Day Four: Do You Need Healing Today?

“I am the LORD, who heals you.” (Exodus 15:26, NIV)

This Christmas, our dear friends face another empty place at their family table. Though we prayed fervently for God’s healing, healing never came. My heart grieves for the forever ache in their hearts that will be there until they reunite with their son in heaven.

This causes me to ask, how can this be, God, when Your name is “The Lord who heals”?

We first encounter this name of God, three days after God parted the Red Sea. The Israelites had gone without water and when they finally found it, it was bitter. They grumbled and complained, as they often did. And, thanks to Moses’ faithful prayers, God answered and transformed the bitter water into sweet.

At that moment, God revealed a new name to His people, “...I am the Lord, who heals you.” (Exodus 15:26, NIV)

This name in Hebrew, Yahweh Rapha, means “The Lord who heals.”

Rapha means to heal, restore, thoroughly make whole. The incomprehensible truth is that God’s healing is so broad and wide that it invades beyond the physical into the spiritual, emotional, and eternal. God’s healing grace and strength is sufficient and made perfect in our weakness, our grief, our disappointments, our loss and our pain.

Isaiah 53:4-5, says, “He took up our pain and bore our suffering…and by His wounds we are healed.” The King James Version says He bore our “griefs and carried our sorrows.”

Matthew carried this name of God forward into the New Testament when He wrote, Jesus drove out “spirits with a word” and “healed the sick” (Matthew 8:16-17). Jesus’ healing work fulfilled Isaiah’s words above.

God our Healer sent Jesus our Savior to the cross for our healing. First, for our spiritual healing, but for our emotional and physical healing as well.

Jesus, our Lord and Savior, has a limitless supply of healing power. As His children, we have the privilege and right to go before His throne of grace and ask for healing.

Will healing always come in the way we pray? It will not.

That’s what makes this easier to teach and say then it is to do.

But, here are a few steps to walk through when you go to the Healer in prayer:

• Tell Yahweh Rapha the need or desire of your heart.
• Pray without doubting.
• Leave your request in His hand.
• Trust that His answer will be the best way to accomplish His plan and purpose for what you’ve prayed.

And, as you wait, if you sense your prayer may not be in His plan, pray for surrendered faith.

Is there a prayer weighing on your heart today? Do you need God the Healer to move? Take time to pray through that need. Pray without doubting. Leave your request with Him. Wait expectantly with surrendered faith. If you need encouragement to pray in surrendered faith, read Jesus’ story in Luke 22:39-46 or Paul’s story in 2 Corinthians 12:1-10.

God, thank You for sending Jesus to the cross for my healing. Jesus, I come before You today seeking to receive from Your limitless supply of healing power. I pray in faith, without doubting, giving You the desire of my heart for healing in this circumstance. I will leave it in Your hands, trusting You will move in mighty ways. And, if what I’m praying is not Your best, help me to surrender the desire of my heart. I trust You. In Your name I pray. Amen.