A Dynamic, Living and Demonstrable Reality...

Today let's return on our earlier study of Emily Gardiner Neals' God Can Heal You Now and consider some of her early thoughts after she began to travel extensively about the US and witnessing wonderful healings.

To bring us all on the same page, recall the Emily Gardiner Neal was a magazine feature writer specilizing in medical scientific subjects. From the beginning she claimed to be a staunch agnostic,

"and the claim that healings of supposedly incurable disease were the result of the direct intervention of the Holy Spirit seemed to be fantastically childish nonsense at best."

Now we jump two years into her travels and witnessing "wonderful healings" and she concludes:

"The phenomenon is no longer new to me, but my sense of excitement and awe has not diminished...Today more clearly than ever before, I see in the healing Church, the unchallengeable anwser to the agnostic belief that Christianity is mere legend, born of Man's need; or only a philosophy, a way of life; or solely an historical event which occurred and finished two thousand years ago, to be interpreted or misinterpreted ever since."


"To know the healing Christ is to see Christianity transformed into what is is meant to be: a dynamic, living and demonstrable reality."

God Can Heal You Now...p.148


We will explore in our next post how Emily faced her first incredibly uncomfortable situation. This was when desperate Parents asked her to pray for their dying child. I don't know how many times I have personally read this, but it's always a spine tingling experience.

MikeR

God's Mysteries in Healings

Emily began to make some general conclusions in the early months of her journey into the world of spiritual healing:

"Scores of such verifiable healings, reported by reputable doctors, induced me to believe that these healings were not mere happenstance. At the end of a few months, I noted that this strange healing force worked in curiously different ways. Some healings occurred though absent prayer, with the patient miles away. Some were instant and complete; others were delayed and gradual. In most cases of spiritual healing, the defective organ supposedly causing the illness was resored to normal function, but in a few cases the individual attained complete health in spite of the fact that the condition of the organ remained ostensibly unchanged."

Emily tried to make sense out of the emerging evidence:

In an effort to shed some light on the healing phenomenon, I searched continuosly for some evidence of a general, underlying psychic factor - some common quality of personality, perhaps, that might make those healed peculiarly susceptible to the healing power, whatever it was an wherever it came from. I could find no such common denominator. Those healed came from every walk of life. They were of varying degrees of intelligence and different levels of education. There were of many diverse temperaments. Only after the healings was there a discernible common bond: a joyous faith in God, founded on the conviction shared by factory worker and professional alike, the God's mysteries cannot be intellectualized."

Source: Celebration of Healing, p.13-14

Spiritual Healing and the "Risen Christ"

This description of spiritual healing was key to me as I read and studied Emily Gardiner Neal's encounter, as a skeptical reporter, of the faith healings she witnessed:

"There is nothing new about faith healing. It has been practiced in one form or another for thousands of years. Many were the sick treated, and probably helped, at the temples of Aesculapius, legendary Greek god of medicine. Many have been the sick treated and possibly cured by withchcraft. Many are the sick today, who by faith in an amulet, a well-phrased slogan, or their doctor, are physically improved.

But there is a vast difference between these kinds of "faith" healings, and today's revived ministry within the Church. Spiritual healing does not concern itself with the curing of the body alone with no reference to the spirit; nor yet is it the type of metaphysical healing which affirms the spiritual at the expense of the physical. Spiritual healing deals with the cure of the whole person -- body, mind and spirit. Its goal and purpose is the seeking of a closer relationship with God -- the soul's salvation. When the spirit is healed through faith in and through the power of the Risen Christ, healing of the mind and body follows as an expected corollary."

Source: God Can Heal You Now - Emily Gardiner Neal

A Reporter Finds God - A Great Hunger

I will be sharing quotes and thoughts in the next few days (possibly weeks) from "Celebration of Healing", a selection of writings of Emily Gardiner Neal who came to a healing ministry from a background in journalism.

Her first book, published in 1956 was A Reporter Finds God Through Spiritual Healing, and she continued writing and engaged in healing ministry through 1989 - when she quietly went to be with her Lord, Jesus Christ.

Today I will start somewhere in the middle with this soul grabbing quote:

After traveling all over the nation, talking to and with people of every educational level and in every stage of belief and disbelief, I have observed a great hunger. The hunger is not for intellectual answers to religious questions that the mind may be satisfied, but for a personal experience of the living God that the soul may be fulfilled.

May this be our desire today...