God's absolute faithfulness | Numbers and Psalms (Part 2)

In December 2002, as part of the process of getting a resident’s permit in Ukraine, in order to prove I did not have TB which is endemic out there, I had to have a lung X-ray. But the doctors called me back, took more X-rays, and then told me I had a shadow on my lung and that I had pneumonia. Probably I had already had it for over a month, because I remember a fever had started on the last day of October while I was evangelising in Siberia.

Back in England I was treated with antibiotics, but after two courses of treatment I went again for X-rays and the patch on my lung was bigger. The doctors became extremely worried, they didn’t want me to travel overseas and they set up exhaustive tests in a hurry. They said bluntly, ‘It’s not pneumonia, you have lung cancer.’

I believe in prayer and in a God of miracles. But I am faced with a challenge: do I really believe God or not? I had to go for a bronchoscopy when they would put a camera down my lung and take a sample of the growth. The doctors had already fast-tracked me into a process which would lead to an operation to remove all or part of my right lung. The only question, how much of my lung they would take away?

God said to me, ‘David, you’ve got a mountain in your life that you’ve got to move, and that mountain is to get that cancer out from your lung. If you can believe that without an operation you can be completely healed, then nothing will be impossible from there on.’ Now desperately seeking God’s answer from Scripture, I was reading from Jeremiah 33:6, ‘I will bring health and healing’; and Jeremiah 33:20-21, ‘I will not break my covenant with David’; and Psalm 89:35, ‘I will not lie to David’; and ‘Is anything impossible with God?’ (Jeremiah 32:17&27).

A few months later I was in the hospital, tubes down my lung looking for cancer – but God had already given me the answer, I knew it was gone. The doctors looked at me in amazement and said, ‘You have no cancer!’