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Grateful for the power of prayer

This is the testimony of Dominique Vandelannoote, member of the Evangelical Church in Leuven. We received it through Annie who also prayed for him and put regularly a prayer request for him in our prayerbox.

“In March 2014 I was diagnosed with rectal cancer (cancer of the rectum which affects the lower part of the colon).

Given up by the medical doctors in Belgium, but not by God

HEAL THE SICK Luke 10:9

This is one of the assignments with which Jesus commissioned his disciples to go out into the cities of Israel. It is still valid for us who are His disciples today. Ela took this up and sent us some of her testimonies (for which we are grateful!):

I have an acquaintance. She was given up. She is 43 and had a cerebral aneurysm. It started bleeding twice. As a result she was paralysed on one side and nearly blind in one eye. No one in Belgium dared to perform surgery.

I prayed for her for a long time. After many months I went back to visit her. When she answered the door, I could hardly believe what I saw:

John, the disciple Jesus loves

For me and for many others, this is a stumbling block in the Bible. What to do about it? So Jesus seemed to love one of the disciples more than the others. Some even claim that Jesus had a homosexual relationship with John. But if you really want to understand the core of this verse, you just have to think twice and read carefully what it says. What's important is that it's not Jesus who makes this statement, but John. And nowhere in the Gospels do we read that Jesus says that He prefers one to all others.

So the saying and the conclusion come from John himself. Did he receive a special revelation? As far as I'm concerned, over the years it happened occasionally that someone said: "God is happy with you". It was a statement that I kept in mind because I was used to hearing sometimes "God loves you". But according to me there is a difference between loving someone and being happy with someone.

Recently an elderly lady came up to me after a meeting and said God told her to tell me He is happy with me. Usually I forget such a sentence quite quickly. But this time I began to think about it. I did not have a special revelation, but I did have the Word that clearly states that God loves us and is happy with us. So I decided to just accept that word.

Maybe the same happened to John. Maybe he was so proud that Jesus loved him that he felt the need to make it known, while the other disciples weren't so concerned about telling it. Nobody knows exactly how it went. It seems clear to me that Jesus did not love John more than the others. But one thing is for sure: John knew for sure that he was the disciple Jesus loved.

I just wanted to bring this to your attention and hope you will think about it. I wish you a lot of blessing with it.

Hugo, the disciple Jesus is happy with.