“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
Mark 11:22-24 NIV
January 24th, another Thursday activation, I learned about what it means to have faith without doubt when praying for healing over someone. Gabe gave a great message this day, and a word from the Lord came over him and he asked “who has pain in their foot or knee?”. Josh, who has had varicose vein pain in his knee for the past 3 years, comes up and tells Gabe the pain he’s been having. So Gabe and the rest of the squad and I pray over Josh’s knee about 6 times. After each prayer, Gabe told Josh to jog around the chairs (because that’s when Josh felt pain the most) and tell him how he felt on a pain scale of 1-10. Now in the span of those prayers, Josh’s pain in his knee went from a 4, jumped up to a 6, and came back down to a 1. Satisfied, and Running out of time in the activation session, Gabe told us all to now go into self reflection until 10:45am. Self reflection allows us to process and talk with God about what we just learned. During self reflection the Lord gave me a vision that he wanted me to act upon as soon as self reflection was over. Josh and I were in the grass yard in front of our base. Their God told me to pray for him twice (no more than that) and after each prayer tell Josh to take a lap (each lap was about half that of a school track). He specifically told me josh won’t be completely healed until after praying for him the second time, and before the prayer, asking Josh “Do you believe the Lord is going to heal your knee today?”. Once Josh would say yes, he would then take another jog around and be healed. I then was told to say, once he was done, “you have been healed because of your faith”. Now during the self reflection as I was receiving all this from the Lord, I was shaking and feeling very warm, thanking him ahead of time for the healing he was about to do. 10:45 hit and I got up and went to Josh’s hammock and asked him to come with me. I only asked him if his knee was still hurting and he said yes, so I then said I am going to pray for you and you are going to be healed. After I did all the Lord had commanded me, Josh exclaimed “It feels so much better!”, and I praised and gave thanks to the Lord. What God didn’t reveal to me was that Phillip was going to bear witness to all of this. God gave philip a word to tell Josh that he is going to be healed today, and Phillip came and said this right after the first prayer. 3 days later, Sunday, Josh gives us an update on his knee and he says there is no pain at all, it is completely healed. He was telling us that all the other times we’ve as a team prayed for his knee, he wasn’t really sure if it was God’s will to heal him; and in the back of his mind he was always thinking about the surgery that he could get for it. However on that activation day he had more faith than ever.
I’ve never really knew what it meant to have “faith” until that activation day. God revealed to me that whenever I’d pray healing over someone, I’d usually say “If this is your will father”, not consciously knowing, I was guarding my heart from being let down if nothing happens. I didn’t have faith in knowing that God’s will is to bring life and life more abundantly. In the Bible it says that we have the power through the holy spirit to heal the sick and give sight to the blind. When Jesus healed the two blind men in Matthew 9, he first asked them “Do you believe that I am able to do this?”. After they replied yes he said “according to your faith will it be done to you.”, and their sight was restored. Not only did it take the faith of the one praying, but the one being prayed over also had to have the faith that he would be healed. Jesus said “I am willing” to the man with Leprosy and he said “Be clean!”, immediately he was cured. I don’t have to ask what the father’s will is because he is a God of healing, both physical and spiritual. His will is to bring life and life more abundantly.
