-Transcript-
00:29 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:34 Welcome to the Cafe. Pastor Clark Covington here with another episode of KJV Cafe. If this is the first time you’re joining us, thank you.
00:41 Thank you for listening. If you’re a regular listener, why not check us out online, kjvcafe.com or on Facebook. And also we have a podcast, a daily podcast, episodes just like this on the podcast app, your favorite podcast app.
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01:06 So anyways, that’s my introduction. And then I just, I got through the introduction. I’m like, okay, I guess we’re done.
01:18 No. Today we are not done. We’re just getting started.
01:23 And we’re in Jeremiah. We’re in Jeremiah 17:14. And the prophet Jeremiah says, heal me, oh Lord, and I shall be healed.
01:27 Save me and I shall be saved for thou art my praise. We’re talking about God, the great healer today. And I love Jeremiah.
01:38 I have a special place for prophet Jeremiah in my heart because there are a lot of times that I just look at this world and this country, especially, but also this world and just I’m heartbroken for this world and what has happened to even the church in these last days.
01:55 And so I love Jeremiah, also known as the weeping prophet. And if anyone would know about God’s healing power, it’d be Jeremiah because he was greatly persecuted for telling the truth and giving true prophecy that was lived out.
02:11 He had to, he gave prophecy and then he lived it out. He said, look, we’re going to be invaded. We’re going to have this problem and that problem, we’re being judged.
02:18 And they were, and he was, and it was really, really, really a challenging time. And he says, heal me, oh Lord, and I shall be healed. Save me and I shall be saved for thou art my praise.
02:32 So this is an act of faith. He is saying, if you do this, God, it’ll be done. You heal me, I’ll be healed.
02:37 You save me, I’ll be saved. For thou art my praise. God should be our praise, amen.
02:43 And for many, many reasons, and certainly the least of which is not the fact that he heals, that’s a great reason to praise God. And last episode, we talked about the healing power of God. He forgives all sins.
02:56 He heals all diseases as Psalm 103:2-4 tells us. You say, Brother Clark, I’ve got a chronic disease and I’ve given it to God and I’m still sick. Well, I’ll tell you this.
03:08 If you’ve been saved, you won’t be sick in heaven. And that this short-term, you know, they call it chronic, make it sound like, oh, you know, eternal. It’s not eternal.
03:23 We’re going to shed this mortal body. Both my wife and I have chronic illness. I have allergies that never go away.
03:28 I laugh at our kids. They have seasonal allergies. I say, what seasonal allergies? I got them all the time.
03:34 But I also have empathy for them because they don’t. And so when they do, that’s awful. Whereas, you know, for me, it’s nothing new.
03:39 But my wife has an illness with her thyroid, had to have her thyroid removed and is on medicine, on medicine for the rest of her life. And we have chronic illness in this house, but this house, we pray to God and we ask him for healing.
03:54 And we don’t, again, we’re not against the medical establishment.
04:00 My wife works in healthcare and I thank God for the medical establishment and I thank God for godly doctors, godly nurses and all the rest. But why on earth are we not going to God more as we deal with physical ailments, as we deal with spiritual ailments, as we deal with mental ailments?
04:17 We go through all of these things, worries and depression. Read about the great men and women of God.
04:24 They suffered greatly in this category. You know, there’s a, when you get called to preach and you get to that point where things are a little bit overwhelming
04:36 and God has been very merciful in my ministry in that he has not called me to a large congregation. And so we’ll have a very small group and I’ll joke around and say, well, God gave me all I could handle.
04:43 And that is true. I, I try to bear their burdens of our little congregation. I pray for them.
04:51 I care about them, you know, and, and that’s, that’s probably all I can handle a small group in that sense, because you know what? You get to the point where you’re really struggling.
05:01 A lot of preachers out there get really worn down and yet there is a God and his name is Jesus and he is the great healer and he tells us to do what?
05:13 Number one, to pray individually, to pray individually, to seek him. The Bible says to pray without ceasing.
05:20 You know, the Bible talks about this idea of if we keep, for lack of a better word, pestering God with our problems, will we not get help being born again, children of God?
05:31 Because when our kids pester us, do we not help them? I mean, it’s very effective. I’ve got a young one that is a, he’s got a PhD in pestering, amen. And he is relentless and dad, can I have a banana? No dad, can I have a banana? No.
05:44 You know, just get a granola bar, get something you can get on your own. Okay. No, I need a banana.
05:51 Okay. So for five minutes, it’s no. The next five minutes it’s come on, leave me alone.
05:56 The last five minutes is here’s your banana. There you go. Okay.
06:02 Now as earthly fallen creatures, if we have it in us to just get, you know, to go ahead and help our children when they have a need, how much more so will our heavenly father?
06:09 And I know it’s a simple example, but how much more so will our perfect and loving and precious heavenly father not help us when we have a need? But do we have that faith like Jeremiah had to say, God, if you do it, you know, heal me, oh Lord, and I shall be healed.
06:18 Do we have that level of faith that we say, heal me, Lord, I shall be healed. Or do we want to hedge our bets or do we, you know, have this doubt that we sow in our hearts and our minds, corporate corporately, we’re supposed to pray as a group.
06:37 James 5:14 is any sick among you. Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.
06:47 You know, one of the most beautiful pictures that I’ve got in my mind, when we were at a larger church and larger meaning instead of a few, it’s, you know, 150 to a hundred or so, it’s still smaller, but to me, it’s larger.
07:04 One of the most beautiful pictures I have in my mind of that seven year period I spent there is that, you know, we’d get together and pray for the sick and yes, the oil would get broken from the broken out from the bottom of the pulpit shelf there.
07:17 And you know, pastor would anoint, uh, the sick person with oil. We put laid hands on, we’d pray, we prayed as a group and we prayed, uh, as, as the, with the idea that God was going to do something and all how time and again, we saw him move.
07:35 Now there were times that we prayed for folks, one young, young man in particular, we prayed, prayed, prayed and called out to God. I remember being a tent revival calling out to God and there must’ve been a dozen preachers there just screaming out to God and the Lord took them home. But that was God’s will for that man’s life.
07:54 And a testimony to his life was he stayed faithful to the Lord his entire life. And so we don’t always see the result we want, but we’re looking at the scope of mortal life and God is looking at eternity.
08:05 James 5:16, confess your faults one to another, pray one for another, that you may be healed the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.
08:16 So we are to pray one for another. We are to not forget that. You know what? I’ve preached almost every episode on KJV Cafe of getting right with God and people be like, well, why do we need to get right with God? We’re not under the law.
08:28 We’re saying we can do what we want. Well, guess what? What does it say here? What does it say here? The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. It doesn’t say of that person that’s backslid.
08:40 It doesn’t say of that person living in rebellion and sin. It says a righteous man and who is right? Jesus Christ is right.
08:47 When we live like Christ, we’re living righteous and when we live righteous, guess what? God’s going to be near our prayers.
08:54 He’s going to hear our prayers and you say, brother Clark, that’s your opinion. No, it’s not. The Bible says that God is far from the wicked.
09:00 What’s the inverse of that? He’s near the righteous. Okay. I’m not a, I’m not a Bible scholar here.
09:07 I’m just pointing out facts. God’s going to hear our prayer. And so as we live righteously, the best that we can, as we confess our faults one to another, as we pray for each other, God will do the healing.
09:18 And that’s why in our prayer meetings, we have a bunch of people that are introverts and quiet and so forth. Not a bunch, but the few people that are there will often say, you know, it’s almost embarrassing.
09:30 Well, you know, my, the, my allergies are acting up.
09:35 I can’t sleep at night. You know, my diabetes, whatever it is, you know, we don’t really want to offer that up. It wasn’t like a, this would be great to tell everybody about, but we do because it’s biblical and we know that that prayer will work.
09:45 We believe God’s working healing hand, uh, will do the trick. And we’ve seen it time and again. And I’m telling you, we give God praise, a young man in our church that had awful headaches and for years had awful headaches and went to neurologists and everything, and they couldn’t fix it.
10:06 And we prayed for him, prayed for him, prayed for him. And one day the headaches went away and they haven’t come back. Praise God.
10:05 You know, we see it and we, we give God the praise. Now we’re not just healed here by God, but we’re healed for an eternity by God. Isaiah 53:5, but he was wounded for our transgressions.
10:17 He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him and with his stripes, we are healed.
10:24 So the most important thing here, and we’ll spend the rest of the few minutes we have left looking at this, the most important idea of the healer isn’t healing us in this life because this life is not the end.
10:37 This would be what’s called the first death. Okay. And we aren’t to fear the first death.
10:42 We’re to fear the one that can send us to the second death and that is to hell and that’s at the judgment. So when we’re saved, we go to heaven and we have the resurrected body in heaven. We have that.
10:57 We have a perfect peace in heaven. We have joy in heaven. There is no night in heaven.
11:03 Heaven is beautiful and it’s lovely and it’s a place of rest, a place of peace. I believe we’ll work, but I believe we’ll enjoy the work. Amen.
11:08 Every bit of heaven is perfect and we have that perfection to look forward to by Jesus Christ himself. And so we are healed in the sense of not just physically healed by Christ and we’re saved and born again and seek him, but we’re healed for an eternity by Christ by what he did. What Isaiah, the prophets say that he did.
11:29 He willingly and obediently was wounded for our transgressions, not his, he was perfect. He was bruised for our iniquities, our sin. Okay.
11:37 The chastisement of our peace was upon him and with his stripes, we are healed. Isn’t that poetic? With his stripes, we are healed. 1 Peter 2:24, who his own self bear our sins in his own body on the tree that we being dead to sins should live unto righteousness by whose stripes you were healed.
12:02 And so we see here that we are healed. And that’s a healed with a, uh, cause we’re born with a, a, a problem with God and issue with God. A, the Bible word would be enmity or warfare with God and we’re made whole or reconciled to God.
12:20 We have peace with God only through what Christ has done on the cross. And so when we accept Jesus Christ as our savior, not being a member of a church necessarily, not, not giving, not doing good works, nothing else, but simply believing on the blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse us from sins, believing us that believing that Jesus Christ died for our sins on the cross at Calvary. When we simply believe on him and we’re saved, we’re born again.
12:42 We have the Holy Spirit living within us now. And our name is written down in the Lamb’s book of life, never to be blotted out, never to be erased one time forever. Now we’re healed for an eternity.
12:52 We’re healed forever. And Jesus Christ did that healing. So what, you know, what, what are we to do? Number one, be grateful.
13:04 Hebrews 13:5, let your conversation or your behavior be without covetousness and be content with such things as you have. For he has said, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.So we need to be grateful to God for what he did on the cross at Calvary.
13:19 We don’t need to covet or desire anything else. The Bible talks about getting to the point where we are wanting nothing because God has provided our need, our, what we need to survive, our clothes, our food, et cetera. And he has saved us for an eternity by what he did on the cross.
13:34 And when we go and say, God, but we need this extra, that is coveting. And the Bible’s saying, the Bible’s forbidding us to do that. That’s a sin.
13:42 We don’t need to do that because simply believing on Christ and being saved is enough. We’ve been healed by Christ.
13:49 We are to pray to God constantly with thanksgiving, letting our requests be known unto God, the peace of God, which passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
14:02 That’s Philippians 4:6-7. We pray. There’s so many other things we can do, but simply remember here today for time’s sake to wrap it up, that Jesus Christ died for your sins so that you could be saved.
14:11 And he is the great healer. And he healed you when you’re saved and you accept him as savior. He healed you here on earth and you have peace with God and he healed you for an eternity in heaven.
14:20 And he deserves all praise, honor, and glory. Thank you so much for listening today.
14:24 Tune in next time. Take care. God bless and amen.