Potter's Wheel Episode #2 - May 2019

LUKE 4:38-39

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TRANSCRIPT

(edited)

Hi, friends. Welcome to The Potter’s Wheel. Today, we are in Luke 4:38-39. It’s the story of how Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law. I’ll read it right now. “Jesus left the synagogue and went to the home of Simon. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked Jesus to help her. So, he bent over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. She got up at once and began to wait on them.” Mark actually says that Jesus helped her get up and Matthew says that Jesus touched her, and she was healed. There are some key points to this passage that I want to highlight first, and then let’s extract some healing principles out of it.

The first issue is that he had just been at the synagogue, where, if you watched the last video that I did, he delivered a man from a demonic spirit in the synagogue. Now he’s out of the synagogue after this power encounter and he’s in the home of his faithful disciple, Simon Peter. It says that they asked him if he would help her. It’s interesting to note that sometimes, we don’t have the faith for healing, but people need to help us. It’s a community activity. I really want to encourage you not to lay a burden on people who think that they have to have the faith to be healed. Sometimes, if faith is present in the room, healing will occur.

Secondly, Luke writes that she had a great fever, or a high fever. She was in really bad shape. This was a significant fever; this was not just something mild.

Finally, it’s curious to note that he rebuked the fever. He did not pray for healing. He did not command her to be healed, he rebuked something. That word for rebuke is only used in addressing demonic spirits. It was used in Mark 4, where Jesus is rebuking the storm as the disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee. Once again, the inference there is that there was a spiritual force behind that weather problem that was, in my opinion, trying to kill Jesus and Jesus’ disciples. So, we have this verb that was only used for addressing demonic spirits. The inference is that she [Peter’s mother-in-law] had some type of spiritual problem. Even though it’s not mentioned specifically in this passage as being a spirit, he used the language of addressing a spirit. There are twenty-three passages in the book of Luke that deal with demonic spirits. This one isn’t one of the twenty-three, but there’s an indirect reference to demonic activity causing this illness. We do know that demonic spirits cause blindness, they cause people to lose their ability to speak, they cause people to have severe mental disorders, as in the case of the Gadarene demoniacs in Mark 5. Those are some highlights of those particular texts.

I want to talk about some healing principles. 1) We need to always seek the source of the sickness. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 says that every human being is made of body, soul, and spirit. One of those areas of our lives will be affected if we are sick, or sometimes, a combination of two or three. So, we always want to go to the root source of what is causing the sickness. 2) We note that Jesus helped lift her up and is fulfilling a principle there of encouraging people to do something they could do before as an act of faith. We see that in John 5 where Jesus told the man at the pool of Bethesda, “Take up your bed and walk.” In the act of taking up his bed, the healing came because he took up his bed. In this case [with Peter’s mother-in-law], there was a psychological barrier, probably because she just couldn’t imagine being healed, that when he took her and helped her to get up, and she started following him, healing came. Even though Matthew says she was just touched, I think it was Jesus rebuking the spirit and touching her all in almost one motion, and it looked like one thing from each Gospel writer’s perspective. But it’s clear that there was a spiritual thing going on by the fact that Jesus rebuked the fever.

I want to close with this one thought, and I mentioned it before, anytime that you’re ministering deliverance, you always want to do it with a team. I suggest doing it in private. I had a situation happen recently where I started praying for a person in a public service who had physical problems. As I started praying, their face started to contort and then I knew that I was dealing with a demonic spirit at that point just from the manifestations that I was seeing in this person’s face. I really felt the Lord check me in the moment. I felt like it wasn’t supposed to happen publicly. I have prayed publicly for deliverance, but I rarely do that. So, I turned to the pastor and said, “You and some leaders need to fast and pray and deal with this situation in private and have the person who has the problem fast and pray. Then, come back at a later date.” It’s like picking your battles when the conditions are more favorable to the work of the Holy Spirit.

God bless you. I hope you gleaned a few nuggets out of this particular passage. I know that I did. I look forward to seeing you next time here at The Potter’s Wheel.