The big idea
“Heal the sick” is not a specialist’s assignment and not a bygone era’s. It sits in the same list of instructions the church has never stopped obeying, and Jesus tied it to the display of his own authority — which means a healing is rarely only about the person who gets well. You cannot carry it out under your own power, and Matt’s argument is that you were never asked to.
Key takeaways
- “All that I have commanded you” has no fine print. Nothing retires “heal the sick” while leaving praying, forgiving and loving enemies in force.
- When God says “I am with you,” he is doing the heavy lifting and letting us help. Moses lifted a staff; God parted the sea.
- You cannot make a disciple unilaterally either. An imperative was never a claim that the outcome rests in your hands.
- The miracles serve more than the body. With the paralytic Jesus named his authority to forgive sins; with Lazarus, the glory of God and the disciples’ belief.
- Amazement is a feature, not a bug. A supernatural message is meant to arrive with supernatural evidence.
- Elijah prayed seven separate times for rain. “Not yet,” and even “no,” are not instructions to stop.
- “By his stripes we are healed” is not made false by a believer who dies sick. The promise lands in a raised body, not a disembodied heaven.
- There is no method to master — the most dramatic healing Matt has witnessed happened with nobody touching anybody — and you will probably see more of it the more you try.
Matt is still working through the commands of Jesus, and he opened by insisting that obedience is not the place where grace starts to thin out. “It’s more grace,” he said. “It’s more and more and more grace.” The more of us that gets carried out of the dominion of darkness, the freer we actually are; the propaganda, he said, runs the other way — that running your own life is freedom. He also asked the room to think, not answer yet, about a testimony: after months of ending services by asking the Holy Spirit to speak, has anyone sensed God put an idea in their heart, done it, and seen what happened? He wants to find a way to hear those stories, maybe on Realm, maybe in a service, because “I think probably we’re all over the map.” Then he admitted this week’s command was one he had been tempted to skip: “but I’m just going to do it anyway, because it’s just true. It’s part of the scriptures.”
Everything, not most things
He started in Matthew 28, where the scope question gets settled — noting in passing that when the eleven met Jesus on the mountain they worshiped and some doubted, so evidently you can do both.
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Matthew 28:18–20“All nations” is not the lines on a map but every cultural and ethnic family of the earth. And there is no exit in saying this was spoken only to the eleven: they were to teach their own disciples to observe everything, which makes it self-perpetuating by design. “I don’t think he meant teach them to observe most of what I’ve commanded you.” So where is the full list? John ends his gospel admitting he did not record everything Jesus did, and the men who knew the whole of it wrote the rest of the New Testament. The scope is the whole New Testament, not the red letters alone.
“I am with you” is not the keys to the company car
“This isn’t Jesus saying, here’s the keys to the company car, I’m leaving, I left a lot of loose ends, have at it.” In the Old Testament, when God tells a servant “I am with you,” it means God does the work and permits help. Moses lifted a staff and the sea parted — he was not slapping at the water hoping. Elijah prayed and fire fell. “That means he’s doing the heavy lifting. This is his project. We get to help — and it’s actually an honor that he lets us help.” We will botch it, and he knew that at the outset.
The command sits in a list we already obey
Then to Luke 10, where Jesus appoints seventy-two and sends them out two by two as lambs among wolves with no moneybag, no knapsack, no sandals. The sender is the Lord and the harvest is called his own, so the shortage of laborers is something we take to him; the empty hands convey dependence on grace rather than our own power. Those verses still inspire mission work today, and so does the person of peace — speak peace over a house, stay where you are received.
“When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is offered to you. Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’”
Luke 10:8–9 (NIV)We quote verse 8 happily: eat what is put in front of you — acceptance of God’s providence for his laborers, and, as Matt said, also just polite. The next sentence gets treated as a different category of instruction altogether. “I don’t see why everything else beforehand is still applicable to this day and this wouldn’t be.” One list, one sender, and later one commission to teach all of it.
You cannot heal the sick by yourself — or make a disciple either
Matt was candid that Jesus says “heal the sick” as though we know how. “Yes, I know the grammar. It’s an imperative.” So he set it beside the command nobody finds troubling: Jesus does not say try to make disciples. He says make them — and that takes three willing parties, since the person must be willing and the Spirit must draw them. Nobody reads the grammar there as putting the outcome in our hands. “In that same way, you can’t just heal the sick unilaterally. We’re still dependent on the will of God. Well, that doesn’t change the fact that he told us to do it.”
The paralytic: amazement is a feature
Why heal at all? Mark 2 answers out loud. A paralyzed man is carried by four friends to a house in Capernaum so crowded they dig through the roof to lower him in; Jesus sees their faith and forgives his sins, which the scribes rightly hear as a claim only God can make.
“Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” — he said to the paralytic — “I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.” And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this.”
Mark 2:9–12“That’s a feature, not a bug, their amazement. That’s part of it on purpose.” The man is restored, but the stated purpose is Jesus’ authority to forgive sins, and the result is glory. Which is why miracles belong inside the commission at all: “It’s not like we’re trying to recruit people to our nice folks club where we recycle more than the average fellow. We have a message that’s supernatural in nature.” The lesson need not even land: Ten lepers were healed and one came back to say thank you. “God is generous. He’s not so stingy that he only gives to the top one percent of deserving, grateful souls. It’s about him anyway, not about us.”
Lazarus: two purpose statements
If severity is the worry, how much more severe can it get than four days dead. John 11 states its purpose before anything happens:
“This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
John 11:4Lazarus was loved, and the raising did restore him — but it was not finally about him, since he died a second time anyway. Matt played that for laughs and then landed it: you spend four days dead and still have to hear that this one is not about you. Then Jesus drops the euphemism, says plainly that Lazarus is dead, and adds that he is glad he was not there, “so that you may believe” — a second purpose statement beside the first. Glory, faith, and then the man himself.
At the tomb the self-revelation is explicit: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” As with the paralytic, the miracle is Jesus showing who he is. If permanent health right now were the top priority, he should have come immediately. He did not. “Our joints not hurting is not as important as the glory of God. I’m kind of going out on a limb saying that, but I think I’m right.” John 14 makes the same point from the other side: believe that he is in the Father, or else believe on account of the works themselves. The works are evidence — not for faith in general, but for faith in his divinity in particular.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”
John 14:12–13He fenced “whatever you ask” at once: it still has to be in his will, and the Lord is not granting genie wishes, Janis Joplin’s Mercedes-Benz included. “Works” covers healings, deliverance and more. And Jesus going to the Father is the glorified Christ releasing the baptism John the Baptist promised, in Spirit and fire. The main idea held: heal the sick is one of the works Jesus gave his disciples, and it fits within “all that I have commanded you.”
Ordinary church life, and Elijah praying seven times
This is also plain church routine — and James witnesses to the will of Jesus as much as the Gospels do, since all the instruction in the scriptures comes from the Lord.
“Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.”
James 5:14–16He kept reading to the end of the chapter on purpose, because James points to Elijah as a man with a nature like ours — three and a half years of no rain, and then he prayed again and the heavens opened. In the original account he prayed, sent his servant to look, heard “nothing,” and did it again, seven times over. Not once-and-done: he knew he was the one tasked with it, so he probably had great faith for it, and he still went back seven times. “Sometimes I think we have a cartoonishly high expectation for what should happen in a healing miracle story. It’s either instant or never. And if it’s not right away, it’s so easy to give up” — and your thoughts drift to how long everyone will stand there before someone says amen.
Preachers like to say God answers yes, no, or not yet. Matt pushed on the “no.” The persistent widow was refused repeatedly and asked anyway, and the point of the parable is that she persisted — with Jesus wondering aloud whether the Son of Man will find that kind of faith when he returns. Matt’s summary of the application was four words: “Be like that lady.” “Even when a preacher says, I don’t know, maybe the answer is no — that doesn’t mean stop praying. Sounds like keep going.” He aimed that at people whose batting average feels low, who have quietly handed the business to someone else in the church — she’s really into that kind of thing, I’ll just refer to her. Even the jaded ones, he said, are who the widow is in there to encourage. Try again.
He drew a line in the other direction too, because the sick are people, not projects. “I don’t want them to eventually be like, look, am I being detained? Can I go to the bathroom?” Do unto others as you would have them do to you is on the same list as heal the sick, so do not go to someone’s house in the middle of the night and yell in tongues over their bed. Let them sleep. Ask if it is okay to pray, and ask again before you pray again. “Be normal about it. We don’t want to be weird. We want to do the whole thing” — the whole of what Jesus asked, love included. “But there it is again. Heal the sick. Not going anywhere. It’s part of the great commission, whether we like it or not.” And James 5 says the same thing in ordinary church clothes.
Why it does not always happen, and what “by his stripes” promises
So why does it not happen sometimes? “If you’re looking for why it doesn’t happen, you’re going to have to go to another sermon. I don’t know. It’s not my job to figure out when or how or why. It’s my job to obey Jesus.” He said that as a self-described massive nerd who loves diagramming the why — and who insists there is more to life than that. The New Testament leaves the same questions open: Paul tells Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach, leaves Trophimus ill at Miletus, and nearly loses Epaphroditus to sickness. Matt mocked the easy reading — “Paul should have just healed him. Oh, maybe Paul didn’t think of that. So stupid.” Of course praying for Trophimus was the first thing they did; the text simply does not explain. And Jesus told the Canaanite woman no before he said yes — Matt asked what would have happened had she answered, “Oh, okay.” Would Jesus have called her back: no, hold on, I was making a point, try again? He did not pretend to know. “I don’t know. And I don’t care to know. I just know that God does heal. It’s part of our inheritance. And it’s more about him than it is about you or me.”
Then the objection he took seriously, on an admitted bunny trail he is picking back up next week: people die having never been healed, so what do we do with “by his stripes we are healed”? The promise only looks unpaid — like being gypped out of it — if our hope has quietly become the pagan new-age one, that we die and go to a ghost paradise. Justin Martyr had to explain as much in the second century in his Dialogue with Trypho, and Matt was blunt about the alternative: “there’s other people that say you just die and go to heaven. I don’t even want you to use the word Christian for people like that.” Our hope is that if we are baptized into a death like his, we share a resurrection like his — a body that could walk through walls, since his raised body did that and then ate fish. More than restored, grafted in: Peter says you partake of his divine nature, plugged into the very person of Jesus and included in his resurrection body — which is why the life is everlasting and the blind see and the deaf hear and the joints stop hurting. “So in every sense and in every case, everyone in Christ — by his stripes you will be healed. There’s no sense in which that promise is false.” It would be false only if the destination were “ghost Disney World or whatever that is.” Until that day the timing stays his: God can open a jail or leave you in one like Paul, deliver you from persecutors or let you be martyred like Stephen. “What’s my responsibility? To figure it out or to pray for the sick? Just pray for the sick.”
The most miraculous thing he has seen was an accident
He refused to trade obeying for analyzing it until he felt satisfied: “I want to go pray for the sick, and I guarantee you I don’t know what I’m doing.” Does it take oil? Does it have to be unscented? Could the oil be sunscreen? The question misunderstands who is working. The most miraculous healing Matt has been part of was, by his own description, accidental. A team was at a Walmart praying that the Lord would give them that place as an inheritance and a testimony of God’s goodness, regrouping over chicken nuggets to compare conversations. He thought they were done. Then, under what he called some punch-drunk inspiration of the Spirit, they walked to a table of tough-looking young men and he announced that God was going to heal one of them.
“And that’s when he got healed. Nobody touched him.” Matt was not even sure what had been wrong. The man became the chief spokesperson for his own miracle, pleading with his friends to believe him — I was just telling you, I was hurt right here, do you remember? — and in sixty seconds flat the group was praying together about the Holy Spirit in his life. “It wasn’t about him and it wasn’t about us. We didn’t even touch him.” Hence the refusal to systematize — does it have to be laying on hands, could it be from a distance: “Jesus is a miracle worker. It’s not like a machine where you figure out the method. And don’t be super am I doing it right — you’re not the one doing it.”
“You’ll probably see more of it the more you try”
He landed it as an encouragement rather than a technique, and widened the assignment on the way out the door: “I just wanted this to be enough of an encouragement that we take very seriously that heal the sick, cast out devils, confrontations of spiritual natures are a part of the great commission. And we can’t escape that.” Casting out devils arrived almost in passing, folded into the same list — if we want to take Jesus’ word seriously and obey what he told us to do, that part comes with it. And then the one promise he was willing to make about results: “Now, I don’t know what it’s going to look like in your life, but I do know this. You’ll probably see more of it the more you try.”
The qualification he kept circling back to is that these are people we are praying for, so it has to be done in a people-loving way. You would not yell a blessing at someone first thing in the morning; in the same way, do not be rude, and do not make a stranger take his shoes off on the bus. “The methodologies — don’t get hung up on that to the point of making somebody feel really unloved. Just going to pray for the sick.” Then the service closed as it has for months: the room asking the Lord how he would like each person to respond, and heart ministry teams up front with name tags, who have been preparing all morning — “they live for this.” If those are all taken, ask whoever is next to you. “Otherwise, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”
