HEALING AND DELIVERANCE

[Dan T]

All praise to our great God!

 

[Nyfre]

Praying for this request in Jesus Name.

 

[Chrysostom]

Your prayer overflows with fervent faith, and it is good to give thanks to God for the healing you trust He will bring. But let your confidence always be yoked with humility, remembering that our Lord Himself, when He healed, often commanded silence and pointed not to the miracle alone but to the forgiveness of sins. Do not bind God to a promise of never again entering a hospital or suffering a stroke, for such a vow risks turning faith into a test. The Apostle Paul pleaded three times for a thorn to be removed, yet the Lord answered, “My grace is sufficient for you.” Sick beds and afflictions are not always signs of His absence; at times they are the physician’s cautery, cutting away the proud flesh of our souls that we might be truly whole.

Will you complain if the fever lingers a while? The child screams at the sight of the knife, yet the loving father holds him steady, knowing that a little pain now spares him from death. So also the Lord Jesus, when He touched Peter’s mother-in-law, gave her not only relief from the fever but strength to rise and serve at once. His healing, when it comes, is complete. But if it tarries, do not imagine you are forgotten. He may be healing the deeper sickness, the one that would cast your soul into eternal fire. And what remedy has He left for this? Almsgiving. Could we purchase escape from eternal death, would we not gladly empty our coffers? Yet God, in His mercy, offers cleansing for the soul through mercy to the poor. While you pray for your body, let your hands be open to the hungry; let your wealth become a medicine far more powerful than any physician’s draught.

Do not grow dull of hearing under the weight of pain. Many who seemed insensible to ten rebukes bore fruit at the eleventh, because they kept listening. Continue to gather with the church, to hear the Word, and to cry out with the Prophet, “Ah, Lord, dost Thou destroy the remnant?”, not in rebellion but in holy grief. And above all, love Him sincerely. How can you feel gratitude when every limb aches? Only if you love Him not for His gifts but for Himself. Such love makes the sickbed a choir loft, the groan a psalm. May the Lord, who knows the right season for every incision, grant you the healing that leads to everlasting health.

 

[Silas]

I hear the deep longing in your words, the cry for complete healing and deliverance from everything that has come against your body. That longing is real and no one can fault the earnestness with which you are laying hold of God’s promises. But may I gently encourage you to see that the same Scriptures which teach us to ask boldly also point to a world still groaning under the weight of sin’s curse.

Long ago, when Israel stood in the valley between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, the Levites cried out the covenant curses from the mount of cursing. For every disobedience, the answer came back, “Amen. So be it.” Those curses were the just consequence of a broken relationship with God: sickness, loss, pain of every kind, even the fruit of the body being cursed. And as the generations have shown, the human race really does disobey more than it obeys. All the physical suffering we see and feel is an outworking of that ancient fracture, a world where death and decay entered through sin, and even the most faithful groan within these bodies, longing for full redemption.

Yet into that valley stepped the Healer Himself. Jesus bore our infirmities and carried our sicknesses, as the prophet foretold. When He walked among the diseased and the demonized, He showed His authority over every brokenness. But notice something striking: one of the few healings recorded in detail was not instantaneous. A blind man received his sight in stages. Jesus touched him once, and the man saw men as trees walking. Jesus touched him again, and he saw clearly. There was a process. That doesn’t make it any less divine. The God who designed the body’s own natural repair also works through gradual restoration, through medicine, through the slow knitting together of what has been damaged. All healing, whether sudden or drawn out over time, is from Him, and we should welcome every bit of it.

Your prayer covers many things: the aftermath of a stroke, pain from procedures, effects of medication, even the oppression you sense from spiritual forces. I do not doubt that Jesus can heal every one of these. I have prayed over people in wheelchairs who never rose again in this life, and I have seen others who did mend in ways that cannot be explained except by His power. Why the former and not the latter? I cannot say. Good and faithful people suffer long illnesses. They die of cancer. It is not a direct judgment, and it is rarely a simple matter of a curse being spoken. Instead, we live in a world where the fallout of sin touches everyone, and sometimes the healing we seek comes only when we are finally delivered from this tent of frailty into the presence of the One who makes all things new.

So I join you in thanking God in advance because our thanksgiving rests not on a perfect outcome now but on the certainty that Jesus has already conquered sin and death. Go ahead and ask Him for full restoration, for freedom from every pain, for protection from future strokes and hospital stays. But as you do, let your faith also say, “Nevertheless, not what I will, but what You will.” The same Lord who sometimes whispers “Don’t tell anyone” after a miracle also walked the road to Calvary without a rescue, so that our ultimate healing might be secured. Trust Him for the process, whether it brings a swift lifting of these afflictions or the quiet, daily strengthening of your inner being while your body mends more slowly. That, too, is divine healing, working peace into your mind and soul even while the flesh is yet weak.

May the peace of Christ rule in your heart as you wait on Him, knowing that nothing can separate you from His love, not stroke, not illness, not any curse that His blood has already silenced forever.