Broken & Healed Bodies

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Thank you for spending your Mother's Day here. It's good to be in this series called Embodied. We are in our third week of this, where we're talking about how your embodied life matters, your body matters. Every body matters. Isn't that kind of cool? God, when he created this world, loved this world. That's why he created this world, and he created you and your body and this material existence. And it's a great place in a lot of ways. And yet, at the same time, have you noticed how broken this world is? It's pretty broken. It's good, but it's still broken. So what do you do when your body is broken? How does God handle broken bodies? That's what we're going to be dealing with today. Does he just kind of like say, well, deal with it, put up with it, you know? When you get older like I am right now, you have to kind of deal with it, right? Those knees, I'm trying to avoid knee replacement surgery, shoulder replacement surgery. How many of you, I mean, I know. You get older and your body starts breaking down, no matter how hard you try not to have it, right? So what does God say? Oh, don't worry about it. Someday I'll just replace it all, give you, you know. Or you don't even need your body, you're just going to kind of unzip it on the last day and just become kind of a spiritual being, whatever that is. There are a lot of philosophies and religions that kind of do that type of stuff, but I think what we're going to see in the embodied life of Jesus, God takes on a human body. He becomes human. And what we find is when you look at Jesus, you see what God is like. Okay, Luke 13. It fits in really well. Now, Jesus, he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath, and behold, there was a woman who had a disabling spirit for 18 years. She was bent over and could not fully straighten herself. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said to her, woman, you are freed from your disability. And he laid his hands on her and immediately she was made straight and she glorified God. But the ruler of the synagogue became indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, said to the people, there are six days in which work ought to be done. Come on those days and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day. Then the Lord answered him, you hypocrites, does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it away to water it? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan bound for 18 years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day? As he said these things, all his adversaries were put to shame and all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by him. Great text. Lots going on here. And we're going to have four points in this message. An extra one from normal, but it won't be any longer. Here are the four points. We're going to look at the reality of our lives, the remedy that Jesus brings, the results of it, and your response to it all. I promise you, Sierra Adelaide, it won't be any longer than normal. Oh, Katrina's complaining. That is Katrina. Okay. No, I'm sorry. She doesn't complain. She just is a hard worker. She's a great daughter, right? Awesome. The reality. Years ago, I read, I don't know if any of you are C.S. Lewis fans. He's written a number of things. He wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, which were turned into some movies, a few movies. Great stuff. Great metaphors, great works. He's also written, believe it or not, a science fiction trilogy. Any of you read his science fiction trilogy? You have to go pretty deep to get there. The first one is called Out of the Silent Planet. The second one, Perilandra, and I can't remember. I think the third one is That Hideous Strength. They're kind of fun, but they're kind of like H.G. Wells type stuff, in the sense that they're outdated now. We've passed the science, in a sense. But they're still imaginative. They're more fantasy literature, in a sense. I think it's Out of the Silent Planet, whatever that one was. I think it's in that the hero in that one goes to a planet that has never heard of, because they have not fallen, like planet Earth, of sin. And he has to try to explain, this hero in it, what sin is. And he finally has to figure out sin, he says, is being bent. You go like, is that interesting? It is interesting. In our gospel lesson, there's a woman who's been bent over for 30 years. And it's not that her sin caused it, but it is a metaphor for what sin is like. And that, you might find out, actually, in the Hebrew language, there's a number of words for sin. And one of them happens to be the word avon. And Tim Mackey of The Bible Project says this. Avon is about distorting what is otherwise beautiful and good, and the authors use it to refer to behavior like murder or adultery. It really means being crooked, or twisted, or misshapen. In fact, the wor...