By Kenneth Copeland

Did you know that receiving healing from God isn’t hard? People sometimes make it sound like it is. They talk about it in religious terms that leave the impression that divine healing is a strange, mysterious phenomenon that’s both rare and difficult to understand. But really, the truth is just the opposite. In this post, Kenneth Copeland will share the biblical truth on healing and how you can receive it too. 

Divine healing is actually simple. It’s one of the most obvious, easy-to-grasp manifestations of God’s power there is, and it’s so common it’s accepted as a fact of life by Christians and non-Christians alike. Even skeptics who claim they don’t believe in healing, do.

• When they nick themselves while they’re shaving, they believe the cut will heal.
• When they get a cold, they believe that within a few days they’ll get well.
• If they break a bone, when the doctor tells them it will be healed in four to six weeks, they believe it without question.

“Well, that’s not really believing in divine healing,” someone might say. “Those kinds of healings are just natural occurrences. They don’t have anything to do with God.”

God, the Source of All Healing

Yes, they do! He’s the Source of all healing. He’s the One who created the human body and put healing in it in the first place. Even natural healing is, in a sense, divine because the Divine engineered it and set it in motion.

Although unbelievers don’t think in such terms, as believers, we should. Rather than thinking of divine healing as something foreign, unfathomable and infrequent, we should renew our minds so that we think of it as normal. 

Even when healing manifests in strikingly supernatural ways, we ought to see it as God just doing what He does. We should see it as His Anointing causing the natural system of healing He created to operate at a higher level.

Take the case of a broken bone, for instance. When the anointing comes into that situation, instead of taking four to six weeks the bone might heal in four to six seconds. From a natural perspective, that’s nothing short of miraculous. But it was produced by the same healing process that normally takes place in the body. The anointing just sped up the process.

The anointing can work at the speed of light if you’ll turn it loose to do what it’s fully capable of doing. It can also work progressively, over time. Either way, it can accomplish the seemingly impossible. And because of what Jesus did it’s always available to us.

All we need to know is how to activate it. How do we open the door for God’s super to come on our natural so that whenever the need arises, we can be supernaturally healed?

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!”

By Your Stripes I Was Healed

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 cleaner’s, 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 lying 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.

That’s why Proverbs 4:23 says, “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues [or forces] of life.” Your spirit is where your life is! When it gets weak—when the spiritual forces like faith and healing that are supposed to flow out of it begin to dry up—your soul and body become weak as well.

On the other hand, when your spirit is strong and healthy your soul and body are enlivened. The physical part of you is quickened because your heart is pumping out the forces of life.

Don’t Just Remember The WORD of God – Feed on It

What is it that keeps your spirit strong and healthy so those forces can keep pumping?

The WORD of God! It’s spirit food. It nourishes your inner man just as physical food nourishes your body. The more you feed on The WORD, the more you attend to it and incline your ear toward it, the more abundantly the forces of life keep flowing. The more you keep The WORD before your eyes and in the midst of your heart, the more life and health can be ministered to your flesh.

Jesus said, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God… It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life” (Matthew 4:4; John 6:63). So, The WORD is the answer to every situation.

It’s the first place you turn when symptoms of sickness come on you. Even before you start praying, open your Bible. Read what it says about health and healing. Then pray God’s WORD back to Him. Remind Him of what He’s already said and receive it by faith.

Once you’ve done that, keep looking at The WORD. Stop looking at symptoms and practice envisioning yourself without them. Particularly if it’s a situation you’ve been dealing with for a while, set aside some time to just sit and meditate on the healing scriptures. Take verses like 1 Peter 2:24 and say, “LORD, I believe this. Now help me with my imagination so that I can see myself walking in it. Help me see myself healed.”

Your imagination is a powerful thing, and God is the One who gave it to you. So don’t be afraid of it. Let Him train you to use it for good. Instead of just reading a few healing verses on the run, fellowship with The LORD over them and let Him help you dig into them. Chew on those verses and picture what they’re saying until suddenly one day you say, “Yes! I see it! I’m healed!”

Gloria refers to that as the moment when faith boils over. It’s the moment when faith flows out of your heart with such force that it drives out all doubt.

“But Brother Copeland,” someone might say, “I know the healing scriptures by heart. I can practically quote them all by memory, and my faith for healing isn’t boiling over.” That’s because faith doesn’t come by knowing and remembering. It comes “by hearing, and hearing…the word of God” (Romans 10:17). It comes from actually feeding on The WORD.

You can know what a potato tastes like, but that’s not the same thing as feeding on it. You can remember what you had for lunch yesterday, but that memory won’t nourish you today.

The same applies to The WORD. While knowing The WORD and memorizing it are wonderful, that’s not the same as feeding on it. To feed on it, you have to do what Proverbs 4 says and attend to it, by looking at it and listening to it. You have to take it into yourself anew and make the decision, I choose to believe this.

Something happens inside your spirit when you do that. When you decide to believe something, particularly when you say it out loud, it gets your spiritual juices flowing, so to speak. It’s like when you decide to eat something in the natural. Once you make the decision, your taste buds wake up. Your mouth starts watering and your digestive juices start flowing. You don’t have to tell your body to do those things — it’s an involuntary reaction.

Likewise, when you decide to believe The WORD and say it, your spirit involuntarily kicks into gear. It gets ready to produce the force of faith and release the power of God that’s resident in The WORD so that word can become life and health to you.

Can it really be that simple? you might wonder.

Sure. That’s what God intended. He never meant for healing to be hard to receive. We’re the ones who made it hard with our religious traditions. Religion messed up God’s system by saying things like healing isn’t always God’s will and that He sometimes makes us sick to teach us something. But nothing could be further from the truth. 

Jesus purchased our healing when He went to the cross just as surely as He purchased our salvation. Through His death and Resurrection, He “redeemed us from the curse” and that curse is three-fold. It includes spiritual death, sickness and poverty.

The devil is the author of all those things. He’s the author of all human suffering, all disease, all pain, all stress, and Jesus defeated him. He destroyed the works of the devil and secured for us a three-fold redemption. A redemption that includes eternal life, healing and prosperity.

By providing that redemption, God settled the fact once and for all that healing is His will for you. It’s already yours in Christ. All you have to do to receive it is follow God’s prescription. So, go ahead and do it.

Treat The WORD of God like you would a life-saving prescription from your doctor. Don’t just leave it sitting on your nightstand. Don’t just look at it now and then and say, “I wonder why that’s not working for me?” Take it as prescribed.

Attend to it. Incline your ear to it. Keep it before your eyes, in the midst of your heart, and in your mouth. Believe and declare, not what you see or what you feel, but the Words of God.

For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh!

How to Receive Healing

1. Your heart or spirit is where your life is, so when you fill your heart with The WORD, it ministers the life-force of healing to your body. Proverbs 4:23
2. The WORD of God is spirit food; it nourishes you spiritually in the same way physical food nourishes you physically. Matthew 4:4
3. Spend time feeding on healing scriptures until, by the eye of faith, you can see yourself healed just like The WORD says. 1 Peter 2:24
4. Don’t be moved by contrary symptoms, but instead believe and speak The WORD until healing manifests in your body. Mark 11:22-23

This article was included in August 2019 edition of Believer’s Voice of Victory magazine. 

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