Praying for the sick

James 5:14 (NIV)

14 Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord.

The Apostle James tells us if there is anyone who is sick that we should call the leaders of the church together, praying for them and anointing them with holy oil in the name of the Lord.

Longtime Atlanta radio personality Jenn Hobby received devastating news on Saturday.

"August 13, 2016," Hobby said on Facebook. "It is the day that Reese and our family started to beat cancer."

The day that forever changed our world. It is the day that Reese and our family started to beat cancer.

For the last two weeks, we’ve been in and out of the emergency room and doctors’ offices chasing the origin of numerous symptoms. We knew something wasn’t right with our gregarious 10-month old; we just didn’t have any answers.

Saturday morning, Reese had an MRI of her pelvic region. The initial scan would reveal a large mass. One hour after our lil angel went back for a routine MRI, the doctor would sit knee to knee with us and tell us Reese has cancer.

We were immediately admitted to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. As we walked on to this highly specialized cancer unit at arguably one of the best pediatric hospitals in the country, we felt comforted by the incredible staff and facility yet terrified by the reality of our circumstances. In an instant, we became part of a new family that shared one common theme – we are the chosen ones to beat cancer.

We are so grateful to have such an incredible network of family and friends. The love and support Reese and our family feel is beyond words. Thank you to everyone who has reached out and lifted our baby up in prayer. Please keep going.

She is strong and a fighter…We are going to beat this. Reese is going to be healthy again soon. We are surrounding her with love and light and laughter.

With determination and love, Jenn and Grant

Luke 18:15-17 People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

Let us all pray for Reese, Jenn, her husband Grant, her other daughter Lauren and the rest of the family. May the Lord touch Reese with His healing hands and give the doctors the wisdom to know what to do.

We belong to The Lord

Romans 14:8 (NIV)

8 If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.

Christ is the gain we aim at, living and dying. We live to glorify him in all the actions and affairs of life; we die, whether a natural or a violent death, to glorify him, and to go to be glorified with him. Christ is the centre, in which all the lines of life and death do meet. This is true Christianity, which makes Christ all in all. So that, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's, devoted to him, depending on him, designed and designing for him. [Matthew Henry Commentary]

Nicole Cliffe became a Christian on July 7, 2015, after what she called "a very pleasant adult life of firm atheism." "The idea of a benign deity who created and loved us," she writes, "was obviously nonsense, and all that awaited us beyond the grave was joyful oblivion … I had no untapped, unanswered yearnings." But here's how she describes what happened to her:

First, I was worried about my child. One time I said "Be with me" to an empty room. It was embarrassing. I didn't know why I said it, or to whom. I brushed it off, I moved on, the situation resolved itself, I didn't think about it again.

Second, I came across John Ortberg's CT obituary for philosopher Dallas Willard. John's daughters are dear friends, and they have always struck me as sweetly deluded in their evangelical faith, so I read the article. Somebody once asked Dallas if he believed in total depravity."I believe in sufficient depravity," he responded immediately. "I believe that every human being is sufficiently depraved that when we get to heaven, no one will be able to say, 'I merited this.'" A few minutes into reading the piece, I burst into tears. Later that day, I burst into tears again. And the next day. While brushing my teeth, while falling asleep, while in the shower, while feeding my kids, I would burst into tears.

She read more Christian books and every time she cried all over again. She emailed a Christian friend and asked if she could talk about Jesus. She writes:

But about an hour before our call, I knew: I believed in God. Worse, I was a Christian … I was crying constantly while thinking about Jesus because I had begun to believe that Jesus really was who he said he was … So when my friend called, I told her, awkwardly, that I wanted to have a relationship with God, and we prayed … Since then, I have been dunked by a pastor in the Pacific Ocean while shivering in a too-small wetsuit. I have sung "Be Thou My Vision" and celebrated Communion on a beach, while weirded-out Californians tiptoed around me. I go to church. I pray …

[Evan after accepting Christ] I continue to cry a lot. [I read a news article] that literally sank me to my knees at how broken this world is, and yet how stubbornly resilient and joyful we can be in the face of that brokenness. My Christian conversion has granted me no simplicity. It has complicated all of my relationships, changed how I feel about money, messed up my public persona … Obviously, it's been very beautiful. [Adapted from Nicole Cliffe, "How God Messed Up My Happy Atheist Life," Christianity Today (5-20-16)]

Delight in God's riches

Psalm 119:14 (NIV)

14 I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in great riches.

The psalmist reminds us that we should rejoice in God’s statues as one rejoices in the riches of the world. For God’s ways a greater than anything we can imagine.

Our treasure and our truth come from Scripture. Scripture is God's guidance for us on how to avoid Satan's harmful traps and to live God's blessed life. Rather than seeing God's Word as limiting, we need to see it as a gift of love and to value it more highly than riches.

I’m not sure I know anyone who has won the Publisher’s Clearing House, but when the show the commercials of someone showing up with a large check, the person opening the door is not only surprised by delighted.

We too should take delight in God’s word and enjoy the surprises waiting for us.

Taking in wisdom

Proverbs 9:9 (NKJV)

9 Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; Teach a just man, and he will increase in learning.

There are those who are willing to listen to those with wisdom and in doing so they become wiser. The person who listens carefully also gains in knowledge.

When I was 18, my father, a doctor, learned what it was like to be on the receiving end of medical care. He was diagnosed with cancer. His type was very survivable if caught early—which could only be known through surgery.

I sat next to him in the waiting room before the operation. It was odd seeing him in a hospital not striding with confidence into a patient's room or giving orders at a nurses' station like a battleship commander—something I had witnessed many times as a boy accompanying him on Saturday morning rounds. Instead he sat in silence with his shoulders rolled and hands shaking.

"You know doctors make the worst patients," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because we know too much. We know the thousands of things that can go wrong that most people never imagine."

Thankfully his cancer was caught early and he survived, but something important happened when the physician became the patient, when the expert became the examined. He gained something that can't be taught in medical school or acquired from years of practicing medicine. Cancer gave him empathy. I saw his compassion for his patients grow following his own health crisis. Doctors may make the worst patients, but patients make the best doctors.

[Skye Jethani, "Dreaded Exams," Leadership Journal (March 2014)]

Oh, when we take the time to learn the opportunities to learn from life and apply it in such a way that we become a comforter to others.

Waiting for God

Psalm 149:4 (NIV)

4 For the Lord takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with victory.

God is a king who rules by love and he takes pleasure in His people and want them to prosper and be in communion with him. He places crowns upon the heads to those who humble themselves before Him.

Charlie and Agnes are some of the meekest people I've ever known. Charlie is a bright, energetic, hard-working man who could have been successful at just about anything he set out to do. What he set out to do was mission work. He spent his entire career working with some of the lowliest people on earth—alcoholics on skid row. For many years he was director of Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago, and then in his retirement years he went to work for the McCauley Water Street Mission in New York. At a time in life when most people his age were playing golf or taking cruises, Charlie would commute every day to minister to homeless men on the streets of New York.

You don't get rich doing mission work your whole life, but every once in a while, Charlie and his wife, Agnes, would get to do something special. One year they invited me and my wife, Karen, to join them for a night on the town. Someone had given them tickets to hear Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall—velvet-covered seats in a private booth. It was a great night, and we all enjoyed it. As they drove us home that night, Karen and I were sitting in the back seat, and I was admiring Charlie and Agnes. They were all dressed up for their big night out. She was sitting close to him, like they were high school sweethearts. They struck me in that moment as two of the happiest people on earth. Just then I noticed a little plaque they had stuck to the dashboard of their old Chevy. It explained everything: "God always gives what's best to those who leave the choice to him."

Charlie and Agnes had long ago given up striving, fretting, and demanding things from God and from life. Instead they had surrendered to God their talents, their careers, their safety, their material needs, and even their retirement. Instead of chasing the abundant life, they waited for God bring it to them.

[Bryan Wilkerson, in his sermon "In God We Trust (Though We'd Rather Pay Cash),"]                               

Wisdom in God's Word

Psalm 119:130 (NIV)

130 The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.

God’s word provides wisdom for all people so they are able to understand the truth.

During Superbowl XXXVII, FedEx ran a commercial that spoofed the movie Castaway, in which Tom Hanks played a FedEx worker whose company plane went down, stranding him on a desert island for years. Looking like the bedraggled Hanks in the movie, the FedEx employee in the commercial goes up to the door of a suburban home, package in hand.

When the lady comes to the door, he explains that he survived five years on a deserted island, and during that whole time he kept this package in order to deliver it to her. She gives a simple, "Thank you."

But he is curious about what is in the package that he has been protecting for years. He says, "If I may ask, what was in that package after all?"

She opens it and shows him the contents, saying, "Oh, nothing really. Just a satellite telephone, a global positioning device, a compass, a water purifier, and some seeds."

Like the contents in this package, the resources for growth and strength are available for every Christian who will take advantage of them.

We just have to take the time to read God’s word so that we can apply it in our lives and not let it sit there idle without ever looking to see what wisdom we can find.

Doing the things we hear

James 1:22 (NIV)

22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.

If we rested in bare hearing, and never acting, it would never bring us to heaven.

At the 1993 annual meeting of The American Heart Association, 300,000 doctors, nurses, and researchers met in Atlanta to discuss, among other things, the importance a low fat diet plays in keeping our hearts healthy. Yet during meal times, they consumed fat-filled fast food—such as bacon cheeseburgers and fries—at about the same rate as people from other conventions. When one cardiologist was asked whether or not his partaking in high fat meals set a bad example, he replied, "Not me, because I took my name tag off."

{Boston Globe (11-10-93); Stephen Nordbye, Charlton, Massachusetts}

We can take off our name plates, but God and others still know who we are. They know if we are listening and doing the things we hear.