What is Healing For?
18 Aug 2007 Leave a Comment
in healing, sharing jesus, Uncategorized
Originally posted August 18, 2007
I am eating up this biography of Aimee Semple McPherson. It’s called “Sister Aimee” by Daniel Mark Epstein.
Here is an excerpt from one of her sermons on healing.
“God heals that they may go out to save others. He does not heal that the sick may take up worldliness and travel in sin again. The central thought they must have when they come to me is first and last and all the time—-save their souls.”
Aha! Did this ever occur to you? It didn’t to me until today when I read this passage. McPherson had been having a huge crisis in her ministry, because she started out as an evangelist and became known as a faith healer. Because sometimes hundreds of people were “hanging their crutches on the rafters” after her touch, invalids were lining the streets, crowding the basements of the venues where she preached. Now, that’s a good problem, right? Except that she would say that her ministry was really 99% about saving the lost, and 1% about healing. And the quote above sums it up. WHY do we want people to be healed? So that their sickness and pain would not distract them from the real life and the real work.
