When Healing Looks Different Than We Thought/Want {Day 18}

Many were healed, transformed, and changed as revival struck our congregation.  We went from six hundred people up to one thousand in attendance on Sundays.  I had only been there, maybe a year.

There were outreaches, conversions, discipleship, friendships being made.  It was not uncommon to see people with Bibles spread out in every Starbucks, or in restaurants all throughout our city.

People talked about Jesus.  We weren’t afraid of speak His name.  As a result, families got converted, salvations became rampant; faith increased, and very effortlessly, healings started to take place.

I remember one service where a man ran through the isles with his crunched held over his head.  He had got healed, in an instant.  Another had his well literally rise many feet as a result of people praying that his well would not need to be dug again, which can cost thousands.

Some people drove hours, just to get to our church. People’s desperation for God drove people to do anything to get into His Presence.

However, the focus was never about the healing, but always about the Healer…and there was great thought taken so that there would be no boasting or circus like demonstrations of what God had done.

There was also a praise journal.  People would write down what God had done for them, and it would be accumulated in one large church praise journal.  I would have loved to see it.  Still do, even to this day.

Oh how our faith can be ignited when we know God isn’t just there to “get us through”….but that He really can and wants to help us, direct us, heal us externally or inwardly, walking with us as more than a Father….but a friend.

One man however, I remember, didn’t get healed instantly. (At least not the kind of healing we most often think of)  Me and my prayer partner prayed for him.  He had cancer, very late stages.  And something in me whispered as I lay hands on Him, “I want to take Him home”.

 I knew that He was going to die.  And yet, his little boy looked up at me with big brown eyes…in hopes our prayers would save his Daddy.

That week, His daddy did die.  Something inside me knew it even before it happened.  Many lost faith.  Some couldn’t understand why we can’t pray and make God do what we want Him to.

I will never forget the next Sunday.  This same little boy came up to the front of the church where we all were praying for others.  He was with His mama.  He cried, pulled, tugged away….not wanting to get prayed for.  He had expected his daddy to live, but God had chosen instead to heal his daddy by taking Him home.

My heart aches to think how there can be a deception in the church.  A thinking that we can command or dictate God. This illusion that as we are given His power through these empty vessels that confine us….somehow we get to own, or possess, or command His Spirit to obey us.

But we are never the powerful ones.  If anything ever, good is done in and through us…it’s all God, completely, each and every time.  And in trusting God, we must never run ahead, always carefully following simply and only what He says and where He takes us…even as we pray.

There is a need when revival comes, to constantly be laying down all we are, all we have, and all we want.  A need to repent and keep on repenting.  To lay barren and not take up any fleshly ownership of His Spirit that might graciously be moving through us.

One thing I have learned most is that He is God…He alone is on His throne.  And whether crutch-less or instantly taken home…God is always Sovereign.  He knows what He is doing.  And we can trust Him even when the results look different from what we had hoped or anticipated.

We, simple human beings, must never think that we are Saviors….when we are only servants.

Forgetting His Lordship is often what quenches revival; in the church, but also in our own heart of hearts.

We must let God continually sift us, never resisting His plans…even when they don’t different from ours.

After all, scripture teaches…pruning is not punishment.  God chastises those He loves.  God never condemns us, but like a loving parent….sometimes God allows the allow us to look even more like Him…

And after all, whether in the center of revival, or not….who of us doesn’t need continual sculpting?

God is still Jehovah Rapha, our healer….whether cancer free….or body dying,  Spirit on it’s way to meet Jesus.

And if you think about it, we have freedom, if we put our value in our Savior and not our earthly healing….

Still, either way, we win.