Whenever I answer one of those surveys about my health, I always check the box that says, “Excellent.”
Then I’ll stop and reconsider how I spent two weeks in the hospital last summer for a lung infection and went back a month later for heart surgery.
Excellent? Really? Yes, I think so. Not a day goes by that I don’t talk to God about my health, asking for His care. I eat carefully and get plenty of exercise, especially after two months of cardiac rehab. But I never stop praying for healing. Like this.
1) Put your body in God’s care. At night as I lie in bed with my eyes closed, I picture God’s care. That little ache, this fear, that concern, this worry, I put them in God’s hands.
Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, I am alive and well. But those good doctors and nurses and aides, and health professionals, I think of them as God’s co-workers. Healing starts with the Highest.
2) Tell God what is wrong. Reading Jesus’s stories of healing, I’m struck by how often He asks people what’s wrong. Take the man lying there by the pool of Bethsaida who had been ill for 36 years. “Do you want to be made well?” Jesus asks. (John 5:6)
Wouldn’t that have been painfully obvious? The sick man goes on to complain that he has no one to put him into the pool when the water is stirred up. By the time he gets there someone else has stepped in front of him.
Jesus doesn’t have time for his excuses. “Stand up, take your mat and walk,” Jesus tells the man. He does just that. He didn’t need the healing water. Just needed to be frank with the Lord.
God knows what’s bothering us. No need to make excuses. Be honest in your prayers.
3) Step out in faith. Think of the centurion who approached Jesus, asking for healing for his paralyzed servant lying at home in terrible distress. “Only speak the word, and my servant will be healed,” the centurion says (Matthew 8:8).
This is a Roman centurion, not even a practicing Jew, and yet he trusts in Jesus’s healing power, begging in humility. That’s what seems to impress the Lord.
“Let it be done according to your faith,” Jesus says. And it is.
4) Speak up. Take the woman who was healed of hemorrhages she’d suffered from for 12 years. She sneaks up in a crowd and just touches the fringe of Jesus’s clothes and is healed instantly.
“Who touched me?” Jesus wants to know (Luke 8:45). The woman hoped to remain hidden and disappear; after all, in that era, as a woman with hemorrhages, she should not have been anywhere close to a man like Jesus.
Forced to step forward and speak up, she is told, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”
Be honest in your prayers. Speak up. Acknowledge your needs. Then trust in God’s provisions and be healed.
