The scripture says about what the Lord did to rescue us from the sicknesses and diseases, that the enemy had designed for our destruction:
“He sent His word and healed them and delivered them from their destructions.”
Psalms 107:20 NKJV
There is absolutely no shortcut to being able to get healed and be in good health, apart from the proper application of the word of God faithfully and consciously, until we receive the desired result.
Even after getting healed, it’s important to keep on declaring the same promises of God continually, so as to stay healed and healthy.
This is where a lot of Christians are missing out of their healing, as they have stopped reminding the Lord about His promises of healing in the Bible.
They have stopped keeping God in remembrance of His promises. So, the door remains open for the enemy to keep on afflicting them with sicknesses and diseases. God can’t do anything for you apart from what His word has already declared about your situation.
There is an enemy who does not want to see anyone healed and be in good health. He is always doing something to frustrate the efforts of the believers in Christ, to be healed and to stay healthy.
That’s why we have to be steadfastly using our spoken words appropriately against him, so as to stay healed and healthy.
Anyone who is not prepared to declare God’s word in this world of evil is deceiving himself. The devil does not want to see you declaring, what God’s word says about your healing and good health.
You have to be determined to go against everything that he is using, to prevent you from declaring God’s promises over your life.
It is the proclamation of what God had already decreed in His word, that brings to come to pass the affirmation of His promises in our lives.
That’s why the Bible says:
“Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, Whom He has redeemed from the hand of the enemy,”
Psalms 107:2 NKJV
The redemption of our spirit, soul and body had been completed by Christ Jesus, in His finished work on the cross at Calvary. But for us to be able to make it the reality of our lives, we have to be saying so with a conscious, persistent and consistent effort.
If you know that you had been redeemed from sicknesses and diseases, you ought to be saying so, until your healing manifests.
And so as to be able to keep your healing and get yourself into perfect health, you must keep up with the confession of your redemption from sicknesses and diseases in good faith.
The devil does not want you to be saying that you had been redeemed from sicknesses and diseases. He wants you to be sick, depressed and frustrated. He will do everything possible to hinder you from the confession of your faith.
He actually believes that he will succeed in preventing you from having what God had already given to you. That’s why you have to remain vigilant and focused in standing up to oppose him.
The truth of the matter is that it’s impossible to keep on declaring your redemption, if you are not consciously making efforts to feed on God’s promises for your situation. God’s word that brought you redemption ought to be before your eyes and on your mouth always. This is how we are able to keep it in our hearts.
This calls for a lifestyle of devotion to the word of God. If you have received anything from the Lord, you ought to keep it in front of your eyes always. You don’t allow the devil to steal what you have received from the Lord.
This is how you can prevent yourself from being distracted by the devil and the world around you.
The process of meditation on God’s promises demands that we should be making utterances, with the words of healing. Real scriptural meditation requires you to be muttering, or speaking up loudly about what you are meditating on, so that God can hear you, the angels can hear you and the devil can hear you also.
God’s word that is being declared in this way is your sword of the Spirit, which extinguishes the fiery darts of the wicked one that has been targeted against you.
And this is what you ought to be doing, even when it seems as if nothing is happening. The truth about the situation is that something is actually happening in the spiritual realm, which you can’t see physically with your naked eyes.
You may have been seeing certain changes through the declaration of those words of healing. But don’t ever give up or relax as a result of that.
This is the moment when you ought to be keeping the pressure on the enemy, by not quitting confessing God’s promises.
Silence is therefore not an option for a victorious Christian. A Christian who wants to remain silent in the midst of a spiritual warfare for healing and good health, is as good as dead.
The only place that is good for quiet people is the cemetery. As long as you are alive in your physical body, you must understand how important it is to keep on glorifying God with it.
God never called us into His Kingdom to be silent. In fact, He longs to hear us say His words back to Him, because it’s our contact point of agreement with Him on this earth (Matthew 18:18).
That’s why we had been commanded to be saying exactly whatever He says to us.
God wants to see you healed and in good health at all times. The provision for your healing and good health is already available for you in the stripes of Jesus Christ.
But it’s up to you to be appropriating it to the maximum for your own benefit.
So therefore, if you have benefits that belongs to you, it’s nobody’s fault but yours alone if you’re not accessing them.
Don’t just stand there, start saying something!
You therefore can’t be healed and be in good health by just standing on the sideline, while doing nothing to change the situation with your body. You’ve got to start applying God’s word by speaking it, until your situation changes.
The devil wants you to just stay on the sideline doing nothing. He wants you to be treating being sick or living an unhealthy and ungodly lifestyle, as a normal thing in life that everyone else goes through.
But you’ve got to recognize that it’s not normal to be sick and not to be in good health. The world around you want you to be a normal Christian. And that basically means being a nominal Christian by name only, with nothing to show as your benefit for it with good health.
A nominal Christian does not see the need to be declaring God’s promises, even though the scriptures says that we should. To that person the declaration of God’s promises is a form of extremism. He sees it as being too radical, as it goes against the norms of the society in which he lives.
Is our Christian life meant to be guided and determined by the opinions of the world or by God’s word? The world never gave Jesus to save us (John 3:16).
Neither did the world give us the Bible. God, the Father sent His Son (Jesus) to the world, so as to save the world from sins. The Bible is God’s word to the whole world – Christians and non-Christians.
At the time when God began to write and declared the scriptures on Mount Sinai to the Israelites, He first of all wrote it with His own hand. And then He spoke directly to the people, so as to reveal Himself to them (Exodus 20:18-21).
But they could not stand before the Holy God, who could speak directly to sinful men. So, God decided to put His Spirit upon the men, who were inspired by Him to write down what He wants to tell us on the earth.
That’s how the Bible came to us, and His Spirit is still inspiring men to write and speak to us about our world today. The Bible is God’s voice to our world today. If you need to know what God thinks about our world today; just take a look at the Bible. Begin to read and study it today.
The devil wants you to cower in fear of what he is doing, to aggravate your physical pains and sufferings with the illnesses, sicknesses and diseases on your body.
He wants you to be the type of Christian who does not live, by following the teachings of Jesus Christ, so as to be healed and be in good health. He wants you to be like all the others in the world around you, who are suffering and dying as a result of sicknesses and diseases.
Nominal Christians will only remember God, whenever they are seriously sick or struggling with serious unmanageable problems. The devil would have pushed them to the dead end of the road, before they will begin to start crying out to the Lord for help.
And in most cases, those cries from them are about how terrible their situation is. They like to complain about their problems before God, while thinking that their complaints will move God to act on their behalf. Whereas they ought to be reminding Him about His promises, as He gave them to us in the Bible.
When struck with an ailment in their bodies, nominal Christians will initially go through all the routines, that medical science can offer to alleviate their sufferings.
They will only remember about God when medical science has proven not being helpful to them at all. The word of healing from the Lord becomes the last resort to them. God’s promises of healing and good health are an afterthought to them.
But the true believers in Christ Jesus will react differently. For them there is nothing that can make them change their stand on the issues of healing, prosperity and good health.
God’s word is the golden standard for their healing and every other problem in their lives. They will always make their stand clearly known before God and before the enemy.
In fighting against sicknesses and diseases, it’s important to make your stand known at the very first onset of the symptoms.
There is no need to be waiting until things begin to get worse, before doing something about it. You can silence the enemy from the very first sign of the symptoms in your body, by using your authority in the name of Jesus Christ, to make him take the symptoms away from your body.
You do this by making him know what God’s word says about your healing and good health. When you are doing this, you are making him realize that you are in charge of your own body. You are making your stand known to him that he is not in charge. This is how you can make him flee away, in terror of who you are as a child of God.
God will always stand by those who are standing on the authority of His written word. And if any Christian is unable to do that, then that Christian has indeed taken a stand already, for what the devil is doing by his inaction against the attacks of the devil.
It means that he will take anything that’s coming from the devil, without any form of aggressive action against him. If you’re going to win in the battle for a healthy body, you’ve got to be aggressive about it.
Let God’s word feed your body!
While Jesus was being tempted by the devil in the wilderness, He had made up His mind even before the tempter came up to Him, about what to do about the temptation.
Can you imagine how devastating it would have been, if the Savior of the world would had just sat down on the sideline, while the devil threw all his shots at Him?
It would have derailed God’s plan and purpose for the salvation of the world. But thank God, that Jesus never stood still before the enemy. And you don’t have to be standing still either, whenever he comes with his temptation or symptoms of sickness on your body.
Jesus fought the devil back word for word, and every thought with spoken words. He never gave him any room for maneuvering at all.
The devil had come out against Jesus in just the same way, that he came against Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden with his lies and deceptions. But Jesus never responded as Adam and Eve had done.
He never sat on the sideline to see if the devil was right. Neither did He allow the devil to be throwing words at Him anyhow. Jesus had made up His mind that God’s word meant exactly what it says.
And that’s exactly what the devil needs to know about your stance for healing. You are not different from Jesus on the earth today. You can be clear in your stand against the devil, by making him realize where you stand, whenever he comes after your body with sicknesses and diseases. You can fight him back with spoken words, just as Jesus overcame him during the temptation.
Jesus never minced His words in response back to the devil during temptation. Thank God for His written word. If we don’t have God’s word written down for us as we have it today, we all would have been lost eternally, without any hope for the redemption of our souls.
But God’s written word is available for us today, to use against the devil in fighting sicknesses and diseases; just as it was available to Jesus in overcoming temptation in the wilderness.
Jesus spoke the word of God directly in overcoming the tempter. And in the same manner you can speak God’s promises out of your mouth, so as to get yourself healed and stay in good health.
Jesus had told the author of sicknesses and diseases during His temptation that:
“ .. It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”
Matthew 4:4 NKJV
Jesus was reminding the devil here about the word that had already been settled in the heavens. It’s the same word that had been declared and written by God, for our healing and good health on this earth.
Jesus had to remind the devil every time that He was tempted, that God doesn’t ever change His mind about anyone of His promises.
Whatever was written by God in the scriptures is already settled forever in Heaven. But we have a duty as Christians to enforce His promises on the earth, just as it is established in Heaven (Psalms 119:89).
That was what Jesus did during His temptation to overcome Satan. And we need to be doing the same thing to triumph over sicknesses and diseases on the earth today.
Jesus was responding in the above scriptural text to the temptation from the devil to turn stones into bread.
The enemy knew that Jesus was just coming out of a long fasting period. He had figured out that He must be very hungry for food, after a long time of abstinence from it.
But Jesus in His response wanted the devil to know that food alone, is not essential for the sustenance of the physical body of man.
He wanted him to be aware that God’s word is as important as eating bread is to the human body. Bread is necessary for our physical bodies, just as God’s word is also good for our healing and good health as well.
As the scriptures says:
“My son, attend to my words; consent and submit to my sayings. Let them not depart from your sight; keep them in the center of your heart. For they are life to those who find them, healing and health to all their flesh.”
Proverbs 4:20-22 AMPC
God’s word is what God had already said about every situation in our lives. It is unchangeable, and therefore it’s the finality of it all. If God says anything about your situation in the Bible, then nothing can change or alter it.
God’s word is what delivers healing and good health to the flesh and bones, as we are delighting in it day and night by keeping it in the midst of our hearts.
The environment in which you are living right now can affect what you are eating and drinking. But God’s word transcends every environmental impact on your body, to give you healing and good health.
You need God’s word to be able to live a healthy lifestyle, just as much as you need it to heal yourself also.
We do eat daily so as to be able to grow up in physical strength and stamina.
In the same manner we need to be feeding on God’s word, so as to grow in our faith as we are exercising it.
You can’t exercise your faith effectively if you’re not feeding it with God’s word every day. God’s word is the necessary food for growing daily in faith.
A Christian man was once praying to the Lord to increase his faith. He was facing some challenges in his life. He did not know how to confront them.
He had thought that he needed his faith to be increased. So, he fasted and prayed for his faith to increase. But fasting and praying could not change the situation.
He finally ended up discovering by the prompting of the Holy Spirit within him, that the scriptures say:
“So, then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”
Romans 10:17 NKJV
That was what brought the light of God to the darkness of the world around him. He had been praying for his faith to be increased.
But now he has found out that faith can only grow, when it is being exercised and fed with the word of God. Faith that is not being nourished and exercised daily cannot grow or be increased.
And since he already had faith, what he needed to be doing, was to be spending more time in God’s word for his faith to grow as he’s exercising it.
There is no amount of prayer and fasting that can make you grow or increase your faith. You must be willing to feed and exercise the faith that is on the inside of you.
No matter how little your faith may be, it is going to grow and be increased, as you are using it to do something for God.
This man had grown up in the local church that had taught him to be praying and fasting for his faith to get stronger.
But he finally realized by the prompting of the Holy Spirit and God’s word, that faith does not grow stronger by fasting and praying.
Faith grows when we are exercising it by acting on God’s word. So therefore, God’s word is the necessary ingredient for our faith to grow.
The food that was eaten yesterday was good for your body, but for today you will need to eat something fresh in order to sustain your body.
It’s the same way with your faith. The word of God that you read and studied yesterday, may not be necessary for this day. You need a fresh revelation from God’s word that is relevant for today.
Feeding yourself daily on God’s word will cause your faith to grow for the healing of your body, and the sustainability of your healing with good health.
You can’t rely on what you already know about what God’s word says. You will need to be making fresh demands on it daily, so as to stay healed and healthy in your body.
That’s what makes your faith to grow. And if you can apply God’s word to heal yourself and stay healthy, you will soon see yourself ministering healing and good health to those around you.
Everyone in this world has some form of faith in one thing or the other (Romans 12:3).
But only those who are born of God’s Spirit do have the God’s kind of faith (Mark 11:22-23).
And God’s word is what gives you the faith of God to heal your body, just as God’s word is also essential for having good health.
But faith can’t grow if you don’t feed it with God’s word. That’s why Jesus made the above statement to the tempter. No one can live a victorious Christian lifestyle on the earth, without daily feeding on the word of God.
You can’t grow in faith by feeding yourself with all the junks from the social media, newspapers or the television. Get into the real world of the spirit where you can practice your faith.
It’s not everything that is authentic on the earth, but God’s word is real and authentic. You need to be exercising your faith in God’s word to overcome the world:
“For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.”
I John 5:4 NKJV
There are a lot of Christians who are not living in victory, because of their unholy association with the world.
It’s what is preventing a lot of Bible believers from growing in faith towards God today. They are spending more time with the world and the lust of their flesh, than with God’s word.
God’s word is what makes your faith to grow. The words of the people of this world are faith killers.
Just because a philosopher, psychologist or social scientist says something does not make it scriptural. Be wise. Don’t let the enemy put you in the corner, where you will start crying for help to God, due to your unnecessary interest in the cunning ways of men.
God’s word is the food for your faith to grow in God. That’s how we keep our faith alive and active against the enemy as Christians – by meditating on God’s word day and night.
You need God’s word for your spirit man, just as much as you need to be eating food for the physical body to grow and stay healthy.
A Pastor once asked me the question, about how some other Pastors were able to Pastor their Churches without tears. He was actually complaining about not having the time to study very well, before going to the pulpit on Sundays.
I looked at him in surprise, because I knew that he had been spending most of his time, running after his church members across his town every day, so as to take care of their material and emotional needs.
He did not have the time to fellowship with the Father, or with the Good Shepherd in the word of God.
Yet he had all the time to be running around caring for the sheep. As the Pastor of the Church, he is of course duty bound to show compassion for his flock. But that must not ever take the place of fellowshipping with the Lord in the word.
He eventually realized that his sheep would not grow without being fed with the word of God. God’s word is able to supply all of their material and emotional needs, if only he as the Pastor was spending enough time studying the Bible, so as to be able to teach them how to do it.
He could had been spending endless hours daily with them, but it was never going to satisfy the hunger and thirst in them for God. So, he decided to start taking time out daily for studying God’s word.
And in less than two months his congregation grew spiritually and numerically. The church members whom he had been running after, started getting committed to the church than ever before. They were being fed with God’s word, and so they started growing up spiritually.
God’s word is essential for the spiritual growth of the believers in Christ Jesus, just as we eat food daily for the body to grow. We need God’s word to be able to exercise our faith effectively and to grow up spiritually.
Your level of spiritual maturity as a Christian is determined, by how often you are exercising your faith in God’s word. You can exercise your faith in God, just as you are exercising your physical body also.
As an example, you can exercise your faith in God, by getting someone to pray for you so as to get healed in the body. But a time will come when you need to be exercising your faith, to heal yourself and to stay healthy also.
You will know when that time comes as you are growing in faith. Your dependency on other people’s prayers for healing will start to diminish. Then you will begin to exercise your faith to heal yourself.
And by that time, you will know that the Lord is beginning to depend on you, for more things in His Kingdom.
It’s just as your faith works to get certain little things done in life. At a certain time in life, you will need the same faith to go for bigger things. You can use your faith to get a job that pays you a small salary now. At a point in time, you will need to exercise the same faith for a bigger salary.
So, your faith works and grows by feeding it on God’s word and by exercising it. It’s just as your body is healthy and is growing also by feeding it with food and exercising it.
You are not the same person that you were ten or twenty years ago. But it’s still the same you. You may have grown up just as your physical body and your faith in God are both growing.
Exercising your faith and your body.
Therefore, faith grows by exercising it, just as the body grows by doing physical exercises as well.
We don’t rely on food and physical exercises alone to stay healthy in the body. Your body needs to be feeding on God’s word for healing and good health as well.
Bodily exercises are important, but spiritual exercises are far more beneficial to the body. As the Apostle Paul once advised Timothy:
“For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come.”
I Timothy 4:8 NKJV
The Passion Translation says it like this:
“For athletic training only benefits you for a short season, but righteousness brings lasting benefit in everything; for righteousness contains the promise of life, for time and eternity.”
1 Timothy 4:8 TPT
Bodily exercise is healthy for you. But the benefits from it can’t match the spiritual benefits of the exercise of your faith, to live in righteousness and holiness before God. Such spiritual benefits are eternal. They can never be taken away from you.
Bodily exercises are meant for living longer on the earth, but the spiritual exercise of your faith gives you eternal benefits.
Bodily exercise as stated above by the Apostle Paul is not permanent. It’s only for the season of our lives on this earth. The only exercise that is eternal and permanent is your spiritual exercise by faith before the Lord.
Everything that we do by faith before God lasts forever. That’s why a lifestyle of faith in God is important to live longer on the earth.
You have the power and ability to determine how long you will live on the earth. Your future and your destiny are in your own hands. God has given it to you. It’s in your heart and in your mouth. What are you going to do about it?
Don’t let the enemy make you sad and unhappy. He will do this by lying to you that, it’s boring to be saying the same thing over and over again.
But the benefits of doing this outweighs those lies of the devil. Speaking God’s word to your body is what preserves your healing and gives you good health.
If bodily exercise is working for you, that is fine. It may not necessarily be working for everybody.
One thing that works for a person may not work for others. But there is only one thing that works for everyone. And that’s the word of God.
Putting it before your eyes and in your heart, will bring you so much benefits, as it comes out of your mouth to manifest what you are saying concerning your healing, health and prosperity. You will begin to see yourself as God sees you, when you are speaking His word.
The devil is the thief who has come to steal your health. He is seeking to steal your joy and to make you sad in the process. His ultimate goal is to destroy your body completely, because he does not want you to use it to serve the Lord on the earth.
Good health is God’s will for you.
Being sick deprives God of the glory that He deserves in your life. That’s why the Apostle John declared at the beginning of one of his letters to us that:
“Beloved friend, I pray that you are prospering in every way and that you continually enjoy good health, just as your soul is prospering.”
3 John 1:2 TPT
John was praying here about God’s will for our health and prosperity. He never mentioned here about the healing of our bodies, because he knew that a healed body already belongs to you as a child of God. Jesus took the stripes on His body for us to be healed.
But it’s our own responsibility as Christians to be maintaining the healing of our physical bodies, by cultivating a healthy lifestyle pattern that glorifies Him.
John was praying here for us to be able to have a sound understanding, about how to enjoy the Christian life in good health.
Enjoying a good health does not give us the license to be living the lifestyle of the ungodly, who don’t really care about what they are eating and drinking. To them for as long as anything smells good and tastes good, it is fine to be eating it.
The Apostle John was praying for us to get smarter in taking care of the physical body, so as to be able to enjoy good health, as we live longer in the service of the Lord.
To qualify for good health, it must have been proven that one is not sick in the body.
A sick person is not seeking good health yet. He needs to be healed first, before he can begin to work on being in good health. Physical healing is therefore a prerequisite for good health.
It’s important that we are not misconstruing being healed as being healthy. A person can be healed in the body, but there is a lot of work ahead of that person to stay healthy, so as not to get sick again.
Interestingly enough the Bible makes us to understand that it is the same word of God, which healed us that is also able to keep us healthy. It says:
“Kind words are like honey— sweet to the soul and healthy for the body.”
Proverbs 16:24 NLT
Listening to kind and sweet words has a way of triggering the response mechanism in your brain, so as to soothe your body and keep you healthy. The word of God has a way of doing this for us.
A family man who gets home daily from work and begins to yell and scream at his wife and children, is not saying kind words. He is not being sweet to the souls of his family members.
Eventually they will begin to fall sick, because of the environment of fear, that’s being created by the man around them. Fear brings sicknesses and diseases to the body. But exercising your faith in God casts out the fear, to bring you healing and good health (1 John 4:18).
Most especially important is our ability to praise and worship the Lord. When we are giving thanks to God, our physical bodies have a way of realigning to it.
We will begin to raise our hands, as our legs begins to move and our voices begins to express, what comes from our hearts in adoration of Him.
The Bible also says:
“Do not be wise in your own eyes; Fear the LORD and depart from evil. It will be health to your flesh, And strength to your bones.”
Proverbs 3:7-8 NKJV
The reverential fear of God will keep you far away from the evil of this world, so that you don’t start eating and drinking like the ungodly people of the world.
And when you are fleeing from the temptations to do evil, you are fleeing from sicknesses and diseases.
Your ability to get sick is diminished as you separate yourself from temptation.
Your physical body will be able to naturally stay healthy and remain healed. Your spirit man will then be more realigned with the Spirit of God inside of you.
Your bones will start getting stronger. Instead of using your strength to do evil, you will begin to learn how to use it in glorifying God.
In other words, God’s word is able to restore your health. When you are paying attention to what it says, without allowing it to get out of your focus; then God’s word will keep you healthy. It will protect you from the attacks of the enemy.
The moment a Christian start paying attention to the evil reports of the world, then the enemy will make sure that he aggressively uses those evil reports, to weigh such a Christian down into the depression mood.
Whatever is at the center of your focus in life will affect your health. That’s why you need God’s word to protect your body.
If God’s word does not depart from your eyes, you will begin to see yourself in good health. You will begin to see yourself in good health as God sees you.
And always remember as the Bible says:
“Forever, O LORD, Your word is settled in heaven.”
Psalms 119:89 NKJV
God’s word that healed you is already settled and established in Heaven. But Heaven is waiting on you to make it a reality on this earth, from your heart and with your mouth. This is how we win always!
Our foe is defeated forever. He is on the run from you in terror. You are a winner.
Stand in the victory that Christ had given to you, by declaring that you are healed and healthy in your body every day. That’s who God calls you – “healed and in good health”.
