Have you ever thought about dying?
I mean, it used to be popular for
people of our generation to say, oh, what
a morbid thought, but I think we're different
now, aren't we?
We really do feel that we ought to
be able to face that, whether we're Christians
or not.
I think everybody is beginning to sense, yeah,
I should be able to face the thought
of death and think what I would do
with death.
So, really, I'm pushing you on it, you
know, I'm asking you, have you ever thought
about dying or about death, and have you
ever thought the way you'll meet it?
Some of you will know Dylan Thomas, the
English poet, and you remember he was watching
his father dying, and he wrote a poem,
and oh, it was a raging, rebellious poem.
Remember, he said, do not go gentle into
that good night.
Old age should burn and rave at close
of day.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And Thomas's whole poem was that, you know,
that everybody should rage against the dying of
the light.
Now, he's a psychiatrist from Iowa University, and
you may have read maybe two weeks ago
in Time magazine that he interviewed different men
and women who had almost died in mountain
falls or in parachute jumps where the parachute
failed.
And you remember he said that there seemed
to be three stages.
The first stage, the person seemed to rebel
against the whole thing and resist it.
And then the second stage, the person tended
to have a real review of their own
lives and to look for a moment at
all the things that had happened, and especially
the pleasant things.
And then the last stage was they really
seemed to embrace death and surrender themselves to
it.
Now, what do you think of it?
If you say to me, well, I mean,
in spite of all that you say, I
kind of recoil from the whole idea.
I don't like to think of death.
I don't feel I need to, and I
don't like to think of it.
And I think that that's right, brothers and
sisters.
I think really we were made not to
have to face death originally.
Really, God made us to live forever.
And that's part of the reason we recoil
against it, you see.
Now, you can see that in Genesis 3
and 22, if you look at it, that
we were really originally made never to die.
In Genesis 3, 22, it's page three in
that black Bible, Genesis 3 and 22b, lest
he put forth his hand, and take also
of the tree of life, and eat, and
live forever.
So, obviously, the Creator had put the tree
of life in the world, had made the
Holy Spirit, because he is the tree of
life, had made the Holy Spirit alive in
the world, so that we could receive of
that Holy Spirit and live forever.
And that was God's plan.
Really.
God planned that the bodies, you know, would
never grow old, that there'd never come wrinkles,
that our hair would never grow gray, but
that we would just live on and on
forever, and would come into his immediate presence,
and would just be like that forever.
And you remember that really the whole problem
came when the first man refused the tree
of life.
He refused to live dependent on the Holy
Spirit, and he decided to live his own
way by trial and error.
And that's what it means to eat of
the tree of knowledge of good and evil,
you know.
To live by trial and ever error, to
do what you thought was right by your
own muddled attempts, instead of receiving God's Holy
Spirit into you by faith, and letting that
express itself through you.
And so the first man, you remember, refused
to receive this uncreated supernatural life, and immediately
he did that, his whole body began to
experience the effects.
And of course the mind began to be
impaired, and the emotions became unbalanced, and the
body itself began to be weakened.
And that's really now why we have weakened
bodies.
At that time, you see, even the body
became temporary.
The body was made to be permanent, but
when the Holy Spirit ceased to flow through
it, it began to be temporary also.
And you find that, if you like to
look at it, in James, and James 2
and verse 26.
It's about page 1055.
For as the body apart from the Spirit
is dead, so faith apart from works is
dead.
But you see the first statement, as the
body apart from the Spirit is dead.
And so when the Holy Spirit was no
longer flowing through us, our bodies became temporal.
And they immediately came into a position, you
remember, where at the beginning of Old Testament
times they seemed to live for about 120
years, and now they live for maybe an
average of 70 years, don't they?
And even that varies from country to country,
because there are places where people only live
on an average 45 years.
But the whole body suffered because of the
lack of the Holy Spirit.
And then that happened to even good men,
you see.
Even men who were walking in obedience to
God, even their bodies that they inherited from
the first man that came into the world,
even their bodies were temporary.
But worse things happened as men began to
behave like Cain and Abel.
You remember the way Cain behaved, if you
like to look at it, it's Genesis 4
and verses 6 through 8.
As men began to try to prove that
they were worth something because they lacked God's
approval on their lives, so they began to
compete with each other.
And that of course brought a death of
its own.
Genesis 4 and verse 6.
The Lord said to Cain, Why are you
angry?
And why has your countenance fallen?
If you do well, will you not be
accepted?
And if you do not do well, sin
is couching at the door.
It's desirous for you, but you must master
it.
Cain said to Abel his brother, Let us
go out into the field.
And when they were in the field, Cain
rose up against his brother Abel and killed
him.
Now, as men began to share Cain's sense
of insecurity and began to try to establish
their security by driving everybody else away from
them and putting everybody else under their feet,
so of course men and women began to
hurt each other.
And so not only did the body become
temporary, but we began to injure each other.
And in a real way, brothers and sisters,
in a real way, every automobile accident is
connected up, you know, with if not anger,
that sense of insecurity or impatience or lack
of love and concern for our brothers and
sisters.
In other words, really, it is God's will
that there should never be an accident, you
see.
But this is another way in which death
came into the world.
As men and women began to be selfish
and angry and irritated with each other like
Cain, they began to commit injuries against each
other, and that of course brought death as
well.
There was another way that death was brought.
As men and women lacked love for each
other, so they began to be careless about
their own habits, their own habits of hygiene.
And as they began to be careless about
those, so germs began to be created in
the world.
That was not God's original plan at all.
But germs began to be created and they
began to transmit disease.
And you get that kind of teaching, you
know, if you look at Leviticus 11.
Because even back in Old Testament days, God
was trying to teach them what in fact,
you remember, we only learned in the 18th
or 19th century in New York, that the
way to stop plagues was really to be
clean in your own habits and to be
clean about washing.
Leviticus 11 and verses 31 to 34.
And even in these days, you see, which
was maybe 1500, 1600 BC, God was trying
to stop the spread of germs.
In Leviticus 11 and verse 31, it's page
92.
These are unclean to you among all that
swarm, these certain insects and animals.
Whoever touches them when they are dead shall
be unclean until the evening.
And anything upon which any of them falls
when they are dead shall be unclean, whether
there's an article of wood or a garment
or a skin or a sack.
Any vessel that is used for any purpose,
it must be put into water and it
shall be unclean until the evening.
Then it shall be clean.
And if any of them falls into any
earthen vessel, all that is in it shall
be unclean and you shall break it.
And food in it which may be eaten
upon which water may come shall be unclean.
And all drink which may be drunk from
every such vessel shall be unclean.
Now, of course, the way the reason God
said that was men weren't behaving that way.
Men and women were becoming careless about themselves,
about their friends, about their neighbors.
And so germs and disease began to spread
in the world.
And sickness came into the world as a
direct result of man's lack of love for
God and lack of love for his neighbors.
Then you know too that men and women
began to hate each other, yet pretend that
they loved each other.
And that's how sexual intercourse, as we know
it, apart from Jesus and apart from his
spirit of unselfish love, that's how that began
to be treated in the world.
And that brought its own problems.
Remember, you have it outlined in Romans chapter
1, Romans 1 and 26 through 27.
And the whole question of birth defects, you
see, did not begin simply with thalidomide.
And that kind of problem, which you know,
is another example of man's lack of love
and selfishness.
But the birth defects began to come because
of men and women's dealings with each other.
Romans 1 and 26 to 27.
For this reason, because they rejected God, God
gave them up to dishonorable passions.
Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural.
And the men likewise gave up natural relations
with women and were consumed with passion for
one another.
Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving
in their own persons the due penalty for
their error.
And of course, not only in their own
persons, but in the persons of the people
that they bore.
So the illegitimate child receives some of the
sin of the father or mother.
The illegitimate child with a sense of insecurity
and a feeling that nobody wants them, which
they often pass on to the other people
unless they really deal with God.
That is part of receiving in your person
the due penalty of your error.
Or the child that is born with deformations
and deformities on its face because of VD
in the parents.
That kind of thing comes directly from men's
sin.
And so, brothers and sisters, God had to
watch as men did without the Holy Spirit.
And as they lacked the Holy Spirit, their
own bodies began to produce not only the
anger that injured others, not only the selfish
that destroyed others' bodies, but also the disease
through their habits and then the deformities that
they passed on and birth defects.
And then you see there was another set
of diseases altogether.
The set of diseases that we call psychosomatic.
You know that if you go into any
psych ward, most of the people suffering there
are suffering from guilt or they're suffering from
the high cost of retaliation.
People in psych wards are normally suffering either
from guilt or from a terrible burning deep
sense of resentment.
And really all psychosomatic diseases can be traced
back to the works that God purposely calls
the works of the flesh.
That's one of the reasons he calls them
the works of the flesh.
Not only that they come from preoccupation with
your own body, but that they actually produce
results in your body that are disease and
sickness.
And you see those in Galatians 5 and
19 through 21.
As men and women lacked the Holy Spirit
in their own lives, so they began to
produce these feelings and these attitudes in themselves.
It's page 1015.
And each one of these, you see, produces
either a tension in the muscles that begins
to produce diseases or produces certain secretions in
the glands that begin to produce disease.
Or it affects the flow of blood which
produces disease.
You can see how close these things are,
you see.
If you are embarrassed, you know what happens.
You blush.
Because obviously the embarrassment can affect the flow
of the blood to your face.
Or you are nervous when you're standing up
in front of a crowd of people and
you find that you could drink a gallon
of water, your mouth is all dry.
Because the nervousness and the fear of men
affects the secretion of the liquids and the
fluids in your mouth.
Now you can see that the psychosomatic diseases
all come from this fact that these works
of the flesh, this resentment, this hatred, this
fear, this worry, this nervousness always affects either
the flow of your blood to different parts
of your body or the secretions of your
glands.
Or it affects the tension in your muscles.
And those are all the things that begin
to produce sickness and tension in your body.
Now you can see them there in Galatians
5 and 19.
Now the works of the flesh are plain.
Immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife,
jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness,
carousing and the like.
And this is really why William Penn explained
to that person, you remember, who asked him,
you never get angry with anybody?
Why not?
Just for their sake?
And he said, no.
I am my own worst enemy when I
get angry with anybody.
And even he in those days realized that
anger destroyed the person who is angry far
more effectively than it destroyed the people against
whom it was aimed.
And so, dear ones, this is part of
what we mean, you see, when you read
Romans 5 and 17 there, you remember.
Romans 5 and 17.
It's page 981.
If because of one man's trespass, death reigned
through that one man.
That's part of what we mean by that.
That death really did begin to reign in
our bodies.
And the body that you have received is
a body that has been acted upon in
thousands of those ways that we've just discussed
this morning.
Part of the body that you have received,
you've received from a mum that has in
some way, at some time or other, had
some of those works of the flesh in
her life.
The body that you've received has come from
a dad that in some way has not
dwelt completely in the peace of God.
And you yourself, you see, will multiply that
and compound it if you live the same
way.
Now, you know that when God looked down
upon us, we must have looked like such
a bundle of poor cripples who were determined
to spread our hatred and our sickness throughout
the universe, that he must have felt tempted,
you know, just to destroy the lot of
us and start all over again.
And you know that he didn't do that.
But he took us all and he put
us all into Jesus, his son, and he
destroyed us all there on the It's a
miracle.
You and I don't understand.
But he did that.
In his own eyes, as far as he
is concerned, he has destroyed us all in
Jesus.
And he's destroyed all our weakness in Jesus.
And destroyed all our sickness in Jesus.
And all our impaired minds and our unbalanced
emotions, he has destroyed in Jesus.
That is why Jesus was able to tell
us that he could give us the Holy
Spirit again.
Because God had worked out his justice on
Jesus and so he was free to make
the Holy Spirit available to us.
And that's really what we need, you see.
In order to reverse the terrible effects of
this lack of the Holy Spirit in our
bodies, we need the Holy Spirit.
Brothers and sisters, in your bodies this morning,
you don't need more medicine and more drugs.
You don't need more hospitals.
You really need the Holy Spirit of God's
uncreated spiritual life.
That's the only one, really, that will make
a permanent change in not only your mind
and your emotions, but in your body.
And this is why Jesus laid such emphasis,
you see, on the Holy Spirit.
He knew that he had died in our
place so that God was satisfied as far
as his justice and his holiness was concerned.
And he could now make available to us
the Holy Spirit again.
And that's why Jesus said that, you remember,
in Acts chapter 1, where he's talking to
the disciples.
And we often think, oh, after Jesus died,
that was all he had to do.
Why does he make such a big deal
of this commandment?
But you can see why.
The whole purpose of Jesus' death was so
that God could make the Holy Spirit available
to us again.
And Acts 1 and verse 4.
And while staying with them, he charged them
not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait
for the promise of the Father, which he
said you heard from me.
For John baptized with water, but before many
days you shall be baptized with the Holy
Spirit.
Now, dear ones, we were never meant to
live without the Holy Spirit, you see.
We weren't made to live in these bodies
without this supernatural power of the Holy Spirit.
This is God's oxygen.
And without it, you will not breathe, and
you will not be healthy.
Without it, you'll always be doing a patch
-up work on your own body.
Now, you can see that immediately Jesus came
into the world with this Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit began to reverse the effects
of that death.
For instance, men then who died with the
Holy Spirit available were actually sleeping.
And that's what happens.
When you receive the Holy Spirit into you,
though to us you'll look as if you've
died, you'll actually be sleeping.
Now, that's true if you like to look
at it.
It's Matthew 9 and 24.
We often like to interpret it, you see,
allegorically and say, ah, Jesus was just being
nice, you know, and kindly and trying to
comfort the rest and say, don't worry, she's
just sleeping.
Jesus doesn't tell lies just to comfort people.
Matthew 9 and 24, and it's about page
842, Matthew 9 and 24.
You remember, they all said the girl's dead.
He said, depart, for the girl is not
dead, but sleeping.
And they laughed at him.
But when the crowd had been put outside,
he went in and took her by the
hand, and the girl arose, which kind of
proved that she was sleeping.
So, when the Holy Spirit comes, death, physical
death, is not death.
It is a passing from this existence into
a new spiritual existence.
And we actually are just sleeping.
So, the Holy Spirit, when he comes into
you, so makes your body alive that when
you come to the time of death that
God has allowed to continue to come to
us for his own plans, then it is
a sleep.
It's not a death.
You get that, you see, in even our
own language.
Cemetery, you know, cemetery, c-e-m-e
-t-r-y comes from the Latin, or
the Greek, coimeterion.
And coimeterion is a sleeping chamber.
And the old Christians who were able to
influence our English language away at the beginning,
they purposely called the place where we put
people after they died, a sleeping chamber.
Because in their eyes, it was just a
sleeping until they would rise up the next
day.
And that's why when people who have received
the Holy Spirit die, it is a great
time, you know.
It is a real rejoicing time.
I remember when my dad died in Belfast.
Oh, it was great.
We sang, you know, there's a lovely hymn,
in heavenly love abiding, no change my heart
shall fear.
And safe is such confiding, for nothing changes
here.
Green pastures are before me, which yet I
have not seen.
Blue skies will soon be all me, where
the dark clouds have been.
And it was great to sing it, you
know.
I know that he was singing it too,
up there.
And we were looking at the old dead
body, you know.
Now, I remember my wife, she was there,
touching the old body and saying, it's not,
it's not him at all.
And right enough, I could see it.
It wasn't him.
It was a body that he'd used while
he was here.
But it obviously wasn't him.
I didn't sense at all that he was
there.
And it's that kind of experience that you
have when you begin to receive the Holy
Spirit into yourself.
Death itself, you see, is transformed into just
a sleeping.
And it becomes something that you do not
fear at all.
And something that you only accept when it
is God's good permissive time to let it
come to you.
But God will keep you from it until
you achieve what he wants you to achieve.
And that's why Jesus said that, you remember,
in Isaiah, or God said it really in
Isaiah 53 and 4 through 5.
That when Jesus died, actually, he destroyed sickness
and pain.
And as far as God is concerned, he
only lets those continue within us as far
as they will serve his purposes, to bring
us closer to himself.
Isaiah 53 and 4 through 5.
And if you have the RSV, it's page
634.
And you will also see the footnotes that
give you the translations of the Hebrew.
Isaiah 53 and 4 and 5.
Surely he has borne our griefs.
And you see the footnote X at the
bottom of the page.
Sicknesses.
And the Hebrew word means sicknesses.
Surely he has borne our sicknesses and carried
our sorrows.
And you see the footnote Y as an
index.
And look at the bottom of the page.
Our pains.
So that verse is, surely he has borne
our sicknesses and carried our pains.
And so it is as with our sins.
If he's carried them, we don't both need
to carry them.
And we don't need to carry our sicknesses
and our pains if Jesus has borne them
for us.
And that's what happens when you begin to
receive the Holy Spirit into your own life.
The Holy Spirit begins to remove your sicknesses
and pains.
And begins to take the health of Jesus'
body and impart it to your body.
And that's what those verses mean in Romans
8, if you like to look at it.
Romans 8 and 10 through 11.
Many of us, I think, if you have
not really entered into this normal state of
those of us who receive the Holy Spirit.
And I think we need to see that
God expects us to enter into this.
Romans 8 and verse 10.
But if Christ is in you, although your
bodies are dead because of sin.
Although your bodies may still have some of
the symptoms, you see, of disease.
Your spirits are alive because of righteousness.
And then if the spirit of him who
raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also
through his spirit which dwells in you.
And that same spirit that raised Jesus from
the dead will give life to your body.
And brothers and sisters, I really mean that
it works today.
You know, if you're sitting there and saying,
well, do you mean it works sometime in
the future, maybe when I die?
No, it works today.
It is not God's will for us to
live in sickness.
It is not God's will for us to
live in pain and ill health.
It is God's will for us to learn
how to receive his spirit into our bodies
for real health.
And that is the Father's plan.
Now, how do you do it?
Well, God only allows sickness to continue in
you.
It's a work of Satan.
It's not God's work.
He only allows sickness to continue in you
as long as he can achieve something through
it.
So if ever sickness comes upon you, really
what you need to do is go to
God and ask him, Lord, do you want
me to see something that I haven't seen
before either about myself or about you?
And let God show you what that is
and then simply receive God's health by faith.
In other words, it's true that you have
not sickness today because of your sin, you
see?
Say you have the flu today.
Well, you haven't the flu because of sin.
Right enough your resistance has probably been lowered
by all kinds of things.
But you have sickness because a germ has
come to you.
Or you haven't trouble with your appendix because
of your sin.
We have trouble with those things because of
the corporate sin of mankind.
But it is true, brothers and sisters, that
God can keep sickness from you if he
wishes.
And the only reason he lets sickness come
to any of us is to bring us
into a new place in our relationship with
him.
And so the first thing we should do
when sickness comes is not try to believe,
you know, I believe, Lord, I believe, you
bore my sickness, you bore my pains, you
know, and kind of ought to suggest ourselves
into health.
But our first job is, Lord, why have
you allowed this to come?
Is there something you want to teach me
about yourself or about me?
And I know once you've taught me it,
and once you've seen that I've realized it,
you'll remove the sickness.
And that's true, that will happen.
Now, the teaching for that is in 1
Corinthians 11, the teaching that sickness does need
to be dealt with first by confession, you
see, and by allowing God to show you.
Because I think there's a lot of foolish
talk among us, you know, about you haven't
enough faith if you're not healed.
Well, that's not true.
God has plans and purposes for allowing sickness
to continue, as you can see with Paul,
you remember, who besought the Lord three times
and the thorn was still there in his
flesh.
But it is connected in some sense with
a readiness to confess.
1 Corinthians 11 and 30.
That is why many of you are weak
and ill, and some have died.
But if we judged ourselves truly, we should
not be judged.
And so Paul says that there's a place
for asking God to show you if there's
any way in which you are bringing this
sickness upon yourself, if there's any real sin
that you're walking in, or if there's any
way in which you have not entered into
the beauty and the Christlikeness of Jesus.
I think a lot of us, you see,
say, oh yeah, I know God put me
into Christ and he destroyed me there, but
we are not actually willing to be destroyed
in Jesus.
And we're not really willing to die to
ourselves.
And often God allows a sickness to come
to show you that you're not really willing
to die to yourself.
And he wants to show you, that there's
anger in your life that should not be
there, that there's resentment against a friend that
should not be there, that there's a grudge
that you've been bearing for years that should
not be there, that there's a retaliation and
a desire to pay back that should not
be there.
And so God will often allow this sickness
to come in so that you'll see that
you have not really died to self.
And there is a good book that you
may want to get from the bookshop called
None of These Diseases.
And Macmillan is a doctor of medicine and
wrote the book to show how our own
inner attitude again and again affects our outer
attitude and brings disease upon us.
And, you know, he talks about this business
of dying and dying to self and dying
to self's right to get your own back
and dying to self's right to have your
own way and dying to self's right to
resent and retaliate.
And he says this, at the beginning of
each day consider yourself a sheep that is
going to be abused even to the extreme
of being slaughtered.
If you take that attitude of mind then
nothing that comes up should frustrate or disturb
you.
A man awaiting death is not disturbed by
many stress factors that upset people.
He is not upset because his neighbor's chickens
are scratching up his flower bed.
His arthritis has not worsened because the taxes
on his house have been raised.
His blood pressure is not raised because his
employer discharged him.
He doesn't get a migraine headache because his
wife burned his toast.
And his ulcerative colitis doesn't flare up because
the stock market goes down ten points.
The crucified soul is not frustrated.
The man who willingly, cheerfully and daily presents
himself as a living sacrifice can excellently adapt
to the severest situations and will fall be
more than conquerors.
And dear ones, it is true.
A lot of us live in constant strain
and tension.
Really, dear ones, even as you're sitting in
your seat this morning, you know, you probably
have strain and tension in a thousand different
places in your body and your face that
you do not realize.
And you see, it's that that predisposes your
body to accept the germ when it comes.
But there is a place where you can
rest in absolute peace and it's the place
where you're willing to be crucified with Jesus.
Where you're willing to accept that God has
destroyed you in Jesus and you don't have
rights.
You don't have rights to tell your mom
where to get off.
You don't have rights to be treated by
the professor in a different way.
You don't have rights to have your own
way rather than your roommate have her way.
You don't have those rights.
And it's beautiful, brothers and sisters, when you
come into that kind of death to self,
it's beautiful the freedom from strain that you
can live in.
Free from the blood flow being restricted, free
from the muscles being tensed, free from the
old glands putting out secretions or failing to
put out the secretions that God wants.
And it is possible then to begin to
live in real peace.
And actually one of the beautiful things, you
know, that MacMillan shows on medical evidence is
that the healthiest attitudes of all are those
described just a few verses above, you remember,
or a few verses below.
The sick attitudes.
In Galatians 5, it's the attitudes that the
Holy Spirit brings about in a person.
And he says if a person was to
try to live the healthiest psychological and physical
life they could live, this is the way
they ought to live.
And it's Galatians 5 and 22.
And this is the kind of fruit, you
see, that the Holy Spirit brings about.
And this is how he brings health.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love,
joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self
-control.
Against such there is no law.
And really, brothers and sisters, those are the
attitudes that the Holy Spirit produces inside you
when you really begin to receive him into
yourself.
And that's why we say, you see, that
we have weakened bodies because we lack the
Holy Spirit.
But as soon as we begin to receive
the Holy Spirit into us, these bodies begin
to be strong.
And loved ones, there are a lot of
details in teaching on healing that I would
urge you maybe to follow out in.
We have cassettes, maybe about five cassettes, in
the library that I know I preached maybe,
there must be three hours of teaching on
health and sickness.
So I do urge you to go and
listen to those, you know, rather than just
take this morning's brief presentation, because there are
many details that have to be filled in.
But nevertheless, in spite of the fact, brothers
and sisters, it is the Father's will for
us to live in health.
And it is possible to live in health.
Now remember, Old Simpson, you know, describes it
this way, his own experience.
Then the body broke away in every sort
of way.
I had always worked hard, and from the
age of 14 I studied and labored and
spared no strength.
I took charge of a large congregation at
the age of 21.
I broke down utterly, half a dozen times.
And at my last, constitution was worn out
completely.
Many times I feared I should drop dead
in my pulpit.
I could not ascend any height without a
sense of suffocation, because of a broken down
heart and exhausted nervous system.
I heard of the Lord's healing, but I
struggled against it.
I was afraid of it.
I had been taught in theological seminaries that
the age of the supernatural was past, and
I could not go back from my early
training.
My head was in my way.
But at last, when I was brought to
attend the funeral of my dogmatics, the Lord
whispered to me the little secret, Christ in
you.
And from that hour I received him for
my body as I had done for my
soul.
I was made so strong and well that
work has been a perfect delight.
For years I have spent my summer holiday
in the hot city of New York, preaching
and working amongst crowds, as I never did
before.
Besides the work of our home and college,
and an immense mass of library work, and
much besides.
But the Lord did not merely remove my
sufferings.
It was more than simple healing.
He so gave me himself that I lost
the painful consciousness of physical organs.
That is the best of the health he
gives.
I thank the Lord that he keeps me
from all morbid physical consciousness, and a body
that is the object of anxious care, and
gives a simple life that is a light
and a service for the Master, that is
a rest and joy.
Maybe that's the secret.
Health is received by faith, not by sight.
Have you healed me?
I don't feel healed.
Have you healed my headache?
No you haven't.
Health is not received by sight.
It's received by faith.
God's health and strength is made perfect in
the presence of your own weakness.
But brothers and sisters, it is not God's
will that we should live in sickness.
And you know, if you don't catch any
of the other nuances besides that truth, it
would be good just to hold on to
that this morning.
Because Satan has persuaded so many of us
that, well, we're just sick kind of people.
We just have three colds every winter, and
we need to rest a lot after a
hard day's work.
And dear ones, you know, Satan just predisposes
us to sickness.
Loved ones, that's not God's will.
God's will is health.
So this Christmas, would you let Jesus come
into your body for health and strength?
Don't just keep him, you know, to the
spiritual things.
But would you ask him, Lord Jesus, I
believe your Holy Spirit is here to bring
health to my body, and I want to
die old and well.
And that is God's will, for us to
die well.
Not to die of sickness or disease, but
to die of healthy old age, after we've
done what God planned for us to do.
So will you think about it over Christmas
and ask yourself, am I giving ground to
the whole lie that I'm just a sickly
person, you know?
Or am I really living in all the
health that God has for me?
I know that many of you are sitting
there with pains and sicknesses of all kinds,
so I think we should just be serious
and just pray for a little, okay?