Barb shared…
There’s a store called Aldi. I’ve been to this store once a long time ago. One day, I had it in my head I wanted to stop at this store. So I went and if you know the store, you have to have a quarter to get a cart. I went, “Oh no, I need a quarter.” I asked my daughter, “Do you have a quarter.” She said, “No.” I opened my purse to dig around to see if I had a quarter. This lady pushed her cart up and said, “Do you need a quarter?” I said, “I don’t know.” Number one, that was a lie. I needed a quarter. I was over to the side because it was cold outside to look through my purse for a quarter. She pulled her cart right up next to me and waited. She pulled out her coin purse, unzips it, has it open ready to give me a quarter. All the while, I’m digging in my purse for a quarter. She said, “Do you need a quarter?” Obviously, I need a quarter but I’m not taking the quarter! So, finally, I found a quarter. I said, “Look! I found a quarter.” She goes, “Oh okay.” She zipped up her coin purse and started to push her cart away and said, “I was going to do my good deed for the day.” I went, “Ohhh, okay.” I just totally missed it. Wanting to provide for myself and not letting her help me out. Then I said, “Lord, I know I just missed it.” He said, “I want to supply all of your needs.” He doesn’t look at a quarter. He sees she needs a cart. I’m going to get her a cart. He said “It doesn’t matter that you have a quarter in your wallet. I want to supply your need. I want to do it.” Here I am. “No. No.” Resisting. I totally missed it. So I got my quarter in my hand and walking over to the carts and this other lady walked up with a cart and said, “Do you need a cart?” I looked at my quarter and said, “Yes I do!” And I took the cart! I’m not going to miss it twice, Lord. I thought isn’t it strange how we think how we’re trusting the Lord and believing for Him to supply all our needs, but when He comes in what we would think is a simple way, we resist. If somebody says, “Hey, do you want to get ahead of me in line?” “Oh, no, no, no. It’s okay. I’m not in a rush.” Well, who says that the Lord doesn’t need you to be somewhere, that you need to be ahead in the line. But we resist when God tries to bless us. So He was trying to teach me that He wants to supply it all. I don’t care what is in your wallet. Don’t depend on what is in your wallet. What’s in your wallet is probably for someone else. Let Me get what you need to you. Not through your own resources. I thought the trouble that He went through to get those people there for me to be there at the same time that I was there at the store and how I said, “Lord, I’m so sorry that I frustrated Your efforts to bless me.” Cuz He had the angels out there getting her to get to the store with her coin purse and have extra quarters to be right there when I came in. There she was. Anyway, that’s my testimony. Don’t resist when the Lord is trying to supply for you regardless. He doesn’t look at it if it’s only a quarter or a quarter of a million dollars. It’s all the same to Him. It’s all supply. So don’t resist any of the supply.
Pastor Ray…
I have a testimony I wanted to share. It’s based on Romans 4:17–18. “I have made thee a father of many nations,) before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.” In the Message it says, “We call Abraham “father” not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn’t that what we’ve always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, “I set you up as father of many peoples”? Abraham was first named “father” and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, “You’re going to have a big family, Abraham!” That’s the truth. Because he was willing to believe when he couldn’t make it happen.
I was reminded of this yesterday. Someone shared a testimony about his wife. Out of the blue, she was given an evil report. Internal problems. His wife refused the word from the doctors. He said she kept confessing the right things, declaring the right things. They both were in agreement. In a matter of days, the doctors gave her a total, clean report. All of it was gone. They saw it, but it left.
Then a few years ago, both my sons and I were doing a project in St. Louis for a ministry to create a front in their sanctuary. They didn’t know what to do. We got connected with somebody from another company that specializes in sound equipment but not visual things. They wanted us to create a plan for this church in St. Louis. They accepted the design we drew. We built all the things we could build here in Minneapolis and then rented a truck and took it all to St. Louis. We had a week to get the project done. There were some serious pressure because we didn’t really know how we were going to carry it all out. We built something but didn’t know how we’re going to get it on top of what we built. No idea. We tried not to give into fear. The pastor kept coming in to look at it. “How’s it going?” “Oh, it’s going great.” After two days, we went out to eat late in the night. We went back to the hotel. Brian, my younger son, in the night got sick. Really sick. He was throwing up. Now that created more pressure because we needed all three of us to get the job done.
I went to the church and thought Brian would be fine. An usher came and got me. He said, “Your son is in the hospital. I’ll tell you where to go.” They didn’t know what started it. Since he was a little boy, he’s had to deal with diabetes. He’s been admitted to the hospital over the years because if it gets out of line then everything gets out of sync. He could pass out. What happened is it threw his body off and they were going to have to do something to get him back in line. They said there were some internal organs that they didn’t know what was happening. These organs were in trouble. “You could have this,” or “I think you’re going to have that.” They kept hammering nonstop negative things. I had to go back to the church to keep working while he’s in the hospital. So the pastor sent an assistant pastor to the hospital to stay with Brian. Thank God. So he had Charles Capps minibook “God’s Creative Power for Healing.”
I want to inject this. At the introduction of that book, Capps said, “Medical science tells us there are many incurable diseases such as forms of cancer, arthritis, heart disease, aids,” just to name a few. “This book presents a supernatural help to all people with incurable diseases. God’s Word is supernatural mixing faith with God’s Word by speaking it out of your mouth as a means of applying God’s medicine. The rest is up to the individual as to whether or not they have the confidence to take God’s medicine on a regular basis.” I love that. “The purpose of this book is to reveal principles from God’s Word and instruct you in how to cooperate with and apply these principles to obtain healing. Many today are seeking healing but yet they talk sickness and suffering until they establish that image in them.” They buy into the image. “Their thoughts and words produce a vivid blueprint and they live within the bounds and limitations of that blueprint. In the following chapters, you’ll learn how to make that blueprint line up with the Word of God.”
Okay, so, this assistant pastor has Capp’s book. The picture the doctors were painting was serious. You can start thinking, “Oh my gosh, am I going to make it out of here alive?” They were giving an absolutely ridiculous evil report. Continually. He had the Charles Capps book and all he did was read it over and over, confess it for eight hours in bed. It got so strong in him that when they’d come in and tell him, “I think it’s this… breaking down… blah, blah, blah…” He almost didn’t hear them; it’s like it went over his head. What he was confessing was building up his faith in the fact that he would be healed and not receive those reports and get out of the hospital whole. After eight hours, they came back in and said, “I guess you don’t have any of that. We think maybe you had food poisoning. You can leave.”
That sounds like a little thing but what the staff member said about his wife was we were thanking God that we’ve been here in this church receiving the Word of faith teaching and standing on the Word because we felt if she had even in her thoughts received it. If you receive it, then you’ll have it. What an awesome testimony. In eight hours, he went from a really bad report and then was able to get out of the hospital. I picked him up and finished our project. We left rejoicing. The pastor was blessed too.
Anyway, we call those things that are not as though they were! That’s what we do by faith, all the time. When we speak over such big things like a nation, we’re calling things that are not as though they are and we have to, no matter what prayer or prayers we’re praying, we have to be in faith. And speak those things out and not, like Capps said, a lot of times people will speak what they hear from the doctors and then receive it. They’ll walk in that. But if we begin to believe what we say, it shall come to pass.
Jennifer: I have a testimony. I’ve been coming to Living Word since my son was two. He’s going to be 15 soon. In 2017, I got diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, stage 4. it started with pain in my back. I just blew it off. I thought it’s going to be fine. Eventually, it got to the point where I was limping. Long story short, I did a mammogram and everything was fine. But I’m still feeling weird. One night my back was so bad that I had to have my son help me get out of bed. I couldn’t sleep flat anymore. I had to lay on my bed and rest my back on the wall. I got to a point where I couldn’t do it anymore. I called the doctor and made an appointment. They did all kinds of tests and didn’t find anything. She sent me to the U of M to a specialist there. Then I felt a sharp pain in my chest region. I went to Mercy hospital and they treated me like I was seeking pain meds. I denied it. They didn’t believe me. They did x-rays and didn’t find anything. So I left. Fast forward to Friday, I went to the U of M. Three hours, I needed to use the restroom but I couldn’t stand up. I called the nurse, she thought I was joking. A male nurse helped me go to the loo. They gave me pain meds. Eventually, I could tell something was up because they were pacing back and forth. They asked me if I was in an accident. I said no. They said my spine was fractured in multiple places. “That’s the reason you can’t walk.” Then they said, “You’ve got cancer.” What do we do? They said it’s stage four. We don’t know what to do. It started at your breast, now it’s everywhere from your brain down to your leg. So reality hit me. I had faith. I didn’t hear the bad news. All I heard was “Okay, God is going to fix this.” They gave me a drug. I said let’s start now and get going. They scheduled me for chemo. I started to shake so bad I thought it was the end. The nurse said it was because they forgot to give me premeds before chemo. That has been my journey since 2017. I’ve had chemo every week. I’m now on chemo every three weeks. In December 2018, I had to have a full body scan and they kept saying, “Jennifer, we don’t see anything anymore! You’re done!” But I want to praise God because He has been wonderful. I just want to be a testimony. It might help someone.
Dave shared…
Just to pick up with what Jennifer said, the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said to say this. It doesn’t matter what you think about your situation, it only matters what God says about your situation. You can spend a lot of time focusing on natural things in fear, holding yourself captive to that which is around you. Your mind is captivated by the things around you.
Barb was on autopilot and God’s trying to get her attention. God’s trying to speak to her about this little thing that really to most people doesn’t matter. But it isn’t about the little thing. It wasn’t about the quarter. The issue was about hearing God’s voice and letting God do His will.
That’s that I got with Jennifer how the Holy Ghost was telling her during the process that she was going through different things. He said this and this. That is the thing that will get you through the problem you face. But we focus on that one thing that… like focusing on that quarter. Yet God’s right here. I believe that God would have lined up people just to get her attention to say, “Hello.” We need to understand that. This is so key to getting a miracle in your life. We pay so little attention to it. It’s because we’re so accustomed to doing what we know to do. But what you know to do is very limited. If it’s a financial need, you’re limited to how much money you have in the bank. God doesn’t have any limits. What is your need? A million? A quarter? To Him, it’s not a value in the sense that we understand. He just sees it as a need and the Bible says “I shall provide all your needs according to” who’s riches? His riches. His bank of riches includes money, health, provision, peace. He’s got this bank full of stuff. It’s got your name on it. It’s waiting for you to draw upon that resource. The way you draw upon that resource is your attitude and perspective toward that which you face. It isn’t praying for hours a day.
I remember brother Hagin saying that concerning healing, “When it always came to my family, I never spent a lot of time praying about it. What I would do is get in the Word and see what the Lord said about healing. I’d meditate on the scriptures.” He’s saying that he got his mind in order. He was saying that he got his perspective in order. He said “I got the truth in my mind first. Then I let everything else around me change.” In your life, you face challenges. If you remember, Jennifer said this is what was telling me but I knew the Lord was giving me peace. These things were cues. The Lord is grabbing your hand and pulling you out of your circumstances by the cues He gives by the Holy Spirit. He’s speaking to your heart.
I went to the store the other day. I had one of these moments where I felt like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” You have a challenge you’re dealing with and you feel like, “Uhhh.” And tears started coming down my face. That’s how I felt. The Holy Spirit said something to me. Right away. He was right there with me. He spoke something to me. The Holy Spirit started talking to me about things I wasn’t even thinking about. Not only it addressed the issue I was dealing with and then He said, “And beyond that… this, this, this and this and this is going to be fine because I’m going to do this.” He just started speaking to me. I wasn’t even asking about the other stuff. I was focusing my attention on this mulligrubs thing I was dealing with. The Comforter came to me. He started speaking to me. As He spoke, faith started stirring up in my heart. I lost the tears and I got joy. I got excited about what He was saying because I was believing what the spirit of grace was saying. I wasn’t believing what the natural circumstances were saying. You see that? That pulled me out of that place and things changed instantly. All the things I was concerned about changed in the next day or two. It really has to do with the way you see it. As a man thinketh in his heart so is he. The way you see life, the way you see circumstances, the way you see your challenges, that’s how life is going to go for you. That’s why it’s important to be led by the Holy Spirit. He’s the one that takes you from the bottomless pit and brings you up there on high with Him in victory. That’s His job. It’s not your job to get you out of the funk.
