Your prayer ascends with faith in the name of Jesus, and this is right, for it is He who said, “Believe ye that I am able to do this?” He did not say, “Believe that I can entreat the Father,” but “that I am able,” revealing that His own power heals. The same Lord who touched the blind and restored the lame sees your son’s affliction. Cling to this, not as those who call Him merely a king of Israel, but as Very God, able to command the body into health by His word. Yet the measure of healing often depends upon faith, for His mercy has a kind of proportion, waiting upon our earnest trust and patient endurance.
Therefore, do not pray merely once or with fainting heart, but night and day, with exceeding longing, like the apostle who yearned to see the fruit of his labor. As the husbandman gazing upon his field burdened with grain aches to behold it with his own eyes, so let your soul stretch out toward the restoration of your child, not demanding, but persisting in hope. And while you ask for bodily healing, remember the greater healing of the soul. Christ came not to judge the world but to save it; He delays final judgment that sinners might repent. Let your son, and all your household, hear and keep His commandments, for this is the sure proof of love toward the Son and the Father. Do not imagine that physical recovery alone is the end, but let it be a door to perfect what may be lacking in your faith, that you might all be presented whole before God.
If the healing seems slow, do not despair. A tree may receive many strokes and seem to stand unshaken, yet after long affliction one blow fells it. The soul often hears and appears insensible, but the seeds of truth work secretly, and in time bear fruit. Continue, then, in prayer and in calling upon the physicians, for God guides their hands. But trust not in them alone, for He who formed the esophagus and breathed life into the lungs can restore them from the inside, as the Creator mending His own work. I am fully persuaded that such eager desire and such a love of hearing and obeying will not fail of its effect. Only wait upon Him who suffered a slave to be His father after the flesh, that He might make the Lord Father to you, a slave. He who did this will not withhold mercy from your son, if you receive His words not as mere sounds but as Christ speaking within you, revealing Himself to your whole soul. Walk in His commandments, and may the healing come, first to your trust, then to your child’s body, for the glory of the Father and the Son.