If I coughed on you, there’s a pretty good chance you’re gonna get sick. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you all have been doing nothing but coughing and sneezing on each other. Everyone around here is sick! Whole families have been taken out! Flu, cold, stomach. It’s a disaster here. War torn battlefield.
But think about this: you can give someone your illness, but not your health. You can give someone your germs, virus, bacteria, but you can’t give them your health. You could give them things that might help with health, assuming the body responds. Medicine, diet, exercise. Those might help. For people with more serious diseases there is even surgery or transplants. But even those don’t make you healthy. You’re body still needs to respond and heal itself.
You can give illness to someone else, but you can’t give health. Only you can give yourself health. You stand alone here. Why is this?
A few weeks ago I preached that the Medieval World used to think that everything, somehow and someway, reflected the person of Jesus Christ. The life and death, the Cross and Resurrection, are sown into the fabric everything. I think that’s true.
So, what does it mean that only you can give yourself health? What did Christ says many times, “By your faith, you are healed.” (check out Matthew 15:28; Mark 5:34, 10:52; Luke 17:19) Does this mean that you have the power to make yourself better? That you have something in you that makes you well. No. Not at all.
If that were the case, you need never get sick or die. You could always use your powers to make yourself better. So, what does it mean, “By your faith you are healed?” You stand alone. You stand alone with God. By faith, you trust yourself to God, that he will heal you and if he doesn’t (and some day he won’t!), then you trust the craziest thing of all: he will raise you from the dead!
And no one can give this to you. Others can help you, encourage you. I can write emails like this, preach sermons. But you stand alone. By your own trust in God are you well. If you cannot be alone with God, no one else can heal you. Health comes not from someone else. It emerges from within you. This is true both physically and spiritually.
All things, in every way, shape, and form, are instructing you about the life of faith and the person of Jesus.
Tom+