Fighting Cancer

Just read Hitchen's Vanity Fair article in which he describes his first raw reactions to being "stricken" with cancer. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/09/hitchens-201009

Even though he is still stoically anti-anything-God, it's hard not to warm to him. He is an amazing thinker and writer and speaks with an openness and frankness that serves up some tasty food for thought. He is also very quotable:

"I have been ....knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light."

"In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist."

"I love the imagery of struggle....Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water."

Great writing but a terribly sad situation. It brings home to me again the importance of fighting against sickness, not just with drugs but with supernatural power. Those like myself who are relatively well need to take up the fight for those who are sick. It's unthinkable to me that, according to Christopher, some people are actually praying for him to stay ill. Jesus never did that! Encouragingly though, most of the correspondence he has got is from people who are praying for him to make a full and swift recovery. While people in Christopher's situation battle though the side effects of powerful drugs we need to call upon God to release power from heaven to heal the sick.

I am currently half way through a year-long series on healing (it's actually not as long as it sounds as I've only done 5 preaches so far) and I am thinking about what to speak on this term. Do I continue in Matthews gospel chapters 7-10 and talk about Jesus sending out the disciples to heal the sick or do I start the second half of the series in Acts? I think I need to finish the Matthew series well but there is a lot of overlap. Acts is really the outworking of the instructions Jesus gives his disciples in Matthew 10.

I am determined to believe for break through in healing despite all the other commitments and responsibilities I have. In the next couple of months I am going to two conferences where the guys from Bethel will be speaking. It will mean several days away from home and getting back in the early hours of Sunday morning to preach at church but I cannot let this go. I can't let life's busyness deflect me from launching a strategic attack on sickness. If I have to burn the candle at both ends for a couple of months then so be it! I want the "lovely light" of healing in Jesus name to shine brightly from the church. I want to break the tape at the end of my race having drawn on heavens recourses and exhausted my own. I want to be bent double before Jesus gasping for breath, having given it 100%. I'll have all eternity to recover so what's a few late nights.

It's been great the last few week praying for people and seeing small improvements. Back aches instantly going and headaches being lifted in Jesus name. I rejoice over these things and they are spurring me on but I long to see cancer go and people freed from the clutched of MS. LORD please stretch out your hand to heal in the name of Jesus.