Do Not Consider Your Body

When God promised to give Abraham a son, the patriarch would never have been able to believe this promise if he had considered his own body already aged and worn out. But Abraham saw only God and His promise.

This kind of faith enables us to lay hold of the difference between the healing that is expected from earthly remedies alone and the healing that is looked for from God. When we use earthly remedies alone for healing, all the attention of the sick one is on the body. Divine healing, however, calls us to turn our attention away from the body, abandoning ourselves to the Lord’s care.

In order for the child of God to receive divine healing, the following must take place: sin must be confessed and renounced, one must completely surrender to the Lord, self must be yielded up to be wholly in His hands, and one must firmly believe that Jesus desires to take charge of the body. Then, the healing becomes the beginning of a new life of intimate communion with the Lord.

What a contrast this is from the greater number of sick people who look for healing from earthly remedies alone. What infinite care they exercise in observing the least symptom and what they eat and drink. How much they are taken up with whether they are thought of and visited by others. How much time is devoted to considering the body and what it needs, rather than to the Lord and the relationship that He seeks with their souls.

All this is totally different when healing is sought for in faith from the loving God. Then the first thing to learn is to cease to be anxious about the state of your body. You have trusted it to the Lord, and He has taken the responsibility. The commandment of Christ, “Take no thought for…your body” (Matthew 6:25), appears here in a new light.