The Victory

"God never asks us to wait, knowing we will die ..."

EVERYTHING doesn’t need to be a mountain, nor every mountain be a bad thing. I stumbled across a song that says this well. The chorus goes:

“Maybe that mountain saved my heart from a valley. Maybe that desert taught me to pray for rain. Maybe that water never parted for a reason. And You're leading me a better way.” (“A Better Way” by The Color)

Every time I hear it, it provokes me. One, that we expect every victory TO LOOK the same. God has shown, time and time again, that He does things differently. He will be seen as our victory. And two, that we expect every victory to look THE SAME. We get so bent out of shape when it isn’t and so don’t see ourselves clearly.

Often, the victory comes when we realize our anger, our emotions, aren’t godly. I prayed this weekend for understanding. After struggling with a situation for some time, it finally hit me if I would change how I feel about it, then it wouldn’t be a problem anymore.

We spend so much time defending our feelings. Like we have the right to be mad, to be offended, to speak out, and sadly, for some, to be depressed, to take their own life. God’s desire for us is long life. He wants us to never give up but to live happy, healthy, satisfied lives (Psalm 91:16). Most in the church are afraid to encourage someone who is fighting a deadly illness when it drags toward death. But when one man overcomes it and another one lays down and gives up, though Heaven is a glorious gain, there is a fracture in such opposite thinking.

Does Jesus heal all sickness and disease? Is His heart our healing, or is He only for those who are tough enough? Those with heaps of faith?

Healing is for everyone and for anything we suffer.

What is the way toward healing then? The answer: Commitment to the process of it. I’ve come to realize, through my own walk toward full health, that God often uses natural timing. Though He can and will heal instantly, just as He set the sun to rise in the east and to set in the west, a defined process of time, His way of healing each of us is also a process of time. God never asks us to wait, knowing we will die before there is any fulfillment. It looks that way to us, but that isn’t who He is. He does not lie in His Word. Jesus came to give life more abundantly (John 10:10). Knowing Him well is what keeps us holding on, keeps us going forward. He is hope and endurance. In opposite, not knowing Him well, believing errors – about Him as Healer, about ourselves as children of God, about doctrine – brings doubt, and doubt fed upon causes us to give up.

Many things, I have had to walk through. Here is the mountain that saved me from the valley and the desert that taught me to pray. Here is the water I wanted to part and there to be dry land and a much easier route. Instead, He had a better way. One time, Jesus rebuked the storm and it calmed. The word used there actually means the storm stopped talking (Mark 4:39, “be still”). Another time, Jesus got in the boat, and it was immediately at the other side of the lake (John 6:21). Lazarus, His friend, died while Jesus seemed to dilly-dally, a distance away. When He showed up at the tomb, Martha and Mary both said, “Lord, if you’d been here, he wouldn’t have died!” (John 11:21,32).

Perhaps the biggest example is Jesus Himself. The Jews had formed all sorts of ideas about who the Messiah would be, so that when Jesus ministered among them, even healing the sick in entire multitudes, and multiplying bread and fish to feed thousands, most of them grew angry and denied He was it. With miracles all around them, they asked for a miracle (John 6:30). We are one with Christ now. He lives IN US and walks WITH US. We must put this in our thinking so much that we cannot be separated from it. Even in the midst of pain. Even when the doctor gives us a negative report. Even when family and friends don’t understand what we’re dealing with. Whatever the wall in front of us or within us, we are not alone, God is here, and He promises us total healing. Healing is the only ending.

I cannot let anything, even pain, distract me from the Word of God. – Becky Combee, “Don’t Be Distracted” (Listen To This Sermon: https://youtu.be/-GbctHFDwh0)

Minister Lance Wallnau describes our struggles as endless circles. We feel trapped with no way out. This helps me because doubt isolates us. And isolation breeds loneliness and discontent. But know this—others are in similar shoes, some worse, all slightly different. That Minister Wallnau described it so well removes the burden from me. I place it down at Jesus’ feet. And plan to leave it there.

“Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy-laden and overburdened, and I will cause you to rest. [I will ease and relieve and refresh your souls.]” (Matthew 11:28 AMPC)

“Yea, though I walk through [in one side and out the other] the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” (Psalms 23:4, my emphasis)

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com