Is Healing Real? - Interview with Minister Larry Tilmon

spk_0:   0:10
today. I probably got one of the best gifts I had in a while. My sons grandfather on my ex wife's side came by and gave me toilet paper. And it was the best thing I've had since Christmas. And it really, really tugged at my heartstrings. Um, but today, with me, I have a very special guest, and he has physically abused me throughout the years. And, ah, I think by law, he's allowed to because he's my father

spk_1:   0:49
and all states, except one.

spk_0:   0:51
Yeah. So you're my father in all states. Except one. Yeah, I'm not I've never been there is nice. I haven't. So we went to visit my my pastor at my church today, and he was he got, um, was it called a pacemaker put in. And the pacemaker? He says Doctor had Tourette. He says, Doctor, we cut down on the go, uh, and then while he was getting cut on because he couldn't be put under because he ate before he went and he didn't realize he was gonna have to get anesthesia. And you can't eat like, 24 hours before, and so he's kind of numbed up, but he said he still felt a lot. And while he's getting cut on, he said, he looks over and there's a group of people getting trained and people watching the procedure. And he notices a girl is leaning on another girl in front of her nurse trainee. And she had passed out from watching and Faster said that he looked over and he said, Uh, I think your girl over there's fast out. Everyone at the same time turned their heads and looked and ah, they're like there's a room full of trained specialists And nobody recognized that somebody had passed. So they were cutting on him and working on him while they had her laying down at his feet and they were just trying to bring her back. And so it was a full day for him altogether. But, uh, that was just a funny little story that I wanted to tell because, uh, he said the guy get going. Oh, no. All right. Uh, and, uh, I don't know how to respond to that. Got a situation, but yeah. So, um, my guest today is my father. He is, uh, probably to switch gears a little bit from laughing to be in serious, really one of my, uh, biggest heroes. Because, um, which I'll talk about another podcast. But he was, uh he was there for me when I was in. Probably not probably the lowest time in my life. And, uh, even though he showed me tough love, he still he still supported me through through everything. And so, uh, but today, the question and the title of his podcast is going to be is healing Riel. And the reason I wanted to have him on this show is because I wanted to. He is a testimony firsthand of many experiences going, uh, throughout his early ministry and the ministry that he has now, and, ah, tell the people have father.

spk_1:   3:46
Hi, Father. Um,

spk_0:   3:55
I had to twist his arm and threatened his life. Pretty much

spk_1:   3:58
has been many, many years since I've been a radio interview or anything like this for sure.

spk_0:   4:03
So, uh, in your early ministry before you actually, and I don't know the time for him. So you went on the road, and then you told God, if you're gonna pray for people to be healed or you were about to go in ministry felt the call like touch on that. A little bit of what? Thea the time frame and how it all kind of unfolded.

spk_1:   4:23
Well, as probably getting close to the 20 year old mark. Maybe you load on that in a couple years ago. A couple? Well, 20. Yeah, 15 years goes up like that. And, um, I knew that if I was gonna be in the band, suicide's gonna be laying on hands on many sick people and especially with eye problems. And I had worn glasses for nearsightedness ever since the fourth grade. And so I asked the Lord. I said, Lord, if you are going to be helping me to pray for sick people with eye problems and I'd like for you, just heal mine. I took my glasses all put him in the top drawer of my dresser and just left it. That and, uh, didn't really have a problem seeing the distance anymore. They wouldn't say there was a bales went off in the miraculous healing, but just ah, put the glasses in the top drawer and, ah, years late years later, went to an eye doctor caused the insurance. I had required it to get it I test and the lady took my eye tests and, well, you don't need glasses, except your left eye's a little weak, but you don't need glasses. And that was a doctor verification after all those years that I didn't need any kind of ah ah correction for nearsightedness like I'd had as a younger fella. So that was just one of the first times that I knew beyond a shadow of doubt. God was in the healing business. I knew it, but that was personal.

spk_0:   5:51
That's why I kind of invited you. I really wanted you to this podcast with because in his launching phase Ah, I want to do some very serious topics about so that my vision behind this podcast just gonna give you a little four warning of what this is going to be. It's not gonna be a podcast for believers. Only it's gonna be a podcast where people who don't believe or a questioning who got is. I want this podcast to be a light to those who believe, and those who don't were on the fence or have doubts. And, um, so a big thing that people talk about that they don't really understand. And it's something that you can't really wrap your your physical mind around is a spiritual place, a spiritual existence. Ah, healing a supernatural. We We love to see it on movies, but we don't really understand it. And we don't really think because it's in Hollywood that it can be a real part of your life. And this podcast is about Those things are real and they do exist and got Israel. And he does exist. And his presence is, um, is evident in so many aspects. And I just want this podcast unfold and kind of shine a light on them. So, uh,

spk_1:   7:00
once one thing about healing that people may not understand is the fact that healing can be instantaneously done or it can be a gradual thing. Ah, heating is the completion of a process. It can begin. God has different ways of doing it. They can do it instantly. Or I could just do it over a period of time. Uh, some say why he has to use doctors. Do it. He can, but he doesn't have to use doctors, didn't use anybody to create the world. Why does he have to use anybody do anything else. But some have said that healing stopped when all the apostles died off. That was last of it. Well, you didn't wait too late to tell me that because I had rheumatoid arthritis, severe rheumatoid arthritis, and God healed me of that. I haven't had it since I was in my late thirties and I'm a little bit older net now. Not much, but a little bit.

spk_0:   7:52
And this toe add to this the rheumatoid arthritis thing was not something that he is that he is telling the story of and that I'm listening to and and taking it in. This is a story that he's telling that I'm a part of because I remember Ah, just to kind of stripped bare of of the whole circumstance. Remember my dad putting. And my dad was not a man that, you know, showed that he was weak. If he had a younger guy come up trying to do something, he's going out. No, which is probably a part of his shoulder back problems now. But he would put a blanket over his head and he would kind of like job in the Bible would cry out asking God what have I done? And I remember watching my dad. The man that my dad could beat up anybody else is that my dad was the one that I would threaten other kids with. They were picking on me at school because my dad was gonna handle business and and trying to get him up out of the chair with my mom to get him to the bathroom so that he could go because you couldn't raise himself. He couldn't button his own shirt. This is not something. And we are talking about physical healing at this very moment. But it's also a spiritual and emotional and physical healing. That is possible because through all this, um, there was a lot of emotions, a lot of spiritual questions that you had, I'm sure, like God, Why me? God, what have I done? Thio. Dessert. What have I done wrong? That you would put this kind of judgment on my physical body?

spk_1:   9:19
Not only that, but it was a time that I was pastor in a church and I had some of jobs. Friends come by, a couple came by the church and just pretty well told me if I didn't have sent in my life. I wouldn't be going through this and that I needed to repent of something. And I told them Point blank. I said, Look, ever since it started, I've been asking God what I need to repent of and anything I do, I repent of it right now. I don't want to do it again and so you know. But they were with an accusation pointing towards me, saying, Well, I must have seen in my life to be the fact that I'm going through such ordeal. The pain was unbearable. It was just constant pain. Medicine would put me to sleep for a couple hours, but since I'd wake up, the pain would be right back. And I got weaker and weaker and weaker day by day and finally got to a point that I thought, Well, I'll just give up, Lord, if you want me to live this way, I'll just do it. And my thinking took on that kind of ah ver bage. If you won't play, say that in my mind. When the church had asked me if they could pray for him and I sitting on the altar at the front with a bunch of people around me from the church and they on a Sunday morning service and they were praying for me getting ready to pray for me. And I had just thought that Lord, if you want me to give up, I'll just give up on one of our dear ladies named Betty And she put her hand on my forehead and said, Lord, don't let him give up And she said that at the moment in my mind, I just thought that Lord, I'll just give up And that moment I said, I'm not giving up. I hear you, Lord, I hear that message loud and clear. Used his Presbyterian lady to tell it to me, but I hear it loud and clear, and I'm not giving up. And so I started leaving for healing from that point, and God did miraculously healed. We have not had rheumatoid arthritis since then,

spk_0:   11:08
and no evidence of it.

spk_1:   11:09
No evidence of it.

spk_0:   11:10
The doctors couldn't believe. Can you give your story of what the doctors say? Well,

spk_1:   11:14
the rheumatologist Ah said it first. Well, you're not You're not hurting in the joints. Know your fingers? No knees, no ankles toes? No, and he's got me upon the table. And he's a young intellectual, young doctor. And he said, Well, I must have missed diagnosis this then I said, Doc has been a lot of people praying for me all over this world. All around the globe, I get e mails of preachers I don't need no in other countries. Tell me there's praying for me. Hey said, Well, I don't guess you would hurt. Don't hurt. Look at me. I'm an example. It didn't hurt that God did it for me. Make a long story short, though, Uh, while I went in the hospital because I couldn't get out of bed one morning and on, my wife decided to take me the hospital as well at that time, and he put me, He put me in the hospital for a couple three days. But while I was there, I got better in just a couple of days, just where I could get in and out of a wheelchair, and I went down to the chapel in the hospital, told the nurses, I was going down. There's Wednesday night and my church was having church, and I was gonna go have church myself. So I got in the chapel and had about 34 little tiny pews in that little tiny room in that research hospital in Kansas City. And it was a young lady sitting up on the front pew, and I could tell she was weeping. And But she was, you know, praying quietly, and I knelt, got out the wheelchair and knelt down by the back seat. And when I got up, the Holy Spirit said, Don't leave yet And so I turned around and said in the pew to three minutes later, she gets up out of the front pew and comes back close to where I'm sitting and get ready. Go out the door. It's Mamma's or something. I kept you pray about. And so she just turned sitting right in front of me and start just unfolding their life to me. A year ago, she had lost her baby. She hadn't got over that yet. Her boyfriend had been shot and he was upstairs and emergency surgery. Her life was falling apart, and I finally got to the point that, ma'am, have you ever accepted Jesus as your savior? And she said, No, I have it, I said, Would you like to? She said, Sure I would. And so right there on those two pews Research Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. After all the tremendous pain I went through, I have two young black lady come to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior. And when she left the room, I told the Lords, Lord, if if I had to suffer this pain to get here to help her get to you, it was worth it all. And so that's why I've always felt about it. It was a painful experience, and it was a trial I've never been through before my life. But in the midst of that trial, the Lord help me delete somebody to him, and that was worth at all.

spk_0:   13:52
Do you have any stories of when you went on the evangelistic field? Do you have any stories that come to mind that are to stand out in your mind from about healing and any of those?

spk_1:   14:03
Well, when I was a young evangelist, I was still I hadn't really started full time. At that time, I had a gospel singing group and we were preaching revival and singing in a Baptist Church up in southern Missouri and was packed every night. And this Dad brought his little 78 year old boy up to the front for prayer. And he was blind in his right eye on definite left ear and God, instantly I mean, instantly open both of them. I mean, there was no question about everybody there, saw it happen and and experienced the same thing that he did. And so, uh, I mean, that's the first real miracle like that that I ever remember seeing as a young man. And from that point, week after week revival after revival, we'd have someone test five, some kind of a healing or some kind of a miracle that happened in their life. Um, trying to thank some others of one guy came up to me a year after I prayed for him, and it wasn't made, but, I mean, you're after God had performed it, Um, he had had holding his heart. He went to the doctor next day after revival service and and I didn't come back for a year, and he came to me and asked me, said that I think you'd like to know the SS I remember praying for me a year ago. I said Yes, but I don't remember what the problem was and he told me. He said. I went to the doctor the next day and said they verified that the hole was gone. And so, you know, just case after case like that, it didn't know. Was that be in church? I had a young man come and get me to take Go pray for a son, which was about two years old. It had a hole in his ear drum, and he took him to the doctor. And the doctor said, Well, there's no hole in that ear drum and God healed that little two year old boy just instantly holding his ear drum. And so I mean, what comes to healing when Jesus died on the cross? He did it for our salvation. But the Scripture teaches us in Isaiah and the Book of Peter won the books writings of Peter that by his stripes we are healed or were healed, as Peter said, meaning that part of the price that was paid was for healing. And I'm not sure where people got the idea that Jesus stopped all that when the last apostle died, because many teach that that's very evident today. He steel heels. He still works miracles. A matter of fact, I've been doing a lot of listing lately lately to old time, as they used to call him healing evangelist in the forties, fifties and sixties. Even before I was born and many of them had miracles, that was unexplainable. But take it on, explain. It was a miracle because there was nothing and God made something out of it. There was bones that we're missing, and God would put bones back or eyeballs missing our pupils missing. And God would put full working eyeballs again in people's even Children, you know, and in their head and making them work again. I mean, we shouldn't really have problem believed that if God created the Earth, he could do anything.

spk_0:   17:06
And for those of you listening, if maybe you actually stumbled upon this podcast and you really don't know a lot of the phrasing of the some of these air church words, um, stuff like e evangelist. They are ministers, preachers of the gospel that travel from church to church. They don't have necessarily a they're not a pastor of a church. They travel from church to church, and they don't have their own congregation. They come at minister underneath the leadership of the pastor. That is the preacher that's at that church. You may not know a revival means you may know what the actual translation means of the word. But revival is something that the evangelical church kind of brings into to call, like a week of a evangelist or could even be the pastor. But most time it's a special speaker that comes in and they, Ah, for Sunday through Wednesday, Sunday through Saturday or several weeks, and they call that a revival. It's a revival of the spirit of revival of the people to ah want something that once was dead, too now be revived and to come alive again. And so that's the whole point. It's kind of like a church pep rally. In a way, you have healings like you just preach to revival. This last week touch on that. What was some of the stories of the I know Tristan, my son. His great grandfather has been having pains for the past five months, he guesses in his kidneys It's kind of in the back back hind quarters right there. And, uh, he said he was praying for someone else who came up praying for the need of prayer for their kidneys, and he instantly was healed and the pain left his own body while he was praying for somebody else. But I think it's amazing you're not even praying for yourself forgetting prayer and God does it anyways. And that's just a testament of who got is. But what was Some of the other people came to the front Well, that I wasn't there all week. I was just there for a couple nights.

spk_1:   18:53
Yeah, there was. There was a lady came forward One night. The Lord spoke to me about somebody's pancreas. Just I wouldn't I'm sure. What's lady? Well, it was a lady, But the night before, God spoke to me about somebody's pancreas, and this lady in the church came to me the next day. When I was at the church, the passion I was there and she was talking to us about it, she said. You mentioned Pancreases. My pancreas is out of whack, and I got diabetes and says, I've been asking the Lord for a sign and said, Then you spoke about pancreas. She said the next few days that she checked her sugar levels. Which pancreas effects? The, ah, diabetes or the sugar levels in our blood stream. But she had checked him the next two or three days during during the rest that revival. And she said, she ain't what she wanted and all the sugar levels were exactly normal. So she believed God had healed her pancreas and gave her a new one, if necessary. What God is able to do that? Of course, that's only her testimony on. I'm waiting to hear back that her doctors have verified it a cz well, because that's when that's when you know for a fact. It's not just a, ah temporary thing, but it's actually hell completely. When the doctor says OK, you don't have it anymore. There's been people down through the years that God has healed cancer of, uh and I'm not talking about with radiation. I'm talking about just miraculously healing it and be gone like my room toward arthritis. It was gone no longer. There never has been since, in case after case divine healing. When we say divine. We mean it comes only from God, not from medicine, but God. And yes, medicine helps people, and I'm not against medicine. Ah, doctors do what they can and medium are very intelligent. Gods give him ah, a lot of inside into the body because they study it. So but But when the bottom line is even for doctor gives you medicine, it's got to be God. It actually makes that body hell, whether it's the process of the medicine, getting it in a certain direction or just just total healing. And we know all of us know, too, that things that chemotherapy and radiation would like it really don't necessarily heal the cancer. It may put it in remission, as they call it, but it's I'm sure it's helped many, but But I've seen many cases to it didn't help him that only God could do them. A miracle. A miracle in the in the realm of healing is usually something that's not. It's not always a, uh, a drawn out process, although it can be, but sometimes it's instantaneous. It could be instant and, you know, whatever were praying for in our bodies. God designed our bodies. And who better to go to than the design of our bodies to ask him for help or healing or a

spk_0:   21:46
miracle in our bodies? So I I want to leave you with the challenge kind of Ah ah, in thought I've heard a lot of people saying I've never seen it, So how can I believe it? Well, there's a lot of things that we haven't seen with our own eyes that we have not experienced with their own bodies and thoughts we haven't had but Thio just blanket it and say that because we haven't seen it or we haven't experienced it ourselves. It doesn't exist, and there's a lot of things that a reality that I've never seen a $1,000,000 Not yet, hopefully. But I know that Israel and then exists because other people have experienced

spk_1:   22:25
and you've never seen your brain, and it may not exist, but still they're supposed to.

spk_0:   22:29
It's yet to be determined, but I'm having faith. So be open to, uh, the Lord speaking to you. You're not gonna find the questions you may have if healing Israel, If God Israel did. Jesus really did all these things of the disciples. They really happen to these actual facts. You're not gonna find the answers in the world. You're gonna find him in the word of God. And it is the living word of God, which means that as you read it, it can come away. It can, and it will come alive to you.

spk_1:   22:57
Some of our greatest examples of hating came when Jesus walked the Earth. The blind man are more than one blind man, one named Bart amaze in particular, Uh, the woman with issue blood for 12 years. Ah, young lady. It died. He raised, directed her on and on and on the list goes on and on. Lazarus came forth from the tomb, had been dead for four days and yet Jesus resurrecting. So he is our example of healing and miracles and he was the son of God. But he's still alive. And if he's still alive, why can he still do miracles, which he can and does still does. But it takes us accepting the fact that he can do it and, ah, you know, asking, um

spk_0:   23:40
never be scared. Like I'm a youth pastor and I drill into my youth. Never be afraid to question God. He is the ultimate answer. He's not scared of your questions. If you read through Psalms, you will hear the psalmist and a bunch of other people questioning God and not even understanding what's happening. We talked about job earlier. They were questioning God like that question to find the truth. So don't don't be afraid to question Thanks for listening to faith and failures. Feel free to download this episode. Share it with your friends and we'll see you next time.