Thinking about God, Jesus and The Big Questions

In the Bible, there were examples of Jesus healing on the Sabbath. The Pharisees of the time saw this as heretical because they had interpreted the keeping of the Sabbath to mean doing no work at all, even in the case of dealing with emergencies or healing. In this Bible verse, we will see an example of Jesus healing on the Sabbath and what ensued. We can see that the Pharisees clearly thought of this as Jesus trying to make an exception to the rules: He left that place and entered their synagogue; a man was there with a withered hand, and they asked him, ‘Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath?’ so that they might accuse him. He said to them, ‘Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath.’ Then he said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and it was restored, as sound as the other. But the Pharis...

This question came up from my son, after we had prayed to God for a sick family member in hospital to be healed and she was healed. I was rejoicing that God answered the prayer, when my son asked me the very good question "How do we know that God answered our prayer and that it wasn't just coincidence or the doctors doing a good job?" It's true that we may never absolutely know beyond a shadow of a doubt. Yet I believe that if our prayer is in line with God's wishes (whose wishes we know more and more by getting to know God more), and if the prayer was answered, then it was God doing the action.  I still noted that my son's question was a very good one, and my answer went like this: "Not everything in life we will know for certain. But we are always most likely to be correct when we credit God for all of the good things and blame Satan for all of the bad things." In any one particular situation we may not necessarily know for 100% sure beyond a shado...

These last few weeks at church we've been learning about healing, and how in order to be healed through faith we must never embrace sickness, for it is very dangerous. This means instead of saying " my headaches" we should say " the headaches". We also should not pray to God asking him to cure the sickness. We can do that, but it's not what will get us results. What will get us results is having authority for the healing in the name of Jesus. Just like the apostles, we too can cast out sickness from ourselves, but we should remember the healing happens only in the name of Jesus (i.e. not by our own name). It is the Holy Spirit that provides this healing. Jesus did not ask God to heal people, nor did the apostles. We need to use that same delegated power. The power is from God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit; we simply use that power from them to provide the healing. But it is much harder for healing to occur when the person has claimed (i.e. embraced) the...