The Impact of The Story on Me
My LifeGroup sat on picnic blankets this week and talked about Jesus’ ministry. How Jesus spent with people and how they saw His power in healings and demonic deliverances. As we read and talked, our faces came alight with hope and faith in a powerful God! Then our prayer time felt like a sad contrast as we prayed for what seem like the inevitable deaths of a marriage, a young mom, and a young boy. How do we hold these things together?
That’s a huge question for a blog post. It’s a huge question for a LifeGroup to tackle in an afternoon. But it’s a question God welcomes us to ask. In fact, people asked it of Jesus at the end of His life. “If you are the Son of God, why don’t you just come off the cross? Why don’t you just send your angels to stop this death from happening?” (paraphrased from Matthew 27:40-42) In other words, why don’t you just use your power now?
Reading The Story reminds me that suffering will happen. Jesus, although God himself, did not choose to avoid suffering during His time on earth. People around him suffered and died. He suffered and died.
AND
He rose. And people around Him rose and were healed. And so while in this world we will have trouble, Jesus says, “Take heart. I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). And in that same verse, Jesus says that he told us that suffering would come, “So that in me you may have peace.”
Suffering and death. Overcoming and resurrection. Only in Jesus are both of these things held together. Only in Jesus will we find peace as an answer to the suffering we experience. And The Story this week reminds us that Jesus came to bring the power of resurrection–life over death–into our world. So as I plead for life and health and restored marriages, I’m reminded that our God, Jesus, is the God who heals. Only He brings life after death.
The challenge at the end of our LifeGroup was this: When might you be able to tell one of these stories of Jesus’ healing this week? I told the story where the woman who’s been bleeding reaches out to touch Jesus and is healed to a woman who’s been told she has weeks or months to live. I prayed the story of Jesus bringing Jarius’ daughter brought back to life over a young boy who died this week. I am so desperate to see Jesus’ healing power brought into our world today.
Will you join me in praying for Jesus to make His healing power known in the lives of your friends and family this week? Will you pray in hope of the resurrection with me for families who are grieving this week? And will you please take an open opportunity to share a story of Jesus this weekend? We all know people who need peace. And it is in Jesus alone that even in suffering we may have peace.
Pastor Megan