Are You Living In God's Reality?

---

The Creation

We are going to look at how the world as we know it is totally out of order with God's reality, and how that effects us in the realm of physical healing.

The beginning is usually a very good place to start, so let's go to the creation account in Genesis. When God created the world, He did it in an order that evolutionists tell us is impossible. If we try to the creation account from a strictly natural or scientific perspective, it sounds like nonsense and is very difficult to believe. It can't make any sense until we take God's character consideration. Let me explain why.

Genesis 1:1 describes God's very first creative act: God created the Heavens and the earth. According to the bible, He did that before He created the sun, moon or stars. Evolutionists tell us that it all started with gaseous "expanses" that somehow ignited and became our sun and other stars. The stars had little eruptions of fiery material that "broke off" from it, then cooled into planets. They believe that process took hundreds of thousands of years, and they believe that the sun had to be around a very long time before the earth came into existence.

[By the way, if you want to have fun with an evolutionist, just ask them where the materials that comprised the first stars came from. They won't be able to answer it; they have to fill back on "faith" that it just existed. (They call it a "premise," but it boils down to "blind faith.") In truth, it is easier to assume that a purposeful living God "just existed" and that He planned and created us. It takes more faith to assume that inert matter just existed, and by amazing series of coincidences that defy all the laws of probability, this inert matter generated life and the systematic and ordered world as we know it. I would love to go on with this tangent about how much "faith" it takes to believe in evolution, but this isn't a course on "refuting evolution," so I better get back to our main subject...]

God did not just create the earth on the first day, He went on to create light, then He separated it from darkness. Genesis 1:3-4 describes it this way: "Then God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Then He separated the light from the darkness."

The scientists have a problem with this passage as well. God still hadn't created the sun or stars before He created light and separated it from darkness. Our science tells us that is not possible to have light without some source of light. Evolutionists assume that the sun provided the first light. Yet this passage tells us that God created light before the sun. How is that possible?

Jesus said something in Matthew 19:26 addresses this dilemma nicely. He said, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."

The bible explains just how this is possible, both in Isaiah 60 and in Revelation chapters 21 and 22. The solution is very simple. God Himself radiates light, and He is a truer and brighter light than our physical sun. When God is present, we don't need the sun to make light, because God is light.

Let's look at the verses to back up what I just said.

Isaiah 60 talks about what Jerusalem will be like when God restores its glory (e.g., after Jesus returns). It starts out in verses 1 and 2 in a manner that most people think are figurative: "Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and His glory appears over you."

Why do so many of us take that figuratively? Probably because we have been taught to. My guess is that years ago, some bible teacher was trying to reconcile the bible with his understanding of science. Science tells us that the sun gives us our light but the bible can't lie. His solution was to suggest that God was talking symbolically, instead of literally meaning what He said. However, the passage itself proves him wrong, because it goes on to clarify that God literally meant what He said.

Look at verses 19-20. They say that God is going to replace the sun and moon (earthly sources of light) with His own glory and radiant light. The passage reads, "The sun will no more be your light by day, nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you, for the Lord will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory. Your sun will never set again, and your moon will wane no more; the Lord will be your everlasting light, and your days of sorrow will end."

We find something similar in the book of Revelation, where it describes what the "New Jerusalem" (or the "city of God") will be like after Jesus returns. Let's start at Revelation 21:1-2a: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God..." Now look at verses 22-23, "I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp."

In other words, God will eliminate the sun because He doesn't need it to make light. Why? Because God Himself is the source of light.

Let's look at one more verse along this line. Revelation 22:5 says, "There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever."

Now let's go back to the original issue: if we look at creation from the limitation of just scientific understanding, it doesn't make sense--how could God create light before He created the sun? The idea of Him doing so seems "wrong," because science tells us that we can't have light before we have the sun and stars (the sources of light).

The problem is not with the bible account, it is with the way science looks at the world. Science is limited, because it doesn't know or understand the nature of God; it doesn't take God into consideration. Once we realize that God is the source of light, the dilemma (over the order that He created things in) goes away. He did not need the sun to create light because He choose to radiate light from His own Person. That means He did not have to create the sun first.

To sum up what we have been talking about: there are two realms to our reality. There is the physical realm (the one we usually think about), but there is also a spirit realm to reality. If we want to know what is real, we have to consider the spirit realm in addition to the physical one.

What does all of that mean to us in terms of physical healing? It means that the world order (of what is correct/true) does not always line up with God's order. But we find it easier to accept the world order (e.g., science, the empirical method, etc) as reality, and God's order becomes a vague realm of "faith."

In short, the problem is that we are living most of our life in the wrong reality. We accept the "lie"--our misunderstanding of reality is based on the limits of a scientific method that doesn't know God as "truth." The real truth (or true reality) involves the spirit world as well as the physical one. If we remove the spirit world from our view of reality, then all we have left is science and medicine, and that doesn't leave much room for supernatural healing.

Please don't misunderstand me. I think science and medicine are very good things. I love the benefits of science. If it weren't for science, we would not have the internet, and you would not be reading this teaching series. Medicine is wonderful too--when I am sick and God doesn't heal me supernaturally, I go to my doctor and get healed that way. I like my doctor and am very grateful for his help.

Science and medicine are both good things, but they are not all of reality. We must not allow our thinking to be confined to just the thinking behind science and medicine, or we end up living the lie.

We must retrain ourselves to incorporate God's character and nature into our thinking and our view of reality. Then we can see what "true reality" looks like, and supernatural healing becomes a normal component of "reality." When we live in God's order/reality, sick people get healed and miracles become normal.

Faith Verses "Reality"

We looked at "reality" in our last lesson, and we discovered that our world is comprised of two different realities that both exist together: the physical realm and the spiritual realm. If you take just one without the other, you get an incomplete (and wrong) idea of what reality looks like. The goal of this teaching series is to help us "rethink" our picture of reality to include a better understanding of the spirit realm, so we can live in the fullness of all that God has for us.

We discovered that our western culture tends to disregard the spirit component of reality. It prefers to deal only with what it can observe, quantify and measure in the physical world. That leaves out an important piece of "reality," and it makes us "live a lie."

One part of that lie is has to do with the realm of healing. It reduces "healing" just to what medicine and science and what doctors can do for us. That is not good, because there are so many things that modern day medicine cannot deal with very well: cancer, nerve damage (that leaves a person blind, paralyzed or deaf), degenerative diseases such (as muscular dystrophy), brain damage, etc.

Modern day medicine has come a long way and I am very grateful for it. But there are still more things that modern medicine cannot fix than then are things that it can fix. If all healing was limited to what medical science can handle, it would make for a very sad world. Medicine is good, but it is not the whole picture.

In order to see the whole picture, we have to include the spirit-realm piece of reality, because it offers us solutions to many problems that medical science can't fix.

Unfortunately, most of our thinking is defined by the "scientific" view of reality. That thinking creates a problem for us. Even though we want to have faith, a big piece of how we think is limited to the what we see and hear and feel and sense in the physical realm. We want to have faith, but something inside of our thinking shouts that it we can't see it and measure it, then it doesn't really exist. We live this "lie" (that reality is limited to just our physical world), and we become trapped in wrong thinking. This handicaps us, making it harder for us to operate in the spirit portion of our world, and we have a hard time moving into the realm of miracle-producing faith.

The problem doesn't go away when we see our first miracle. Our faulty view of "reality" still interferes with faith, making it hard for us to believe that God will do the same miracle again the next time we pray. Let me give an example of what I am talking about.

In September of 1994, I prayed for a deaf lady at a meeting, and she was healed. God opened her ears! You would think that experience would have instantly given me faith to pray for any other deaf people who came my way. But my view of "reality" was still limited to the physical world and not the spiritual one. I wanted to believe that God would heal all deaf people, just like He healed that lady, but the scientific mindset of our culture hindered me. It screamed in the back of my mind, "That was an exception. Deaf people don't usually get their hearing back. That miracle was the exception, not what normally happens. It probably won't happen again, because it is not normal for deaf people to hear."

That wrong thinking had been engrained into me by our culture. As a result of that, I had to wait another two years before I saw the next set of deaf ears open.

Part of my problem was that I believed that healing came by faith, but I did not understand what faith was. I had a misconception that faith was convincing your self to really believe something that you knew to be "not really true." Let me give you an example of what I mean.

Have you ever been in a meeting where someone in obvious physical pain gets prayed for. When the prayer is over, you can tell from their body posture and facial expressions that they are still clearly in pain. But they claim to be healed, "By faith." If you press them, they will admit that they still have all of the symptoms, and nothing has changed. But they claim to be healed because they have faith that God will heal them. If you check back with them two weeks later, none of the symptoms have changed and they've gone to the doctor to get medicine for temporary relief from the symptoms until the "manifestation of their healing" kicks in. But they claim to be healed, despite all the physical evidence to the contrary.

That type of attitude was always problematic for me. I am a prophetic person so I put a very high value on "truth." If a person claims to be healed when all evidence says they haven't, that looks and feels like a lie to me (or at least a denial of reality.) It sounded to me like that type of faith was simply self-deception. I couldn't imagine why the God of truth would ask us to lie in the guise of faith. The concept of 'faith' in the context of healing, was confusing and problematic for me for a long time.

One day God finally explained it to me. There are two realms. I was trying to have faith based on the physical realm, but faith was a spirit realm thing. Faith is not blindly denying the physical facts around you in hope of what you want to have faith for. Faith is seeing into the spirit world and basing your behavior on that "reality" instead of on the physical realm reality. Faith is not based on what you wish (or hope) God might do for you; it is based on what He is actually doing. Most of the time, we can't see what He is about to do by observing the physical reality; we have to look at the spirit reality because God is spirit, and He operates in the realm of the spirit.

2 Corinthians 4:18 explains faith this way, "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" (NIV). Hebrews 10:23 tells us that we don't put our faith in this thing or in that event--we place it in God. It says, "Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful." Hebrews 12:2 tells us to look "to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith."

Thus faith is not hoping something will happen so hard that we somehow make it happen. Faith is the ability to see into the spirit world, to find out what God is doing, and then to act accordingly. Hebrews 11 is the famous "faith" chapter. Most of the verses in this chapter start with the words "By faith..." and go on to describe an action that was taken because of faith. In each case, the person looked past the physical reality into the spirit reality and saw what God wanted to do, then they based their behavior in the physical realm on what was going on in the spirit realm.

Hebrews 11:1 tells us, "Now faith is the...evidence of things not seen." I don't think it is saying we make something up and it happens because of our great faith. I believe the "unseen" in this verse is referring to the spirit realm--which is completely real, but it can't be seen or measured by physical world. Verse 3 goes on to clarify this a little. It says, "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible." In other words, faith starts by seeing what God is doing in the spirit reality, and somewhere along the line, that things transitions into our physical reality.

"Reality" is not the enemy of faith. To the contrary, faith is based in reality--but it is based in the spirit reality, not the physical one. Faith pulls things that God is already doing in the spirit reality into our physical reality. Once they arrive here, then they can been seen and felt and heard and measured.

Let's apply this back to physical healing. Let's take the case of a deaf person. If we look in the natural, we can easily establish that the person is unable to hear...we can measure and quantify it if the person is partially deaf instead of completely deaf. Doctor can look at nerve functioning and determine that the optic nerve is not carrying sound impulses to the brain.

There is a type of blind faith that just looks at the physical reality and says, "This person is deaf. Jesus healed deaf people on this earth, so maybe He will heal this person." If the faith doesn't see into the spirit realm of what God is actually doing, then there is not a lot of substance to it. If you pray for the person and they claim to be "healed," but they still can't hear anything--well, I am not sure that is faith. That might be denial. The problem is that no one crossed over into the unseen spirit realm to find out what God is doing in this case at this moment. Sometimes God is gracious and heals just because the person is desperate to be well. (God is nice and He likes to heal.) But there hasn't been a release of true faith that sees what the Father is doing and does it with Him.

But when we learn to stop limiting ourselves to only our physical reality, then we can press into the spirit reality and see what God is doing. Once we see Him heal in the spirit reality, it is easy to carry that over into our physical reality. And once the faith has been carried over into the physical realm, then we can see and measure the healing. James 5:15 tells us, "the prayer of faith will save the sick..." That healing is not a future-tense "I might be healed if I keep claiming that I am healed." No, that healing is observable and measurable. You can whisper in the previously deaf person's ears, and they can hear you and repeat back to you what you said.

Faith is not claiming a "lie" from our physical surroundings in hope that it somehow becomes real. Faith is looking past the physical realm into the spirit realm, seeing what God is doing, then acting according in response to what He is doing.

There is no conflict between faith and reality--we just have to be mindful of which reality that faith operates in, (e.g., the spirit reality) and focus on that reality when we are praying for the sick.

God's Order and How Sin Corrupts It

The world we live in is upside down from God's order. What we think of as "normal" is actually twisted and altered from what God designed it to be like. It has been corrupted by sin--in other words, the reality we live in is a "lie" because it does not line up with God's truth. What we think of as "normal" is actually backwards from how God designed it to be.

Let me illustrate this by looking at a couple of aspects of the original design. Genesis 2:4b-6 tells us,"4 ...When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5 neither wild plants nor grains were growing on the earth. For the Lord God had not yet sent rain to water the earth, and there were no people to cultivate the soil. 6 Instead, springs came up from the ground and watered all the land" (NLT).

God's initial design did not include weeds, thorns, thistles, etc. The earth's soil was fertile and the only things that grew in it where those things God had designed for our benefit. We did not have to work or toil in any way to prepare our food; it was simply provided for us by a loving God who wanted to take care of us. If Adam or Eve was hungry, all they had to do was to pick fruit off of one of the trees in the garden, and it sustained their body wonderfully. At that time, fruit was completely nutritious and provided everything that our bodies required for perfect health.

Thorns, thistles, weeds and the like came into existence as a result of sin. You know the story: God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree Of Knowledge Of Good And Evil, and they disobeyed Him. The result of their disobedience included the curse in Genesis 3:18-19: "17 Then to Adam He said, 'Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, "You shall not eat of it:" cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. 18 Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. 19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

The curse of sin literally brought physical changes into our world, pulling it out of God's perfect plan and contorting it. The elements of the curse that God spoke over Adam included:

• The fertile ground was cursed (weeds, thorns, thistles, etc).
• We were cut off from God's provision, e.g., we had to toil for our food.
• We had to process/prepare our food instead of it coming already prepared. [God introduced processing grain into bread instead of providing it "ready to eat without any preparation on our part." It is possible that the nutrition content of fruit changed at that time, making it incomplete. There is no record of Adam and Eve eating animals (protein) before the fall, but shortly after it Able becomes a shepherd and man began to eat sheep, as per Genesis 4:2.]
• Death, sickness and aging (the physical decomposition of our bodies back to "dust."

The curse put our physical reality out of order from God's initial plan for us. From the moment of creation, God loved us and wanted to take care of us; that is why He created the garden for us to live in. That is why He gave us the tree of life, so we could physically live forever with Him.

Sin made all that go away. Genesis 3:22-24 tells us, "22 Then the Lord God said, 'Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever-- 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken. 24 So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life."

God's desire to take care of us has not changed. Our physical reality has been distorted by the curse of sin, and it shouts to us that we have to take care of ourselves because God won't take are of us anymore. But the blood of Jesus has broken the power of that curse, and it puts those of us who belong to God back under His provision.

Jesus addressed this in Matthew 6:30-32, where He said, "30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32 For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things."

In short: even though our physical reality has been altered by the curse, the blood of Jesus reaches down to restore God's original plan of order in our lives. However, if we want to tap into God's provision for us, then we have to choose to live in God's reality (the spirit realm) instead of in our physical reality.

Let's look at another aspect of God's original creation order from Genesis 2:4b-6: rain. We tend to think of rain as normal--that is how God waters the plants, and rain is our primary sources of drinking water. But rain did not exist in God's original design. Genesis 2:5-6 says, "For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth...but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground."

The earth wasn't watered from above, it was watered from below. God's original way was better, because the only thing that got wet was the vegetation. God's original way of watering things was comfortable and convenient for us.

But that all changed when man became so wicked that God wished He had never crated us. Genesis 6:5-7a tells us, "5 Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6 And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. 7 So the Lord said, 'I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth.'"

Fortunately for humanity, there was one family who were "righteous," e.g. who had hearts to obey and honor God. That family was Noah, his three sons and the four wives. God commanded Noah to build an ark so his family wouldn't drown in the coming judgment. Once the ark was finished, then God created rain to carry out His decision to destroy His creation. Genesis 7:4 tells us, "For after seven more days I will cause it to rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made."

When the rain drops first started to fall, people had no idea what it was, because they had never seen it before. They had never heard of drowning either, but they soon got a chance to experience that first-hand.

[I have a personal theory about why God destroyed the world that way instead of just instantly striking everyone dead. I believe He choose something that was a bit slower so it gave people time to consider what was happening, so they could repent and turn back to Him. At that point, the judgment had begun and God was not willing to spare their physical lives from death. But I believe He wanted to spare their spirits and give them eternal life, if they would just repent and turn to Him. Noah had preached what God was going to do before the flood started. The water level went up over a period of time, giving people time to think about what Noah said and to repent. The bible does not record whether or not anyone actually repented as the flood waters rose. But I do believe the reason God did it slowly was in hopes that some might repent and end up in Heaven with God.]

We don't know why God choose to use "rain" to destroy the world, but we do know this for sure: rain was not normal; it was not part of God's original creation plan. God introduced rain in response to our sin and wickedness, as a form of judgment. Now here is the interesting thing-- after the flood was over and the water subsided, God did not go back to the original system where mist came up from the ground to water the earth. God allowed the new plan to remain--the one caused by our sin and wickedness.

Once again, our physical reality was marred by sin, and things were turned upside down. Now water fell from the sky instead of coming from the ground. Sin caused our physical world to be 180 degrees out of alignment with God's original plan. We are so used to our physical reality that we think of rain as normal--it feels like it is the original plan/design; but it wasn't.

The same is true of sickness and disease. They were not part of God's original plan either, but our reality has been twisted by sin and we tend to think of them as normal. But they are not normal, and they are not meant to be a part of a Christian's reality.

We will look at this more in our next lesson.

Sickness Is Not God's Will For Us

Our last lesson looked at how sin corrupted the physical world that God created for us. We looked at two examples of this from Genesis. First, we saw that God's original design did not have any weeds, thorns, thistles, etc. Those things came as a result of the fall. Second, we saw that in Gods original design, mist came up from the ground to water vegetation. Our wickedness caused God to turn that upside down. He created rain to destroy most of a wicked and rebellions creation. Suddenly we have water from above, falling down from the sky and getting everything wet.

There is another result of the curse of sin that effects all of us: sickness and death were introduced. They were not part of God's original plan, but the fall put us under the curse, causing sickness and disease to enter our world.

But we are not under the curse any more. The blood of Jesus broke the power of it over us. Jesus' death and resurrection did not just give us eternal life; it also annihilated the power of sickness and disease. That is why Isaiah 53:5 says, "But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed." That is why 1 Peter 2:24 tell us that Jesus "bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness--by whose stripes you were healed."

Yes, Jesus won eternal life for us when He died on the cross. But that was not the only thing he did--He also gained authority over all sickness and gave us His authority to heal the sick.

Let me ask you a question. The answer will seem pretty obvious, but here goes: If sickness and disease were God's will, then why would Jesus die on the cross to eliminate it?

Here is another (similar) question: If God is the one who makes people sick, then why would Jesus run around healing them? Jesus said that He could never work against what His Father is doing. He put it this way in John 5:19, "Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner." Acts 10:39 tells us that "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."

Acts 10:38 makes it pretty clear what God's stand is on sickness. (That verse also makes it clear what the devil's stand is on sickness.) In short, God is against it and the devil is for it. In fact the devil is the one who causes sickness, and Jesus' response to sickness was to go around healing those who the devil made sick.

We have been talking about two "realities" in this teaching series. There is the physical reality, the physical world as we can see and measure and experience it. There is also the spirit-real reality--God's will and God's activity. It is harder to see into the spirit-realm, so most of our thinking is based on our physical reality.

But whenever there is a tension between the two, the "real truth" lies in God's reality, not the physical one. That means we need to start seeing and thinking in God's reality in regard to physical healing. If we do that, then Heaven will invade earth. The spirit reality will start producing physical healings that we can see and observe and measure and experience. God's will (to heal the sick) will be accomplished in people's bodies.

The problem is that many of us don't see a whole lot of divine healing happen around us. We see mostly the physical reality that surrounds us; which is the devil's will and desire for humanity instead of God's will. We see sickness and we see disease; they seem real and normal to us.

But God's reality (the spirit realm) is the true reality. God's will is to heal the sick. In fact, there isn't a single instance in the bible where someone who was sick came to Jesus for healing and Jesus refused to heal that person. But there are many instances in the bible where Jesus healed the sick. He healed because He lived and operated in God's reality.

Think about it--Jesus only did what He saw the Father doing, and Jesus healed a lot of sick people. That means that the Father was healing sick people in the spirit reality, or Jesus would not have done it in our world. God would not do heal the sick if it was His will and desire for us to be sick. The truth is that God doesn't want us to be sick--He wants us to be well.

Let's look at this a bit more. If sickness was God's will for us, why would Jesus send His disciples out in Luke 9:1-2? It says, "9 Then He called His twelve disciples together and gave them power and authority over all demons, and to cure diseases. 2 He sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick." If sickness was in the center of God's will, Jesus would not have done that, because He and His disciples would have been fighting God's will. Shortly after that, Jesus sent out another 72 of His followers to go heal the sick in places where He wanted to go preach (Luke 10).

Jesus sent His followers to heal the sick, plus He personally healed multitudes of sick people. That sounds to me like Jesus was on a crusade against sickness and disease. God's reality invaded our physical reality, and as a result, sick people were healed. Why? Because sickness is not a part of God's reality.

Jesus had no trouble seeing into God's reality, and pulling that reality into our physical world. That is what made it possible for Him to heal so many sick people. It is clear from the way that Jesus acted that He did not want people to be sick, He wanted them to be healthy.

Sin messed up our world. It introduced sickness and disease, turning our reality upside down from God's reality. God's reality is a reality where the sick are healed and where His people live in divine health.

So why is it that we find it so hard to move in His reality and heal the sick? Why do so many who we pray for go away without being healed? It is because we live too much in our physical (limited) reality and not enough in God's truth. It is because we have trained ourselves to believe that you have to "see it" for it to be real, but faith operates in the unseen realm.

So what is the solution to our "faith" dilemma? It is to find a way to expose ourselves more to the spirit-realm where healings happen, so that our faith can grow.

Randy Clark has an amazing healing ministry. He takes large teams of ordinary believers on trips with him--usually different people on each trip. The teams go to various parts of the world (mostly to "second' and "third world" countries) to pray for the sick. So far, not one of his team members has returned from a trip without seeing God super- naturally heal at least one person through them. Many of these same people had tried praying for the sick at home and had not results. But when they traveled with Randy, they saw God heal.

One time Randy explained how this happens. He said that it is not about him or his anointing. It is about stepping out of our limited physical reality into the spirit-reality. He said that for most of us, our faith is based on our experiences in the physical world. It starts out low because we see a lot of sickness around us, but we don't see a lot of healing. We base or faith on what we experience more than on what we read in God's word. Then we step out and try to pray for some healing that is above our faith level, and we have a bad experience--the person is not healed. That experience (praying and not seeing the healing) lowers our faith level even more. Randy calls it a "downward spiral of faith."

Randy takes people out of this faithless environment to place where a lot of healing miracles are happening. People start to experience God's miracles and their faith level shoots up. Maybe they pray for a person with stomach pain, and that person is healed. That increases their faith. When they have a higher faith level, then they can see even bigger miracles. In short, Randy pulls people out of our physical reality for a week or two, and lets them live in God's reality--and then the healings happen.

So what do you do if you are living mostly in our physical reality and not seeing healings? If you can afford it, I recommend you take a trip with Randy Clark or Todd Bentley or another healing ministry that brings teams overseas to pray for the sick. That will give a boost to your faith, because you will get to experience God's healing power flow through you.

But if you can't afford to do that, there are other ways to "transport" yourself into God's reality. If there are places around you were physical healings happen, then start hanging around those places. When healing evangelists come to town, go to their meetings. Also, begin to read a lot of testimonies of healings. You can find them in bookstores and on the internet.

The more you fill yourself with God's reality, the easier it will be for you to pray for the sick and see God heal them through your prayers.

Sickness and the Demonic

What makes a person sick? Most of the time it is things from the unseen world. Some of the unseen things are physical and some are spiritual.

Science has taught us about the physical unseen things that make us sick: germs, bacteria, genetic weaknesses, etc. They are invisible to the naked eye, but they really exist--we can put slides under a microscope and see the germs that make people sick. Science has made this aspect of the unseen world real to us. We understand how germs and bacteria work so that we can change our behavior to be less susceptible to them.

For instance, when someone is sick with a cold, they are trained to do their best not to spread their germs to others; they cough or sneeze into a tissue to catch the germs, so they don't spread. When we are around someone who is cognations, we wash our hands a lot to kill the germs before they make us sick. We do our best not to breath the air that someone with a cold has just coughed into. We use antibiotic soaps and antibiotic sprays to kill bacteria that makes people sick.

Science has done a good job educating us about how to deal with germs and bacteria--it has become second nature to us. But that is not true in all parts of the world. I remember my first missions trip to a rural part of India, where we ministered in a remote village. The Indian pastor who we were working with was very intelligent, and he was well educated in the bible. But he lived in a rural village where the people are not educated in basic health care, and he did not know about germs.

He invited us to eat dinner at his house. His youngest son had a bad chest cold, and was coughing and sneezing. Since they did not know anything about germs, they did not try to do anything to stop them from spreading. The child ran around the dinner table and coughed into everyone's food, and into the faces of several of the family members. I tried to warn them about germs, but they could not comprehend (or did not believe) what I was talking about.

I did not want to get sick, so I politely "lost my appetite" and stopped eating after the child coughed into my plate. After dinner, I went back to my room and carefully washed my hands and face with antibiotic hand soap. I made it a point to spend as little time as possible in the same room as the sick child, who was sneezing and coughing all over the place. Why? Because I understood the unseen thing called "germs" and I understood how to deal with them. The child's family did not understand these things, so they did not take any precautions, and they all got sick.

The family did understand about demons, so they wrongly attributed their sudden outbreak of bad chest colds to the wrong source. They blamed it on the devil when the real culprit was germs. They rebuked the evil spirit that they believed caused their sickness. But they got no relief from it, because this particular sickness was not caused by a demon. In the end, we gave them cold medicine we had brought with us from the USA to help them, and the medicine did relieve some of their symptoms.

Here is why I am telling you this story: they understood one aspect of the unseen world that caused sickness--demons. But they did not understand the other one--germs. And because they did not understand how germs work, they were powerless to deal effectively with them.

Most of us in western culture have the same problem "in reverse." We understand germs and can deal effectively with them, but many of us are clueless about the other unseen cause of sickness--demons.

The bible makes it clear that demons cause many sicknesses and heath problems. Over and over again, they brought sick people to Jesus and He healed them by casting out a demonic spirit. Mark 1:32-34, tells us that Jesus healed some people by casting out demons. It says, "At evening, when the sun had set, they brought to Him all who were sick and those who were demon-possessed. And the whole city was gathered together at the door. Then He healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and He did not allow the demons to speak, because they knew Him."

Mark 9:17-27 attributes epilepsy to a demon. Matthew 9:32-32 attributes muteness to a demon. When Jesus cast the demon out, the mute man could speak. Luke 8 attributes a type of violent insanity to demons, and when the demon was cast out, the violent man became instantly sane and started behaving normally. Jesus cast out a great number of demons when he prayed for sick people. The reason He did that is because the demon was making the person sick. He had to get rid of the demon in order to heal the person.

Jesus taught this principle to His disciples. When He sent them out to heal the sick, He also gave them authority over demons. He tied the two things (healing the sick and casting out demons) together, because He understood that they were related. Jesus understood that not all sickness is caused by demons, and He did not do a deliverance every time He healed a sick person. But He also knew (and wanted His disciples to understand) that many times sickness is caused by demons. When a demon is the cause of a medical problem, then the only way to "heal" that problem is to get rid of the demon that is causing it. If you don't get rid of the demon, then the sickness will just come right back. When Jesus gave His disciples authority to heal the sick, He gave them authority over demons at the same time. Why? Because the two are closely related. Look at Matthew 10:1: "And when He had called His twelve disciples to Him, He gave them power over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease."

I have a friend who is a very godly woman. She loves the Lord passionately and is on fire for Him. Her husband is also a believer, but he has not made a serious commitment to obeying God. He has had a lot of medical problems and has been on medical disability for some time now. I believe he is effected by some spirits of infirmity. We pray for him and he gets a miracle healing, but shortly after that, he gets a different (but similar) medical problem. We can heal a specific illness or problem, but as soon as we do, the demon causes a new one to surface. It doesn't do a whole lot of good to cast the spirits of infirmity out, because they are attached to areas of his life/thinking that he hasn't turned over to Jesus. It is like he has an open door for these demons; anytime we cast them out, they just come back again. They will keep coming back until he gets rid of the sins and attitudes (unforgiveness, etc) that they latch on to.

As I said, he has been prayed for and miraculously healed many times. But shortly after he gets healed from one thing, a new similar thing pops up in his life. He is slowly growing in the Lord, and I am looking forward to the day when he will make that commitment to give Jesus total Lordship in every area of his life. When he does, he will be set free from a lot of bondages and oppressions and besetting sins, and at that time we should be able to permanently get rid of that spirit of infirmity. When that happens, we will be able to get him all healed up and off of disability.

One time his wife, my friend who is on fire for God, got a serious stomach aliment. She felt nauseous all the time and threw up most of what she ate. She tested for pregnancy and it came back negative. At first she through the stomach problems were emotional, possibly related to an inner healing issue that she was working through. That motivated her to work through it quickly and release true/complete forgiveness. She achieved complete emotional freedom from the issue, but the stomach and digestive tract problems continued after that. So she went to her doctor, who ran tests, but he could not find anything medically wrong with her. He even ran the serious tests, like stomach cancer, but (to everyone's relief) they came back negative. Of course, she also got healing prayer from many different sources as this was going on, but the problem persisted. By then the problem had been going on for several weeks and she was getting really weak from not being able to keep her food down and absorb nutrition.

We were talking on the phone and suddenly this idea hit me. Since she was married to a man who we believed had a spirit of infirmity, perhaps her husband's spirit was causing her problems? This occurred to me because husband and wife share a very intimate contact, and some people believe that demons can transfer from husband to wife during intercourse. So I suggested that we pray regarding a spirit of infirmity from her husband.

She was open to the idea and came to my house for prayer. We prayed for about half an hour. I took authority over any unclean spirits that may have transferred to her from her husband. Something came up during that time and the Lord revealed that she had believed a lie about her father not caring about her. God healed the effects of that lie. Then I rebuked any spirit of infirmity that may have entered from her husband to cause this digestive problem. I cancelled it's assignment in Jesus' name and commanded it to leave her. Right then, her stomach pain decreased very noticeably. After the spirit was gone, I switched to straight healing prayer to get rid of the remaining symptoms.

My friend experienced about 80% relief from stomach pain and the nausea totally left her. Over the next couple of days, her problems continued to improve until she had 100% relief--she was able to eat without any nausea or vomiting or stomach pain.

In my friend's case, a spirit of infirmity was causing her problems. It came from an unexpected source--her husband. The spirit was able to attach to her because of an old wound (related to her father's reaction). She had been hospitalized as a teenager with a stomach problem and her father was nervous about hospitals. He sort of joked nervously the whole time he visited her, plus did not come often or stay long. That got translated in her thinking into the lie that he did not care about her. After God broke the power of that lie, the spirit of infirmity had nothing to hold on to and it was easy to get rid of. Once the demon was gone, the majority of the problem left with it, and simple healing prayer took care of any residual problems.

The reason I shared this story is to illustrate how demons play a role in making us sick. When this happens, we have to deal with the demon in order to get the person well.

Angels And Healing

We have spent this teaching series talking about the two realities that we live in: the physical one and the unseen (or spiritual) one. Both of them are real, but we have been trained to put more credence on the physical one, because we can see, measure, and observe it. But faith operates more in the spirit realm. If we want to move in faith, we must learn to see into the spirit realm. We must never equate faith to wishful thinking or to blindly hoping that something will happen; faith is seeing what the Father is doing (in the spirit realm), and then doing it with Him here in our physical world. Physical healings take place in when we peak into the spirit to see that God the Father healing the person. Then we pray in accord with what God is doing, and we see His will break into our world with a miraculous healing.

We also learned that what we think of as "normal" is actually corrupted by sin; it is twisted from God's perfect will. For instance, sickness is not God's desire for us, it is a result of sin. God doesn't make people sick, the devil does. We see this clearly from Scripture. 1 John 3:8 tells us, "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil." In short, one of Jesus' missions on earth was to destroy the works of the devil. Acts 10:38 tells us how He accomplished that: "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, [and He] went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him." In short, the devil is the one who opposes God's will by making us sick, and Jesus destroys his work by healing the sick. That makes it pretty clear that God's will for us is healing, not sickness.

In fact, John 10:10 tells us that the devil comes "to steal, and to kill, and to destroy." In short, the devil is so keen on making people sick that he has a large group of demon's whose job is to make people sick. They vary in rank from low level spirits of infirmity (general sickens and infirmities) to higher ranking demons who specialize in things such as blindness, being crippled, blindness, muteness, to spirits of death (who bring terminal diseases like cancer, etc). Our last lesson looked at the role of demons in making people sick. We saw that some sickness is purely physical (germs, etc), but some sickness is spiritual demons). We also learned that when a demon makes a person sick, we have to get rid of the demon in order to get that person well.

But demons are not the only creatures from the spirit realm who are involved in sickness and healing. God's servants, the angels, are also active in this.

The bible gives us an example of this in John 5:4. It says, "For an angel went down at a certain time into the pool and stirred up the water; then whoever stepped in first, after the stirring of the water, was made well of whatever disease he had." This is the only clear-cut reference in Scripture to angels healing the sick, but there are other passages where we can take that inference. Randy Clark does an excellent job of developing that in his Open Heaven teaching series. I am not going to duplicate that in my lesson, but you can read Randy's teaching.

I would like to share an experience that I had with angels and healing. I went on a missions trip to Brazil with Randy Clark in October of 2002. Randy taught the local pastors during the day and had outreach crusades at night. As members of his ministry team, we sat through his teaching in the day sessions and then prayed for the pastors. That meant we got to hear the teaching that Randy did for the pastors. The first day, Randy did this teaching on the role of angels in healing. It was all new to me and I took careful notes. What he said at that training meeting is very similar to the Open Heaven teaching I referred to in the above paragraph.

At the time, this was all new to me, and it was not easy for me to accept at first. I really respected Randy (I consider him a spiritual father and a role model), but I was not sure I could buy what he was saying about angels being involved in physical healing. We had some free time between the afternoon meeting and the evening one, so I prayed and asked God to show me if what Randy taught was true.

That night at the evening service, God whispered something to me just as the ministry time began. He said, "Teresa, I am assigning a healing angel to minister with you tonight. Watch and see how powerful the ministry time will be, then you tell Me if what Randy preached about angels and healing was true or not."

As soon as we were released to minister, I was mobbed with people who wanted prayer, and God powerfully touched just about every one of them. It seemed that as soon as I touched someone, before I could get more than a sentence of prayer out of my mouth, the power of God would hit them. There was a lot of shaking and falling and crunching and other manifestations of God's power on people. Because I had an interpreter, I got a report of what happened with each person. Almost everyone was healed to some degree and about 35 were totally healed. One lady had a cyst on her breast that disappeared while we prayed...she examined herself in the lady's room and came back to report the cyst was gone. That may have been the most powerful healing ministry time that I have ever experienced. There was such a strong anointing to heal that it was fun and exciting to pray. Time flew, so many were healed, God came in such power.

When it was all over, God asked me, "Well, Teresa, what do you think now?" I had to admit that working wit a healing angel had made a huge difference in praying for the sick. God wanted to underscore the role that angels play in healing, so the next night He left me on my own to pray (e.g., He did not assign a healing angel to assist me.) I still saw healings, but I had to work much harder for each one. I had to pray for people for about ten minutes each instead of getting the instant healings. I ministered for an hour that night and I only saw about 5 or 6 healings. Then God asked me if I noticed a difference between ministering on my own or ministering with one of His healing angels. You bet I noticed a difference. That experience convinced me that angels really do play a role in healing.

I have since learned that God is capable of doing whatever He wants to do totally on His own--He doesn't need assistance or help from anyone-- but He loves to involve His creation with Him in doing His works. We see an example of this in the Great Commission, where Jesus chose us to be His witnesses. He did not really need human witnesses, He could have divinely appeared to people, or spoke to them in dreams or whatever. But He choose to involve us in a work that was important to Him because he loved us and wanted to give us a chance to do things with Him.

He used the same pattern with His disciples. He healed all sorts of sick people and did not need any help with that. Yet He choose to involve His disciples in what He was doing. He gave them authority to heal the sick and sent them out two by two to the towns He was about to go minister to. He sent them "to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick" (Luke 9:2). Jesus let His disciples participate with Him in what He was doing because He loved them. He does the same thing today with us for the same reason.

He does the same thing with the angels. He lets them participate with Him in what He is doing. We see it over and over in Scripture. When God wanted to speak to someone, He usually sent an angel to speak for Him. God spoke to Hagar through an angel in Genesis 16:7-11, He spoke to Abraham through an angel in Genesis 22:11. He spoke to Jacob through an angel in Genesis 31:11, He spoke to Moses through His angel in Exodus 3:2. The list of God speaking to His people through His angels goes on and on.

But that is not all God did with angels. When He wanted to judge Sodom and Gomorrah, He sent His angels to evaluate the cities, and to deliver Lot and his family out of Sodom before the judgment fell (Genesis 19). God used an angel to lead the children of Israel through the wilderness (Exodus 33:2). God used his angels to carry out His judgments, such as the Passover angel (Exodus 12), and the angel who struck the people of Israel dead when David did the census (2 Samuel 24). God used an angel to strengthen Elijah for his journey in 1 Kinks 19. God assigns angels to protect and deliver His people (Psalm 34:7). God sent His angel to fight and defeat enemy armies (Isaiah 37). God sent an angel to deliver Peter from prison (Acts 12). And God sent an angel to stir the waters in the pool of Bethesda, to heal whoever stepped into the water first (John 5:2-4).

God has a habit of involving His servants in doing His works with Him. So it should not surprise us that angels are involved in healing the sick, just like we are. Jesus has given us authority to heal the sick, as per Mark 16:15-18. We can heal the sick whether or not we work with (e.g., cooperate with) His other servants, the angels. But it is stupid to turn our noses up at any resources that God releases to assist us in doing what He tells us to do. One of those resources are His healing angels. If we are smart, we will learn how to cooperate with them in healing the sick and advancing God's kingdom.

People ask me, "Teresa, how do I cooperate with the angels in praying for the sick?" The answer is simple. Keep your eyes on God, not on the angels. Never exalt them to the point where you are worshipping them, because we are only to worship God. His angels are there to serve God, just like we are. Treat them with the same respect you would show an anointed human minister who was working with you on a project. Don't over emphasize them or over-exhort them, but at the same time make room for them to minister with you. You might try praying and asking God to send His angels to minister with you.

Never forget that we live in two realities at once--the physical world and the spirit reality. Both are equally "real." The more we can see into the spirit realm, the more we can perceive what God is doing and do it with Him. And as we do that, then Heaven invades earth and God's perfect will is accomplished in our midst. And part of God's perfect will is to cast out demons and to heal the sick.

[Previous Lesson] [Next Lesson]

Support Gateways of His Light by sharing this page on social media