I met with a friend a couple weeks ago who I hadn’t seen for some time. His wife was always telling us to pray for him, as he had severe lung issues, but what I didn’t know was that he didn’t even tell his wife that his doctor had told him he only had about five years left to live. And that was five years ago.
A year ago, his condition caused him to be bedridden most of the time, but his wife never gave up praying for him. One night, while he was bedridden, she went to a church service where a guest healing evangelist was at. He would call people out of the audience and pray for them, and each time he went to call out the next person, he would look over at my friend’s wife, but then call out someone else. Finally, he stopped and told her that God was telling him to pray about severe asthma for her, but that he had seen her dancing earlier in the service so he knew it couldn’t be her that God was talking about. “Does someone in your home have severe asthma?” he asked her. “Yes”, she said and they prayed for her husband.
She told her husband they prayed for him but he shrugged it off. People pray for me all the time he told me. But the next day he didn’t need to take any of his medications or inhalers. That week he went to his doctor and the doctor couldn’t hear anything in his chest so he ordered an x-ray. The x-ray came back so perfect that the doctor called the x-ray office to confirm he had the correct plates. They double checked, reading off all the numbers, but he had the right plates. The doctor told my friend that his lungs looked like the lungs of a 25-year old athlete! The doctor was Jewish but even he said that “Your Jesus gave you new lungs!”
My friend’s prognosis had been quite grim, but God can and does heal people.
After my friend got better, he happened to be called upon to go pray for a man who was dying in the hospital, who was about to be moved to a hospice as they only gave him a few more days to live. His organs were already in the process of shutting down. This man was well beyond the point of being able to communicate his desires as he couldn’t move, communicate or respond in any way. His condition was so grim that my friend said he started to pray a meek prayer that God would comfort him when he got to heaven.
But after only a few seconds of praying that passive prayer, my friend says he heard God tell him “stop”! God told him this man was not going to die but that he would live. So my friend changed his prayer and started to pray what God had told him.
Soon, the man started to make a horrific loud noise and all the medical equipment alarms went off. That day, the man started to improve and my friend continued to go back on a regular basis and pray for him. It took weeks, but he did recover.
Now as I sat there in a restaurant listening to my friend tell me that testimony – a restaurant he is a regular at – he said that one day they forgot to give him his check, so he got up and stood in line at the cashier, something he normally never does there. But he pointed out to me how one table is right next to where the line forms and that morning an elderly lady was sitting there. As he waited in line, he started to talk to her and when she found out he was a Christian, she asked him if he could please pray for her son-in-law who was very sick but was just being moved out of ICU because he had improved some.
He asked her about her son-in-law and soon realized it was the very man he had been praying for! Not only did God heal her son-in-law, but God showed this woman that He had answered her prayers by sending someone to pray for him. On top of that, my friend, who was about to go visit this man once again, now knew the man was no longer in ICU.
God doesn’t seem to be moved by our grim reports. Rather, He seems to be moved by our prayers. Including the prayers of a mother-in-law, who at least had enough faith to believe that God would send someone to help. Someone, it turns out, who wouldn’t have even been there except for the prayers of his wife. A wife, who wouldn’t give up, who kept praying for her husband, and who eventually found a healing evangelist who prayed a prayer that God answered.
We may seem too weak to move God. But that doesn’t mean God is unmovable.