The big idea
When Jesus sent the seventy-two out, “heal the sick” sat in the same list as travel light, stay in one house and eat what is put in front of you. We quote every other line in that list without blinking. Matt’s argument is that the one about the sick is still ours too — and that the healing miracles were never mainly about comfortable joints. They were about glory, authority and belief.
Key takeaways
- “Teach them to observe all that I have commanded you” reaches past the Gospels. John says plainly he did not record everything; the men who travelled with Jesus wrote the rest of the New Testament, so James 5 carries Jesus’ will as surely as Matthew does.
- Christians invoke Luke 10 constantly — travel light, look for a son of peace, eat what you are served. Verse 9 is in the same breath. There is no principled way to keep the hospitality and drop the healing.
- “Heal the sick” is an imperative you cannot fill unilaterally — and so is “make disciples.” That takes three willing parties too. The grammar does not change what is beyond your power alone.
- In Mark 2 the amazement is a feature, not a bug. The healing was staged to prove the Son of Man’s authority to forgive sins.
- John 11:4 is a purpose statement: glory, and belief. If Lazarus being permanently healthy had been the top priority, Jesus should have left immediately.
- “By his stripes we are healed” is not an unpaid promise. It is paid in full in a physical, resurrected body — which is why the Christian hope was never ghosts in paradise.
- Elijah prayed seven separate times for rain, and the widow kept asking after the judge said no. The expectation that healing is instant or never is cartoonish, and it is why people quit.
- Method is not the point. The most striking healing Matt has been part of happened across a Walmart table with nobody touching anybody. What he will promise is frequency, not technique: “You’ll probably see more of it the more you try.”
Matt came at healing the long way round — through the question of what, exactly, Jesus handed his church when he told the eleven to teach the nations “all that I have commanded you.” He is clear that the commission is not Jesus delegating the job and stepping out of the room. “This is not Jesus giving us his authority to finish without him,” he said. “He is finishing this thing, and we get to be with him.”
1. Everything he commanded — which is more than the Gospels
The sticking point in Matthew 28:20 is the words full scope. John ends his Gospel by admitting he left things out — the world could not contain the books. So who would know the whole of what Jesus taught? The people who travelled with him. And those men wrote the rest of the New Testament. Matt’s conclusion is unfussy: if you want the full scope of what Jesus wants from his church, read all of it, because “all of the wisdom and information and instructions that we get in the entirety of the scriptures come from Jesus.” That is why he treats James 5 as the Lord’s own instruction rather than a later add-on.
2. The list in Luke 10 we already obey
“After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to go. And he said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go your way; behold, I am sending you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. Carry no moneybag, no knapsack, no sandals, and greet no one on the road.’”
Luke 10:1–4Matt slowed down on who is doing the sending. The labourers are short and the harvest is enormous, and the harvest is explicitly his — so he is the one we take the shortage to. The empty pockets convey something too: trust, dependence, reliance on God’s grace rather than our own equipment. Those verses still send missionaries today.
So does the next bit. The whole idea of a person of peace comes out of Luke 10:5–7 — say peace over the house, stay put if a son of peace is there, eat and drink what they provide, do not shop around for better lodging. Hope uses that language for trips, for cross-cultural work, for evangelism.
“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)Every Christian Matt knows quotes verse 8. You are a guest in a strange house, something unidentifiable arrives on a plate, and you eat it because this is what Jesus wants — an acceptance of God’s provision for his labourers, and also just good manners. His question is simply why verse 8 survived and verse 9 did not. “I don’t see why everything else beforehand is still applicable to this day, and this wouldn’t be.”
3. An imperative you cannot fill by yourself
He conceded the obvious objection before anyone raised it. Jesus says heal, flatly, as though we knew how. Matt’s answer is that we are already comfortable with exactly this problem elsewhere: “He also said make disciples. You can’t unilaterally make a disciple.” The person has to be willing, the Holy Spirit has to draw them — three willing parties for one disciple. “Yes, I know the grammar, it’s an imperative. But in that same way, you can’t just heal the sick unilaterally. We’re still dependent on the will of God.” Which does not cancel the instruction. It only means the instruction was never ours to execute alone.
4. The paralytic: amazement was the plan
He read Mark 2:1–5 whole — the packed house in Capernaum, the four men dismantling a roof, the bed lowered through it, and Jesus responding to their faith by forgiving sins, which is not what anyone came for. Then the scribes’ silent objection, and the proof:
“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 2:10–12“That’s a feature, not a bug, their amazement,” Matt said. “That’s part of it on purpose.” Glory, and a public demonstration of authority to forgive. The man’s restored body is real and good, but it is not the only thing happening, and Matt is not sure it is even the main thing. He is also not troubled by not knowing: it became the refrain of the whole message that the how and the when and the why are not his assignment.
Which is why he thinks the miracles belong in the commission rather than beside it. “It’s not like we’re trying to recruit people to our nice-folks movement where we recycle more than the average fellow. We have a message that’s supernatural in nature.” And he refuses the screening instinct that asks whether a given person is a good candidate — grateful enough, teachable enough. Jesus healed ten lepers and one came back. “God is generous. He’s not so stingy. He only gives top 1% deserving grateful souls? It’s about him anyway, not about us.”
5. Lazarus: the purpose stated out loud
“So the sisters sent to him, saying, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ But when Jesus heard it he said, ‘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 11:3–4Verse 4 is a purpose statement, and Matt would not let it be about Lazarus. Lazarus was loved, and Lazarus also died a second time later, so permanent health was plainly not the point. A second purpose statement follows when Jesus tells the disciples he is glad he was not there, “so that you may believe.” Glory, belief, and then — third — a brother given back.
The timing is the argument. “If Lazarus being healthy and never unhealthy was the goal, and if that was the top priority, then Jesus should have gone right away.” 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.”
And the same story carries one more purpose. Martha says she knows her brother will rise at the last day, and Jesus moves the resurrection from a date to a person:
“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.”
John 11:25–266. Works, and the faith they are meant to build
In John 14:10–11 Jesus offers his works as evidence — believe me, or else believe on account of the works themselves. Matt noted what the evidence is for: not faith in general, but faith in this particular claim about who he is.
“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 put a fence around “whatever you ask” — the Lord is not a genie granting a Mercedes-Benz, as Janis Joplin had it. But he read the clause positively too: it is God’s will that we fulfil the commission with him, and demonstrating his power is part of that. “Works” here is deliberately broad — healings, deliverance, all kinds of things. And Jesus going to the Father is not an absence; it is the glorified Christ releasing the baptism John the Baptist promised in Spirit and fire.
7. James 5 — ordinary church life
Hope had already done this earlier in the service, and Matt went back to read the instruction they had been following.
“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 5:14–16Note the frame: elders, confession, one another. This is not a specialist ministry bolted onto church life; it is church life.
He deliberately read two verses further, to Elijah, a man with a nature like ours, who prayed and the rain stopped and prayed again and it came back. Go look at the story: he prayed seven separate times, sending his servant to check the sky between each one, and the report came back dry six 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.” Preachers say God answers yes, no, or not yet — and Matt will not even let no settle the matter, because the widow in the parable was commended precisely for asking again after being refused. “Sounds like keep going.”
8. Why doesn’t it always happen? Wrong question for today
He was blunt: “If you’re looking for why it sometimes doesn’t happen, you’re going to have to go to another sermon. It’s not my job to figure out when or how or why. It’s my job to obey Jesus.” That is a concession from a self-described massive nerd who likes diagramming things.
And the New Testament gives him cover. Paul tells Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach rather than healing him. He leaves Trophimus ill at Miletus. Epaphroditus was sick nearly to death. Of course they prayed; it was surely the first thing they did. And Jesus himself told the Canaanite woman no before he said yes. Matt’s aside there is worth keeping: what if she had simply accepted it? “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.”
9. “By his stripes we are healed” is not an unpaid promise
People quote Isaiah 53:5, then watch someone die sick, and feel cheated. Matt’s answer went through the oldest Christian objection to the pagan afterlife — Justin Martyr spent his Dialogue with Trypho explaining that Christians are not people who merely die and go to heaven. Our hope is that if you are baptized into a death like his, you will share in a resurrection like his — a body that, like the risen Jesus, can pass through a wall and eat a piece of fish. Peter’s word for it is that you partake of the divine nature. “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 if we just die and go to ghost Disney World.”
He called that stretch a bunny trail and said Hope will be further into it next week, but he would not soften the edge of it: of teachers who say we simply die and go to heaven, “I don’t even want you to use the word Christian for people like that. It’s so wrong.” Then the not-my-assignment refrain came back one last time, carried by two men rather than an argument. “God can release you from jail if he wants or leave you in there like Paul. God can deliver you from persecutors or let you get martyred like Stephen. Who knows? What’s my responsibility? To figure it out or to pray for the sick? Just pray for the sick.” Peter walked out of a cell past the guards; Paul finished the book under guard; Stephen was stoned. None of it altered the instruction. And Matt will not trade obedience for the satisfaction of a finished diagram: “I don’t want to reverse it so that I spend so much time just diagramming and analyzing and I’m like, all right, I feel satisfied with that. No, I want to go pray for the sick — and I guarantee you I don’t know what I’m doing.”
10. The one that went best was an accident
The method anxiety — oil or no oil, scented or not, hands on or not — Matt waved off with a story. A team was at a Walmart praying that the Lord would give them that place as an inheritance, a testimony of God’s goodness. They were finishing up over chicken nuggets, comparing notes on conversations, when on what he called punch-drunk inspiration of the Spirit they walked to a table of young men and announced that God was going to heal one of them. That is when it happened. Nobody laid a hand on anyone. Within a minute the man himself had become the chief spokesman for his own miracle, pleading with his friends to remember where he had been hurt, and the conversation turned to the Holy Spirit and an open door.
“Jesus is a miracle worker. It’s not like a machine where you figure out the method. Don’t worry about that. And don’t be super am I doing it right? You’re not the one doing it.”
11. Take it seriously — and be normal about it
He landed on the scope of the thing rather than a technique for it. “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. If we want to take Jesus’s word seriously, we want to obey what he’s told us to do, then we can’t avoid that.” What he would not do is predict the shape of it for anyone — only the frequency. “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 one caution he pressed was love. Praying for the sick is one of the things Jesus commanded, and so is doing to others as you would have them do to you — we want the whole of what he asked, not a favourite part of it. So do not stand over someone’s bed at night praying in tongues; let them sleep. Do not yell a blessing at someone first thing in the morning, and do not make a man take his shoes off on a bus if he would rather not. Ask before you pray, and ask again before you pray again. Do not let a person wonder whether they are being detained. “The methodologies — don’t get hung up on that to the point of making somebody feel really unloved.”
He closed the way Hope closes every week, by asking the Lord directly how he would like each person to respond — “Lord, I ask that you speak to each one of us very clearly in your mercy, to help us to know how to obey you” — and then handed the room to the heart ministry teams waiting up front with name tags on. “You know you’re not bothering them. They’ve been preparing all morning. They live for this.” And if the teams are full, ask the person next to you. That is also church. Then the benediction he sent them out on: “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”