"Sovereign Lord, you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them....enable your servants to speak with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus." -Acts 4:24&30
It takes great faith for me to write about what I'm writing today. I'm going to write about healing. This can sometimes be a touchy topic with followers of Christ because some people believe that healing was more for the time of the Apostles, and some people believe it is completely relevant for today. I tend to favor the opinion that it's for today as well, because Jesus never mentioned a timeline for how long the gift of healing was relevant. I am as much a follower of Christ as any one of his disciples ever were; therefore, I believe whatever He imparted to them, can be mine as well.
This is hard for me to talk about sometimes, though, because often healing is not immediate. If you cut yourself, you likely have faith that in time your wound will close itself and you will have 'new skin' as long as you do your part to keep your wound clean. If your skin does not close back up, you will begin to wonder what is wrong. Adversely, when you cut yourself, you probably don't freak out and run to the ER unless you think you're dying. Why don't we have that faith about diseases? Or indescribable pains?
I do. It's hard, but I do. For example, I threw out my back about a year and a half ago and it took 3 days before I could walk on my own at all. It was bad. For the next 8 months, I hobbled about and favored my back and visited the chiropractor regularly. Then one night, when my back was especially hurting, I cried out to God and took hold of the hem of His garment. I said,"Lord, heal my back. I will use my strong back to serve you more." Immediately, a warm sensation went into the spot of the worst pain and it just *disappeared*. No more pain. That was almost a year ago.
However, for a month or so now I've had a terrible pain in the left side of my face. It starts in my inner ear and goes down into the hinge of my jaw and the upper and lower teeth of the left side including the left side of my tongue and underneath by my chin. It has indeed kept me awake at night and made it hard to speak or listen. I have pleaded with God to remove my pain and even had many lay hands on me and pray for my healing. I have popped numerous pain pills and guzzled whiskey for relief. Some things help sometimes and nothing works all the time. I need healing. I know God's hand is on me and I know this healing is working itself out. However, it is taking faith. Great faith. There is no physical outworking of my healing (same as when you first cut yourself) but I know it's coming (same as when you remove the band aid after two days).
I speak of healing because I know it's real. My last posting was about a lamb that was hypoglycemic and almost dead. One of the ways I've devoted my farm to God is that when an animal is sick, I lay hands on them and pray for their healing. I've devoted them to God and call them His and thank Him for making me their steward. I prayed for this lamb and fed her goat milk by stomach tube for three days. I gave her vitamins and kept her warm. She is healed. For the past two or three days, she's been romping and playing outside in the grass. She sucks down her own bottles with no assistance and picks fights with the dogs. Healing is real and it's not in my power, but God's. This is only one of the many, many, many examples of prayer-led farming bringing about healings.
"After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly." -Acts 4:31
it can get really hard sometimes to just pray and trust God, i remember when our dog was hit in broad daylight after a family member had cursed our pets (when he cursed our kids, i told him to repent and shut his big YAPPER!) so i scooped the dead dog off rte. 322 and began to pray for him to rise from the dead. big disappointment. It's a little on the insensitive side, but i do like it when Harold Hill said "if you pray for someone and they drop dead, say, Hallelujah and move on to the next one" Life and death are not up to us, these are God's business. I love it when the word says "all my days where written in your book before one of them came to be" We serve a all powerful God who still does miracles! keep on praying, don't ever give up! nothing is too big or too small for Him.
ReplyDeleteI love your posts. I very much believe that we in America do not see healing because we lack the faith to ask and believe. Our God is the same God that healed the blind, lame, lepers, and sick and since He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, how could we even consider that the power of healing is a thing long past? The Enemy wants us to believe that because then we continue to rely on a weak God who used to heal but no longer does. Sad to say we have bought into it.
ReplyDeleteSounds like the pain in your jaw is trig-menial something. My friend had it. It is actually a neurological thing so let's pray for brain healing. God healed her of it several months ago and I actually believed it to be more of a spiritual attack since her heart was being renewed in new ways by God but the pain brought her down. I agree with the Christian Cowboy: We serve an all powerful God indeed!