HEALING BEGINS
JUNE 6, 2010
CARLA COOPER-HICKS

1.  This message is about being healed and learning to be who God created YOU to Be:  Getting aligned with God, resting in this relationship - - grasping the PEACE which Jesus leaves YOU, and living up to what YOU already have.  I talk a lot about Being.  In the past, my topics for messages have been “WHO AM I?”, “The Creator and the Creation”, & last year, I focused on Mary at the foot of Jesus. Being. Absorbing, becoming like Him. Being fed.  Mary at the Feet of Jesus—In Luke 10:38-42  ...... Martha told Jesus “tell her to help me." And Jesus answered and said to her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. “But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.“    Being with Jesus. Absorbing His presence.  We were designed to be in a relationship with God.

 

Ephesians 2:10 – “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.   Workmanship is from the Greek word poiema where we get our English word poem.  So to think more colorfully, we are God’s poem created in Christ to do excellent work through which God intended us to make a life. We work for God’s purpose as his work expression to work for his glory in a life he intends for us and gives us through his grace.

 

2. We’re like that unique puzzle piece you hold in your hands and you are looking all over the partially completed puzzle for its unique hole in the midst of thousands.  Remember a few weeks back, Wes Cain mentioned to the children about being like a puzzle piece? I made a lapel pin out of a puzzle piece once and it became a unique way to share what God has done in my life the past few years. If you feel like you don’t fit, maybe it’s the wrong puzzle box lid; you need to find the picture where your unique piece fits before you compare yourself and criticize yourself.  You fit perfectly into the big picture puzzle God designed.  So what did GOD create YOU to BE?

 

3.  “Walking With God”. Chapter “Motive”, John Eldredge (2008) John says:  “Let’s come back to something very basic to our pursuit of God and the transformation he is always after in our lives—everything we do has a reason behind it, a motive.  Within the Christian community we tend to focus on behavior, and that is right and that is wrong...”

   The word of God moves through us and in us in two ways: Legalistic and Holistic.  We have learned the Legalistic and now God, your creator, is trying to convey the rest of the story to us....living in His Way, His Truth, and His Life. He paid the price fulfilling the Law and He sent us the Comforter to guide us into all truth, to live in Him and He in us.

    Romans 12: 1-3  NIV Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

 

Here’s a visual of the process to bring us to God.

 

Legalistic

Holistic

 

 

God isn’t just interested in the covering over of our sins--God wants to make us into the people we were originally created to be:

 

 

 

RESTORATION

The legal transaction understanding

The holistic understanding

The point of the cross becomes what it has done for us—Jesus’ death satisfies God once & for all:

FORGIVEN

The point of the cross becomes what it has done in us—Ongoing. New life here, now & eternally:

 

 HEALING

 

4.  In Rob Bell’s book “Velvet Elvis”, when he was having a personal crisis serving as a “Super Pastor”, he went to his counselor. He heard:

 

“Your Job is...            ...the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it”

 

     a.  Repent: Return to God – Shuva – be restored

 

     b.  Go in ‘Shalom’: Peace is not just the absence of conflict—it’s the presence of the goodness of God. It’s the presence of wholeness, completeness.

 

     c.  Live up to what I already have:  Ask for healing in my broken places.

           

    Repent, go on Shalom, and Live up to what you already have in Christ. Rob Bell’s book “Velvet Elvis” has inspired much of this message here. He highlighted that Peace is not just the absence of conflict—it’s the presence of the goodness of God. It’s the presence of wholeness, completeness.

 

REPENT:  is returning to the relationship God originally planned for His creation, you! Your first you!

 

PEACE: So when the woman with the hemorrhage of 12 years touched Jesus’ shawl because she knew she would be healed, Jesus knew power had gone out from him to her. The only thing Jesus said to her was to go in peace (Luke 8:43-48); he is placing the blessing of God on all of her. Not just her physical body. He is blessing her with God’s presence on her entire being. And this is because for Jesus, salvation is holistic in nature. For Jesus, being saved or reconciled to God involves far more than just the saving of your physical body or your soul—it involves all of you. God’s desire is for us to live in harmony with him, body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions—every inch of our being...Jesus heals us. He saves us to heal us to have a living, breathing conversation with you for now and on into eternity. This is the new life we are promised.

 

LIVING up to what I already have:  Hebrews 10:10-14  (The Message) “God's way - by which we are made fit for God by the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus. Every priest goes to work at the altar each day, offers the same old sacrifices year in, year out, and never makes a dent in the sin problem.  As a priest, Christ made a single sacrifice for sins, and that was it! Then he sat down right beside God and waited for his enemies to cave in.  It was a perfect sacrifice by a perfect person to perfect some very imperfect people. By that single offering, he did everything that needed to be done for everyone who takes part in the purifying process.

 

Our community of believers are missing the point! The point of the cross is not sin management—the point of the cross is to restore me to what God originally intended. Holistic. Get past the Do’s/Don’t/Can’s/Can’t/Should/Shouldn’t    Sin Management is asking for forgiveness over and over and over and over – God’s grace is to ask to be healed, daily, hourly, seasonally....ask for the perfection, the holiness that love of God can bring.  Rob Bell says on Pg 139, Velvet Elvis. “I can’t find one place in the teachings of Jesus or the Bible that we are to Identify ourselves FIRST & foremost as sinners.”

 

5.  ROB BELL’S Velvet Elvis:  Page 143-144 “Eternal life then is a certain kind of life I am living more and more now and will go on forever. I am living more and more in connection with God, and I will live connected with God forever.

This has huge implications for when I do stumble, when I sin and the old person comes back from the dead for a few moments.

I admit it

I confess it        

I thank God I am forgiven  

I make amends with anyone who has been affected by my actions                  

And then I move on.

Not because sin isn’t serious, but because I am taking seriously who God says I am. The point isn’t my failure; it is God’s success in remaking me into the person he originally intended me to be.

God’s strength, not mine.

God’s power, not mine.

So what does this mean for the Christian life?  To begin, Christians are people learning who they are in Christ. We are being taught about our new identity.

Do you see how deeply this new identity affects the life of a community? I heard a teacher say that if people were taught more about who they are, they wouldn’t have to be told what to do.

It would come naturally. When we see religious communities spending most of their time trying to convince people not to sin, we are seeing a community that has missed the point. The point isn’t sin management. The point is who we are. 

We are saints, Greek hagios, which means “holy or set apart ones.”

Your identity...is harmony with God. Jesus is our role model of who God intended the human being to be. - Stop beating yourself up because Jesus said to love others as yourself...are you loving your self these days? - Are you gracious to your self? - Are you healing.  You can repent and ask for forgiveness but the important thing is to ask to be HEALED. Placed in us the word RECONCILIATION. Think of a big vitamin pill with RECONCILIATION written on it. It’s in you and you’re absorbing it into every cell. Or maybe think of a pacemaker, brand name: RECONCILIATION. God has put it in you and you are a new creature.

2 Cor 5: 17, 18, 19 “Therefore, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things have passed away; Behold, new things have come.  Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.”

THEN you can love others as you love yourself. What’s a True Christ-like way to be Legalistic? Jesus summed up the 10 commandments in Matthew 22:36-42  He said “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.“  " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.‘   This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.‘ Namely, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses (sin) agains† them, and He has placed in us  the word of RECONCILIATION!

6.  The perfect scripture verse describing what this new creature looks like is in Colossians 3:12-15  “Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.  Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.   And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.  Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.”

REMEMBER:  Shalom = Peace and it is not just the absence of conflict—it’s the presence of the goodness of God. It’s the presence of wholeness, completeness.

When we choose God’s vision of who we are, we are living as God made us to live. We are living in the flow of how we are going to live forever.

This is life of heaven, here & now.

And as we live this life, in harmony with God’s intentions for us, the life of heaven becomes more & more present in our life.

Heaven comes to earth – Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis, page 147 “or

We can choose a way out of sync with God with how God created us to live.  The word for this is hell: a way , a place, a realm absent of How God desires things to be. We can bring heaven to earth or we can bring hell to earth.

For Jesus, the question wasn’t, how do I get into heaven but how do I bring heaven here. The question wasn’t  How do I get in there? But how do I get there, here?

 

7.  A visual of the ever-continuing process of becoming who we were created to be:

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