Healed Well and Made Whole: Rightfully Receiving and Maintaining Your Healing

By Michael Garrett

In a world enmeshed with sickness, disease, and pandemics, the knowledge and truth of God's Word regarding health and healing have never been more important to understand. The secret to supernatural health and healing is available for all who press in to understand what belongs to them and how to walk in it. In his book Healed Well and Made

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Oct 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685566722

Michael Garrett

Born in Oklahoma in the early '50s, Mike Garrett grew up and became a successful international businessman. Baptized in Christ Jesus at the age of eight, he remembers the changes that event made in his life. But as a nation and its people turned further from God, so did Mike's family, slowly removing themselves from the safety of God, trusting in the science of man for the answers to life. Early in life, at the end of his college years, Mike began the search back to God to find the solutions and health that science and man could not provide him. Mike is married to his college sweetheart, Pam, and they have three children and twelve grandchildren. This book contains the very teachings and truths from God's Word that he found and trusted in to be healed and made whole.

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Healed Well and Made Whole

Based on God’s Word, the Bible, and the experiences of over forty-five years living life as a Spirit-filled believer, Mike Garrett shares from his heart what the Bible boldly teaches the believer what truly belongs to them regarding healing, how to get healed, and how to remain healed against every obstacle.

By Michael Garrett

Healed Well and Made Whole

Trilogy Christian Publishers A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Trinity Broadcasting Network

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Copyright © 2022 Mike Garrett

Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked AMP are taken from the Amplified® Bible (AMP), Copyright © 2015 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org. Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked TPT are from The Passion Translation®. Copyright © 2017, 2018, 2020 by Passion & Fire Ministries, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ThePassionTranslation.com. Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

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Trilogy Disclaimer: The views and content expressed in this book are those of the author and may not necessarily reflect the views and doctrine of Trilogy Christian Publishing or the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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ISBN: 978-1-68556-671-5

E-ISBN: 978-1-68556-672-2

Dedication

I dedicate this book to Kenneth Copeland, whom I heard on a Sunday morning television broadcast so many years ago while being in the midst of depression and fear. It was the obedience of this man to follow God and teach His truths at a time in 1979 when it wasn’t cool to preach the teachings of faith and healing. Because of men like him and others such as Oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagin, who committed to God and taught those who would listen with open hearts, we now have God’s truth being taught with passion and God’s anointing all over the world. The words and message Kenneth spoke that morning resonated with my spirit and, for the first time, gave me hope that I could recover and be made whole again. So it is with all my heart that Kenneth and his dear wife, Gloria, and their family be blessed in every physical and spiritual way, not only in this life but forever in the life to come.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank all those men and women of faith through the last forty-plus years who are too numerous to share that I have set under and had my spirit trained, guided, nourished, and lifted up. These faithful men and women have allowed me to come to this point in time that I would write this book to share with another generation what I have learned and been taught by God regarding healing and walking in the faith to receive it.

Foreword

My heart’s purpose in writing this book is to share the revelations, challenges, tests, and trials I have learned from God’s Word and grace for His people regarding healing. I have longed to write this book to share and teach about the promises of God through Jesus Christ. To teach about the powerful promises of what is available to the Christian who will fully embrace those promises.

My life experiences have forced me to dig and unearth many nuggets of gold in God’s Word that give us hope and life when there appears to be no hope. In those times when all seems to be lost, someone either intercedes on our behalf with these promises in faith, or we embrace them ourselves in order to overcome life’s obstacles. Many perish not knowing how to tap into God’s grace and promises. Others blame God for not acting or doing something to assist them when in reality, God has already provided the answers to their needs and problems. God has already made available through His Son, Jesus Christ, all things that pertain to life and godliness. But we have a part to play in our own deliverance. He has given us free will, and He will not force us to do anything we are not willing to do. We see conditions daily that challenge our faith and resolve, often wondering why God doesn’t do something when all the time He has already provided the answer if we would only seek Him and study to find it. It is like finding water and food to survive after being lost in a hot desert for days on end without any.

So often, we are confronted with the challenges of life that there seems to be no way out of our struggles. The wisdom and talents of man can promise just so much through medicine, science, or technology. But the Word of God states in 2 Peter 1:3–4,

As His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by the glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.

2 Peter 1:3–4

If we will just take the time to read and study and seek God through His Word, learning to apply its truths, we will find that God will meet us in our time of need.

It is my honor to share with you this journey into God’s truths on Spiritual warfare, healing, and life in His grace. This grace is often hidden from our sight either because of our misdirected actions, sins, unbelief, or man’s theology that misses the mark of God’s truths. Many seek His deeper truths but somehow miss that mark, or they finally develop the steadfastness to fully receive all that God desires to bless them with. It is my prayer that this book will change your life, the lives of those you love, and those you share it with. I do not promise that this journey will be without trials, temptation, or even failure from time to time. I do know if you will persist in learning, studying, and seeking God for answers to life’s problems that there are wonderful answers to meet your needs just waiting for you around the corner. I pray you will begin to be victorious in more and more battles as you discover that you are overcoming more often than not in this experience of life on earth that we all live in. In doing so, you will find the joy, the peace, the confidence, and the faith to always move forward in life without fear of the unknown. You will be able to face head-on the challenges of life that you had previously avoided. One day you will look back on how far you have come and realize just how blessed you have been and how much faith has become a part of you in order to face the daily issues and stresses of life. In that day, you will look back and find that God has protected you and taken you through the fire to safety over and over again.

This book will help you build that strong foundation of faith within yourself, starting with one stone upon the other. That foundation will allow you to face the challenges that man is confronted with daily and push the enemy, Satan and his demonic host, out of your way. Read each chapter in its order as it is necessary to build your firm foundation diligently. Each chapter will help you build one stone upon another so your house sits on a stone foundation that the winds of life cannot destroy easily.

I have put my heart and soul into sharing the teachings in this book that have taken me almost fifty years to learn. My walk with God has not been without many tests and trials, nor will yours. But if you will dedicate yourself to study and show yourself approved keeping God’s word in the midst of your heart each day, you will find the victory in life that God has made available to each of us. Every day God teaches me more, adding depth to my faith as He will with you if you are obedient to His word. I pray this book blesses you as much as it has blessed me to write it. I wish Godspeed to each of you, my sisters and brothers in Christ.

Preface

In writing this book, I want to point out to each person that the information you will read and digest will be hard for many to accept outright from the start. Each of our lives has been colored and influenced by many conditions, experiences, and the teachings of others. Many of the influences that our lives are conditioned by range from the country you were raised in, the schools and teachers you learned from, the parents that raised and influenced you, the life experiences you have endured, the church and church teachings you have been exposed to or lack thereof, the lessons in life you have learned to depend on and live your life by, the hard knocks that have made you who you are today, the people that have come into and out of your life, and the list goes on and on and on. You see, each of us has been conditioned and programmed over and over in so many ways that we are not an open book anymore, as one teacher of mine might point out. We are a people often so conditioned and colored by life, past experiences, and teachings that we often turn in the wrong direction when the storms of life strike us.

So, for many of us, the information, the teachings, and the scriptures I share with you may or may not be easy at first to receive. Give them the time and consideration they deserve. Take them to God patiently and ask Him to confirm them. But have an open mind, and at first, just consider if what I share might possibly be from God and what He is trying to teach you. The things I share may conflict with many of the teachings that you have fully embraced or come to believe. They may challenge many of your foundational beliefs and structures of what you believe as truth or fact. Some of the things you have held very tightly to survive may need to be let go of to move forward, and that will not be comfortable at first. In reality, many of you will be tempted to stop reading this book at different points throughout its many chapters because you will be confronted with clear choices to either change a belief, tradition, and experience or stay the present course. What I do ask is that you read the information given and use your Bible to follow along and prove out to yourself what is being shared is scriptural and is truth. That you will see clearly that its content and context is accurate and in line with what the Bible states over and over again. Do not be fooled by some of the conditioning and experiences of life that you might have learned from in the past that were set up to destroy you or keep you from moving forward to freedom with God. Keep your mind open to things you might have long ago dismissed. God’s Word is the truth we must embrace if we want to be free, truly free, as Christ Jesus has provided for us already. The freedom and health He wants you to walk in, and experience is a gift well worth seeking and fighting for.

I will use multiple references and witnesses from the scriptures, and not just an occasional scripture pulled out of thin air to make a doctorial truth come to life. Now not everything I write will be in your Bible, but it will be from the Bible’s truths. I hope you can embrace the concepts and truths I will share with you as you learn to understand the information in each and every chapter. Remember each chapter builds on another chapter, and at first, information in a given chapter may conflict with your life experiences, but as you learn more and more from each and every chapter in this book, you will start to have the foundation to apply the knowledge you will be reading and learning about. It will start to answer your deepest questions, and past understandings that you may previously have thought were true but are keeping you from receiving from God. This book will change your life if you will take the time to study and stay with it. You will need to consider some of the information written within with an open mind and not discard it at first until you have taken it to God and allowed the scriptures to come to life in your heart. Take it slow and give it time as you study and verify the scriptures and comments about them and how they might apply to your life and your current circumstances. By the end of this book, I pray you will understand what it’s taken me over forty-five years to learn. I pray that this book will change your life forever, becoming a true blessing to you and your loved ones for the rest of your life.

Before closing, I want to share one simple scripture that sums up the heart of this book, and that is Deuteronomy 30:19: I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore, choose life, that both you and your descendants may live. Throughout this book, this scripture is paramount. We often wonder why bad things happen to good people. This scripture sums it up; it is up to you to choose life or death. Good people often choose death by making bad choices in life. Either out of ignorance or out of foolish choices by not knowing what God’s Word says about something or choosing to do wrong when we know to do right. We all have a choice. I have included a closing chapter on this scripture at the end of the book shared from one of brother Kenneth Copeland’s newsletters in 2021. This book hopefully will show you what those choices are and how to choose life over death.

And last but not least, I pray that upon reading and hopefully rereading this book or many of its chapters many times that you will be empowered, having learned how to walk in the faith, the grace, and power of God’s Word for the rest of your life. It’s going to be quite a journey; if you are ready, let’s get started.

Chapter 1

My Healing Journey

Old habits in life are hard to break. The Bible says in Proverbs 22:6, Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. My parents did a great job raising my two brothers and myself, but they never knew much about God’s promises and His grace other than trusting Jesus as their Lord in the new birth. I received Christ in the spring of 1962 at eight years of age. It was a genuine experience, thank God, and it stayed with me. My family attended the First Christian Church in Oklahoma City in those days. We attended regular services for another two years, and then, because of disagreements my parents had with church policies or leaders, we just stopped going to church altogether. So, my foundation as a young boy in knowing much about God and His Word had only a very basic salvation foundation along with some Bible stories, mostly of the Old Testament. That basic foundation stayed with me throughout my education years of grade school, high school, and college but only to the level that I knew Christ as my Savior and not much more. I didn’t understand the concept of Him being my Lord in much detail but just as my Savior. As a young man starting out after college, I just didn’t know what was available from God to meet the challenges I was experiencing at the time or would soon be walking into. I wasn’t living a very holy life, but on the whole, I wasn’t a bad person either I just really looked like many others I knew who were just getting by trying to survive. So, seeking God wasn’t my first solution to my problems so many years ago. When several major problems entered my life, it was the winter of 1978. My now pregnant wife and I had traveled to Colorado to enjoy a winter holiday season with her family. I don’t remember all the details, but for the past several months, I had become more and more anxious as I was growing into a new marriage from about eighteen months prior. The transition from a lot of freedom and being single to being married and tied to a nine-to-five job had been somewhat of a new challenge, and I was experiencing some minor depression and didn’t know or understand just what I was experiencing. I was finding that I was developing more and more anxiety about daily living. I didn’t have any idea what was going on with me or really what tools to use to deal with what I was experiencing. On the return road trip from Colorado, I experienced several major anxiety attacks. It was a form of fear I did not understand or know what to do about it. I really had no idea what was causing the experiences or how to stop the attacks other than I was scared about my life and the future. I want to pause here because my experiences were not all that different to what many college students deal with during their time at school or right after college. For the most part, we, as young adults, are supposed to have things figured out and be able to work through the transitions from being under our parent’s authority to being totally responsible for our own life. But the truth is society doesn’t always prepare us very well, especially when we get in trouble, or things begin to unravel in life. Before moving on, I want to give you a little background on myself. I had been quite an industrious young man during my college years. I had started and run my own photography shop taking party picks at fraternity and sorority parties at Oklahoma State University for my last three years of school. I was almost working full-time, keeping that afloat while at the same time working on a commercial aviation license and going to school full time. In other words, I was burning the candle from both ends. I was having a blast while at the same time working myself to death. By the time I left school and started in the family business, I was somewhat already burned out and living off the high of my previous lifestyle experience. During college, it was not uncommon for me to visit on a Saturday night three to five parties to make sure my photographers were doing well. I knew most of the college students at many of these parties, as most of the sorority girls would buy their party pictures from my company. Now life was very boring and stiff, and being newly married did not seem near as exciting as my college lifestyle. Now back to the story.

Things continued on until the middle of March when my wife gave birth to our first child three and a half months prematurely. Our new daughter weighed just one pound eleven ounces. This was not how life was supposed to work, but we had been dealt a really tough hand, and now we had to play that hand as it was dealt to us. We were both thrust into caring and worrying every moment whether our daughter would survive or not. The storms in my life just got taken to a new level. Everything changed in a heartbeat, and that was tipping the scales against my ability to function and survive. The fear, the pain, the lack of peace I was experiencing at that time only added to my dysfunction. To make matters worse, just before our child was born, I decided I didn’t like the family job I was in, and I had decided to go out on my own and build houses. This actually was, in disguise, a real blessing as it would give me a creative outlet that I would need in the storm we were experiencing. I was now visiting job sites and learning all about how speculative builders built the houses they would make their living from.

I was fortunate to be from a family that had been in business for many years. I had been made a partner right out of college in the family business. I was blessed with good work, a good paycheck, but something was not right for me selling insurance and sitting behind a desk most of the day taking calls and calling others. After selling my party pic business, this new line of work was downright depressing to me compared to what I had been accustomed to. I was making more money, but was this how my new life was to be? It seemed so boring. My college years and the party pic business were so exciting. The desk job was slow, not exciting at all, and not very fun. Marriage didn’t seem to be so great either. I just didn’t really know what or where life was going to take me. Looking back, I wasn’t really prepared or ready for what this new life was all about. It was unknown territory for me. In looking back and seeing so many young people transition from college to the working life and then marriage, I probably wasn’t much different, except I had already experienced owning a company of my own that was a lot of fun to participate in. Now it appeared everything had changed so quickly, and I wasn’t the only one driving my life anymore. I started losing interest in life and found myself wanting for something else to cover up the fear and depression that was tagging along with me. This mild depression and concern (or fear, looking back at it now) grew each day, it seemed, and I didn’t know just how to handle it or what was really causing it. A red light was going off in my life, and I had no idea what it meant or what to do about it, so I just pressed and pushed on, driving myself forward the best I knew how. People in my family didn’t show weakness, and I had been brought up to be stoic as well. I didn’t really have much of God in my life or any knowledge of what was available to me through Jesus either. I was just trying to do everything on my own with what limited information I had at the time. Not unlike so many other young people.

One of the benefits of working in the family business was the provision to build my own home. I had spent some time working out in the field on that project and enjoyed the freedom away from the office very much. I could see things being created that helped me build an image of accomplishing something versus pushing paper that just went into a file after working on it. I decided I enjoyed this new avenue of work more than selling an intangible product like insurance and was in the process of studying other builders in the area and the houses they built when our child was born. I was in the middle of starting at this new profession with little background on just how to make it happen. What I did have was a great belief in myself and my abilities. That was a gift from God and my family. I had determined to move forward and push myself hard to accomplish this new task. The change of working in the building of houses and structures would eventually be a piece of the puzzle that probably saved my life. God was really leading me one step at a time to prepare me to be able to handle what was just around the corner.

The birth of our new daughter, like that of any new child, brings new responsibilities to the parents. But having our first child born so early from conception and hospitalized in the new neonatal emergency area at Mercy Hospital was more than we had planned for. Being born three and a half months premature, she weighed just one pound and eleven ounces. Her chance of survival, her doctor commented, was less than 5 percent, as told to me very early in the morning, right after her birth. I shook with such fear and unbelief that this was happening to us. My wife was in the other room when the doctor came to me. He brought her in so I could see her while she was still alive. She was so small with tiny little fingers you could literally see through them. The doctor asked me one of the most important questions I ever answered. I say this now after knowing the future that was to come. This child would live and give birth to five grandchildren, that are the joy of our lives today. But at that time, all seemed lost, and fear gripped me so tightly. Given the information on her chances for her survival, did I want to have her transported to the new neonatal emergency hospital across town or let her die here on her own? She wasn’t expected to live very long. I was all alone as my wife was dealing with the fear of the situation still in the delivery room. Not fully knowing how the child was doing or what her conditions were. I was very scared and confused as a young father would be. I choose ‘yes,’ please transport her very quickly, I said. I wanted her to have every chance to live as any new father would hope for their child. I had no idea what path lay before us or how this new journey would proceed. But I knew she deserved every opportunity we could afford to provide at the time. I feared for her life as I spoke those words, Please hurry and transport her at once; don’t delay. The fear I was having over her gripped me for many months ever so tightly, and I was never very far away from its presence for a long time after that. I never liked hospitals, and the fear of visiting my daughter each time gripped me to my core every time I walked into that neonatal emergency room with so many hoses and monitors hooked to her body. It was all I could do to force myself to go visit her each time in that hospital.

At every turn, I struggled, as I had a great fear of death all my life which I was unable to run from any longer. I was now confronted with it daily with my new daughter. I wasn’t sleeping well, and I was struggling to be the man I needed to be for my wife and my new daughter if she was to live. We were heartbroken over our situation and the condition of our daughter. Life was not supposed to be like this, I kept telling myself. My wife needed to spend all her time now at our daughter’s bedside. She needed the attention and touch only my wife and I could provide her if she was to survive. Day after day, we watched God perform one miracle after the other, but our daughter was never far from death’s door as the months passed. We watched other children die each week who might have lived if only the parents could have spent more time touching and talking to their child as my wife was doing each waking moment for our daughter. These prematurely born children are bedridden and separated from their mothers while at the same time hooked up to every type of IV, sensor, monitor, oxygen breathing device, etc., known to medicine. They struggle for every breath as their lungs are not developed enough to work properly. They are poked and prodded and forced to endure many medical tests every day, yet they are so small they cannot even cry out while in pain. We do not understand the long-term, lasting repercussions many of these children carry for the remainder of their lives. The doctors and nurses that work with these children are a blessing from God. I can only be so thankful for them and their dedicated service to us and our daughter.

God was upholding us in this time though often we could not see it. Others were praying and interceding for us that we could never fully know or understand. Each visit to the hospital was almost more than I could face as we both watched, moment to moment, our daughter’s struggle to survive and to breathe. Each day brought one crisis after the other, especially in the first month. After just a few weeks, she required open-heart surgery to close off the patent ductus arteriosus, which kept opening and starving her of much-needed oxygen. Would she live through this dangerous procedure? We had been told by the doctors there was a great risk of her death but that without the operation, she would surely die. The decision was made for us yes, proceed. She had already been through so many attacks of suffocation we didn’t know if she would ever function normally as an adult if she did live. It was in God’s hands.

I remember so well being in the elevator with her going to surgery that morning, the time in the waiting room, and that constant fear that gripped me so tightly it strangled me almost to death by itself. She survived the surgery, and back to the neonatal emergency center, we went for recovery. The days dragged on as if you were never given the time to breathe and relax. I struggled on with nowhere to turn other than to cry out to God, whom I neither knew how to reach nor how to pray effectively. I had never been instructed or trained in the very basic principles of spiritual warfare that I needed so dearly to fight and survive in this battle my wife and I were in. If you get nothing from this book other than to teach your children the deeper things of God and His Word, then your time reading this book will be a great blessing for you and your family. (What you will learn in the proceeding chapters will teach and equip you with the tools and the truth to win in any battle that life throws at you.) I had never been taught before, during my youth or early years, fully how to pray or what God had already provided to us over 2000 years ago on the cross. I spent much of my time studying the housing market and new homes in the area, building my plan to start this new business of building homes. We would need the income to provide for our family. Each day I would visit the hospital in fear and trembling. It was my wife who carried the load of being at my daughter’s side throughout each day. Each night we would talk about her condition and how it was going on my search and work progress. Everything was uncharted waters for the time being. We proceeded on through the storm. The joy of marriage did not seem joyful at the time; it seemed a terrible experience we were living. In looking back, memories of stories and movies I have seen come to mind watching couples lose children or suffer great hardship with only one choice and that choice to push on, and so we did the best we knew how. We were lucky, more so than many others I have seen, in that we had great support in family and finances with good insurance that really covered almost all the expenses. But where material things ended, the spiritual side of life was greatly lacking. We just didn’t know enough or know where to turn to for additional help other than past experience and what we had been taught.

Looking back, my whole life up to the last year or so had been one of confidence and success. But shortly after getting married, I was finding everything I had depended on before in life wasn’t working out as I had planned. My health had changed, and I was anxious about everything now. That anxiety and depression had come upon me slowly at first but was now gripping me so tightly it seemed I was never without it. They became my constant companions (fear and depression) to my dislike, so it seemed. They seemed to follow me everywhere I went and into everything I did. And the crisis with our daughter and my new line of work just starting out had me off balance wherever I turned.

Several months before our child’s birth, my wife and I had started to attend the church of her youth and where we had been married. We knew we needed God in our lives, especially with a new child coming, and we needed the support of a loving community. The truth was we just didn’t know what was just around the corner for us. Many in the church and in our family were upholding us with their prayers in ways that we will never fully know. It was the first true experience of intercessory prayer I could ever remember. I, having been baptized at the age of eight, knew Jesus as my Lord and Savior, but I knew very little about God’s word and His promises regarding our inheritance Jesus had provided for us through His death on the cross and His resurrection. After my family left the church when I was ten, it was only a couple of years before my church experiences faded like a light being slowly dimmed. My grandmother on my dad’s side was very close to the Lord. After I accepted Jesus and was saved, she had taught me to memorize a wonderful prayer that I continued to pray nightly at bedtime. I had continued this prayer all my life and had felt a knowing in my heart that I was called by God as a child, but I didn’t know or understand just what that meant or how to walk in it, nor did I know much about God’s Word and what it meant for me. It was like having a huge bank account with all the money someone would need but starving because I didn’t know how to use the account or place a demand upon it to have access to the funds that already belonged to me.

The Bible says in Hosea 4:6a, My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, or knowing about God’s Word, His promises, and His ways. I had lived a very common life like most other Americans my age had lived. I grew up experiencing all the things most kids did during the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. I knew Christ in my heart just enough to keep me out of real trouble but not enough to live a victorious life. I guess you can say I acted as best as I knew how to with what I knew at the time. I just didn’t know much about God, His wisdom, or His word. As many would say, I lived a good life; wasn’t that enough? Wouldn’t that keep me on the right path all my life? The truth was it wasn’t enough, and I was failing at every turn I made. My education, my skills from scouting years, the talents I developed in school and work were of some help during