When we have learned the process of faith for receiving healing, we have learned how to receive everything else God promises us in His Word. ~F. F. Bosworth
This is the dilemma for me as a healer and the source of one of my own hypocrisies. I believe in divine healing. I have witnessed divine healing. I have been directly involved with divine healing. Yet, I also have been led and shown what would heal me personally, because I have found that I cannot facilitate healing for myself...perhaps God designed it that way for me so that I would not become too self-reliant? Perhaps that is how it is so for all healers so that we must rely on God? The answers elude me.
A friend recently mentioned that she if she had the gift of healing, she would not call herself a "healer," because all healing comes from God. I understand her thoughts very well for I felt the same way for many years, as I hid in my prayer closet. However, just lately I have begun to notice that I am less patience with this double standard I see before me. I should not call myself a healer, even though I tell how I was given this gift and that it most definitely comes from God, from Whom all healing comes as every Christian believes, yet it is acceptable for Christians to put their faith in modern medicine and a doctor, even if an atheist, and pray to God on the side to guide the doctor, rather than to wait on the Lord for His healing.
Think about that for a moment.... To do nothing but just wait on the Lord God for divine and direct healing...well, that is just crazy talk!
So, just how much faith do we REALLY have in God? We say we trust Him with our lives, believing we do until...we realize we never really have, that is, until the time we have had to do so.
Last year when my husband and I chose to refrain from eating any food for the forty days of fasting called by our church, a number of the members probably thought we were crazy. Most of them had never fasted food before and of those who did, it was one meal a day or perhaps a day. Most believe it is unhealthy, but actually it is quite healthy. Most of our church members chose to fast Starbucks, the Internet, TV, and electronic games. My husband and I both had fasted before, although never so long as forty days. While my husband dropped pounds he did not need, I dropped down to the point that I was showing too much in the ribs. Sometime after the fast ended, one of the members mentioned something about trusting God for your very life and he looked at my husband and me. He had been left with the impression that we had done just that. Perhaps we had.
However, because we had exercised fasting in the past, we were familiar with it. Not just how we would fair physically, but how it would affect us spiritually. It was something we welcomed and felt was worth the suffering and waiting. It is far easier, in a way, to practice fasting, because you know that you could end it just by beginning to eat. You are in control of it. The only thing that keeps you in the fast is your commitment and your purpose.
However, that moment when a doctor says surgery is necessary or cancer has been detected, you realize you have no control over what you are about to suffer. You did not choose it and you cannot see any purpose in it. Yes, there will be prayers to God at those times, but there also will not be much waiting for the prayers to be answered. Whatever the doctor suggests is probably what you will do immediately, asking God to bless it as you make appointments for the very thing you would prefer to be spared through healing, but you doubt that it can be any other way.
Where is that trust, that faith, in the Healer then? I have heard for years the rationalizing that Christians make that God can heal through doctors and perhaps He does, but maybe it is only because we are not patient to wait on His healing in His timing, we do not trust Him first and foremost. Perhaps we are unwilling to suffer and wait, so that His healing will be doubtlessly evident, even to the unbeliever--what an opportunity missed!
Divine healing does happen to people everywhere, but I do not think it is a coincidence that I have heard of far more miraculous healings happening in parts of the world where modern medicine is less available, where people do not have a choice, where waiting on the Lord is the only option. Where else would faith be any greater than in those who must rely on the Lord completely for their very lives?
I write this knowing I myself might not have that strength in my own faith, as I ponder this question: Have you trusted the Lord, your God, for your life...really?
~ My Lord, I have struggled with this so much. I have only questions awaiting Your answers. ~
