Why have a healing ministry?
For me it’s all about the Kingdom of God. We pray ‘your Kingdom Come’. How? What will it look like when your Kingdom comes? It will be when ‘Your will is done on earth as in Heaven’. So what will it look like when God is running this show?
Well let’s look for a minute at this expression “the Kingdom of God”.
It is the expression Jesus used above all else to in relation to his ministry. He said at various times:
The Kingdom of God is at hand,
The Kingdom of God is upon you,
The Kingdom of God is near,
I must preach the good news of the Kingdom
Go and proclaim the Kingdom of God
In key places, Paul’s ministry is also summarized in terms of the Kingdom. The very last verse in Acts has Paul proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.
He reminds the troublesome Corinthians ‘For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power’.
Have you ever noticed that there is a big hole in the great creeds of the church. Without exception they all say something like Jesus was ‘born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate’? What about the bit in the middle? What about the life of Jesus? What the creeds fail to mention, takes up the major part of all four gospels — by my count at least 85%.
So what was going on in those three years of Jesus ministry? A recent book by one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars (N.T. Wright) puts it this way. He says ‘God was becoming King’. The title of the book which deals with this exact subject is ‘How God Became King’.
Wright says: ‘The central message of all four canonical Gospels is that the Creator God, Israel’s God, is at last reclaiming the whole world as his own, in and through Jesus of Nazareth. That, to offer a riskily broad generalization, is the message of the kingdom of God, which is Jesus’s answer to the question, What would it look like if God were running this show? If you want to know what the world would look like if God was running the show — look no further than the life of Jesus’.
At the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, Satan was the one with authority. When Jesus was tempted, we read this (in Luke’s account): ‘And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours’.
At some stage during Jesus’s ministry (specifically when the seventy had been sent out — Luke 10:18) there was a regime change. Jesus said ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven’.
But at the end of Jesus’ ministry, after the resurrection, Jesus, in what we know as the Great Commission, says: ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations’.
During Jesus’s ministry and in particular through his death on the cross and resurrection, the powers were defeated, and God’s long promised kingdom was finally inaugurated.
So what does the Kingdom of God that was inaugurated through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus look like? What does it look like if God is running this show? Well, a read through the gospels tells us.
It is an upside down Kingdom where the poor in spirit, mourners, the humble, those seeking righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, peacemakers and the persecuted are blessed.
It is a kingdom where those who care for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the prisoner will inherit the kingdom.
It is a kingdom where fasting and giving are to be done in secret, where we are not to be judgmental, not to be fearful, to love our enemies and pray for them.
It is a kingdom where sinners are forgiven and set free.
It is a kingdom where Jesus shows that he has extraordinary authority over nature.
It is a kingdom where divisions of race, status and gender are eliminated.
And it is a Kingdom that is now, but not yet.
But overwhelmingly, when you skim through the gospels, it it a kingdom where damaged, broken people are made whole.
Where the deaf have their hearing restored,
Where the blind are made to see,
Where the dead are raised to life,
Where the lame and crippled are healed,
Where the demon possessed are delivered,
Where the paralyzed are healed,
The fevered are cured,
The dumb are enabled to speak,
The unclean are cleansed,
Where incomplete bodies are made complete, and
Where sinners are forgiven and set free.
John’s gospel records the cry of Jesus the cross ‘It is finished’. This is usually interpreted as a bill being paid, or an account settled, so that our sins could be forgiven. But John’s point is that it is the completion of Jesus’s task, his vocation to inaugurate NEW creation. In Genesis we read: ‘Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done . . . ‘ That creation, the creation in which we live, was and is corrupted by sin. On the cross, when Jesus cried ‘It is finished’, the work of inaugurating NEW creation, the work of inaugurating the Kingdom of God, the work Jesus had been going about for three years, was finished.
‘Through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God’s Kingdom has been launched on earth as in heaven, generating a new state of affairs in which the power of evil has been defeated, the NEW creation has been decisively launched, and Jesus’s followers — that’s us — have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice.’
And that includes healing the sick. In the Great Commisssion, as we have already noted, Jesus says: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. He goes on to say: ‘baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age’.
And of course, one of the things he commanded his disciples to do was to heal the sick.
And that’s why every church should have a healing ministry.