Can God Really Heal Me? - Healing 2020

Summary

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In this talk, Heather Khym shares her personal experience with God’s healing. She talks about how one of God’s truest desires is for our healing, and we must be open to Him in order to receive it. She touches on how faith is one of the most important things we must have in order for us to fully grasp God’s healing.

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Reflective Study Questions

“Earth is not our home, Heaven is the home.”
Peter Kreeft

The image that we were created in is an image of Love, God Himself. AndHe desires deeper relationship with us and He is constantly pursuing us. Have there been times that you have felt God’s desire to be closer to you? How have you responded? How might God be calling you to move closer to Him in this current season?
Heather mentions how Adam and Eve walked in the Garden and spoke with the Lord. It sounded like an easy relationship, like any conversation they had with the Lord was natural and easy, and free-flowing. How do you enter into conversation with the Lord? What comes naturally for you when you speak with Him?
Heather mentions that it’s important to remember our goal is eternal life with the Lord in Heaven. How can remembering this help you in your current season and struggle?
God wants to bring us comfort in our pain and struggle. Have there been times where you have closed yourself off to Him and maybe made it more difficult for Him to enter that situation? What are some ways you can make yourself more available to Him now, for Him to come to you and bring you comfort?
Miracles are still happening today. Heather shared the story of her dad’s miraculous healing. What can you takeaway from this story? What might God want you to know about Him through this story?
God does not always work in our lives in the way that we are praying for or hoping for. Yet, we know He loves us. We know He has a greater plan, even if we cannot understand it right now. What are some ways you can grow in your trust in the Lord right now? What are some ways you can learn more about His heart, who He is?

Text: Can God Really Heal Me?

Welcome, I’m so glad that you’re here, so glad that you took the time to carve this out of your schedule, to spend time learning about healing and opening your heart to what God has for you. I am hopeful that this retreat is really going to bless you. I just want to start with letting you know who I am, my name is Heather Khym and I am from just outside Vancouver, British Columbia. I live here with my husband Jake, and our three kids. My husband and I have a ministry called Life Restoration. And really our heart for our ministry is to just journey with people, to disciple them and help lead them into the restoration and freedom that God has for us. I also have a podcast called Abiding Together with my good friend, Sister Miriam James Heidland and Michelle Benzinger. And I’m so happy to be with you today to talk about the topic of healing which is one of my favorite things, so why don’t we just start with a prayer.

Opening Prayer

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord, we welcome you here. You say in the scriptures that when two or more are gathered in your name, that you are in our midst. So we just acknowledge your presence here with us, no matter where we are, no matter where we find ourselves, we acknowledge that you are here with us, that we are not alone. And we invite you into our hearts, to open our hearts, to open our minds, to open our ears, to your words, to your truth, to your healing, and to your restoration. Come with the power of your spirit, Lord, and speak your truth to us, and restore us. We pray this in your name Jesus, Amen. In the name of the Father, and the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Understanding God’s Power To Heal

So let’s just dive right in. I’m going to be giving four talks, as all the speakers are. And when I was thinking about it, I thought, what am I going start with? Well, let’s just start with the big question on everybody’s mind, can God really heal me? This question I think, we all have struggled with at various points in our life, and maybe you find yourself in a place right now where this is the question on your mind or maybe it’s kind of buried down deep, and you just sort of wonder that every now and then, is God really who He says He is? Can He really heal me or do I just have to suffer the rest of my life?

I want to address some of these things. And I want to dive into this question, because I like this question, I think God likes this question too. Because when we are not afraid, when we actually have the courage to face this question, to ask this question to the heart of God, it gives Him an opportunity to give us an answer, to show us who He really is, that He is a miracle working God, that He is a savior, and that He can make all things new.

For many of us, we don’t know that experience on a very personal level, and we may have heard stories about it. And so it leaves us wondering, are these just stories or is He really going to be that for me? Am I really going to know that in a personal way? Well, the good news is that God wants us to know Him in a personal way. This is how it was from the very beginning, when God created Adam and Eve, it was relationship. He made us, He made them in His image and likeness, and He is love. So the image that we were created in is an image of love, and love is relationship. So everything about Adam and Eve, and God and us is relationship, it’s about union, it’s about closeness, it’s about the fulfilling of every longing in our heart, about Him giving himself totally to us, and inviting us to do the same.

We know that in the garden with Adam and Eve that they said they walked in the cool of the day with God just talking, like that would be, I think about that often, how awesome that would be to just be walking with God in the garden, being able to ask Him questions and talk to Him. It was relationship, just as we would with a friend or just as we would with someone in our family that we could walk, and talk, and listen, and understand. This was God’s desire for us, this is His desire for us still.

But we know that in the garden, there was a rupture. And really at the heart of all that happened there was that the enemy came in, and whispered a lie to Adam and Eve, and it really caused this distrust. And they started to question is God really who He says He is? Is He really good? Does He really want my good? Is He holding out on me? is He holding back something good like this tree? And I think that many of us wonder the same exact thing as Adam and Eve. We may not be living in an actual garden with God, but I think in our day to day life, we ask those questions too, like God, are you really going to satisfy all the desires of my heart? And many of us are struggling, we’re hurting, we have pain in our life, we have suffering. And we’re asking these deep questions, like God, can you really heal me? Are you really going to come through? You’re really going to show me who you are. Are you really, God, are you really who you say you are?

God’s Healing In The Scriptures

We can read through the Scriptures, and we can see over and over again, that God is pursuing us. Ever since Adam and Eve fell, and ever since sin and suffering, and pain and death entered the world as a result of sin, God has been pursuing a communion with us to fill the gap, to heal the rupture and He is wanting to do that in our hearts, even now that every rupture, every place that is far from Him, this is where God wants to go, and this is where God wants to heal. We see Him do this over and over, and over again in the scriptures. He is where the last people are, He is where the hurting people are, He is where the broken ones are. He makes it known to us that He is close to the brokenhearted and it says that in Scripture as well.

When Jesus comes into the world, and the Father sends His only Son, the whole mission was to make a way for us. It wasn’t just to work this miracle, it was because He wanted a union with us, He wants a relationship with us. That’s what heaven is going to be, heaven is going to be everything made holing in. In Revelation, it describes heaven as there’s going to be no more crying and no more tears, no more sorrow, no more shame, no more sadness, we will be completely fulfilled, and we will be with the lover, and that is God.

If we don’t have that in the forefront of our mind, that heaven is really the goal, I love Peter Kreeft, he’s a Catholic author, and he says, “Earth is not our home, heaven is our home.” This is the truth, and if we don’t have that in the forefront of our mind, it’s going to be very hard for us to have hope and have peace in this place on Earth where we will experience pain and suffering. What Jesus shows us is that He’s not just another guy, He’s not just a good teacher, if He was, then He couldn’t have risen from the dead. Him rising from the dead, experiencing all the pain and suffering and sorrow, and bringing new life, and rising from the dead shows us that everything and anything can change in us.

I love this scripture that He quotes in Luke and this is Him telling us who He is. So when we have that question like, God, who are you? Are you really who you say you are? And I’m just gonna quote it for you here. He’s quoting actually a scripture back in Isaiah. It’s Isaiah 61:1-4, where he says, “The spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim a year of the Lord’s favor, and a day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, to provide those who grieve in Zion and to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.” If you hear those words, and you let them sink in for you, -isn’t that powerful? God is saying, “I’m the one who has come to heal you, I am the one who has come to set you free, I am the one who wants to take all of your sorrow and to bring you comfort, and replace it with joy.”

I also think for some of us, like we hear things like this in the Scriptures, or we read the miracle stories that happened in the Scriptures, and we might be tempted to think, well, that’s what happened in the Scriptures. And I’ve heard even some priests say things like that, that we don’t see the same kind of miracles happen today that happened in the Bible, but Jesus says in the Bible that we will do even greater things than He did, that we will see even greater miracles than people saw then. And I’m here to tell you friends, the truth is that God is alive and well. He didn’t just live 2,000 years ago, He is alive now because He rose from the dead and He is the same miracle working God that He was then, He is the same yesterday, today and forever.

Miracle Healing Story

I just want to share a little story with you. When I was a junior in high school, I was about 16 years old, my dad was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And that was incredibly rattling for the family. My dad’s very strong, very capable, but as we know, cancer and disease, and sickness, that doesn’t matter, it can take anyone and he was diagnosed with this horrible disease. And needless to say, yeah, we were all rattled, and I was very upset, I was a teenager, I didn’t know how to handle this. He was immediately put into chemo treatments and all different kinds of things, and we were just so, so afraid, and of course, we began to pray.

Does this sound like all of us? When we are faced with tragedy, we really start praying, asking God for healing. And it seemed like every time that we would pray for something, it seemed like God wasn’t answering our prayer, because He didn’t give us what we asked for. So the doctors were going to look in his blood, and so we would pray, God, please don’t let the cancer be in his blood, and then we get the results back and there it was. And then we’d pray, please don’t let it be in his bone marrow, we get the results back and there it was, and the tumors were spreading all over his body.

And so one night, he was in the cancer clinic, and they wanted to take a greater look at these tumors that were in his body, and they had said to him that his chances of survival were about 3%. And they said, “You need to get your things in order, because this is going to go quickly.” And so he was laying in the hospital one night and he had a little Bible beside his bed. And he picked up the Bible and he read a story about God’s mercy, and he was really touched by that, it really opened him up, he felt the mercy and love of God in that moment.

And he flipped open the Bible again, and it landed on the story of the healing of the leper. And so he read that story, and he put the Bible down on his chest and he said, “God, if it’s your will, I ask that you would take away the spirit of cancer and replace it with a spirit of good health.” Now, my dad, he’s a very logical guy. So what happened next, didn’t really make sense coming from him, that truly was a supernatural experience, but he said, “I had never prayed for myself before, I never felt worthy to ask God for anything.” He prayed for other people all the time, but he had never asked God, this is the first prayer that he ever made, and asked God for something.

When he put the Bible down on his chest, he had this intense experience of power and light, just rushing through his eye sockets, and all through his body, and after a few seconds, it was so intense that he opened up his eyes and it stopped. He closed his eyes again and nothing. And then all of a sudden this joy, just like welled up within him, and he just began to laugh. People probably thought he was crazy in that hospital. And he called us and I remember, being a kid and being at home and hearing this laughter on the other end of the phone and be like, “Who is this?” And he said, “It’s me, something has happened to me.”

So the next morning, the doctors came to do a scan, and to see what was going on with those tumors and if there was really even anything that they could do at that point. And after a few hours of waiting, the doctor came back and said, “Mr. McGuire, that was the most boring three hours of my life because there’s no cancer there anymore.” My dad was miraculously and completely healed by the power of Jesus. All of his cancer was gone, he was made whole. In that moment, the doctors couldn’t explain anything, the day before they saw tumors, and the next day, there was nothing there and my dad is still here today, living right next door, he’s doing very well.

Trust In God’s Healing

God is a miracle working God, and not just 2,000 years ago, He is a miracle working God right now. Does God have the power to heal us? Yes, He does, yes, He does. I think where we need to go with this is that we need to ask God for the gift of faith, and to be able to trust Him, because He’s not just like a genie in a lamp, where we just asked Him for things and that He is supposed to respond to everything that we ask Him to do as if we know the best plan. I don’t know why God healed my dad that day. I know that I’ve prayed for many other things, and the answer didn’t seem to be what I thought it should be, and I’m sure you have too.

But if we trust the heart of God, that He is good, that He’s not holding out on us, then we can be secure in asking Him and trusting that no matter what He says, or what He does, or what He doesn’t do in our mind from our limited perspective, that He loves us, and that His desire is to satisfy us and bring us into deep relationship with Him. This is His whole mission, this is why Jesus came and this is what He desires for you, right now, in a personal way, that He desires you to experience greater freedom and wholeness. He truly is a miracle working God. And I think that we need to ask for the gift of faith, friends. We need to just ask, it is a gift and I think for many of us, we struggle in this area, we get afraid of these big questions, and I think we need to freely ask and we need to ask for the gift of faith to be increased. So let’s just pray right now for that.

Prayer For Faith And Trust

In the name of the Father, and the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. God, we come to you with our questions and our doubts, especially the lie that you are distant, and that you don’t care. The lie that maybe you are the cause of our suffering, that you’re trying to teach us a lesson somehow. We ask that you’d come with the truth, that you are good, that, that’s not the kind of God you are that you are good, and you desire our good, you desire our freedom, and our healing, and our wholeness, but most of all that you desire relationship with us. So Lord, I ask that you would come with a gift of faith, that you would increase our faith, and increase our trust in you. We pray this in your name Jesus, Amen. In the name of the Father, and the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

I’m looking forward to the next three talks that I get to share with you, as I talk about how do we follow Jesus in the Paschal mystery into the resurrection, and also like the questions of how do we surrender in our own littleness and I just look forward to spending more time with you. May God bless you.

About Heather Khym

Heather Khym has been serving in ministry for over 25 years and has a passion for evangelization, discipleship, and creating an environment for people to have a personal encounter with God. She attended Franciscan University where she studied Theology with a concentration in Catechetics and met her husband Jake. In 2005 they started Life Restoration, a ministry which seeks to help people experience freedom and restoration in Jesus. Currently, Heather leads retreats, speaks, and has a successful podcast called Abiding Together with her dear friends Sister Miriam and Michelle. She lives in British Columbia with Jake and their 3 children.