Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Healing! - The Backside of the Cross!

The Backside of the Cross… Where healing stained the cross!

There has been a deep stirring in my heart for some time concerning miraculous healing's. For years I have seen crazy physical healings across the world. From Cancer to Blindness all healed in services. In factsSince writing this word we have begun to see supernatural healings.

My journey: I have always so deeply desired the suffering of others to be healed. Where is our authority? When I see a child afflicted with twisted limbs from a palsy I want to walk up to that child and lay hands on him. Alas, most of the time I question my own faith! There has been times where people have stood in altar lines for me to pray for them… I would see the wheel chair and almost want to run. I wanted to shout father I don’t have the faith….

Story of Nate: I must admit to you something so deep I thought I would never share this with anyone but Karen… It concerns my son Nate. He was injured playing college football. He has two crushed disk that are causing his spine to be out of place. The only way to fix it is major surgery. I had a personal battle with healing- I have prayed for my sons back- We prayed and prayed and he wasn't healed! This caused me to go on a journey. Seeking out how to walk in a healing anointing. He still hasn’t been healed. It caused doubt in my life until I began to study. Then I realized healing is divine! Now I am waiting on God as I walk out this journey. I know God has got him!

*I am learning that sometimes in our doubt the door of discovery shines much brighter! It is when doubt shifts to expectation that miracles begin to happen*

Psalms 103:1-4 Praise the LORD, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. 
2 Praise the LORD, my soul, 
 and forget not all his benefits— 
3 who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, 
4 who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion,

I have thought at times that maybe there is a formula…. But really it is about walking in faith, prayer, and His word!

Healing isn’t just New Testament!
Exodus 23:25, 
Worship the LORD your God, and his blessing will be on your food and water. I will take away sickness from among you.

Psalm 107:20
He sent forth his word and healed them; he rescued them from the grave.



Jeremiah 30:17, But I will restore you to health and heal your wounds,' declares the LORD, `because you are called an outcast, Zion for whom no one cares.

So healing was promised before the cross, but brought into completeness at the cross! I know God still does miracles!

"Expectation is the birthplace of a miracle"!

I. God loves to heal His children!
God doesn’t punish the righteous! Sickness is the result of the curse!

In John 14:9 Jesus told Philip that if you have seen me (Jesus), then you have seen the Father.

I John 3:1, How great is the love the father has lavished on us that we should be called his kids!

It says later in the New Testament that everything that the Father wanted to show us about Himself, He revealed to us in Son, Jesus Christ.

Hebrews 1:1-4, In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven

I love the story of the prodigal son. He was so hungry he desired pig slop. He settled for less than his fathers table!

Luke 15:16-18 (The Message) 16 He signed on with a citizen there who assigned him to his fields to slop the pigs. He was so hungry he would have eaten the corncobs in the pig slop, but no one would give him any. 17-18"That brought him to his senses. He said, 'All those farmhands working for my father sit down to three meals a day, and here I am starving to death. I'm going back to my father.

I love it! I says that when he saw what he was settling for in this life, that that is what brought him to his senses.

So many times we look at this as someone that has completely walked away from God. But I believe this passage also applies to those that are believers but have settled for a life that is less than what God ever intended for them.

John 10:10 (The Message) A thief is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.

I find it amazing that so many believers actually believe the opposite of this verse. Oh, we don’t verbalize it that way and say that God came to kill, steal & destroy & that the devil, or thief, came to give us abundant life.

Religious people say…. God has given me this disease to teach me a lesson. That is not possible. He is not the author of sickness.

We live like the prodigal son before he came to his senses thinking that God has put us in this situation or allowed us to be in this situation.

But can I tell you, if you did to your kids what we accuse God of doing to us, you would be put in jail for child abuse.

There is a law of seedtime and harvest. If I am a giver he will bless me back! What I sow I reap!

Genesis 8:22, As long as the earth endures, 
seedtime and harvest, 
cold and heat, 
summer and winter, 
day and night 
will never cease.

If I am sowing seeds of gluttony, then I will most likely reap the harvest –heart failure, diabetes, etc. So much of our disease is caused by our choices. Yet, other diseases are just that- DISEASES.

Somehow, we have begun to believe that God has given us this affliction to teach us something and we won’t lose it until we learn the lesson.

Well, if everything that the Father wanted to show us about Himself, He showed us through Jesus…then let’s look at the life of Jesus.

I never saw where Jesus went up to a person that needed healing and said, “Hey bro, I would love to heal you right now, but my Father is trying to teach you a lesson right now and you still need more time. Maybe come back later.

It’s difficult to imagine how much the church has fallen in 2,000 years. What has happened to the miraculous?

Acts 10:38 (NKJV) how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were
oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him.

If you look back over church history, the John Alexander Dowie’s, Amiee Simple McPherson’s, & Smith Wigglesworth’s…people who had incredible healing ministries. One thing they all had in common, one common denominator, was that they believed ALL sickness is from the devil.

Not everybody believes that…but they also don’t have any miracles in their life. So do the math.
If we go back to the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1 & 2. There was no sin in the Garden until Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit. Likewise, there was no sickness or disease up until that time.

Acts 4:11-12, Jesus is “the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone. 12 Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

The New Testament was written originally in Greek, and the word for salvation is literally translated as to:
1. deliver one from the penalties of judgment
2. to heal from sickness and disease, make well, restore to health.

Psalm 103:2-3 (NIV) 2 Praise the LORD, my soul, and forget not all his benefits—3 who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases

Sickness and disease are mentioned again in the same breath as sin. So in other words if he can forgive my sins then he can heal my diseases.

It’s a transformation of how we think regarding healing and miracles

You say, ‘Well my Great Aunt got cancer and died and it really brought our family together. Well God can win with any hand. He can win with a pair of twos. He’s big enough that He can win with any hand. That’s the greatness of God. It’s not that He ordained calamity or difficulty.

And it’s that kind of thinking has given so much room for the devil to come and steal and destroy and we say God has allowed it. No He hasn’t allowed it…the church has allowed it.

We have reduced the cross to merely a get out of jail free card while missing the messages of freedom surrounding the tree of forgiveness and power!

There is a battle against everything we believe. It is a constant war. God is calling his church to experience complete freedom. The law is always at work with us.

II. Jesus broke off the chains of law for us!
What began as a selfish act under a tree ended with a selfless act on a tree!
Galatians 3:13, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole! (Deut. 21:23)

Romans 8:3-5, For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh,[a] God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.5 Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.
We broke the law and Jesus was condemned to death for it. The problem is we still live in bondage to what he destroyed!

The Cross…He gave us freedom over sin!
He gave us freedom over death, hell and the grave!
He gave us freedom over our thoughts! (crown of thorns)
He gave us freedom over what we do with our hands- (nails)
He grafted us to him- (piercing in the side)
But now slide to the backside of the cross….(look at His back)

III. The Backside of the Cross mandated my healing!
2700 years before Christ would go to the cross a prophet would foresee the future! He would declare the most horrible and most powerful day to fall upon humanity.

It would be the day that the sin in the garden would be abolished.
It would be the day that separation from God would be amended.
It would the day that healing would be ripped into a savior!

Isaiah 53:2-6, (message) The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling, 
a scrubby plant in a parched field.
There was nothing attractive about him, nothing to cause us to take a second look.
He was looked down on and passed over, a manwho suffered, who knew pain firsthand.
One look at him and people turned away. We looked down on him, thought he was scum.
But the fact is, it was our pains he carried— our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.
We thought he brought it on himself, 
that God was punishing him for his own failures.
But it was our sins that did that to him, 
that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole. Through his bruises we get healed.
We're all like sheep who've wandered off and gotten lost. We've all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we've done wrong, 
on him, on him.

Is 53:5- By His stripes we are healed! (on His back he took my sickness)

They took Jesus and tied him to a whipping post and beat him with a cat-of-nine-tails that had shards of metal and glass. And every time he was struck with this whip, it would attach itself to His flesh. And then the Roman soldier would yank it off his body pulling massive amounts of flesh off with it. They would do this 39 times (40 death) until he was completely unrecognizable.

I used to read the passage in Isaiah that I read to you earlier and I never understood why it would say, ‘by his stripes we are healed’ right in the middle of all the reasons why we are forgiven of sins.

Then I began to realize something…sin is to the soul, what sickness is to the body.

1 Peter 2:24, He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.

Today, whatever your sickness or affliction may be, He paid for your healing, your deliverance, your salvation, before He left the story.

IV. His stripes created 5 mandates for your healing!

#1- A life of Faith mandates healing!

Romans 10:17, 
Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ

1 Cor. 2:4- My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.

Hebrews 11:1,[ Faith in Action ] Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

#2- Speaking life mandates healing!
Matthew 18:19, “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.

Proverbs 18:21- “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat the fruit thereof.”

Death and life are in the power of your tongue. Most times we misquote this verse and talk about the power of death and life are in the tongue, but death and life have no power in and of themselves. The power lies in your tongue’s ability to produce or create death or life.

Hebrews 11:3 says, “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God.”
(so frame your world)

Proverbs 6:2 says, “You are snared by the words of your mouth; you are taken by the words of your mouth.

Matthew 12:37 says, “For by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned

#3 The laying on of hands mandates they shall be healed!

James 5:14-16, 14 Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. 15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. 16 Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

Jesus often laid hands on people before healing them (Mark 6:5; Luke 4:40; 13:13). Paul laid hands on a sick person and he was healed (Acts 28:8).

#4 The mandates of heaven demands healing!

Luke 11:2-4 (NKJV) 2 So He said to them, “When you pray, say: Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done On earth as it is in heaven. 3 Give us day by day our daily bread. 4 And forgive us our sins, For we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And do not lead us into temptation, But deliver us from the evil one.”

It is the job of every believer to live in such a way that we see the reality of heaven on earth. (Lifestyle shouldn’t change at all in heaven)

#5- Authority mandates your faith

TL Osborn- “Physical eye site can blind spiritual vision”

We have authority through the cross!

Authority to cast out demons:
Mark 16:17, "And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils..."

Authority to heal the sick:
Mark 16:17-18, "And these signs shall follow them that believe...they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."

Now we must apply this authority and declare healing!

1 comment:

  1. Please email us your physical need and we promise to pray so hard for you! info@mercyseatministries.com. We believe you will experience a miracle!

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