Hey y'all this is Troy Black so today
I'm going to talk about three keys to your healing. These are three truths that I have had
to get in my own life personally that I've had to receive and begin to believe
and to walk out before I begin to actually see God heal. And I
think one thing that a lot of Christians struggle with is not necessarily seeing
a lot of prayers answered or at least you know it kind of...the appearance of
their prayers not being answered. And something I used to struggle with a lot, I felt like if God has made these promises to answer prayers
especially ...in this area of healing and
personal health, then why don't I see more answers to my prayers? And if you're at a place where you're asking that question, this video is for
you.The first key to your healing is understanding the truth that God wants
to heal you. And this is something that I used to struggle with a lot I know a lot
of believers struggle with it, so if you struggle with this concept, this truth,
know that that's okay - a lot of people have been in that same place, a lot of
people still are there and you know what? I'm not perfect at believing God's Word
every single day either. There are times where the doubts begin to arise and I
have to go right back to God's Word and say, "God remind me of your truth and help
me to walk out that truth." So there are a few specific instances in scripture
where someone's lack of healing, somebody's sickness or disease or
something they're walking through physically is actually not healed for a
time in order to give God glory. And in a few of these that I can think of offhand
are Lazarus - you know Jesus waits a few days before going to see Lazarus who's
sick and because of that Lazarus dies, but then Jesus is able to raise Lazarus from the dead and God gets the glory for it. Another one is the man
who was born blind. Jesus shows up on the scene; this man has
been blind from his birth and Jesus heals him. His disciples
asked, why? Why was this man blind? and Jesus said it's so that God
would get the glory. And the third one is actually Paul, the Apostle Paul,
he talks about this thorn in his side. Some people don't believe that that was a physical
issue - I personally believe it was. Paul actually says...we don't see
Paul getting healed from this if it really was a physical issue - what we see
is he says that God told him that "My grace is sufficient for you." And so these
are a few instances in scripture where the lack of healing or a delayed healing
was for God's glory, but what I want to specifically say about this is in two of
these instances the people were actually healed. The man born blind is healed,
Lazarus is raised from the dead, and Paul might be the one exception in
the whole Bible I can think of where someone is not healed and
it's for God's glory. And the point I want to make based on this is that I
believe a lot of people in the Christian Church believe that God often does not
heal for his glory but the truth is that that is the exception in the Bible. It's
not the norm, and in the question I want to ask based on that is Why? Why
do we allow our theological expectation of what God is going to do in our lives
be based on the exception more than it's based on the norm in Scripture? And
here's the the answer I want to propose: it may be that we are basing our
expectations on what God is going to do on our experience, and not on what the
Bible actually says. In the Gospels, if you go read the four Gospels, you can see
God's heart for healing visibly displayed through the life of Jesus.
There's six times that I can think of off the top of my head where Jesus
provides something a physical... for a physical need and the
first one is the wedding where they ran out of wine, Jesus provides the wine.
And then there's two fishing trips where the disciples are fishing
they don't catch any he's like casts a net on the other side and he provides
the fish. And then there's the time where He tells Peter to go fishing, [he] catches one
fish and there's a coin in the mouth. And then there is the two sermons
outside where the crowds are following Jesus and He actually provides,
supernaturally, food for all of them. And these are the specific examples
of Jesus providing, making provision supernaturally, and yet
we as Christians, I think, a lot of us tend to be willing to pray for provision
a whole lot more than we're willing to pray for healing. I think some of us
are willing to believe that God will actually answer those provision prayers
more than He will answer the healing prayers, and yet I can only think of
these six examples where Jesus personally provided supernaturally and
yet he healed over and over and over and over throughout the Gospels. And I'm not
trying to say that God doesn't want to provide by saying this, He
absolutely does - God is a good provider for His children, but the point I'm
making is if you look at what Jesus was doing throughout the Gospels you can
clearly see God's character and His heart for healing. So I just picked four
verses from the book of Matthew, there's other verses like this, these are just
four of them but these show Jesus' heart for healing. Matthew 4:23, "Jesus was
going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the
gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of
sickness among the people." Matthew 9:35, "Jesus was going through all the cities
and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of
the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness."
Matthew 12:15, " But Jesus, aware of this, withdrew from there. Many followed Him
and He healed them all." Matthew 15:30, "And large crowds came to Him, bringing with
them those who were lame, crippled, blind, mute, and many others; and they laid them
down at His feet; and He healed them." And when I hear these verses I get
pumped up, right? But you might be in the camp where you hear these verses and
you have this thought - and I used to be there - where you have this thought where
you say well if Jesus was here physically in person, then I
would believe that he would heal me - but listen to what Jesus said in
response to that doubt, listen to this - Matthew 28:20, "lo, I am with you always
even to the end the age." The point I want to make is that
there is a truth in God's Word to nullify every doubt in our minds. Get
into the Bible and find it, find that truth that applies to whatever doubts
Satan is attacking you with right now. God's Word is true. Our doubts; those are
the lies. Part of God's character that is visibly demonstrated in the Bible is
that God wants to heal. God is a healer. My encouragement to you today is to
begin to believe it. A few years ago I released another video called "Christian
Healing." If you haven't watched it go check it out. In that video I actually talked about when God began to reveal this truth to me personally; I was
reading the Bible and and learning about God's heart for healing but I also was
asking God and praying and saying God do you actually want to heal this thing I'm
suffering with right now? Well when I began to seek Him personally, the Holy
Spirit actually said something to me that changed my view on this forever, and
it was He painted this picture of my daughter Mirabelle in my mind and He
said, "if Mirabelle's hurt will do you want to help her?" and my answer was like,
"Yes, Lord, yes of course I want to help her, she's my child," and this is what He
said to me, He said, "Of course I want to heal you, you are my child," and in that
moment I got it you know like it was like the light bulb came on and another
thing I talked about in that video is a time where I actually was suffering from
severe stomach pains and chronic fatigue and God instantly healed me from those
things, so if you haven't watched that video go check it out. The second key to
your healing, the second thing you need to understand in order to begin walking
out the healing that God wants to provide is that (number two) God has
already healed you. And I know that might sound a little crazy at first but let me
explain what I mean by that: God has already provided the grace that you need
in order to be healed. 1st Peter 2:24 is an amazing verse that shows us, it
says "and He Himself bore our sins on His body on the cross,
so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were
healed." You need to get this concept, that Jesus' death on the cross covered your
sin but it also covered the consequences of your sin as well. So when that
question raises in your mind - why would God want to heal me? Why would
God heal me? Do I even deserve to be healed? you can point back to Jesus on
the cross and say God would want to heal me because Jesus has already taken all
of the consequences for my sin on Himself, He's already bore my wounds, what
I deserved upon Himself. And some people look at that verse 1st Peter 2:24
and they look at that phrase "by His wounds you were healed and they say well
it's probably talking about the spiritual healing of salvation or
something like that, but if you actually look at the Greek word, the root word
behind the word that's used for healed there, it actually means...it most of the
time means "healed" as in physically healed, and sometimes it can mean
spiritually healed as well. It's also the same word that's used when Jesus, in
Luke chapter 17, Jesus tells the ten lepers - these guys who have these crazy
skin diseases that there was no cure for at the time, and He tells them go to the
priests, and then this what He actually says, He says, "Go and show yourselves to
the priests," so this was a commandment out of the law of Moses that if they
were actually healed, if the disease went away, then they could go
show themselves to the priests. So Jesus could only say that to them, to
these ten guys, if they were already healed. The leprosy did not go away
until they began to listen to what He said, believe it, and actually go. So along
the way we see that they're actually healed and the leprosy goes away. But the
same way that Jesus was able to say take the step of faith that you would take
after your healing, that is what this verse is saying to us, it's saying by His
wounds you were healed because we accept that healing that God has already
provided by His grace through faith - they're responding to His words in faith.
So early on last year I began to have these pains in my side
and I had the notion that they were related to anxiety and so I was
thinking I'm pretty sure this is an anxiety thing, you know, I'm under a
lot of stress right now, I'm pretty sure that's what this is. So I went to the
verse in James 5:14 that says, "Is anyone among you sick? Then he must call for the
elders of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in
the name of the Lord;" So what I did was I looked at that verse and I felt like the
Holy Spirit was saying through it "you need to go to the elders of your church
and just ask for prayer." So I went up one Sunday morning and one of the elders
at the church that me and my wife attends, he's an awesome guy
named Mark Iwon, who I love, and he just prayed for me, but what's funny
is I actually asked for prayer for anxiety and for the pain to go away, for
healing from the pain. Maybe he didn't hear me, I don't know but he
literally only prayed for the anxiety. He just prayed for the anxiety
and by the end of that day I felt a hundred percent at peace, the anxiety was
completely gone and by the next day the pain was 100% gone as well, which I
thought was amazing. But probably about three or four months after that I
started to feel again some of those same pains a little bit and I started to have
this doubt in my mind, this doubt that... where I was questioning God
and saying wait a minute God did you not really heal me? What's going on
here? And so I began to experience these pains again for a couple of weeks and
I'm thinking the whole time - I'm kinda doubting a little bit - thinking
well maybe I wasn't really healed. Then one day I began to pray about it
and I said, "God, will you heal me? Will you heal me right now?" And the Holy
Spirit spoke very specifically to me and He said, "Troy, I already healed you." And
literally not 24 hours later the pain was completely gone, again.
So the first key to your healing is you need to understand this truth from God's
word that God wants to heal you, God is a healer. The second key that you need to
get is that God has already healed you, He's already provided the grace for your
healing to take place. This is the third truth out of God's Word that I want to
share with you today and it is; that God wants to reveal to you why you're not
experiencing healing. So if you're at that place where you you say, you know
what? I am believe in God's Word, I believe He wants to heal me, I believe
God can and is able to heal me, I believe He's already provided the grace for my
healing - and yet you're asking this question: but why am I not walking in
that healing? Why do I feel like I'm not experiencing the healing yet? And the
answer to that question is that God wants to get personal with you. He wants
to walk personally with you and explain and even reveal to you in your heart
what it is that may be blocking you and your healing. So, yes, God has already
provided the grace for our healing but there are two ways that we ourselves
actually reject that grace and I want to talk about these two ways: The first one
is unbelief and the second one is disobedience. So I'm gonna dive into this
idea of unbelief and and how that applies to healing. The same way that we
receive salvation and forgiveness of our sins by grace, through faith, we receive
healing by grace and through faith. I'm going to show you this from Psalms 103: 2-3,
it says, "Bless the Lord, O my soul, And forget none of His benefits; Who
pardons all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases;" so this verse is
showing that literally this is a benefit of just knowing God and one
benefit is that He forgives all your iniquities and then right next to it,
literally parallel, is that He heals all your diseases. And maybe you're thinking
"this doesn't apply to me," but I want to look at the three
identifiers in this chapter to let us know who this person is talking about.
Who gets to receive these benefits, right? So the three identifiers are: Number one,
those who fear Him - and go read Psalms 103 if you want to see these for
yourself - Number two, those who are His children - Number three, those who keep
His covenant. And what's so amazing about this verse is that it was
written under the Old Covenant, during the time when the Old Covenant
was still in place; the Old Covenant was a covenant of works that was kept in
faith, the New Covenant is a covenant of grace that's also kept in faith. And yet
verses like this still apply to us because God
never changes, so the characteristics of God that are found in this verse, and the
principles of God that are found in this verse still apply to us today. So we can
look at this and we can see that maybe we haven't been perfect in our Christian
walk, maybe we've made mistakes along the way, we all have (I have), but
what's amazing about the New Covenant is it a grace-based covenant so when we look
at Jesus on the cross and we received the sacrifice for sins that He was
willing to give on our behalf, then we get to walk in the righteousness of God,
we get to know God - that is the beginning of our walk with God, when
we receive His forgiveness and we are saved - that's the beginning of a
beautiful relationship with our Creator and it's a relationship that's not based
on us living in perfection all the time, it's not based on us never
making mistakes, it's based on His grace. In the same way that we get to
receive friendship with God based on grace and through faith, we get to
receive the benefits of knowing God by grace and through faith and one of those
benefits, from Psalms 103, is that He heals all our diseases. All of the
benefits of God's grace are available to those who know God, who are in
relationship with Him, but that is not a relationship that was just started by
faith it's a relationship that's walked out by faith, and I'm gonna show you this
in Romans 1:17. It says, "For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from
faith to faith; as it is written, 'but the righteous man shall live by faith." So the
question I want to ask based on this verse is, even though your relationship
with God begun by faith you believed and that's how you were saved in what Jesus
did for you, are you living in that same place of faith today? Are you walking out
that relationship in faith? If not God wants to get personal with you, He
wants to get personal with you about what you're walking through, maybe about
what you're suffering through right now. He doesn't want to leave you in that
place by yourself, He wants it to be a personal walk but it also needs to be a
faith walk. So the first way that I believe we often reject God's grace for
healing is through unbelief. The second way is through disobedience.
If you've ever had the thought this sickness is God punishing me, you
need to understand that that is wrong theology. God is a just God and He will
not punish two people for the same sin. Listen to me: God - through the man, the
perfect man and son of God, Jesus Christ- He already accepted your punishment on
the cross. And you need to understand there's a very subtle but important
difference between these two ideas. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ and
you're experiencing sickness or disease or a chronic pain or whatever it might be,
that is not God's punishment, but it may be that when we are
experiencing that, that you and I are actually rejecting His grace.
There's a verse that says that God disciplines those He loves,
as a father that loves His children. I'm not rejecting that idea at all, I
believe the Holy Spirit disciplines us through conviction. The Holy Spirit is
gentle, He's always disciplining, disciplining us in a loving way,
in a loving manner and He's not going to use sickness or disease or injury to do
that, and the reason is because Jesus already bore those things on the cross.
And what's crazy is the idea of, I think sometimes we split up disobedience and
unbelief into just two separate categories, but we also need to
understand that disobedience is actually unbelief in action, it's living out that
unbelief that's in the heart. So if there's an area in your life where maybe
you feel like you have been doing something God does not want
you to do and you've been stuck in this place, and maybe you feel like it's a
stronghold in your life, whatever it might be, you feel like you can't get out
of it; My encouragement to you today is to ask God to reveal to you, ask Him to
get personal with you, He will and He wants to; ask Him to show you, is this
place where I am stuck in this disobedience, is this connected to a root of
unbelief in my heart about something? I feel like a lot of times as
believers we look at these two paths, the path that God has laid out before us,
the path that looks better to us that we want to walk down, and the only reason we
wouldn't take the path that God has laid out for us is because we don't
really believe it's the best path for us. But God has good plans for you,
God created you for a reason, He has a purpose for your life,
and He always has good thoughts toward you. He's a loving father and you can
trust Him, you can believe that He has the best path in mind. So the reason I'm
talking about unbelief and disobedience so much is because I'm trying to explain
some of the things that God's Spirit might reveal to you when you begin to
pray about why you're not walking in healing right now. But the really good
news is that God is able and willing to speak to you personally,
through the still small voice of His Holy Spirit and to reveal if there is
something that's standing in the way of your healing. He's willing to show you
exactly what that is and two resources I want to mention quickly is - one, I've
written a blog post, it's on my website Troy black videos.com, and it is called
how to hear God's voice. Go check it out. The second one - it's a video in which
I talk about hearing from the Lord personally, and it's called three keys to
waiting on God's timing. So go check those out. I want to finish with a story
that applies to this third point though. So when I was in college my senior year
I started to date this girl and I did not pray about it beforehand. I just
thought this is a good idea. I liked this girl and I was thinking this was a
good direction ahead, I was a senior in college and, to be honest, I believe the reason I didn't pray about it was because I was actually acting out
of fear a little bit and there was a little bit of that unbelief in
my heart obviously because I was thinking I'm about to graduate college, I
need to get married - I had this pressure that I was putting
on myself that didn't really need to be there, and yet at the same time I
allowed it to make these big choices without actually praying about it and
asking God. So I got into this relationship, we begin dating - we were
only dating for a couple weeks and suddenly I got this severe sickness. It was like really bad where I had a high fever, I don't know if it was the
flu or what it was, but I actually had a fever
off and on for about two weeks and I was laid up in bed.
I would get out of bed and like hobble to class just to pick up my homework and
then and maybe to eat something, and then go right back to sleep.
And I was just...I kept thinking, "Oh, I'm about to get better today, I'm about
to get better today," and I kept wondering why, why am I not getting better?
And finally I'm laying there in bed and I'm just praying about it and the Holy
Spirit begin to actually ask me to break up with this girl. He said, "I want you to
break up with this girl," and I'm like, oh man, and I knew it was gonna hurt her
really bad because she was obviously very invested in the relationship,
and I'm thinking like I can't do it, I can't do it, so I kept putting it off.
Finally, after two weeks of being sick I asked her to come over. She
comes over sits in my bedroom next to my bed where I'm literally laying in bed,
and I just I told her, "I feel like God wants us to break up and I'm
trying to be obedient." She got really upset about it and left. I felt
really bad later 'cause I realized if I had just prayed about it beforehand I could
have saved her and myself a lot of pain, but what was really amazing was she left
the room and five minutes later, no exaggeration, I sat up in bed and
realized my fevers gone, the soreness is gone - literally 100% better, got up took a
shower and then started doing my normal But if you can relate to any
part of that story at all, what I don't want you to get out of that is that God
was punishing me with sickness I don't believe that He was, based on His Word.
But I believe that when I was willing to take the suffering I was going through,
the pain I was going through, and even the decisions I had made
outside of His will, when I was willing to take those and lay them down at His
feet, and to trust Him with speaking into my life and with whichever direction
that He wanted me to go, He actually showed me why I had not experienced
healing up to that point and how to get there. So my prayer is that you were able
to take the best out of what I said today and to be able to hear it in
that light. I love y'all so much, and I'll see you next time.
