praying something for someone else.

And more than that, He did not feel like he deserved anything from Jesus.

Can you see in the story that he didn't feel worthy?

He didn't even feel like he deserved to have Jesus in his house much less to work a miracle for him.

So his idea wasn't that I deserve something, but it was that, Jesus, because you're kind and powerful, please do it anyway.

And I noticed that he's not part of the church.

Do you observe that when you just read the story?

You're just thinking that Jesus found someone with great faith who wasn't part of the church.

Turn forward a few pages to Matthew chapter 15.

Matthew 15 is the only other New Testament chapter where Jesus talks about someone who has great faith.

And behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coast and cried unto him, saying, "'Have mercy on me, O Lord, you son of David.

"'My daughter is grievously vexed with the devil.

Do you see some things that this lady has in common with the soldier?

For 1 thing, she's not part of the church.

For another thing, she's not asking something for herself, but something for her daughter.

For another, she is earnest in her petition.

She's asking, she's not coming to Jesus like you would talk to a pure friend.

But please don't misunderstand that idea to say that prayer is talking to God as to a peer.

By a peer, I mean someone who is your equal.

If Barack Obama becomes my friend, that's not going to make him into my peer.

And when I talk to him, it's going to be Mr.

Maybe if we're friends for a long time I might begin to call him Barack.

But even if it did it would be with a great deal of respect.

When we speak to God, the earnestness we show gives some evidence of the fact that we know that we are a suppliant asking someone who is mighty.

But when we talk to God in a nonchalant way, almost like we would talk to someone who is on our same level, that type of communication, that lack of respect, is an irreverence that really reduces the power of our prayers.

It's why it's the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man that avails much.

Verse 23, but Jesus did not answer her even a word.

And his disciples came and besought him saying, so now they're praying, send her away for she cries after us.

But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

You know, that had to be hard for her to listen to.

It had to be hard to have the chosen man not even want to have her around.

Not only does the master not answer, but the others don't answer, and then they ask the master to send her away and complain about her like she's a nuisance.

But it had to be worse when Jesus said, I'm only sent to the Israelites.

Series

Church Plant

Growing Faith

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

The Doctrine of Personal Ministries

Part 2 - Who Fed the 5,000?

1h 13m

The Doctrine of Personal Ministries

Part 5 - Mining the Manual

1h 16m

Training Center Churches

6. May I Have Your Attention, Please?

51m

God is Love?

25-Too Many Members

48m

Experiencing the Revival

1h 16m

Medical Missionary Work- Part 1

38m

Witnessing on Campus

Lambs Among Lions

31m

Plenary

Why is Jesus Always Talking About Plants

1h

Discipleship: Our Church’s Desperate Need

45m

Plenary

You Won’t Need Elbows in Heaven

51m

Occupy Wall Street with Jesus

5. Studying with W3s and Winning Souls

1h 8m

Acts: First Generation Lessons for Last Generation Believers

2. Discipline

1h

Sound Doctrine