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Understanding the power of the Kingdom right here and right now
One of the things I love about NT Wright’s writing is he uses phrases that scare the living daylights out of people like me who are used to the abuse of those words. When Wright dares to move into territory that sounds a lot like the old “Kingdom Now” theology I studied in college, I get nervous. Yet, he refuses to surrender…
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Does Jesus know you showed up?
Luke 8 has the story of the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years. It’s a great story of “pressing in” (literally) to Jesus. The question that comes to my heart today is this: “Are you so passionate about prayer that Jesus knows you just showed up?” All the people pressing in, Jesus knew something happened when the woman touched him.…
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Jesus and Healthcare
One common claim I hear from some liberal theologians, thinkers, and politicians is Jesus supported universal healthcare. Somehow, Jesus healing people gets equated with universal healthcare insurance. I’m never sure how that leap is made. If those liberals actually believed in Jesus’ healthcare methods and practiced them, I might be more convinced of their arguments. As it is, even if I grant…
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The Ordinary Life
In Acts 3, Peter and John were on their way to prayer. They were doing the ordinary stuff of life when the extraordinary happened: the healing of the lame man. They were not on their way to a healing crusade, so they brought the man with them (or gave him a flier hoping he would attend). God is ready to…
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Healing
A story of healing. A friend’s daughter was facing heart trouble. She and her husband have two young children and she had been suffering some heart pains. Going to the doctor, the first round of examination found about 1/3 of her heart was seriously damaged. They immediately set up another round of tests to determine the course of action. It…
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The danger of presuming on God
In Luke 17 there is the story of the ten lepers healed by Jesus. Only one came back to give thanks. 11 Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy met him. They stood at a distance 13 and called out in a loud voice, “Jesus, Master, have pity on…
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The Pressing IN of Faith
The gospel for reading this morning was Luke 8:40ff. There are two people pressing in: Jairus (for his daughter) and the woman with the bleeding problem. Both needed to press in hard. Jairus comes and gets Jesus, but when word comes that his daughter is dead, the common sense thing would be to forget about it. Just go home. Bury…
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My Name is Legion
2 As soon as Jesus got out of the boat, a man possessed by an evil spirit came out of the tombs. 3 This man lived among the tombs, and no one was ever strong enough to restrain him, even with a chain. 4 He had been secured many times with leg irons and chains, but he broke the chains…
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Where Healing Dwells
Mark Chapter 2 has a series of stories that I think are summed up in Jesus’ little story of wineskins and new cloths: 21 “No one sews a piece of new, unshrunk cloth on old clothes; otherwise, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and makes a worse tear. 22 No one pours new wine into…
Tag: healing
