KNEES ARE FOR KNEELING

​i was blessed to spend much of the past week with a buddy of mine who currently has no place to lay his head.  You could call him homeless, because he is, but that term conjures up all sorts of images that don’t necessarily apply to him.  In any event, he had a couple of bum knees.  The medical establishment said he needed knee replacement, but my buddy knew the Great Physician and He had other plans.
 
After my buddy had hobbled around for a long time and toyed with the idea of letting surgeons cut on him, as they had successfully done a few years earlier to bring healing to his wrist, he had a supernatural encounter with God during a worship service (which, on the surface at least, had nothing to do with healing) and God healed his knee!  He knew God was at work when his knee started to burn and he was led to shift his focus from his healing to his healer.  In that moment his heart overflowed with praise and gratitude because God is good, kind and sovereign over everything that happens to us, and in every moment God is always working to give us His best!
 
By the end of that service, the pain was largely gone, as was most of the swelling.  He was pretty sure God had given him a new knee, so he decided to check it out by playing several rounds of volleyball in the sand.  My buddy is in his sixties, so whether that was foolish or faith i cannot say - perhaps a generous amount of both - but his knee held up; the strength and stability that had evaded him for years had returned, and he tearfully pronounced himself healed in the name of Jesus!
 
He found it necessary to keep declaring that over and over during the coming weeks and months, through periods when some of the pain and swelling returned, although never to the extent he’d routinely endured before his miraculous healing.  At those times when his knee was talking to him again, another voice also arose, claiming that he hadn’t really been healed.  His healing was a fraud, just a figment of his imagination, that other voice said.  But he refused to listen to it because he knew what it was - it was the voice of doubt - and he knew where it had come from - it was from the pit of Hell - and so he thanked God for his healing even while he was limping and sure enough, the healing stuck, the pain and swelling subsided again, and his faith continued to grow in fits and starts.
 
My buddy needed all that faith because his other knee started to talk to him.  The knee he’d called his “good knee” soon became his “bad knee,” and all the symptoms he’d previously experienced seemed to return on the other side of his body.  That could have discouraged him, and at times it did, but the healing he’d already gotten, through which his formerly “bad knee” had become his “good knee,” helped remind him that Jesus is someone he could depend upon.  He had healed him before, and He could heal him again.  So every time his new “bad knee” wobbled, he prayed for healing and believed that he’d been healed, even when his knee was screaming at him that nothing had changed and it hurt really bad.
 
Part of him hoped for another miraculous healing like he’d gotten during that worship service, which seemed particularly fantastic because nobody had even prayed for his healing that day.  He had been asking God to heal him for what seemed a really long time, and that proved enough.  But another part of him sensed that God wasn’t going to work that same way again this time.  i got that same sense, almost every time i prayed with him on the phone.
 
So last week when we finally got together in person, for the first time in almost a year, i laid hands on his knee and invited Jesus’s Spirit to invade his joint.  After all, Jesus isn’t just his healer but his healing, and His presence brings healing to our minds, our souls and our bodies.  And He is also our faith - the very substance of everything we are hoping for and the evidence of what we cannot yet see, as it says in the Book of Hebrews.  He loves to work from the inside out, first strengthening our spirit-man or -woman to believe for healing and then working through our renewed faith to heal not only our hearts but our bodies.
 
While we were praying the other day, my buddy said that he sensed the anointing for healing, and he received it as a very good sign.  He believed that his knee was being healed, even though he didn’t feel heat the way he had when Jesus had healed his other knee.  He continued to believe he was healed over the next few days, during times when the pain was present and at other times when the pain subsided or disappeared.  He refused to let his flesh tell him whether he was healed.  God’s word says that by Jesus’s own wounds we are healed, and that was enough for him.
 
By the time we said goodbye, we were both fairly optimistic that the worst was now behind him.  He was walking without a limp, at least when he wasn’t carrying much of a load.  And the next morning he texted me, saying that he had carried a couple of really heavy packs for about a mile and a half without any pain whatsoever.  About ninety percent of the swelling was gone and his eyes were full of tears because he was absolutely certain he’d been healed!  Praise God!!
 
His healing is really encouraging me today because i’ve had a bum shoulder for nine years.  My other one used to be worse, but God healed it.  i had been trying to ignore the pain, figuring it would eventually heal on its own, but then i realized i hadn’t been praying, so for the last year or so i’ve been asking God to heal it.  At one point i was planning to go see a doctor and maybe get an injection.  Years ago i did that and it worked; the steroid they gave me knocked down the pain and inflammation long enough for my body’s natural healing mechanisms to kick in and my shoulder got better.  But this time when i prayed, God said no; He wasn’t working that way.  He was giving me the healing i’d asked for without medical intervention; i just needed to believe Him and trust Him, even when there’s no evidence that anything has happened.
 
So that’s what i’m now doing, and i’m really grateful that God has brought me to the place where i can depend upon Him for something like that.  A little more faith is really the only injection i need.  And even in that, i have more than enough, because faith is His gift to me, and what He gives is always enough.  His gift is Jesus, and Jesus is always enough!