Jesus is my Healer

Jesus is first and foremost, a healer to me and my family.

Believing this statement was not an easy journey and at times, I have had my questions and unbelief. My mother passed away from cancer when I was 19 years old. Over the course of a year, I watched it eat away at her body and devastate her mind.Years later, my father would pass away from a major brain aneurysm.

On May 18^th, 2004, my wife Kim and I welcomed our first daughter, Lauren, into the world. Lauren was delivered by emergency C-section. The doctors told us that just 20 minutes longer in the womb and she probably would not have made it. Lauren had many medical conditions that she needed to be healed from.She had congestive heart failure, liver failure and kidney failure. She was in respiratory distress, due to premature lung formation. She had an extremely large hemorrhage in the ventricles of the right side of her brain.The bile ducts that connect the liver to the gall bladder had disintegrated.In fact, the specialists had only ever seen something like this in people who had a transplant that had failed. In the hospital, there were many procedures that were performed on our little Lauren, such as: high frequency ventilation, surfactant therapy(aided in helping mature lungs), she was intubated (breathing tube) for 6 days, 2 liver biopsies, gall bladder scan, CAT scan, echocardiogram, blood tests at least three times a day, and she was given multiple medicines to prevent infection and potential seizure activity.

Needless to say, my faith in healing again was being tested, but Jesus had another plan. He would, over the first 40 days of Lauren’s life, heal one condition after another and at the end of 40 long days, we were able to take her home from the hospital. Jesus has continued to heal her over the next 16 years, from many different conditions that we have come up against.

Seven years after Lauren was born, Jesus “recruited” my wife and me into the healing ministry. Still having doubts, after watching all of the different things that my daughter had to fight against, as well as both of my parents passing away (my mom only in her 40s), we would attend a communion/worship service and my hands started to heat up. This was a physical sign to me that I had the gift of healing and that Jesus was calling us into His personal ministry, the ministry that took up the majority of His time on Earth.

Did you know that 20% of the entire gospels are dedicated to describing Jesus’ healing ministry?There are 31 documented healings in the gospels, and it is described in some cases that “all that were brought for healing were healed.”Jesus had a plan for our lives, like it says in Jeremiah 29:11, a plan to prosper us and not to harm us, a plan to give us hope and a future.

Over the next 9 years, through an amazing series of events, we would get to be involved with Jesus in His personal ministry.

• We would witness healing of cancer, healing of chronic diseases and medical conditions
• We would witness healing of families and marriages
• We would pray for the sick during the Living Nativity and watch hope be restored to the hopeless
• We would witness people healed from past hurt and pain
• We would witness someone sing perfect Italian opera while we were praying for him
• We would get to teach others about Jesus and His ministry of healing
• We would watch our entire lives be transformed by Jesus

We would be witness to the healing of our own family, as God gave us our second daughter Emily and use her to heal wounds. Eventually, our entire family would partner with Jesus and pray and heal the sick.

Jesus is waiting for you to join His ministry. He will work through unbelief and difficult times, as He did in me and my family. He is patient and will wait for you, but He is also persistent and will continue to attempt to recruit you.

One of my favorite scriptures that Jesus speaks about healing is in Mark.

Mark 16:15-18 - He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

By Pastor Mike Noyes