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You don't have to
call your doctor to get it. You don't
even have to drive to the pharmacy. All
you must do is reach for your Bible,
open to Proverbs 4:20-24 and follow the
instructions you find there:
"My son, pay
attention to what I say; listen closely
to my words. Do not let them out
of your sight, keep them within your
heart; for they are life to those who
find them and health to a man's whole
body. Above all else, guard your
heart, for it is the wellspring of life.
Put away perversity from your mouth;
keep corrupt talk far from your lips."
As simple as they
might sound, those four verses contain
the supernatural prescription to divine
health. It's a powerful prescription
that will work for anyone who will put
it to work.
If you have
received healing by the laying on of
hands, following this prescription will
help you maintain that healing. If you
have believed for healing, but are
experiencing lingering symptoms, it will
help you stand strong until you are
completely symptom-free. And if you are
healthy now, it will help you stay that
way--not just for a day or a week, but
for the rest of your life!
Powerful
Medicine
To
understand how this prescription works,
you must realize that the Word of God is
more than just good information. It
actually has life in it. As Jesus said
in John 6:63, "The Spirit gives life;
the flesh counts for nothing. The words
I have spoken to you are spirit and they
are life."
Every time you
take the Word into your heart, believe
it and act on it, that life of which
Jesus spoke, the very LIFE of God
Himself, is released in you. You may
have read the healing scriptures over
and over again. You may know them as
well as you know your own name. Yet
every time you read them or hear them
preached, they bring you a fresh dose of
God's healing power. Each time, they
bring life to you and deliver God's
medicine to your flesh.
That's because the
Word is like a seed. Hebrews 4:12 says
it is "alive and full of power--making
it active, operative, energizing and
effective..." (The Amplified Bible).
It actually carries within it the power
to fulfil itself.
When you planted
the Word about the new birth in your
heart, then believed and acted on it,
that Word released within you the power
to be born again. By the same token,
when you plant the Word about healing in
your heart, believe and act on it, that
Word will release God's healing power in
you.
"But, Gary," you
may say, "I've met people who know the
Bible from cover to cover and still
can't get healed!"
No doubt you do.
But if you'll look back at God's
prescription, you'll find it doesn't say
anything about "knowing" the Bible. It
says, attend to the Word.
When you attend to
something, you give your attention to
it. You make it top priority. You set
aside other things so you can focus on
it. When a nurse is attending to a
patient, she constantly looks after him.
She doesn't just leave him lying alone
in his hospital room while she goes
shopping. If someone asks her about her
patient, she doesn't feel it's
sufficient to say, "Oh, yes. I know
him."
In the same way,
if you're attending to the Word, you
won't leave it lying unopened on the
coffee table all day. You won't spend
your day focusing your attention on
other things.
On the contrary,
you'll do what Proverbs 4 says to do.
You'll continually incline your ear to
God's Word.
Inclining your ear
includes more than just putting your
physical ears in a position to hear the
Word being preached (although that, in
itself, is very important). It also
requires you to actively engage with
God's Word, to believe it and obey it.
In fact, The
Amplified Bible translates Proverbs
4:20, this way: "My son, attend to my
words; consent and submit to my
sayings." Submitting to the Word means
making adjustments in your life. Say,
for example, you hear the Word in
Philippians 4:4 that you are to "rejoice
in the Lord always." If you've been
doing a lot of griping and complaining,
you'll have to change in order to submit
to that Word. You'll have to repent and
alter your behaviour.
Take
as Directed
In addition to
inclining your ear to the Word of God,
the Proverbs 4 prescription also says
you must keep it before your eyes and
not let it depart from your sight. In
Matthew 6:22-23, Jesus reveals why
that's so important. He says, "The
eye is the lamp of the body. If your
eyes are good, your whole body will be
full of light. But if your eyes are bad,
your whole body will be full of
darkness. If then the light within you
is darkness, how great is that
darkness!"
Your eyes are the
gateway to your body. If your eye (or
your attention) is on the darkness, or
the sickness that is in your body, there
will be no light to expel it. If,
however, the eyes of your heart are
trained strictly on the Word, your whole
body will eventually be filled with
light, and healing will be the result.
Granted, it isn't
easy to keep your attention centred on
the Word like that. It takes real effort
and commitment. It may require getting
up a little earlier in the morning or
turning off the television at night. But
I urge you to do whatever it takes to
take God's medicine exactly as directed.
It won't work any
other way!
That really
shouldn't be so surprising. After all,
we wouldn't expect natural medication to
work for us if we didn't take it as
prescribed.
No rational person
would set a bottle of pills on the night
stand and expect those pills to heal
them. No one would call the doctor and
say, "Hey, doc! These pills don't work.
I've carried them with me everywhere I
go--I keep them in the car with me, I
set them on my desk at work, I even have
them next to me when I sleep at
night--but I don't feel any better."
That would be
ridiculous. Yet, spiritually speaking,
some people do it all the time. They cry
and pray and beg God to heal them, all
the while ignoring the medicine He's
provided. (They might take a quick dose
on Sunday when they go to church, but
the rest of the week they don't take
time for the Word at all!)
Why do people who
love God and believe the Bible act that
way? I think it's because they don't
understand how putting the Word in their
heart can affect their physical bodies.
They don't see how something spiritual
can change something natural.
If you'll read the
Bible, however, you'll see that
spiritual power has been affecting this
physical world ever since time began. In
fact, it was spiritual power released in
the form of God's Word that brought this
natural world into existence in the
first place.
When you realize
that God's Word is the force that
originally brought into being everything
you can see and touch--including your
physical body--it's easy to believe that
the Word is still capable of changing
your body today. It makes perfect sense!
Faith in
Two Places
"I'd have no
problem at all believing God's Word
would heal me if He'd speak to me out
loud like He did in Genesis," you might
say, "but He hasn't!"
No, and He
probably won't either. God no longer has
to thunder His Word down at us from
heaven. These days He lives in the
hearts of believers, so He speaks to us
from the inside instead of the outside.
What's more, when it comes to covenant
issues like healing, we don't even have
to wait on Him to speak.
He has already
spoken!
He has already
said, "...By [Jesus'] stripes ye were
healed" (1 Peter 2:24). He has already
said, "...for I am the LORD, who heals
you" (Exodus 15:26). He has already
said, "The prayer of faith shall save
the sick, and the Lord shall raise him
up..." (James 5:15).
God has already
done His part. So we must do ours. We
must take the Word He has spoken, put it
inside us and let it change us from the
inside out.
You see,
everything--including healing--starts
inside you. Your future is literally
stored up in your heart. As Jesus said,
"The good man brings good things out of
the good stored up in him, and the evil
man brings evil things out of the evil
stored up in him." (Matthew
12:35).
That means if you
want external conditions to be better
tomorrow, you'd better start changing
your internal condition today. You'd
better start taking the Word of God and
depositing it in your heart just like
you deposit money in the bank. Then you
can make withdrawals on it whenever you
need it. When sickness attacks your
body, you can tap into the healing Word
you've put inside you and run that
sickness off!
Exactly how do you
do that?
You open your
mouth and speak--not words of sickness
and disease, discouragement and despair,
but words of healing and life, faith and
hope. You follow the last step of God's
divine prescription and "Put away from
thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips
put far from thee" (verse 24). In short,
you speak the Words of God and call
yourself healed in Jesus' Name.
Initially, that
may not be easy for you to do. But you
must do it anyway because for the faith
to work it must be in two places--in
your heart and in your mouth. "For
it is with your heart that you believe
and are justified, and it is with your
mouth that you confess and are saved"
(Romans 10:10).
Some people say
faith will move mountains. But, the
scriptural truth is, faith won't even
move a molehill for you unless you
release it with the words of your mouth.
The Lord Jesus
told us that "I tell you the truth, if
anyone says to this mountain, 'Go, throw
yourself into the sea,' and does not
doubt in his heart but believes that
what he says will happen, it will be
done for him." (Mark
11:23). Notice the word say
appears three times in that verse while
the word believe appears only
once. Obviously, Jesus wanted us to know
that our words are crucial.
It's also
important to note that He did not
instruct us to talk about the
mountain, He instructed us to talk to
it! If we're going to obey Him, we must
talk to the mountain of sickness and
cast it out of our lives. The Lord told
Charles Capps, I have told My people
they can have what they say, but they
are saying what they have! Instead
of saying, "I'm healed," most Christians
say, "I'm sick," and reinforce the
sickness or disease.
"But, Gary, it
bothers me to say I'm healed when my
body still feels sick!"
It shouldn't. It
didn't bother Abraham. He went around
calling himself the Father of Nations
for years even though he was as
childless as could be. Why did he do it?
Because as it is written: "I have made
you a father of many nations." He is our
father in the sight of God, in whom he
believed—the God who gives life to the
dead and calls things that are not as
though they were.(Romans 4:17). He was "fully persuaded
that, what [God] had promised, he was
able also to perform" (verse 21).
You see, Abraham
wasn't "trying" to believe God. He
wasn't just mentally assenting to it. He
had immersed himself in God's Word until
that Word was more real to him than the
things he could see. It didn't matter to
him that he was 100 years old. It didn't
matter to him that Sarah was far past
the age of childbearing and that she had
been barren all her life. All that
mattered to him was what God said,
because he knew His Word was true.
If you don't have
that kind of faith for healing right
now, then stay in the Word until you get
it! After all, "faith comes from
hearing the message, and the message is
heard through the word of Christ." (Romans
10:17). Read, study, meditate, listen to
tapes, watch videos of good,
faith-filled teaching, and watch our
weekly and daily television broadcast
EVERY DAY until God's Word about healing
is more real to you than the symptoms in
your body. Keep on keeping on until,
like Abraham, you stagger not at the
promise of God through unbelief, but
grow strong in faith as you give praise
and glory to God (Romans 4:20, The
Amplified Bible).
Having Done All...Stand!
As you put God's
prescription for health to work in your
life, don't be discouraged if you don't
see immediate results. Although many
times healing comes instantly, there
also are times when it takes place more
gradually.
So don't let
lingering symptoms cause you to doubt.
After all, when you go to the doctor,
you don't always feel better right away.
The medication he gives you often takes
some time before it begins to work. But
you don't allow the delay to discourage
you. You just follow the doctor's orders
and expect to feel better soon. Really
you are "treating" your spirit that is
the source of supernatural life and
health for your physical body.
Release that same
kind of confidence in God's medicine.
Realize that the moment you begin to
take it, the healing process begins.
Keep your expectancy high and make up
your mind to continue standing on the
Word until you can see and feel the
total physical effects of God's healing
power.
When the devil
whispers words of doubt and unbelief to
you, when he suggests that the Word is
not working, deal with those thoughts
immediately. Cast them down (see 2
Corinthians 10:5). Speak out loud if
necessary and say, "Devil, I rebuke you.
I bind you from my mind. I will not
believe your lies. God has sent His Word
to heal me, and His Word never fails.
That Word went to work in my body the
instant I believed it, so as far as I am
concerned, my days of sickness are over.
I declare that Jesus bore my sickness,
weakness and pain, and I am forever
free."
Then, "having done
all to stand, stand" until your healing
is fully manifested (see Ephesians
6:12-14). Steadfastly hold your ground.
Don't waver. For as James 1:6-8 says,
"...he must believe and not doubt,
because he who doubts is like a wave of
the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.
That man should not think he will
receive anything from the Lord; he is a
double-minded man, unstable in all he
does."
Above all, keep
your attention trained on the Word--not
on lingering symptoms. Be like Abraham
who "considered not his own body"
(Romans 4:19). Instead of focusing on
your circumstances, focus on what God
has said to you.
Develop an inner
image of yourself with your healing
fully manifested. See yourself well. See
yourself whole. See yourself healed in
every way.
Since what you
keep before your eyes and in your ears
determines what you will believe in your
heart and what you will act on, make the
Word your number one priority. Keep
taking God's medicine as directed and
trust the Great Physician to do His
wonderful healing work in you!
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