It may be true that laughter is the best medicine, but it’s not always easy to laugh when illness or pain hit us. Pain concentrates the mind and it’s difficult to think of anything else. On Sunday night, Mark began the first of four sermons in July looking at the topic of healing.

We can need healing in different areas: physical, mental or spiritual. The good news is that Jesus is our healer. Matt 4:23-24 TNIV tells us ‘Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them.’

Jesus’s first priority was to teach and to preach the gospel. He wanted men to know the salvation offered by God. Salvation is the gateway to our perfect healing. He healed people out of His love for them and was able to heal ‘every disease and sickness’. Nothing is too difficult for Him. He healed out of His love for people and out of a desire for God to get the glory in every situation.

One of the things which prevent us from receiving healing from God is a stiff-necked and stubborn attitude (see Acts 7:51 TNIV). A literal stiff neck is incredibly painful and does not allow us to move our heads freely; it narrows our vision and prevents us from having a whole view of GOd. God has, sadly, often found His people – the recipients of His blessing and grace – to be stiff-necked, stubborn, deaf (see Ex 32:9 TNIV.) It is a dangerous place to be when we resist God. All of us can be incredibly stubborn and can resist Him, but there is, as Ecclesiastes 3:1-3 TNIV reminds us, a time for everything, including a time to heal.

Mark concluded with three searching questions:
1) Do we believe God can heal?
2) Do we need healing?
3) What are we going to do about that?

The service ended with prayer for healing, as it will each Sunday night during July. It is too important a topic to ignore and we can pray not only for those in the meeting but also for our friends, families, neighbours and work colleagues who need to know that our God heals.

Alan and Janet hosted a quiz about fictional doctors for us. This was, quite obviously, the best quiz ever:

Winners with 23 points:

Alan and Janet showing prizes:

Active participation:

Other winners:

Last night’s family service was on the topic of healing (every Sunday night during July, we will be looking at this subject, with opportunity for prayer for healing at each service.)

We started with some ‘Doctor, doctor’ jokes, however (laughter obviously being the best medicine!) Here is a selection of jokes told by members of the congregation:

Doctor, Doctor, I feel like a pair of curtains!
Oh, pull yourself together!

Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I’m a toilet.
Yes, you are looking a little flushed.

Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I’m a frog.
What’s wrong with that?
I keep thinking I’m going to croak.

Doctor, doctor, I’ve got terrible wind. What can you give me for it.
Have you tried a kite?

Doctor, doctor, I have terrible diarrhoea and I think it’s hereditary.
Nonsense! Diarrhoea isn’t hereditary.
But it’s in my genes…

Some of the jokes were longer:

“A man with a painful leg goes to the doctor. The doctor hears a tiny voice coming from the man’s kneecap and listens with his stethoscope. The kneecap keeps saying ‘lend us a tenner, lend us a tenner.’
The man says ‘my ankle hurts too’ and on further examination the same thing happens: another tiny voice saying ‘Lend us a tenner.’
The doctor says, ‘This is worse than I thought. Your leg is broke in two places.'”

“A doctor saw a patient after an operation and told him he had good news and bad news. The patient asked for the bad news first and was told they had had to amputate both legs. Thoroughly alarmed, he asked what the good news was. ‘The man in the next bed wants to buy some slippers’, he was told.”

“A man went to a doctor complaining of pain in several areas. He pointed to his knee, to his shoulder and his face. The doctor was able to give an immediate diagnosis: ‘You have a broken finger.'”

“An English doctor, a German doctor and an American doctor were discussing their transplant successes. The English doctor had performed a liver transplant and was pleased that his patient was looking for work within six weeks. The German doctor was more impressive as he had done a lung transplant and the patient was looking for work in 4 weeks. The American doctor said he had operated on someone with no brain and they were now in the White House and everybody else was looking for a job in 2 days!”

Garry’s joke involved a long exchange between a doctor and a lawyer:
Q: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people?
A: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
Q: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
A: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
Q: And Mr. Jones was dead at the time?
A: No, he was sitting on the table wondering why I was doing an autopsy.
Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So, then is it possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive nevertheless?
A: It is possible that he could have been alive and practising law somewhere.

Waiting for God is not particularly easy. A song I love has the line ‘It’s certain that waiting’s the most bitter lesson a believing heart has to learn’ (Michael Card, ‘Maranatha’) and I’ve certainly found that to be true!

Dave’s sermon this morning, looking at God’s sovereignty and purposes, also forced us to think again about God’s timing. The world waited for 4000 years for the Son of God to be revealed but then, as we are told in Galatians 4:4 TNIV, “But when the time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under law.”

The children of Israel waited 400 years for release from Egypt but then, when the time was right, God sent Moses to face Pharaoh and his gods head on, and to win a victory that brought great glory to the name of the Lord throughout the world.

The cripple at the Beautiful Gate waited 40 years for Peter and John to heal him and he then went about glorifying and praising God.

The man born blind waited many years for Jesus to come and give him sight so that the Name of the Lord would be glorified.

Each one of us has a personal promise or promises from God.
If He said it, then it will come about – at His time and to bring glory to Him.

The Lord has promised great things to this church and some have waited for nearly 60 years, and some have even died before seeing the promises come about.

But God will fulfil His promises when the time is right.

While away on holiday on holiday recently, Dave and Joan went to a lively Baptist church in Aberdeen. A lady was talking to Joan and this lady said that she felt that God would fulfil His promises to Joan before she died, that Joan would see the fulfilment of God’s promises to her. Considering that some of these promises were made over 20 years ago, that is a great encouragement.

When will these promises be fulfilled? When the time is right.

When will the time be right? Only the Lord knows.

But of one thing we can be certain, it will the time when it brings the greatest glory to God.

Then, not only Joan, not only us here in this church, not only the Christians in the Dearne Valley, but every eye will see and every tongue acknowledge, every single one “then will know that I am the Lord your God.”

Dave spoke this morning on Exodus 6:9 TNIV: ‘I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians.’

Often, we are faced with difficult circumstances which challenge our security and even our faith in God. Illness strikes and despite our earnest prayers no healing is forthcoming, so where is the God who said He was our healer? Financial difficulties arise and we cannot see a way out – where is the God who promised to meet our every need? Our lives, spiritual or otherwise, seem to be at a low ebb and seem to be going nowhere. Where is the God who promised to lead us and guide us? We are suffering depression and we feel awfully alone. Where is the God who promised to never leave us or desert us, who promised us fullness of joy?

At such times we very often wonder where God is, what He is doing, why He doesn’t come to our rescue. This account in Exodus 6 TNIV contains a phrase that keeps appearing which can help us in those times and which holds the key to all our questions. ‘Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.’

The ten plagues which God sent on Egypt may seem cruel and harsh to us. They were intended to demonstrate God’s superiority over all the Egyptian gods:
Khuum: the guardian of the Nile and Hapi: the spirit of the Nile
Osiris: the Nile was believed to be the bloodstream of Osiris
Heqt: a frog-like god of resurrection
Hathon: a mother goddess who was a cow
Apis: a bull of the god Ptah, a symbol of fertility
Minevis: also a bull, the sacred bull of Heliopolis
Imhotep: the god of medicine
Nut: the sky goddess
Seth: the protector of crops
Re, Aten, Atum and Horus: all sun gods.

Pharaoh was also said to be divine. In sending these plagues, the Lord was demonstrating the total ineffectiveness of any other god compared to the One and Only God. He could undoubtedly have used other methods, but He waited until the situation looked totally hopeless, and then He moved, in the way that only He could move in order that everyone would know that He was the Lord.

God often works in ways that are hard for us to fathom so that others indeed can know that He is the Lord. We see this in John 9:2-3 TNIV and in 2 Cor 12:7-9 TNIV. These passages reflect the Biblical principle that in everything that the Lord does, He has one overriding priority, that ‘every one shall know I am the Lord your God.’ That is why we very often do not understand what God is doing or what He is not doing. God’s timing and God’s purpose are not related to our conception of what He should do and when He should do it. The whole purpose of God’s dealings with man, indeed the reason that man was created, is to glorify God.

When we find ourselves in those situations where we don’t understand what God is doing or where He is in a situation, we must always remember that God is God and as such He doesn’t owe us any explanation at all. Nonetheless, we have the undeniable assurance that, in all things, God will work for His glory and for our ultimate good.

I found the last Bible study (looking at the way we need our thinking to be renewed) to be deeply challenging and the part about making new pathways for our neurons to follow became even more relevant to me during the past week as I have been on an outdoor pursuit residential trip with the Senior department at my school.

Outdoor pursuits are not my thing at all. But there were definite pluses to the trip, namely staying at the beautiful Christian Guild hotel Willersley Castle in Cromford, Derbyshire.

… with views like this to ponder each day:

… and meals in this exquisitely beautiful dining room:

(If you’re looking for a holiday hotel, I can’t recommned this one highly enough; the Christian staff are so welcoming and helpful and the accommodation and surroundings are beyond compare.)

But back on topic: the reason I was reminded of the Bible study was that on some of the hikes through the Peak District National Park, there seemed to be no paths at all to follow! We were led (thankfully!) by experienced guides who knew the way, which was just as well, because on some paths, I seriously wondered how these could have got the name ‘public highway’! I came back with scratches over my arms and legs from bushes that were definitely in the way of the path I was treading! A number of us were nettled and had to use dock leaves to soothe our irritated skin. The paths we were walking were not all wide and easy by any meaans; the terrain at times was rough. On the first night, we did a ‘night walk’ and came back down a very steep slope in the pitch black with just a few torches to give us light. We had to tread carefully to avoid stumbling and falling. I have no photos of those treks, largely because I was concentrating so hard on staying upright that there was absolutely no way I was messing around in my rucksack getting a camera out to record these experiences! I was too concerned about not falling and injuring myself when I was supposedly responsible for teenagers (most of whom were like gazelle, bounding about with a carefree abandon I found bewildering!)

Some parts of these hikes were hard work and challenging (and I was gratified to see young, fit people puffing and panting up some of the hills we climbed, reassuring me that it was the incline and not my lack of fitness which was making this hard work!) Thinking God’s thoughts is not always an easy path to tread. We have to ‘unlearn’ our old patterns of thinking and for many of us, after a lifetime of being washed in the world’s way of doing things and thinking, it is not easy to tread a new path. We have to be constantly vigilant because there are obstacles en route which would cause us to stumble. Hebrews 12:12-13 TNIV says ‘Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. “Make level paths for your feet,”so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.’ Thankfully, there is strength and healing in the Lord for those of us who need level paths for our feet!