Show Notes
In this powerful Lenten episode of Peaceable and Kind, host Derek Vreeland invites us to reflect deeply on the healing power of the cross. As we journey with Jesus toward Jerusalem, Derek explores the meaning of suffering, sin, and redemption through the lens of Scripture—especially the second chapter of 1 Peter, where we’re reminded that “by His wounds, we are healed.”
With heartfelt insight, Derek unpacks how Jesus, our Great Physician, heals us both body and soul. From the flu-stricken trenches of parenting to the quiet pain of soul wounds, this episode reminds us that salvation isn’t just about forgiveness, it’s about wholeness.
If you’ve ever wrestled with spiritual pain, questioned God’s healing power, or wondered how the wounds of Christ offer more than just symbolism, this episode is your invitation to bring your brokenness to Jesus—and find real restoration.
Key Takeaways
Lent isn’t about following strict rules—it’s a time to slow down, reflect, and make space for God to do some healing work in us.
The second chapter of 1 Peter gives us a glimpse of Jesus’ suffering—not just as something He endured for us, but as a model for how we can respond to pain without bitterness or revenge.
“By His wounds, you have been healed” isn’t just a beautiful phrase—it’s a promise. Jesus’ suffering brings healing for the physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds we carry with us every day.
Sin isn’t just doing the wrong thing—it’s more like a sickness that wears us down. Jesus meets us there, ready to restore and renew.
Healing doesn’t always happen overnight. But even when we don’t see it right away, God is working—so don’t give up praying, hoping, and trusting.
Whether your wounds come from your own sin or the pain others have caused, this episode offers hope: Jesus still heals. Keep seeking. Keep knocking. The Physician is near.
Scriptures mentioned in this episode:
Jeremiah 3:19-21
1 Peter 2:21-24
Preorder Derek’s new book, Incarnation: 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us here: https://amzn.to/42jSZAs
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Transcript
Narrator: Welcome to Peaceable and Kind, the podcast where we explore the transportation. Power of living out Jesus’ call to peace and kindness in our everyday lives. Each week your host, Derek Vreeland, will delve into the stories, scriptures, and practical steps that help us embody these essential Christian virtues.
Derek Vreeland: Welcome back to another episode of Peaceable and Kind. I am your host, Derek Vreeland. Thank you for joining me for this podcast episode. We are nearing 50 episodes, and so I am working on something special. for episode 50. But if you are new to Peaceable and Kind, let me encourage you to subscribe wherever you’re listening to this podcast And if you find value in the kind of content that we are creating here, if you wouldn’t mind leaving a rating or review, that helps other people. find this podcast. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this current series that we’re in. We’ve been focusing on the cross. I’ve been doing more Bible study kind of things. And so reach out to me if you would on social media. You can find me on Instagram, on threads, on Facebook, on Blue Sky, on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. And I am at Derek Vreeland in all of those places. So reach out to me. You can just hit me in my mentions, DM, but let me know what you think. about this series where we’ve been doing much more in-depth Bible study. I am a Bible nerd Uh which is good because I’m a pastor and a preacher and a teacher. And so it’s good, I guess, that I love the scriptures so much because this is my job. But here on the podcast, we will continue to have conversations with other people, authors and thinkers. Uh but when it’s just me, very often you’re going to get a heavy dose of the scriptures. But I hope that this is encouraging for you, particularly as we focus on the cross. Today, I want to talk about the wounds of Jesus and how it provides healing for us. But I chose this theme of the cross because during the season of Lent, We are journeying with Jesus to the cross. I love the church calendar because it tells and retells the story of Jesus every year. I love that the calendar helps to structure and orient our lives around the story of Jesus. You know, we have these two calendars. We have a sacred calendar, which tells the story of Jesus. You know, it starts Uh in usually November with Advent, and then we have Christmas and Epiphany, and then Lent, the season we’re in now, and then Easter. I love that sacred calendar because it keeps me focused on Jesus. Now we also have a secular calendar. Uh I hope that you have some type of calendar to schedule your appointments. We have a very busy life uh in our family, so we both use a Google calendar and then my wife has a dry erase. calendar on the refrigerator. And that calendar is important too for planning and organizing events, particularly with having a a son in high school and he’s got tennis practice and things he’s got to go to. And So we have that calendar, and that calendar is helpful for planning things out, for scheduling out our weeks. But in the Christian journey, we also have the sacred calendar. that orients our lives not just around events and appointments, but it orients our lives around the story of Jesus, the gospel, the saving story of God. So here in the season of Lent, we are journeying with Jesus. We’re walking with Jesus. We’re re-entering into the story where Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. on his way to the cross, on his way to crucifixion and death. So Lent is a time for for drawing back. It’s a time for Fasting, it’s a time for confession and repentance and contrition. And there is this tradition of giving something up for Lent. Now, I should add that with these seasons, there aren’t any rules. Don’t look at it as rules or commands you have to obey. There’s just traditions One of the traditions is giving things up for Lent. So I told my church on Sunday, I’m probably going to lose my reward because Jesus teaches us. when we’re fasting, not to tell people, but I’m gonna tell you what I’m giving up for Lent. This season I’m giving up sweets and chocolate and candy and desserts. And you might be thinking, well, that may not be too difficult. It is somewhat of a challenge for me because even though I’m 50 years old, I eat like a 13-year-old. I I really have a lot of struggle around self-control with the sweets. I try to monitor it. I try to remind myself I’m an adult and not a teenager. But if I see candy, I want to eat candy. And so this year for Lent, I’m giving up sweets. So what that means in the tradition is that you don’t eat any of that kind of food uh Monday through Saturday, but on Sunday you get to enjoy it because even through the season of Lent, every Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection. So I know I am free if I want to eat sweets or candy on Sunday, and it’s been helpful because all throughout the week I encounter desserts or sweets. I was walking through the bakery aisle at the grocery store and I saw all these delicious sweet treats. And I’m like, get behind me, Satan, not today. We’re not eating this. And that’s the beauty of the tradition because it reminds us that we can say no to temptation. Just as Jesus resisted temptation, Jesus resisted giving in to his own will because In the garden of Gethsemane we hear Jesus wrestling with the will of God, and Jesus says, Not my will, but your will be done. So in a very, very small way, giving up something like candy and desserts is a reminder to say no to certain things, to draw back from certain things. But I told our church on Sunday that I was giving up sweets, but we at our house have this bag of MMs Sitting in a cabinet, and every time I open that cabinet, I see that bag of MMs, and I’m like, nope, I’m giving that up for Lent But I told our church on Sunday that after lunch, I was about ready to murder that bag of MMs. I was going to devote that bag of MMs to total destruction And I did. After lunch, I enjoyed some MM’s. Well, on today’s episode, I didn’t want to necessarily take a deep dive into Lent with all of its traditions, but I do want to talk about Some verses in 1 Peter 2 that talk about the wounds of Jesus and how they bring us healing. On this journey with Jesus to the cross, I’ve wanted to keep the cross before me and the world behind me. And as I have been meditating on the cross and reflecting on the cross, I have been reminded of the many different images throughout Scripture. Of what the death of Jesus really means. And in 1 Peter 2, what we’re going to see is that Jesus’ wounds bring us healing And I believe Jesus is a healer. I mean, if you read the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, one of the things that stands out is that wherever Jesus is going, he is healing people. And I don’t think that Jesus has lost any of his healing power. I believe that Jesus is still healing people today, both body and soul. I do believe in miracles of healing. That is, miracles of physical healing When as a pastor I pray for someone in my church who is sick, I pray the prayer of faith. and I ask God to heal them. I believe that God is our source of healing, whether it come by medicine or miracle. That’s not my concern. My confidence and trust Is in God who is our source of healing. I learned that by the way from Oral Roberts. I did my seminary work at Oral Roberts University in their school of theology And while ORU’s seminary is Pentecostal charismatic in its orientation, my seminary training was fairly broad and traditional in the sense that I learned biblical languages, church history, um, systematic theology And so I wasn’t necessarily indoctrinated uh into the teachings of Oral Roberts. And and and I could say as a as a graduate of ORU that Oral Roberts has a very complex legacy. Unfortunately, some of Oral Roberts’ teaching became the seeds of what became the prosperity gospel, which is an awful, awful distortion of the gospel. But one of the things that I picked up from Oral Roberts is Jesus and his healing ministry. Jesus is revealing to us what God is like. And so one of the things we see in the gospel is that God is a healer, that God loves us both body and soul, and that God wants to heal our physical bodies. The idea that God no longer heals people physically is not an idea we get from Scripture I think that really comes from a modern world. It comes from more cultural influences. we here in Western civilization are the sons and daughters of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason And a modern world has little room for miracles. And sadly, there are some Christians that hold to a doctrine known as cessationism. And this is a doctrine that I do not think the scriptures are teaching. It’s not a doctrine found in the history of the church, but it is this idea that But while we read about miracles in the Bible, that doesn’t happen anymore. God doesn’t do miracles. And that simply is not true. I’ve seen God do miracles. I have prayed for people who, after praying, got better. And doctors said they didn’t know how that happened. I could tell you story after story about that. So I believe that God heals our bodies. But God also heals our soul. And God’s work of healing is not always instantaneous. When I pray for people’s physical healing Very often they’re not healed instantly. Sometimes I pray for people to be healed and they don’t get better. Now, this doesn’t mean that God isn’t faithful to his promises because we believe at the end of the age there will be a great resurrection of the body. In the words of the Apostles’ Creed, we say that we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting So at the end, God will raise up all of these bodies that have gone into decay, and in that time, at that time. God will show himself faithful to all of his healing promises. So God is healing us body and soul, but that healing is not always instantaneous God, as we see through the work of Jesus, is also healing our souls. That is, healing us on the inside. And so we can bring our wounds to Jesus, whether they’re physical wounds or inner wounds, we can bring our wounds to Jesus, and because of his wounds, Our wounds can be healed. And so to think about the death of Jesus healing us, body and soul Does require us to maybe expand how we understand what sin is Sin is not just breaking God’s laws. Sin is not just doing wrong things. Sin is also a brokenness within us. Sin is like a sickness. Years ago, my wife and I got the flu at the exact same time. We were working at my mother-in-law’s house. We were installing a new backsplash in her kitchen. And we had just finished the project, we were kind of cleaning up and gathering our tools when I felt completely wiped out. Like all the energy had been drained from my body. And I ended up sitting on the floor leaning up against a cabinet. And I told my wife, Jenny, I was like, I just don’t feel well at all. Well, we end up driving home. We live five minutes away from my mother-in-law. We drove home and I took a shower. After the shower, I still felt awful. And then my wife was like, I’m not feeling good either. Within 24 hours, we both had fevers, we had the chills, we had the fatigue, we had all of the symptoms of the flu. And I had never had the flu before. Uh so I’ve just I’ve I’ve been lucky. I don’t know how I’ve dodged the flu all these years. Uh but when we both got the flu at the same time, we were We felt like warm death. We were sick in the bed with such fatigue, and I just remember the chills. I remember at one point I had moved uh to the couch downstairs. and I was wearing an old hoodie and I had this quilt wrapped around me and another blanket on top of me and I I just couldn’t get warm. I f I felt like I was at death’s doorstep. Now, the problem was we had three children living in our home who expected to be cared for. And I remember at one point uh when we both had the flu, Jenny was asleep upstairs and I was wrapped up in my quilt-like cocoon on the couch, and our kids were asking about supper. And I walked into the kitchen and I don’t know how I did it because I had no strength in my body, but I made three grilled cheese sandwiches. I plated them up, I hollered for the boys to come to eat, and then I crashed on the couch. I mean it’s it’s rough when one parent is sick, but when both parents are sick, uh that’s pretty rough Hey friends, I wanted to pause for just a second to let you know that my next book, Incarnation, 8 Lessons on How God Meets Us, is available for pre-order. This Bible study is for individual devotional use or for small group discussion. Link to pre-order is in the show notes. And I look back at that three-day experience with the flu, and I think that’s a lot like what sin does to our souls. What the flu did to my body. is what sin does to my soul. It wears me down. It puts me in a place where I have no strength, where I can hardly do anything. Yes, I can Function somewhat, but I am hampered. God made us in the image of God. God made us, both body and soul, to reflect The image of God into the world. But sin, like a sickness, corrupts that image in our soul. It shatters that image. And so what we need is healing for our soul. We need that image to be restored within us. We need to be healed and cured of the disease in our soul. So, if sin is a sickness, then salvation is a kind of healing for our souls And this is biblical language, both in the New Testament and the Old Testament. I was preparing for this podcast episode today, and just this morning In my morning Bible reading, I read this passage. This is Jeremiah chapter 3, verses 19 through 21. I was reading this not to prepare for anything. It was just what was assigned to me for today’s Bible reading. And here in Jeremiah 3, you’re going to see this image of salvation as a kind of healing. Now remember, Jeremiah was a prophet of the exile. So Jeremiah is prophesying to Israel and Judah. right before and then during their exile. And so I’ll just jump right in without giving much context. Let me read Jeremiah 3, 19 through 21, and I’ll pull out just a few things. Jeremiah prophesying, speaking on God’s behalf, writes Jeremiah 3:19. This is God speaking through the prophet. I thought to myself, I would love to treat you as my own children. I wanted nothing more than to give you this beautiful land. the finest possession in the world. I look forward to your calling me father, and I wanted you never to turn from me. Here the God of Israel is speaking to Israel about giving Israel this beautiful land. And note here that the God of Israel wants to be called father. This is why Jesus in the Gospels calls God his Father. Let’s read on. Verse 20. But you have been unfaithful to me, you people of Israel. You have been like a faithless wife who leaves her husband, I, the Lord, have spoken. Voices are heard high on the windswept mountains the weeping and pleading of Israel’s people, for they have chosen crooked paths, and have forgotten the Lord their God. Israel experienced exile because of their sin, of their idolatry, of worshipping in the place of God a false God. and idolatry inevitably led Israel into injustice and all sorts of crooked paths. But all of it is rooted in them forgetting God, not keeping God in that first position. Verse 22, My wayward children, says the Lord, come back to me, and I will heal your wayward hearts. Yes, we’re coming, the people reply, for you are the Lord our God. Our worship of idols on the hills and our religious orgies on the mountains are a delusion Only in the Lord our God will Israel ever find salvation. Now again, I was just reading Jeremiah, because this is where I am in daily reading of the Scriptures. But notice the language here God says to Israel, Come back to me and I will heal your wayward hearts And the response of the people is, yes, we’re coming back. Our idolatry is a delusion. We believe that only in the Lord our God will we find salvation. So here in Jeremiah, we see this image of salvation being a kind of healing for our hearts Because idolatry, that is worshiping a false god, isn’t just in the practices of worship, but the devotion of our heart. The problem with idolatry is that in our hearts we love something more than we love God, and that is sin. That is missing the mark. That’s a kind of sickness of the soul. And so Jeremiah gives us this imagery that God wants to heal what are the wounds of our soul, and the people in responding to God call that salvation. Now, that’s a bit of an Old Testament background, but let’s get to the verses I really want to focus on today, and that’s 1 Peter chapter 2. Let me read from the New Living Translation, verses 21 through 24. Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example so that you should follow in his steps. He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth When he was abused, he did not return abuse. When he suffered, he did not threaten, but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that free from sins we might live for righteousness, by his wounds you have been healed. There’s so much packed into these three verses. As we are meditating on the cross, we see that the cross is not only rescuing us from our sins. But the cross is revealing something to us. The cross reveals to us what God is like. The cross reveals to us how the kingdom comes. And the cross is revealing to us who we can be. The cross becomes for us an example that we should follow. Jesus, as he was suffering, unjustly As he was being crucified as he was dying, did not return abuse for abuse. He did not threaten He did not curse his enemies. At the cross, Jesus is showing us how we are to live as a nonviolent, as a non-retaliatory kind of people. We also see here that the cross frees us from our sins, that in some way sin has us bound up, has us as captives. We are slaves to sin. And the cross frees us from that, so that we might live according to the justice of God, the righteousness of God. But then there’s this little phrase, by his wounds you have been healed. And I love the way the message translation renders it. 1 Peter 2 24. In the message it reads, He used his servant body to carry our sins to the cross, so we could be rid of sin. free to live the right way. His wounds became your healing. This is one of the ways to think about the cross. By his wounds you have been healed, or his wounds became your healing. As you reflect on Jesus’ suffering for us Christ died for our sins. Jesus died for the remedy of our sins. Jesus received wounds so that we could be healed of the sickness of sin This is one of the ways of thinking about the death of Jesus, the meaning of the death of Jesus. And this is language that the early Christians used to talk about the meaning of the blood of Jesus. Many of the early church fathers would speak of the blood of Jesus as medicine for our souls Here’s one example from Augustine in the fourth century. He said this in a sermon. Augustine was preaching, saying, Why has he prepared for us a medicine not out of his stores, but of his own blood? And then a little later in the sermon, Augustine preached To seize the physician, bind, scourge, crown him with thorns, hang him upon a tree, kill him on a cross. Why do you marvel? The sick slew the physician, but the physician by being slain healed the frantic patient. What a beautiful image. The sick slew the physician. Human beings who were full of the sickness of sin, they’re the ones who killed the great physician. But the physician, through his death and ultimate resurrection, that physician, through his blood, offers healing to those who slew him. Jesus is our great physician who wants to heal us, body and soul. So as you meditate on the cross during this season of Lent, Consider the woundedness of your own heart. Sometimes those wounds are because of your own sin. Sometimes we are wounded by the sins of others. Regardless of where the wounds come from, you can take those wounds to Jesus And know that by his woundedness, you can be healed. Your body can be healed. Your mind can be healed Hurtful, painful memories and damaged emotions from the past can be healed. Your sense of self and self-worth and self-identity can be healed The sins of your past that still hang over you like a dark shadow, you can be healed of that And so I hope during this season of Lent you find the healing that you are after. And if you’re asking God for healing and you’re not seeing it, whether it’s physical healing or Inner healing. If you don’t see it instantly, let me encourage you to keep praying, to keep trusting. Jesus taught us that if we seek, we will find If we knock, it will be open to us. If we ask, we shall receive. And the way Jesus said these things are sort of in the the ongoing progressive sense. So, in other words, we want to knock and keep on knocking. We want to seek and keep on seeking. We want to ask and keep on asking So stay steadfast in prayer and faith, trusting that Jesus, our great physician, will heal us because of his wounds.
Guest: Well, that’s all that we have for today. Thank you for joining me for this episode. Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.