Healing and the Kingdom

Thanks to the choir for that wonderful special music. It was fantastic. It's great to be here to spend the feast with all of you. It takes me back a little bit. I can remember seeing my sister there playing piano when we were kids, and she first started playing special music. I still am her little brother, and I've always taken that job very seriously, which means that when she was 13 or 14 and playing hymns or special music, I was usually in the audience making faces at her to see if I could make her laugh. So if you see her doing that to me today, just let her be. She's earned it. Well, today, I would like to spend this time with you for the sermon and start with this simple question. Why did Jesus heal people? I've got a three-year-old, almost three-year-old grandson, so that question, why, comes back to my head a lot, and I always have to come up with answers. You know, the Bible records somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 55 distinct healing events. Of those, roughly 35 of them are in the Gospels, and the vast majority of them happened by Jesus Christ. They were performed by him, just a small handful after that in the book of Acts. And if you add into it a few of the larger healing events that you see talked about in the Bible, where Jesus went out and healed huge multitudes of people, by and large, the vast majority of healings that happened in the Bible were through Jesus Christ directly. But why? Companies these days like to have statements of purpose, things that go beyond just their mission statement, and statements that explain what it is that they're about, and their designs so that they have greater meaning and deeper meaning to get people to really buy into not just what a company does, but what they're about. And the reason that I'll give for why Jesus healed people is that it was a statement of purpose on his behalf, a statement of purpose that he was making. And I'd like to spend the time that we have today, these next two or three hours, to talk about that. Okay, everyone's still awake. We've got that settled. Good. So today we're going to talk about healing and the kingdom. What's the connection? What does it mean for us today? So let's start with why in the world we're talking about this today. Some of you are probably wondering, this out of the gate, did he lose his sermon notes on the way, and this is all that he had. No, this was the plan. And we are talking about healing today for a very specific reason. And that is that Jesus Christ made it clear that healing was a central part of his mission. And I don't know if we've stopped to think about it, but proclaiming the kingdom of God and performing healing were so closely tied together in everything that Jesus Christ did. And before we go any further in this message, I'd like to just spend a few minutes to talk through that, to make a few points around that so that we can see that. Now, we probably remember that very early on, one of the earliest accounts of Jesus Christ's ministry, this one, as it's told by Luke, he went back and he quoted Isaiah 61.

And that was a prophecy of Jesus Christ, a prophecy of the Messiah. And if you remember, Jesus Christ stood up in his hometown. He told all the people that he grew up with, in so many words, that guy you read about in Isaiah, it's me.

Now, he did it, obviously, in a humble way, in exactly the way that God would have him do, but that's what he's saying here. The Spirit of Lord is upon me, quoting Isaiah 61, because he's anointed me to preach the gospel and he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted. You see those things tied together, right from the beginning, from the prophecies in Isaiah that he was talking about at this point.

Proclaiming liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, again talking about healing.

To set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. So not only words from Jesus Christ's own mouth, but actually words where he was quoting the prophet, in this case, Isaiah, talking about what it was that he was sent to do.

And this becomes clear if we look through his ministry. We're not going to turn to all of the different verses, but depending on where you look, we could probably find somewhere around 25 passages in the Bible, in the Gospels, unique passages where proclamation of the kingdom by the coming King Jesus Christ are tied together with healing. We'll look at just a couple of those, just to establish the fact, call things back to memory. One is in Matthew 4, starting in verse 23, talking about Jesus going out and preaching. He went about all Galilee teaching in their synagogues, preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, and healing. Healing all kinds of sickness, all kinds of disease among the people. And another verse, Matthew 9, 35, a few chapters later, again, going about the cities and the villages, teaching the synagogues, preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness.

Repeat it again and again. We could probably spend the rest of the time that we have in the sermon, just reading through all the different verses. And it was no different when he sent out his disciples. They went out with similar instructions to tie those two meanings, those two ideas, together.

Here again, just a couple of passages where that's talked about, sending out the twelve in Matthew 10, verses 7 and 8, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand, heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons, freely you've received and freely give. There's another account of sending out the 72. We'll take this one from Luke, chapter 10, verses 8 and 9. And he tells them as he sends them out very similar words, Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat such things as are set before you and heal the sick there, And say to them, The kingdom of God has come near to you. So these two concepts repeatedly tied together.

So now that we've established that I didn't grab the wrong notes for this sermon, and this really is about the kingdom, How much has we thought about the fact that healing and the kingdom are so closely tied together? The statement of purpose that God made, that Jesus Christ lived out in what he did when he was on this earth.

So why healing? You know, when you think about it, there are all kinds of incredible ways that you can get people's attention, right? Long before P.T. Barnum started to make his way across the U.S. with his traveling circus, There were all kinds of spectacles that people would do to get attention. You probably remember hearing stories about Benjamin Franklin, And how he flew the kite, and he had the key on the string, and he could touch the key and prove electricity. Well, back in the late 1700s, people were traveling from town to town, and they had these things called laden jars, And they would accumulate an electrical charge, and they'd set up a demonstration for people, And they'd go, and they'd touch the jar, and their hair might stand on end, or they'd get shocked, And everyone would laugh and have fun with it, and pay, you know, some money, and they'd go on to the next town. A little more unusually, in the early 1800s, what do you think people would make money doing going across the country? There was a food that they would eat that everyone thought was poisonous, And they would travel the country and eat it. It was actually tomatoes.

Back in the early 1800s, you were a daredevil. If you went out, you ate a tomato. From what I can read, people thought because tomatoes were part of the nightshade family, they were actually poisonous, And so people would actually go out, similar spectacles, they'd go from town to town, and they would eat tomatoes. Go figure. Before ketchup existed. So when you have your ketchup with your french fries tomorrow, you can thank the people who went out before all of us in the early 1800s And prove that tomatoes are not poisonous. But there are a lot of ways to get attention, but God chose healing.

Healing was much more than just an attention-getter. Like I said, it was a statement of purpose. It showed God's care, and it showed a couple of essential qualities of His kingdom. And that's why I'd like to spend the meat of the message today dwelling on and thinking about, When we consider this statement of purpose that healing is, what are those elements that God was teaching about? These are the two that we'll cover. First of all, restoration. We've heard about this a little bit already today, returning God's creation to its intended state. And the second is one of reconciliation. We heard about, to some extent already, in the sermonette today, this afternoon, re-establishing proper relationships, not only with God, but with fellow man.

Part of His purpose. Part of that statement of purpose. And when you think about, as we heard this morning, the idea of ruling, being part of government, administering justice, having proper judgment, this purpose of restoration, this purpose of reconciliation, is going to have to be at the core of what we do. It will have to be the way that we relate with other people, the things that we're trying to drive, and everything that we're doing in those roles.

So let's talk first about restoration. I don't know if you've thought before about restoration in the context of healing, but Matthew 12 will read this account. We often read it as an account about the Sabbath, and what should and should not be done on the Sabbath and having mercy on people. I want to focus this time just on the actual healing event that happened in Matthew 12, starting in verse 9. So when Jesus departed from there, he went to the synagogue, and behold, there was a man who had a withered hand. Now it doesn't tell us exactly what was wrong with the hand, but it would have been clear from looking at it that it was injured. And he said to the man, stretch out your hand, and he stretched it out, and it was restored as whole as the other. I don't know if you've thought about this before, or focused much on it. I really hadn't. When we look at the different accounts of healing that are within the Bible, because a real commonality in the things that Jesus Christ did when he healed people was it was incredibly visible. In most cases, there was a group of people around. In most cases, it was something very dramatic physically, all the way to somebody being dead, that was altered and restored when he performed the healing. In this case, it was the restoration of a man's withered hand. If you think about lepers who were cleansed, they were clearly diseased. Leprosy was a disease of the skin. You could look at those people, you could see the disease that they had on their skin. They were healed, healing of the blind. You think of Lazarus. The healing of Lazarus went all the way to the point where he was in the tomb. You could smell his decaying flesh. I hope I'm not being too gross after lunch. But it was clear to the people around that there was a change in condition. There was something fully restored, not partially restored, through that act of healing.

But physical healing also restored more than just the body.

It restored more than just the body. And I'd like to read another account of the healing of Jesus Christ that'll drive that point home, hopefully in a meaningful way for all of us. Luke 8. This is the well-known account of the woman who had a flow of blood. It says here, for 12 years, she'd spent all of her livelihood on physicians. She couldn't be healed. And she came out and she touched the border of Jesus Christ's garment. And immediately the flow of blood stopped. Now, a pretty incredible miracle right by itself when you think about it. And it's followed by a couple of interesting verses that I don't have in my slides. You can look at them if you want within your Bible. But Jesus Christ kind of stops and He turns to Peter and He says, hey, somebody touched me. Did you see who touched me?

And Peter, if you read into the passage even a little bit, says, what are you talking about? We're in this crowd of people. There have been a line going into a concert or the state fair or something like that. And everyone's shoulder to shoulder and they're jostling. That's the kind of situation that was described here. And Peter's like, here we are, you know, we're jostling with the mob, we're cramming in, people are touching everybody. Why are you saying, did somebody touch me? This is just a bizarre question. And why would it matter anyways?

Why did it matter?

Have you ever thought about the life of this woman and what it was like?

We're not going to turn there, but I've got the scripture here in Leviticus. It talks about the laws of ritual uncleanness that would have happened under the Levitical law.

And anybody, a woman who had a regular cycle flow of blood would have been unclean for a few days' time during that time period. A woman in the situation that this woman, this healing was in, had a constant flow of blood for 12 years.

So what did that mean for her socially?

She was ritually unclean without pause, from what we can surmise, for 12 years. No normal human contact, because anyone she would have touched would have been made unclean.

The very fact that she was there in the crowd means she might have actually snuck out and been somewhere that she shouldn't have been, likely to see Jesus Christ, likely because she wanted to touch him and be healed, and she had the faith that that could happen.

There was much more that was restored to her that day than just her physical health.

That isolation that she had, that uncleanness being shunned by anybody who she came into contact with.

That's why it was important to Jesus Christ to know who touched him, because he wanted to make a point.

If you read even further down in the account, he actually stops and he talks to the woman.

Probably not something that happened to her a lot in her day-to-day life up to that point in time, because of what she was, because of the way that she was cut off.

And he spoke with her, and he didn't speak unkind words.

Get away from me, you're unclean. But he spoke kind words to her, having healed her.

There's a much larger message here of restoration that's taking place than simply the physical healing, as important as that was.

This woman was restored to being a fully functioning member of her society in a way that she hadn't had the opportunity or the ability to do previously.

I'd like to look at another element of what's happening here that ties in so directly to the kingdom, again through this idea of healing.

Haggai, probably not a set of verses that we've spent a lot of time with, not ones that I have at least.

In Haggai 2 verse 11, there's a bit of a discussion that Haggai has as he's speaking about holiness and unholyness to others.

And again, I'm just going to paraphrase it here. You can turn there later if you'd like.

But Haggai says, look, so I'm a priest, I've got a piece of meat, and that meat is holy.

So I'm going to put it in my garment, and I'm going to walk with that piece of meat which is made holy.

If my garment sort of trails and it touches something else, does it make that other thing holy?

And he's referring, of course, to the rules of holiness and purity and impurity that we see back in Leviticus.

And of course the answer was no. Holiness does not pass on that way. You don't take something that's holy and start touching things with it and make those things holy.

It's not the way Leviticus worked. On the other hand, he says, if I've got this meat in my tunic and I'm walking down the street and it brushes against something that's unclean, do I become unclean?

And the answer was yes. Because again, under Levitical laws, you might remember, if you touched an unclean thing, you became unclean. And usually it was until sunset, there were things you could do, you would wash, and then you would become clean again. And we're not going to go into all the reasons that existed, but that was what the law was. But did we see what happened in this miracle?

Under the Levitical law, Jesus should have been made unclean by touching this woman.

But that's not what happened. He was showing powerfully that God's Spirit was in him.

He was showing that he was the very king of the kingdom to come. His purity was such that he could make whole the things that he touched.

There's no account of him saying, after he talked to the woman, I've been made unclean. He healed her, his power went out from her. That was the end of the story. Does that remind you of anything that you see when we think about the kingdom of God?

It's a very interesting predictor of the future, and it ties incredibly closely to one of the things that we see written about the kingdom.

Turn with me, if you will, to Ezekiel. And we'll just read a short part of a fairly long passage.

If you have time later in the week, I'd certainly encourage you to spend some more time in some of these areas of Ezekiel and what they talk about.

Ezekiel 47 will start in verse 1. And this is a vision that Ezekiel is having. He says, he brought me back to the door of the temple.

He's being delivered a vision. And there was water flowing from under the threshold of the temple towards the east.

And you might recognize this as a millennial prophecy, and it's talking in figurative terms about this water that's going to flow out of Jerusalem, and it's going to purify everything it touches. And when it reaches the sea in verse 8, its waters are healed.

And it shall be that every living thing that moves, wherever the rivers go, will live.

This is an incredible expansion of what we saw Jesus Christ do with this woman.

These healing waters, they're not made impure by things that they touch. It's quite the reverse.

God's Holy Spirit is so completely in this. He is healing the world, and everything that these waters touch are immediately healed.

His power is everywhere to change things, to make a different world.

You know, when you think about all of the things that we see in our world today, things that we might like to touch and heal and change on a daily basis, we're probably all touched in our heart at different points in time as we see things that are going on.

And wishing that we had the ability to do something about it. This is what's coming.

That healing that Jesus Christ performed, these living waters that flow out, and everything that they touch is made whole, restored to what God intended as the purpose.

You know, we often talked about this verse in Acts as being the pivotal verse in the Bible because it talks about the point of what it is that's going to come, and how the coming of Jesus Christ is going to launch something completely different. Acts 3, starting verse 20.

And of course, the prophets, the writings, are full of prophecies, as we'll hear over the course of this upcoming week, about Jesus Christ as the king, about the millennium, about his kingdom, about all of these wonderful things that are going to happen.

Restoration, of all things. Restoration that was shown in just a small but powerful figure of sense and the healings that Jesus Christ performed.

I'm not going to read through all these. I put these verses up on a single slide just to illustrate how much restoration is part of everything, if these verses don't already come to mind to you. You think of what we always have talked about, sometimes singing about, the wolf dwelling with the lamb, the lion eating straw, the earth being filled with the knowledge of the Lord.

Restoring things to what they were like. You know, there's a whole motif that we're not going to go through about how God's going to essentially restore what he started in the Garden of Eden before man went astray and restore those things. When God was right there, walking with mankind in the cool of garden.

Imagine that time coming. The desert rejoicing and blossoming as it rose. The mountains and hills breaking forth into singing.

Healing of the land. Healing of the blind and the lame. And as we've already read, I think a couple of times this feast, Romans 8-21, the creation itself being delivered from the bondage of corruption.

Restoration. Everywhere that you can possibly think. Physical disease. Problems of the mind, because we don't have the spirit of God in the world as a whole.

The earth itself physically restored. Everything set to where God wants it to be. Because of his healing power that's going to come as a part of his kingdom.

As we finish out this part of the section, let's turn to Revelation 21.

Restoration. So much a part of these millennial verses, we can go back to the end of the Bible, the end of the book of Revelation.

I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people.

Restoration of the order that existed for such a brief period of time there in the Garden of Eden. God himself will be with them and be their God.

He'll wipe away every tear from their eyes, or we no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, and no more pain, for the former things have passed away.

How incredible is that going to be when all of the things that cause us pain and sorrow and discontent in this world are passed away, and the world is restored to what God intended it to be?

Absolutely incredible what we have to look forward to.

So let's look at the second element of why healing. Much more than a parlor trick, much more than just some attention-getter, so that people would listen to the message.

And this is healing as reconciliation. Healing as reconciliation.

As we talked about a little bit earlier, that reconciliation has to happen at two levels. Man has to be reconciled with God, only available through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the grace and the giving of the Holy Spirit. And as we are reconciled to God, we must be reconciled with other human beings.

Let's look at this again through the lens of healing, and how healing shows this concept to us.

Again, it starts way back in the Old Testament. This has been part of God's plan since he founded it.

It's a thread that runs all the way through the Bible when we sit back and we look for it. Psalm 103, starting in verse 1. Praise the Lord, O my soul, all my inmost being, praise his holy name.

Praise the Lord, my soul, and forget not all his benefits. Who forgives all your sins, and we see the reconciliation, and heals your diseases. Again, tied together. Who redeems your life from the pit, and crowns you with love and compassion. Who satisfies your desires with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagles.

Again, healing and reconciliation, in this case, coming together with proclamation of that time in the kingdom.

So let's go to another healing. This is my favorite, actually, and we're not going to have time to jump into all the reasons I love this one. I just love the fact that this guy's friends cared so much about him and had so much faith that they were willing to climb on the roof, dig through the roof, and lower this man down into the house, into the middle of a bunch of people to be healed. An incredible show, and not just a show, but an act of living faith.

Mark 2, verse 5. When Jesus saw the faith, and he says their faith, not just the man who was ill, he said to the paralytic, Son, your sins are forgiven you. And then, further down in verse 9, as he's questioned, he says, Which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven you, or to say, Arise, take up your bed and walk? But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins. For that reason, he said to the paralytic, I say to your rise, take up your bed and go to your house.

So Jesus Christ is very clearly in this circumstance that he was about much more than the physical healing of this person. He needed to show that he had the power, the power to forgive sins, to drive reconciliation with God, because that's what the forgiveness of our sins do. And so healing demonstrated the power of Jesus Christ to do that. He had to show that he was the king of that coming kingdom, and his healing, his reconciliation in this case, was central to what it is that he's doing.

Let's read another section, which I find just incredibly compelling. It's another sort of a preview of something that we see happen in a much bigger way later on after the death and the ascension of Jesus Christ. You know, we think about the fact that it's an act when Peter has the vision that there's suddenly understanding that salvation is available to someone other than those of a physical bloodline of Abraham. But we thought about this healing of Jesus Christ and how he actually showed that quite a bit earlier in Matthew 8.

Here Jesus entered Capernaum, and a centurion came to him pleading with him, saying, Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, dreadfully tormented. And Jesus said, I will come and I will heal him. Now, do we think about what this really means? You know, we heard some discussion already today about, you know, enemies that we might have, nations that we consider to be the other, to be against us, that God could never want to do anything good for them. Think about the prophet Jonah, who tried to run away because God sent Jonah to a nation that was an enemy with his nation. Jonah was going to be a nationalist. He was pro-Israel. He wasn't going to go to that other nation and try to see anything good happen for them. God, of course, showed his mercy. The Romans were an occupying force. There wasn't a lot of good in what the Romans did in Judea. There were foreign army. You probably remember that there were a number of different accounts in the Gospels where people were looking for Jesus Christ to be not the Messiah who would come and give his life, but the Messiah that would come and throw off Roman occupation. So here, it's a Roman centurion that comes and asks for healing for his servant. And Jesus heard it. He marveled and he said to those who followed, Assuredly I say to you, I've not found such great faith, not even in Israel. And I say to you, and look what this is talking about, in the future, in the Kingdom, many will come from East and West, sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven. That was a statement that he was making. You've got this Roman centurion and his servant over here. He's got incredible faith. And by the way, there's going to be a whole ton of people who have nothing to do with the lineage of Abraham. They're going to come from East and West. They're going to come from anywhere you can find them, and they're going to sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom. He was making it clear through this healing of what it was that he stood for in terms of reconciliation with all people. Verse 12, the sons of the Kingdom will be cast out into outer darkness, and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. He's talking about people who, through the prophecies that they memorized from an early age, should have known exactly who and what Jesus was. And then he said to the centurion, go your way, as you believe, so let it be done for you. And his servant was healed in that very same hour. Incredible story of reconciliation. How is this echoed in the millennial prophecies?

Any of the prophecies of the millennium come to your mind as you think about this?

It's the idea of enemies. Isaiah 19. This talks about a highway that's going to exist, and we can talk about whether this is a literal highway or if it's a metaphor, but the nations he's talking about—he's talking about Egypt—was located south of Israel. A big power. Of course, they had the children of Israel captive for many years until they were freed. He talks about Assyria to the north, another nation that gave the northern kingdom of Israel especially a lot of trouble and eventually carried them away. And here, in this millennial prophecy, Jesus talks—I'm sorry, Isaiah in this case—talks about the enemies of the nation of Israel and what's going to happen with them. The Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians. They'll know the Lord. They'll give their sacrifices and offerings to him. They'll make a vow to the Lord. They'll keep it. The Lord will strike Egypt, but then he will bring healing. For the Egyptians will turn to the Lord, and he will listen to their pleas, and he will heal them.

In that day, Egypt and Assyria will be connected by a highway. The Egyptians and Assyrians will move freely between their lands, and they'll both worship God. And in that day, Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth. For the Lord of Heaven's armies will say, blessed be Egypt, my people. Blessed be Assyria, the land I have made. Blessed be Israel, my special possession. Now, it's kind of hard to completely appreciate those lines, not being in the place that those people were that heard that prophecy when it was first given.

You know, think about whatever the worst national enemy is that you can think of. People that you think God hates and wants to crush, or at least that you would like to see God crush. Insert their names here. This is what Isaiah was saying. Mortal enemies, those who have taken people captive and killed them, they're going to sit down together and be joined together and freely move back and forth between their countries.

With a highway, no barriers, and they'll all be called God's people. That reconciliation that's going to happen, which can and will happen through the second coming of Jesus Christ.

This is probably the best example that I could find for somebody of my generation. Many of you are probably familiar with the Berlin Wall. Some of you have probably seen it.

My mother's side of the family is all from Germany. I remember as a kid standing near the area that you see on the left side of this picture when the wall was up and looking at it. And the Brandenburg Gate, which you see here, was no man's land. It was filled with barbed wire. It was mined. Nobody was ever going to think about moving across there because guns were trained on them. They even attempted anything to enter that area. They would be gunned down and killed. Here's that area now on the right-hand side.

Again, this is not a statement about Germany being the millennial place, but it's a description. It's the modern depiction that we can think about of how places that were enemies, where wars were fought, become highways and thoroughfares where you can move. Think about this being done at a grand scale. If you ever think about all of the land, the money, the time, the effort that we spend on boundaries between nations as we guard ourselves against others—and I'm not saying it's not prudent to do that. I'm not trying to make any political statement by saying this. It's the nature of humanity. Nations have enemies. Nations fight wars. Nations invest incredible amounts of money in borders and in protection. It's not going to have to be that way in the future, in the Kingdom. And those who we might consider enemies will be fellow children of God in that Kingdom, fully reconciled. Let's go back to Revelation at the very end of the book. Revelation 22, again talking about this time of full and complete reconciliation that happens, is full healing. And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and the Lamb, and in the middle of its street, and on either side of the river, was the tree of life. Again harkening back to the Garden of Eden, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. Not just one nation, all nations. And there will be no more curse, but the throne of God and the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants, as we heard this morning, shall serve him. They'll see his face, his name will be on their foreheads, there'll be no night there, no need of lamp or light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light, and they will reign forever and ever. So why healing? Hopefully the point is made. Healing provided physical restoration, it provided physical reconciliation, that signifies a greater spiritual restoration and reconciliation that will take place in God's kingdom.

It's a statement of purpose. It was a demonstration of purpose, of what it was that God wants to work out in his kingdom. So here's the big question. I usually call it, So What? When I'm putting together a sermon, usually somewhere near the end of my sermon, as I'm working on it, I write big words in my notes that say, So What? If we can't figure out what this means for us, we probably need to give it some more thought. So what does this have to do with all of us? You know, we talked about healing as God's purpose, and a demonstration of that purpose. It's talked about from way back in the past, the miracles of Jesus Christ are in the past, we saw the prophecies of the kingdom that are in the future, and where does it lead? It leads through all of us. It leads through the present. If we see that same purpose of God demonstrated in the past, we see that same purpose of God demonstrated in the future, we have to think very carefully about what that exact same purpose of God means in our lives. And let's just spend a moment talking through that. Conversion, of course, heals us. It heals us of the things that we're not capable of doing and being as humans. It restores our mind, not back to something that was, but to something that God intended it to be. It's a different kind of restoration in that way. It's not like God's putting us back to what we used to be like as humans. He's putting us to what we were created to be, as human beings with our mind joined with God's spirit in order to do his will.

A couple scriptures that demonstrate that. First of all, 2 Corinthians 5, 17. If anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation. Old things are passed away, and behold, all things have been new. Everything is restored. Whether we see it when we look in the mirror every day, God sees it. And he tells us that as we receive his Holy Spirit, we are restored. We are set into that place where God created us to be as his children.

Romans 12, very similarly, after we hear from Paul early on that we should present our bodies a living sacrifice to God. In verse 2, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. That you can prove what that good and acceptable and perfect will of God is.

That's that restoration that happens in our mind. Our minds are set to what it is that God wants them to be, how he wants them to be. He heals our mind. He also does that through reconciliation to him. And very importantly, carrying on from what we heard in the first message this afternoon, taking that reconciliation and offering it on to others. I think the best verse that describes this is here in 2 Corinthians 5, which just encapsulates this entire idea. All things are of God who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ.

That's happened. That's happened through his Holy Spirit. And we can be in that state. He's given us the ministry of reconciliation. So something has happened to us, and we are expected to do something with and to others.

And that is, in verse 19, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and is committed to us the word of reconciliation. So we're ambassadors for Christ as though God were pleading through us.

We implore you on Christ's behalf to be reconciled to God. So as we think about that reconciliation that's happened within us, it should be leading us to live our lives in a way that's completely different. Jane Goodall, many of you have probably heard of her, gave her entire life to some of the Conservation Acts in Africa. I found this quote incredibly appropriate from her, not trying to endorse or not anything that she specifically did, but I thought this quote was incredibly powerful, what she said.

You cannot go through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. Sometimes we just feel like we're invisible. Sometimes we feel like nobody really notices. Sometimes we feel like God doesn't even notice what it is that we do, and that we're not having an impact of any sort. What she said, I think, is really a truism, and what we saw in the previous verse.

What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. What I take away from that quote is the idea that we cannot go into life thinking, nobody cares what we do, so it doesn't really matter so much what we do. And it's possible sometimes to get hopeless to that point, where we feel like, you know, I really can't have an impact on anything, so how far should I really extend myself? And, you know, I don't want to be inappropriate about this, but you think of everybody that Jesus Christ healed, and what happened to them at the end?

They all died. Even the people Jesus Christ raised from the dead died. And of course, that has to be the case because they were physical. He knew the healings that he performed were going to be temporary in nature, because he wasn't giving eternal life at that point in time, not the way his plan worked.

But he still did it! He still did it. What does that mean to us in our lives? We think about that spirit of reconciliation that was given to us. Are we going to perfectly be able to reconcile our lives with everybody around us? No. It takes two people to do that. It all depends on what's in the other person's mind. But the way that we live our lives can have a positive and even a reconciling impact on other people. And that's what we're asked to do.

And the reason I go back to the quote from Jane Goodall, she was saying, you know, it's going to happen. You're going to live your life, and the way that you live that life is going to impact other people, whether you mean it to or not. You kind of have a choice at that point in time to drift along and let whatever happens happen, or to be more intentional about it, in our case, using the Holy Spirit, thinking about what it is that God is doing in us, and how we can extend that same attitude, that same mercy, that same spirit of reconciliation to other people.

Are we in that sense being agents of God's healing in the world around us, in whatever small way we can do it, in each of our own physical spheres? So, to answer again the question, what does this have to do with us? The healing that's going to define God's kingdom is active in us today through His Holy Spirit. Again, we think about His purpose, that through line of His purpose. We saw it in the past, we see it in the future, it runs through us, through God's Spirit. And we have to be agents of healing in this world and beyond this world. So, wrapping things up and leaving us all with a challenge.

We talked today about healing and how the concept of healing is inseparable from the Gospel. You can't have the Gospel message as Jesus Christ taught it without the healing that was a part of what He did. And it was there to demonstrate His purpose, to help us to understand what it was that He's all about, what it is that He's going to create, in a very tangible and also emotional way. It demonstrates the restoration and the reconciliation that God is going to bring to creation.

And that same thought, that same Spirit has to work in us today. So we can be agents of healing, of restoration and reconciliation, not only in this world, but beyond. Exactly like we heard in the message this morning. In fact, it's not my vocation that I'm going to have to offer in the Kingdom. There's one thing that God said He cannot, He will not create. We have to build it, and that is a heart that's submissive to Him. That submits itself to the Spirit and allows it to work through us into others. That's the Spirit of reconciliation, of restoration. So here's the challenge for this feast.

I encourage all of us to think about how effective are we as agents of God's healing? And let's get real tangible about it. If you're interested in doing this, please do. What is one area of my life that needs restoration? You know, this is a great time at the feast. We're pulled back from our day-to-day life. We're in a different place, a different pace.

We don't have to worry about all the things we have to in our day-to-day life. Let's use it! Stand back and get perspective and think about what it is that's happening in our lives. What's the one area in my life that needs restoration? How am I going to put that before God, use His Spirit, and ask Him to help drive that? Secondly, what's one area of my life in which I need to seek or drive reconciliation?

And how do I pursue it? Maybe it's within the family, maybe it's in the workplace, maybe it's on the pickleball court. It could be all kinds of different places. It's going to be different for each and every one of us. But I encourage all of us to think about this question.

What's one area of my life in which I need to seek or drive reconciliation, and how can I pursue it? Put those things before God. Talk to Him about it. Ask Him to move within your life, to take that Spirit of healing, of restoration, of reconciliation that's going to animate everything that happens in the Kingdom, and to make it active in our lives today.