Part 250

O ALMIGHTY and everlasting GOD, with whom alone are the issues of life and death, who dost wound and dost heal, who killest and makest alive, who bringest down to the grave, and liftest up again, and hast commanded us to call upon thee in the time of trouble, and thou wilt deliver us, stretch forth, I beseech thee, the right hand of thy majesty on high, and save me from the power of this present sickness, which otherwise will destroy my life. Have compassion on me, as thou hadst on _Peter_’s wife’s mother, when she lay sick of a fever. Rebuke my distemper, and grant it may leave me. Speak the word, O LORD, and thy servant shall be whole. It is but for thee to say, Go, and it shall go: for I believe, LORD, that thou art the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. JESUS, thou son of _David_, have mercy upon me. By thine agony and bloody sweat, by thy cross and passion, by thy precious death and burial, by thy glorious resurrection and ascension, and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, good LORD deliver me from my present approaching illness. Behold, to thee I fly for succour. In obedience to thee, do I give place to the physician. But I know that I may waste all my substance, and shall not grow better, but rather the worse, unless thou, O great Physician, who, in the days of thy flesh, didst give sight to the blind, and restore strength to the lame, and didst cure the woman of the bloody issue, dost also recover me from my sickness. Do thou, therefore, who didst bless a bunch of figs to the recovery of _Hezekiah_, sanctify the means that shall be made use of to my recovery. O let me not, like _Asa_, seek only to the physician, but depend on thee, O LORD, for a blessing. Or, if the decree be gone forth that I must die, grant, O LORD, I may set my house and heart in order, and though thou killest me, let me put my trust in thee. Into thy hands I commend my spirit: though worms destroy my body, yet grant, that in my flesh I may see thee my GOD.