Rediscovering Our Awesome God

I have invited several people to Guest Post here from time to time. I am delighted to share the following from Pastor Denny, with whom I’ve enjoyed dialoguing on the topic of healing.

After discovering the Healing School Blog and getting involved with several of the discussions it renewed in me the desire to search once again for the truth about something I once had no doubt about, and that was God’s ability and desire to heal us of our afflictions. As a new believer with little to no knowledge of the bible I had enough faith to pray and fast for the healing of a little boy who would eventually become my son. His mother and I had only been seeing each other for a couple of weeks when she invited me to dinner one evening and during preparation her 1 ½ year old son Nathan was burned after tipping a pitcher of scalding water onto himself due to his curiosity. I showed up for dinner only to be told what happened and went to the hospital to see how he was doing. There I learned that he had 3rd degree burns on his upper arm and was fighting a high fever. I went home and started to fast and pray for three days I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing but on the third day when I was planning to break my fast his fever left him and he began to improve immediately. That simple act did more to prove to me there was a God than any preaching I had heard up to that time and set in motion a practice of praying over my children anytime an illness came upon them and God was always faithful. Not that we didn’t use doctors and medicine but that I always turned to God first for he is the healer.

I don’t know what happened in the years that followed but somehow I just abandoned the habit of praying to God for healing. I think maybe I got too sophisticated in my thinking and turned more to theology and learning instead of knowing and trusting. Also, I think I was turned away by some of the so called faith healers and charlatans who give Christianity a bad name with their questionable practices. But, that is not a good excuse for ignoring a fundamental aspect of our faith and the nature of our God and his promises to us his children. I have for some time believed that God in creating us put within our bodies the ability to take care of itself or in other words healing potential. The way our bodies work and regulate themselves is a miracle in itself and any doctor with any integrity will tell you he can do nothing to cause healing, he can only do the labor involved in patch and repair but he cannot make the body heal. That is something God designed in us from the beginning. I believe that many other ancient cultures discovered this long before the western world. The Chinese had a unique understanding of the human body and how to manipulate it to heal. Having no knowledge of the one true God they made many of their own assumptions in the spiritual sense but I think they saw God’s handy work in action better than the west with it’s science and need for human explanation. We in the west and modern society attribute and lot of thanks to God for our medical care and health but our trust is in science and its ability to come up with the next cure rather than God who is the source of all cures.

Now I am involved in ministry that involves not only the need for God’s power for healing but for deliverance as well. In Jesus ministry these two divine actions always worked in conjunction with one another to reveal the power of God to a lost and dying world. Maybe that is why the Church struggles so much with being relevant to our world today, we don’t bring them anything more than what they are already used to, we don’t bring them the awesome power of the almighty God; The God who sets the captives free.