Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. And hospitals are certainly not fun places. I mean, that's a place of needles and tubes, monitors and pills and bedpans. None of us really like that experience. We all dislike it at a certain level. I think we all fear diseases. And yet each one of us, if we're not facing it now, will likely face it in the future. Disease is inevitable.
The key is, how do we respond to it? You see, there's a lot in the Bible about diseases. I didn't think the average believer knows that. 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. This past week, I was once again reminded of one of the great fears that all of us seem to have as we live out our lives on this planet. You see, we were we were praying for an accurate diagnosis for someone in the body that could be facing a very serious disease.
Fortunately, they received good news and a good diagnosis. But as a pastor, I have been with many people throughout all these years who find themselves filled with fear. At the prospect of a serious disease in their life. Fear is almost always the very first reaction we have when we face something that is potentially fatal. David Jeremiah, who is a famous pastor internationally, a DTS grad, wrote a book called When Your World Falls Apart, and in it he was describing his own battle with stage four large cell lymphoma.
The prognosis for him is that it would be fatal. And Jeremiah writes this. He said, So was I afraid? Absolutely. I was desperately afraid.
There's no denying that. Was I afraid to die? No, I'm not afraid to leave this life, although I'm not eager to do so either. He said, A good bit of my fear focused on losing precious years of the people I love. Some of it was simply fear about the pain.
Some of it was about the unknown. How could you respond to the news that you were suffering from possibly a fatal disease? He said, Imagine the thoughts and feelings that might flood your heart at such a time.
And then you'll know the same things that I was experiencing. He goes on in that book and says that cancer is one of those subjects that you can't comprehend secondhand. Potentially fatal diseases become a host for fear in our lives. And sadly, each one of us are going to spend a certain portion of our lives. Very likely with a fatal disease.
The reason for that, I think, is. We weren't designed for fatal diseases. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes that God has placed eternity in our hearts. Fatal disease to us is a termination of life. And so it's not natural for us. And we have this tendency to fear over it. And the fear can become extremely powerful in our lives. We start imagining things. I think I feel a tightness in my chest.
I think there's a lump somewhere where there shouldn't be a lump. And we start just thinking in our head because of our fears about the disease. And usually death doesn't do its work suddenly.
It does it in increments, slowly but surely. The outer man is decaying, as the apostle Paul said. The diversity of the human body allows many different points of entry for the grim reaper. In our lives, according to the Center of Disease Control, the leading causes of death in America in descending order are heart disease, then cancer, respiratory diseases, Alzheimer's, diabetes, kidney disease and pneumonia. And it's not just an emotional toll.
In America, we're spending nearly three trillion dollars a year trying to stop diseases from happening to us. The word disease is an interesting word. It's dis and ease. And all that it means is not easy. That's what the word disease means.
Not easy or not at ease. And that's exactly what it makes us. It disrupts our lives. We end up becoming dependent on a plethora of medications. You see them being advertised on TV constantly, no matter what you're facing. But by the way, did you ever notice the people that are on the advertisement and on the commercials are always happy, healthy people?
They just always, they really look great. And they keep telling you what a great thing this medical breakthrough will be or this medication will be. And then when you're done seeing those people, then and only then there's a man that comes on and he sounds like an auctioneer. And he's going as fast as he possibly can to tell you all the possible side effects to your disease. And hospitals are certainly not fun places. I mean, that's a place of needles and tubes, monitors and pills and bedpans.
None of us really like that experience. We all dislike and at a certain level I think we all fear diseases. And yet each one of us, if we're not facing it now, will likely face it in the future. Disease is inevitable.
The key is how do we respond to it? You see, there's a lot in the Bible about diseases. I didn't think the average believer knows that. But the Bible says a lot about diseases in the Bible. Although I will say this, I've never heard a sermon series on diseases.
You know, it's rather not talk about it. Paul had a thorn in the flesh. We're not sure exactly what that was. Was it an eye disease of some sort?
Migraines, there's been several people make conjecture over that. Job find himself at the end of his at the end of his suffering, sitting on an ash heap out with boils all over his body on the city dump, scraping the sores. Lazarus, a friend of Jesus in John 11, had a terminal illness. In Mark five, you have the woman with the issue of blood. In Second Kings five, you have Naaman and his leprosy. King David talked about the evil disease that clung to him in Psalm 41.
King Asa had a foot disease. King Jeroboam had a disease in his intestines in Second Chronicles 21. Almost all the people in the Galilean area, according to Matthew Chapter four, said had all kinds of sicknesses and kinds of diseases. Epaphroditus was sick, sick almost to death in Philippians Chapter two.
And Dorcas, she fell sick and died and was raised from the dead by Peter. But I want to look at one particular story about disease, and I'd like you to open your Bibles first to Second Kings 20. We'll look at a couple of verses then and move on. This disease is so prevalent, it's used three different times in the Old Testament.
The story is repeated three times, as though it's very important for us to understand it. It's a disease that came upon a fatal disease that came upon Hezekiah. Hezekiah is a king of Judah. He's one of the great kings for most of the time in Judah.
He's considered to be a tremendous king. He he actually drove out all of the idol worship. He restored the temple.
He restored the function of the priesthood. He did a lot of really neat things. The whole country was prospering under him.
He was twenty five years old when he took over. It's an amazing story of a really neat young man. The whole nation was prospering, according to Second Chronicles 31. It said Hezekiah did that was with right and good and true before the Lord is God. And in every work that he began in the service of the house of God, in the law and in the commandment to seek his God, he did it with all his heart. And so he and the nation prospered. These are the good times, good times for him, good times for the nation.
Everything is happening and doing well. And then after about 15 years of his reign, something happened. Verse one, Chapter 20.
In those days, Hezekiah became mortally ill and Isaiah, the prophet, the son of Amos, he said, came to him and said, Thus says the Lord, set your house in order. You shall die and not live. Now, imagine that.
I mean, just imagine what that would have felt like. And by the way, this is much worse than a doctor telling you that. This is a prophet telling you that.
OK, what's that mean? The prophet knows the future. God tells the prophet the future and says, Go tell Hezekiah he's a dead man walking. So you've got to imagine how would you respond to something like that?
It's not a good prognosis at all. Well, he turned his face to the wall and he prayed to the Lord. And he said, Remember now, O Lord, I beseech you how I have walked before you in truth and with a whole heart and have done what is good in your sight. And Hezekiah wept bitterly. Doesn't that sound just like you? Or me? If you get news like that, what happens first? Weeping, a time to mourn and prayer.
You see, that's what happens to all of us. He weeps and he prays. Now, I want you to go with me to Isaiah 38 and pick up the story again. Isaiah 38, this time from the prophet's point of view.
Isaiah 38 sounds exactly like the passage in Second Kings when it begins. He said, In those days, Hezekiah became mortal to you. Isaiah, the prophet, the son of Amos, came to him and said to him, Thus says the Lord, set your house in order.
You shall die and not live. And then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and he prayed to the Lord. He said, Remember now, O Lord, I beseech you how I have walked before you in truth and in the whole heart and have done what is good in your sight.
And Hezekiah wept bitterly. What I want you to see in Isaiah, though, is notice what his prayer is. Listen again.
Remember now, O Lord, I beseech you how I have walked before you in truth and with a whole heart and have done what is good in your sight. Let me paraphrase it. You owe me.
That's what he's saying. You owe me. I mean, I am a good man. I turned the whole nation around. I'm a good king. I'm a faithful guy. You owe me. That's a very natural response when you know somebody has a long future ahead of them and they're serving the Lord.
We use all those terms, right? He went, she went way too early. If I were God, they would still be alive. If I'm looking for somebody who's going to go to heaven, I wouldn't be that person. God's using that person. Why would God want that person to go to heaven? You see, when that person is so useful on earth, that's what Hezekiah is saying. You see, he said, Lord. Now, on a certain level, it seems like a pretty selfish prayer. You see, it seems as though he's got a shallow, selfish prayer.
And you could just write it off, but wait till you see what the answer is. Verse four. Then the word of the Lord came to Isaiah, saying, Go and say to Hezekiah, Thus says the Lord, the God of your father David, I have heard your prayer. I have seen your tears. Behold, I had 15 years to your life. Ah. That's what we want, right?
I mean, that's what we want. And I know people look, can I apply that the Hezekiah prayer to me? I've known people that have. I actually had a man told me he's just praying for 15 more years. Because it's biblical. You see, it's biblical right there. You want 15 years?
God will give you 15 years. Well, first of all, it is biblical. Secondly, it's the only time in Scripture that that happened.
So I don't know if I want to make a pattern out of that necessarily. But I think a more important question here is, because shocking as this answer is, is that why in the world that God answer that? You see, why in the world did God ever answer that? It's all there in verse five, but we don't see it. He said, Thus says the Lord God of your father who? David. Ah, there is the reason for the answer. You see, you don't know it when you look at it this way.
You say, what do you mean? So it's Father David. OK, do you know this about David? Did God make a Davidic covenant with David?
Yes. And what do you tell David? Messiah is coming through you.
The Messiah, the hope of the world, our saviors coming through David. Now, what's interesting about that is Hezekiah. Has a son named Manasseh. And Manasseh, the scriptures tell us, became king when he was 12. When he was 12 years old, he became king. Now, how many years did Hezekiah get?
15. So we know something here. This has a lot to do with the offspring, so much so, by the way. That when you get to Matthew Chapter one and you read the genealogy to Jesus Christ, who is called a Matthew one, the son of David in that genealogy.
Guess who's there? Hezekiah and Manasseh are both part of the lineage to Jesus Christ. So why did God say yes? You see, why did he say yes? Because he prayed for it and he got it. No, because it was for God's glory and God's plan. You see, it was always going to be that it's always for God's glory and for God's plan. That's why he said yes.
That's why it works from that point of view. Notice Hezekiah then in verses 10 to 15. He replies and 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 of 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 into 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's 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. 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 or 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 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've got to say it differently. Isn't Jesus? That's what you say. 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 2 Chronicles 32. 2 Chronicles 32. Verse 25. The writer of the Chronicles picks up the story. In verse 25 of 2 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 the 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. 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. ... ...
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