Hope and healing.
There is in our society a cry for things that offer hope in these days.
So much of the looming crisis that seems brewing on the horizon challenges us as to whether we will face the future with hope in our hearts and without any fear or succumb to the sense of hopelessness that seems to be overcoming so many.
The Holy Spirit through Paul expressed his desire for all christians to be full of hope in Romans chapter 15 and verse 13 where He said
"Now may the God of hope,fill you with all joy and peace in believing,that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Hope is something that we as christians are supposed to abound in.
Psalms 42 quoting from the authorised version says
"Hope thou in God, for I will yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance and my God."
The amplified translation puts it like this
"Why are you cast down my inner self?And why be disquieted within me?
Hope in God and wait expectantly for Him,for I shall yet praise Him,Who is the help of my countenance and my God."
Hope therefore is an expectancy and an expectation of the desired end which we wish and desire to see.
Because many christians have a vague notion of what hope from the bible truly is they often do not seek to establish a firm foundation of hope in their lives, and to guard their hope for the future jealously.
Perhaps the clearest and most succinct definition of what biblical hope is can be found in the first chapter of the book of Philipians where Paul says
"According to my earnest expectation and hope that in nothing shall I be ashamed"
Hope is an earnest expectation, that brings no shame because we believe that the good end which we hope for shall surely come to pass.
Hebrews chapter 11 and verse 1 puts it this way "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,the evidence of things not seen"
Hope is here described as the foundation of our faith, for it precedes it, since faith is the substance of those things that we are hoping for.
What does this mean exactly?
It means that since we can only receive from God by faith in any area of our lives we have to have established a firm foundation of hope in our lives first in order for faith to rise up within us and receive what God desires to give us.
Hope is therefore not something vague and wishful and maybe it will maybe it wont proposition.
Hope has guts it has heart it has certainty and it most definitely has courage.
How can I have hope like this some may say?
And the answer to that question very much depends upon from where you and I are deriving our hope.
For hope only ever comes from the Word of God and from the promises of God.
The promises of God have within themselves hope, they are if you like containers of living hope and our job is to lay hold upon this hope by laying up these promises within our lives.
This is why many people fail and falter, because they are looking to find hope in what God has said and something else.
But it is only when we make the promises of God our only refuge that we are sheltered from the storm.
Likewise it is only when we determine that Gods promises are sufficient and need no other thing to support them, it is then that we will diligently seek to lay them up within our hearts and to nurture them.
Sometimes believers tend to place their hope in a change of their circumstance being imminent or a healing quickly appearing or a relationship being radically restored, if there is some evidence that they can see and take hold of first, then they say this will offer them hope.
But in reality this is not the way that hope is gained or that hope is strengthened in our lives,because God wants for us to so lay hold of hope in the promises of God that we need no other supporting evidence or confirming coincidences in order for us to believe that what God has said will come to pass.
It is the attitude of heart that says "even if everything around me or within me seems to show the opposite of what I am believing, I believe that Gods word concerning this issue is going to be the end result."
That is biblical hope.
It lifts our esteem of the word of God to a higher place than any other circumstance of our lives.
This is exactly what Abraham did when he "against hope believed in hope and so he became " the father of many nations.
In other words Abraham took the hope that was delivered to him from what God had said, (you will be the father of many nations) and used it to defeat mere natural hope, which would have be limited to his age and his bodies ability to reproduce.
Natural hope would have only said to him "You are to old and impotent and passed the age, and its too late."
Natural hope depends upon the circumstances being favourably inclined Supernatural hope looks to God alone and believes for the impossible.
I believe that in 2011 and as 2012 fast approaches we need to be a people whose lives are clearly marked by the presence of real bible hope.
We need to rise up and to face whatever the challenges of our lives may be that face us and defeat the voice of discouragement and despair with living hope.
There are three basic areas of our lives that most of us will need greater hope in or three basic areas that we can divide our life up into.
One is relational the second is financial and the third is health and healing.
Most peoples lives will be challenged in one or more of those areas at different times and it is amazing to discover how much the bible has to say about each one of these areas.
In this blog I would like to focus on the area of health and healing and to lay a foundation for real bible hope to arise in our lives for our healing and for our health.
Gods will is to heal us and for us to be in good health.
"Beloved I wish above all things that you may prosper and be in health even as your soul prospers."3 john vs2
In Isaiah chapter 53 we have what is commonly regarded as the great redemption chapter of the old testament.
It is all the more remarkable when considered that it was prophesied over seven hundred years prior to the birth of Christ, and Isaiah peered down the telescope of human history and spoke in detail of the events of the cross.
This prophecy gives to us a picture not only of the fact of the cross, but great spiritual insight into what occurred spiritually when Jesus hung and bled on the cross two thousand years ago.
"Who has believed our report?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of dry ground.
He has no form or comeliness;
And when we see him there is no beauty that we should desire him.
He is despised and rejected by men,
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.
And we hid as it were,our faces from him;
He was despised,and we did not esteem him.
Surely he has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed him stricken
Smitten of God and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement of our peace was upon him
And by his stripes we are healed."

One thing that is of vital consequence in understanding the place of healing in the church is to understand why we are healed.
We are not healed because God has compassion on us in our suffering neither because our prayers have been answered or because we have years of natural life and service left to give to God.
Certainly all of the above are true but they are not the reason why.
The reason why we are healed is because on the cross two thousand years ago Jesus Christ of Nazareth made a substitution for us when he bore all of our sicknesses and diseases.
The cross is the foundation for our healing.
Unfortunately due to an incorrect translation of certain verses in the English translation from Isaiah this fact has not stood out as prominently to us as it should.
The words that are translated griefs and sorrows are the Hebrew words translated Choli and Makob and should have been translated into the English as sickness and pain.
Everywhere else throughout the Old testament where they are used they are translated as sickness and as pain.eg deut 7,15 28,61 1 king,s 17,17 2 kings 1,2 8,8 2 chronicles 16,12 and 21,15.
Also job 14,22 and 33 19 to name but a very few.
The verses should have been translated,

"He is despised and rejected of men,
A man of pains and familiar with sickness."
V4 "Surely he has borne our sicknesses and carried our pains,, and by his stripes we are healed." v 5
Why would the translators not have translated these words accurately in there original meaning?
I can only imagine that prejudice had a bearing on this decision.
It is interesting that in the Hebrew bible these verses are accurately translated and they are in some others European languages including Spanish.
However when this was translated into the king james version over 400 years ago there was a root of unbelief existing within the church certainly as far as divine healing was concerned.
It was neither embraced nor commonly practiced, so whilst the intent of the original translators was almost certainly to give Glory to God in presenting the most accurate translation available at the time in the English language, it would seem that human prejudice got in the way and prevented this clearer understanding of what these verses were are saying with regards to our healing from being more widely understood.
Dr Youngs translation of this passage reads as follows,
"He is despised and left of men,
A man of pains,and acquainted with sickness,
And as one hiding the face from us,
He is despised and we esteemed him not.
Surely our sicknesses(choli)he has borne,
And our pains(makob)he has carried them,
And we-we have esteemed him plagued,
Smitten of God and afflicted.
And he is pierced for our transgressions,
Bruised for our iniquities,
The chastisement of our peace is on him,
And by his bruise there is healing to us.

Dr Isaac Leesers translation of the Hebrew English bible translates it as follows,

"He was despised and shunned of men:
A man of pains and acquainted with disease.
But only our diseases did He bear himself,
And our pains he carried.
And through his bruises was healing granted to us. vs 3-5"
"But the Lord was pleased to crush him through disease,vs 10."

Of equal importance is to understand the word borne in verse 4
"Surely he has borne our sicknesses and carried our diseases."
It is the word nasa and means to "lift up,to bear away ,carry away and remove completely."
It applied to the Levitical scapegoat that bore away the sins of the people on the great day of atonement in Leviticus 16 and verse 22,
"The goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities to a land not inhabited and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness."
On the cross Jesus bore our sickness and our diseases as surely as he did our sins.
He bore them in order to carry them away and remove them.
The same word for bear( nasa) which is used in verse 4 to describe Jesus bearing our sickness and our pains is the same word which is used again in verse 11 and 12 to describe His bearing of our transgressions and of our sins.
In the mind and heart of God there is no difference,the great substitutionary work of Jesus bearing our sins is also the great substitutionary work of Jesus to bear our sicknesses as well.
And the sense of this bearing (Nasa) is to carry it and to remove it far away.
We are forgiven because Jesus put away sin by the sacrifice of himself on the cross once and for all.
And we are healed because Jesus dealt as emphatically with sickness and with pain on the cross.
This is the foundation for our faith.
There are two "streams"of healing in the church today.
On the one hand there is the ministry of prayer for the sick and of the laying on of hands.
There are and always have been those who have been given gifts by the Holy Spirit of healing's and the working of miracles.
They tend to be more especially used to transfer the healing anointing into the sick, however every single one of us, every child of God can and should lay hands upon the sick and pray for their recovery.
The healing anointing of God is a powerful tangible reality and is one means by which healing is communicated to the sick today.
In the gospels it speaks of the power of the Lord being present to heal the sick, which would refer to the healing anointing.
That is one means.
Then there is the individual faith of every christian to receive through Gods word the provision of the cross for themselves.
This is when we begin to appropriate by our faith the reality of our healing that was accomplished for us on Calvary.
Proverbs chapter 4 gives us great insight into how we are to accomplish this in our lives.
"My son,attend to my words,
Incline your ears unto my sayings.
Let them not depart from your eyes,
Keep them in the midst of your heart;
For they are life to those who find them,
And health to all their flesh."
We need to understand that Gods word is a living thing and is spoken of again and again in the scriptures as a seed.
It is an incorruptible seed and Jesus in the parable of the sower spoke of the supreme importance of letting this "seed" find good ground within our hearts.
In natural law we see this principal also, according to what is sown so will the harvest be.
If say a farmer plants seed in a field of a certain crop he knows that if the ground is god and the conditions are right he will yield a harvest.
This is not something arbitrary, it is a natural law.
Neither does he go and keep on digging up the earth to see whether the seed is taking root or whether it is growing.
Rather he watches the field knowing that in due course a crop will emerge and it will yield according to the quantity of seed sown.
In proverbs chapter 4 we are shown how to yield a harvest of health in our lives.
We are to "Attend to his words", and we do this by letting them not depart from before our eyes and keeping them in the midst of our heart.
Gods word is described as an incorruptible and an imperishable seed.
It will never return to God void but when believed and acted upon will always accomplish what He desires and fulfill the purpose for which it was sent.
If we require healing then we must look to the promises of healing and health in the bible and begin to meditate upon these until they never depart from before our eyes(our consciousness) and lay them up richly within our heart.
John Wesley once said that the enemy satan has successfully counterfeited true heart faith in the church and replaced it with a mere mental assent.
I believe that his assessment was profoundly accurate.
For well over two hundred years in the church since the so called "enlightenment" reason has sought to replace faith and what is rational is used to dismissed what cannot be easily explained by natural reason alone.
This gave birth to secular humanism as we now know it but its roots were the exaltation of the human mind, the intellect and reason against revelation.
The bible speaks far more about the human spirit than it does the mind.
In the gospels the Pharisees were those that reasoned with their minds and sought to work out how they might trap Christ and humiliate him.
Jesus however spoke of his disciples hearing and understanding his words with the eyes and ears of their hearts which is to say their spirits.
Proverbs chapter 4 is therefore not simply talking about memorizing verses of the bible, rather it speaks of meditation to a place where the promises of God are richly dwelling within us that is within our hearts and ever before our eyes that is at the forefront of our minds.
That is the condition for "finding "Gods word so that they become life to us and health to all our flesh.
It is a great tragedy how many christians never discover the word of God and the promises of God becoming a quickening and vital power of God in their lives because they do not distinguish between the soul and the spirit in their lives.
The word of God cannot be planted into our minds to become this, it can only be planted into our spirits, our inner man that hidden man of the heart as the bible calls him.
It is there in our innermost heart that the seed of the word of God begins to germinate and grows up to become greater than whatever the need may be in our life.
Just as the seed can only do its work in nature by being kept in the ground, so Gods imperishable seed can only do its effective work in us by being kept in the midst of our hearts.
And that is satan ploy according to Jesus in the parable of the sower to try to get the word out of our hearts.
What satan well knows that some christians do not know is that once the word of Gods promise has been received and believed and begun to take root in our hearts, there is no way way that it will fail to produce a harvest in our lives.
If we need to improve our health then we should go to the passages in the bible that promise healing and health and write them down if necessary and begin to meditate upon them until they grow up as living faith within us that grows and becomes greater than any of the symptoms that we have been struggling against.
Gods word contains His healing life and virtue in it,which is why proverbs 4 says that it will become life to us and health to all our flesh.
However just as taking a medication will only do us good if it is administered in the correct way, and usually that means getting into our blood stream, so the healing virtue and life giving properties of Gods word will only do us good if we get it and keep it in our hearts to overflowing.
One of the quickest and most fruitful ways to get the word of God into our hearts and to keep it in the middle of our hearts is by oral meditation.
We need to often and constantly speak the word of God and especially the promises of God to ourselves until they become second nature to us and we can quote them out of our hearts without trying to mentally remember them.
This is a good gauge and arbiter of how much we have truly layed them up within ourselves.
Two years ago as of writing I came to one of the few crisis times of my life.
after a routine operation I was cast into a spiritual battle where I had to take sleeping pills to get to sleep, and beta blocker to stabilize my heart.
It was needless to say not an encouraging point to reach.
In addition I had reached a place of utter burn out in the life of ministry.
During this period God showed how I had erred and how I had let the enemy enter in (I knew some of the areas where I had sinned and compromised but the Lord gave me much more clarity during this time)
I emerged from this dark valley a new man and today I am healthier and spiritually more alive than I ever have been.
I was completely healed.
Partly I needed to shut the door to the enemy by repentance of the known areas of sin in my life.
And also I needed to reconnect with the word of God with my faith in a manner and in a way which I had neglected for many years greatly to my own cost.
I began by finding every Scripture on healing and writing them down, and by reading every book that I could on healing.
And my faith began to grow.
This process did not happen overnight, but daily twice a day I would speak them and speak them and speak them, until they soaked into my spirit, so that today Gods healing promises dwell in me richly.
And to this I continue to speak out Gods healing words (along with many other promises that tell me who I am in Christ and what my inheritance is) in order to keep those words in the midst of my heart,and keep my faith strong in those promises.
Thank God for the power of his word!
Some christians treat divine healing as something almost arbitrary, God is soverign they say and He will heal when he wants to and whom he wants to.
That however releases us of any responsibility on our part to exercise any faith for healing and to grow in our faith regarding it.
It also has little foundation in the word of God most especially in the gospels where it is evident that Jesus looked for and rewarded faith in the lives of those who came to him for their healing.
The foundation for our faith is the cross of Christ, there our healing was secured and there it was obtained.
Gods motive to heal may well be His compassion but the grounds of our healing health and wellbeing is the fact that Jesus obtained this for us on calvary tree.
It is a finished and accomplished thing.
I encourage you do not let the devil rob you of the blessing of healing and the blessing of health to all your flesh.
It is an accomplished fact in the eyes of God.
See it as accomplished in your eyes too.
Rise up in your faith and posses what is legally yours by the blood of Christ.
In this next year I pray that more and more of Gods people may become marked by the presence of this living hope, and be seen as a people of hope with regard to the future.
I will end with the scripture which I quoted at the beginning of this blog from romans chapter 15 that expresses the heart and mind of the Holy Spirit for us, the church in this regard
"Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing,that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15 vs 13)