Jesus, You, and Healthcare, Part 1

We all want the best for the people we care about in the world for our kids or grandkids, our class-mates boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse. We want the best for those people. I wonder who do you think of when you think of who you love the most and you want them living free from disease. You want them living healthy. You want them living a life of prosperity, a life of wellbeing, where they've got enough food, a life where they have freedom. Who do you think of when you think of someone you really want that for?

I think of my two daughters, Zoe and Evie. Zoe and Evie are two of the best things that ever happened to me. I get to be their dad. And they're at that stage of life where they think I'm like the coolest, smartest, strongest. It's awesome. I mean, I'm just living it up because I guess some of you who have teenagers have told me that maybe that changes, like, I don’t know, I've got my fingers crossed that it won't, that they're still going to think I'm the smartest person in the world when they're 16 we’ll see, but Zoe and Evie, they have dolls that have dolls. They have pets, stuffed pets, they have pets and they all have names and they have these intricate life stories.

Their bedroom is a whole village of these little imaginary creatures. And you can peek in on them doing imaginary, play on the ground and there's little conflicts to resolve and all sorts of great stories. It's a pretty peaceful world for the most part, but there is a villain you see Zoe and Evie have an older brother named Jack.

And Jack's actually, as far as older brothers go, speaking of someone who had three older brothers he's actually a very good older brother. He really doesn't pick on them much. And they play the three of them play together really well. But every once in a while, Jack, who's more into dragons, World War II aircraft, T-Rexes - every once in a while, he'll just be overcome with a creative impulse to raid the village and he'll go in and he will wreak havoc. And usually he helps them clean up. But there was one day in particular where Zoe was just devastated. Her whole little world had been destroyed and she ran to me and she said, “Dad, I just feel like everything is ruined.”

And as I was walking her down the hall to rebuild her world, my mind couldn't help but jump to the many adults I know who really relate to that. Who, in the last year and a half, their business or their family or their health has been completely turned upside down some days it feels like the world's being torn apart around us. There is a villain. There's the evil of cancer. The dragon of death, the villain of broken relationships.

You know, as I helped Zoe rebuild her little world, I got thinking, man, wouldn't it be nice if it were this simple in the adult world, just realign some stuffed animals and worldwide hunger goes away, and inequality goes away, and disease goes away. Here's the question we're wrestling with today. How can you be a force for good in a world that is so broken and in so hurting, because I'm guessing whether you're here as a long-time believer or a skeptic or somewhere in the middle that you have some part of your heart that you genuinely want to help the people around you. I'm guessing you and I have in common that you don't want to see people going hungry.

You don't want to see people suffering. You don't want to people gasping for breath because of a viral disease. If I could tell you today, how you can be the solution to the thing that most grieves you in the world, would you want to know how? I mean, if there's a meaningful way, not, not pie in the sky, but a meaningful way that you could attach your life to a powerful movement that's bigger than just you and it actually, as a result, clothes, people who are poor, feeds people who are hungry, gives healthcare to people who otherwise could not have it. Would you want to be part of that?

Well, I want to answer this question today through the words of Jesus and through the lives of some who have taken His words seriously. You see the challenge with studying Christianity, at this point in history, is that today one out of three people in the world claims to be Christian, but not all of them actually read the words of Jesus and do what He says.

So, we're going to look today at some heroes of history who actually read the words of Jesus and did what they said. And I want to show you how you can do the same. Our first story is from Rochester, Minnesota. It starts in August of 1883, when an F-5 tornado destroyed the entire city of Rochester, Minnesota. It was one of a series of tornadoes that came, one after another, and as a result, they killed 37 people. More than 200 were injured. All their little wood homes and buildings right after the Civil War were destroyed. Businesses were lost. Children were orphaned. Wives became widows. Now the city of Rochester, like most cities in the U.S. at this time, did not have a hospital in the city. It just had a few private practice doctors. Well, within that rubble, within that debris, there was a young woman. She did not have money.

She didn't even have a lot of power, but she had one thing, a willful resolve to do the words of Jesus where she lived. Her name was Mary Moes. And Mary Moes went around ministering to the injured, caring for the sick, the hurting, the homeless, finding homes for the orphans, making sure that the widows had a place to sleep. And as she did this, she had a vision, a, a vision that you might actually call it a God-sized vision because she saw that the only doctors in the area, they just practiced private medicine for the rich people, essentially. They were the only people who could afford to have a doctor come to their house. And she met a young doctor there in Rochester, Minnesota, and she shared this vision with him. She said to him, “If you could gather a few doctors, we could create a little hospital where poor people could come.

Anyone could come and get healthcare.” And he said, “Well, we would need a ton of nurses.” And she said, “Well, I'll do it. I know a number of other young women who who've given their lives to follow Jesus. We will change the sheets. We will change the bandages. We will feed the ones who can't feed themselves. We will lift them to the bathroom. We will do the work. If you can gather a few doctors.

So, the doctor agreed and Mary Moes gathered together a number of other young followers of Jesus. And together with that doctor, they started a little clinic. That clinic grew and grew. And today, if you were to ask a non-Christian medical researcher, what is the number one hospital in the United States? Better yet, what's the number one hospital in the world. They would say that it's the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Uh, you see that doctor that Mary Moes met was named Dr. Mayo and Mary Moes’ story is one of many, when it comes to healthcare in the developed world. In fact, if you were to go to the Mayo clinic today, right in the middle of their whole campus, you would see this building behind me, which is called St. Mary's hospital. St. Mary's a real person. It's the person we just saw. It's Mary Moes.

You see, you might be thinking I'm never going to start a hospital. I'm just an ordinary person. Well, Mary Moes was just as ordinary. What she did is she lived out the teachings of Jesus, where He placed her and her life is proof of this that God uses ordinary people who believe the words of Jesus - when He said to feed the poor, to set the captives free, to do unto others as we would do to ourselves, God uses ordinary people who actually believe that and they live it out and through them, He does extraordinary good.

Mary Moes is not some radical exception when it comes to the founding of hospitals. But I want you to think about this. God is not the author of evil, but He says in his word that he takes what Satan means for evil and He turns it for good. And I just want you to think about this. God can take a tornado that killed 37 people and He can turn that into a hospital that saves hundreds of thousands of people. In fact, in the case of the Mayo clinic, it's not just hundreds of thousands, the medical advances that it has exported out to other hospitals around the world as a model in healthcare, have saved millions of lives.

Well, when I was working as a journalist and was having doubts about Christianity, I was in the middle of an investigative report on healthcare there in Arizona. I was noticing that all these leading hospitals were named Saint Josephs, or Saint Vincent’s, or Baptist-this, or Methodist-that, or Mercy-this, or Franciscan-that. And I knew those were all Christian terms. And as I researched, as a journalist, I thought, Why are none of these hospitals named after atheists? Why are none of them named after Islamic leaders? Why are none of them named after Buddhist leaders or Taoist leaders? Is it a coincidence that they're all named after Christian people? I mean, how did the Christians pull this off?

I began looking into the founding of the best hospitals in the country and in the world. And Mary Moes’ story is just one of dozens that I found. If you look at the other top five in the U.S., you would see Massachusetts General Hospital there in Boston was started by two pastors, two pastors who had just graduated from what was a Bible seminary at the time called Harvard. And they had such a heart for the poor in that city that they started a hospital there. And today, Massachusetts General’s one of the top five in the nation.

Another one would be Johns Hopkins, similar to the Mayo clinic. Many of the practices of John's Hopkins have been exported all around the world to save lives. Where did Johns Hopkins come from? Well, it was started by a Quaker Christian who bears that same weird name, John with an S attached at the end, that's actually spelled properly Johns Hopkins.

And at the end of his life, he gave his fortune to do three things. He wanted a Christian hospital, a Christian university, and because this was before the Civil War and he hated slavery as a Quaker Christian, he gave the other third of his fortune to start an orphanage for young African-American children who did not have parents.

These believers are like players in great team. If you think of Jesus being like a college football coach, I know that might be a little sacrilegious, but you think of that halftime talk where the football coach is like, “Now go and do this.” Jesus told His followers to go in the world and do a certain thing: help their neighbors love their neighbors.

And they've gone now and they've done it. And we now live at a time where if we get an infection, we just go to the doctor's office or a hospital. We just assume it's there. They weren't there 200 years ago, who put them there? Why did they put them there? The top ones that I studied all had stories like St. Mary Moes. They're believers in Jesus who did what their coach or their leaders said to do.

Here's one example of how Jesus put it in Matthew 5. He said this, “You are the light of the world,” if you call yourself one of My followers, “like a city on a hilltop that cannot be hidden…” He continues and he says this, “No one lights a lamp and then hides it under a basket or a bushel, instead, they set it up on a table so that it can give light to everyone in the house.”

And then Jesus says this to any follower of His who takes Him seriously. He says, “In the same way, let your good deeds shine.” True followers of Jesus are to affect our neighbors in such a way that the people around us see something. In such a way that it gives praise to our Father in heaven.

Now there are two groups of people I want to address in this moment. The first is those of you who aren't yet a believer, or maybe you've been raised in a Christian home, and you're kind of doubting and you're deciding for yourself, What am I going to believe? The first challenge I want to give to that group is this. I want to encourage you to look for the people who actually do what Jesus said.

I know in my life, I had some people who were called Christians, but as I read the words of Jesus for myself, I realized that's not actually a follower of Jesus. They're not doing what He said. And when you find these people, who've done these terrible things, and they claim to be a Christian. You'll find they're not actually doing what Jesus said. It's called cultural Christianity. They've claimed the label, but they have not followed the leader. And I would encourage you if you're a doubter or a skeptic, that if you will get yourself around the people who take Jesus’ words seriously, you'll see something that you won't find anywhere else in the world.

Now, to the believers, I want to give the same challenge from the other perspective. And that's this. If you call yourself a follower of Jesus, do the people who live in your home, do the people who work in your office, do your classmates, teammates, relatives, see any of this in you? Do they see some good deeds that, you're not doing them to earn God's favor but - you're overflowing. The love of God is overflowing from you to your neighbors. You don't have to be perfect but it becomes, we're all known by our actions. Even a child is known by their actions. Do the people around you have this sense of: Wow, if that's what followers of Jesus are like, I'm interested.

Well, after I learned the impact of followers of Jesus on the top ten hospitals, these are all documented in my book, Jesus Skeptic, I then looked into who are the leading anti-slavery voices who ended open and legalized slavery, both in England and the U.S., because it was the British Empire that then spread the end of slavery to much of the world and the U.S. as well, but the U.S. was late in the game, sadly. But before that slavery was a global norm on every continent.

So, who are the people who ended it? People like Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman. And when I read their writings for myself or in Harriet Tubman's case, she didn't get an education, but many of her words are written down. I found that they were also followers of Jesus and not in an incidental manner, but in a motivating manner. One of them Elijah Lovejoy. He was a pastor and he was a newspaper man. And he became a martyr. He was the first casualty of the Civil War. Before shots were fired in war. He was using his printing presses to say that slavery was evil, that it flew in the face of God's nature. And it so inflamed people who were for slavery, that they burned down his printing shot, and they shot him with a shotgun. I mean, people who gave their lives to end slavery, who according to their own writings, when I sat down to read them said, “I'm doing this because I believe in a God who made all people in His image.”

Today, we take for granted that even a six-year-old knows what an immune system is. Three hundred years ago, people didn't know what that was. There's a whole field of medical research called immunology. And it's because of immunology that we can now not only treat disease, but we can prevent a lot of diseases. It's why we don't fear polio or a number of other diseases that used to wipe people out - because of immunology. Who's the father of immunology? Edward Jenner, a devout Christian. He's credited by medical researchers as saving more lives than anyone else in human history.

Because so much that we take for granted about our modern world is the result of the engineers who are trained at the leading universities. Where did they come from? And, and it's not guesswork. It's not opinion. It's just good, old, boring research. You can find the founding charter and the original crest of every university. And here's what I found of the top ten - Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, 10 out of 10 were started by Christians for the purpose of teaching the Bible. And then over the years, they added additional curriculum.