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Physical Healing - A Biblical Assessment, Part 2

From the series Does God Still Heal?

God does, in fact, heal today, but often our presuppositions and expectations prevent Him from accomplishing all that He wants to in our lives. This series, from James 5, will help you sort through the many and conflicting voices in our day about the issues of healing.

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Message Transcript

Chip: Well, we are doing a series on: Does God Still Heal? And I have a very special guest. This is Dr. Susan Richards. And she is a medical doctor with kind of a unique perspective as a medical doctor and an ordained Christian minister. So tell me first about your medical background, Susan.

Susan: Yes, thank you, Chip. I am just so delighted and happy to be with you. I am a licensed medical doctor and my field of specialty is family medicine. And I went to Northwestern University Medical School and have served on the clinical faculty at Stanford University School of Medicine. I have done quite a bit of teaching there. And currently I am actually in ministry at Stanford.

Chip: Wow!

Susan: I have moved from the medical center to the main campus in terms of the ministry aspects and work with the undergraduate and graduate students.

Chip: Wow, so, you’re a medical doctor. You then are teaching medical doctors how to be good medical doctors. And then this shift occurred. This healing ministry. Tell us a little bit about maybe how that happened and what it is.

Susan: Yes. During my active years when I was primarily a medical doctor, I was always guided by God to have a great deal of love and compassion for the patients that I worked with. It’s very intimidating to be a medical patient. It’s scary. People get very fearful of what’s going on with their health.

And I was always the doctor that you could go to who would give you a big hug and who really made you feel at home and made you feel comfortable. And I didn’t realize at the time, but God was already doing a ministry in doing that.

But six years ago, He spoke to my heart and said, Susan, I want you to become ordained in ministry.

Chip: Wow!

Susan: And at that point, I went through ordination and through training. And then all of a sudden, through I consider the hand of the Lord, many of the hospitals in the Bay Area started to open up. And I started to pray for the sick in all of the hospitals in our area. Stanford Hospital, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, the Veterans hospitals, Valley Med, the private hospitals.

And I started to see the hand of the Lord creating what I would have to call “medical miracles,” because there was no other way that I could explain them. I love the fact that I have a medical background and I am a minister because I pray very much as a follower of the Christ and a strong believer in the principles of the kingdom. So I pray that way, but I also pray medically.

So I pray very specifically into the condition in a way that the average lay person can’t do, because I understand the medical part.

So I can go right into the condition itself and I can focus on whatever the physiological, the structural imbalance is going on, and pray for that to heal. And I find it’s an amazing combination. I love combining the medical healing and the prayer healing. I find it is incredibly effective. It’s very powerful.

Chip: Having the privilege of praying with you, you pray in a way that is a little bit different than maybe people have seen in terms of a healing ministry, because I saw verifiable, specific cases of miraculous healing. Quadriplegics who are walking and burn victims who miraculously were healed in answer to prayer and, in fact, you have taught many others to pray. So could you give us a couple of examples?

Susan: I have seen things that just defy my own training. For example, I have seen so many quadriplegics walk that you can’t even explain it under normal circumstances. They should be on ventilators. They should never be out of a wheelchair. Yet I have seen quadriplegics walk many times. And jog and mountain climbing now and bowling and swimming. So they are completely recovered.

I have seen patients who are morbidly obese have what I would have to call supernatural weight loss from God, where they have lost anywhere from eighty to two hundred pounds in two weeks to four weeks, which is medically impossible. Or I would pray for them and every time I would pray, they would drop thirty pounds or fifty pounds.

I have seen burn patients where, one in particular was amazing, where it was young man with third-degree burns over his whole upper and lower body and with prayer, all of the burned tissue fell off. And he was left with pink, baby-looking skin overnight. He should have been treated for these burns for six months or a year with skin grafts and so when the Lord steps in, the healing is so rapid, it’s so complete, it’s what I call “no muss, no fuss.”

Chip: One of the passages that we are talking about in James 5 makes a real strong connection between the mental, emotional, and even spiritual wellbeing, even talking about if someone has sinned. And either their relationship with God is wrong or maybe resentment or they have hurt someone else. Do you see a correlation between people’s mental, emotional, and spiritual outlook and walk with God and their physical wellbeing?

Susan: Absolutely. From the medical side, we all know as doctors that stress plays a huge role in illness. Eighty to eighty-five percent of the time, illness is at least triggered or worsened by stress. And what I have seen as a physician who is also a minister is that often, if people come to me with let’s say a bad back.

Chip: Yeah, I could identify with that.

Susan: I won’t just look at them as a bad back. I will look at the whole person when I am talking to them. I want to know what are their triggers. Do they have emotional triggers? For example, they are upset with their boss, they are fighting with their husband or wife and their back goes out. Every time they get upset, their back gets worse.

Or they are doing things orthopedically in terms of the way they sit at the computer for hours at a time that is aggravating or worsening this. So when I pray to the Lord, I pray for that whole person. And I find that it is really a very wonderful, positive thing to do.

Chip: Thank you, Dr. Richards. It’s so good to spend a few minutes with you. And for those who maybe grew up like me and thought that supernatural things don’t happen, God doesn’t do miracles, healings don’t occur, it’s great to meet a Stanford teacher and doctor who prays in our hospitals and where God is working in powerful ways. So thank you so much.

Susan: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Chip.

End Video Interview

Here’s what I want you to hear. God uses medicine. God, at times, according to His will, chooses to miraculously intervene. And there is a very strong correlation in this passage between our mental, emotional, and spiritual health and our physical health.

In fact, so much so that the application in verse 16, notice on the next part of your notes, it says, “The general application.” How do you stay physically healthy, then? Okay? How would you remain physically healthy? It’s a New Testament time. It’s not like there are lots of doctors.

By the way, sometimes you get sick because of bacteria. Okay? What we do is one group wants to spiritualize everything and another group wants everything to be super empirical and I’ll tell you what: I sure don’t understand it all. But I don’t think anybody does.

But here’s what we can know as followers of Jesus that will highly impact our physical health. Therefore, notice, in light of physical illness, in light of what you should do when you get in a desperate situation, in light of what elders do and how God works and in light of the high probability that that physical illness often is rooted in sin, not all sickness is sin, but a lot of it is. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another – why? So that you may be healed.

The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much. And that group, then, this was the very first book in the New Testament written. That group then would be like us, “You know, hey, when Peter prays, yeah, I get it. When the apostle John prays I get it. But we’re just regular people.”

And so notice what James says. He says, “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain. And it didn’t rain on earth for three and a half years. And then he prayed again and the sky poured rain and the earth produced its fruit.”

Literally, what he is saying is: He’s a regular guy like us. And, literally, the phrase here when he prayed, literally, it’s with prayer he prayed. In other words, he really prayed in his prayers.

I ask myself sometimes, Do I really pray in my prayers or do I just say words? He’s talking about fervent, focused, believing. I’m coming before You, God. This is the situation. This is who You are. These are Your promises. I am asking You, specifically, to intervene. And I am going to keep coming and I’m going to press into You and I want to hear from You.

If there is an issue in my life or an issue in this situation, God often uses health issues to get our attention to bring about major things in our life and relationship with Him and others.

So let’s ask a few questions of this passage. What is the presumed relationship between sin and sickness in this passage? Very high. Now, jot a note, okay? Because someone is going to walk away with, Chip said that people are always sick because they have sinned. Errrrrrgg. Okay? No.

But is there a very high correlation between a number of illnesses and sin? Yes. Let me give you a list of some common sins that create physical illness. Unresolved anger. Anxiety and worry. If you’re commanded not to worry and you worry, because we all do it doesn’t make it less a sin. It’s saying that, God, You’re not in control. I can’t control it. And I can’t tell the future. And so I am eaten up inside. And when you worry, your stomach acid goes, right? And when you worry and when you’re under stress, your immune system drops.

Stress. Unbelief. God, I don’t believe You’re going to come through. Therefore, since I don’t believe You’re going to come through, I am going to take care of myself. So I’m going to buy things with money I don’t have, presuming on the future. Now I feel all this pressure and I’m overwhelmed with debt because I didn’t obey You in my priorities.

Bitterness. Rebellion. Addictions. Gluttony.

And so we live in a world where we sinfully have lifestyles that are killing us. We create drugs to treat the symptoms and our souls are starving. So what is the solution?

What are we told to do regularly for our health? Confess. And he says, “Confess your sins,” literally it’s the sin specifically, “to one another that you might be healed, and pray for one another.” Literally, the word is intercede. Intercede means: I have heard your struggle. You confess that you have resentment toward your husband. You confess that it’s not a glass of wine, it’s three or four. You confess that you have resentment toward your boss.

You have confessed that your priorities are out of whack, you’re not giving your children the time that you know they need. You have confessed that there is someone at work that you have this emotional attachment and you’re fantasizing. You have confessed that you’re logging on to the Internet. You confess that you’re a shopaholic or a workaholic. And these are unhealthy things. And I am going to stand before God and I am going to ask Him to help you.

The power of sin is secret. If you go through Church history, when revivals happen, whether it’s the Moravians, whether it’s the Wesleys, whether it’s movement in our country with Whitefield the small groups in the Wesleyan groups, they would meet twice a week and they had this set of questions on a card. They would ask one another, “How is thy soul with God?” Second question, it went something like this, “Has thou sinned against thy Creator or anyone else by thought, word, and deed?”

And you know what they did in these small groups? They confessed their sins to each other. What we do is pose. We project we are doing better than we are. And what I can tell you, what we have all experienced, see, we start confessing when we get desperate, right? When there’s nowhere else to go.

I will tell you, if we will follow Scripture and confess our sins to one another, one, you’ll be shocked at how regular everybody else is. And, two, God promises He will bring healing.

This is preventative healing. We are to confess to one another.

And then notice what kind of prayer has healing impact. It’s earnest, fervent, believing prayer. Godly people shooting it straight, being for one another. Who qualifies to be heard by God for healing and the miraculous? Ordinary people like you and me.

I want to summarize, because I want to give you something that is very tangible as you walk away that you can think through healing in a very, very specific way. And as you do, the big picture is you are going to meet people who have very strong, emotional views. And they have had experiences and all I am saying is I am all for everyone’s experience. I just don’t want to build my theology on anyone’s experience or anyone on radio or anyone on TV or myself.

I want my theology about everything to be around: What does the Bible actually say? And I would encourage you to take these notes, look at these passages, and agree or disagree. But get your convictions from God.

But by way of overview, I think there are three things we can learn about healing. Number one is at times, it’s called the intervention of God. It’s Acts 3, right? Peter and John are on their way to the temple. And there’s a guy there, they don’t have any money. He has been lame since birth. “Silver and gold have I none, but in the name of the Lord Jesus, arise and walk!” He reaches up, bam! Miraculous intervention. I always pray for that one.

The second one is the interaction of God: 1 Timothy 5. Timothy, you’re my son in the faith. Paul had a lot of faith. Paul healed a lot of people. Take a little wine for your stomach. In other words, there’s some medicine you should take. God is going to use the medicine prescribed to heal your body. It’s going to be the Spirit of God using medicine to heal your body.

And third is what I call the enabling of God. And this is like the Joni Eareckson Tada answer to prayer. The apostle Paul said…Paul had faith. Paul believed. Paul had been to the third heaven. Paul healed people. “Heal me, God!” “No.” “Heal me, God!” “No.” “Heal me, God.” “No. Paul, My grace is sufficient for you.”

Here’s the deal with healing: It’s not primarily, even when Jesus did it, it was never primarily about simply solving a physical problem. Every miracle and every healing, almost always was to affirm or make clear or deliver a person. But it was to make a major, major point.

Sometimes God heals to make that point. Sometimes you endure it and His grace is sufficient and He gets glory through it. Sometimes He uses a doctor and an MRI and a medicine and a surgery.

Biblical, medical, spiritual integration is what I believe the Bible clearly teaches and is the call of God for us to believe He can intervene, to believe and step out, to have lifestyles of nutrition and rest and wisdom and obedience and confessing our sin to one another. And finally, where at the right time, in the right way, we use medicine that God has given us. That’s what He uses to bring about transformation.