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Message taken from the Devotional Emails Entitled
From My Heart To Yours

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Example 2.

"This sickness is not unto death, 
but for the glory of God,
that the Son of God 
might be glorified through it."
John 11:4

Last year around this time, I was having some health problems
which required me to go to a gynaecologist. While I was
waiting for the doctor to see me, a man with a little baby in his arms
said to me..."Are you a Christian?" 
I replied that I was and he said
"May I share my testimony with you?"

He began to open up his heart to me and said that the last
few of years had been a real struggle for him and
a tremendous testing of his faith. He was a caregiver for
his mother who had cancer, and for his aging father.

After his mother's funeral, his father told him to go
up to a hunting cabin they had, so that he could rest.

He proceeded to tell me that he just got there, and the
phone rang...it was the police, telling him that his father's 
house had burned down in a fire and that his father was dead.

Heartbroken, he went back to make the arrangements
for another funeral...

Still grieving for his family, he was told that his
daughter had cancer and needed to go for treatments.
He said that the treatments were working and that the
cancer was in remission, but that the trauma of the
whole situation was too devastating for his wife...
One day he came home, and she had killed herself.

By now, his faith was at an all time low, and he was very depressed.

After about a year, he met a young woman, and they fell in love...
Later they married and she became pregnant. The couple was
overjoyed and he was anxious to start a new life again.
His children from his first marriage were already grown
and had left home, but this was a new beginning for him.

In the delivery room, something was terribly wrong, and
the doctors painfully told the couple that their son was
not responding and he was dead...they were sorry,
but there was nothing more they could do.
He asked the doctor if he could just hold his son...
He took the baby in his arms and lifted his in the air and prayed to God...

"LORD, you have said that if we ask anything in your name, 
you will do it. Lord, please I've had enough, I am asking,
in the name of Jesus', that my son will live. The doctors
cannot help him, but you can. "

The baby began to cry and life came into his tiny body.
The doctors told them that probably, because the child
had gone so long without breathing, that he would have brain damage.
They wanted to prepare them for what they may have to face.
But, here was this beautiful little child, a year later...
walking and playing with toys in the waiting room for me
to see, perfectly healthy and normal. His name was Matthew.

In John 11, about the story of Lazarus, Jesus didn't run to the
aid of their friends the minute they needed help...
Not because he didn't love them, but so that the
Glory of God might be shown through Him....

We all have a tendency to think that when God doesn't jump right
in, when we think he should, that our situation is hopeless.
We have the tendency to pray, but then to keep saying to our friends,
that the Doctors say that there is nothing that can be done...
or things will never change.

So we cancel out our prayers, by our lack of faith and negative confession.

Later on last year the sickness that I had cleared up...but I believe
that perhaps I was ill, just so I could see how easily this man
opened up to a stranger and shared his faith and his trials and his victory.

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