SCRIPTURE: Mark 1:29-34
Sickness healed, demons driven out and silenced.
How did Jesus heal the sick, and what are demons, and how were they affecting people?
I’ve dealt with sickness, and I’ve dealt with demons, but I am not sure how it all works.
People who deny the spiritual reject both the healing of sickness and the reality of demons.
And yet people still experience miracles, and demons continue to impact our world, whether believed in or not.
Long after philosophers declared that God was dead, God and the spiritual remain alive and well in our world.
And we are still looking for a way to deal with sickness, and with non-physical (spiritual) illness.
Reductionism (reducing our world to material, non-spiritual reality) has failed, and people are once again looking to God (the spiritual) for help and hope and healing.
God has stepped into our world to offer help and hope and healing, and Jesus remains the key to it all.
We must gather at His door, we must bring our physical and spiritual troubles to Him.
What do you sense the Lord saying to you?
PRAYER
Lord, I need You, physically and spiritually. Please show Your healing power today so that people will know You are the way, the truth and the life!
Jesus follower
trying to find His way
Jesus went to hang out at Simon and Andrew’s house. Simon’s mother in law had a fever and was staying in bed until it passed. Jesus came by and healed her. What is significant about this is that Jesus doesn’t only heal the big sicknesses, as we see a few verses later, but he also cares about little things. I also see that Simon and Andrew and Simon’s mother in law all were in the same house. I am not sure how their culture worked, but it sounds like perhaps they all lived together in order to support their expenses. This could explain how Simon and Andrew could drop everything in terms of making a living, and follow Jesus.
The Sabbath would have ended at sunset. People brought the sick to Jesus after the Sabbath was over in order to have them healed. I guess Jesus had already healed a few people by this time. Otherwise, how would they know that there was going to be a healing service after the Sabbath? The whole town knew to gather at the door. It would have been a great evening.
The demons were not allowed to speak, because they knew who he was. Jesus was into keeping a low profile. To have it said that He was the Son of God, as the man earlier in the day said, was not part of the plan of his revelation of himself. Even though this was true, He knew that people would not understand, and would have a hard time with this truth. Revealing his deity was one of the reasons he was later crucified.
I pray that God will let me see his greatness in his care for things that are big for us, as well as for the small things. I pray that I will grasp his deity, and how that is reflected in my life.
Observations:
Jesus healed the mother-in-law of Simon and she began to serve Him. And then after sunset, many people brought the sick to Jesus and He healed them. This mysterious ‘healer’ was not know by the people but the evil spirits knew who Jesus was.
All this happened after sunset set. Those words stood out for me. Why? The beauty and majesty of the sunset. The perfect ending of a day in His presence. Just the ‘magic’ of the sunset – awesome! God’s presence: God’s grace. And I stand in awesome wonder – and marvel at this His creation.
Applications:
Jesus heals. The demons knew Who He was but the people? They were learning. I am still learning of His presence each day anew – in the sunsets of each day, in the sunrise of this day He has created, in seeing His presence as I walk with Him just as His followers did then – seeing His presence, His creativity, His power in the presence of each day. And I must speak of that each and every day. I serve an awesome God.
Prayer:
Help me this day Lord to see your mighty hand at work within Your creation.
Not what these hands have done
can save this guilty soul,
not what this toiling flesh has borne
can make my spirit whole.
Not what I feel or do
can give me peace with God;
not all my prayers, and sighs, and tears
can bear my aweful load.
Thy work alone, O Christ,
can ease this weight of sin;
Thy blood alone, O Lamb of God,
can give me peace within.
Thy love to me, O God,
not mine, O Lord, to Thee,
can rid me of this dark unrest,
and set my spirit free.
Thy grace alone, O God,
to me can pardon speak;
Thy power alone, O Son of God,
can this sore bondage break.
I bless the Christ of God,
I rest on love divine,
and with unfaltering lip and heart,
I call this Saviour mine.