A Prayer For You: For Healing

Why is it that the thing that allows us to do so much in life, is also the one thing that can exclude us from so much too? Our bodies are certainly ‘beautifully and wonderfully made’. They can be incredibly strong one moment and yet the next, the tiniest virus can knock us down. Nearly all of us started life with a perfect complexion and with the capacity to grow bigger, stronger, and capable of more, each day. And yet a day will come to us all, when this process finally slows, stops, and goes into reverse, as time and the wear-and-tear of living take their toll.

Many of the people we know and meet may appear to us to be healthy, and few of us, when asked how we are, find it easy to share the hidden pain of an injury or the frustration caused when we know, we now cannot do what we used to be able to. We talk more about our concerns for family and friends who are sick, troubled by injury, or by ongoing disease.

It can be easy to be too optimistic about the healing offered by medicine’s advances, or too pessimistic when we feel the hurt of the loss of someone for whom this healing never came. In a culture where death remains the ultimate evil, and which has little to offer to counter the fear of facing it for ourselves or for a loved one, we elevate those who have the power to heal and vilify those whose treatments fail.

But yet, when we look within the Bible’s wisdom, we read of a God who has the power to heal, and of Jesus, who loved the broken and hurting people he encountered so much that his touch brought healing, wholeness, and a hope that one day this healing will touch all our lives and will transform our tortured bodies.

So, if you need healing, or if you know of someone who needs to be made whole, shall we pray together, to the God who has the power to heal?

Loving Father God, today we are asking you for healing because we know that you have the power to heal us, and because we know that you hear our prayers. We thank you for the healing that you offer through the surgeon’s skill, the doctors treatments and the nurses care. We thank you for the people who dedicate themselves to serve us and we ask that you will bless them with insight, diligence and your healing touch.

Jesus, we bring to you our friends and family members who are sick. Please help their bodies fight the diseases that make them ill, may they receive the diagnoses they need and the treatments that will bring them a full recovery, at the right time, in a place they can access and from people who embody your care for them.

And Lord God, in the situations where life hangs by a thread, when bodies are broken, sickness overwhelms and strength runs out, we ask for your miraculous intervention. Let us see your hand at work, your healing touch, the restoration of life that only you can give. Please Lord, when we have nowhere else to go, when everything seems hopeless, by your power and grace, bring healing, please.

Sometimes, Jesus, we have carried a sickness or injury for a long time. We have prayed, we’ve had the treatments, made the adjustments to our lives, done all we can to be made well, and yet we are still not well. We have told ourselves that this is our lot, we have settled our minds, that for us healing is not now. Jesus, help us to hold on to you, and to the knowledge that one day your healing will be ours, perhaps in this life, but certainly in the one to come.

And finally Lord, we lift to you ourselves, and those we love whose sickness is hidden in our minds. In whatever form it takes, however it makes us feel, whatever we are compelled to do, we ask Jesus, that you will touch us and fill us with your Spirit. That you will renew our minds, restore our broken spirits and that you will guard our hearts and minds with your all-surpassing peace.

And we ask all this in the healing name of Jesus.

Amen.

Be encouraged.