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Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005 | ||
God the ultimate problem solver
By JOHN HATCHER You may have heard of the woman. She had gone from doctor to doctor to clinic to hospital, perhaps shelling out her co-pays or the full cost. Bottom line, though: she had spent all her money on the medical community and they had gladly taken her money, but she continued to bleed. Her flow of blood was not stopped. She was broke and still broken by her illness. Did the medical community care for her chronic condition of 12 years? Probably not. She was just a face in the crowd. A statistic. No longer a concern because no longer with cash. But she heard about a new kind of physician in town. He didnt take fees. And he didnt do exams. He just healed people of their infirmities. So, she took a chance. She bound her bleeding self, went into the crowd swirling around this new healer named Jesus and got just close enough to touch the hem of his robe. You see, she had finally given up on the human medical community and figured if she could just touch his outer garment, she would be healed. And it happened. The moment she touched him in faith, healing power flowed from him into her ailing body and Jesus turned to her and said, Daughter, take courage, your faith has made you well. I am reminded far too often of how much confidence we place in our modern systems of law, medicine, industry, science, knowing full well how they have failed us in the past and how they have proved faulty in the past as a firm foundation. Why do we put such faith in them today? Take the father of our country, George Washington. He died because the best medicine of the day was bleeding to heal. Take Galileo. He was excommunicated from the church because he contended the earth rotated around the sun and not the other way around contradicting the best science of the day. Take the courts of the last century: they permitted the murder of the unborn. One of the most convicting things anyone can say to me when I complain about a sickness or a health issue, John, have you prayed about it? I have seen with my own eyes the consistent failure of the systems and communities designed to assist humankind in our lives and found them to come up wanting far too often to place too much faith in them. This past Saturday, the Bible in the chapel at Emory Hospital in Atlanta was open to Psalm 60. It was a comfort to me: O Lord, grant us help against our foe, for help by man is worthless. This day, I encourage you to put your confidence in God. He is the God in the storm. He is the God who can rescue you out of the storm. He is the God who can undo the damage of the storm. Man is worthless with such great opposition as you and I have in our lives. |
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