Mr. W. A. Fay suffered from cancer of the stomach.
He has been ministered to perhaps thirty times.
For the first ten days, there was no evidence of healing whatever or a subsiding of his suffering. After that, there was a gradual subsiding; then color began to return to his face, and he began to put on flesh.
Now he can eat anything and everything, and as much of it as he can get! And that is not all, beloved. He found the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ while the process was going on, and he says that is the big part of it.
I guess the Lord knows how to open doors in people’s hearts. A good many Christians overlook the fact that Jesus Christ made the ministry of healing just as broad as He could make it.
To the Seventy (Luke 10:8-9), He said, “ … into whatsoever city ye enter, and they receive you … heal the sick that are therein.” And then what did He tell them to do? “… Say unto them, The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.”
Last evening in the healing rooms, just at six o’clock, I was visited by a woman who I met four or five months ago in the Deaconess Hospital. The dear lady had been given up to die. She had been examined by x-ray, and a large cancer in her stomach was discovered. They told her there was nothing to be done for her. So, the dear husband sent for me to speak a kindly word to his supposedly dying wife. I did not understand what I had been sent for and when I got to the dear soul, I supposed I had been called to pray the prayer of faith for healing.
I said, “Dear Mother, you do not have to die.”
“But,” she said, “the doctor says so. The X-ray shows such a sized cancer. I guess, brother, I will have to die.”
And I said, “It is a lie. You do not have to die.”
For two or three months, we battled against that condition in the woman’s soul. The Spirit of God would come upon her every time we prayed. Her pains would disappear, she would go to sleep, etc., but she was not really healed. That went on week after week and month after month until I was almost worn out before her soul raised to take victory.
But last night she walked into the healing rooms.
She told me that she weighed only seventy-five pounds when I met her and that now she weighs one hundred twenty pounds. She went to the hospital this week and had the same physician x-ray her. When they saw the picture, they said, “There must be some mistake.” And they got the original and examined it. They could not understand it.
She said, “Doctor, I found a new Physician, the Great Physician, the Christ of God, and I do not care about your [x-ray] plates. I know the cancer is gone.”
But the [x-ray] plates showed it was gone. The woman has gone back home a happy woman. But, beloved, the victory only came when the consciousness of the power of the living Christ took possession of that woman’s heart. Blessed be God.
Not a dead Jesus, but a living Christ! Not a sepulcher with a dead man in it, but the glorious, risen, present Christ in your heart and mine. The Christ lives, bless God, at not only the right hand of God, but the Christ lives in your soul and mine. The victory that He attained is evidenced not alone by the declaration: “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore,” but the victory He attains through you and me now.
That was His peculiar victory, but the victory of the Christ that gives the [children] of God [their] gladness now is the consciousness that the Christ lives and the
Christ reigns and that by the power of God, sin, darkness, death, and hell become obedient to the Christians through the Christ that is in [them].
Mrs. Carter is one of my neighbors. She lives at 714 South Sherman, [Spokane, Washington]. Mrs.
Carter had a tumor. For nine months, her physicians believed that the woman was pregnant, until after nature’s time had passed.
She continued to grow larger and larger for thirteen months from the beginning, until it was estimated that the tumor would weigh fifteen pounds. She came to the healing rooms and I ministered to her on three occasions, when there seemed to be no special evidence of healing beyond that her body relaxed and became comfortable.
But the fourth time she was ministered to, the Spirit of the Lord came upon her so powerfully that the next morning she returned at eleven o’clock perfectly normal in size. The tumor had disappeared—not as tumors usually do, in liquid form, or giving any sign of substance whatever. It simply dematerialized and disappeared and was gone. God Almighty did it, bless His name!
When I stand in the presence of people like Mrs.
Carter and realize what God has done in them, it seems to me that if I had been suddenly brought face-to-face with such things [for] the first time, an awe of God would get hold of my soul as it did twenty-five years ago when for the first time I saw God heal people.
Twenty-five years ago, this ministry was as new to me as it is to you. I went into one of John Alexander Dowie’s great meetings in Chicago where a portion of the room was filled with cots on which dying folks lay.
My brother, a man who had been an invalid for twenty-two years and the most terrible sufferer I have ever seen, was healed in that room.
Dowie came in and sat down to teach for a little while, and as he looked down and saw the intense
suffering of my brother, he dropped his Bible and came down to him and said, “Young fellow, I see you are suffering,” and he prayed for him. Instantly the power of God flashed through him. He arose and walked out of the place in his nightgown.
Three others, a great deal like him, were on cots.
Dowie prayed for each one, and one after another received the healing touch and arose from their cots.
When I saw [my brother] well, I walked on my tiptoes for about three weeks. The wonder of God’s power had been revealed to my Methodist soul. – John G. Lake