Extraordinary Love Calls us to take Extraordinary Measures: A Sermon from June

This is the tale of two fathers, one father with a sick daughter and the other father with the ability to heal.




This is really the story of a little girl, sick with a hugely bloated belly, the six year old daughter of a Malian African pastor. Because of the pain, the little girl was not free to be a child, to do the basics of what a child is supposed to be able to do: to play and learn. Her dad, in passion for his daughter’s health, would pray for hours on his knees for God’s healing. When the doctors first started treating her, they thought that she had tuberculosis. But after treating her for six months with heavy medications, the pain was still present, the belly still extended. The dad, bereft, brought her back to the hospital but the doctors unfortunately were at the end of their diagnostic powers. Without having anything left, he got down on his knees again…for hours a day.  The dad asked the doctors what other course of action they could take. So, the doctors gave the little girl a CT scan, extremely rare and expensive for an African, especially a pastor…easily two year’s salary without health care. The results were discussed by email with American doctors. The answer coming from across the sea was that it was a cyst attached to many of her internal organs. Again, a total dead end. No Malian doctor would attempt such a surgery on a six year old. It seemed the little girl would have to live with the growing cyst without any possibility of care until she became an adult. Still, the father did not stop praying.


Then, enter my own father, traveling to Mali last January to a hospital six hours away from this loving dad and his daughter. What the pastor did not know, was that my dad was trained, not just in various types of surgery, but pediatric surgery in particular. So, in hope that the American surgeon could bring peace to his six year old daughter, the dad drove six hours over horrible roads, the little girl crying out in the backseat at each bump. Finally, using the CT scan that had seemed financially irresponsible, my father donned his surgical cap, gave this little girl anesthesia and with precision, cut the mass away from each organ, leaving the little girl pain free and healthy. The next morning my dad checked on the two of them, the pastor was joyfully watching his daughter’s belly go up and down as she breathed. It was flat…and she was able to sit up and talk. He tearfully thanked my father and spontaneously raised his voice in worship. His prayers had been answered.


Extraordinary love sometimes calls us to take extraordinary measures.


This is another story…this time with a mother. A dear friend, Clare, about ten years ago found out that her son, Bronson, had gotten caught in the web of the horrible world of heroin. …and was now being held by drug dealers in a house against his will until he could pay for his addiction. I’ll never forget this image she shared with me: white Clare knocking on the door of a rundown drughouse in one of the worst parts of their urban downtown and when the door opened, and a man peered out, Clare pried the door open, throwing herself into the house and with determination, went searching room by squalid room pulling back blankets, turning heads with empty eyes until she found her son. But, the danger was not over. In most of these houses, the drug dealers are armed and this one was no different. She was followed by an armed drug dealer and threw a huge wad of cash around the room, creating such a chaotic scene that she was able to escape with a stumbling, scared Barrett. She did not care about her own safety. She was willing to go to extraordinary measures because of love.


She was the epitome of grace and love unwilling to see her child die.


This, precious friends is the kind of love that we see in God in 1 Kings 18 with the contest on Mt. Carmel.


I’ll set the scene: You see baal was supposed to be the weather god and couldn’t send rain. He was supposed to be the fire god and could not rain down fire. God, our God was not above meeting baal on his own turf in order to show the emptiness his people were giving their lives to. He revealed himself in power…to save his people.


Extraordinary love goes to extraordinary measures.


But, I’m not done telling you the whole truth of what the Israelites were facing. The truth was even more sinister.


Israel exchanged a covenant with the Almighty Creator of the universe with a slavery to a god who was demanding blood. Baal worship was not a wild frat party around a golden calf.  Baal often demanded a bloody human sacrifice. Where temples of baal worship have been unearthed, nearby have been found the piles of children’s remains, especially infant’s bodies. In two other places in scripture, we even hear that Kings Ahab and Manasseh had sacrificed their own sons in order to try to gain the baal’s favor for their success. We see just a glimpse of the horror in this scripture when the prophets of baal could not get him to answer their plea to send fire and began to cut their body.


Forgive me for this difficult description, it is just absolutely essential that we get that this was not an embarrassed boyfriend, this was a loving, protective God, a Father demanding the freedom of his people from life-destroying evil. God, our God, was going to extraordinary measures to reveal himself to his children to guide them back to Life.


Sometimes we stray from God into something that doesn’t at the time seem sinister, but then we look back on our lives and realize that so much has been stolen from us. The worst thieves can sometimes be the most unexpected. Does that make sense?


Andrew, Kathy, Marie and myself had a chance to go to a healing prayer workshop two weeks ago and one of the most profound truths that I heard at the whole weekend was learning to ask myself: what has this cost me?


Sometimes the things that we believe are really lies. You need to be perfect or to perform in a specific way in order to be loved. You are not smart. You are ugly. You will always be rejected. You need people’s approval in order to be loved. Or after a parent has died or abandoned us, we hear an inaudible voice whisper, “I am on my own.” And for the rest of our lives we live, walled off, a self-fulfilling prophecy.These lies become a major motivation in our lives, sometimes coming out of one painful encounter with a teacher or a parent. These can be lies that we are told outright or that we were told indirectly:


Here’s another one: I will always fail. There are literally hundreds of these lies stemming from the wounded places in our lives that become the jumping off place for the sin and pain in our lives. Unless cleaned up and healed by God, these lies and places of woundedness becomes the garbage where the rats reside. This garbage is the rats' playground. In religious language: These lies and wounds become strongholds of the enemy. This is where the evil one can steal, kill and destroy.


The question: “what has this cost me?” often brought tears to my eyes during the week at the conference. Because of these lies, we often wall ourselves off from people to protect ourselves. Or like the Samaritan woman at the well, we jump into bed with people who do not really love us in order to gain approval, go to pornography to silence the loneliness or need for respect. We go to food to make ourselves feel better, hours of television, silly books, gossip, drinking, friends that we know aren’t good for us…but we don’t want to be lonely. Put your own stuff in the blanks: I go to--------- when I feel bad. We often don’t even know that we are doing it, we may have learned to go to the action so early we don't see it as a reaction anymore. But years can be stolen by depression, or even stolen by perfectionism, and our dreams are often stolen by fears.


Our bodies themselves pay the price. These strongholds literally give us years of pain.


What has this cost me?


Does this make sense? We might not have baal stealing our children, but we do have the evil one stealing our freedom. But wait, these lies do steal our children as well: these same lies and fears we live with are often passed right down to the next generation. If we don't deal with our fears, our sins and the lies we believe now, they will become our kids' inheritance.
AND we might not be asked by our god to cut ourselves to prove our worthiness, but in a way, that is exactly what we are doing by over and over trying to achieve to show we are enough, or trying to gain someone’s approval to show that we are worth loving, or respecting.


The sad thing is that we bring these same lies right into our relationship with God…thinking God wants the very same from us and move these same assumptions into our relationship with Him.


The question of the day is: what has this really cost me? What has believing this lie cost me?


We are stuck in a web with the enemy’s shadow peering over us and we need God to go to extraordinary measures for us.


Listen to these words spoken by the prophet Isaiah…that Jesus proclaimed as his mission in this war. Drink this in. There is hope:


“I have come to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners…to comfort all who mourn and provide for those who grieve in Zion.”


Jesus took the extraordinary measure of leaving paradise to take on our flesh…coming into the sinful world that his children created in order to literally die for them. Have you ever heard a father say that he would die for his children? This is what God did.


This is what Clare would have done for her son Bronson.


Elijah today illustrates the best news of all. When we cry out to God, He always shows up! We don’t have to work ourselves up to get His attention. We don’t have to cut ourselves…or be perfect…or somehow try to come to Him with great amounts of good works to tell him that we are worthy. We come as we are…and as in the story of the prodigal son, the father will run with unbounding grace toward you.


God longs to sweep in and rescue! His personality is that He goes after the one lost sheep. He even does the ultimate, sacrificing his body on the cross in order to satisfy the blood demanded by our sins so that we can go free. By His wounds we are healed. His blood is the beginning of our healing.


He longs to show up for us when we cry out for him. You, my dear, my friend, are that son, that daughter. He will go to extraordinary measures to heal, to rescue, to restore and redeem all that was lost. Part of our going to Ohio for this training was that we could be one of the friends standing beside you, showing you the way to freedom, where Christ is pointing the way. We can show you the map out.


You are precious to the father’s heart. He longs to come through for you. Longs to show up for you. Longs to reveal himself wherever you are…He just says, come, son, come daughter, just as you are…and I will take extraordinary measures to bring you freedom.