Jesus Healing Ministry, Part 2

[00:00:00] I made a mistake the last time in saying I was going to try to tell you something like 20 kinds of diseases and somebody came to me afterwards and said it never counted up to that many. So if anybody kept notes, let me run over what I tried to say in just a minute or two and then we can maybe try to straighten this out. This is based on the Merck Manual, which is a kind of a doctor's handbook, and it's getting thicker every edition. [00:00:37] I think the last edition runs around 3,000 pages. The first category of illnesses pertains to the allergies, where people can have stuffiness in their nasal passages or hives or asthma because of an abnormal sensitivity to certain substances. One of my friends was allergic to caffeine and so he stayed away from all coffee or anything like that and one time he was a guest in a home and they didn't know about this and they served him some candy called toffee I believe and he ate some of it and after a while he began to go into shock and he said I feel just like I drank a cup of coffee. [00:01:23] Well, this was an allergy. It had nothing to do with a lack of faith. It's just a characteristic of the human body. Then we have, secondly, the blood diseases, like leukemia and Hodgkin's and anemia and all the others. And thirdly, we have diseases of the heart, like leaking valves and so on, and of the blood vessels. If a blood vessel ruptures, we call it, in common language, a stroke. A cerebral, what do they call it, vascular accident, I think. [00:01:56] That's just a big word for stroke. Fourthly, we have, the Merck manual classifies together deficiency diseases, like protein deficiency or vitamin deficiency, which the sailors, a couple hundred years ago, didn't know about, So they'd get scurvy on their voyages, and then they found out if they took along citrus fruit, I believe it was, they could avoid the scurvy. And then the metabolic diseases, from the word metabolism, such as diabetes, the diabetic has something go wrong in his body, I believe they're called the Isles of Langerhans, something like that. [00:02:41] and the person can't handle the sugar question and instead of having a normal blood sugar level it goes sky high and all kinds of sad consequences follow if untreated I don't know whether I should be real practical as I go along or not I think I'll risk being criticized and be real open with you I don't have the art of beating around the bush So you must forgive me if I just talk plainly. [00:03:15] A man and wife came to me one time bringing a 12-year-old boy along and wanted me to do a miracle because the boy had just been found to have diabetes and they didn't want to have the bother of having to take medicine the rest of his life. Well, it so happens that my wife and I have a handicapped child too and so I said very lovingly I thought if I had miracle working power I'd start in my own family [00:03:45] and the man was so angry he left the church so I evidently missed it somehow but I don't know what the minister claimed where he went but the boy had to take either insulin or a substitute Anyhow, am I coming through? That is to say, I think it's rather cruel to make promises that can't be carried out. And so, I was probably too blunt. I should have found a gentler way to try to help the brother than what I did. [00:04:22] Then there are the endocrine, that's number five. Five, the endocrine system gets out of whack in one way or another, such as the people that don't get enough iodine develop huge goiters. I saw these back in the mountains of West Virginia when I was a student at EMC. Six, we have diseases of the eye or the ear. These two unusually complicated organs of seeing and hearing. The surprise is not that occasionally there's difficulty. [00:04:57] The surprise is that most of us are so near normal. This is true of a thousand areas. I gave an illustration the last time of glaucoma in the human eye where the canal of Schleim gets plugged up or something goes wrong and the intraocular pressure gets high So that if you go to a good eye specialist like Dr. Dana Troyer, and you're past 40, the likelihood is he will not let you get out without measuring your eyeball pressure. [00:05:28] And if you have glaucoma, he will immediately begin treating you with a drug which will lower the pressure in the eye. And if that isn't enough, he'll do surgery and create some kind of a drain for the eye to prevent your losing your sight. and so also with the ear you can the worst the obvious thing of course is deafness people have many other problems with their ears a continual ringing or buzzing sound that they have to put up with or dizziness and so on seven is are the gastrointestinal illnesses anything from botulism [00:06:06] I was reading the Gospel Herald one time. I was searching for something and I came across an incident that happened somewhere out in the far west. I forget whether it was Oregon or Montana or something. There was a fairly good sized number of people together for a Sunday dinner and somebody had not properly canned some beans. and there was botulism in the in the pot and it's amazing how fast they began to die [00:06:40] after this meal. I mean within 12 hours I think a good many that that died that had eaten were already dead. That's botulism. Appendicitis would come in this category because the appendix is 8. In the whole area of the genitourinary aspect of the human body, here we have common things like kidney stones, older men frequently have difficulty with their prostate, and so on. [00:07:21] Nine is the liver. Ten, musculoskeletal problems, things like arthritis or disc trouble in the back. Eleven, diseases associated with the nervous system, anything as insignificant as headaches or as severe as migraines or epilepsy, meningitis, sleeping sickness. Twelve, I'm not sure I'm giving these in the same order, we have poisons that can affect the human body [00:07:55] so that many manufactured articles will have the antidote published on the label. Have you noticed that? That if somebody accidentally drinks this like a child who doesn't know any better then the first thing to do is so-and-so and second thing is get medical help as soon as possible. But not only do poisons include things like that, we have also the whole area now of drug addiction, which is again repeating history. [00:08:26] Prior to 1900, there was a good bit of drug addiction in the United States because there were no laws on it, and people could just go to the drugstore and buy laudanum. This was a very common thing that was kept around the house when there was a mother bearing children. and I know my grandparents kept laudanum on hand and one day their youngest son drank half of the bottle or whatever and they called the doctor and it was too late there was no way to get it out of [00:08:57] him and the doctor said if this boy falls asleep he'll never waken up you've got to keep him awake and the older children then hauled him around an express wagon for so many hours and saved his life Now that was a form of drugs, a poison. You understand in what sense. Then there are the germ diseases. There's a large number of these. A good example would be what's called Cux Bacillus, tuberculosis. [00:09:30] There are the virus diseases. That should be 15, is that right? If we're counting straight. Common cold is a virus disease. 17 or 16 whatever it is we have the tumors that develop in the human body anywhere from the brain to well there's no limit to where they can occur and they can be benign in which case they're not so dangerous or they can be malignant then we call that cancer actually we ought to use the word [00:10:00] in the plural I suppose I understand there are many cancers not just one cancer and it's likely that the medical breakthroughs will come in a series I understand that the hope is that they're very close to a crack through in things like leukemia and so on at the present time some other cancers are still very stubborn but as I said the last time God has given us, in his goodness, bodies with remarkable powers to ward off and to overcome the various things that attack us in this life. [00:10:42] And there have been prisoners who volunteered for experiments like this, and they made a little slit in their skin and implanted cancer cells, and the body promptly rejected those cells. So there's something about a normal body, and that's the doctors would give their right arms to know what it is, which can reject this type of thing, and something breaks down, you see, so that the body loses that power to reject cancer and various other things. Somewhere along the line, I mentioned the matter of emotional illness, which is, I think we could describe it something like this, that it's an abnormal in degree reaction to stress or difficulty or whatever it is, shock. [00:11:39] You can mention. Pick the matter of height. Normal height ranges in a rather large range, from the pygmies of Africa to the tall Scandinavians. But they're no less or more human because of the height which they have. And you could take anything at all. How many times a person's heart beats, how many times he breathes a minute, what his IQ is. There's a whole category always called within normal limits. You see what I mean? [00:12:11] And so the person who finds that he has a slightly slower heart than somebody else should not go around and ask the next thousand people what rate they have. That's none of his business. His heart is slow. That's all there is to it. And we had a man at North Goshen like that years ago. And he went to a certain physician whom I will try not to name. He's a very good physician and a good friend of mine. and he kept pressing the doctor the doctor told him well you have a slow pulse and he kept pressing the doctor to know what could happen and finally the doctor got disgusted and said well it could stop so we might as well face up to that that that's true of all of us then there's a whole category I started to say about that within normal limits and that's true of what we're talking about here of [00:13:06] emotional illness. If a person has a series of traumas for the mind, like your house burns down one day and your child gets killed in an accident the next day and your wife drops dead the third day, that's the way trouble often comes, then that puts a person into a very severe trauma and we should react then within normal limits. That is to say, if we go hang ourselves, that's not within normal limits that's that's that's radical and the person who is emotional ill [00:13:42] loses the capacity to stay within normal limits i don't know whether i'm communicating very well or not but the the things that that are difficult to face become impossible to face and then the mind contrives ways not to face up to it and so the person withdraws to some extent from reality etc. etc. This should not make us critical of the person who has a problem we don't have. It should make us most sympathetic because we're all human, completely human. [00:14:18] It does mean that as much as possible we should try to practice emotional health just like we try to follow the rules of physical health with proper food, proper exercise, proper everything. So, we should do with the matter of emotional health, we should learn to turn to God in prayer when we're facing something which is too heavy for us, we should learn to let go of what we can't control, even if it troubles us, etc., etc. Then, there's another category which I don't think I mentioned specifically the last time, and that is aging. [00:14:55] A person who is well-informed in this area could almost trace out what's going to happen in each decade of a person's life because God has made us that way. And so the person who maybe is in the 40s discovers he doesn't quite have the reserves which he had when he was in the 20s. Now, it may be so slight that, say, a farmer or a man working in a factory or what will hardly notice it. [00:15:26] But I'll tell you where it is noticed, on the athletic field. And so a man will be the world champion tennis player or boxer or what have you for a time, and you come around ten years later and he can't do it anymore. He's lost just enough of that extreme speed and power and so on that he had physically © BF-WATCH TV 2021 [00:16:17] I had trouble the other day thinking of my phone number. That is impossible to believe. But I couldn't remember whether the last part was 4-4-9-7 or 4-9-9-7. [00:16:48] That's a confession. The 19th and last thing is the whole area of accidents and injuries. These are beyond human control in some cases. You may be driving ever so carefully and somebody smashes into your car with dire consequences and there was nothing that you could have done to have avoided that and all kinds of accidents occur on the farm, in the factory, on the highways, in airplanes and so on. [00:17:19] It's just a part of living in this life. I should not ask if an accident occurs, now what did I do to deserve this? That's making a moral problem out of an aspect of human living. Are you understanding me? It's a normal thing in this life for accidents and so on to take place. And when Paul was on the shipwreck journey, he blamed the captain for not using good judgment in setting out when he told him he shouldn't. [00:17:54] And Paul was right. Nevertheless, all the troubles that came then, Paul didn't wring his hands over it. He simply adjusted to it. It was only things that were being lost. God intends people to be [00:18:33] The person who starts out as an unbeliever, say at 20 years of age, may not seem much different in his physical and emotional health from the Christian of that age, but you look at the two of them when they're 80. My word, there's a gulf between them. The two paths run very far apart. I guess what I'm trying to hint at is this health is generally a total thing that is to say you're just one person and the more you're a happy Christian and following the rules of health and doing whatever you can for whatever weaknesses occur in your body the better your total physical spiritual mental health will be we're just one person do you all see this you can't cut sharp between [00:19:23] physical health emotional health and spiritual health the ideal is when you have all three combined in one happy person and it's a tremendous asset it's a tremendous asset and many Christian physicians are very much aware of this so that some people instead of taking so many tranquilizers I'm not saying there's no there is a place for tranquilizers I'll say that positively but it might be I think a diabetic, unless he's healed, ought to take whatever the doctor prescribes. [00:20:19] scribes, and the same way all down the line. Now, are there any questions? This is a matter of review, and I did it by request. Any questions so far? Then let me enlarge on the conclusions which I gave at the end of the last hour, and then move into the new topic for today. The first thing I tried to say in our conclusions were, a summary, We are creatures. That means we're not God. God sits enthroned in his universe, absolutely dependent on nothing or nobody. [00:20:59] And we are absolutely dependent on such elementary things as air and water and sleep and food and so on. Secondly, it's a remarkable thing the way God has created us with a self-correcting mechanism. In body and mind, a self-healing mechanism so that you can smash a finger or whatever it might be and you see the person three months later or whatever, it's all healed up, he's largely regained the full use of whatever his trouble was. [00:21:37] Thirdly, I tried to point out that we should not just put everything in one basket and call it sick or whatever. We ought to distinguish between the more trivial things and the more awful or more serious things. I used a crude illustration. To cut off the tip of a finger is a trifling affair. to have a shark bite off your whole leg will likely result in bleeding to death in a hurry unless you can get help very fast. [00:22:11] And this is just a parable of how we ought to take the various things that come. We ought to take action in proportion to the seriousness of the thing that we are facing. even a natural process such as childbirth is normally nothing for an amateur to monkey around with because what does the average husband know about procedures to take if some unusual tragedy occurs [00:22:41] such as the mother begins to hemorrhage now I'm not taking a sly crack here at all these courses in trying to get the husband to participate In the birth of the child, to be present, and to do the exercises with the wife and all that kind of thing, I think that's all beautiful and fine. But I would consider it criminally neglectful not to call a physician at the time of the birth of a child. Because what if the mother hemorrhages to death, as I understand three women in this community have now done, [00:23:16] because husband and wife agreed they're just going to trust God and not get a physician. Now, I can't go along with that at all. And I think I have a dynamic faith in God. I have seen God act in marvelous ways, not only in our family, but many other cases. And I run into remarkable things which come pretty close to miracles, if not full miracles. And I want to give you some of them today. But I would stand on this principle. [00:23:48] Normally, God does not do for us what we could do ourselves. That's just a general rule. And so, A.B. Simpson, who was a fine man of God, and a good theologian, the founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. I am not worthy to criticize that man. He was such a fine Christian man. But on this point, he was wrong. Absolutely wrong. He said, it's God's second best to use means. [00:24:22] So he, instead of taking an aspirin for a headache, he prayed. That's all right. He isn't going to die of a headache. But when he got to middle life, and he began to have to have his hand farther and farther away in order to read, he was having the normal aging process. That's when people have to get bifocals. I think I was in the early 50s when I got them and I thought that was doing fairly well to reach that age without bifocals and some older people incidentally then the aging process corrects that [00:24:57] and they can get along without glasses and people call that second eyesight it isn't second eyesight it's one aging process correcting another one well A.B. Simpson prayed fervently and I'm not I'm not making fun. I'm just trying to say how real this is. He prayed fervently that God would take care of this presbyopia in his eyes, and God didn't do anything about it. So he called on his friends to pray, and still God did nothing about it. So he finally got himself a reading glass. Well, the only thing about that dumb arrangement is you have one hand then tied up holding the reading glass, [00:25:31] whereas if you hook it on your ears, you have two hands left. And so he finally, in desperation, got glasses and did away with his reading glass, and it was a defeat for him in his theology, but not as bad as the next one. He felt that a Christian should be delivered from illness. He should just die like a ripe apple dropping off a tree. Now that's a beautiful thought. [00:26:02] And some people die like that, including unbelievers. Don't they? Sure they do. Some people die like that. My friend Harold Myers, the bishop of the Salem congregation, not long before he died at 60, said to the congregation I can't sympathize with the sick I have never even had a headache he was just a bear of a man and then at 60 years age of age without being sick at all he was riding [00:26:32] his tractor and the tractor just gradually went over to the side of the road and the man was dead his heart stopped that's all now as far as I know he did not bring that on as far as I know He had a weakness that he didn't know about, namely his heart, you see, and I don't know what it was that actually took him in the end. Well, coming back to my friend, to this man Simpson, this great man of God, he wrote wonderful books on the Holy Spirit, for example. He was a good man, but he was wrong on this little point. [00:27:04] He felt that we did not have to do what we can do, and he thought that he should not get sick. Well, it so happened he had a long, painful illness before he died. Does that prove he wasn't saved? No. Does it prove he wasn't sanctified? No. He was a spirit-filled, beautiful child of God who had sort of gone off the deep end on this particular item. Any questions? Speak up a little bit so they can hear you. I'm just asking a question on this man's sense of you as a lady. [00:27:37] What prompted him to be so strong? Well, the question is, what made Brother Simpson feel like he did? All of us come under the influence of books or persons, you see, and there always have been people who were inclined a little bit that way, that faith makes means unnecessary. and the only reason I give illustrations is to try to make the point live that I'm talking about. [00:28:13] Daniel Kaufman was one of the finest Christian men I ever knew. He was really a spirit-filled person and he got appendicitis and he refused to be operated on and he lost over 100 pounds he dropped from around 260 to to 140 or 130 something like that he was almost a skeleton he was a big man and he did recover now I do not hold that against Daniel Kaufman that's his business if he wants to take such a chance but I really think he took a foolish chance now he did come through but he could just as well have died now I don't know whether this is [00:28:55] I'm not offending any of you or not. I'm just trying to think with you. And I'm trying to make this point that ordinarily God does not do for us what we can do. This leaves an enormous area that we can't do. But what we can do, we normally should do. And that means get your teeth filled, get your teeth straightened, get your appendix taken out if it's infected, and so on. The fourth thing I tried to say was that most healings take time. [00:29:30] I think that doesn't require any discussion. And fifth, I tried to say with all the vigor I have, don't accuse a sick person of lack of faith. I can't think of anything worse than that. It's so cruel. And if you ever get sick yourself, you'll remember this, what you said about somebody else. So don't accuse a sick person of not having faith. He might have a better faith than you do, but because we're in the flesh, we are subject to these at least 19 kinds of illnesses, and I think the 20th one is real too, that a person by his sinful rejection of God and sinful living in sin deliberately ruins his whole life so that he becomes an old sourpuss before he dies, and that isn't good health. [00:30:20] And the sixth thing is, don't limit God. That's right where we were at the end of the hour. In other words, having said all that I did, I still want to leave an open area where God may act in ways beyond his usual ways of acting. Now I'd like to add two more points before we go on, and that is, no, just one more point. and that is that we can neglect health measures and perish we can neglect our health and perish [00:31:00] that is to say God has not only given us bodies with remarkable and minds with remarkable capacities to recover from whatever traumas or invasions of of germs or whatever we have to put up with. But listen, he has also given us minds to try to discover specific remedies for specific illnesses. And that's the whole field of medicine. In colonial America, for example, [00:31:36] there was only one doctor, I believe, who was able to cure, what do you call, Schittlefieber in English. This disease, no, no, it's an intermittent fever that they now give quinine for. Malaria. But people didn't know what it was in those days. They didn't have the word even. And in German, they call it Schittlefieber. That means you shake when you're in the one aspect of it. You'd have the fever for a bit and then you'd shiver. [00:32:09] and D.A. Yoder told me how they used to get it down in southern Indiana, the Bower Congregation, that the bed would shake and nobody knew what caused this illness. But the American Indians treated the illness with bark, the bark of a tree. And Dr. Benjamin Rush ground up this bark and gave it to people and they got better like mad. And he didn't know why, he just knew it worked. Now, my hat's off to him because he had made a discovery. [00:32:41] And most of the things that we take for specific problems of health are to some extent known by common people. For example, my wife's grandmother, who thought she could avert some heart trouble by eating peach seed stone, the heart, whatever you call that, the little thing inside the peach seed. Now, I think that contains digitalis. I'm not sure about that, but I'm just giving you an illustration. [00:33:14] People in the long run learn that certain things have value, and then scientists come along, and they discover what makes it work. They discover what it is that makes it work. Then they can produce artificially either that drug or something still better, and so on. And that's the whole tremendous field of medicine. and up until I don't know when they started doing appendicitis operations until that time if you read the obituaries in the Herald of Truth why people were dying of inflammation of the bowels [00:33:46] that was appendicitis and they didn't know what it was and they didn't know anything to do for it. So my hat is off to modern science. It is not, this has nothing to do with rejecting faith. Is this clear to everybody? This has nothing to do with rejecting faith. It has nothing to do with rejecting prayer. It is simply this observation of common sense that God has commanded us to subdue and rule over the creation [00:34:18] and that he has put things in this world which will be helpful to us in life in this world. And our hats are off to Dr. Luke, the physician, and to the testimony of Jesus The question that I want to raise at the beginning of this period and then go on to discuss it the rest of the period, or discuss an aspect of it, is there was obviously a gift of healing on the part of the Lord Jesus. [00:35:02] May it by faith be a trap for you to come to the end of it. The current age is the church of the living. No, I thought I had said that the last period. Yeah, I see. Well, let me just say it again. The very things that we're commanded to do in terms of forgiving and loving and being joyous in the Holy Ghost, those things enhance health. and the opposite of holding grudges and and being sour and critical and so on that those people [00:35:39] paying off a price in health they pay a price you can literally worry yourself into ulcers and not just ulcers the whole the whole body suffers a little louder And Menninger is no name to be sniffed at. [00:36:10] I'm always a little amused at the U.S. Department of Health, which gave a big grant, I forget, $40,000 or something, to find out why the Hutterites are so well emotionally. and he concluded it was because they believed in the forgiveness of sins. Yes, that's right. [00:36:50] You couldn't have said it better. Amen. Amen. I want to come to that. Now, I started to say it's obvious that Jesus had a limitless ability to perform cure. He was the divine son of God, and he demonstrated the nature of God and his power as the son of God by healing all kinds of things, curing people of everything that there was to be cured of. [00:37:37] Secondly, the apostles had those same gifts, and I would like to propose for your consideration that you consider 2 Corinthians 12.12, which gives the marks of an apostle. The marks of an apostle were that he could do, and the Greek says, signs and wonders and powers. Signs means the miracles performed by the apostles were pointers to God and that they were God's servants. [00:38:16] They were attestations by God to the claims of these men to be the legitimate heads of the church established by Jesus Christ. And so you find the same miracles that Christ performed were performed also by the apostles as the marks of an apostle. Now, that still doesn't say whether or not God in his sovereignty could or does give miracle working power to specific individuals more than the general run of Christians. [00:38:57] I would like to mention two persons that have caused me to believe that even today God may endow certain persons with exceptional, shall I say, faith-working powers in connection with illness. The one was brother J.B. Smith. His name was J.B. Schmidt, originally, in Canada, and he grew up as a wild, swearing, non-Christian. [00:39:29] He told me this himself as an old man, and he was German-speaking, so that some man said to him one time, he said, Schmidt, I've heard a lot of people swear, but I never heard a man who could swear as eloquently in German as you can. And then John S. Kaufman from Elkhart, the pastor from Elkhart, came into the community holding meetings And Schmidt and another young man made fun of the meetings And each one teased the other whether he was planning to go forward And they both had made up their minds they wouldn't [00:40:02] And this is what Schmidt told me as an old man He changed his name later to Smith He taught Bible at Heston and he was the first principal at VMC and then in his old days was a minister at Elido, Ohio and there I happened to take a meal with him I had many other contacts too but I mean this is where he told us this at the table he said between the time that he made fun of John S. Kaufman's meetings and the night of his conversion he was out in the woods in wintertime cutting wood [00:40:43] When the Lord Jesus called Paul by his Hebrew name, he didn't say, Paul, Paul. He said, Saul, Saul, which is not Greek. The Greek word would be saule, but he called him in his mother tongue. And J.B. Smith was cutting wood, and clear as day, he heard somebody say, Jakob. And he looked all around, and there wasn't anybody in the woods. and he tried to forget it and went back to cutting and again Yakup and I think it happened three times [00:41:17] and he told me he said I got down on my knees in the snow and he said I'll accept Jesus Christ at my first opportunity and he went to John S. Kaufman's meetings and just to show how human we are there were a bunch of young people went together in a sleigh and the sleigh upset and they had a lot of fun and he said by the time I got to church I had no more conviction but God had not forgotten his love for J.B. nor had he forgotten J.B.'s promise and J.B. would the the thing was packed the house so he couldn't get into a seat so he went in the [00:41:53] anteroom and caught up with the girls that's what he said but he said from time to time I'd leave the anteroom and come and stand at the center aisle at the back and listen to J.S. Kaufman That's all it took And the Lord smote him with such conviction He couldn't have stayed back there if he'd have wanted to And when Kaufman used to give the invitation To come down and kneel at the front And he gave the invitation And when J.B. got down there He looked who was kneeling beside him It was that guy that had made fun Sovereign grace of our Lord [00:42:29] Okay He told me that, I just want to give you three illustrations from his life to make me think that God may have given him an unusual gift in this particular area. He said, now you see, this is in contrast with the idea that miracles as such ceased with the apostles. That's an old standard Christian theological interpretation. And I'm trying to bore a hole here big enough to crawl through [00:43:00] That there are some individuals, apparently, that God still may gift in this way. One time he had toothaches of bad. And I don't know where he was or what time of the day or night it was. But he said it just came to him that if he would do like Naaman did, just put a hot cloth on his cheek seven times and pray that the toothache would go away. And he did, and it left. Now you can laugh if you want to, but it wasn't funny to him. It was very significant. [00:43:38] A little louder so they can hear you. We didn't vote for any cause. He's a peer. He's a lecturer. I was in the sect of Danny. I hope this works. [00:44:11] Okay. Could you all hear what he said? I don't know. I don't know anything about that. He didn't say anything like that at that time. but then also he told me this he said that the testimony here was about an Amish brother you said from Topeka that years ago that seemed to have a gift of healing it was not a matter of powwowing nothing no monkey business like that no no no no hocus pocus of words or anything [00:44:48] anyhow he felt that this brother had a healing gift and he helped their family JB told me that His wife one time had delivered a baby, and in those days people didn't know as much about being absolutely antiseptic where possible. And she developed childbed fever. I can hardly pronounce that thing medically. Puerperal or something like that. Is that right? And he said she was terribly sick, and he said he knelt on one side of the bed, and the Christian hired girl knelt on the other side of the bed and prayed. [00:45:24] and at the end of the prayer he said his wife's eyes were at an angle like that looking upward and he said her face took on a glory and he didn't think uh-oh she's being healed he thought she's dying and she said I see Jesus and then after a little while all the glow left her face and she came back to normal and she said I'm hungry and she proceeded to get well now I'd be the last The greatest person in the world to say, no, that had nothing to do with prayer. It was just one of those remarkable healings, I mean, remarkable recoveries. I think it did have something to do with prayer. I think that God did, on this particular occasion, do a remarkable healing, and all you can do is praise his name. [00:46:10] But this does not mean then that the rest of his life J.B. could ignore doctors and say there's no place for doctors. Of course there's a place for doctors. There's a big place. He also told me this incident. He said his sister and I knew the woman. She was the grandmother of Howard Good of Ontario, Mennonite minister. And I met the old lady later. She was in a mental hospital in Canada and J.B. went to see her. and before they left he and his son prayed [00:46:41] and at the end of the prayer much to his surprise I don't think he prayed for a miracle and didn't expect one but much to his surprise his sister said I believe I'm well and the hospital authorities agreed she was well and they released her I don't know how many days that took but very shortly so that was one case the other thing is going on on the other side of the world all the time right now in Indonesia and I served on the presidium of the world council I'm also with Brother Joe Yodaharjo, who is a leader in the Indonesian Mennonite Church. He's their moderator. He's not an uneducated ignoramus. He speaks at least seven languages. He's theologically trained. He's anything but a crank. He's a humble, quiet, effective man of God. [00:47:33] and people run to him from everywhere in Indonesia and he prays with them and they feel that they are remarkably helped and I witnessed only one little case along this line we were having a committee meeting in India we were sitting on the porch of a bungalow in very hot weather and a man came there and Joe Yeo said to the chairman of the Presidium of the World Conference he said, excuse me a few minutes and he went with that man alone and prayed [00:48:03] and it turned out the man was, I forget which way it was, he was a diabetic and he was either, I think he hadn't taken enough insulin, I think that's the way it was and he was either with awful high sugar or in insulin shock, one extreme or the other. I think it was that he hadn't taken enough insulin or taken too much sugar for what he'd taken and anyhow he prayed with him and then he said to him, Now, I'm tempted to say this a little bit humorously. [00:48:37] It looked as though he prayed a little too long because his blood sugar level was a little too low after the prayer. He thought it was dangerously high when he came to Jouyou for prayer. Now, I'm not trying to be funny. I'm not trying to be a fanatic. I still believe everything I said in the first part of this lecture. I just want to leave room in times of special crisis when we have done everything we know medically and surgically, then I would like to leave an area yet where God can reach in with his hand in cases should it be his will. [00:49:15] And I think we've all seen cases like this, haven't we? We've all seen cases where it looked as though things were absolutely hopeless and then God seemed to do a remarkable thing. Merle, speak up. I would have nothing whatsoever to do with that whole stinking department of powwowing. Pow-wowing is the use of secret incantations, supposedly effective because of the formula that you use is correct, and so on. [00:49:55] I think it is absolutely contrary to scripture. I'd bleed to death before I'd call for a pow-wower. No, I'd call for a tourniquet. Verne? That's what I was coming to. Okay. [00:50:27] Anything else before we look at it? Oh, of course. I think we ought to pray about everything we do. All our natural work, all our spiritual work, Our health, our welfare, the program of God's kingdom. If I have diminished conviction for prayer, then I've been totally misunderstood. Remember, if you're outside, be dead to your condition. [00:50:59] Third, you did already operate. Eighth, that you read or prayed before you operate. You said, I have already prayed. And there are, I mean, that's, that's, I won't add it to it. That's enough. Some lady told a surgeon to pray before operating. He said, I've prayed already. A little louder. What? All about her. Yeah. [00:51:34] I say it. It is a full night. Not fun. He didn't seek contact with the payee, but asked if he worked there. [00:52:09] Okay, it's time to look at this. What I'm trying to say to you at this point is this. In place of an individual venturing to function as an agent of God in healing and having healing lines and healing campaigns and that kind of thing, take Jojo. I don't think you could induce him to do that at all. You know what I mean? This man in Indonesia. I think the last thing you could get him to do was set up a tent and invite all the sick in the area to come and he'll heal them all. [00:52:46] No, sir. It's not that at all. It's a matter of a man of God praying in a particular case with people. Now, I'm suggesting in place of commercializing whatever gift a man might have, I think it would be more in line with the New Testament for healing to take place in answer to prayer in the life of the local congregation. Now we come to James 5 13 to 16. If you want to open it let me comment on what I think it says and then I want to read a couple [00:53:21] testimonies from Christian leaders in this area 513 to 16 of James the first thing he says is that the sick person is to send for the elders of the congregation we would say today the pastors secondly these elders shall anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord and pray over him it's said in opposite order there but the pray is in the air is an aorist participle which throws it The Assurance is given that the prayer of faith will heal the sick man and Christ will raise him up. [00:54:02] It just says the Lord, but that means the Lord Jesus. And there's a special promise of forgiveness. You notice the whole thing is Christian here. The whole thing is religious. This is not ruling out the physician. It's assuming that you would, the physician would do everything he could do. And if he's a Christian, he might even stand in and observe the anointing service. This is no insult to him. But why the special promise of forgiveness? For this reason, dearly beloved, 999 out of 1,000 sick people worry about their sins. [00:54:40] Because we're human. This is universal. You may not believe that. You get sick and see. I mean really sick. Then you'll think about your sins. People confess things on their deathbed that were not confessed for 50 years. We're just made that way. And so here you have this blessed promise that when the elders, the person in faith sends for the elders, the elders anoint with oil, and they pray over him in the name of the Lord, and he's assured also by the word of God [00:55:13] that his sins are forgiven, not because of oil, because of Jesus, because of his relation to Jesus. And you notice it doesn't say healing by God is confined to anointing with oil. Some of you knew Sam Weaver, the track man of the Indiana-Michigan Conference. I knew him very well. His son's here in the audience. And after his one son was killed, it left a widow and two children. and this was a real burden to Brother Weaver [00:55:46] and he prayed about the thing a great deal and prior to that incident he was so weak that he could not carry a bucket of lemonade to the people in the harvest field much less work there he'd carry it part way and sit down and rest a while and then he'd carry the lemonade the rest of the way is that right Merle? and he was praying one night about this daughter-in-law and grandchildren that he was so concerned about and suddenly he said he felt the power of God surge through his body [00:56:16] and after that he worked like a normal man. Hmm? Six years. Now you can't tell me that's imagination. Neither is it any argument at all against taking digitalis or any other drug that a doctor would prescribe. It is simply saying we do what we can and then we have the blessed privilege in prayer, not only in healing and everything else. In everything we do, we commit it to the Lord And so the physician prays at the beginning of the day [00:56:47] That the Lord will give him insight and helpfulness to the people that he ministers to And many medical solutions come to a doctor by way of insight I sat in a medical amphitheater one time at a medical college with a friend And they wheeled in a boy who had been very sick and the surgeon, first he called down some seniors and asked them to look at some x-rays which he had taken and they couldn't see anything and then he told how buffaloed he was [00:57:19] and one night I believe, he got awake at night and it dawned on him what was wrong with that boy and I'm not sure I have the word right anymore this was about 40 years ago, M. Paima there was a puss pocket in his lung and he said I bisected that fellow, spread his ribs apart, and went in there and took out that puss pocket and the boy got better. Then he gave a whole lecture on Empyema. It was a wonderful demonstration and lecture. But you notice it came to him as a sudden insight, in the night. [00:57:50] He didn't learn something, but he applied something. So the physician, at the beginning of the day, if he's a Christian, will be praying that God will bless him that day. The farmer will pray that God will bless him. and every other person in this audience should be praying each day that God might give us the wisdom and the grace and so on that we need and that includes healing. And then it says that we're encouraged to confess our sins one to another. In other words, don't go around wearing a mask. [00:58:23] Admit that you are human. Admit that you're tempted to discouragement or tempted to whatever it may be and solicit the support of your brothers and sisters in the faith. This is wholesome. Dare I say this is good psychology. This is good mental health. Not to wear a mask, but to be human and to acknowledge to your companion, to the church, to your loved ones that you have limitations. My wife lost a niece a few weeks ago with cancer. [00:58:56] She was 30, what was her age? 39? 39 years old and I happened to visit her about a week or two before she died and I admired that girl's spunk so much she looked at me and she said I'm gonna fight this thing and she also told me she hadn't lost a pound of weight yet which surprised me no end nevertheless she was a week or two from her death and I said listen Lois I hope you and your husband are not playing games each one pretending that this isn't anything I said if [00:59:29] I hope you feel particularly down some morning. You just tell him, Walter, I'm so discouraged this morning. I need your prayers. And Walter ought to have the same privilege. He ought to be able to say, Lois, this is getting me down. Will you pray for me today? And what does this do to us? It draws us together. It strengthens us in Christ. I hope the Lord is giving me the right word so it comes through clear. I am not one-sixteenth of an inch against science or medicine or education or anything else. [01:00:02] I'm moving on to the area when we have done everything we can. We still have the privilege of bringing it to our kind Heavenly Father. And I'm not quite finished yet with this point. I take this total healing here to be not only healing of disease, but the burden of guilt, or anxiety, or hurts from our past, or temptations to grudges. I would say it's a dangerous thing to set yourself up as a divine healer. [01:00:35] It's a dangerous thing. You're liable to croak yourself. It happens all the time. But it's a glorious privilege for the people of God to unitedly intercede for the conversion of sinners, for spiritual victory, for wavering Christians, for physical deliverance of a sick person or an injured person. If you were in an airplane, I would say fasten your seatbelts, [01:01:06] Because this is going to be hard for us in our human nature to take. And the only reason I say it is I am convinced to the bottom of my soul that this is true. And if I'm wrong, reject it. The spirit-filled Christian remains a fallible creature, limited in wisdom and judgment. Do you believe that? The spirit-filled Christian remains a fallible creature, limited in wisdom and judgment. [01:01:41] Therefore, all petitions and intercessions are undergirded by trust in God's infinite love and goodness and joyful submission. Did you hear that? And joyful submission to his all-wise providence. Now, I think this takes enormous more faith [01:02:16] than demanding that your will be done. And the other doesn't work anyhow. It just doesn't work. And this does. This does. Will you forgive a personal illustration? I try not to do too much of this. But we were back in eastern Pennsylvania about 1947, 46 maybe. And we had four little children at that time. [01:02:48] And one of the boys was perfectly well one day, and the next day he was at the age of death. and we sent for Dr. Nace, Mennonite doctor that we knew very well and he came out and gave him medicine but he was enough alarmed to come back in a few hours and bring a second doctor along and the two doctors went over this little boy he was about six years old and they gave him more medicine and the body just acted as though that medicine had no power at all [01:03:18] His fever went up to 105 and three-fifths, and my wife got quite alarmed, my wife's a nurse, at the danger of brain damage, and she took cold water and cloths and mechanically lowered that fever, but that didn't cure the problem at all. Well, bedtime came and I volunteered to be his nurse for the night and they made a little cot for me beside the boy's bed and I lay there without sleep and I talked to the Lord and I did not say, and God is my witness, I did not say, God you've got to heal our boy, you can't let our boy die. [01:04:00] I would like to ask, what would give me authority to talk like that to God? Who am I to tell God what to do? And so this is how I prayed. And I'm sure that the Lord led me to this because I'm as weak as any of you are. I said, Lord, if this boy is going to grow up to be corrupted by the world, take him now. And I meant it. And if he would have died, I could have accepted that. So could my wife. But I said, if you can use him for your glory, he'll eat [01:04:32] And in just a few hours the fever broke and he began to sweat And the next morning the doctor said, the boy is well You can go to Indiana anytime you want to Well, I felt like Abraham coming down the mountain And believe me, I thought of this 20 years later when we were driving to Kansas for his ordination I remembered that precious night So you see, prayer involves, at its very heart, not at the edge, prayer involves always the spoken or the assumed attitude. [01:05:10] Lord, you are all wise, you are all loving, you know the future, and I'm giving this matter over to you. Then he can act. Then he can act. And if the person dies, we know if they're in Christ, where they go. If the person lives, we rejoice that they're spared to serve with us for a little longer time. Now that's the main thing I wanted to try to get across today. Vernon first. Now, that's a good question. [01:06:21] And I think this is nothing unusual what you're saying. I thought I had a note here I wanted to call attention to. I wanted to read two testimonies. Our time is going so fast. The first is from a great Lutheran scholar, Johann Albrecht Bengel, who died in 1752. He was a tremendous man of God. And this is what he wrote on this passage. What Christ had committed to the apostles, Mark 6.13, was afterwards continued in the church, even after the apostles' time. [01:06:56] And this very gift, remarkably simple, conspicuous, and salutary, that means wholesome, continued longer than any other. Then he quotes from early church fathers. Ephraim Syrus, who died 379, has a remarkable testimony. If, in discharging thy office, thou anointest the sick with oil, it even seems to have been given by God that it might remain in the church always, as a specimen of the other gifts, just as a portion of the manna betokened the ancient miracle. [01:07:29] James clearly assigns the application of this oil to the presbyters, who were the ordinary ministers. Oh, happy simplicity, interrupted or lost through unbelief. And let me tell you, the new Roman Catholic Encyclopedia has no article on extreme unction. It has no article on last rites. The article is entitled, Anointing the Sick with Oil. Praise the Lord. This is not a preparation for death. [01:08:00] It is a preparation for healing. I'm still coming to your question. The other testimony is by Henry Alford, the great commentator, A-L-F-O-R-D. He died in 1871. He was a member of the Church of England. In sickness, let the sick man inform the elders of the church. Let them, representing the congregation of the faithful, pray over the sick man, accompanying that prayer with a symbolical and sacramental act of anointing with oil in the name of the Lord. Then the prayer of faith shall save, in parentheses, heal, the sick man, [01:08:34] and the Lord shall bring him up out of his sickness. and even if it were occasioned by some sin that sin shall be forgiven him such as the simple and undeniable sense of the apostle arguing for the efficacy of prayer and such as above seen he takes a crack at Rome the perversion of that sense by the church of Rome now in answer to Vernon's question any promise that you can quote from the Bible [01:09:04] Like he healeth all our diseases That's the same kind of thing you see Forgives our sins and he heals our diseases Those promises can have exceptions Due to our ignorance or our limitations In all good faith A given Christian, John Brown, and that could be each one of us could be absolutely convinced in our hearts that it's God's will for us to be healed. [01:09:38] We call for the elders of the church. And it was not actually the will of God. It was our strong desire to live. This is not a lack of faith. It's simply acknowledging that we are creatures. Even our prayers are not infallible. Our prayers are offered by fallible people. Now, our time is about up. Would anyone like to add anything to what Vernon has raised here? Why is it that if we do anoint with oil, that we can't have 100% healing? [01:10:15] Brother Hostetler first. Oh, that's a good question. What do we do in the case of sick children? We had a child born one time at North Goshen with a disease, I don't know the name of it, where the bones just break on the slightest occasion. I think the child was born with four or five broken bones and kept breaking bones like mad. And the odd thing was, I was traveling on a train and I ran into Aaron Mast, a much older man than I and a wonderful man of God. [01:10:53] and Brother Mass said to me, have you noticed the difference between anointing believers with oil and laying hands on sick children for healing? I said, no, I'd never thought of that. Very soon after this, the family of this, that had this child came and wanted the ministers at North Goshen to arrange a service for that child. And so it was a beautiful service. The parents on both sides were there and all the brothers and sisters on both sides were there. It made a big We had a prayer service, and Brother Minninger, the pastor, and I laid hands on that child, and it did not break a bone for a year, which I thought was a rather remarkable thing. [01:11:34] Now somebody else had a point over here. We can't make a robot out of God. And also, the nicest thing I ever heard in relation to a sick person was said by the late S.C. Yoder. He was bishop of the college church. He and I went together to Elkhart Hospital one time to anoint a sick man. [01:12:04] And listen carefully. Brother Yoder said to the man, Do you believe that God can heal you if it's his will? And the brother said, Yes. And now I come to this beautiful question. Brother Yoder, with his fatherly way, some of you knew him, didn't you? Brother Yoder said, he looked on him with his beautiful brown eyes, and he said to the sick man, If God would have something better for you, would you accept that? And the man said yes, and that's what he had [01:12:36] We act sometimes as if the prolongation of life at any age is an indisputable good I hope that if the time ever comes when I can only be kept alive by most heroic measures And the Lord obviously wants to take me home And I've told our, my wife and I have told our children this And I guess we ought to give a written notice to the doctor do not prolong our distress if the Lord wants to take us home because think of the glory that awaits us on the other side [01:13:11] don't use a doctor yeah yeah yeah I forgive you, you were a former student that's right [01:13:42] that's right in other words this kind of an incident can have a very wholesome effect on the life of the church and for Vernon's sake I wanted to say one more thing some of you knew Harold S. Bender who was sort of a father in the Lord to many of us and I remember so well how shocked I was when I discovered he had cancer and he lived about three or four months after that and when he came back from surgery at St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago [01:14:15] the surgeon there, I'm sorry to tell you, had lied to him and told him that everything was now taken care of this operation was never a failure and it was all fine and that wasn't true at all He told the family he'd live three to six months. Well, Bender tried to believe him, but Bender deep down knew he was a sick man, and he called for an anointing service. And S.C. Yoder was there, and John Mosum was there, and I don't remember who all. And it was a beautiful service. [01:14:46] We sang together, and we prayed together, and I ran into a member of the family the next day, and I said, how did you appreciate the service yesterday? and this family member said I have never been in a service that meant as much to me and there's some sick people who say that even if they later pass on to glory they are immensely helped by this reassurance of the love and forgiveness of God and the caring concern of loved ones and that's the note I want to close on today you and I are crucially dependent on the [01:15:23] love of the brotherhood we are crucially dependent we need mutual support one from the other and just to have somebody clasp your hand with tears and say I'm praying for you can mean more than words can say and the danger is we all go our separate ways and we die one by one without anybody seeming to care or go out of their way to be kind now I thought I had another thought I've lost it does anyone else have anything to say before we close [01:15:59] absolutely absolutely obedience to the word of god that's tremendous absolutely yeah and he's so good he's so good he knows what he's doing he makes no mistakes he knows what he's doing My grandmother had cancer. She did that. But I never saw that. That doesn't help me at all. [01:16:31] It doesn't help you when you decide to do it. Yeah. Anyone else? Yes. Well, the context would lead us to believe that he's talking partly about physical healing and partly about total healing. but uh