And in case you didn't know, there were no hospitals at all in the entire world until the advent of the Christian Era. In the last part of the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea founded the first hospital, a Christian hospital. Monastic orders added hospitals to their monasteries in the fifth and sixth centuries. Missionaries went on to found the first hospitals in China and Japan in the 1800s. It was not until the eighteenth century that hospitals began to be secularized. Say what you will, Christianity brought many good things to a world that was focused on the survival and good of self. Suddenly, someone else cared about you, even if you were poor or sick. Try that in a pagan society.
It has often been said that the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints. I am not sure we believe that. I have seen too many unwelcoming saints in my lifetime, those who would limit where they even offer the gospel at all—we want nice, middle class, nuclear families with no big problems. "They would really help our contribution," I have also heard people comment about certain visitors. If that isn't a mercenary motive for spreading the gospel, I don't know the meaning of the word. But what did Jesus say to the people of his own era with the same attitudes? …Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners (Mark 2:17).
And then we have our own problems that need some spiritual hospitalization, the ones we don't want to admit. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed… (Jas 5:16). Have you ever attended an assembly that actually does this? Not unless someone "goes forward," you haven't. And why? We're too proud for one thing, and we are also too scared—someone might run with our confession and use it against us. "Did you know that so-and-so has this problem?" And so we do not get the benefit of this humbling and also encouraging command—humbling to have to admit you are not perfect, and encouraging to see that others have the same issues and learn how they deal with them.
A spiritual hospital is for the sinner, the spiritually sick, the one who has to fight sin and temptation the way others fight infection and disease. And as long as we refuse to admit it, we will never get the medicine we need, for we are indeed the needy.
Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance (Luke 15:7).
Dene Ward