Is it God's will to heal me?
Part Five.
Hi, welcome to today's little lesson.
This is another special DR Congo edition, and the Christian community here has finally
quieted down once again.
They get going around 6:00 a.m., and you hear all of this praise and worship and prayer
going on in different churches around here, in the city of Lubumbashi.
Lasts till about 7:00, and then things get quiet so I can come out here and talk to you
without having all that background noise.
So we're asking the question, "Is it God's will to heal me?"
We've been looking at the scripture, because we're interested in what the Bible says, because
so many times the foundation that Christians have laid in their lives, or had laid in their
lives sometimes inadvertently, is a foundation that's not built on the word of God.
It's built upon somebody's experience.
Anytime you talk about healing, inevitably, someone brings up the topic of, "What about
so-and-so?
They didn't get healed."
Well, okay, that's a valid point, because we'd expect that if healing is God's will,
that people would be healed, especially wonderful Christians and so forth.
But yet, that's not the final word on the subject, right?
Just because somebody failed, for some reason or another, to make a connection to receive
healing from the Lord doesn't mean that it's not God's will for you to be healed.
Okay?
And it doesn't mean it wasn't God's will for them to be healed necessarily, either.
Because we certainly have, I think, delved into that idea several times here now.
We can't determine God's will by experiences.
If that was true, if that was the case, if that was a valid means of determining God's
will, we could determine God's will was that for most people to go to hell, because most
people have gone to hell and are going to hell.
But we know it's not God's will for anyone to go to hell, unless you're a Calvinist,
of course.
But I'm no Calvinist, and I'm always trying to persuade people to not believe the Calvinistic
idea that God wills for some people to be saved and other people not to.
But there's many other examples of scripture that even Calvinists can't deny.
I've mentioned previously, of course.
It was God's will for all of the children of Israel to enter into The Promised Land,
nobody can deny that.
But they didn't benefit from the promise that God had given them because they didn't mix
God's word with faith.
That's what the Bible says.
They failed to enter because of their unbelief.
And Jesus ... Jesus told people many times, "Your faith has healed you."
Sometimes he got mad at the disciples because they didn't have faith and failed to do something
that they could and should have done if they would have had faith.
Okay, so this is in the Bible.
Without faith, it's impossible to please God.
I'm not going to try to figure out what happened to everybody else.
I'm going to be concerned about what the Bible says about me.
So the Bible lays this bedrock foundation of revealing God as the healing God.
Jehovah Rapha.
Early on in the Bible, we studied that scripture.
We looked at a number of scriptures already, make it very clear that healing was a part
of the covenant that Israel had with God if they ... You know, it was contingent upon
their obedience and so forth.
There was many stories in the old Testament of God healing people.
Then we go into the Psalms and there's promises of healing.
Even Proverbs has a promise of healing.
I might get a chance to read that to you, and the stories of healings amongst the prophets.
Jesus appears on the scene.
He's healing people like crazy.
Then we come into the epistles and there's stuff about healing in there.
"Is any among you sick?
Let him call for the elders of the church", and so forth.
Paul writes and says, "God's working miracles among you because of your faith", and so forth.
In the book of Acts, there's all kinds of healing.
I mean from cover to cover, God reveals himself as the healing God.
That ought to be the bedrock foundation of our understanding of healing.
But too many times, there is no bedrock, or if there is, it's this bedrock, this thin
little bedrock that's based upon somebody experience or one scripture.
Like someone recently was telling me, "Well Paul told Timothy to not drink water, but
to drink wine for the sake of his stomach and his frequent ailments.
So there you go.
That proves that healing's not for everybody, because you just can't believe and have faith,
because Paul didn't tell Timothy to have faith.
He told him to use some medicine, to take some wine as there's some medicinal benefits
there.
So that's how God's working."
Build a whole foundation, a whole theology of healing on one scripture where Paul told
Timothy to drink a little wine for the sake of his stomach.
Well, that's such an easy one to explain within the context of the whole rest of scripture.
Believe me, one little scripture doesn't undo the whole Bible.
To take that one scripture and say, "Well there.
That's that's everything the Bible says about healing.
Our entire foundation of healing is based upon one sentence.
Paul told Timothy to drink a little wine for the sake of his stomach and his frequent ailments.
Well, there it is.
That does undoes everything else in the Bible that God says about healing."
Come on, come on.
Come on.
We're smarter than this.
So why did Paul tell Timothy to drink a little wine?
That's not all he said.
He said, "No longer drink water", he said.
That's what it says, "But drink wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments."
So what does that tell us?
That tells us that the water that Timothy was drinking was giving him stomach problems.
"No longer drink water."
Of course, if you study it out, Timothy was far from home.
Anytime you go far from home and you go ... Well back in Timothy's day, anywhere you went,
because it was all undeveloped nations back then.
So anywhere you went, there's a unique bacteria in their water.
The local citizens are immune to that bacteria because their body has built up an immunity.
But a stranger coming in from a foreign place drinks the water and he gets really sick.
Of course he gets better eventually, because his body builds up the same immunity.
Well, I've traveled all over the world for decades.
I'm in the Democratic Republic of Congo right now.
Am I drinking the water?
I never drink the water.
I always drink bottled water because I've learned my lesson.
So what Paul told Timothy, it was good wisdom for any missionary to follow from then on.
Paul may have even been giving it by divine revelation to Timothy.
"Here's the solution to your problem.
You keep poisoning your body with this polluted water.
So stop drinking the water.
Drink wine."
The wine that has the alcoholic content in it, kills the bad bacteria and so forth, comes
out of grapes, So you're much safer drinking the wine than drinking the water.
So don't base your whole theology of divine healing on one little verse in the Bible where
Paul told Timothy to drink wine for the sake of his stomach.
I would tell you there's many natural things we could talk about regarding healing.
My dear friend who just passed away, I told you about in previous little lessons, he had
Type Two Diabetes.
Well that's adult onset diabetes.
You can reverse Type Two Diabetes by changing your eating habits.
That's a fact, a scientific Fact.
He didn't.
I sent him books years ago to try to help him.
But I don't know if he knew he never read them or something.
But again, you can't be looking to the Lord for healing while you're abusing the temple
of the Holy spirit and digging your grave with your teeth.
Sure.
There's natural laws of health and healing that you can't violate if you expect to be
healthy.
Drinking poison regularly in a foreign country is not a good thing.
All right.
Well we're out of time for today.
Thank you so much.
Hope to see you on our next little lesson.
God bless you.