Healings from God’s Mercy
By: David Martin
The gifts of the Spirit resemble the two sides of a coin because there are two aspects that we encounter. One is you receiving. God wants you to receive everything He has purposed for you to walk in in the supernatural, namely walking in the fullness of the life that Yeshua came to give you. We’re going to see Yeshua was not the healer. God was doing all the miracles through Yeshua. There is a parallel now in that Yeshua is our healer today, “By His stripes we are healed.” Just as God worked through Yeshua, Yeshua wants to work through you.
Yeshua set aside His deity so you and I could walk in the anointing the same as He walked in the anointing. But all of those miracles happened because people came to Him.
Now we’re going to see the other side of the coin. The miracles we have mentioned happened by what I call operations of grace. The Bible says, “…by grace you are saved through faith…it is a gift of God; not works, lest any man should boast.” Grace is unmerited favor. I like this definition of grace, “Grace is God’s ability to do for you what you cannot do for yourself.” But we are going to see that God is not limited by our faith. We will look at an example that illustrates healing by God’s mercy. His mercy provides for you what you do not deserve. You and I deserve judgment, but praise God for His mercy!
What we’re going to examine is an example in which Yeshua goes to the problem. In this instance He provides healing at the pool of Bethesda. Bethesda in Hebrew means mercy. So the story’s setting is at the pool of mercy.
“After these things there was a feast of the Jews, and Yeshua went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem by the sheep gate a pool, which is called in Hebrew Bethesda, having five porticoes. In these lay a multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, withered, waiting for the moving of the water.” Notice how many people: a multitude. They all were sick and in need like a hospital of our day. Did Yeshua go in there and just heal them all? God’s ways aren’t like our ways. He thinks differently and we need to think the way He thinks. He gives us that opportunity, to think with the mind of Messiah, but you have to be sensitive to what He is saying.
At Bethesda God was saying, “Pick out this one specific person who has been lame a long time.” It says, “…for an angel of the Lord went down at a certain season into the pool and stirred up the water; whoever then first, after the stirring of the water, stepped in was made well from whatever disease with which he was afflicted. A man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Yeshua saw him lying there, and knew that he had already been a long time in that condition, He said to him, ‘do you wish to get well?’ The sick man answered Him, ‘sir, I have no man to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, but while I am coming, another [man] steps down before me.’ Yeshua said to him, ‘Get up, pick up your pallet and walk.’ Immediately”—the working of miracles and the gift of healing together—“the man became well, and picked up his pallet and began to walk.” In this case, the man didn’t go to Yeshua, Yeshua went to him. The man didn’t even know who Yeshua was. He said, “Would you like to be made well?” The man said, “Well, I have no one to put me in the pool.” He didn’t even know that Yeshua was the stirrer of the pool. But by God’s mercy, we see a sovereign act of God. Yeshua simply says, “Get up, be made whole” and immediately the man was made whole.
What you see here is different operations of the gifts of the Spirit — the grace of God in contrast to the mercy of God. The ability comes from God, but sometimes we’ll move through grace with faith and other times it is purely His mercy.
I had a scenario some years ago when in Tacoma, Washington. I was ministering to a large group from a number of congregations. They knew about gifts, but they never operated in the gifts of the Spirit. They had not been around someone like me before. So, I taught on faith. At the end of the service, I gave an altar call and probably five or six hundred people were at the service. When you have that many people to pray for, you can’t pray a long prayer over each one. I’m going down the line and the power of God was so strong people were just falling over. I caught sight of one lady out of my peripheral vision. She was just hobbling forward ever so slow, coming with a walker. I lost sight of her and she just kind of mingled into the crowd.
I didn’t know her story until the next day when the pastor called me. She was hit by a drunk driver and the left side of her body was crushed. She had been living in excruciating pain for eight years. Pretty much living in a wheelchair and using morphine to deal with the pain. The woman would come to his office every Thursday for counseling because as bad as the pain was, now she’s also dealing with anger because her life was destroyed by a drunk driver. As she came forward for prayer she was fearful of falling down like the other people because of her pain. When I prayed for her, she did hit the floor, but she got up completely healed. That night, for the first time in eight years, she went into her house not using the ramp, but the steps. She didn’t need morphine to go to bed or to function. She came walking up the steps to her counseling, and when she sat down for her session, she realized God not only healed her physically, completely restored, but He healed her heart. There was no anger, there was no animosity, and there was no bitterness. She was completely healed by God’s power. But she came for prayer with faith. She came expecting a miracle.
The next night I’m in another congregation and God again does much the same thing. At the end of a long service a woman comes up and she says to me, “Would you pray for my son?” She said, “You need to understand that he’s in great pain from an abscessed tooth, [but] he doesn’t believe in this stuff. He doesn’t even want to be here.”
It turns out he had been to the dentist for the pain, but then the mother came directly to my service. He had waited the entire service without having his prescription filled. He was angry, very profane and he did not want prayer! He cursed at me.
I said, “How can you say that when you saw all these people tonight get healed?” He said, “They’re not really healed.” He said, “They’re going to go outside and they’re going to discover they still have their problem. They’re still going to have issues. They’re just caught up in the emotionalism of it. I don’t believe in this —. I’ve seen all this mockery and sham on television.” And unfortunately, there have been men of God that made a mockery of healing ministry.
I’m fed up with this guy’s attitude and his foul mouth and the way he’s treating me. So when I prayed, I don’t think there was any motivation of compassion in me at all. I just prayed, “Be healed.” The power of God hit the guy and this guy is probably 6’2” and about 270—big. So he’s standing there and the power of God hit him and he begins to fall over backwards. A couple of guys that were behind him, kind of wobbled him over to the pew. His wife came running over to us, picked up his head, and she starts smacking him. Wow! I’m thinking, “If that tooth didn’t hurt before, it is really going to hurt now.” She’s walloping him pretty good, trying to get him awake. His finger goes into his mouth, and he says to me, “It’s gone. The abscess, it’s gone. There’s no pain!” I can tell you it wasn’t my faith. His mom was there, and she was believing for her son. I said, “Do you believe now?” And he said, “Yeah, this is incredible.” He accepted Yeshua as his Savior, and then two or three other people that knew him who were there, they got saved too.
This is God’s mercy. This healing had nothing to do with my faith for certain. It was the mom’s faith probably. But clearly it was the mercy of God and this is what God wants to do through you, whether by His grace or by His mercy.
Which gift? Who cares? It is God’s ability. It is God’s desire to heal you and to work through you to heal others.
