Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Healing Christ: 20. Helping So As Not to Hurt

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Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Healing Christ: 20. Helping So As Not to Hurt



TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Healing Christ (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 20. Helping So As Not to Hurt

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Helping So As Not to Hurt

We've been talking about Christ's power in healing; what He can do. We've spoken of His love in healing; what He will do, and do with an eager gladness.

Now, we want to talk a bit together about Christ's wisdom in healing, the way in which He does heal. There's a rare wisdom in Christ's method in healing men's bodies.

There is nowhere that wisdom is so much needed, rarest wisdom, as in giving. Those engaged in giving help to others habitually, in a larger or smaller way, know well what a fine art is needed here if men are not to be hurt when they are needing help.

To give so as to help, and help in the best way, and help only, not hurt, is a fine art indeed. Nothing is more ticklishly difficult. Thoughtless giving is cheap and common, lazy and hurtful. Love is always thoughtful, though it cost more. But love ignores the cost even when it must be counted.

In His healing, Christ is thinking always of two things, the immediate need and the deeper need, the body, and the man himself living in the body.

Often helping the deeper need meets the bodily need too, and meets it in the best way. The glad, intelligent surrender to Christ as a Master brings certain changes in one's habits. And this in turn radically affects the body and the health, oftentimes.

Often Christ's touch upon the life prepares the way for the touch upon the body. It does yet more. It leads to the intelligent thinking into things. And this in turn leads to such obedience to the laws of the body as to prevent a recurrence of the bodily trouble.

Sometimes that obedience is very simple. Sometimes it is radical. It may mean breaking old habits in such common things as eating and sleeping and the methodical daily round. And health and healing are very dependent on these common things.

Christ is love. And nowhere is love more put to it to be really helpful than in giving. The tangle of sin has come in to blur men's eyes, and teeter their judgment this way or that, and especially to make the will twisted and abnormally set in its way.

There are two things to note keenly here, as to how Christ heals. There are two "hows," the how of conditions and the how of method.

The conditions underlie all else. This has to do with one's touch with Christ. The method has to do with the healing itself, the way it's done.

The physician and the sick man must get into touch. Christ and the man needing Christ's healing power must get together.

Some have supposed that saintliness is the requirement for the healing touch. They have supposed that the saintly may come and expect the healing touch; but hardly others.

Well, of course, the closer the touch the better. And saintliness practically means simply a close touch, the habitual close touch.

But it isn't the saintliness that heals, nor because there is enough of it. There must be touch, of course. But it is Christ, Christ's blood, that heals.

It is never because of any merit in us such as saintliness suggests. It is through the contact, however saintly it may be or not, that Christ's healing power comes in.