Suggestions come thick and fast, earnest suggestions, encouragements, hopes, ambitions and spirit-filled replies. When someone is ill and prayer is called for, we ask for healing. It comes and I say, “Thank you,” and “Glory to GOD for that.” I’m also saying we need healing God’s way.
“Test all things; hold fast what is good.” 1 Thessalonians 5:21
Others words and mine
I am so grateful to every person who has written, texted or posted to me with a word about or for my husband’s overcoming of Covid-19. Like me, many have sought the Lord to ask His will and His way.
My husband is now well on the way to recovery. The worst is passed. May the best be yet to come. All glory to GOD!
The heart of this post is not to draw a conclusion as to how the recovery will be fully manifested. At this stage, my husband is on a long road to recovery, the recovery the Lord promised me the day before Alan went to hospital. I’ve no doubt he will recover. I have no doubt I heard the LORD… And just in case I might have doubted, He confirmed it 3 more ways since His initial message, “Alan will recover.”
So what about “what if’s”?
Doctors want the best for their patients, and work hard to attain it. And yet they are trained to be very adept at drawing the worst scenarios for family members.
When you’re given a what if that contradicts the word from the Lord, reject it — but graciously. It may irk the doctors as you don’t acknowledge their concern. But your loyalty is not to them but to the patient. Overriding the word of a doctor dismisses the enemy in a heartbeat.
And if you’re given a word from a relative or friend that pushes a particular agenda, even if you hope for that agenda, stand firm on what the LORD has said.
There have been times when intercession led to supernatural requests but a backlash came to bite my husband immediately thereafter. I’ve since prayed that issue through so it doesn’t happen again.
The Sovereign LORD is in charge
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths.” (Proverbs 3:4-5)
Our LORD is outside time. He can work any way He wants to work. I give Him carte blanche — unrestricted access to Alan, to me, to my family’s health and healing.
The Lord may choose to do a quick thing. It could confound and astound medics in a Western hospital if a critical patient suddenly stood up fully restored. Or it may build and deepen faith where a patient is quietly restored to full health when he was on the brink of death. The LORD knows the best way.
I do know this (which was shared recently by a dear prayerful friend):
“The eternal God is your refuge, And underneath are the everlasting arms; He will thrust out the enemy from before you, And will say, ‘Destroy!’”
(Deuteronomy 33:27)
We aren’t to lag behind; yet let’s not rush ahead of the LORD either.
I don’t know whether the healing process will be extraordinarily quick, or slow, or in line with the natural course of physical healing. I’m open and it would be great for my husband not to have to fight his way back in the physical to full health and strength. He has rescued Alan from sickness and will deliver him to health. But, I do know, and have learned, that healing will be done GOD’s way. And there is no better way.
A Revelation about Spiritual Maturity, Physical Reality and Miracles: Spiritual maturity means facing challenges without contest. It means fighting the good fight and finishing the race. Today, I believe it also means God enabling us to see into the future and into Heaven at a deeper and broader level than ever before. We are in a new age. Old things have passed. New things have begun. Let’s begin to allow God to use us to shift them.
Ready: God is doing a new thing in His people and we need to be prepared to be ‘blown away’ by His power and presence at work in us. We need to prepare ourselves for a paradigm shift.
Set: We live in a material world. Reality is tangible. But I believe our awareness of reality needs to expand – at least for the spirit-filled believer in Jesus Christ, hungry to mature and see God’s purpose fulfilled in his life. This is a time for a paradigm shift.
What is a paradigm? A paradigm is a way of thinking, a way of perceiving our reality based today on our previous experience and the assumptions we’ve developed from those previous experiences.
For example: We base our thinking on certain assumptions, which in turn leads us to make certain decisions. For example, the thought “I’ll eat lunch at noon today because I’ll be hungry at noon today” is based on our previous experiences which established our eating habits . We usually feel hungry at noon and so we assume we will feel hungry today. Because of a pattern in our previous experience, we anticipate or expect we’ll be hungry at noon today.
A paradigm shift is a shift in our thinking, our expectations and assumptions. The example above is trivial. But it leads us somewhere… As we walk out our faith and grow in maturity, God will use us when are prepared. Studying the Word of God, learning to give and receive love and forgiveness, surrendering every moment of our day to the Holy Spirit – all of these are signs of our growing spiritual maturity. Our character is being built. But there is more to this faith-walk. What about the miracles?
For what are we being prepared, if not for more of God’s glory on earth as it is in Heaven?
Friends, I want God to move mountains for the Glory of God and as a witness to the world! Jesus said with faith we could. How about you?
I believe there is something new on the horizon for the disciples of God who wish to fulfill their purpose in Christ. What it is and how it effects our walk with God has to do with our concept of physical reality. There is more to be learned about our physical world and it’s boundaries. In order to move in God’s miracles we need faith. To move beyond our assumptions and limitations and into an understanding of different dimensions, we will be enabled to move in God’s miracles.
Today, humankind’s suspicions about other dimensions and ways of perceiving our world is growing. But we must stay God-centered. Isn’t it time to fully explore the supernatural and otherworldly nature of His universe? How do we move mountains? How do we do greater things than we saw Jesus do?
I believe it has to do with our understanding of reality. Perhaps it is through a Godly-supernatural transcendence of reality that the limitations of our physical world are overcome, and the sort of miracles that Jesus accessed we also will be able to do. Individuals in our secular world today assume what we touch is real. In fact, some people believe “if we don’t see it or can’t touch it, it’s not real.” I’d like to propose a paradigm shift.
What is most real, Believer, is that which we cannot see. Until we live and breathe this truth, we are limited in our faith and action.
Consider scriptures such as the following: “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for the pulling down strongholds.” (2 Corinthians 10:4) Clearly the literal/physical meaning of weapons is being replaced by the concept of spiritual weapons. I suggest that this transcendence into the spiritual realm can be discovered elsewhere in scripture to help us deepen our understanding of, commitment to, and maturity in Christ.
“But Jesus said to him, “No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fitforthekingdomof God.”(Luke 9:52)
When we read scripture from the 1st Century church, do we filter everything based on our current understanding? Let’s consider Jesus’ words carefully, and put it in the in light of a paradigm shift. Let’s go back to what Jesus and the hearers knew.
First, we need to be fit for the kingdom of God. How do we know if we’re fit? For one thing, we look forward (not backward). For another, we relinquish the plow (and the provision by self-effort that it symbolizes).
I have nothing but an inner sense of revelation; I believe the plow also represents the confines of physical reality.
“Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul; neither did anyone say that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they hadallthingsincommon.” (Acts 4:32) Jesus encourages us to let our possessions – or family members or significant persons or things – go. As we become unfettered in our mind and will, God may move us into a different dimension where the tangible cannot hold or limit us. But in order for that to happen, perhaps, first we have to let go.
John transcended our reality when he saw the Revelations. Philip was translated in order to meet the Ethiopian Eunuch. Jesus walked on water; he moved through walls when doors were locked, he was translated to be with Moses and Elijah on a mountain. Might it be that, through faith he overcame physical reality so that he was able to accomplish these miracles?
Understanding how his faith worked does not change the fact that Jesus worked miracles. But perhaps in order for us to do ‘greater things’ for the Kingdom, we need to alter our perception of reality so that we can overcome physical – and mental – limitations, and allow God to increase our faith.
Jesus promised ‘greater things would we do.’ The Church seeks to operate in the healing miracles and the food multiplications and to ‘move mountains, but relatively few of us are doing these things. I’m wondering if a key to this is a paradigm shift to our understanding of reality. Can we begin to operate more effectively in the realm of God’s supernatural power when we have an improved understanding of God’s different dimension(s)? Is it through this revelation that we can defy the natural world and it’s natural laws – which are subject to God’s laws? Are we being called to overcome the physical world in a Godly way?
The 1st Century believers may well have done this; perhaps we need to do this in order to bring the fullness to earth as it is in Heaven, the fulfillment of what Jesus promised for his Church, and bring it all of the glory to God.
Steps to enabling a paradigm shift from a tangible focus to the supernatural: 1. In God’s timing, willingly surrender your worldly goods in principle (I’m suggesting you don’t literally give away everything, but through Holy Spirit’s conviction upon you – if it should come to you – surrender all of your worldly goods to God). This way you break free of any hold they may have over you. 2. Pray and ask God to bring us all into a deeper experience of His love and glory. 3. Seek the will of God: Does He want you to move in the supernatural? Ask Him to take you there in the Spirit. 4. Go (physically, literally) to a place local to you where a miracle is needed. Ask God to show you Truth and how to bring it closer to whomever you are with: in hospital, in the street, or in your home or workplace. Be open to whether the miracle will be measurable in the physical realm or internal. 5. Pray for a miracle.
Go: We can’t manufacture miracles. We can’t even manufacture faith. But we can ask God for both, and we can grow in our understanding of how He can make these as accessible to us in a greater way, as He did for the 1st Century Church.
