The great ill you describe in your father’s body and your mother’s lungs is a testimony to the brokenness that sin has wrought upon all flesh. Yet it is precisely for such wounds that the Great Physician has come, for Calvary is the place for the healing balm rather than for the lancet and the knife. The work of Jesus is not so much to point out disease as to indicate and to apply the remedy. He is able to heal, and there are times when the power to save is more than usually manifest, acceptable days, days of salvation.
Observe that the least thing about Christ is healing. The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations, not only the fruit, but the leaves, the little things, the hem of His garment, the whisper of His name. Every promise is a leaf; every drop of His blood is a leaf; every word of His intercession is a leaf. These healing leaves change the life blood, affect the spirits, and make the nature other than it was before. For your father’s swelling feet and troubled sight, for your mother’s labored breath and raging infection, there is an abundance of healing power in Jesus Christ. Let them but touch Him by faith, and virtue will flow out.
Remember, however, that healing and forgiveness are placed in happy conjunction. The inhabitant shall not say, I am sick: the people that dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity. When Jesus healed the sick of the palsy, He first declared, Son, be of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven thee. Pardon and healing were one! Pray earnestly, therefore, not only for the removal of these bodily pains, but that the Sun of Righteousness would arise upon them with healing in His wings, driving out every shadow of sin and fear. How shall they reckon themselves beloved children if the Father is still held before them only as Judge? It is the Spirit of adoption that teaches us to cry, Abba, Father, and this cry is better music than cherubim or seraphim can reach.
Let your parents look to the Father as He is viewed aright: the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the object of our gratitude, not of our dread. Jesus has said, He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father, and the Father Himself loveth you. He is the orphan’s Father, the helper of the helpless. Does your mother feel the suffocating weight of her illness? Is your father bowed down by his manifold infirmities? Let them cast themselves upon Him, for in Him the fatherless findeth mercy. I will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. He will prove a better Father than the best of earthly fathers could ever be. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight.
Healing must come before serving, and it comes when the Lord takes the sufferer by the hand and lifts her up. That contact is everything. Oh, the glorious doctrine of the Incarnation! There is healing in it. A broken heart for sin, a real saving work of God upon the soul, this is the great need. In vain your presumption if you fancy yourselves safe without a real healing from His hand. Yonder in Heaven, those faces which look so bright and comely, fresher than new born babes, owe their freshness to these healing leaves! God grant that your dear father and mother, and you also, may know this pardon and healing through our Lord Jesus, for “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.”
