I spent most of the time on the fact that Jesus didn't heal everyone. If that's true, then what are the implications for what it means to follow Jesus? Did Jesus come to make us happy and feel better? Was his purpose to heal and make our lives better? We have a pretty noisy group of high schoolers, so I was surprised at how the room fell silent after I made this remark: "Jesus was a really crappy healer. Every single person he healed as recorded in the Gospels died. If his goal was to heal everyone, he had a 100% fail rate."
My point? Jesus' intent wasn't to make our lives 100% hunky-dory. His intent was to point to the Father, then die on the cross for our sins so that we might be forgiven. There's been a lot of great discussion recently on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, probably because of Kenda Creasy Dean's new book that takes a fresh look at the implications of what was first described in Soul Searching in 2005. I've made it a point to try to deflate the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism as a worldview. I think a large part of that involves teaching the suffering way of Jesus.
By the way, the following YouTube video of Mark Driscoll and Joel Olsteen is Driscoll's amazing critique of Olsteen's prosperity gospel worldview. I think it also works as a great critique of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism:
