"You words sometimes glorify illness, instead of rejecting illness. How can your mind help heal your body if you keep telling yourself that God has a special purpose for your illness? You have to believe that God has used that purpose and now it's time to find healing....and believe it with your whole heart!! And seek His Truth in healing."

Going back to Paul, he said, "But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. " 2 Corinthians 12.

Would you say he was doing the same thing? Obviously he wanted the affliction gone. He said he pleaded with God to take it away, and more than once. But he understood that God had a great purpose in it. He wasn't boasting about the affiction itself, but he was boasting about Christ's power working in the affliction. That is what I am doing. I hate the illness in and of itself. I've begged God to take it away many more times than Paul did his affliction. And I can't say that I'm near as glad as Paul now to boast about my weakness. But I know, like Paul, that God is sufficient in weaknesses. I will boast about that fact, and praise Him for that. And if he does bring me to healing one day, I will praise Him for that as well.
Someone once said to me that they think a lot of people get comfortable with being ill. Huh? Well, not me. But Paul does talk about in another place, learning to be content in whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, whether with plenty, or with nothing. I need work in that area. I'm not always content with where I'm at.


"You have to believe that God has used that purpose and now it's time to find healing....and believe it with your whole heart!! And seek His Truth in healing."

We can't tell God when it's time. In the story of the woman with the condition where she couldn't stand up straight, she had been that way eighteen years. God healed her in His timing, not after 10 years, not after 15 years, but after eighteen years of her being like that.
I say all the time, I will be healed the day God wants me to be healed, and not a day sooner or later. In the hardest days, that is hard to say. I get impatient. But it's also a comfort to know that God is still working out good things in this suffering, and that I'm not just suffering in vain.