The Power of Love in Healing

The past two Sundays we have been praying healing prayers. This week I talked about the power of love for healing.

Love Is powerful.  “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:34-35 (NIV)

This is new and powerful because we are urged to love each other like Jesus loves us. It takes love to a new level and to a new dimension. This speaks directly to who you are as a person and a Christian. Loving brings health and power into your life and your love brings health and life to those around you. We struggle with all of this because we really don’t understand love. Thousands of books and songs are written on the subject of love each year. But I doubt that we truly understand it. Especially if one looks from a Biblical perspective.

What Is love? Love is not a warm emotion; it is an act of the will. Jesus commands us to love one another. It cannot be commanded if it is an uncontrollable emotion. Like the forgiveness we talked about in my blog last week, we decide to love and then carry out that decision. Love is not how we feel, it is what we do. It is described perfectly in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (NIV). “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

There is not one emotion mentioned here. Love is not an unmanageable emotion, it is an act of the will… a decision we make and then carry out by our actions.

Love and hate are both quite powerful. They can bring life or they can take life. They can strengthen or they can weaken. Love brings faith and hate nurtures fear. The basic nature of God is love and the core of Christianity is love. Scripture speaks to these points. “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:16-18 (NIV)

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?” Matthew 5:43-46 (NIV)

Love is the source of salvation which is the ultimate healing. “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” John 15:13 (NIV) “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:6-8 (NIV)

Love or the lack of love dictates our behavior. Love is foundational to all we do and all we are as Christians. It is through love and with love that we claim all God has for us. “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live
and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Deuteronomy 30:19-20 (NIV2011)

Allow me to share a story of the healing power of love. (This is an excerpt from my book, RENEW YOUR CONGREGATION, HEALING THE SICK AND RAISING THE DEAD.)

Travel back with me in time. It was almost 30 years ago. It was a Saturday night. Really it was the wee hours of Sunday morning. Five of us shared a room. We spent the night together. It was a room for one, but we all managed to squeeze in. We all knew each other. In fact, we are related...enjoy each other’s company...love each other. But not one of us really wanted to be there.

It was an expensive room. My guess is it went for about $2,000 a night. Good view of the city. Nothing else special about it. There was no pool available. No Jacuzzi. The only meals available were at a cafeteria. The room service was nonexistent. The floors weren’t carpeted. I have seen larger bathrooms on a bus. No doubt that what made the room expensive was the equipment: the monitors, IV pumps, electric multi-position bed, oxygen, vacuum pumps, and cabinets of medical supplies. The room we shared was room 466 in the intensive care unit of Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.

I had received the ominous telephone call earlier that evening: “Your brother has taken a turn for the worse, and we want his family to come to the hospital.” I used to work in a hospital so I know that the “turn for the worse” line is “medicalese” for “your loved one just died, and we want you to come to the hospital so we can tell you to your face that he is dead.” So I went to the hospital without much hope.

Being hospital savvy and knowing I would be arriving in the middle of the night, I wore a tie and my clergy name badge. Instead of stopping me, the security guard in the ER showed me the way to the intensive care unit. Instead of questioning me, the nurse in intensive care directed me to Mr. McConnell’s room.

Getting there was the easy part. Surprisingly, my brother Bob was still alive when I arrived. Just barely, but alive. My sister Kae, her daughter June, and my daughter Meg, were there staring at the monitor screen. There is not much else to look at, so everyone in the room tends to stare at the monitor. And they were waiting. Waiting for me… Waiting for Bob to die… Waiting for God to do something… Waiting. I arrived, we prayed, and then I joined the waiting.

We took turns sitting in the three available chairs. We were playing a sort of musical chairs without the music. We wrapped up in blankets and complained of the cold. Individually and as a unit, we pursued the hopeless search for a comfortable position. My theory is hospital chairs are designed to be uncomfortable to make one miserable enough to go home and get out of the staff’s hair.

Nevertheless, we stayed and sought sleep, and we resisted sleep. We talked. We talked to Bob, and we talked about Bob. We talked about better days and family and how and what our children and grandchildren are doing and whatever happened to old what’s-his-name and spouses and ex-spouses and what had been and what could have been and what should have been. We stood by the bed and held Bob’s hand and looked into his tired face and listened to his labored breathing and prayed and wept and hoped against hope.

Morning came. Bob was not only still alive, but just a bit better and rallying quickly. His doctor showed up and was amazed to find him alive. The doctor didn’t quite know what to make of it. Temperature—down. Blood pressure—up. Blood oxygen—up. Lungs—clear. It was amazing. The doctor wondered aloud, “How did this happen?” We didn’t know. He held the only medical degree in the room.

I have a theory. A popular Christian song says, “In this very room there is quite enough love for one like me.” I believe in that very room in the intensive care unit of Jewish Hospital there was quite enough love for Bob. Enough love for Bob—for Bob to live through the night. For Bob to recover live for almost 25 years in North Carolina where he was close to and enjoyed life with his children and grandchildren. Ask me, and I will tell you that it is true. You can live on love. Love is powerful enough to work miracles and bring healing. My hope is that we all find a room like that very room I was blessed to spend that Saturday night in. It was a miserably marvelous room. It was a room filled to overflowing with love.

It is in rooms like that room where healing happens.

Copyright © 2015, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved

Bill McConnell is Senior Minister at Lindenwood Christian Church in Memphis, Tennessee and is a Church Transformation consultant and a Christian Leadership Coach. He is a frequent speaker at Church Transformation events. His latest book on church transformation is DEVELOPING A SIGNIFICANT CHURCH and is available at Westbow Press.

He can be contacted @ bill45053@gmail.com. Connect with him on Facebook @ William T. McConnell or on Twitter @billmc45053 or visit his Amazon Author Page @ Amazon

I Didn't Sign Up for This

A few years ago I was honored to be invited to Pennsylvania to participate in the ordination into ministry of a wonderful young man I had been coaching. It was a great day in Scott’s life and in the life of his church. The look of joy and pride on the faces of his wife, Brenda, and his parishioners was a thing of beauty.

In preparing to deliver the ordination message, I could not pass up to opportunity to look again at the words of Jesus as he sent his disciples out to do ministry. “As you go, preach this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven is near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received, freely give.” (Matthew 10:7-8) Everything about Scott’s ordination day reminded me of my call to the ministry. I was reminded that I didn’t sign up for the job it has become. “Heal the sick and raise the dead”: you must be kidding.

Have you ever felt under qualified for a job? I have… for many years. It is called the ministry. One of the voices in my head (Don’t worry, this one is just me talking to myself.) keeps saying, “You can’t do this.” I have found that voice to be eerily and consistently correct.

As I began preparations to answer God’s call on my life, my hope was that going to seminary was going to prepare me for ministry. Wrong! Three years and a master’s degree later and still the mocking voice in my head was correctly assessing my ineptness. Like most students, I spent a couple of my school years serving a student church. The experience was supposed to help prepare me for ministry. The only thing it did for me was verify that I was totally incapable of doing the job. Let me give you an example.

It was a lovely spring day during my last year of school that I received a call from one of my parishioners. In a rather agitated voice she explained that she was having a problem with her husband and wanted to know if I could come over and talk to him. Even though I had no idea what I was going to say, feeling obligated, I agree to make a visit. Upon my arrival at the family home – a farm, I discovered that I had arrived on the scene without all the pertinent facts at hand. One of the several potentially helpful facts the dear lady failed to mention was that her husband, who had been drinking all day, was up in the loft of their hay barn with his deer rifle taking shots at anything that moved. And when I pulled up in the barn lot and headed for the house, I was something that moved. Fortunately he was drunk enough that none of the four shots he took at me came particularly close to hitting me - which, considering my size, was pretty much a miracle.

While amazing myself with my foot speed from the car to the house and observing that I ran faster that day than my high school football coach would have ever believed, I again mentioned to myself that I was not capable of doing this thing called ministry. As I was heartily congratulating myself on surviving the trip to the house I also thought that I should give deep consideration to going back to college and picking up the courses needed for a teaching certificate.

I am embarrassed to admit that while in seminary I did something I had never done before. I read the Bible. It was an unnerving experience. It was in the Bible that I read Jesus’ instructions to a group he was sending out to do ministry. He told them to heal the sick, raise the dead and cast out demons. The casting out demons part sounded like a particularly good idea during this home visit on this day.

If healing the sick and raising the dead were included in the job description for doing ministry, you could count me out. I had developed a couple of skills and hoped to develop a couple more, but healing and raising the dead were not in my repertoire.

Well, one thing led to another and I ended up in the ministry. Fortunately I started out in a pretty safe place, as an associate minister at my home church. No pressure there. That congregation had known me all of my life, had watched me grow up, which was not a pretty sight, and knew just how inept and incapable of doing any meaningful ministry I really was. Expectations were not running high.

Then one hot August day, just a few days before I was to leave the church and move to Iowa to take a church in a small town there, God and I had one of the first conversations we had ever had. It was Wednesday and my day to make the hospital calls. I was on my way to my first stop to visit a woman I had known for years. She was the mother of a good friend. Martha was in the hospital suffering from a ripping case of lupus and she was not doing well. Lupus is a disease that affects the immune system and causes the body to attack itself. One by one Martha’s internal organs were shutting down.

So I’m tooling on down the road, minding my own business, thinking about nothing much in particular when I get the strongest impression that I should pray for Martha to be healed. I mentioned to whomever or whatever was giving me that impression that I don’t do healing. I hadn’t signed up for healing. I had some hair back then, but I was no leisure suit wearing, high volume talking, money raising, television faith healer. If they had healing classes in seminary, I must have missed them.

I had been trained to go to the hospital, be pleasant, not stay too long, don’t sit on the bed and pray with people before I leave. The prayer I prayed was always a nice, generic, blah, blah preacher prayer. It was a nice prayer but not a prayer for healing. I could be pleasant, but I don’t do healing. The “impresser” clearly spoke into my thoughts and said, “You don’t heal people, but I do.” I explained that to pray for healing would make both Martha and me uncomfortable. I had learned early in my ministry that my job was to make sure everyone remained comfortable. And even though I had not seen it in the church’s Policy and Procedure Manual, I was pretty sure that praying for healing was against company policy.

Involved in this “conversation” I had lost track of time and where I was. It seemed that suddenly I found myself in the hospital parking lot and the impression that I needed to pray for Martha’s healing was stronger than ever. I wasn’t really great at calling on people in the hospital but I must tell you that never in my life had I been more uncomfortable making a hospital call as I was making that particular hospital call.

When I entered the room I was shocked to see how bad Martha looked; how sick she really was. She could not have weighed more than 80 pounds and she was too weak to sit up in bed. “Oh great”, I thought, “Nothing like a bit of a challenge when confronted with my first prayer for healing.” We visited for a few minutes. As I prepared to leave I asked, as was my habit to ask, if she would like for me to pray for her. She said that she would like that. I then admitted to her that I felt like God wanted me to pray for her healing and asked if that would be okay with her.  She smiled warmly and said it sounded like a good idea to her. So I took her hand and prayed. I don’t remember the exact words but I do remember that the prayer was very short and very direct in asking for God’s healing hand to touch her. She smiled and we said our goodbyes.

Just a couple of weeks later my family and I set sail toward the adventures God had in store for us in pastoring a church I a small town in Iowa. I figured I would never see Martha again. The next few months were hectic as we found ourselves settling into a new home, a new culture and a new church. For us, with two young children, being 600 miles away from home was difficult. December rolled around and we were excited to be going back to Louisville to spend Christmas with the extended family. My home church was kind enough to invite me to preach while I was in town for the holidays. I think the invitation had more to do with them wanting an excuse to give a young preacher with two little children and another one on the way a little money and less to do with them wanting to hear me preach.

There was a nice crowd at the early service and we were able to see lots of friends. As usual, the attendance at the late service was much larger. Greeting the several hundred people as they poured out of the sanctuary was almost overwhelming. As the crowd thinned down a nice looking middle aged lady approached me. I greeted her with a handshake and a hello. She smiled at me and said, “You don’t recognize me, do you?” I had to admit that I didn’t. She said, “I’m Martha. I have been looking forward to coming to church today to tell you that God answered your pray. From that day you prayed for me, I have been getting better every day. God healed me.”

I am embarrassed to admit that I was shocked. She had not been prayed for by a great man of faith. No, it was just me, Rev. Incompetent. And she was exactly right. I didn’t heal her, God did. But God was kind enough to let me be a part of a miracle. The lesson I learned that day is I am not capable of healing the sick and raising the dead. And that is not my job. My job is to expose people to the God who does those things.

I am still looking forward to the day I perform a funeral and everybody goes home afterward.

Copyright © 2013, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved

Let's Fight

Let me begin by stating the obvious: Christians are just people. I am amazed at how often people who do not claim to be Christian hold Christians to some standard of behavior that is unattainable and then are extremely judgmental toward Christians. As bad as some of them are at it, Christians do not hold the monopoly on being judgmental. It just seems that when applied to Christians, the judgmental tag sticks better than it does to others.

That being said, as a person who has been on this spiritual journey called Christianity for several decades, I feel qualified to say that we Christians do and say things that call for judgment, comment and even ridicule. It is with a great deal of regularity that I see and read of things Christian leaders have said and done and wonder what in the hell are they thinking? What often astounds me is that they choose to make statements and take high profile stands on issues that are really not all that important and sometimes none of their business. Really.

Over the centuries Christians have consistently chosen up sides and fought verbal, theological and sometimes physical battles over minutia. Take a look at this example. http://trilliansthoughts.tumblr.com/post/56379573415/two-churches-located-across-the-street-from-each-other. This battle of the bulletin boards is funny but it is also typical and sad.

Too often groups of Christians have seen other groups of Christians who disagreed with them over a point of theology as the enemy and attacked them with a great deal of energy. Fellow believers are not the enemy. And, by the way, non-believers are not the enemy either. Unfortunately Pogo the Possum was correct when he said, “We have met the enemy and they are us.” Over the centuries bickering among the ranks has done more damage to the cause of Christ than any group, movement, religion or philosophy. I must admit, I would shy away from joining any group that treats other members with such hate and disrespect. Charles Swindoll said, “Christians are the only people who shoot their wounded.” Years ago a good friend observed, “I don’t need to join a church to experience hostility and disrespect. I can just stay home and get that.”  

We Christians love to fight over theology. It seems very important to many religious groups to be right… about everything… all the time. My take on the whole deal is that as complex and mysterious as the things of God are, your chances and my chances of getting it all exactly right are minuscule. Instead of insisting that we have everything right, let’s just hope against the odds that we got something right. Instead of looking for things to disagree on and argue about, let’s expend our energies looking for things we can agree on and support each other in doing things that empower the cause of Christ.

Then there are politics. We love to argue “social issues” as if we knew what we were talking about – which we don’t. I find it interesting that, generally speaking, my theologically liberal friends are politically liberal and my conservative friends generally come down on the Republican side of issues. I find this almost laughable. How, I wonder, can anyone who is paying any attention believe that the BS and drivel that flows out of Washington has any connection with truth and is in any way designed to help and profit anyone but the politicians who are hawking their talking points in their never ending quest to be re-elected. I have a dear pastor friend who consistently shares Democratic talking points on Twitter as if they were the Gospel. I find it both irritating and sad. He is a very intelligent person that somehow believes all that hokum. I find it no more believable than the Republican malarkey. But we religious types, all across the political and theological spectrum, wrap our political agendas in spiritual terms and square off with each other as if we had the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What we really have is lots of partial truths that have been carefully formulated and crafted and presented to us by people who really don’t have our best interests at heart.

But who cares if it is the truth or if it is helpful. Let’s fight.

Frankly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to fight over this stuff. I believe that we, people of faith, must spend our time and expend our energies keeping the main thing the main thing. And friends; Jesus is the main thing. If you will take a look at this scene from one of my all-time favorite movies, The Sixth Sense, you will understand where I am coming from. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsNjQhyvRnU.

Much like the little boy in this movie, I see dead people. People who do not know God. They are everywhere and they don’t know they are dead. They drive nice cars; have nice homes and good jobs. But they are dead to God and that breaks my heart and moves me to action. The main thing we need to focus on is helping people who don’t know God and have not experienced His amazing love, healing and forgiveness, to know God. Sounds like a full time job to me. And you will have to fight me to stop me.

Copyright © 2013, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved