Real Life

Yesterday, I talked about how I'd been speechless about most of the term since coming back. Well, one thing came to my mind today.

Something that I've thought a lot about since the beginning of this school year was healing. I had to write papers on healing for a couple of my classes and it has gotten me to think about it quite a bit. For whatever reason, in the Alliance, there's a lot of talk about whether there is healing in the atonement and all that fun stuff. Well, it's not my goal to bore you with all the theology behind the different positions.

My stance on healing is quite simple.

There is brokenness in life. Sin has caused for life to be difficult and stressful. When sin gets a hold of people, it starts to gather and clutter together more and more - just like how dust collects on an old untouched book, etc. Eventually, the sin will lead to brokenness. Brokenness can mean many things, none of which are pleasant in the least.

My view is this: I believe in a God that heals. Nothing is impossible with God; and as a Christian, the same power that raised Jesus from the grave lives inside us. I think we often overlook how profound that is. Think about it for a second. Death, the result of sin, the ceasing of existence, is the final state of a human's life. Jesus, once a human, died the exact same death that everyone else who had died. But by the power of God, Jesus overcame that death. Having accepted Jesus into our lives, that exact same power is the power that lives in us! Honestly! Just writing about it gets me all worked up; is it not the most amazing thing you've come to know?

That's why, to me, it's quite simple. If God can raise Jesus from the very death that we are all entitled to, then surely he can heal any other wimpy brokenness that consumes our lives. There is brokenness everywhere we face, and I believe in a God that can look at that and say, "that is nothing to me; let me be the one to help. Let me be the one to heal you."

It's really tough to understand the full capacity of God's healing power. Fact of the matter is, we can't. We have a tendency to put God in some box and that he's limited to it. We don't do it intentionally; it's just how it is because the only grasp of God that we have is through our own personal life experiences. So if we haven't seen God do something in particular, it's perfectly reasonable to have difficulty understanding that God is able.

Romans 8 is one of my favorite chapters in the entire Bible; so I leave you with this:

⁹ You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. ¹⁰ But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. ¹¹ And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.