THE PROMISES

Upon hearing the news about my tumor, two people have looked at me with a question in their eyes and stated with wonder, “You knew.”  

I did.

And I don’t think God would be pleased unless I took the time to write about the simple reasons why I knew my tumor would leave my lung. Some of you, I know, have been following these posts for 4 years. Many of you have begun to read it only in the past year or two and have missed many of the posts I have written explaining why my faith in healing has been strong.

If you are a follower of Jesus Christ and consider Him your Savior, it is good to be reminded of the truth that is generally withheld from sermons and teachings. The truth is that divine healing is just as much of a promise from God as His peace, grace, and provision. There seems to be a pervasive reluctance among leaders in our churches today to expound upon the promises of God. I’m not sure why. There is so much power in God’s promises, if you have faith in them.

Faith does not mean that you HOPE in the promises. It means that you know God means what He says in His word. Faith is not believing that God can do something. It is knowing He will.

Dick and I have come to know that God is who He says He is. Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever (Heb 13:8). He is absolutely faithful to providing what is promised. He cannot change (Malachi 3:6). He keeps all of His promises. Every one.

What were these promises that Dick and I have stood on?

There have been specific promises regarding healing. Here are just a few of them:

Ps 103:4-5        He forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases.

Matt 8:16-17   Jesus cast out demons with a word and healed all the sick. This was to fulfill what was written by the prophet Isaiah: He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases.

Exodus 15:26   I am the God who heals you.

And then, more simply, there are the promises that Christians see in Scripture and can often recite by heart but they are not taken as promises that God will keep. I hear things like: the promises are all relative, they apply to others and not me, if God hasn’t fulfilled this promise by now, He is not going to, etc. So many believers do not stand on them as applying to themselves. They don’t have faith in them.

These are some of the amazing promises our Creator has made to us who follow Jesus Christ:

I Jn 15:14-15   This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have what we asked of him.

John 14:13       I will do whatever you ask in my name so that the Son may bring glory to the father. You may ask Me for anything in My name and I will do it.

Matt 21:22    If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer

John 10:10       The devil comes to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.

Mk 11:22-23   Have faith in God. 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. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Dick and I learned that there was not one word, even translated from the original Greek, which excluded physical or emotional healing from ANY of those promises. We knew that healing was God’s will because He sent Jesus into the world to destroy the devil’s work (1 John 3:8), and what did Jesus do? He healed everyone who asked him. If healing was not God’s will, Jesus was violating it every time he laid hands on someone and healed them or delivered them.

So knowing healing was God’s will, we knew we could look at any of the above promises and trust that they applied to my cancer. We knew God would be honored by our faith in the promises without wavering. Without faith, the Bible says, it is impossible to please God (Heb 11:6).

We learned we could cast that mountain of cancer into the sea in the name of Jesus and that it mattered.

And so we held fast.

Did I have some days of despair in 4 years? You bet I did. Plenty of them. Satan did his level best to derail my faith in healing. Pain and nausea and fatigue and constipation and inability to function in general takes a toll and I had a few dandy pity parties. Fear would creep into my soul and I would hide inside of it. But Dick refused to come to any party I threw and always set me back on track and we continued to claim our promises. We claimed them when others rolled their eyes as if we were in denial. We claimed them through the pain. We claimed them when the tumors grew. We claimed them when the cancer cells proliferated. We claimed them only because God said it was so.

You will hear the argument that we cannot dictate to God what His will is in this matter. You are right! You can’t. We didn’t ever tell God what to do for us. HE told US what HE was going to do!! We read and believed.

When God hands you a signed check, you need to cash it, not stow it in your desk of doubt.

People are so afraid of dictating to God what they want to happen that they can’t muster up any faith for what He has already promised WILL happen.

Faith is not conjuring up, through an act of your will, a sense of certainty that something is going to happen. No, it is recognizing God’s promise as an actual fact, believing it is true, rejoicing in the knowledge of that truth, and then simply resting because God said it. Faith turns a promise into a prophecy. A promise is contingent upon our cooperation, but when we exercise genuine faith in it, it becomes a prophecy. Then we can move ahead with certainty that it will come to pass, because God does not lie. (Streams in the Desert devotional, Reiman)

Listen up, believers. Listen and believe. The Bible is very clear about how faithful our Lord is:

Ps 145:13          The Lord is trustworthy in all He promises and faithful in all 
          He does.

Num 23:19        God is not a man, that he should lie; He doesn’t change his mind like humans do. Has he ever promised without doing what he said?

Titus 1:2            God cannot lie.

2 Cor 1:18-20    Jesus isn’t one to say yes when he means no. He always does exactly what he says. He carries out and fulfills all of God’s promises, no matter how many of them there are; and we have told everyone how faithful he is, giving glory to his name.

Psalm 33:4        God’s word is true and everything he does is right.

If these verses are nothing more than strokes of a keyboard on thin paper, then the Bible is a  farce. As Christians, we either take God’s Word at face value, and bank our lives on what He says, or we treat it with a sacreligious relativity. It cannot be both.

If God says it, you can believe it.

Even if you have to wait 4 years and 4 months to see the fulfillment.

Cancer makes you desperate. And our desperation led us to the truth of who Jehovah-Rapha, our Healer God, really was. We began to study and read and pray. And we found the promises. We parked our car of stage 4 cancer at the feet of the throne of God and basically told Him, “You have said that you will give us what we ask for if it is in line with your will. We want this tumor to go away. And we believe you will do it someday. We believe it because You said it. And we will wait.”

We chose to believe God’s words.

We chose faith, not hope.

We chose to absorb the truth and to wait.

We knew.

We are neither “lucky” nor “deserving” nor “a fluke.”

We are kids of the King who chose to listen to our Father and believe Him.