Whether we’re dealing with a terminal diagnosis, a chronic condition, or a debilitating fear, addiction, or dependency, God is willing and able to deliver us. This is a phenomenal truth, and there’s little else that the devil seeks to attack more than our faith in God’s delivering and healing power. The world and its systems come against this vehemently, and I discovered just how much the world hates faith in God when someone close to me received a terminal diagnosis. Perhaps more than any other time in a person’s life, an extremely difficult situation is the time to cling to God greater than we have at any other point in our lives. It’s a time to seek Him with all our hearts, but we must also be aware that the devil is working hard to cancel out our faith. Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we can stop this from happening, and we should.
A good friend of mine is near 90 years old. She drives, is generous and kind, and sharp as a tack. She loves the Lord and puts all her trust in Him. Several of her friends and relatives have passed from this life. When I inquired how she was coping, she talked about the sadness of losing them, but also said something else surprising. As she has aged, she told me that she had to love some of her senior friends from a distance. “When you talk to them, it’s always about their illnesses or what they can’t do because of this or that. I understand it, but if I dwelt on those things and talked about it as much as they do, I’d lose the battle before I even got out of bed.”
The Mind
My friend understands that the mind is a battlefield, and we either win or lose based on our commitment to think like Christ. It is precisely because of this that the devil attacks our minds, so that we will abdicate our power and authority to stand strong. Our blessed Master teaches us in Mark 9:23 that all things are possible if we believe and trust God. Well, what does it mean to believe? To believe is to use the energy of our minds and hearts to place our total confidence in something. It is when our confessions, conversations, thoughts, and actions all point to the thing we say we believe. The right way of believing is to place our total trust in what God says. It is to put on the mind of Christ and to think the way he does.
God can do anything, but He limits Himself according to our faith. He commands us in Ephesians 4:23-24(AMP), “23 and be continually renewed in the spirit of your mind [having a fresh, untarnished mental and spiritual attitude], 24 and put on the new self [the regenerated and renewed nature], created in God’s image, [godlike] in the righteousness and holiness of the truth [living in a way that expresses to God your gratitude for your salvation].” We are commanded to continually renew the very core of our minds to God’s Word. Our attitudes must change from doubt and unbelief to faith and right believing. This is what it means to be fully engrossed in the practice of disciplining our thought lives. We are to tame our thoughts by capturing each one, especially before we speak them forward. While they are captured, we must then ask ourselves if what we’re thinking lines up with what God has said in His Word. If it doesn’t, it is a thought that can subtract from our healing and wholeness rather than add to it.
To put on the new self is to continually affirm our new nature in Jesus Christ. The old nature is what leads us to sickness, disappointment, and devastation. Why? Because God tells us in His Word that the old nature is a carnal mindset, and He says in Romans 8:7 that the carnal mind is an enemy against Him. It’s a mind that puts the words of people over the Word of God. This is not to say that people can’t help us, but we must never be mistaken, all healing comes from God, and He is the One with the final word.
The Mouth
Proverbs 18:21(AMP) declares, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” This verse should prompt every person to put themselves on pause. Examine the words that you speak in a general conversation. How much of it is glorifying to God? If it is a conversation about your condition, how much of it is your confession of God’s healing and delivering power? How much of it is about your faith in His Word? Whether you realize it or not, you are not just telling others what you believe in your heart, you are telling yourself what you believe.
Jesus Christ teaches us in Luke 6:45(NLT), “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart.” We can’t go higher than what we believe, and what we believe will flow from our mouths. Often in our conversations, we will tell a person what everyone else says about our condition and circumstances except God.
Isaiah 53:5(NLT) says about our Redeemer, “But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed.” Our Heavenly Father declared that by the stripes, the whips that Jesus Christ took as he was being beaten and crucified, we are healed. Jesus was nailed to the cross and crucified our sicknesses and afflictions there. This is what we must confess, that we are healed by his stripes!
Recognize the authority and power that God has given us. Jesus Christ said in Matthew 16:19 that he’s given us the keys to the Kingdom. We have the power to speak a thing into fruition. By the confession of our mouths in faith, we can call those things that are not as though they were. God’s Word is life to us, and we need to speak His promises over our own lives continually. Never speak death into your own existence. You are a child of God’s light, and He tells us in Ephesians 5:8(NLT), “For once you were full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord. So live as people of light!”
The Effort
James 2:26(NLT), tells us, “Just as the body is dead without breath, so also faith is dead without good works.” These ‘good works’ are not always about physical effort, but spiritual effort. Whenever we’re faced with crisis, it is a wake-up call. Something has gone horribly out of balance in our souls because we haven’t nourished ourselves enough with the bread of life, which is God’s Word.
Many people will not mount up in faith when dealing with adversity, but will acquiesce and say things like, “Well, it’s in God’s hands. He will take me when He’s ready.” Jesus Christ gave his life on the cross to save us from sin and death, so why would it be God’s Will for us to continue being a slave to those things. People often fall prey to giving up because they do not want to become tenacious and diligent about letting God transform them. Whether we are sick or well, we are all in God’s hands; this can never be disputed. But He would rather we be healed and well so that we can continue to give Him glory by doing good works and fulfilling our call within His Will and plan.
The efforts we should be focusing on are about forgiveness, humility, and sharing. These are the things that restore balance to the soul. 2Corinthians 13:5 tells us to examine ourselves to see if our faith is genuine. What the devil meant to take us out can be turned around for the glory of God, but we must comb the depths of our hearts and minds to examine ourselves. Resentment, pride, arrogance, stinginess, pettiness, wickedness, vengefulness, and other kinds of doubt, fear, and unbelief—these do not bring God glory. They weigh down the soul and keep our lives spiraling in darkness until our lights are snuffed out. This isn’t what God wants.
Jesus Christ declared in John 16:13(NLT), “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what he has heard. He will tell you about the future.” The Holy Spirit abides within us. If we allow him, he will guide us to the truth, and we can depend on this with all that we are. The truth is that sometimes the thing in our hearts that is blocking our healing is the sin of pride and arrogance, the refusal to humble ourselves before God. It’s the person we never forgave or the wounds that we caused others and never apologized.
Blockers to our blessings are almost always about unrepented sin. So, we must be clear that we are empowered through Christ to receive revelation from the Spirit that will transform us. He will tell us the wrong we need to make right before God, and praying for forgiveness, being thankful to our Heavenly Father, and being transformed by His love will back our faith and strengthen us in His healing power.■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 601
Amplified Bible (AMP)
Copyright © 2015 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, CA 90631. All rights reserved.
“Faith in God’s Healing Power” written by Reverend Fran Mack, edited by Kim Times, for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2022. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord!