UPDATE

I went to my doctor today. There is no magic cure for yet another bowel obstruction.....I need to keep taking OTC remedies and drink lots of water and hope for the best. I am on day 7 of another bout of it. My life has been reduced to praying for peristalsis. Sad. He doesn't want me to try to take the 2 pills per day again because I am having too many side effects with just the one. Between the low blood pressure and constipation and abdominal pain and increased PVC's, I am having more and more time wondering if I should even continue this drug. I really need to pray about that possibility. I just do not feel well ever.


Sam comes home on Thursday for spring break. I am taking a week's drug holiday so that I can be the mom he used to see.....the mom before the tiring and frustrating side effects from cancer treatment stole a piece of my essence. I am hoping we have an enjoyable week together.

REASON #3

I am very aware that every time I present another one of my beliefs about divine healing, I am setting myself up for someone to tell me that what I believe is not “correct.” I love that I live in country where I can respect what you take from the Bible, and you respect what I take from the Bible.

What has convicted me most about sharing these beliefs is not just that I have been asked what I have learned, but that I have asked God over and over and over again in this 17-month-long investigation into divine healing, to check me if I am out of His will in any way or if what I am finding is not His truth. I have asked Him to make it very clear to me if I am off base in any of my beliefs. In 17 months of study, I have had nothing but confirmation from God. And so, I share my third “find.”

My search led me to an astonishing fact…..Jesus bore my diseases on the cross just like He bore my sins. WHY, I have asked myself and others, doesn’t the global Christian church around the world today TEACH this? Why hadn’t I ever heard this before? It is a hidden pearl of great price. My pastor told me that yes, in his seminary, that doctrine was taught. So, too, in probably many seminaries. And yet, this doctrine is rarely heard about.

In my book, I have written most about this prophecy and its fulfillment. I will again try my best to summarize this in general terms.

Isaiah 53 clearly teaches that bodily healing is included in the atoning work of Christ, His suffering and His cross. The church today teaches that He was wounded for our sins, but it neglects to look at the sentence which precedes it which says He also bore our infirmities!

           

            Surely He has borne our infirmities and carried our sorrows (also

            translated as pains). But He was wounded for our transgressions,

            He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace

            was upon Him, and by His stripes, we are healed. Is 53:4-5

Some translations read “griefs” instead of “infirmities.” My resources said that the original Hebrew word for griefs is everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible translated as “sickness” or “physical affliction.”

Jesus was made sick with our sicknesses and made sin with our sins. We are redeemed from disease as we are saved from sin, because Jesus bore them both. The verse below confirms that Jesus bore our sicknesses, and was fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy with His ministry on earth:

           

            Jesus cast out demons with a word and healed all the sick. This

            was to fulfill what was written by the prophet Isaiah [which says] 

           He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases. Matt 8:16-17.

We appropriate healing, then, in the same way we appropriate salvation when we are

saved. By faith alone through grace alone. To be saved, we confess our sinfulness,  accept that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is the only way to heaven, and claim salvation. As I have come to understand this, we can claim healing, then, just like we claim salvation when we accept God’s free gift. This does not necessarily mean that healing is instantaneous. It means that the Word of God SAYS he bore our diseases, so that is what I believe. I take Him at His word.

Even David spoke this biblical truth before Jesus ever came to earth: Bless the Lord, Oh, my soul…..who forgives all our sins AND heals all our diseases. Psalm 103:3.

The requirement for forgiveness of sins was the shedding of blood. Torture was not a requirement to provide salvation. Only the shedding of blood. But Jesus’ body was completely broken and tortured for our pain and disease. He was flogged and beaten until Isaiah tells us that He was unrecognizable:

            But many were amazed when they saw him.
            His face was so disfigured he seemed hardly human, 
            and from his appearance, one would scarcely know he

           was a man. Is 52:14

By those stripes we are healed. He did not need to be beaten to save us from sin, but to save us from disease. It was God’s will (Isaiah 53:10) to bruise him and make Him sick, because He wanted full deliverance for His followers.

I have chosen to take these words as truth. I believe what the Bible says. My illness was borne by our Savior. It doesn’t matter if I still have cancer cells on a PET scan. It doesn’t matter that there are tumors in my lung. Those things are testimonies of my human senses. I do not listen to the witness of my senses. I accept the Word of God over my senses and I have chosen to act on it. Seventeen months ago I found this truth, and from that day on, I have said to everyone who asked, “God is healing me.” And He has already healed one tumor of mine and one lymph node. I don’t know God’s timetable, but I have total faith that I will see total healing.

If I have never once doubted my salvation once I accepted Jesus as my Savior, then I should not doubt my healing either. Scripture is clear that he died for both. I stand on that. When it will become manifest in my body, I do not know. But by faith in the Word, I will wait and continue to see myself as God sees me, healed by His stripes.

It is simple. It is profound. He was tortured for me so I would not have to bear this cancer. I have accepted the indescribable gift of that, and have unwavering faith in it.

PRAYER REQUEST

I am under assault again. Woke up this morning with my back out again and sciatica. On top of the continual bowel obstruction (yes, again.......I HATE what these drugs are doing to my colon), I feel the spirit of depression descending again. I have felt SO good for one week. I really thought this was the beginning, but it did not last. I am pleading God for mercy right now. I have run out of steam with medical problems. I would covet your prayers right now.

DAY AT DORDT

Dick and I went over to Dordt today to take in a Defender basketball game with Sam (against Midland Lutheran College in Nebraska), a semi-final game in the GPAC conference tournament. Dordt won the regular season championship and are on their way to the national tournament in Missouri in another 2 weeks! It was an amazing nail-biter of a game with an atmosphere that was so highly charged that it made all of the high school and USD games here in town seem like the rec league. I've never been in a packed college gym with such incredible student and home-town support. My ears may still be ringing!

Students get free pop and popcorn, so Sam supplied us!



Warm-ups




Our section starting to fill up 45 minutes before game time




Sam and 3 of his best friends, Sam E. (sitting left), Sam V. (standing left),
Tim (Sam's roomie, standing right), and Cody (sitting foreground).



"Spooning" the camera...we took the guys out to Pizza Ranch for dinner after the game.

Sam has the greatest friends ever. We had never met Sam and Cody before and they were as warm and fun and personable as all his other buddies that we have met. Sam has been blessed with just an amazing, tight group of girls and guys that not just have a blast together, but really care about each other. He chose the perfect college!

'Twas a super Saturday....

REASON #2

I am finding it challenging to summarize each section of the book I put together, but it has been valuable for me. It reinforces the simplicity of what I believe. I should be able to make it succinct. I realize that none of this will have any import to readers who do not believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God. That is my premise. If biblical truths aren't your thing, check out some other blogs!! What follows is the second reason why I stand in faith for healing.

Before my cancer, I had never wondered about God as a divine healer. Jesus as Savior was what I knew. When I accepted the free gift of salvation through grace alone, I was saved from a life in hell. That gift was everything I needed. I didn’t have any reason to look further into God’s different “roles.” But the desperation of an incurable illness produces desperate searches. In it, I found a second solid reason to hold fast to God for divine healing.

In the Old Testament, God established Himself as Israel’s healer right off the bat. He gave 7 redemptive names to His people in the Old Testament. Christians are most familiar with Jehovah-shalom (The Lord is our peace) and Jehovah-jireh (The Lord will provide). But He gave them Jehovah-rapha first (The Lord is our healer, our divine physician).

He revealed this to the Israelites after they crossed the Red Sea. Exodus 15:26 says, I am the Lord who heals you. It is confirmed in Psalm 105:37 which says, No feeble person came forth (from the passage through the sea) from the tribes. Bible scholars estimate that there were up to 3 million Israelites at that time. They were all healed of disease and infirmity.

Jesus established Himself as healer in the New Testament. Of the 56 individual events mentioned in the gospels during a 2-year period in His Galilean ministry, 19 of them are healings! One-third of that ministry window was spent healing the sick!

            Great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them all. Matthew 12:15

            When the sun went down, everyone who had anyone sick with some

            ailment or other brought them to him. One by one he placed his hands

            on them and healed them. Luke 4:40

The gospels are rich with stories of Jesus’ miraculous cures for people who came to him in faith for healing.

What I was now able to do was tie some truths together. First, Jesus came to do God’s will on earth.      

            Lo, I come to do your will, O God. Hebrews 10:7

            I came down from heaven not to do my own will but the will of Him

            who sent me. John 6:38

If healing was not God’s will, then Jesus would have been robbing His Father of all that glory by making people well.

Secondly, Jesus was bringing glory to His Father by healing the sick.

           

            I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave

            me to do. John 17:4

            The One who sent Me is with me; He has not left me alone, for I always

            do what pleases Him. John 8:29

I found NO place in the Bible where disease brought God glory, but there are plenty of verses about healing bringing God glory.

My pursuit led me to a simple algebraic formula which answered my question of whether the Creator of the universe was willing to heal me. If A= B and B=C, then A=C. If Jesus was on earth to do His Father’s will, and if He was healing all who asked as part of that work on earth, then healing was God’s will!  

All the dots were connecting for me!

Skeptics will say, “But that was then, this is now. The day of divine miracles is over.” WRONG. God does not and has not changed.

           

            I am God. I change not. Malachi 3:6

            Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever. Hebrews 13:8

God is still healer today. I can come to Him in faith for healing and know that His will is for me to be well, and that my healing would bring God the Father glory!

One side note here: When I came to believe that God still divinely heals today, I also found confirmation about my first discovery (that disease is not from God). These are two of many verses verifying God's stand on this:

            The reason the Son of Man appeared on earth was to destroy

            the devil’s work!  1 John 3:8

            Ought not this woman (referring to the woman with bleeding),

            whom Satan has bound for 18 long years, be loosed from the bond? Luke 13:16

If Jesus came to destroy the devil’s work on earth (and it is vast), and He healed all who asked Him for healing, then the devil’s work has to be disease and illness.

Once again, by a simple biblical connect-the-dots, I had a verification that my first revelation was spot-on. God does not put disease on us, and Scripture is clear that disease is Satan’s handiwork.

My arsenal of faith for healing was getting stronger.

My 3^rd reason, coming up: Jesus bore my diseases on the cross just as He bore my sins. This may be the most compelling and surprising truth I found. I’m excited to share it with you next.

TIME TO SHARE

I have been asked more than once about the basis for my faith in my healing. Most folks are curious about what I have written in my book, which is a compilation of what I have studied about divine healing in Scripture and other books, leading me to unwavering faith that God is healing me.

I decided that it is time to share. Maybe some of my blog readers are wondering the same thing. It is difficult to make short summaries of my book sections, but I will try as best I can to make my point briefly. It should be understood that I have many Scriptures to back up my belief, though I won't take up all the space here to cite them.

Maybe-----just maybe------one of you who needs healing will believe these truths as well, and stand on The Rock for your own deliverance. I will do this in 5 or 6 "installments" to keep them readable.

The first thing I had to verify before I could stand in faith for healing was that it was God's will for me to be healed. But there was no way I could believe in that because I did not know that disease was not of God. I had never given ANY thought to where disease originated. Apparently I had bought into the theological folklore------completely unsubstantiated by the Bible----that God puts sicknesses into our lives to refine us, as if the Almighty sits on His throne with a collection cancer wands, heart disease wands, Parkinson's wands, etc. and touches them to the foreheads of the children He professes to love so much because they need to grow in their faith. He puts disease on us, we bear it nobly, and by doing so, we glorify God.

How could this myth be passed down for thousands of generations? It is blasphemous! We are calling our God a killer, a murderer, a giver of grief and agony. WHAT?

It did not take too long for me to find in Scripture that God does not smite His children with disease any more than He smites them with sin. He hates both disease and sin. I will take a look at that in another installment. NOTHING in Scripture supports this folklore. God is pure love and wants good things for His followers. (The devil comes only to kill, steal and destroy. I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly. John 10:10)

God's creation was perfect. Adam and Eve had a perfect life in a perfect world and were given eternal life. No where does it say, "On the third day, God said, 'Let there be seed-bearing plants and trees and let there also be cancer.'" Everything God created was GOOD.

Sickness and disease only entered creation when Eve, then Adam after her, sold themselves---and thus, all of us----to the devil by disobeying God's commands in the garden of Eden not to eat the fruit from one tree. They lost their promise for eternal life and they were put in bondage to the devil's power. Suddenly every evil in the world came into existence, including pain and illness, all of it a consequence of their sin. Disease came with the fall of man, initiated by the devil.

It was blatantly clear to me in a mere 3 chapters of Genesis that my cancer was of the devil, not of God. No illness is of God. If disease is something good from God, He would have created it, and given Adam and Eve plenty of it so their existence could be even more perfect. I had my first answer. God did not want me to have this cancer. He does not want any Christian to suffer from disease (much more on this later). Disease is from the enemy. It was born with the fall of man.

Believing that premise, I knew I could proceed to research Scripture as to whether or not God would want to heal me of this cancer that He did not choose for me. God did not put this cancer on me, but how could I ever really know of divine healing could be mine? That was the beginning of an amazing roadtrip through the Bible and other books (which just kept pointing me back to the Bible) that gave me 100% faith and confidence in God's desire and willingness to see believers healed, and gave me every tool I needed to stand firm.

Next time: God established Himself as Healer in the Old Testament; Jesus established Himself as Healer in the New Testament.

IT'S WORKING

I've waited for 3 full days to let you know how your prayers for me have been answered. I wanted the new chemo drug to have a chance to build up in my body before making any proclamations about me being able to tolerate the lowered dosage. NO NAUSEA!! NO NEON FLASHES OF LIGHT IN MY EYES! NO ARRYTHMIAS THAT I CAN DETECT! NO ABDOMINAL PAIN! It is working! I am pre-medicating with anti-nausea drugs 1/2 hour before dinner, stuff my gut at dinner so there is alot of food in there, then take the chemo. I lay down right afterwards very quietly for an hour. And I have not been sick. Honestly, it is a complete answer to prayer. With the bowel obstruction over, the depression lifted, and the extreme nausea gone, I feel good for the first time since early January. I mean, I am remembering real life again! THANK YOU so much for praying about this.

They will try to bring me up to twice a day dosages as soon as they think I can tolerate it, BUT, the good news is, this is a therapeutic dosage, so even if I cannot go back on the twice a day regime, if I can stay just on this, I am getting the effects from the drug. I know this drug cannot heal incurable cancer-----healing is only from God-----but I have confidence that this drug is hitting on those mutated 2nd chromosomes and eating many of them up. I believe that I will see some tumor shrinkage, or at least some reduced cancer activity at the next PET scan.

We are going to our supper club tonight......the first "event" I have gone to since going to chemo in Sioux Falls on the 3rd of January. I have been too sick to even go to church. It will feel so good to get out!!

Again, I can't tell you how much it has meant to me that my friends and family are keeping my concerns lifted in prayer.