HAVE YOU ACCEPTED JESUS AS YOUR PHYSICIAN & HEALER?
(The Secret to long-LIFE & HEALTH)

One day a woman in our church and I got to talking about the promises of divine healing. This sister had a Methodist background. Her husband was a farmer. She told me some Pentecostal people had come into that little town about 1918, had rented an empty store building, and had started a revival.

The family heard about it and decided they would attend. They hooked up the wagon, loaded all their children, and went in town to the meeting. They attended a few times and enjoyed it. The preacher was preaching on divine healing and praying for the sick. People were praying around the altar, and all of them prayed out loud at once!

The one member of their household who could not attend was this woman's 93-year-old grandmother. They got home too late at night for her. One morning at the breakfast table, Grandma asked about the service. "Well, I know you're not going to like this ...."the granddaughter said, and began to tell her about the fellow preaching on healing, anointing people with oil, and laying hands on them for healing. But Grandma exclaimed, "WHOOPEE! Glory! Glory! I'm glad you found it!"

"What do you mean?" her granddaughter asked. "Why," she said, "40 years ago in our Methodist church a fellow came along preaching divine healing, and he invited us to come up and accept Christ as our Healer and Physician, just as we had accepted Him as our Savior. And I went forward with the others. You're old enough to remember most of those 40 years. Did you ever know of my being sick in the last 40 years?" "Why, no. We just always thought you had a strong constitution!"

"No," the grandmother said. "I accepted Jesus as my Physician. I haven't been sick in 40 years. I'm 93 now—and it might interest you to know that I am going home without sickness and disease. I'll never have a sick day in my life!" The sister said to me, "We thought poor old Grandma had become sort of senile, but she encouraged
us to go to the meetings." Grandma lived to be past 94. She got up with the rest of the family before daylight, because by daylight the men and boys would be out in the fields working. After breakfast she would always wash and dry the breakfast dishes, clean up the kitchen, and sweep it out while her granddaughter was making the beds and cleaning the rest of the house. By 9 o'clock they would meet in their sewing room.

While the granddaughter mended, Grandma would read the Bible to her. The sister recalled, "At the breakfast table one morning, Grandma said, 'I'm going home this morning at 10 o'clock.' We passed it by, but before my husband went out to the fields, he said, 'What is she talking about? Does she think she's going back home?' We didn't understand what she meant." Grandma went ahead and washed all the breakfast dishes and pots and pans that it took to feed eight children plus the three adults, swept out the kitchen, met her granddaughter at 9 o'clock in the sewing room, sat down, and began reading the Bible to her. Her granddaughter said, "Just about 10 minutes till 10, she turned to me and said, 'Let me read this to you ....'She read the 20th and 21st chapters of Revelation. She got through about 10 o'clock, said, 'There's Jesus—and I must go! Goodbye!' waved, and went home, sitting there in a chair." (And she was Methodist! Bless God, if it would work for a Methodist, it ought to work for anybody!) Oh, hallelujah, we have sold God short so many times.

"Yes, but maybe that's not God's will for me," you might say. Well, you just go right ahead and talk yourself out of it. Talk yourself into being sick. Talk yourself into dying early—and you will have what you say, because Jesus Himself plainly said: That whosoever shall say ... and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. —Mark 11:23 I'm going to state it again: It is NOT God our Heavenly Father's will that Christians should suffer with cancer and other dread diseases that bring pain and anguish. It IS God's will that we live our full length of time on earth. (Kenneth E. Hagin)