The Heavenly Physician and His Hospital
By John Thiel, mp3
Are you prepared to let God have His own way with you? When the admonition is to come and let us return unto the Lord, what has He done? Are you prepared to let Him do it?
Hosea 6:1 Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. 2 After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. 3 Then shall we know, [if] we follow on to know the LORD: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter [and] former rain unto the earth.
Have thy own way Lord, tear and smite if you must, have thine own way. Is that what you want Him to do? In being church goers and believers in God, the world is rampant with sentimentalism. Everything is so wonderful in the anticipation of believers. Everything is so good and so beautiful. You come to church and see me dressed in my suit preaching, you come and you see all these members of the church and you think they are all so holy and you feel yourself as a failure and you think everybody else is far better than you. Or you may even think that ‘I am a believer and I am better than those people down there who don’t go to church.
Yes indeed the appearances of church life can be very deceptive. Just like if you were to go to hospital. I wanted to become a nurse. I was glad at the thought that I didn’t have to go out there in a rough dirty brick yards anymore and lay bricks in a house, I will be pacing up and down those halls in the hospital with my uniform on and oh, what a beautiful life that will be in contrast, what a shock I received. When I was initiated to look after geriatrics and those of you who know anything about geriatrics they know what a dirty horrifying experience that really is. I was initiated. My high dreams of hospital work were just shattered in one day and I began to realize that hospital work is not as cushy as what it appears and church life is exactly the same. The great physician has a hospital and we don’t often realize that His hospital is the church.
The Lazar House
The world is a great lazar house it is corrupted under the inhabitance thereof and misery is universal. Testimony volume 8 page 169
The world is a lazar house filled with victims of both physical and spiritual disease. Testament volume 7 page 62.
The world has become a lazar house of sin a mass of corruption. Medical Ministries page 218-219
That’s alright, that’s the world out there. You know what a lazar house is? It is an institution for lepers. Have you ever seen lepers in the old days when they used to have these leprosarium’s and especially those days of Christ they didn’t have anything like that. They were all burned up and their noses were rotted off and if you were in their presence it would smell seven kilometres against the wind and all that sort of thing. It is a horrifying thing to have leprosy, your finger withered off and you have got no feeling anymore – it’s a dirty thing. The lazar house is characterized by incurable inmates. Incurable it was the lazar house.
God has separated this planet from the rest of the universe. It is in isolation. Nobody is permitted to come away from this planet to go into the universe because this planet is a lazar house, a mass of corruption. We can see it is getting worse and worse indeed the leprosy of sin has really eaten the heart out of people just about today. Anywhere you look, it is a misery and a shame no matter how many things you would still like to enjoy, those enjoyments are all marred by some decay of corruption somewhere.
God’s People, Israel
Isaiah 1:4 Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward. 5 Why should ye be stricken any more? Ye will revolt more and more: the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. 6 From the sole of the foot even unto the head [there is] no soundness in it; [but] wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.
This is the description of this lazar house.
A continual transgression of nature’s laws is a continual transgression of the law of God. The present weight of suffering and anguish which we see everywhere, the present deformity, decrepitude, disease, and imbecility now flooding the world, make it, in comparison to what it might be and what God designed it should be, a lazar house; and the present generation are feeble in mental, moral, and physical power. All this misery has accumulated from generation to generation because fallen man will break the law of God. Sins of the greatest magnitude are committed through the indulgence of perverted appetite. {4T 30.2}
This planet has become a world of sick human beings.
How Does God Feel about the Lazar House?
Looking into this lazar house as God looks at this planet how does He feel about it? He has quarantined it already but by quarantining it has He put out of mind out of sight? How does He respond to these sick human beings riddled with corruption and putrefying sores? I like that word putrefying. It is not until you end up in hospital and you see a putrefying sore can you really appreciate what He is saying it makes it appreciate what he is saying, it makes you sick to the stomach. I will never forget one young man who burnt himself in the shower his whole leg was burnt and it had become neglected and it had become puss and sour, yak, it stunk and we had to as nurses – lovely job being a nurse – open it up and smell it and scrub it. Are you still in agony? There is nothing nice about things like that. But oh, what a professional job you are in, you think you are great and you earned it all, it’s horrible, it’s terrible. That is the way God sees this planet.
These poor souls that this planet earth harbors; strange enough I am one of them.
“They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” This world is a vast lazar house, but Christ came to heal the sick, to proclaim deliverance to the captives of Satan. He was in Himself health and strength. He imparted His life to the sick, the afflicted, those possessed of demons. He turned away none who came to receive His healing power. He knew that those who petitioned Him for help had brought disease upon themselves; yet He did not refuse to heal them. {DA 823.3}
Isn’t that an amazing representation of His character? Here they are quarantined and you would have thought I don’t want to see them anymore. But no He the Great Physician who was health Himself came down and came to heal them and although He knew that the diseases they had brought and received the hurts, they are suffering in every respect was their own fault. When you feel that somebody’s sin is their own fault, what are we prone to do? It keeps on showing me up all the time. Are you any different to me? I don’t want anything to do with them anymore, do you? But what did He say? He knew that those who petitioned Him for help had brought disease upon themselves. They had petitioned Him for help. What sort of help? Not help in terms of that I may continue in my evil, help that I might be healed. Those people He did not refuse to heal them.
And when virtue from Christ entered into these poor souls, they were convicted of sin, and many were healed of their spiritual disease, as well as of their physical maladies. The gospel still possesses the same power, and why should we not today witness the same results? {DA 823.3}
Jesus the Great Physician
Jesus has come to this planet as the Great Physician. We sung about Him, the Great Physician now is near. In this generation that has degraded even much further than even when Sister White was alive, the diseases of spiritual, mental and physical magnitude are greater now than they were even then and it looks pretty hopeless. Today people are worldwide affected by diseases like drug related mania, HIV. South Africa – the African continent – there are millions of children who are orphans because their parents have died of HIV, it is a very serious condition and it is spreading all over the world, self-made diseases. It’s much worse now than ever before. As we have to meet the pressures of life it’s all heaping upon us and it’s driving people insane – disease. Here we are gathered today people of this planet with the great physician now is near, the one who is ready to help those that are crying to Him for healing. But as we congregate around Jesus to receive His help, those who gathered around Him in the church thinking that ‘yes here I am going to get beautiful comfort from Him and from the people of the church,’ we forget that every single one is gathering for exactly the same reason. They all feel that they aren’t sick and they look upon one another and say ‘oh, you are sick too?’ Or when somebody feels they have been healed, don’t touch me you are too sick, you might just contaminate me. Indeed those putrefying sores are not very nice to be close to and when you have a putrefying mental sore, it is very contagious.
Have you ever been in a room where somebody is all glum and miserable and you come in there and you feel the same thing? ‘Oh what I am here for?’ There is an atmosphere here of disease. Indeed but we are gathering around Jesus the Great Physician. As we continue to remain in His presence we are there to receive His healing rays. We find ourselves in a church with members with dangerous diseases and we are not to shrink back because we see them, we have to draw near because we see the Physician. I forget many times as I’m associating with my fellow brothers and sisters that they might just be affected by my disease as well.
I have to be very careful that I don’t look down upon them because they are probably looking down upon me about some aspects of mine. Although I stand here and preach, if you had a closer look at me you would go ‘oh.’ You would be most sad to think that somebody who is preaching to you has still got characteristics that you would regard as terrible. It is only by the grace of God that He hides me from the strife of tongues and so it is with you and me – every single one of us. There are many things that God in His mercy shields us from because He’s at work to heal us. If He is healing us, do you think He wants other people to see it? Because then they would not come into the presence any more of the Great Physician as that is a contagious hospital. I wouldn’t want to be there. Yes indeed is it possible? Is it right what I am suggesting that the church is a hospital?
God’s church, feeble and defected as it may be is the great object of His care. Acts of the Apostles page 12
The church of Christ, enfeebled, defective as she may appear, is the one object on earth upon which he bestows, in a special sense, his love and his regard. The church is the theatre of his grace, in which he delights in making experiments of mercy on human hearts. The Holy Spirit is his representative, and it works to effect transformations so wonderful that angels look upon them with astonishment and joy. {PH154 18.2}
The church is what? The theatre of His grace. Is this the theatre that people go to and watch drama? Is this the theatre it’s talking about? It isn’t the theatre of drama it is the theatre of a hospital. If this world is a lazar house, inside the lazar house there is a hospital where operations are done. Where the theatre is where the cleansing of the putrefying sore takes place. What did we just read that is? His church. God performs operations.
The Operation of God
Colossians 2:10 And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and power: 11 In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ: 12 Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with [him] through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.
This is a scripture which is taken from another scripture in Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy 10:16 Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked.
The operation of God is to do with the circumcision of the heart and in the theatre God is operating on the heart as well as on all the externals that have suffered because the heart has been so wicked. If you have wickedness in the heart, you have consequential diseases on the outside. If the heart is sick the whole body is sick. This is the reality of medicine. When the heart is operated on, other things have to be dealt with besides.
The church is an operating theatre – a hospital. People are admitted there for the work of the Great Physician. That’s something for us to continually bear in mind and I am sharing this message as I have shared it with some here before because we need to be reminded of it again and again especially when certain things happen in the church that causes us to become bewildered, why is this happening to me? I’ve just been hurt, I’ve just been smitten and I wonder why. Why in the church, isn’t the church meant to be a wonderful place of joy and gladness? What am I meeting here? The hospital, the theatre, that’s what you are meeting.
He will smite. Are you prepared to do what you’ve been singing there ‘take my life Lord, have thine own way, do what you like?’ He says right, you are in the hospital and I am doing it to you. In the hospital you have people who are brought into there who go through different stages of hospitalisation. Sometimes straight into the theatre and sometime preparations for the theatre and then others have to be brought in to build up so that if the operation takes place they won’t die under the operating knife. They need to develop some strength so they come in there for rejuvenation first of all. Then after the operation, you have some people that recover quickly and others very slowly. Some enter for observation to see whether an experiment can be made with them or not because they are so close to death it is a very touch and go situation.
Experiments
Some people don’t like the thought that the doctor is experimenting on you with medications and with operations but what else will you do? You are deadly sick and you need to find some answers. Yes indeed operations of experimentations. The church is the theatre of His grace in which He delights in making experiments of mercy. We totally aware, and were you aware that the church is such a place? If you understand and never forget it, you will never become disheartened when you see things happening in this hospital that you never anticipated would happen. We are all patients including me. As I share God’s word with you, some of you who know already when you share God’s word you realise that what you are preaching is very applicable to yourself more maybe than others. I know that with my experiences that I have been through especially over the last so many years, that I have had to preach God’s word to let its power comfort and help me. It just so happened that it helped you at the same time.
In hospital indeed you see some very strange things and sometimes exceedingly unpleasant things that make you want to run away. Have you ever wanted to run away from church? I’ve heard certain people say, ‘I just want to get away from here, I can’t take it anymore.’ Yeah, you are in the right place because you are in the hospital where the Physician is at work. What do you see? Isaiah 1:6. Wounds and bruises and putrefying sores. What do doctors do with putrefying sores that haven’t been healed for a terrible long time? Fistulas. You know what fistulas is? It is a sore that has not been carefully natured and it has started to rot and go deep into the flesh. Sometimes it travels along like a canal and sometimes it is the most unpleasant places, very private places and as nurses after the operation has been done we have had to actually deal with those deep putrefying sores. What was it there in Hosea? What did God have to do with His people?
Hosea 6:1 Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up.
John 15: I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. 2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every [branch] that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.
Here is the word purging and that purging looked upon as a picture of the vine is better illustrated by this picture of actually tearing or getting in there so that the person will recover. If a particular condition is upon a person because of his heart condition and his body hasn’t received proper blood flow, there has to be certain treatments to recover the dead decaying area of the body and that is where He has to tear. He has to like I shared with you before about this young man who had this burn, we had to scrub a sore to tear all the dead skin away, to clean up all the slough; it’s a tearing horrifying experience and that indeed is done for the necessity of recovery because He wants to bring us through as totally recovered. When you have a fistula, the operation goes right deep in and cleanses it all out, purges it and then they have to pack it with gauze, big long gauze strips and it gets packed in there so that it can heal from inside out. If it doesn’t do that it will heal across the top and the festation will stay inside. That is what happened before you went to hospital, you had a lot of wounds that healed on the top but deep underneath there was still festering. How many people are festering? They’ve got wounds and bruises deep inside.
God Probes His Hospital
When you meet them you can tell ‘oh there’s something that happen way back in their youth or childhood and it is never really being cleaned out and that’s where you get many sparks lying with people because it touches on a very source spot that has not been properly healed. In the church, in the hospital and the theatre it is probed. There are many a people who refuse the probing operation of God.
I saw many souls, that many souls have been destroyed by their brethren and wisely sympathizing with them when their only hope was to be left to see and realize the full extent of their wrong. Testament volume 1 page 213
God is working to probe in His hospital and as He’s doing that through circumstances of human interaction, there are many of people who say ‘it’s alright, you’re not as bad as you make yourself to be, it’s alright just calm down.’ Sympathizing with you when you’re really rotten and there’s a rotten disease in there. It says, they must be left to see and realize the full extent of their wrongs.
I saw that many souls have been destroyed by their brethren unwisely sympathizing with them, when their only hope was to be left to see and realize the full extent of their wrongs. But as they eagerly accept the sympathy of unwise brethren, they receive the idea that they are abused; and if they attempt to retrace their steps, they make halfhearted work. They divide the matter to suit their natural feelings, lay blame upon the reprover, and so patch up the matter. It is not probed to the bottom, and is not healed, and they again fall into the same wrong, {1T 213.1}
Something is to be probed so that you don’t go through that experience ever again. You’re healed. It is not probed and they fall again into the same wrong because they were not left to feel the extent of their wrong and humble themselves before God and let Him build them.
False sympathizers have worked in direct opposition to the mind of Christ and ministering angels. {1T 213.1}
In this hospital, how does God work? I was praying for the Lord to help me today how to put it across and here it is and it will come again later on. God works through His church to bring forth the weaknesses of us and when they come forth by our human interaction with one another, we must not begin to sympathize with the people who can begin to see their wrongs saying it’s not really as bad as that is it? We go, of course not. When it is. It doesn’t mean that because it’s so bad that I’m lost, it just means that I’m being probed so that I can discover how wrong I am so Jesus can heal me. How does it work? You must be left to see it for yourself. That’s what I read didn’t I? But how can you see it for yourself if somebody goes and says ‘it is not as bad as what you think it is, it’s alright’. This is the hospital work. As we have to do this after the operation, it was probed and the gauze was put into there and painful, but afterwards you have to keep on repeating the process of taking the gauze out and putting another fresh one in because the gauze that is sitting inside of this starts to putrefy some more and to stop it from infecting the new wound that has been done by the operation, you have to pull out the old one and put in a fresh sterile one and this is repeated until the whole thing has healed from bottom out.
How long do you think you have to be in the church hospital for to take this in place? If you’ve got purifying sores it goes for a long time and it hurts again and again and again until it’s totally healed out – this is God’s Physician work in this lazar house hospital. When you see a brother or sister with a pained look on their face, they can hardly cope anymore it’s so excruciating and if you say a few words you get snapped up, what do you expect of course it hurts and they can’t control it; it’s terrible, easily offended. When somebody is on a tight rope like that, it is easy to do that. Should we say, ‘oh they’re not Christians? Come on, we should be Christians, shouldn’t we? Why aren’t you correcting yourselves?’ This is the person who stands by and looks at something that’s gone wrong in the church in the human relationships and they start to long to tell the other person, come on this isn’t being Christian.
These are kind of situations that happen, don’t they? We forget that we are all patients with hidden diseases that are being brought out to the open. We will see in our church sufferings. At one moment, everything is smiling and happy because we’ve gone through a terrible thing where we’ve been torn and we’ve been smitten and then He has healed us and we go ‘oh it’s better now that was wonderful.’ The next minute down they again. Seen that? Does that mean we are in the wrong place? Not at all. Exactly meant to be. We’re in the lazar house hospital. God is operating and remember too that it is heart work.
Heart Work
Ezekiel 36:26 A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
What is that? This is a heart transplant. How many in this world need a heart transplant? Is there anybody excluded? Every single one of us and it’s interesting that you come into the hospital and you don’t necessarily get straight into the heart transplant. There are people who enter the church whose heart has not yet been removed the old one and the new one put in. They need to be carefully nurtured to be able to stand such an operation. It’s the most horrifying thing to think that ‘me who is intelligent who have learned the Scriptures so well that can I understand it from front to back, that I should have to have a heart change? I know it already don’t I? What you know in academic knowledge is not necessarily equivalent to a heart transplant. It needs to be something that you actually experience right down to the very depth of to your soul and there are many people who recognize that they are ready and they are baptized, what is else does Sr White say? They are buried alive, self did not die and so they need to stay in the church until it does happen and oh what an upheaval.
What a dreadful experience the church has to go through with people who think they don’t need a heart transplant yet at all. It’s much better if we can get it before we come in but it doesn’t happen like that every time. This heart transplant means that not only are you probably being worked on, on big deep fistula wounds and sore that take ages to clean up but when the heart transplant takes place then you have a real long time of convalescence and the church is the place where you convalesce. It’s a place where you have to not only recover from the terrible operation but you also have to be educated to live with that new heart because that new heart is an old body and the old body is not to used to living a new young heart.
It’s the divine nature don’t forget and that divine nature is totally foreign to the old body to the human nature. There is a foreign material and the body wants to repose. Isn’t that exactly what they have to do? They have to give you drugs so that your heart will not be rejected by this foreign material and so it is in our spiritual experience that the divine nature fights against the human nature and the human flesh fights against the spirit as we know so well.
There is a repulsion inside of you and you have to learn how to live with that. That takes some doing; the hospital is the place. Indeed we read there that there’s an experiment that God does. In this work we need to understand thoroughly the activity.
Theatre of God
The Lord Jesus is making experiments on human hearts through the exhibition of His mercy and abundant grace. He is effecting transformations so amazing that Satan, with all his triumphant boasting, with all his confederacy of evil united against God and the laws of His government, stands viewing them as a fortress impregnable to his sophistries and delusions. They are to him an incomprehensible mystery. {TM 18.1}
This wonderful work of God in His church, the Great physician in His hospital, He is doing transformation so amazing that Satan can’t quite comprehend it and angels rejoice to see this happen. Hence dear believers we will see in the church most strange circumstances. God’s church must be pure but the members are not. What does that mean? In the church you will meet evil.
Although there are evils existing in the church, and will be until the end of the world, the church in these last days is to be the light of the world that is polluted and demoralized by sin. The church, enfeebled and defective, needing to be reproved, warned, and counseled, is the only object upon earth upon which Christ bestows His supreme regard. {TM 49.1}
The church enfeebled and defective as it is is the theatre of God’s grace there. You are going to see in the church evils, because evils are work upon in the church.
Some people seem to think that upon entering the church they will have their expectations fulfilled, and meet only with those who are pure and perfect. They are zealous in their faith, and when they see faults in church members, they say, “We left the world in order to have no association with evil characters, but the evil is here also;” and they ask, as did the servants in the parable, “From whence then hath it tares?” But we need not be thus disappointed, for the Lord has not warranted us in coming to the conclusion that the church is perfect; and all our zeal will not be successful in making the church militant as pure as the church triumphant. {TM 47.1}
God Governs His Hospital
So we’ve got a hospital, it’s God’s hospital, He governs in that hospital. There are many hospitals around if we talk about the church. There are many churches out there, many church denominations. Are all those denominations God’s church where He is doing the operation? I want to put something to you here; if you’ve got a very good surgeon, a top surgeon, where would he be prepared to operate? In a hospital that has got faulty equipment, facilities that are not good and proper and they are not being very careful about hygiene in the hospital? Do you think he will operate there? Not at all. He would make sure that he will look for the hospital that works absolutely correctly. Jesus has His hospital where if He operates in the operation, it will not turn into a golden staph infection which is a germ that once you get it it’s very difficult to get it rid of if ever. He wants to make sure that hospital that church works in perfect harmony with all His instructions. That is one factor. You have to find God’s true hospital the one where He is prepared to do operations. Where if He is operating in a hospital there where they only do damage afterwards to His careful work, He says ‘no, no this is not where I will operate.’
In that hospital where there is pure doctrine, where there is absolutely everything done according to what God has said you must do, there He will work and there He will recover people – very important. As He works in a church where there are evils because there are people there who are coming because they need healing and that’s why they are there because of the evils in their nature, He is now able to do His work.
How Does God do it?
How does He do it? We saw there that through circumstances things would happen in the church and people’s weaknesses will come to the fore. Through difficult times in the church when somebody is really blown it somehow and there is something in the character that needs to be purged, nobody is to go along and say ‘it’s alright people are terrible to you aren’t they?’ – that sort of thing. That’s not what God wants us to do. He wants us to examine carefully, ‘where have I been wrong in this thing so I can discover where my disease is?’ If we all do that, we will understand that the physician is at work through rubbing shoulders with one another in the church.
God has shown me that He gave His people a bitter cup to drink to purify and cleanse them. It is a bitter draft and they can make it still more bitter by murmuring, complaining and repining. But those who receive it thus must have another draft for the first does not have its design effect. EW 47
How many times do we have to go back in the theatre to get that puss out? We can come to God and say ‘have your way, do it all I just give myself to you’ or we can say ‘no, no that’s enough thank you I don’t want anymore’ and God says ‘okay’. But you have to come back again. You are going to get it again and again.
But those who receive it thus must have another draught, for the first does not have its designed effect upon the heart. And if the second does not effect the work, then they must have another, and another, until it does have its designed effect, or they will be left filthy, impure in heart. {EW 47.1}
It is to be totally probed and totally cleaned out or they will be left with filthy impure hearts.
I saw that this bitter cup can be sweetened by patience, endurance, and prayer, and that it will have its designed effect upon the hearts of those who thus receive it, and God will be honored and glorified. {EW 47.1}
Do you want to honor your physician, your surgeon? Then go through with it, let Him have His control, He’s the Great Physician. It is not a small thing to be a Christian and to be owned and approved of God. This is how God works in interchanging among the church, the different talents and different activities.
The whole body compacted and working together. Therefore if that’s the place that we need to be and even though there are evils there and all sorts of uncomfortable circumstances, we will stay there. We will go there to be around the physician to do His work with us. We will attend every meeting because that’s where I need to be to be operated on. If I am living somewhere in isolation with just a few people, I will create my own meetings there so that the Lord can do His work because that’s the hospital that He wants to operate in. if we want to stand the final test to finish with a perfectly symmetrical character, our daily work is chronicled for us.
Character Development and Recovery
Here is the daily work that is ours in this work of character development and recovery.
He who would build up a strong, symmetrical character, he who would be a well-balanced Christian, must give all and do all for Christ; for the Redeemer will not accept divided service. Daily he must learn the meaning of self-surrender. He must study the word of God, learning its meaning and obeying its precepts. Thus he may reach the standard of Christian excellence. Day by day God works with him, perfecting the character that is to stand in the time of final test. And day by day the believer is working out before men and angels a sublime experiment, showing what the gospel can do for fallen human beings. {AA 483.1} {AA 483.1}
It causes me to rejoice to be in the hospital. It causes me to rejoice that when things go wrong in my life that I can go through and make no grumbling moaning tones about it. That’s meant to be isn’t it? And Lord what is it? I study carefully day by day I am learning how to change and to become more like God wants me to be. No matter how hard it is, I will stand faithfully. I am not going to wince and scream at the doctor or at the nurse, I’m going to just quietly bear it.
I like those kinds of patients that when you are hurting them badly they say nothing and you think ‘oh this is hurting all them’ and your heart goes out to them. You’ll love them even more because you they holding their breath and it’s so painful, they are not getting wild at you. I remember dealing with one patient and I was doing something, he put my hand away and said you can’t do it come anymore it hurts too much. I said, if I don’t do it, what will happen? He gave me a hard time. It’s much better if he just held tight and gave over for treatment. Indeed day by day God works with us perfecting our character and we have to understand the meaning of self-surrender. Have thine own way Lord, have thine own way.
Facilities for the Operation
The facilities that are available in this operation are the facilities that God has given in His pure church. I emphasized that a moment ago that the church has been given all the counsel and facilities to be able to do this operation and it must be the church that submits itself to the truth position.
“To His church, Christ has given ample facilities, that He may receive a large revenue of glory from His redeemed, purchased possession. The church, being endowed with the righteousness of Christ, is His depository, in which the wealth of His mercy, His love, His grace, is to appear in full and final display. The declaration in His intercessory prayer, that the Father’s love is as great toward us as toward Himself, the only-begotten Son, and that we shall be with Him where He is, forever one with Christ and the Father, is a marvel to the heavenly host, and it is their great joy. {PH150 5.2}
The church has been given the ample facilities. It is going to be the theatre in which His glory will be revealed to the world.
Ways of Being Discharged from a Hospital
There are two ways by which you can be discharged from a hospital. Either by the treatment failing and you pass away and you are discharged by the morgue, that’s one way of discharge. The other is to fully recover and re-join normal healthy living again. From God’s hospital it’s natural that no one needs to pass out through the morgue, nobody because He will never fail. He can save and heal totally. You have eternal life through Jesus Christ
1 John 5:11, this is life eternal,
What is it? His life is in Jesus
1 John 5:12 He that hath the Son hath life; [and] he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.
We are all prone to go out the morgue because we are dead already, we are already doomed to die. But if we have Christ the true Physician working, He will take us out the right door, not through the back door of the morgue, not at all. The discharge to a happy normal life, will not take place until the church stands there victorious. The church militant is not the church triumphant. When the hospital will discharge its members into their normal life, it will be when the lazar house closes. The release of God’s people into that normal life is described in the most wonderful scripture. No wonder there is going to be shouting, no wonder there is going to be leaping for the joy because the sufferings in the hospital have been so great and now at last there is no more pain and no more crying.
Isaiah 35:4 Say to them [that are] of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come [with] vengeance, [even] God [with] a recompence; he will come and save you. 5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. 6 Then shall the lame [man] leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.
What is happening here? They will come out healed, recovered. Revelations 21:4 is the most meaningful statement for those who’ve had to suffer under the tearing and deep smiting and the healing repetitive program of this planet earth’s theatre of God’s grace. What a wonderful thing to look forward to. Don’t you stay in the hospital with the prospect of coming out on the other side? Isn’t that what you go to the hospital for? Here it is, I will stay through it until I can come out on the other side like this:
Revelations 21:4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
Hospital is Finished
The inmates are healed, discharged to live forever, come then let us return unto the Lord for He has torn yes and He will heal us. He has smitten and He will bind us up, after two days will He revive us in the third day He will raise us up and we shall live in His sight. May God add these blessings to each one of us that we will never forget that while on this side of eternity we are still in the hospital. God grant us this understanding.
Amen.
Posted on 02/06/2012, in Divine Service Sermons, The Church Hospital and tagged Christ, God, Hosea, human, leper colony, leprosy, Lord. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.
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