Fear Of Disease, Part 2

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. How many heavenly blessings does he say in Ephesians 1 that you have? All of them. Every one of them.

He said you have. And it's not just on the heavenly level, but what about on the temporal level? What about the life you've lived? What about the spouse you love? What about the children you've raised? What about the job God provided? The means in which you could live your life? All the blessings that you've had in your life. You see, when we are facing a disease, we don't think about any of those. We don't even care about any of those. So what ends up happening if we don't follow in the blessings?

No, we would not have peace, but we end up filling ourselves up with anger. We're not counting our blessings in any sense of the word, and we have to be careful there. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana. Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's word meets our world. Notice Hezekiah then in verses 10 to 15, he replies about what it was like when he was diagnosed. And it's an interesting thing.

The best reading I found of it is by Eugene Peterson. And Eugene Peterson wrote the message. The message is a paraphrase of the English Bible in order to make it easier for us to understand. And I love the way Peterson describes these verses 10 to 15.

And here's what he writes. He said, in the very prime of life, I have to leave. He said, whatever time I have left is spent in death's waiting room. No more glimpses of God in the land of the living. No more meetings with my neighbors.

No more rubbing shoulders with my friends. This body I inhabit is taken down, packed away like a camper's tent. Like a weaver, I have rolled up the carpet of my life as God cuts me free from the loom.

And he said, in a day's end, sweeps up the scraps and the pieces. I cry for help until morning. And like a lion, God pummels and pounds me, relentlessly finishing me off. I squawk like a doomed hen.

I moan like a dove. My eyes ache from looking up for help. Master, I'm in trouble. Get me out of this.

But what's the use? God himself gave me the word. He's done it to me. I can't sleep. I'm that upset. I'm that troubled. Very interesting response by Hezekiah, much like what we have. Praying my heart out, nothing's getting better and I'm upset.

I can't sleep. What a human response that is. We hate fatal prognosis. But remember, God has placed eternity in our heart and there is a reason. What's interesting about this to me is that Hezekiah then, once he realizes what has happened here, he shows a typical human response.

But I want you to see something else first. What is the process? How did God do this? You think it's going to be a miracle?

It's not verse 21. Now, Isaiah had said, let them take a cake of figs. That's a paste of figs. Let them take a cake of figs and apply it to the boil that he may recover. And that's what it did. The court physicians took a cake of figs, made it a paste and put it on the boil.

Now, you can imagine those conversations. Is this herbal medicine? Or were the court physicians saying, likely, wait a minute, I don't think this is going to work? You know, look, if we could save people's lives by rubbing fig paste on them, we would have been doing this for a long time. The question is, why didn't God just do a miracle?

That's what we always think. Why doesn't he do a miracle? Because this, in a sense, is a miracle.

Maybe C.S. Lewis said it best when he said, God seems to do nothing of himself, which he can possibly delegate to his creatures. That's the nature of God.

You see, that's the nature of God. I want you to think about that. What would a lot of people thought? What do you think the physicians thought? We did this. We did it. We put the paste on and he's healed. Today, we would have handled it differently. The physicians probably lanced the boil and then used antibiotics. Then we did it.

Well, who did it? You see, the question would be this. When you are healed, are you healed by God?

Are you healed by medical science? Here's the answer. Yes. That's the answer.

You are. You see, yes. Ultimately, it always belongs to God. See, you and I don't get to really see what's going on spiritually, so we keep thinking no matter what and we always think, boy, I've got to be so thankful for medical science and we should be. But God's always behind the scene that way. He breaks into praise. Look at verse 17. He breaks into praise and he says, Lo, he said, For my own welfare, I had great bitterness. It is you who has kept my soul from the pit of nothingness. You have cast all my sins behind your back. Also down in verse 20, he said, The Lord will surely save me. So he will play.

So we will play my songs on stringed instruments all the days of our life in the house of the Lord. Just like us. He's now thankful, grateful and praising.

Now, you guys say it differently. Isn't Jesus? That's what you say, and I'm not denying he's not good, but it is a little ironic that you always say he's good when you get what you want. When you get what you want, you say he's good. If you don't get what you want, very few of you say he's good.

Now, he's either good or he's not good. You see how this works? You see, you have to think about it in a different way. He just goes into this praise. And it's an interesting thing when you think about it.

Everything seems to be going so well for him. But I want you to go with me now to Second Chronicles, 32, Second Chronicles, 32. Verse 25, the writer of the Chronicles picks up the story. In verse 25 of Second Chronicles, 32, it says this.

This is the aftermath. But Hezekiah gave no return for the benefit he received because his heart was proud. Therefore, wrath came on him and on Judah and Jerusalem. He forgot all about God.

Just like we do. His near death, humility and by the way, when you're near death, there's a lot of humility there. His near death, humility passed. And now he's filled with pride. When the heat died down, so did his passion for God.

And his pride took over. Isaiah 39 tells us that what he ended up doing out of his pride, he became extremely wealthy. When the Babylonian envoy was in Jerusalem, he decided to take him to the Treasury. Now you got to understand, Babylon is conquering everything in the world at that time and they end up in Babylonian captivity. He brings them all to the Treasury and he says, look at my stuff.

Look at all the wealth that I have. That's not really a wise thing to do to the Babylonians. They come in, took all the stuff, ransacked the city. You see, but he did it out of his pride. That's what he ended up doing. And the whole nation ended up paying for it.

And it even got worse. You see, Hezekiah led the whole nation into apostasy. And then his son took over.

Manasseh. The worst king ever in Judah. He led him in total apostasy. He desecrated the temple. He even approved that sacrifice of children to pagan idols.

The whole nation had been disrupted and Hezekiah led the charge with his own pride after he was healed. Now, the reason I'm saying that Psalm 106 15 says this. He gave them their request.

But sent leanness into their soul. In other words, I'm saying this. Thank God. For unanswered prayer. You see, you've got to be really careful if you get everything you pray for, you will wreck your life. You see, you and I don't have those answers. Sometimes God would just say no. And he's just as good saying no as he is saying yes. You see, and you've got to be careful with this.

So Hezekiah got what he wanted, but the consequences of it all were terrible, not just for him and his son, but for the whole nation of people. So the question comes down to how should we respond? Whenever we're facing serious disease. The first thing I want to say is simply this. Keep your thinking clear.

This is hard, by the way. Keep your thinking clear. What ends up happening when you get a terrible diagnosis is you begin to jump on a merry-go-round of negative thoughts. You can't stop.

You can't stop. You just get on this merry-go-round, round and round you go. You wake up at two o'clock in the morning, round and round you go. All you think about are the negative thoughts of the prognosis. You see, you do it over and over and over again.

And sometimes you even expand it. You start the what-ifs things. What if it's even worse than He said? What if I feel something else here? What if? You see how this works? And what does that do for you? It doesn't do anything for your health, but I will tell you this, it robs you of your peace completely. Now, the Scripture says you are to take every thought captive to Christ.

That's interesting. Why? Because left to yourself, you're going to be in trouble. If your thought life revolves around your circumstances when you're facing a fatal disease, your thought life is going to be there. Remember in Philippians, Paul said that you needed to be anxious for nothing? Don't be anxious. Don't be fearful.

He said, here's what I want you to do. Focus your thinking on whatever is good, whatever is true, whatever is right. In other words, I've got a choice of how I think. Do I think about the circumstances that I might be facing or do I think about the promises of God that He's made to me?

And if you're honest with yourself, you know what you end up doing. We end up thinking constantly about the potential of the circumstances in which we face, and it robs us of any kind of peace at all that we have. Missionary Isabelle Kuhn was fighting cancer. This is some time ago, and she wrote a book called In the Arena, and she faced a fatal cancer. And she said this. She said, I had to refuse to allow my imagination to play with my future. That future, I believed, is ordered by God, and no man can guess it. For me to let myself imagine how or when the end would come was not only unprofitable.

It was definitely harmful. So I had to bring my thoughts into captivity that I may not dishonor my Lord. You clearly have to have thinking. You have to think about this because we're all going to face it. Secondly, count your blessings. It's a great time to count your blessings. In Ephesians Chapter 1, Paul said that you and I are blessed with heavenly blessings. How many heavenly blessings does he say in Ephesians 1 that you have? All of them. Every one of them.

Every one of them, he said you have. And it's not just on the heavenly level, but what about on the temporal level? What about the life you've lived? What about the spouse you love? What about the children you've raised? What about the job God provided, the means in which you could live your life? All of the blessings that you've had in your life. You see, when we are facing a disease, we don't think about any of those.

We don't even care about any of those. And so what ends up happening if we don't follow in the blessings, not only do we not have peace, but we end up filling ourselves up with anger. You see, we're not counting our blessings in any sense of the word, and we have to be careful there. Ed Dobson was the pastor of Calvary Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he got a diagnosis that none of us wish we had. He was diagnosed with ALS, an extremely difficult, debilitating disease. And he said, in the early stages, this is what I did. In the midst of my disease, I began blessing God for all the gifts of my life.

I used this official formula. I learned to do it in Hebrew, and I blessed God for each day. I blessed God for the ability to shower and clothe myself. I blessed God for the ability to button buttons. I blessed God for the ability to lift the food to my mouth even though I can no longer do it with my right hand. I blessed God for everything, and he says, I can do and for every gift that he has ever given me. And he's facing what you and I know with ALS to be in a very, very difficult diagnosis. Thomas Watson, the great Puritan preacher, said, The sick bed often teaches us much more than a sermon.

Boy, is that true. What's the third thing we can do? Turn with me to Ephesians chapter 2. Ephesians chapter 2. Three of the great verses in all the Pauline epistles, 8, 9, and 10. He can't be much clearer than he is in these verses, and yet so many in Christendom have missed it. In 2.80, he says this, For by grace you have been saved.

Can't be much clearer than that, can you? The unmerited favor of God, the gift of God. For by grace you have been saved through faith, not of yourselves. It's the gift of God.

Salvation is the gift of God. He said it's not a result of works so that no one can boast. No one can boast. I earned this. I did something. I showed up in church. I genuflexed. I helped the poor.

No one can boast. And then he says this, For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. We were saved for good works. And I want to say this, as long as you're here, you can do good works. Continue the work.

Get your thinking clear. Count your blessings, but continue your work. If you can think, you can pray.

You see, you can pray. You still have ministry. And the reason I know you still have ministry is you're still here. Whenever it's time for you to have no more ministry, God will take you home. But as long as you're here, you can have ministry. And he says, you've got to continue in the work.

We have his tendency to get victimized by this. And we think I can't do anything anymore. But I can.

That's what his point is. Again, Isabel Kuhn was dying, and she said this. She said, Sound health and a normal life I cannot have while on this platform. Therefore, I accept the fact and I don't fret about it anymore.

She passed away on March 20th, 1957, and wrote this. Facing the end of one's earthly pilgrimage is not a melancholy thing for me as a Christian. It's like a preparation for the most exciting journey of all. And so the platform of this dreaded disease has become a springboard for me into heaven. What a difference. You see, it wasn't like she got alleviated from the disease, but notice her perspective.

She just continued to minister to people. Think of how horrible it would be to be a teenage girl and be a quadriplegic. Your whole life ahead of you. And then think of what someone like Joni Eareckson Tada has done with that life. Just imagine what she's done with that life.

Nothing changed. From your and I point of view, so many people would just quit. I'm done.

I have nothing to offer anybody, and I'm finished. And she wasn't. And to our own embarrassment, she can sing, she can paint.

You know, I mean really well. You know, it's amazing how many people she has inspired because she continued to work. And we all need to do that. And then lastly, Romans Chapter eight, verse 18. Romans 818.

The apostle Paul. He knows suffering. He knows disease. Now, remember, he had a horrible disease. The only and he had treated the Lord three times to remove it with all the other problems that he had. And God told him, no.

No, I'm not going to remove it. You're going to live with this. So I couldn't imagine how terrible would have been for Paul to entreat the Lord three different times. But that's only part of his suffering.

Here's what he says in verse 18 for I consider that the sufferings of this present age are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is revealed to us. Consider your future. Just consider your future. The worst thing that can happen to you.

Can't happen to you. You see, do you know what it means to be a child of God? You're heaven bound.

That's a surety. He's prepared a place for you. It's a place of no more sorrow, no more tears, no more pain.

It's a place where you get a resurrected body. You see, it's all bliss. He said, you have to consider that. He said, this present sufferings, I can't compare with what's coming my way. He considers his future and we have a tendency not to do that.

We don't think about it at all. No wonder the Apostle Paul said to live is Christ. And to die is gain. I would pray that you could live that way. I would pray that that was your perspective to live is Christ to die is gain.

Because it's true. Keep your thinking clear, count your blessings, continue your work, and consider your future. A Puritan preacher once wrote this, Sickness, when sanctified, teaches us four things, the vanity of the world, the vileness of sin, the helplessness of man, and the preciousness of Christ.

That fourth thing eliminates the other three. Oh, death, where is your sting? To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. You see, these are all God's assurances to you and me. The final thing I'll say this morning are the words of David Jeremiah. I love what he wrote.

He said this. We have a great physician who raised his own son from the dead, leaving behind an empty tomb. We have a heavenly home with welcoming doors open wide. We have a sympathetic Savior who never imparts a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power and love and a sound mind. To understand that is to enjoy a spiritual health that overcomes the darkest days that any disease could ever inflict on any of us.

That would be my prayer. You see, we're all going to eventually face it. It's not a matter of if you face it.

It's a matter of what's your perspective when you face it. You see, will that work your way? Will you think clearly? Will you count your blessings? Will you continue your work?

And will you consider your future? And if you do, I don't know if you'll be healed of the disease, but I know this. You'll have peace and you'll have joy.

Let's pray. Father, probably no sermon from the Word of God is more practical than this because virtually all of us will face this. And in its magnitude, Father, of the effect that it can have on us, I pray that we would all be prepared.

We are fallen people living on a cursed planet and disease is part of the curse. And nothing's going to change that till there's a new heaven and a new earth. Father, we'll come to you in prayer and we realize that you can do anything and that any miracle is possible with you if you so decide. But even if you don't, it should not affect our peace and our joy.

As we live out these days on this earth. Father, may we glorify you in the diseases of our life as we glorify you with the rest of our life. We pray this because of your incredible grace.

In Christ's name, amen. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online. At that website, you will find a link to our website at oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.

At that website, you will find not only today's broadcast but also many of our previous audio programs as well. At Fellowship in the Word, we are thankful for those who financially support our ministry and make this broadcast possible. We ask all of our listeners to prayerfully consider how you might help this radio ministry continue its broadcast on this radio station by supporting us monthly or with just a one-time gift. Support for our ministry can be sent to Fellowship in the Word 4600 Clearview Parkway, Metairie, Louisiana 7006. If you would be interested in hearing today's message in its original format, that is as a sermon that Pastor Bill delivered during a Sunday morning service at Fellowship Bible Church, then you should visit our website, fbcnola.org.

That's fbcnola.org. At our website, you will find hundreds of Pastor Bill's sermons. You can browse through our sermon archives to find the sermon series you are looking for or you can search by title. Once you find the message you are looking for, you can listen online or if you prefer, you can download the sermon and listen at your own convenience. And remember, you can do all of this absolutely free of charge. Once again, our website is fbcnola.org. For Pastor Bill Gebhardt, I'm Jason Gebhardt thanking you for listening to Fellowship in the Word.