Where God is working there is healing

A major part of the accounts of Jesus' life are about healing. Once, when studying the Gospels, I took a pen and wrote down all of the actions of Jesus. It was a little amazing to see the long lines of healing, healing, healing, healing...

It's also interesting that it was the healing that got Jesus into so much trouble.  There are accounts of the religious leaders of that day attributing the healings to the work of Satan. (Gospel of Matthew, chapter 12)  Why would they do that? Maybe because they were angry that they didn't have the same power and wanted to discredit Jesus, but maybe simply because Jesus didn't fit into their view of how God worked and they wanted to defend that view.

Strongly held worldviews have little tolerance for heretics.

I believe that healing is a sign that God is at work, and that has been a challenge to the worldview I grew up with. This is what I have experienced:

• There is healing taking place in yoga centers all across the US.  I have seen amazing things happen for people since I started teacher training three years ago. Not just physical healing, but also emotional. 
• There is healing taking place through all kinds of alternative modalities. Acupuncture, massage, Reiki...things that work with the energy body that defy science's current understanding. 
• Personally, I experienced a dramatic healing through Sahaja yoga--which many define as a cult. 

And we get messed up in our defense of our views.  We allow television healers--who have plenty of documented evidence that they are charlatans--to purchase air time on Christian television networks because they use the name of Jesus, yet we produce tons of blog posts with warnings against yoga.  What is up with that?

Easy.  One falls within the lines and one doesn't.  After all, how could true healing come out of anything but a Christian society?

Here's the thing.  I don't know.

But I have experienced that it can.

Does that mean I should become Hindu because the society that produced yoga is Hindu? Of course not. One has nothing to do with the other. We get hung up on the labels.  We want them to line up.

The thing is that they rarely do.  We have to learn to look deeper than the label to see the spirit underneath. Shunning, shaming, Inquisitions and the like have nothing to do with the work of the Spirit.  Joy, love, peace, healing...all of those look like the work of God (as documented extensively in scripture.)

So what does that mean for the many acts of love, forgiveness, healing, and kindness that don't bear His name?

I believe it means we have to redefine the way we look at the labels and to look at the things that do not change.  Healing looks like healing whether you are Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish or Muslim. It is also the work of God. Evidence that He has the power to reverse the curse and that He is much bigger than our worldview.