Tag: the Kingdom of God

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Why have a healing ministry?

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.

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Apostolic preaching . . . and preaching today

Recently in the course of my daily bible reading, I read Acts chapter 17. I was struck by what Paul and Silas in Thessalonica and Athens were preaching about.

The first hint is in verse 7, where they were accused of acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus. This suggests to me that they were preaching about the Kingdom of God.

Then in Athens, in the famous address to the Areopagus, as his hearers were trying to work out what Paul was talking about, Luke records that ‘Others said “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities” — because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection’.

Lastly, in verse 30, Paul asserts that ‘The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead’.

So Paul was speaking about the Kingdom of God, the resurrection and the final judgement. And note that this preaching was not to the church, but to outsiders, to the unconverted if you like.

I have a very interesting book entitled ‘To Preach or Not to Preach: The Church’s Urgent Question’, by David Norrington.

The author argues that all preaching in The Acts of the Apostles was delivered to outsiders, as part of the evangelistic endeavour, and yes, he does deal effectively with possible exceptions. In New Testament times spiritual growth was achieved not by the use of the sermon, but by a variety of other means, all designed to help produce mature Christians in mature Christian communities. There is nothing to suggest that these means included the regular sermon. He calls for the abandonment of the regular sermon delivered to believers, and for it to be used as it was in Acts — to unbelievers in an evangelistic setting.

He makes the obvious point that: ‘while New Testament and extra-biblical records of these early meetings are sketchy, it is quite clear that first century believers were expected to be fully involved in all of the activities of the church. The practice of small-scale meetings in homes was ideally suited for such one-another ministry. One simply cannot find any support, either in the New Testament or in early church history for today’s professional clergy and specialized church buildings’.

By contrast, the ubiquitous sermon, delivered by a trained clergyman in a specialized church building most often acts as a deskilling agent. ‘By using the regular sermon the preacher proclaims each week, not in words, but in the clearest manner possible, that, be the congregation ever so gifted, there is present, for that period, one who is more gifted and all must attend in silence upon him (less often her). . . Sadly, competent preachers may create dependence more effectively than incompetent ones. This means, ironically, that in the long run competent sermons may be more damaging than indifferent ones!’

And then, these two devastating paragraphs, sheeted home to the practice of preaching: ‘Yet today, in spite of exceptions, the individual Christian is often excessively busy and unused to reflection, unskilled in prayer, more concerned with doing than becoming, lacking in understanding of the relevance of the faith to nearly all aspects of life, ignorant of the past, anti-intellectual, materialistic, welded to the secular thought of the day, timid in the face of social and political injustice, barely capable even of recognizing the enemies of God (or his friends), lacking in steady and forgiving love and deficient in the skills required to detect nonsense—a living monument denying the assertion of Jesus that ‘I came that they may have life and may have it abundantly.’ (John 10: 10 RV). As sociologist Jacques Ellul observes, far from being a model of freedom, most Christians are models of mediocre bondage, simultaneously the slaves of the latest fad and the ecclesiastical and humanistic traditions in which they were reared. The disastrous consequence is that the non-Christian world experiences little Christian influence in any area of thought and has little, if any, understanding of the essence of biblical Christianity.

Christianity is thus inexorably pushed to the margins of society. The end-product is social decay, a rise of unbelief, an increase in cults and non-Christian religions, depression and failure, among Christians, a tarnished reputation for the church as a whole and the wrath and the judgment of God.

And yet, there are even those who assert that preaching has a sacramental quality about it. ‘Preaching is not just a word about Christ; it is a word of Christ’. Uhh? ‘We are asked to believe that when the clergyman (our modern professional replacement for the plurality of elders in the New Testament church) in the dedicated church building (as opposed to in homes as was the practice in New Testament times) mounts the pulpit (that elevated fixture introduced in the 3rd century) and addresses a passive audience (who were not passive in the New Testament) or “laity” (a designation added long after New Testament times) in the pews (13th century addition) via the regular sermon (which did not exist in New Testament practice) then and only then is the event especially pleasing to God, who responds with a special, if not unique channel of his grace.’

I maintain, therefore, that sermons today should be delivered to the same sort of audience as they were in the first century — to unbelievers in an evangelistic context — and NOT to believers in a church setting.

Respected New Testament scholar Richard Hays, in ‘The Moral Vision of the New Testament’ affirms that the growth to maturity of the church has nothing to do with sermons. He puts it as well as anyone when he writes ‘Ephesians 4:1–5:20 presents a visionary description of the character of the reconciled community. The diverse gifts in the church have as their common purpose “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until all of us come to the unity of the faith and…to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (4:12–13). Thus, as in 1 Corinthians 12, ministry is conceived as the work of the entire community, not of a specially designated class of spiritually gifted persons. The interplay of gifts in the church is designed to bring the community as a whole to full maturity, so that the church might ultimately stand unambiguously as “the body of Christ,” the complete embodiment of Christ in the world.’