“And He healed them…”
After all that happened in Parque Kennedy my first weekend in Peru, God was not finished. On Wednesday of last week (September 1st) Daniel asked if I would pray with him. I stopped studying and went outside with him to talk. He told me that when I prayed for him at Parque Kennedy, he thought he heard the Lord say, “You are free.” (What! Amazing!) He said that he had recently been wanting to grow in faith and that he believed the Lord was calling him to stop taking his medicine/pills for his epilepsy. He has been seizure free for six years now. For him to stop taking the pills would be a huge step of faith, especially while here at the Bible College campus in Peru. The medicine here is not as advanced or available. He asked me what I thought he should do.
I didn’t want to council him one way or the other. I believe that God can heal and that He did heal Daniel. But I didn’t want to force Daniel to do anything. I wanted him to seek the Lord himself. I also didn’t want to be the cause of a seizure if God had not healed him. I told him that I didn’t know what he should do. Instead I said, “Let’s pray!” So we prayed and stood in silence for a while waiting for God to speak. I didn’t here anything, but Daniel apparently heard God affirm His love for him. He also heard something in Spanish: “Me era la mensaje.” Translated it means: “I was the message.” It was a clear sentence with perfect grammar. Even with the Spanish that Daniel knows, he said he couldn’t have formed that phrase. We were praying about the words that Daniel heard in Parque Kennedy, “You are free” and God answered us, “I was the message.”
But Daniel didn’t look up the Spanish phrase until later the next day. So that night we decided to wait for more direction from God and asked Him to speak to us through our classes and homework, through reading, visions, and dreams…
The next day as I was reading the Bible and writing in my journal, the Lord spoke pretty clearly to me. First he spoke through the story of Noah (Genesis 6). Noah did according to God’s word to him. There was no such thing as rain in Noah’s day (there was a fog that rose up and covered the earth and watered the plants). So God’s word about water from heaven and a flood was pretty far-fetched. But despite the odds, despite what common sense might say, despite what people might say, despite the shame and humiliation, Noah obeyed God’s word. He persevered and built the ark. It took Noah 100 years to build the ark. For 100 years Noah waited for God to fulfill His word. That’s a lot of faith! I saw immediately how this had application to the situation with Daniel. But even more so than this, what I read in Matthew blew me away. I am just going to quote it:
“And Jesus was going about in all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people. And the news about Him went out into all Syria; and they brought to Him all who were ill, taken with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and He healed them.” (Italics mine)
- Matthew 4:23-24
I didn’t go out of my way to find these passages, they came up in my daily reading routine/schedule. This was an apparent and immediate answer to our prayer the night before (speak to us through… reading, etc.).
In addition, that day in one of our classes Dwayne (the assistant director of the Bible College and one of our teachers) shared about stepping out in faith. As he described it, “Bungee jump off of the fingers of Jesus!” I shared with Daniel what God had showed me. He also shared how God had given him a dream in which he stopped taking the pills. God had spoken quite clearly! Nonetheless, Daniel was not sure. I prayed with him again and gave it into the Lord’s hands. The choice is Daniel’s to make, not mine…
