I want to tell you about something extraordinary and wonderful that happened in my life. I call it a miracle, but you can judge for yourself. The story of my miracle begins in 1995 thousands of miles away from my home in America in a small town of Tuapse on the coast of the Black Sea in southern Russia.
My family and I were living in Russia and working to improve the lives of the poor, elderly, and disabled as a demonstration of God’s love for them. We were telling people about Jesus, teaching them from the Bible, and starting new churches for the many people who were becoming believers in Jesus Christ. Little did we know that our faith was about to be challenged as I was suddenly struck down by an illness that caused a breakdown of most of my body’s organs, almost took my life, and forced us to return to the United States.
The complications of this progressively debilitating illness left me without the use of my legs, with horrific pain from nerve damage that required me to be on morphine 24 hours a day, and a need for supplemental oxygen 24 hours a day. I had to take 28 pills every day. The doctors said I would never get better. In fact, several times during my lengthy illness I drifted to the edge of death and back. My wife Patricia and I believe the Bible is the word of God and clung to the promises of God in the Bible that He heals our diseases. Along with our family, friends, church members, and many others, we continued to pray, trusting God for a miracle.
On February 23, 2003, God answered our prayer! My son, Shaun, invited me to a meeting at the church he attended where a visiting Pastor from Argentina was speaking and teaching from the Bible. I needed a great deal of assistance, and it was always very painful, and difficult for me to go anywhere. Because of this, I rarely left the house except to go to the Hospital or Doctor’s office. I had not been able to go to church in some time and welcomed the opportunity provided me by my son’s invitation and assistance.
When the Pastor finished teaching from the Bible, this servant of God prayed for me for more than twenty minutes and then with authority said: “In the name of Jesus I command this sickness to leave the body of this child of God!” He began to quote passages from the Bible in which God promises to heal His children. This man of God called the sickness an instrument of the devil and said in firm voice “Devil, I command you in the name of Jesus to take your sickness and leave this man of God now!”
As he prayed for me, a sense of God’s presence, peace, and power seemed to surround me. He then grasped my hands, pulled me out of the wheelchair, while commanding me, “NOW WALK!”
As we began to walk, his hands grasping mine, the intense pain began to gradually decrease. The skin surface of my legs and feet, long dull with numbness, began to tingle and then explode with feeling. Glory to God!
At the same time, I felt a surge of strength flow into the muscles of my legs. My steps, clumsy at first, became easier and more certain. As he released my hands, his translator who had been carrying my oxygen tank as we walked took the oxygen hose off my face and said, “You don’t need this anymore! Jesus has healed your lungs!”
I paused and took a deep breath. For the first time in years, I felt my lungs fill and expand with air. I started to walk faster and faster, began to jog and then launched into a full run as I ran back and forth across the front of the church’s meeting hall.
I started doing all the things I previously could not do. I began to lift my knees high, swing my legs out to the side, rotate them, squat down, rise up, kneel down on one knee, then the other, then both. I discovered that a full range of motion had returned to my legs. Finally, I laid face down on the floor, jumped to my feet, threw my hands in the air in a joyful expression of praise to God and shouted, “VICTORY! THANK YOU, JESUS!”
I wish you could have seen the expression on my doctor’s face when I walked into his office. This doctor had never seen me out of a wheelchair before. He was awestruck to be seeing with his own eyes what his mind and medical knowledge told him was an impossibility. He immediately ordered an extensive series of medical tests to confirm if I was really healed of everything. As the Doctor reviewed the test results with me, they surprised him. The medical tests proved that the unexplainable had indeed happened. In fact, the medical tests revealed that the miracle had been more extensive than I first thought.
My lungs were now functioning properly, and I no longer needed supplemental oxygen. Due to diabetes, I needed daily insulin injections. Tests confirmed that my body was now producing and processing insulin correctly, and I no longer needed supplementary insulin injections. I had extensive and irreversible kidney damage. Tests revealed that my kidneys were now functioning perfectly.
For more than 20 years I had Crohn’s disease, a medically incurable, progressively debilitating, extremely painful auto-immune disease of the intestinal tract, As a result I was constantly suffering. Now, for the first time in 20 years, the tests revealed a cessation of the Crohn’s disease and a normal colon without the scarring that is caused by the disease.
The doctor was astonished at the report he was holding in his hands. “I do not understand how this happened,” he said. “God has healed me! It is a miracle!” was my enthusiastic reply. The doctor, who had been staring at the report gazed at me from above the frames of his reading glasses and said “I am a man of science, not a man of faith. I don’t know about God or miracles, but I can tell you that every organ in your body is functioning perfectly, the muscles and nerves in your legs have been restored. There is no sign of Crohn’s disease or diabetes in your body. There is absolutely no medical or scientific explanation for what happened to you. It is the most remarkable thing I’ve seen in my life. If that’s what you call a miracle, then I guess you had a miracle.”
The doctor immediately took me off most of the medication I was on because the tests showed I no longer needed them. The morphine and other narcotics the doctors had given me over the past several years for the severe pain caused by the nerve damage were physically addictive. However, I had stopped taking them because I had no pain. By God’s grace I did not experience any withdrawals, or continued struggles with drug addiction as often plagues those who have had to take prescription narcotics over such a long period.
Since Jesus Christ healed me, I continue to be free of all the illnesses I once suffered from, and He has continued to restore my health in other areas. For example, during the years of illness I had steadily gained weight due to lack of movement, inability to exercise, and the side effects of the steroids and some other medications the doctors had put me on to slow the breakdown of my organs. At the time Jesus healed me, I weighed 459 pounds. I have lost half of that weight, and continue to lose weight at a healthy rate.
My family and I are rejoicing in the goodness of Jesus! My son, who had literally spent countless hours over the years of my illness weeping before God as he prayed for my healing, was thrilled to have been a part of this miracle and to have been present when the miracle took place. My youngest daughter was born six months after we returned from Russia. For her entire life, I was in a wheelchair, in horrible pain with all the limitations caused by this illness and therefore unable to play with her or even hold her on my lap.
A few days after God healed me, my daughter and I walked out of church holding hands, down two flights of stairs and down the block toward the car. She suddenly stopped, tugged on my arm and squealed with jubilation, “Daddy look! For the first time ever we’re holding hands and walking down the street together just like all the other kids and their daddies!”
WHAT IS YOUR NEED TODAY?
Friends, God is good, and His mercy endures forever! The Bible both declares to us and assures us in Hebrews 13:8 of this wonderful truth: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and forever!”
God is faithful! I have discovered no illness is to severe, no situation to hopeless, no relationship to broken, no bondage to great, no problem to difficult, no burden to heavy, and no despair to deep that our Lord cannot change it with His love, presence, peace, and power. Don’t give up hope that God will answer your prayers. Persevere in your faith. Hold on to the promises of God in the Bible. Continue to pray and continue to trust Him. Remember, Jesus said in Matthew 19:26, “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.”
