You Are Loved

Knowing that you are loved is one of the most important keys to receive healing. In fact, I believe it is at the top of the list of principles necessary to understand in order to receive from God. You and I are loved by our Heavenly Father!

F.F. Bosworth amplifies the Father’s love for His children (you and me) in his book Christ the Healer this way: “He loves His own sick and suffering child even more than He loves the sinner.” What a powerful notion, but a true one. If God unconditionally loves and makes healing available to the sinner, who has no personal relationship with Him, then how much more does He love you and me?

In some ways, this is a difficult fact to grasp. We live in a “performance oriented” society. Everything we receive in our culture is based on our skills, talents, or work ethic. That mindset makes it hard to conceive of receiving anything based solely on God’s grace and love for us. Yet this is the only way to receive from God.

When Michael began to suffer with the acute arthritic/muscular condition, my wife and I really struggled to stay in faith. His joints were swollen twice their normal size, he broke out in a terrible rash, and he cried most of the time. He stopped crawling and could not move or even turn his neck without pain. There was very little respite. This was our situation 24/7 for three months. There was no known cure for Michael’s sickness. One doctor offered to do experimental treatment on Michael, but he could offer no guarantee that the procedures would be successful. We did not feel comfortable with that option and refused the treatments.

Our real comfort came from the Word of God. The more time we spent reading and studying what God had to say about healing, the more confident we became that Michael would recover, but we were still struggling because we had seen no improvement in his condition. Because we were desperate, we were willing to do anything we thought would help Michael to get better. The danger there, though, was that we became vulnerable to “grasping at spiritual straws.” We tried removing all sugar and dairy products from his diet, but that didn’t help his condition. We asked everyone we knew to pray for him and even took him to some healing evangelists to have hands laid on him. Still there was no noticeable improvement in his condition. One day, about two months into the battle for Michael’s healing, my wife told me she was going to fast for at least three days for Michael’s healing. There is nothing wrong with fasting, but this was not a fast to which God had called her. Rather, it was something she was doing out of desperation to try to make God move on behalf of our son.

After two days of her going hungry, something surprising happened. The Lord impressed her that neither she nor I had entered into the “rest” of faith concerning Michael. We were un- consciously doing religious works to try to merit his healing. He told her she needed to eat and to begin to trust in His love for our son. He went on to say that He loved Michael more than Janice and I possibly could and that He wanted him well more than we did. When Janice shared that with me, it seemed like a dark cloud lifted from both of us. That night, Norvel Hayes was a guest speaker at the church we attended. We took Michael to the service and sat in the back of the church where we would not create a disturbance. Brother Hayes preached a message on the subject “The Compassion of the Lord” and then gave an invitation to pray for the sick. Since the Lord had revealed to us that we had slipped into trying to work for Michael’s healing, we had purposed we would only do those things that the Spirit prompted us to do including responding to invitations for prayer for healing. We both felt a strong impression to respond to this particular invitation. When Brother Hayes came to Michael and me in the prayer line, he prayed for us and then continued to pray for others. Suddenly he turned and walked back toward Michael and me, wrapped his arms around both of us and began to weep with a very strong compassion. He did this for several minutes. I don’t know how to describe completely what happened to us through that experience, except to say that somehow the Father’s love for us, and particularly for Michael, became more real at that moment than Michael’s physical condition.

It was not long after that experience that Michael’s condition began to improve gradually and eventually his body was completely restored to normal. Praise God!

Since that time, my wife and I have shared our testimony about Michael’s healing with others, appearing on several national radio and television broadcasts. I also compiled several categories of Scripture in a book called Scriptures to Live By that has had wide distribution. The publication of the book has caused many people who were in a similar situation to contact us. They were desperate because their son or daughter or loved one had some dreaded disease. They were looking for some glimmer of hope and wanted us to tell them what to do. Most of them had slipped into doing religious works, just as Janice and I had, hoping to earn healing instead of simply trusting in God’s love for them. This is very different from the acts of obedience by the prompting of the Spirit that I referred to in the previous chapter. Our response to them is simple: Stop looking for some magic formula you can apply to make your child or loved one well. We encourage them to focus on God’s love and care for them and to commit only to act on those things they feel led by the Lord to do.

The Bible says faith works by love (Galatians 5:6). In other words, faith works best where we understand that we are loved. Janice and I have twelve grandchildren: three boys and nine girls. Each is very secure in our love for them. As a result, any time I tell one of them I want to take them somewhere and buy them a new outfit or some new gadget they’ve been wanting, they have no problem believing they will receive it. In fact, they will start planning and expecting it to happen. There is no struggle in their faith, because they know their grandparents love them. The same thing is true for us in our relationship with the Father.

Understanding you are loved is a prerequisite to becoming convinced that God’s will to heal includes you. My experience has been that it is much easier to believe God’s love and healing power does not exclude others than it is to believe it for myself. But to receive healing from the Lord, I must include myself on that list. The problem is we know ourselves too well and there- fore exempt ourselves from His love. We mistakenly make our behavior, weaknesses, or failures the basis for receiving from God instead of accepting His grace, mercy, and love. We fail to receive healing because we don’t feel worthy to receive. But the Bible says God is no respecter of persons. Stop focusing on your past failures and look to what Jesus has done for you.

Put your focus on God’s love for you.  Matthew 7:11 (NKJV) says:

“If you then, being evil (or human), know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those (children) who ask Him?”

Think about your own children or loved ones for a moment. If any of them became ill or was diagnosed with some terminal disease, wouldn’t you desire more than anything for them to be well? Certainly! Well, I want to ask you the same question Jesus asked in the verse we just read: How much more will your Father provide healing (good things) to those (you and me) who ask?

God wants you well. He sent His Son to secure every need His children you and I would ever have, including healing. Once you become convinced of His love and help others become convinced of it, healing will flow like a river to undo satan’s works of physical bondage. Because the Father loves you, He has freely provided all the healing you will ever need. What an awesome Heavenly Father we have. You and I are loved!

Adapted from Greg Mohr’s book, Your Healing Door.