This transcript was generated by whisper.ai. I want to welcome you to day five of week five of our look through first and second Kings. We're in second Kings five today, so all the fives are lining up. And in this chapter, we looked at yesterday, the story of Naaman, we looked at the personal side of it, how I need to admit I have a need, go to God with that need, trust God for the meaning of that need in order to see the needs of my life met. The next few days, the last day of this week, first day of next week, I want to look at what this story teaches us about healing, the miracle of healing, because healing is one of the most misunderstood and actually abused of all of God's miracles. I'm not going to skip over it because what we learn here from the prophet Elisha about how you and I are involved in the miracle of healing, how God works the miracle of healing, warnings about the miracle of healing are important for all of us to understand, for what God wants to do in our lives and how to help other people who are hurting and asking God for healing in their lives. Why would God heal this person and why would he not heal that person? Why does he answer this prayer and not answer that prayer? And why does he heal in this circumstance and not that circumstance? And why is it that sometimes this what looks like a spectacular circumstance of healing, you find out was just sort of a show, a thing that was put on. In this very quiet prayer, you find out God was working in spectacular ways. We're going to walk through this story and learn some things about healing. The wrong perspective on healing can really get your spiritual thinking out of whack. The right perspective can really get your trust in God deepened. The wrong perspective, well, let me tell you a couple of wrong perspectives about healing before we get into this story again. One of the wrong perspectives is this phrase you hear, you will be healed if only you have enough faith. That's abuse actually, spiritual abuse. You're talking to somebody who is hurting and you're saying the reason you're still hurting is you don't have enough faith in God. The truth of the matter is, you can read the stories of healing in the scripture, God often used just a mustard seed of faith to heal someone, a very small amount of faith. It's not the amount of faith that you have, it's God who you're having faith in. And this feeling, this phrase, if you had enough faith is just a way for somebody who has guaranteed a healing to say, well, the reason it didn't happen isn't because my guarantee was wrong, it's because there's something wrong with you. No, there's something wrong with the person who guaranteed it. They're not God, they can't guarantee it. Only God can guarantee it. And when healing happens, it's because of the greatness of God, not the size of my faith. That's a wrong perspective. Another wrong perspective is that we are healed so that we would never have to face pain in this life. There's this perspective that somehow as a follower of Jesus, I get in this life what I'm only going to get in heaven. I'm going to get a life on this earth that's totally free of pain. Christianity is not a life without pain. I remember when I was a kid, seven or eight years old, my mom used to take me to the dentist. I hated going to the dentist. And the dentist had this sign in the dentist office that said, painless dentist upstairs with this arrow that was going upstairs. Well, it was a one story building. There was no upstairs. And it was obviously a joke. There was no such thing that dentists are saying as a painless dentist. If you go to a dentist office, especially in those days, ancient days when I was seven or eight, you're going to have some pain when they drill on you. It's just going to happen. What about this life that we live? Even as a follower of Jesus, you're going to have some pain in this life. Ask James, first martyr. Ask Paul, the apostle. Ask Jesus. James put to death with the sword the beatings of Paul, the cross of Christ. Commitment to Christ does not guarantee painless living. The truth of the matter is, just think about this logically, you might be healed a thousand times, but that doesn't change the fact that someday you're going to face death. Unless you're here for the rapture, you're going to face death and there's pain in death. But on the other side of that is the glory of heaven. So this attitude that somehow I'm going to pray that I never have to face any pain in this world is a ridiculous attitude. But that does not mean that there are not times when God does want to heal you of a practical hurt that you are facing in life. It might be emotional, it might be relational, it might be physical. The right perspective on healing is God heals in those times because he cares. You see this every time Jesus heals someone in his ministry. The right perspective is to realize that God heals to bring glory to himself. Really it's more about God than about you when he heals. He's healing to bring glory to himself. And the right perspective is that God heals to enable us to serve. There's something that he wants us to do. And so he gives us extra years on this planet. This story of Naaman, as we get into it more deeply, it gives us a biblical perspective. Some of the keys in a biblical perspective on healing. And I just want you to understand what this story brings out for us. We're going to look at four or five truths these next few days together. First truth is healing grows out of a sensitivity to needs. God's healing grows out of a sensitivity to needs. Naaman was healed because there were people in his life who were sensitive to the needs in his life. The slave girl who gave a message of hope, the king of Aram who gave him the permission to go, Elisha who reached out to Naaman in his need, and Naaman's servant. Remember who said if he told you to do some great thing, wouldn't you have done it? Who helped Naaman to recognize his need. God is the one who did the healing, but people are involved all along the way. People who are sensitive to the need are involved all along the way. To be faithful and available to what God wants to do in healing hurts. You and I have to be sensitive to the needs that are around us. Not just the needs in my life, but the needs that are around us. And the principle here is that God uses others in your life to get you to places of healing. And he will use you in other people's lives to get them to places of healing. It's not like this solo experience, just you and God. No, he involves other people. You might remember the familiar story in the New Testament of the four men who brought the paralytic to Jesus on the mat. He had friends who got him to the place of healing. That's one of the principles of how God works in healing in our lives. So it's not as if we don't need to care about people because God might heal them. No, the only way healing is going to happen is because you and I care about people. A second principle of healing that you and I learned from this story of Naaman is that healing grows out of an expression of faith. It's always on the other side, as all miracles are on the other side of our expression of faith. So as we read yesterday, Naaman took these positive steps of faith. It was from the very beginning. First he went to Israel. That was his first positive step of faith. Naaman had begun to have a faith that determined where he went and the decisions that he made. When faith starts to manage your life like that, you find yourself in different places than you would have been talking to different people than you would have talked to. Then you're beginning to put yourself in a place where God can do a work of healing. And again, as I'm talking about healing, we focused on spiritual healing yesterday. Think about the emotional, the relational, the physical healings that we need in our lives. When you begin to say, "God, where do you need me to be? Who do I need to talk to? " God might say, "You need to go to Celebrate Recovery. " God might say, "You need to be in this church. " God might say, "You need to be at this family event. I don't want to go to that family event. Nobody likes me anymore in the family. I don't like this person. " You want healing, then you put yourself in that place where sometimes you don't want to be. Naaman's going to the kingdom of one of his enemies. They were attacking each other sometimes. He's trusting this group of people who he thought had the wrong gods. But because he heard this advice and he trusted it, he took this step of faith. And then, the greatest step of faith, Naaman had to wash in the Jordan. This is the faith that trusted God alone. He didn't trust in some great thing that the prophet would do. He just dipped himself in the water seven times. He wasn't trusting in some physical evidence. He was trusting in the Almighty God. He was challenged to trust beyond what the evidence warranted, merely on the basis of the fact that God was involved. That's what it means to trust him. Now, there's a third principle in what we just read of healing in these verses, and that is healing does not require a big show. It doesn't require some spectacular show. Verse 10, remember, we read yesterday, "Elisha sent a messenger to say to him, 'Go and wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you'll be cleansed. '" Healing doesn't require a big show. It just requires faith. In fact, if you look at the healings of Jesus, most of them were very personal events. Him talking to one person. A few times, a group of people saw, but most of the time, it was a very private, personal moment. Naaman almost wasn't healed, as we saw yesterday, because of this. He was expecting something spectacular, more spectacular than any of the cures that he tried. Wash in the Jordan River. The Jordan River is far from spectacular. It looks more like a muddy channel than a mighty river. So you put yourself in Naaman's place, and you learn this important lesson about healing. It doesn't require a big show. It's an important lesson to learn in the world today. It bothers me to see healing made into a prime time spectacular. To get the ratings, the healing has to happen at this time, so that we can have it on camera, so everybody can see, so our ratings can go up. You don't have to go on national TV to get healed. We have to learn that healing is a powerful miracle, yet it is one that is often worked in quiet moments, like a family's prayer, or in a hospital emergency room, or in a small group praying together in a living room. That's God's favorite way to work this miracle. You can see it again and again, and again and again in scripture. If you think that it requires a big show, the big show is for us, to get us noticed. And as we're going to see this next week, really, we're not the ones that are supposed to be noticed at all in the healing. It's all about him. But we'll save that for next week. Next week we're going to talk, first day, more perspective on healing from the life of Naaman. As we end this today, I'd like to end together with a personal prayer about all the miracles we've talked about this week, just reminding ourselves. Would you pray with me and just say in prayer, "Jesus, I want to be available. I want to be available for the miraculous work of God in my life and through my life. I don't want to tell you what to do or how to do it. You're the Lord. But I want to be available for what you want to do. And I don't want my life to be defined by what I can do. I want it to be defined by what you can do. So Lord, I make myself available. I make myself available to you. In your name, Amen. " We'll see you next week as we continue to take a look together at the look of Elisha and begin to look at some of the kings of Israel.