BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

As I’ve already said, it’s really quite simple. God laid it out in detail for us in the Bible. He said in Proverbs 4:20-22: “My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart. For they are life unto those that find them, and health [or medicine] to all their flesh.” Notice, those verses say that God’s words are what activate His healing process. We put that process to work in our lives by attending to what He says and inclining our ear toward it. To attend to something means “to give our attention and make it our priority.” To incline means “to lean.” So, applying those terms to God’s WORD means that we make it our authority. We don’t pull away from it when we find something in it we don’t understand or that doesn’t fit our lifestyle. We lean toward it. We say, “That’s in the Bible, so it must be true. It doesn’t matter if it contradicts what I see and feel in this natural realm. It doesn’t matter that it requires me to change. I’m going to receive it. I’m not going to alter The WORD to fit my lifestyle. I’m going to alter my lifestyle to fit the Book!” The Best Flu Shot Ever If you’ll take that attitude, you can tap into God’s supernatural healing power even if you don’t yet know a lot about the Bible. I proved that very early in my Christian life. Even before I learned anything about how to walk by faith, in my early years as a believer, I got healed by simply believing and receiving one scripture. I’ll never forget that day. I was coming down with the flu and I was really hurting. I’d driven Gloria to the dry cleaners, and sitting in the car waiting for her I felt so sick I thought, She’s going to have to drive us home. I had my Bible laying there next to me on the seat and it was open to 1 Peter 2:24 which says by Jesus’ stripes “ye were healed.” Though I certainly didn’t feel healed at that moment I set my attention on that verse. I leaned into it and thought, If I was healed, then I am healed. If Jesus purchased my healing by His stripes, then healing already belongs to me. It’s mine now. Picking up my Bible, I put my finger on that scripture, read it again out loud, and said, “LORD Jesus, I choose to believe this. By Your stripes I was healed. So, I am healed right now.” I sat there for a few minutes, thinking about that and praising The LORD and when Gloria got back into the car, I realized I felt strong enough to drive home. By the time we got to the house, I actually felt good enough to eat supper. By bedtime that night I was feeling really good. I got up the next morning with no symptoms at all. I was such a spiritual novice back then I didn’t even know exactly what I’d done. I didn’t know I’d followed God’s prescription for healing. I was just following the leading of the Holy Spirit. He drew me to The WORD and my spirit instinctively knew how to respond. I received what God said, believed it and produced life. That’s what the born-again spirit is designed by God to do. As Jesus taught in Mark 4, it’s like the soil in a garden. In the natural, when seed is sown into earthly soil, if it’s good seed and good soil, and you’ve got water and sunshine, the seed will automatically grow. You don’t have to take a botany class to make it happen. The seed knows what to do and so does the soil. You just have to put the elements together and the process will work. You can put a fence post in the ground and soil will try to grow it. It will treat that post like a seed and try to rot the husk off of it. It will try to release life from that post and grow it like it’s a tree, because that’s what it’s designed to do. The same is true of your heart. It will take whatever you put in it and grow it. That’s the system God has set in place, and for better or for worse, it will keep working. “A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things” (Matthew 12:35). So your heart will keep pumping out whatever you put into it. 6 : BVOV

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