Partnering with God in Supernatural Healing

Well, good morning. Greetings in Jesus' name.

Some of you might remember that I had begun a series of messages on the Christian ordinances, and I think we came up with seven of them. And the last time I said I would be looking at the subject of communion this time. However, at the time, I didn't realize Wendell was going to cover that in the next message in First Corinthians and his message, so we did a little switching on that. And this morning, I would like to look at the subject of anointing with oil.

And there's a familiar passage that we typically turn to. We can turn to that in James chapter 5. We could turn to many other passages that have to do with anointing with oil and so on. But James 5, a New Testament teaching in beginning in verse 13. Verse 13 through 18, I'll read at this point. "Is any among you afflicted, let him pray. Is any married, let him sing psalms.

Is any sick among you, 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 shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up, and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.

Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another that you may be healed. The effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months.

And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.

Let's bow for prayer.

Dear God, we thank you for your word this morning. We thank you, Lord, that somehow you have revealed yourself in almost every passage of scripture, and we see that again here this morning. And I pray you would open our hearts and ears to receive a message this morning out of this text that you would have us to learn and take home with us. We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

There's a lot going on in these short verses here. We see in these verses that we don't have time this morning to talk about. We see it's in here we have emotions going on. When we're happy, we're to sing psalms.

We learn to sing a new song. And then when we're afflicted, we pray. Afflicted has the idea of being distressed.

We could talk about that this morning. We could talk about our emotions. We have here then the physical. We have a sick person. And then we have here also the spiritual. We see prayer that's effectual. We have fervent prayer. We have faith. We have righteous men. We have elders of the church.

We have confessing of sin. We talk about all those things. We have in here God. We could talk about all those things, but there's the subject in here we also have this oil, and that's what we want to look at this morning.

This oil, what's up with that? Should we be doing this? Should we actually get a bottle of oil and call for the elders of the church and meet together and do this? Is the question this morning.

To that, I would say yes, and I trust that is our heart here this morning. And let's, as we unpack this part of the passage this morning, I entitled this, the title of this message this morning is Partnering with God in Supernatural Healing.

Do we believe in supernatural things? Do we believe that? Everything we discussed so far this morning in Sunday school, I think, had to do with supernatural. It's supernatural for Jesus to come out of heaven and go into the womb of a virgin and be born, and the Father being the Holy Spirit.

And then, as Anthony brought out, for him to come into our life and unite with us, that's supernatural. To call us to repentance of our waywardness and ushering us back into the family of God when we have a nature that is completely contrary to that, that is supernatural work. My five-year-old grandson recently was trying to explain to me. He said we were going down 81, and he said, "Here comes a pickup truck with super wheels."

And I picked his little brain as to what are super wheels. "Well, you know," he said, "they're really big and they stick out the sides of the truck." "Well, then what are other wheels?" "Well," he said, "you know other wheels are just normal wheels."

So folks, today, if you drove a truck this morning with little wheels, you're driving a normal truck, with normal wheels, I should say. In his five-year-old mind, we have normal and then we have super. And I would like to take that thought a little bit and think about the normal healings or the natural healings that we have going for us that we so many times disconnect from the supernatural.

For example, my brother, one of my brothers, just recently had an accident on one of his pieces of farm equipment, and he tore a big gash in his head and laid the skin apart and bled like whatever. Taken to the emergency room, and I called him. I heard about it. I said, "Hey, how are you doing?" He said, "What did" so what did they do in the ER for something like that? Because it was really laid apart, apparently. "Well," he said, "they pulled the skin back together and they put a bunch of stables in there and just stabled the thing back together and sent me home."

So I said the procedure of that, "Corley, they had to clean this thing, and they probably gave you a shaved haircut, get your hair out of the way." "No," he said, "it was a lady doctor, and she got some of my hair right in there and stabled things together with the hair sticking in there. They didn't cut my hair." I'm like, "What? I don't know much about it, but I'm like, you put hair in there. Is that going to heal?" "Well," he said, "I guess nature sort of takes care of that. They think it'll be okay."

Well, a week or so later, I called. I said, "Hey, how's that doing for you?" He said, "Well, it's not healing the best." He said, "I went to see another doctor, and that doctor looked at that and said, 'Who did this?'" But the point I want to make is if we get a cut or whatever, we clean the place and we get the skin back together, it tends to heal on its own, and that's what they were hoping here. I think he got infection in somewhat, but recent, last week, he said it's back to healing and it's coming along fine.

We have remedies that we use that we zero in on the natural laws of healing, and these kinds of healings work very well. And sometimes we forget the hand of God in that, and we just consider it normal. We take it for granted. Now, this kind of law of healing that God put in place works for the Christian and for the atheist.

It works for the man of God. It works for the person that never made a profession of Christianity. It just sort of is put in place. In medical science, I believe the deeper they dig into the human body, the more they're finding out the put in place, as the psalmist said, "When I was in the deeper parts of the earth." I used to think that means when I was in my mother's womb. It may. But then he goes on, "Before I was me, I was only substance, whatever that is.

There's not a me yet." He says that God was already putting together all the details of my members. And when he was doing that, he put in there the laws of healing. When our bone breaks, the fine detail of that, get the bone back into place together, and it'll sort of heal on its own, normally speaking.

And we operate under that law every day. We get the sniffles. We get sick. We get a fever. We take a couple of pills. We take antibody or whatever it might be. Drinking enough of orange juice, you sort of stop coughing. Eventually, it sort of goes away.

We just take that for granted. That comes from God. Let's not just call that ordinary. That was God's doings. The Bible says that in Him we live and we move and we have our being, and we're also His offspring.

A little bit of history on this subject. The question has been raised in the past in the Christian churches, "Is this something we do literally? Do we take oil, real oil? Do we anoint real sick people with real oil, or is this something that is symbolic to something greater, figuratively, and so on?"

And some took this explanation.

They did not believe that it's speaking about literal oil, but to the oil of grace, bringing God into as the oil of grace. And if we would say that, then we would also have to say that God was not referring to literal water baptism, but to the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Because remember, John the Baptist said, "I baptize with water, but there's one coming after me that's going to baptize with the Holy Spirit."

John could not baptize with the Holy Spirit. Neither can we baptize with the Holy Spirit today, but we do water. Neither can we baptize with the oil of grace, but we can anoint, or should I say anoint with the oil of grace, but we can or the healing of grace, but we can anoint with oil.

Another question that has been raised over the years, and I never realized this has been a debated subject for years. If we go back into history, even in the early Anabaptist days, they rejected this idea of literal anointing. And I think it was partly a reaction against the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church took this thing so religiously that it almost became a part of that last thing that you got to obey before you die. And if you didn't, it was questioned on salvation. To them, they made a very religious ceremony out of this. And if you hadn't done it, it was like you're breaking a commandment. And then there was a reaction against that with many of the Christian folks and said, "Well, we don't find our cleansing and dealing with sin with oil.

We find the cleansing is wrapped up in the blood of Jesus Christ and that we're going down a wrong street." And so they had meetings in the late 1800s, from what I read, the early 1900s, ongoing members' meetings, brothers' meetings, and this was the subject, "Should we anoint with oil? Should we not?" And some were very strongly opposed. They said, "If we're going to start doing this literally, we're going to lose the way." And this was a debate. I imagine coming to a brothers' meeting and this is the subject again.

They were doing that a number of years. And then somewhere in the middle of the 1920s, the Mennonite Church came to an agreement that we're going to put that into one of the lists of the ordinances that needs to be practiced in the Mennonite Church.

I found that interesting. They came to that conclusion. Now, I read something that I found is still an ongoing debate today. And here's what I read from a modern-day pastor. He said, "I've been a pastor for many, many years." Now, this is a very recent modern pastor.

And he said, "I've prayed with many sick members. I took part in over 100 funeral services. I did my duty as a pastor. He felt very well. But he said, 'I was never involved in an anointing with oil service.'" And here's one of the explanations he gives, and here's a quote from him, "Today, we have a more advanced medical science. Therefore, we separate the roles of the physician and the pastor. I have worked hand in hand with wonderful medical people who do modern equivalent of anointing with oil."

That's about where I lost interest in that reading. To me, I have two problems with that statement. Problem number one is the Bible says that the anointers must be the elders of the church, not a medical doctor necessarily, so to speak. He can be that. The anointers must be righteous men. They must have a deep faith, and they also must know how to pray fervently.

The second problem I have with that statement is it reminds me of the church in Revelation that was rich, and they were covered, and they made the statement, "I have need of nothing." And Jesus turned around and asked them to repent of their poverty. He said, "You're naked.

You're poor. You don't know it because you don't sense your need." Folks, today, medical science has come a long way. And before I forget to say it, I'm not here speaking against medical science. They've helped me. They've helped my wife. They've helped you in many ways. But if we're going to replace that with the supernatural powers of Jesus Christ and His love to touch His people and healing, then I think we're going down a very slippery slope, and we need to repent of that.

Let's just think of the Old Testament usage for a little bit. This was a part of Old Testament. Often, in the Old Testament, the anointing of oil symbolized God's authority. It symbolized God's holiness. And they would use this oil, and they would call it God's oil. And they would never use an anointing without a clear word from God.

They would anoint the priests. They would anoint the prophets. Elijah was called in a dream, in a vision, straight from God to anoint Elijah to be a prophet. And we have a clear word from God that Aaron was to be anointed with oil as a priest and his sons and so on. We could go into many of those. It had the idea of sanctioned or set apart for a special purpose. And it was God's anointing. It was His oil.

And in Exodus, we have in the law that if anyone other than one that was called to be anointed was anointed by someone, the anointer was to be cut off from the people of God. That's how serious this was.

It was also in the Old Testament. It was symbolic of God's approval, of God's blessing, of God's mercy, of God's love. And we see that in the Psalms. The psalmist, one place, says that I might be anointed when he was asking for the blessing of heaven, that I might be anointed with fresh oil. I don't know what all that meant. Psalm 23, David says, "Thou anointest my head with oil, and my cup runneth over." It's symbolic of God's blessing. "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life."

That was the anointing of God upon David's head that he was asking for.

Number two, in this passage, we believe it's an expression of our need for God. It's an expression. When I bring this oil, when I call to the elders of the church and say, "I need this special service," it is an expression of saying, "I have a need here that is bigger than me." Now, let's look at the context of James.

Am I recommending that we all come running for an anointing with oil service every time we have the sniffles and every time we have a runny nose or a slight headache or whatever? I mean, we need to hire more elders if that's the case because we'd be over at Brandon Heather this morning.

I don't know that we see that. We have an interesting word in this text when it speaks about raising the sick. In the original Greek word, that word is used only, I think, one other time in the New Testament. It is a very unique word, and I can't pronounce it in the Greek. I have it written down here. And the definition behind it is well, let's back up a little bit before we talk about that word. Let's think of the people this is written to. So James opens the letter to a group of scattered Christians that were scattered abroad. They were persecuted. They were run over. They were taken advantage of. And we see that thread going through the book of James.

And we come up to this point in chapter five. We see that these people have been taken advantage of by the rich. And then God says, "Just be patient. Learn from the farmer how he waits on the early rains and the latter rains." And then he uses, Moses, I believe, as another example of endurance, "And just hang in there." And then he comes to this, and he says, "Is any among you distressed?

Pray. Is any among you happy? Sing to God. Praise God." So you see the context this is written in is to a church of believers that is distressed. They've been run over. They've been taken advantage of. And it's not just a slight cold they got. They are sick to the point. Here's the word, and it's definition, as I understand it, from the Greek word. It says to be weary from toil, to be exhausted, to be faint-hearted, as the idea of a wounded soldier from persecution to the point where their faith is shaken.

Now, we say, "Well, that dismisses all of us this morning, really?" Not really. Have you ever been so sick that you were distressed?

Have you ever been so sick that you were discouraged and you were depressed and you couldn't really pray anymore and you needed help? Were you ever so sick that you were diagnosed from the medical system this is your problem only to find out that there's not really a cure?

That's big. That's heavy. And that's sort of what we see in this Greek word here as faint-heartedness, distressed. "I'm finished. I need help. I can't even pray. The devil's coming in here, and he's using this sickness against me. I need God. I need God."

That is how every one of us comes to the faith, just that way. And if we expect a supernatural working of God in our hearts to come to the faith, then we must expect also to have that brokenness and that humility when our physical body is caving in and the devil is using that against us. "Oh, Lord, I'm sick. It hurts. I have no answers. I need You," that expression.

The Bible says, "We are to cast all our care upon Him, for He careth."

Do you remember Jesus told His people, "Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered you together as a mother chicken gathers together her brood under her wings?" That really came real to me one day when I was in probably my upper teens. We were at home, and a thunderstorm came up very quickly. In the summer around here, they can come sort of gradually. We had one that came right now. And we were unprepared for that. So we're all scrambling and running and picking up things yet before they blow away. And one thing that I can never get out of my mind we all made our way to the house, and the storm hit. And out there in the middle of the driveway, there was a mother chicken doing this.

She was doing her noise, and she had her wings out, and there were little peeps running from every corner. And they didn't make it to shelter before the storm hit. And they're sitting out there on the driveway in the blowing cold wind and rain with the mother doing this over her chicks.

And how many of us have mother chickens?

Philip, we don't see that anymore, do we? We used to have them at home. We don't have them anymore, but that is the perfect picture. Jesus told us, "I want to do that to you so badly, but you would not." James says, "You don't have because you don't ask."

You see that? And we bring this oil. We bring this special service. We set it apart. We say, "I have a need here, God. I'm going to invite You. I'm sick. I'm depressed. I can't do it. I need help." You see that? God loves that. I know He does. In fact, He used that woman that kept coming to Him as an example for prayer for His disciples.

It's an expression of our need for God, but it's also what I see in this text. It's an expression of our need for the church.

And I've been there. When I am terribly sick to this point, one of the last things my human nature wants to do is call the church and say, "Hey, I'm sick. I need oil. I need prayer. I need you all."

Some of us are more private than others. I used to be a very private person. I'll give you a little experience I had as a young person. I was thinking of what John was saying this morning and just remembering our heritage. My mind was going back over my heritage and some of the highlights of mom and dad who are gone, and most of you have never met my parents probably.

And then when Anthony was talking about relationships, I also thought of my mother. One thing my mother did with her young boys was she taught us how to arm wrestle.

How many mothers here today arm wrestle their teenage boys?

And my mother was very strong. She had short, stocky arms, and she was very solid. And I remember one of my older brothers was a tie with her for quite a while. One time, mom beat, and the next time, my brother beat. That's how they were doing arm wrestling, very competitive. And I don't know what was going on with mom. Was it relationship with her teenagers or young lads? Was it teaching us how to become men? I don't know, but it took for most of us, and I became, I thought, a professional arm wrestler.

And I was in the youth group, and we went into this thing, and I could beat big guys with arm wrestling. Credit to my mother. She taught me how to do it well. And one day, I'm arm wrestling this big giant, and there was a terrible competition going on. And all of a sudden, something flew in my right shoulder that just hurt.

So I'm in those prideful years. That thing was out of commission, I'm going to say, a good 12 years. It just hurt. It was just lame. I couldn't use it very well. And it got worse with age. It just got worse and worse.

And when I hit my early 30s, it got so bad when I drove my car, I'd have my left hand on the steering wheel and my right hand on my lap. It hurt so bad just to keep it up on the steering wheel.

So I began down the avenue of chiropractors, and I saw this chiropractor. I saw the next chiropractor, and I don't know we ever had an X-rayed even. They did their adjustment and come back, and, "We'll try this and do that, and we think we can help you." And nobody helped me. "Oh, yeah, they made it feel better a day or two or a week." And so we'd try the next chiropractor. Somebody said, "He's really good." Tried a few of those. One put some electrical device on and put some shock current. I don't know. It felt better for a day or so. And I remember I said, "Then there was word given there's this professional chiropractor that he can help me."

And I was going to go and see him that next week.

And during that time, we had a prayer meeting. And I remember sharing this. It was really hard for me to share my problems and so on. I was at that stage of life. I said, "Well, I want to see this next chiropractor, and I don't" I guess my prayer was for wisdom. Is he going to for wisdom on his end. "I need help."

And I was just taken when Brother Lynn said, "Well, you know what? We can pray for your shoulder." "Oh, well, I guess it never quite hit me that way." "Well, thank you. Sure." There was special prayer given for my shoulder.

And you know what? This was on a weekend. By Monday morning, that thing was completely healed.

That has been in my early 30s. Today, I'm 56 or 58, I guess. Do the math. How many years I use my right shoulder now, I don't arm wrestle, but it's as healthy as my left shoulder as far as I can tell.

You know what? That was a real-life lesson for me. I went home, and I said, "Praise God, but also thank You for the prayer of the righteous men." We have that here. "The prayer of faith shall save the sick." I learned some lessons through that, and I said, "From now on, I'm going to incorporate my problems." And I took this passage in a whole new way.

I need the church. I need God's interest and healing touch, but I also need the church. I've been involved in quite a number of anointing services. I have seen miraculous supernatural healings come out of there. My wife has been healed miraculously twice since we're married. It wasn't just my wife and I praying. It was the church. We had an anointing service for her at least once and special prayer for her, which proved the midwife wrong when she said, "There's something terribly wrong." And the only other case I saw like this before ended up being cancer, and we knew that woman, and she died. And this thing was on my mind for two weeks until we had an appointment with the next doctor.

We came to the next doctor, and between there, we had special prayer. It wasn't just myself. It was the church. We came to that doctor, and he looked at that. He said, "I don't know what your midwife was seeing, but everything looks good and normal to me." I said, "Praise God.

God is so good." Now, I have also seen special anointing services that where folks were not healed. Is there a guarantee to this?

But with every testimony, there was given a testimony of God's grace in this situation, and that's just what Paul said. Paul said, "I went three times," and special prayer, could we say. I don't know. Was he involved in an anointing service? I believe he probably was.

That was a practice in the early church, and he wasn't healed. But in the pursuit of healing, he said God gave him finally gave him the answer, said, "My grace is sufficient for thee." Paul wasn't healed, I don't think.

I have some things about me that I've been praying for for years that haven't been healed as of this point. I came to the conclusion that God wants me to have that thing for His glory and for my benefit.

And in that, we can worship God as well.

The anointing of oil symbolizes a full surrender under the Lordship of Christ. Remember, the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 6:20, I believe it is, "You are bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's."

Do you notice that last phrase? Your body and your spirit, they don't really belong to you. You know what that does for me? All of a sudden, my sick body my body that's not functioning like it could or should, it all of a sudden tells me that that is not really my problem.

That is God's problem. And we take oil, and we say, "Here we are, Lord. I'm sick. You're interested in my feelings and my emotions, but this is huge. I can't do it. I'm going to surrender under Your Lordship in this." And you know what? When we come to that place, God just loves to do miracles.

God needs you, and He needs me to do His supernatural healing.

Do you remember? And we could turn to so many accounts in the Bible, some of the miracles that Jesus did, the feeding of the 5,000. Remember, one of the disciples came and said, "Hey, we have all these people. 5,000. Was it just men and without women and children?" I mean, could there have been 15 or 20 thousand people? The disciples were just being like you and I. "All we have oh, we don't have food for these people." And then I think it was Andrew that said, "Hey, I remembered there's a young lad here that has two loaves or five loaves and two fishes, and I think the fishes were small." Is that mentioned?

Well, Jesus was wanting to do a miracle and feed these people. He didn't need the two fishes and the five loaves of bread, did He, to do a miracle? A miracle is overriding the normal, and Jesus was wanting to do that.

But He said, "Bring the fishes and bring the loaves." And out of that cooperation, He did the miracle. Oh, we could think of many, many what about the first miracle He did when He turned the water into wine? He said, "Fill the pots with water." Well, what's up with that?

Why? Why don't you just put wine in the pots? No, He ordered, "I want water in those pots." And then He took that water. See, there again is that relationship, and there's a cooperation for God to perform His miracle, His supernatural work. He needs you. He needs your cooperation, and He needs that oil.

He doesn't really, but He asks for it. "Bring me the oil. Bring me the prayer." The oil's not going to do the healing. That's another question over the debates was, are there healing properties in the oil? If there's healing properties in the oil, then we better know what kind of oil to bring, and we better have a medical person involved, just elders of the church and the qualifications given. It doesn't say anything about knowing our oils.

It's about character, isn't it? So those were some of the arguments. If there's no healing properties in the oil, then why bother?

And therefore, they explain it away to this day.

Do you remember when Lazarus became sick? This was a special friend of Jesus, wasn't it? And he was out busy with his disciples when Lazarus became sick, and then he died. And then Martha says from a distance, "Lord, Jesus, if You would have been here, our brother wouldn't have died."

I always thought it was just Martha that said that, but then later, Mary came and she worships at the feet of Jesus and says, "Jesus, if You would have been here, our brother would not have died." See, their sick, dead brother I love Mary and Martha's spirit here.

They took that sickness and that death, and they said, "Jesus, it's Your problem. It's not our problem. We did what we could, but You weren't here." And then when Jesus saw the emotional pain and the loss, He wept with them. There again, He was wanting to do a miracle, but He needed some cooperation.

Jesus could have raised Lazarus from the dead with the stone in place, but before He did His miracle, He ordered people just like you and me, "Go and get the stone rolled away." What's up with that, Jesus? You mean You can raise a person from the dead, and You can't roll a stone away? Cooperation. For Him to do the miracle, He needs you, and He needs me. The stone needs to be rolled away.

Jesus chose to not do the miracles without or all on His own. Another very intense story we have in one of the Gospels when Jesus now, this is the pool of Bethesda. There was a great multitude of sick people laying around, a great multitude of sick people around the pool.

I, to this day, I do not know what was going on there, but it says that at particular times, there would be an angel there. He'd go down, and He'd stir the water. And then the first person stepping into the water after it's stirred by the angel was that a good angel? Was it a bad angel? I don't know, but it says the person that stepped in was made whole. Well, they're all lined up here. It says they're laying. They have different issues. Some are blind. Some are the list goes on. And Jesus walked there, and there He saw a man that He recognized. He knew a little bit of his history. He knew that there was a long time this man was sick, 38 years, and this man was lying there next to the pool.

And Jesus, "What do you want?" He said, "I have no man to help me into the troubled waters. And every time I get myself to go there, there's another person ahead of me. He's finished. I have no man." You know, when we come to Jesus with that attitude, "I have no man. I have nothing.

I'm helpless. I need help," Jesus loves that. And Jesus came, and He made him whole, took up his bed, and walked, miraculously healed.

In closing, it's also we see an act of worship.

Remember the story not long before Jesus was crucified? He was at Simon the Leper's house eating a meal. Thought that's interesting. Was Simon still a leper? Doesn't really say, but he was at his house eating a meal. And there comes a woman with a box of ointments. She breaks it apart, very expensive ointments, and she anointed his head with that oil.

And all the Jews raised a ruckus, you know, about this, and this oil would have been expensive and could have been sold and money given to the poor, so on and so forth. And Jesus says, "Just leave her alone."

She did a good thing. She did what she could. She came to anoint the body that was going to be buried. And interesting, the comment Jesus makes is that wherever the Gospel is preached over the whole world, this needs to be taught. This needs to be preached as a memorial of this woman. And here we are, how many thousand years later, over the whole world, still preaching that message.

He said she did a good thing, but in her heart, what was going on with her? I believe it was an expression of love and gratitude to her Lord, an expression or an act of worship. And then Jesus said to taught the disciples and taught all of us that we, when we fast, we are not to be like the hypocrites of a sad countenance, for they disfigure their faces that they may appear unto men to fast.

Not if they fast, but when they fast, Jesus says, "When you fast, don't be like them, but you anoint your head

and wash your face." So in their worship, in their fasting now, He says the hypocrites are going to have their reward, but you're going to have a different reward when you do it God's way. And you don't appear to be doing this.

It's an act of worship, fasting, anointing, inviting God to come to her needs. And I don't know how we practice our fasting, but it's usually not to twist an arm of God, but to allow Him to enter into the situation.

It's opening the door to the powers of Heaven to come down in and take our situation and partner with us or we partner with Him in it. Let's trust God. So the answer to my question of my opinion and my understanding and my faith, should we practice this? I say yes because our Lord taught us this very clearly.

And it is opening like I said, it's opening the powers of Heaven to come down and to take charge. Yes, just to run down a little bit of it symbolizes God's authority and holiness. It symbolizes love, mercy, and blessing in the Old Testament, a setting apart for a special purpose.

The New Testament, for our life today, we would understand it as an expression of our need to God, an expression of our need for the church. And I'll just simply say this yet to the church: let's not be hesitant. I know it can be a very intimidating thing, especially to young ladies. I've seen it firsthand. You know, I'm going to call for these elders, and these elders are going to come with oil, and we're going to talk about my problem, and we're going to pray about my problem. That's okay. That is okay.

And I think the rest of the church should be alerted. There is a specific need here that we're addressing and talking about, and we're setting this particular problem right here before the church and before God, and we're united together, and we pray earnestly in faith, and we trust God that either He's going to heal, He's going to raise up, and if He chooses to not do that, He's going to give us grace to carry this, whatever it is. And He's going to go with us through the heaviness of it. He's going to lighten our load. And you know, I have seen very sick people that had a very glowing attitude. That's a blessing. And I say that's a supernatural work right there.

And it symbolizes a full surrender to God, and it's a type of worship. Any thoughts or any comments before we pray?