Healing & Delivering Faith (2)

Introduction:

On Dec. 31st, I shared with you the roadmap that I sensed the Holy Spirit will be leading us on as a church. In alignment with this, we’ve taught about the “open doors” or behaviors that will bring God’s presence into our lives, families, workplaces, and communities.

1. The promise, I feel, God gave us is “I will redeem/ restore this house to be a gateway (a doorway) of My Presence in this community. My presence will mark this house greater than it has in years past.”

2. We discussed how to honor God’s presence by:

a. Bring honor into your home.

b. Honor the leadership in your life.

c. Honor this house of worship.

3. We taught on the doorways of His Presence, forgiveness, and confidence. Then Prophet Phil came and taught on developing “A Hearing Heart.”

4. God is equipping us as a Church to bring hope and strength into our lives and into the lives of those we love.

This morning, I want to begin a series on the second promise we received. “Healing will be the song of this Church, and I will restore broken bodies and fractured homes and mend, with your hands, fragmented relationships and friendships.

1. In times of turmoil, sickness, loss, or devastation, powerful lies can be forged in our souls. Lies that fault God for our pain leave us with little faith in what He has said concerning our lives. But there is a way to escape from the pit of despair. Jesus, in His great love for us, invites us to listen and believe in His healing power. This Sunday, we’ll be teaching how your faith can open the healing and delivering power of Jesus in your life.

a. Story of Peace.

2. To effectively dismantle these lies that rob us of healing, we must perceive sickness and oppression through the lens of His truth.

3. Lie 1: God is “teaching me something” in this sickness therefore, He is allowing me to be sick.

a. Though God can take evil and turn it for your good and His glory, it is not His will to allow evil to affect His children.

b. Jesus gave us a clear and undeniable perspective of God’s desire concerning sickness and oppression.

c. God’s desire is that we experience His healing.

Matthew 15:29-31 John 10:10 John 11:24-26

I remember listening to Tommy Tenny, a fourth-generation Pentecostal preacher, decades ago on a broadcast from the Brownsville Revival. He spoke about how the church has domesticated the power of God; his message were imprinted in my soul.

“Can I tell you that God's biggest problem is how God has to dial down his presence to match our expectations? When he stepped up to the tomb that contained Lazarus, his biggest problem was not raising Lazarus. His biggest problem was raising only Lazarus. When he said, “Lazarus come out, had He not prefaced those words “come out” with the personal pronoun Lazarus, every grave in the entirety of the world would have vomited up its occupant. Why? Because there's going to come a day when He's going to step onto the balcony of heaven, and He’s going to say, “Come out!” Then the dead great and small are going to be raised.”

God’s difficulty is not in doing incredibly powerful things; it is in dialing His power down.”

God longs for us to simply trust Him and join Him in His redeeming work. “When Jesus rose from the dead, it was as if he couldn’t close the door of eternity fast enough, and all the saints of the Old Covenant slipped out with Him.”

Matthew 27:51-53 4. Lie 2: God is punishing me with sickness for past sins.

a. Though sin is the doorway by which sickness entered mankind, God offers us freedom and healing to reign in life. He gives us an escape from the victim mentality that exalts the power of sin over His power to heal.

Romans 5:12-1… For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.)

b. When sickness attempts to enter or continues to plague your life, fight against it by declaring God’s Word over your sickness and persist in receiving your complete healing. Believe for courage and strength to keep fighting until He gives you victory with a Word from Him.

c. Sitting on my porch during the COVID-19 epidemic, I felt a wave of weakness and immediately felt sickness overtake me. The Holy Spirit rose up in me and said, “Fight the fear.” I began to speak God’s Word against it, and within minutes, it lifted.

d. We are in a fight against the forces of sin and death, armed with God’s power and truth, to overthrow the work of the enemy.

e. The source of sickness (physical) and oppression (emotional) is the result of sin entering humanity. Our place as God’s kingdom is to drive it out of our communities.

Matthew 10:7-8

5. Lie 3: If God wanted me to be healed, then I’d be healed.

i. God’s will against sickness was manifest in the life and teachings of Jesus. Jesus healed all who came to Him.

1 John 3:8

6. The element or principle that is needed to step into the realm of healing and wholeness is faith. Faith in what God has said is the key to receiving healing. Of the 23 recorded miracles of Jesus in the gospels, we see the repeated direct and indirect that the sick and broken believed in Jesus’ ability to heal them despite the struggle of their sickness.

Hebrews 11:1-6 7. How can you grow your faith? By Hearing God’s Word.

Romans 10:17

a. So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God—“This is another confirmation of the truth that faith supposes the hearing of the Word, and this a commission to preach it.”[1]

b. Open doors, as many as possible, through which you can hear God‘s voice – His word.

8. How do you exercise faith?

a. “Faith begins where the will of God is known.” – Kenneth Hagin

b. Jesus is the expert on health, finances, marriage, relationships, and every facet of our human experience.

Romans 11:33-36

a. Make opportunities to hear God’s voice: Reading His Word, Listening to His Word, and Watching teachings about His Word.

i. Cassette tape of Old and New Testament, Alexander Scourby driving back and forth to Lamar.

b. Choose to believe God’s opinion above your experience and opinions.

i. The more you hear God’s words, the more your ability to believe what He is saying is empowered.

ii. Whoever you listen to the most is the one who is crafting the lens of what you believe.

iii. As you must flood your mind with the truth, you will increase your ability to believe what God is saying.

c. Speak God’s Word over and over. Faith isn’t exercised in thought; it is activated in speaking God’s Word. The more you realize the power of the word of faith, the less you’ll speak things contrary to what God has said.

9. Closing:

First radical miracle: Story of healing a woman with a crippled child. (Worship Team)

On the flight to Niger, I read the book “Essential Guide to Healing” by Johnson and Clark. We set ourselves up to preach the gospel in Muslim villages. Then, they asked for prayer at the end for those who had needs. A woman with a child less than two years old came forward with faith that God could heal her kid. She was not a believer, but her child needed a miracle, so she came. I felt no surge of spiritual power, yet with compassion and anger that provoked memories of my loss of my little sister, I felt fond confidence in Jesus’ power to heal. I laid hands on that child and spoke healing over his legs. I stepped back and graciously asked the mother, through our translator, to stand him up to walk. She placed his bare feet on the sand and held his hands for support. Then he began to step forward, one foot forward and then the next, as the mother's eyes filled with tears, and we gave Jesus all the glory. As we move into the next season of God’s desire for our church family, it is vital for your faith to grow and develop. But this is not a matter of working up emotions or faking belief, it is a simple resolve to believe what God has said in the face of contrary evidence. Prayer: Jesus, what are you saying to me?

Story of Peace

We were a young family in the 1980s struggling to forge a living in a camper-sized trailer. My brother and I learned English quickly, but adapting to American culture took time. We didn’t understand much of the culture and were naïve to the realities of a drastically different world. We were poor. We often prayed for provisions of food or toys. On more than one occasion, these provisions miraculously appeared at our door. I truly didn’t know how poor we were. That reality didn’t hit until the first semester of public school. A few years after our arrival in the US, my mom was pregnant with our first sister. Her pregnancy, I later learned, went well for the first few months. Then difficulties with her blood pressure began, and doctors urged her to endure a premature delivery. She did, and our little sister entered the world two months earlier than expected. Doctors explained her enlarged bowel area was the result of an undeveloped liver. I didn’t know what it meant, but we dealt with the medical issues for a full three years. Every weekend we made the two-hour drive to visit her at a government-funded hospital in Galveston, TX. Finally, she came home for a short period of time but within months, we were back to regular medical monitoring. We enjoyed her laughs, her uniquely cute smile, and her victory over so many physical battles. Time and time again, the doctors gave up hope, and God intervened because of mom and dad’s prayers. Then the sky fell. In the dark morning hours of that dreadful day, I heard my mom scream. I jolted up and out of my top bunk bed. I rushed into her room to find her wailing with grief as my dad hung up the phone. Having never seen such an emotional outburst from either parent, my brother and I waited for an explanation. Standing fearfully in our pajamas, we heard the terrible words that our sister had died a few moments earlier. My parents, brother, and younger sister kneeled around my parent’s bed and did the one thing we knew to do. We prayed. We pleaded. We cried. After praying, we hurriedly grabbed our clothes and rushed out the door. In times past, we would enjoy the ocean view of the gulf and play at the back of the ferry ship as we sailed into the island. On that cold morning, however, we cried and sat silently, waiting to see the reality of what had happened. A police officer pulled us over for speeding. My dad was furious and attempted to communicate to him the reason for our urgency. He succeeded, and we arrived at the hospital, aided by a police escort. As the main lobby doors of the hospital rolled back, I remembered the story of Lazarus in the Bible. It must have been a scene similar to this one. Maybe this would be a miracle of the same nature; I tried to persuade my young self. Jesus surely could do it again. My parents went into the room first. From my four-foot height, the room door seemed gigantic. My brother and I stepped in, and I remember watching them pull back a sheet that covered her. Peace, my three-year-old sister, lay there in a sleep-like stillness. I didn’t understand what was happening. “She is only asleep,” I thought to myself, “just like Jesus said about Lazarus.” I approached her bed and placed my little fingers delicately on her soft and cooled brow. She was not there. I stared at her. Her body rested before me, but she was not present. I thought I had cried all my tears on the two-hour drive, but a deeper well of sorrow erupted from my soul. We prayed to the only One who could keep this from happening. We prayed, but He did not answer.

Samuel, Stephen . A Reason for Hope: Unlock God's Identity In You (pp. 16-18). Auxano Publications. Kindle Edition.

[1]Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., & Brown, D. (1997). Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (Vol. 2, p. 248). Logos Research Systems, Inc.