Sickness, disease, and infirmity are a major problem worldwide–in the U.S. alone we spend billions of dollars each year on health-related matters, whether hospital and doctor visits, medications, or herbs, essential oils, and other non-“medical” treatments to promote health and heal disease.  As believers, we have a different, more effective, and even longer-lasting solution available to us–divine healing through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately, even though according to Isaiah 53 Jesus paid for all sin, sickness, disease, infirmity, poverty, pain, weakness, and everything else that is less than His highest and best for us, it is uncommon to see believers living in that reality, as the “head and not the tail” and “above and not beneath” that we are promised in Deuteronomy 28:13.  There are a number of reasons for this, which I will attempt to explain as you read further.  Please keep in mind that while I have attempted to make this as exhaustive as possible, there is always more and deeper revelation to be had about how to step into wholeness in Christ.

Any healing journey must begin with diagnosis.  Why do people get sick and what causes their bodies to break down?  I will go into the longer answer in the text that follows, but the short answer is simple:  sin.    If we go back to the beginning, in Genesis 2:16 God told Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because when he did, he would die.  Romans 6:23 goes on to explain why this disobedience caused death, explaining that “The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  Jesus ultimately came to solve sin because it causes us to die.  John 3:16 is one of the most quoted Bible verses and it too explains the reason why Jesus had to come and die for our sins.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believed in him would not die but have everlasting life.”  Quite plainly, sin is what causes us to die.  John G. Lake once explained that sin is incipient death–a term that means that it is a slow, gradual dying process, much like an insidious poison that eats at the body for years before claiming a life.  Sin has gradually caused our bodies to decay, making the average age before dying to be hundreds of years less than what it was back in the beginning when they were living anywhere from six-hundred to nine-hundred years old or more.  Nowadays people are lucky to make it to 80, and considered blessed if they can last to 90, much less 100 or older.

divinehealingthatworks

Our bodies were never designed to die to begin with, but sin entered the world through Adam, and death entered as a result of sin, and thus almost all men and women die.  God is changing this, and releasing a revelation of the gospel of life and immortality that he speaks of in 2 Timothy 1:10-11, but before that we need to understand how we can fix the effects of sin and heal our bodies so we can engage that abundant life Jesus spoke of in John 10:10.

Dealing with sin starts out as simple as asking Jesus to wash us clean of our sin.  If someone is not a follower of Jesus, it is at that time they should believe that Jesus came and died as a blood sacrifice on their behalf, taking their sin upon himself before he died and removing it from them forever.  A prayer one might pray could go like this:

I choose as an act of my will to become a disciple of Jesus.  I acknowledge that Jesus lived on this earth as a human, died as a perfect man, and destroyed death, rising from the dead three days later.  From there, he went on into Heaven to prepare a place for me to join him.  I accept the direction of His teachings and those of the Holy Spirit within me, and I open myself up to be filled and baptized with Holy Spirit as the empowerment God has sent me to be successful as His emissary in the earth from this day forward.  I acknowledge this is a permanent and binding decision to follow the Perfect Being of Love, Jesus the Christ of Nazareth.  And so it is (Amen).

From the moment we become followers of Jesus, what is referred to as being “born again,” our spirits are set free from bondage to sin and they are given new life with Jesus.  The problem is that our soul–the realm of our mind, will, and emotions, has yet to receive this complete and total renewal.  Thus, we must continuously work with God to renew our thought processes and understanding of who God is and what he is like–his divine nature, so that we can become like Him in all we think, say, and do.

I wish we could say this is all that needs to occur to make one whole in body and soul, but there are many other factors that come into play, both in regards to contributing factors for physical and mental illness, and in factors that contribute to healing every manner of problem.  We will begin to take a look at these factors in the next installment of this series.

 

Divine Healing that Works-  The Complete Series

Part 1 – The Root Cause

Part 2 – Demons and Deliverance

Part 3 – Fragments

Part 4 – Limiting Beliefs

Part 5 – Casting Out Demons

Part 6 – Emotional Healing

Part 7 – Triggers and Healing Fragments

Part 8 – Faith For Healing

Part 9 – Power and Authority For Healing