As a nurse, I both have and overhear a large number of extremely random conversations on a weekly basis. I recently was in a room where a woman was talking about how she and others her age had lived long lives and how they need to make room for others. In other words, she was talking about how they all needed to die in order for their posterity to have space on the planet to live. Fortunately or unfortunately, she is absolutely wrong. I say it’s fortunate that she’s wrong because it means people don’t need to die to make room for other people to live. It’s unfortunate because she clearly doesn’t believe that. And we largely tend to receive the results of what we believe. As that saying goes, “if you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right.”
As I have continued to talk about life and immortality over the years, one of the major questions I get asked is that if everything I am saying about what Jesus accomplished on the cross is true, and that we were never meant to die, and that He took care of defeating death on the cross, then why do people still die? And it’s a fair question. But I think it largely goes back to what this woman was saying in believing that she needs to die as the means to exit the Earth in order to make room for other people to live. If we believe we have to die, then guess what: we probably will.
Science is only more recently becoming able to quantify things that the Bible has stated plainly for thousands of years— things such as “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7). The Bible says it in a variety of ways, that ultimately what we behold and believe, we become. If we believe we have to die, then we will die. If we believe we get to live, then we will live. If we believe we are sinful then we will receive sin’s payment, which is death. If we believe we are righteous, then we receive the gift of righteousness, which is life. This principle doesn’t just touch on life and death, influences many other areas of life.
Overpopulation is not our problem on the Earth. Waste is. Poverty isn’t our problem. Waste is. Hunger really isn’t a problem. Waste and mismanagement are. Now, for any single one of those we could easily point to specific examples where they are, in fact, a problem right now, somewhere on the Earth. But my point is they don’t need to be. If we were to get rid of all of the corruption from every government in the world, we could probably solve world hunger in under six months. We have sufficient technology to desalinate the ocean to provide water for everyone all over the world. It would definitely take a lot of construction and planning, but the point is that it’s possible to do. The idea that we can’t do certain things or that we are incapable of certain things as far as providing food, water, or shelter for people is usually just a lie. On a local scale, it is definitely possible for there to be a temporary local hunger problem. When the storms hit North Carolina this past year, there was definitely a local problem. But a temporary local problem is not the same thing as saying that we are incapable of providing food worldwide. Not that the US is perfect by any means, but there are many times that the US has delivered food aid to other countries with starving populations and the leaders of that nation simply stockpiled the food as a means of control instead of distributing it to the people. At that point in time, corruption was the problem because the hunger issue could have been solved with the resources provided.
Lack and limitation mindsets will only ever yield us the same results that they’ve gotten us before: inability and incapacity. Quite often our problem isn’t that we lack something, it is that we have very firm beliefs in our lack and limitation. Sure, there may be lack in an immediate moment, but those who overcome are those who believe that they can overcome. Those who believe they can’t overcome tend to remain stuck in their problems.
I know that sometimes talking about life and immortality, living forever and never dying and never having an old and decrepit body can sound extremely impractical to people who are dealing with what most think of as real-world problems. But explain to me how death isn’t a real world problem and maybe I’ll believe you (hint: you can’t). The truth is, though, if we can believe the truth of the Bible, that we don’t have to die, maybe everything else that feels less-daunting than that will be believable too. Maybe when the Bible says that God has supplied all of our needs out of his immense wealth that we will actually begin to believe that and watch our needs and even our wants get met. Maybe when God says he has made us whole, he actually means for us to experience fullness in spirit, soul, and body. Maybe if we begin to believe that, we will see our bodies healed, our souls healed, and yes, even our spirits restored (while you may not be able to kill a spirit, you absolutely can damage one).
I want to encourage us today to believe for the limitless. To push the boundaries of our expectations beyond what we have been willing to expect before. The Bible says that God is “able to do exceedingly abundantly more than we can ask or think, according to the power at work with us . ..” (Ephesians 3:20). It is a conditional statement, which means that while God has limitless capacity, we have the ability to limit that capacity based on our beliefs and expectations. If we want to receive more, we need to believe more. I’m not talking about just working really hard in toil to believe. I am talking about transforming our mindsets to believe the truth that God has already been telling us because as we do that, we will experience the promises He has made to us.
Maybe believing in life and immortality is a bit much for you right now. Well then, maybe start by believing in a long life. And by long life, I don’t mean adding an extra five years, I mean adding an extra fifty. If the average age at death is in the 70s or 80s, and we know that some people live into their early hundreds, than realistically long life needs to extend beyond that, or it isn’t really long. It’s just the longer end of normal. If you don’t think you can believe for living forever, maybe start believing in experiencing constant divine health: that you never get sick and never get injured. Because in reality, if you never get sick or injured, and your body doesn’t experience decay, then you will never die. In fact, signs of aging will begin to reverse themselves as your body regenerates. I’m not saying you need to arrive there all at once, nor am I pretending I have either. What I can tell you, though, is that I very consistently have people tell me they think I am at least 10 years younger than I am. I personally believe that my long-held belief in life and immortality and the end of decay in the cosmos because of what Jesus did on the cross is responsible for my experience. I have been talking about this subject for the last decade and a half— and as I continue to renew my own mind to believe the truth, it seems only reasonable that my body would be starting to match that belief in an observable manner.
If you want to learn more about how to walk in this revelation of life, I encourage you to pick up a copy of my book The Gospel of Life and Immortality. In my book The Power of Impartation I also discuss some of the principles God has created in the cosmos that you can use to help apprehend the life God has already prepared for you in Christ Jesus. I also write regularly about the topics of inner healing and deliverance because the transformed soul is a major key for us to experience everything God has planned for us. If you want to learn more about how to do that, I encourage you to pick up a copy of my book Broken To Whole. And as always, I write on all of these subjects extensively so you can take a look at other articles I’ve written on this website as well.
