Charlotte called her dad a very mean dry alcoholic. When they were children, before he got sober, he would whip her and her other siblings frequently for no reason. She said when she asked him why he was punishing her, he said if he whipped one, he had to whip them all. They were terrified of him, and so was her mother; perhaps more than any of the children. One day, when Charlotte was in the second grade, her mother left the four of them with their functioning alcoholic father, and she didn’t return. Charlotte told me that all her siblings continue to struggle with various emotional and mental challenges because of these events. As for her, years of memories after her mother left have vanished; she can’t recount much of anything following her mother’s abandonment and has been under psychiatric care most of her adult life.
She’s in her early sixties now, but in her twenties, Charlotte went on to have a family of her own and established a reasonably stable career. In many ways, the family life she created as an adult mirrored the one she knew as a child. Her husband was verbally abusive, and they divorced before her three children were teens. Her children now suffer some of the same emotional issues as Charlotte and her siblings. She prays and attends her church regularly, but words like ‘generational curses’ and ‘demons’ are not in Charlotte’s vocabulary. To her, they are the machinations of us unlearned and radical Jesus lovers. Her thinking suggests that we are outside the lines of intellectual and thoughtful Christian discourse.
The reality that a person can be completely undone, transformed, and wholly delivered through the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit is completely foreign to the teachings of which Charlotte subscribes. “Healings like this don’t exist anymore.” She said. “God is not working that way in modern society.” Charlotte has been told that prayer is only a tool, and while it can bring peace along with other tools in the toolbox, it does not have restorative power through the Lord Jesus Christ, and she should not view it as being so.
Romans 8:9-11 (MSG) says, “9-11 But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!”
God lives inside us! 1Corinthians 6:19 reminds us that we don’t belong to ourselves, we belong to God and our bodies are His temple. He comes to live in us through the person of the Holy Spirit, and this is all the proof we need of God’s desire for intimacy in our relationship with Him. There’s nothing about us that He doesn’t know, and our mission in life is to know His love as fully as we possibly can. We should never think in any way that the intelligence and skill of any human being can exceed God’s supernatural power. All healing comes from Him, and if those in the healing business don’t know it, we most definitely should.
Heavenly Father desires our healing because He wants us to know and experience His love; and to know His love, we must have a thirst and hunger to know Him. He is not a distant God. He’s not a punishing God who wishes to be separated from His people. He wants to be a part of our lives, and He desires to be in partnership with us every moment of every day.
Our desire for encounter with Heavenly Father cannot be surrounded by four walls of our own comfort, where we dictate what we will experience, how we will experience it, and how we will respond to the supernatural move of His power. Surrender is a requirement. It is not negotiable. There must be a willingness on our part to do as Romans 12:1 demands and present our entire beings to Heavenly Father as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to Him. God knows exactly what we need, and His move is not subject to our approval; it is subject to our surrender.
Can’t nobody do ya’ like Jesus! If you’ve tried him for yourself, and ‘you know that you know that you know’ that the Lord will make a way out of no way, you are blessed more than you can ever possibly know. The greatest blessing of life is to be a friend of His wonder working power. Most will spend their entire lives in the bondage of their limited thoughts and beliefs about what God can and will do. They will never hunger for His touch or seek to bask in His glory.
Prayer is a most precious privilege that builds our intimacy with God through the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the vehicle by which you and I communicate our desires and thankfulness to God and do so on a level of mutuality—He honors us with the privilege of touching heaven, and we honor Him with the belief that we can. Our Heavenly Father knew that we would face situations in life that would leave incredible wounds and scars, and that is why He encourages us to welcome “this invisible but clearly present God.” Only then can we experience life on His terms. God’s power is limitless, and when we trust Him with our whole hearts, He is both willing and able to use it for our healing and deliverance.■
Scripture taken from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.
“Can’t Nobody Do Ya’ Like Jesus!” written by Reverend Fran Mack, edited by Kim Times for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2020. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! SMS is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging Christian Women through the Word of God.