My Story - Part 3

Welcome back friends!  Last week, I shared part one and two of my story.  Part one of my story shows the power of influence.  I am grateful for Godly parents who were not only wonderful role-models, but they prayed for me every single day of my life…and still do!  Their influence in my life has definitely played a huge part in what God is doing in my life today.  Part two of my story shows the power of choices and the power of obedience.  You see, I didn’t get to choose the influence that my parents had in my life, but I did choose to be obedient when it came to allowing the influence that Nathan had in my life.  He is a huge part of my life because of a choice that I made 20 years ago and I am so happy that even as a 15 year old kid, I listened to the voice of the Holy Spirit.  We all make choices every day.  It’s important that we are led by the Holy Spirit because the choices you make will have an impact on your future and who you will become.  You see, God has a plan and purpose already written out for your days here on earth, but it’s our choices that will determine whether those plans will come to completion.  So choose wisely. 

Today, I want to share with you part three of my story.  Today’s story will show you the power of Jesus!  This is the part of my story where my faith shifted.  It was no longer about serving Jesus because Mom and Dad taught me that was the right thing to do.  This is the part of my story where I experienced Jesus in such a real way and it’s this experience that has changed the way I pursue God.  You see, I have learned about Jesus my entire life.  I was practically born in the church!  I was there on the second row pew just days after being born!  So I knew all the verses.  I knew all the stories.  I knew about Jesus.  But it wasn’t until I experienced the power of Jesus myself that I really knew Him.  This is the part of my story that for the first time, I understood that the same Jesus that I had learned about my entire life…the same Jesus that raised Lazarus from the dead…the same Jesus that parted the Red Sea…the same Jesus that died for me and rose from the dead on the third day…the same Jesus that I had asked into my heart as a child…this is the part of my story that I understood for the first time that He truly is the same yesterday, today, and forever. 

When I was a young girl, around 12 years old, I began battling with fear and anxiety.  It got so bad that it had such a grip on my life that I literally felt like I couldn’t breathe at times.  Now let me just say something about this time in my life.  This was that awkward time in my life where I was trying to find myself.  I was at that age where I was making a choice…was I going to follow the path that my parents had taught me my whole life or was I going to start doing what I wanted to do.  I was in that stage where I was teetering with sin, curious, yet I was still close enough to God that I always had a guilty conscience and repented.  I didn’t know it then, but that was the Holy Spirit.  Sinning just isn’t fun when you are taking the Holy Spirit with you!  I’m not going to go into this part of my life in today’s post, but I need you to understand something very important.  When we are living in sin, we open the door of our heart and mind and guess who doesn’t waste anytime moving in!  That’s right…Satan.  We don’t have to invite him in.  Sin automatically creates the environment in our hearts and minds that welcome him whether we want him there or not.  Now, I don’t know if my fear and anxiety was a direct result of my sin.  I learned years later that I have family members that have battled fear and anxiety for generations!  So whether it was a generational curse, brought on by sin, or whatever the source may be…it was bad and boy did it have a grip on me! 

For those of you that have never dealt with fear and anxiety, let me paint a picture of what life was like.  I had a great life.  I was happy and healthy.  I was active in sports, made good grades, had an amazing family, had great friends…life was good!  So what would a girl be anxious about when everything in life appears to be great, right?  Well, that’s what I used to think and guess who was always right there to answer my own questions!  The enemy!  There’s a reason Satan is called the father of lies.  He is the biggest liar and he will use your most vulnerable times in life to flood you with all of his lies.

Satan’s lies = Fear = Anxiety = Sickness

This sums up how I lived for ten years of my life!  I began to dwell on the lies of the enemy which led me to live in fear.  When you live in fear, you are anxious about everything!  You worry about things completely out of your control.  This is not only unhealthy for your mind, but worry is one of the leading causes of many serious health problems, including depression, eating disorders, obesity, acne, menstrual problems, and gastrointestinal problems…just to name a few!  The list goes on and on.  I suffered with many of these health problems as a result from my fear and anxiety.  I was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) which is a very painful gastrointestinal problem.  When I began to worry about something small, it would cause my IBS symptoms to flare up which caused me to be very sick.  Well, my sickness would then cause me to worry about the effects of being sick (missing too much school, being behind in my work, missing soccer games, etc.) which just made things worse!  It was a vicious cycle!  I was gripped by fear and sickness so often that I eventually became a prisoner in my home!  I was afraid to go anywhere because I was afraid my IBS symptoms would flare up and I would be stuck in a public bathroom bent over in unbearable pain which would then trigger a panic attack.  Now what teenager wants all of their friends and peers to see them in that condition!?  It was awful!  So rather than chancing it, I just chose to stay home.  There was a comfort level in my own home that allowed me to not worry about things as much so as long as I was home, things were better.  However, just getting up to start a new day to get ready for school, church, soccer, games, dates, shopping, or going out with friends, would be enough to throw me into a panic attack because I would start worrying about what I would do if I’m out at one these places and my IBS flares up!  I can’t tell you how many days of school I missed during my high school years, nor could I count the number of times that Nathan and I were at dinner or a movie and I would have to end our date early and ask him to take me home.  It got so bad that I just stopped going places.  I ended up dropping out of sports because of the fear of getting sick at a game that was too far from home.  If I couldn’t be home in 15 minutes, I just didn’t go!  Do you see how the enemy used fear to make me ineffective?  That’s how he operates!  He’s sneaky.  He slips in when you aren’t prepared for him and he feeds you just one lie.  That lie leads to another lie and before you know it, you’re completely living a life of bondage with crippling chains.  Keep in mind, I knew what God’s Word said about all of this!  I loved Jesus and other than that short period of time where I played around with sin, I have always served Him with all of my heart.  I knew God could set me free!  I knew God could heal my body!  But I began to believe the lies that either God was punishing me for my bad choices or that God doesn’t always choose to heal us here on earth. 

How many of you have been there?  Many of you are believing those lies right now!  Let me tell you about that place for a minute.  When you get to that place where you actually begin to believe those lies, it’s a very hopeless place to be.  When you truly believe that in order for you to experience peace and freedom, you have to die first…you are in a bad place and let me tell you something else…that’s exactly where Satan wants you to be!  Christians are really good about taking the lies of the enemy and sprinkling them with a little bit of spiritual salt and pepper as if that’s going to make the lie easier to live with and believe.  Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.  We accept the lie that God chooses to heal some people on earth, yet He chooses to let others die and receive their healing in heaven…now what part of that message gives a sick person any hope!  None of it!  That’s a lie from the pit of hell and I used to believe it!  I honestly believed that God must not want to heal me because I had prayed for so many years for God to heal my body and mind, yet things continued getting worse.  It must not have been in His Will, right? Somehow He must have been able to get more praise out of my sickness instead of my health, right?  Somehow, there must have been some greater good that could have come out of sickness and fear, right?  After all, I have a relationship with Jesus Christ so I don’t need to let the troubles of this world keep me down because they are only temporary.  I’ll get to experience my healing someday in heaven, right?  These are all lies that were sprinkled with just enough spiritual salt and pepper that they actually became believable.  But let me tell you something, to a teenage girl that has longevity in my family line, these lies were daunting!  The mere thought of living my entire life with these chains of fear, anxiety, and sickness made me feel hopeless.  I began to have thoughts of suicide.  Now keep in mind, I loved Jesus and the fear of going to hell kept me from killing myself.  I was desperate though.  I just needed a breath.  I was drowning in my circumstances.  Satan has a way of doing that.  He will use your circumstances to make you believe that there’s no way out.  I had been to doctors.  I had every test ran on me that you could imagine.  I was on multiple medications, many of those merely treating the symptoms caused from the medications that were treating my physical and mental problems.  Satan took me to a place where my circumstances seemed bigger than my Jesus.  But God…

God is faithful.  He gave His one and only son, Jesus, to die for all of mankind because He loved us…because He loved me.  Jesus…He took every sin, every sickness, every disease, every curse, every diagnosis…He took it upon himself as He hung on the cross.  Do you understand what He did for us?  Not only did he take our sins upon him, but he took everything that the enemy would try to put upon us and He became it.  Jesus became our sin and our sickness so that we didn’t have to.  My Jesus…He did that for me…and He did that for you.  The Bible describes what this did to our precious Jesus in Isaiah 52:14.  “His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness.”  He was unrecognizable because of the sins and diseases that He became.  He no longer even looked human.  Wow.  When you hear that verse, “By His stripes, I am healed” I pray you can truly understand that he didn’t just take 39 stripes on his back so that you could be healed.  No, He became your sickness and disease so that you could be healed.  He took it away from you!  Now that’s a message that gives hope to someone fighting a battle for their health!  That’s a message worth living for!  I am so grateful that God had mercy on my soul and allowed me to truly comprehend this truth.  Let me tell you how He did that for me.

In my darkest hours, when I was being tormented in my mind and body with fear and sickness, I cried out to God.  I prayed that He would take my life because I didn’t want to live like this anymore.  I remember in my darkest moments, there was one thing that would calm me and give me rest…that was God’s Word.  When I would read my Bible, I could feel the pain slowly leave my body, allowing my muscles to relax, eventually allowing me to fall asleep.  I can remember literally placing my Bible over my stomach at night and sleeping with it on top of me.  I didn’t understand why it made me better, but when you are in that dark place, you don’t care.  I just quickly realized there was power in God’s Word and that scripture about God’s Word being “alive and active” took a whole new meaning for me.  It was the only thing that made me feel better so to me, it was alive and active!  I learned as a teenager that there was power in God’s Word.  I may not have had the words to explain that power to others, but God allowed me to experience it in such a real way that I rarely left my house without my Bible.  I was sick…really sick…not only in my body, but my mind was just as sick as my body.  But let me tell you what started happening when I began renewing my mind in God’s Word.  I didn’t understand as a sick teenager that I was renewing my mind and allowing God’s Word to change my thoughts…I just found something that brought me peace and that’s why I was reading my Bible!  But God…

God was renewing my mind during my darkest hours.  He was filling my thoughts with His thoughts.  And then He gave me a prayer.  During one of my panic attacks, I remember being in a fetal position bent over in pain.  It was at night and everyone was sleeping.  I was trying to be quiet, trying not to let my cries be heard from my bedroom.  I opened my Bible and began to read Psalms.  I loved Psalms.  I began with chapter one and just kept reading.  I knew eventually that if I just kept reading long enough, the pain would subside.  My tears were dripping from my eyes onto the thin pages of my Bible and then God gave me this prayer when I read Psalms 6.  Listen to these words:

“No, Lord!  Don’t punish me in the heat of your anger.  Pity me, O Lord, for I am weak.  Heal me, for my body is sick, and I am upset and disturbed.  My mind is filled with apprehension and with gloom.  Oh, restore me soon.  Come, O Lord, and make me well.  In your kindness save me.  For if I die, I cannot give you glory by praising you before my friends.  I am worn out with pain; every night my pillow is wet with tears.  My eyes are growing old and dim with grief because of all my enemies.  Go, leave me now, you men of evil deeds, for the Lord has heard my weeping and my pleading.  He will answer all of my prayers.”

When I read these verses, I literally felt like I could have written them word for word.  I knew without a doubt that they Holy Spirit had drawn me to this particular passage for a reason and this became my prayer.  Every time I felt fear creeping up into my thoughts, I read this passage aloud.  Every time I felt a symptom rearing its ugly head into my body, I read and prayed this passage aloud.  The Holy Spirit began to drop specific scriptures into my heart…some that I had heard all of my life.  Except this time, there was a new understanding that was revealed to me about these specific scriptures.  All this time that I had been renewing my mind in God’s Word, the Holy Spirit was at work in me, giving me fresh understanding and revelation that only He can do.  God’s Word was no longer merely head knowledge.  It had taken root into my spirit.  It was down in my heart!  It was planted!  And now it was time to see it harvest!  I began praying the Word of God over myself…specific scriptures…and when I began to do that, my circumstances began to change.  Why?  I had prayed for ten years that God would touch my body and mind and free me from the chains of fear and sickness!  Why was this different?  Let me tell you why!  God’s Word works and His Word never returns void!  God heard every desperate cry from me.  In fact, the Word tells us he collects our tears in a bottle and stores them.  He makes a record of every tear.  His love for me never changed.  His promises never changed.  His Word never changed.  So what changed?  I did!!!!  My prayers changed!  When I finally grasped what God’s Word said, my desperate prayers changed to confident and bold proclamations!  When I finally grasped what God’s Word said, I began rebuking every lie of the enemy that came to my thoughts and I began proclaiming what God’s truth was instead!  When I finally grasped what God’s Word said, my hopelessness turned into expectancy!  That’s what God birthed into me as I began to renew my mind daily in His Word.  There wasn’t a trumpet sound from heaven or goose bumps all down my neck feeling.  There wasn’t an exact moment that I knew I was healed and set free.  There wasn’t a voice from God that spoke to me and said “Mary, because of your faith you are healed.”  Instead, it was the still soft voice in my mind reminding me of a specific scripture to stand on when I was sick.  It was the peace that came over me as I confessed His Word over me as soon as I began to feel an anxious thought causing me to tense up and begin to shake.  It was the hope I had in Jesus as I finally understood that what I was suffering with, Jesus became it so that I didn’t have to deal with it anymore.  It was that confidence that stirred up within me that allowed me to completely trust God’s Word and believe it even when my circumstances said otherwise.  It was the boldness that came upon me as I proclaimed God’s truth when Satan would attempt to feed me another lie.  That’s what my healing looked like.  It was a process…a journey…a mind shift that only comes from The Lord and through the renewing of your mind.  I had to retrain myself how to think and when I did that, my words and actions became different.  You see, I haven’t had a panic attack in over ten years.  I haven’t had to take medication for my IBS symptoms in over ten years.  But do you know what, Satan hasn’t stopped his attacks on me!  He still sends those anxious thoughts to me all the time.  And do you know what…when I haven’t been renewing my mind in God’s Word, sometimes I’m caught off guard and I can begin to dwell on those thoughts and lies.  We can't control the thoughts that come, but we can control what we do with those thoughts.  If we dwell on those thoughts, they become imaginations and imaginations become strongholds.  We need to keep our minds renewed in God's Word, because when I am armored up and I’m spending time reading God’s Word, I recognize his lies now.  You know why?  Because when they don’t line up with God’s truth, His Holy Word, I can spot them from a mile away!  I no longer dwell on those thoughts.  Now, when I begin to feel those anxious thoughts coming and the lies coming, I take those thoughts captive by speaking God's Word!  I tell the devil how it is now!  “No, devil!  That is a lie from the pit of hell and I rebuke that thought and take it captive.  God has not given me a spirit of fear! No weapon formed against me will prosper!  I am the head and not the tail!  I am blessed going in and blessed going out!  Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world!  By His stripes I am healed!  I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!  If God is for me then who can be against me!”  I begin speaking God’s Word to the devil and guess what…he flees every time!!!  He hates to hear God’s Words!  He flees at the name of Jesus!  He has no power over the Word of God!  That’s why the Word of God is called the “Sword of the Spirit”!  Have you ever noticed that all of the other armor that we are instructed to put on is to protect us from the fiery darts of the enemy?  It defends us or protects us!  But the sword is different!  It puts us on the offense!  Praise God!  I don’t know about you but I don’t want to always be on the defense!  When it comes to the enemy, I want to be on the offense!  I want him being the one retreating and fleeing, not me!  That’s why we need to be renewing our minds in God’s Word…so that when the enemy comes around attacking our minds, our bodies, and our relationships, we can take up the sword of the spirit and begin fighting with God’s Word!  Speak it, pray it, shout it, proclaim it, and declare it in Jesus’ Name!  It is done!  And for goodness sake, don’t be picking it up again once you have been delivered!  I have seen too many believers “lose” their healing because they took it back upon them the first time the symptoms came back around.  Remember how I said that even though I finally got it once I started renewing my mind daily, Satan didn’t just leave me alone!  It was a long process before I finally got hold of what Jesus did for me on the cross and was able to confidently stand on His promises.  It was a long process before I was symptom free!  But do you know Satan still tries to put those fearful thoughts and symptoms on me?  It would be just as easy for me to fall back into my old thought patterns and begin living in fear again and it would be just as easy for me to allow those symptoms to take hold of my body again, but why would I ever do that!?  I have been set free!  I’m not going back to that!  I rebuke those thoughts and symptoms the second they try to come back on me and guess what…they are gone!  That’s because they were never mine in the first place…Jesus took those from me when He died on the cross!  Praise God!  He is faithful!

If you are in need of healing today in your mind or body or you have been living in bondage, let me tell you something, there is hope!  You don’t have to die or wait for heaven to receive your healing friend!  It is available to everyone!  Hear my heart, there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus.  If you are feeling condemned because you aren’t there yet in your faith, stop right here and repeat that scripture over yourself right now “there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus!”  The enemy can use guilt to keep us in bondage just as much as he can use fear so just stop!  Recognize his tactics and speak truth to it!  It’s a process and I am still learning new things every single day but I promise you, if you begin renewing your mind in God’s Word and ask the Holy Spirit to open your heart and mind to new revelation and understanding, I know God will transform your thinking and your circumstances WILL change!  I promise!  How do I know…because God’s Word works!!!!  His Word is the only word that has the power to break every chain in your life…to heal every disease, to break every addiction, to free your mind…His Word will break every chain!  I am so passionate to share this truth with everyone because I am so tired of seeing other believers feasting on the devil’s lies!  It makes me mad that God’s people are suffering with things that were overcome on the cross!  Jesus paid too big of a price for us to keep it!  It’s time for us to be free and live in victory and share what God has done in our lives!  He is good ya’ll!  My God…He is good!

To close our time together today, I would like for you to listen to this song.  In fact, I’m going to invite you to have a little church right where you are this morning and listen to it until the end!  This is one of those songs that I listen to often in my home.  It’s one of those songs that causes me to stop what I’m doing and I crank the volume up as loud as it can go.  It’s one of those songs that I can’t help but sing along to.  And it’s one of those songs that’s causes me to get a little free right in the middle of my living room.  Join me.  I just shared my story how God broke every chain in my life and I am praying that He will do the same for you today.  I am putting my faith out there today and I am believing that God will use my story to stir your faith just enough for you to call on the name of Jesus and go to His Word!  Folks, there is power in the name of Jesus to break every chain so prepare yourself.  Someone is about to get free today!  In Jesus’ Name! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cAUnuH7Lik

In Him,

Mary