Walking in Healing by Love: The Power of Faith

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Greetings, friends and new listeners, and welcome to The Sound of Faith. I’m Sharon Otts, thanking you for tuning in today because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. Today’s message is very important and pertinent to anyone who has struggled with the need of physical healing. This message is not something I’ve read about or heard about, but one I have lived through and still apply every day for my own physical healing. Walking in healing by love. So we’re going to continue today. If you missed last week, I’ll give you a quick recap. We’re talking about walking in healing. Not only to get healed, but to stay healed. Amen? And we learned that in order to walk in healing, obviously you’ve got to walk in faith. Because we walk by faith and not by sight. But we learned that faith is only one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is love because faith works by love. And we concluded that we must walk in healing, we must walk in faith, therefore we must walk in love. So regardless of how much word you know, and I believe that most of us here at Faith Tabernacle know a lot of word, and we know how to minister to our faith. Our faith is ministered to regularly and always has been. We found out last week that you can even have mountain-moving faith. But if you don’t have love as the motivator… We are nothing. We could be using gifts of the Spirit, even workings of healings and workings of miracles. But you’ve got to have love as the motivator. He says you profit nothing. Amen? We learned that there are three things that abide most of all in God’s kingdom, and that’s faith, hope, and love. But that the greatest of these is love. Because we found that when we get to heaven, we won’t need faith. Because we will have sight. And we won’t need hope. Because Paul said, what do you hope for? That which you’ve already got. But we will always need love. And so we learn, too, that this walk of love has a vertical dimension and a horizontal dimension. Vertically, and this was so important for me, you have to know and believe that God loves you. Amen. Not that generic God loves me. Personally know and be convinced that God loves you and therefore he wants to do good for you. Yes, he wants to heal you. He wants to heal every one of us because he loves us. And we learn that only perfect love, which is mature love, casts out fear. And if you have fear, you’re not mature in love. Right? You’ve got to work on that, getting that understanding that God loves you. I even shared with you a breakthrough that I had through a phenomenal episode in my life where first I heard the voice of the devil say that God hates you and that how God brought me out of that. The next day was floating on air, overwhelmed by the knowledge of how much God loves me. Again, if you weren’t here last week, you might get the CD for that. And so one of the best ways to deal with unbelief is to minister not only to our faith, but also to our love. Amen? Walking in love. We learn also that we have a horizontal dimension to that love, that it is imperative that we walk in love towards one another. And that if we don’t, we can open the door for the enemy to attack us. We talked about how Miriam and Aaron murmured against their brother Moses, the servant of the Lord, and she was struck with leprosy. And then we know that because Moses was such a wonderful, loving man and younger brother, he prayed for her and she was healed. Now, we didn’t say that to try to threaten anybody with, God’s going to strike you with sickness. I don’t believe that. And I’ll get on that in a moment. But we did it to show you because the Bible says the Old Testament examples are for our learning and admonition. And we can learn from them. And the big, big, big thing we learn from that is don’t murmur. and complain and speak evil against people because when you do, the devil, not God, the devil gets in the mix. You open a door for the devil to get in. Amen? And we concluded last week by asking the question, if you had truly done all that you knew to do to minister to your faith and get your faith built up and edified, and in fact that you could feel within your spirit, man, because faith is a spirit, God doesn’t give it to your brain. He gives it to your spirit. And you could feel that your spirit was getting increased. Faith was being built up and it was getting strong. And yet you hadn’t received your healing. And someone said to you, you know, you’ve been carrying unforgiveness in your heart against so-and-so. It could go back to your childhood. that you’re upset about things your parents did to you or someone else or through your whole life. And even though you say that you’ve gotten over it, as soon as you hear that person’s name mentioned or if you think about that event, you get that same old feeling in your heart. Amen? And someone said to you, if you will forgive that person totally and absolutely, you’ll get your healing. We said, would you do it? We asked the question, if you have a tendency to be critical of other people and to speak evil things of other people, and you know, you might be a nitpicker, you may be a fault finder, and you may especially point your finger and you don’t like this minister and you don’t like that one, amen. And if you have that tendency and the spirit of God said to you, if you will get over that judgmental spirit, you will get a breakthrough and be healed. Would you do it? And guess what? The whole church said, Amen. We would be willing to do it. Amen? So that was a recap of last week. Now today, let’s turn in our Bibles to Exodus 15 and 26. For part two, in order to walk in healing, not just to get healed, but to stay healed, we’ve got to walk in faith, and then we must walk in love. If we don’t, we can give our adversary an advantage over us. You know, 2 Corinthians 2.11 says, That’s a very powerful verse, and you rarely hear it quoted. Where it says, don’t give Satan an advantage over you, we tend to use it for other things. And there’s nothing wrong with that. To say, you know, don’t go, if you’ve got a problem with immorality, don’t go driving in a car with somebody that’s a married man that you are infatuated with. Or if you’ve got a problem with drugs, don’t hang around people that are doing drugs or alcohol. Don’t hang around people that drink. And we use it for that. But if you take it in its context, it’s saying you need to forgive one another lest Satan get an advantage over you. And I don’t want to give him any advantages. Amen? I’m sure that throughout my life I have given him advantage. I didn’t do it on purpose. Often it was through ignorance. And then I could look back and say, oh, wow. You know, now I see. I opened the door for that. Amen? And so we don’t want to give them an advantage. So let’s find out what God’s word says about our healing. And I’m bringing you to Exodus 15, 26, because this is a verse that we often quote. This is our healing covenant. And I know it’s Old Testament, but I will say to that remark, if it’s that good in the Old Testament… And Hebrews tells us in Hebrews 8, 6, that Jesus is the guarantee of a better covenant based on better promises than when I read this, I understand that not only does this work for us, but we’ve got a better promise because our guarantor is not Moses. Our guarantor is Jesus Christ. But in Exodus 15, 26, we read, And he said, if thou will diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God and will do that which is right in his sight and will give ear to his commandments and keep all his statues, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians, for I am the Lord that healeth thee. Amen. And here we have one of the Jehovah covenant names, Jehovah Rapha. I am the Lord, your healer. Jehovah is God’s covenant name. You don’t see Jehovah used in the very early parts of your Bible of Genesis and such. You see that it’s used regularly once God makes a covenant with men. And the word Jehovah means the God who was and is and evermore shall be. From everlasting to everlasting. So he said, here’s the condition. This is my part and your part. If we will diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord and do that which is right in his sight. Not in the sight of man, but in the sight of God. And I say this because if you try to do what’s right in the sight of man, here’s what you’re going to run into. Over here, you’ve got people that are super lenient. You know, grace covers it all. Do whatever you want. Go wherever you want. You can go to the nightclubs. You can go to the dance halls. You can drink and socialize with the ungodly. You can do all of that. Grace covers it all. So if you go by their standard, you’re going to be in sin. But then you got the folks over on this side. We got those folks that are too legalistic. They’re the Pharisees walking around. Amen. Looking for specks in people’s eyes when they got a log in theirs. So then you’re going to be over here becoming an old Pharisee. And so you can’t do what’s right in the sight of men. You got to do what’s right in the sight of God. And if you are truly your heart is right and honest and you go before God and say, Lord, is this right or wrong for me? And you are sincere. He will convict you. one way or the other. And once he convicts you, don’t talk yourself out of it. Because that’s how people get deceived. They let somebody else come along and say, yeah, but, and support this other thing. When the Holy Ghost checks you, you’re checked. You don’t need nobody else to come and tell you that that’s wrong. I don’t know who that one was for. Amen. So we don’t want to be too lenient and we don’t want to be too harsh. But we always, always want to speak the truth. And according to Ephesians 4.15, we want to speak the truth in love. See, that’s the whole thing. Speaking the truth in love. Sometimes it’s not easy to have to tell people, you know, you’re going down the wrong path. Right. The enemy is deceiving you, but you have to tell them, just make sure you do it in love. Amen? Because if you don’t do it in love, the enemy seizes upon that contentious way, and then the person gets focused on that, and then that makes it so they are not listening to the truth they need to hear. Because the enemy’s good about doing that, amen? Don’t give him anything to work with. So he said, if you will give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes or keep all his laws, this is my part, this is your part, amen? He says, then I’m gonna remove the sickness and disease from the midst of you. I will not let those diseases that come on the, whenever we see Egyptians, let’s just think the ungodly who were not in a covenant relationship with God. It doesn’t mean that we hate them. It doesn’t mean we want them to be sick. It doesn’t mean we think they’re getting what they deserve. The simple fact is they do not have a covenant relationship with God. And when you’re not in a covenant relationship with God, you don’t get the blessings and the benefits. Now God, in his great compassion and mercy, in his sovereignty, he could say, I’m going to give it to you anyway, because I’m just good. And the goodness of the Lord leads to repentance. But for his children, this is something he made a covenant with us. And he said in Psalm 89, my covenant will I not break, and neither will I alter the words going out of my mouth. Amen. amen so if we do our part now let me tell you this setting of this verse that Moses delivered to the children of Israel guess what had just happened before it they had come into the wilderness and they hadn’t gotten any water to drink for three days and they finally found a stream of water and boy were they excited and everybody’s going for the water up Bitter, nasty, undrinkable. They even named it Marah, which means bitter. Amen. So you see that here God is telling them because this is their first instance where the murmuring starts. Murmuring. Even that word sounds murmur. You know, it’s just got that sound to it. And later on, God said, you have angered me 10 times. And all of it was murmuring. And, you know, in 1 Corinthians, the 10th chapter, God says, don’t do like they did in the wilderness. And one of the things he said was, don’t murmur. And so they had just acted bad. Their behavior was bad. So God interjects and says, look, I want to make a covenant with you. Now, let me just finish what the point is. The water was bitter and God told Moses to get a tree. and dip it in the water. And when he did, the water turned sweet and the people were able to drink. Oh, there’s so many little nuggets there. Amen. And the most obvious one is that it takes a tree. to get the bitterness out of your life and to make your life sweet. That tree is a prototype of the cross. Amen? And so now God’s telling them, look, I want to make a covenant with you so that you will not have to have the diseases that were back there in Egypt. And you know, there’s a spiritual and physical connotation here, of course, amen? But specifically, I am the Lord that heals thee. He wasn’t talking about healing your sinful soul. He’s talking about your sick body. He’s a healer. Amen? And the present tense that is built into Jehovah, I was, I am, I will be, amen, means that he wants to keep us healed. He wants to heal us and keep us healed. So the conclusion is the condition for us to avoid disease and receive healing is to keep God’s laws. Now, we’re not just talking about the Ten Commandments. We’re talking about… And also, you know, he gave them many dietary laws, which of course I won’t go into, but he gave them many dietary laws. And he wasn’t doing this arbitrarily to make them feel that in some way they were being deprived because they couldn’t eat, you know, a hot dog or a pork chop. There was a reason for the dietary laws because God made the body and he knows how to keep the body well. So the dietary laws that they were to keep were also to keep them from getting diseases. And you know back then that they didn’t have refrigeration like we have and things like that, amen? And so, you know, they didn’t know. Somebody’s going to get mad at me, and this is not in my notes. They didn’t know that pork is full of worms. They didn’t know that they were full of parasites. They didn’t know that. You mean to tell me you live in 2016 and you don’t know that? All right, that’s something for you to Google later on. Not now. Later on. So the point is, he not only wanted them to keep the Ten Commandments and the dietary laws, but to love one another. Amen? Let’s look at Deuteronomy 10 and 12. And now, Israel, what does the Lord thy God require of thee but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep his commandments and his statutes, what I command thee this day for thy good. Do you know that seven times, at least seven, there may be more, but I found at least seven times that God commanded the people to love him. God commanded, I said love me. I’m telling you to love me and love me with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, with all your strength. And you know, seven is pretty much symbolic meaning of completion and perfection. God’s making a point. But here it begs the question, can you command somebody to love somebody? Can you command a person to love? According to the Bible, you can. You’re quiet out there. Amen. Can love be commanded? Yes, because in the Bible, love is a decision. It’s not a warm, fuzzy, foo-foo feeling. It’s a decision. Amen. It’s a commitment that you make to honor God and to honor his word and to walk in obedience. Okay, I’m going to get the men mad at me. Ephesians 25, 525, God said, Husbands, love your wives. He’s commanding husbands to love their wives. I think that’s remarkable. I don’t see where he says wives love your husband, but husbands love your wives. Amen. Because, of course, we’re wired differently. But men, God is telling you to love your wife. I don’t care if you don’t like the way she cooks. You love your wife. Amen. You love your wife regardless of that one thing that gets on your nerves. Amen. You love your wife as your wife ages. Amen. All right. And you know, she’s already given you several children. Amen. And so, you know, she’s not that trim, cute little thing that she was before she had all those babies and got gray hair from teenagers. The point is he’s commanding husbands, love your wives. And he didn’t tell the wives that, you know why? If a husband will love his wife the way God says, oh my goodness, that wife will return. She will reciprocate. She will love him back so much. He’ll be saying, lady, get off. Leave me alone. Stop hugging me. Stop kissing me. Give me a break. When a man loves a wife and loves a woman that way, she will return them. I mean, you know, we’re talking about Christians. I realize there’s people out in the world, they got bad attitudes. They got the old devil in them, amen? But we’re talking about godly women, aren’t we? So love can be commanded. God commands us to love him and to love one another because the whole law… The whole law of God from Genesis to Deuteronomy, in which the rabbis have determined altogether there are 613 laws. See, we always think of the Ten Commandments, but altogether there are 613 laws God gave Israel to obey. That’s a lot of laws. Amen? Amen? But God made it easy. He made it easy because he condensed 613 laws all the way down to two. And we’re going to see what that is. Let’s turn to Matthew 22 and see what Jesus has to say about the laws. Those 613 laws in Matthew 22, looking at verse 35. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him and saying, one of them, if we would have read the verse before, we see is a Pharisee. And I kind of referred to you how Pharisees act a moment ago. And a lawyer is not a lawyer of a civil government. This is a lawyer of someone who knows the scriptures. They know the law, the scriptures. They would be a Ph.D., If, you know, they had gone to college, they’d got a Ph.D. in theology and such. So one of them asked Jesus a question, but remember how I brought out last week, some people’s questions are not sincere? How many know that some people just want to ask questions because they’re trying to make you look bad? They’re not sincere. That’s what this guy was about. So he said to him, asking him a question, Master, or the better way would be teacher, right? Because I think of master, I’m thinking of you’re my master and I’m under you and I, you know, I own you. But it really should be teacher. The word in Greek is didasko and it means teacher. I don’t know what it is here in Hebrew, but it means teacher. Teacher, this is Greek, I’m sorry. Master. Which is the great commandment in the law? Which is the? There’s 613, but I want to know which is the greatest out of those. Jesus said unto him, thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is just like it. is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. That is powerful. Amen. He’s saying, I’m going to make it easy for you. You want to know what is the greatest one? The greatest one. We’ll just take 613 and we’ll bring them down to two. And the greatest one is you must love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy mind, all thy soul, all thy strength. And there’s another one. Number two is just like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. Because I tell you, if you fulfill number one, you will fulfill number two. That’s what Jesus was saying. If you are truly loving God, not with just an intellectual thing, but with all thy heart and mind and soul and strength, it’s taking in your whole being. You will do number two and you won’t struggle to do it. And you won’t stumble to do it. Amen? You don’t have to turn there, but James said in James 2.8, if you want to fulfill the law according to the scripture, thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself. So here’s how we walk in healing. is by walking in love, keeping the commandments, getting back to Exodus 15, 26. If we keep all his statues, keep all his commandments, then we will not have these diseases. Now we’ve boiled it down and made it simple to love God with all our being and to love our neighbor as ourself. Amen. So let’s go back to the Old Testament and Let’s go to Deuteronomy and read a verse in 715. Deuteronomy 715. And the Lord will take away from thee all sickness and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest upon thee, but will lay them upon all them and not upon thee. So again, we see that he’s saying that… God will take away all disease. The reason why I’m bringing you in Deuteronomy is because, you know, Deuteronomy means do means to and on me means law. So it means second law. In other words, it’s the second confirmation. Because in the mouths of two or three, every word must be established. When you read Deuteronomy, sometimes you feel like deja vu. Like, didn’t I read this before? Yes, you read it before. Moses is getting ready to go to be with God. This is his last words, and he’s going back and rehearsing what God has said. Amen for that second witness. Now back to Exodus, and this time we’re going to look at chapter 23, and we’ll look at verse 25. And you shall serve the Lord your God. He shall bless thy bread and thy water. Wow, do we need that blessing today? And I will take sickness away from the midst of thee. There shall nothing cast their young nor be barren in thy land. The number of thy days I will fulfill. I’m claiming that one. What about you? Amen? So he’s saying that if you will serve me, I’m going to bless your bread and water. Now, if that was important to them, it is a thousand times as important to us today. Because we are now just beginning to wake up and realize that since the 1950s, our foods have been radically changed. They’re not just coming, you know, from a nice little farm somewhere to the store. The farms now have genetically engineered seed to grow the crops. Amen? In order for them to keep turning over many, many different crops because, you know, they’ll plant this plant and then as soon as they harvest it, they turn around and plant something else and they turn around and plant something else. And you know, in the Old Testament, God had a law that the seventh year, a field had to lie dormant. They could not plant anything in the seventh year. What was the reason for that? The ground, the earth was depleted and God wanted it to rest. See, he wants everybody to have their day of rest, even the ground, amen? And so they had to let it lie for that seventh year and then they could go back to planting again the eighth year. Well, today they are not going to let a field lie dormant for a year. No, they got to have some money. You know, we got to sell these crops. So what do they do? Well, let’s just put fertilizer in. Well, let’s just put pesticides in. Let’s just put insecticides in. Whatever we have to do to keep the crops growing and growing more and more and more. Amen. And think about our meat industry and our poultry industry. The way they shoot them full of all the hormones and the antibiotics and all of these things. Amen? So we need God’s blessing on our food and we need God’s blessing on our water. Look what happened to that town up there in, I think it was Michigan, where they got the bright idea to switch from Detroit’s water or Flint’s water, one of those places, and what they ended up doing. Leaching. High amounts of lead. Into the water. And the people are drinking that water. And getting sick. And not only that. For children. Who knows what it will do in the future. Amen. If you don’t say your grace when you eat. You better start doing it. Not only because you need to be thankful. That God’s given you food. We don’t think about that much. Because none of us ever go hungry for sure. But we need God’s blessing on our food. Because honestly we don’t know what’s in it. Amen. We don’t knowingly eat something bad, but we don’t really know, do we? And now our waters are polluted? And you know, I remember when I was pregnant with Scott, I just loved tuna fish. And I ate tuna fish all the time, all the time. And back then, nobody said, you know, don’t do that. Now they’ll tell women, don’t eat much tuna fish. Don’t eat tuna. It’s got too much mercury in there. Could hurt your baby. And back then, I think I ate tuna every day. And I didn’t know it at the time, but later on, I learned that the particular thing that tuna supplies causes a baby’s brain to be more intelligent. And I’ve got to say, Scott’s pretty smart. I don’t know if he got it from the tuna or if he got it from his mother. laughter But today, they’re telling pregnant women, don’t eat tuna or eat very little tuna. You’ve got to have God’s blessing on it. Amen? And then I love the way it ends here. It says, and so you will fulfill the number of your days. That means whatever God has written in your book, when he wrote your name down on the day of your birth. Amen? And according to Psalm 139, we won’t turn there, but it says God knows all our days even before we were born. Amen? That you will fulfill the number of your days. Now, this says to me that it’s not absolute. I will fulfill them as long as I’m walking in that blessing and as long as that blessing’s on my food. But if I of myself blatantly ignore the dietary laws and go eat a junk food all the time… And way too much sugar or something and end up with high blood pressure or diabetes or other things. Amen. That wasn’t what God’s will was, was it? So we have to keep the laws. Amen. Amen. What an insightful and invaluable word for us today. Walking and healing by love. Do you know that in the book of Acts, the chronicle of the early church, the term love is not used once? However, the terms in one accord and in one mind are found 13 times in the first few chapters. You see, it was not necessary to have to keep talking about love when they were all walking in love. His great teaching on the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14. Paul stopped midstream to write chapter 13 on the role of love in the operation of the gifts. He made it clear that unless love is the motivator for the gifts, I am nothing, I convey nothing, and I gain nothing. Not even mountain-moving faith can operate fully without love because, and this is the key to getting healed and staying healed, faith works by love. Paul concluded that there now abides faith, hope, and love, And the greatest of these is love, because love never fails. But without love, faith fails and hope dies. This is why it is impossible to walk in faith and not walk in love. And it is why some Christians do not receive their healing and or keep it. Walking in love is both vertical and horizontal. When we know how much God loves us, we believe his word to heal us. And we don’t allow fear to paralyze our faith because perfect love casts out fear. We must also walk in love towards others in the body of Christ. So if you have done all you can do to purify and strengthen your faith and you feel your faith is rising and yet still you have not received your healing, it’s time to check your love walk. Where there is bitterness, criticism, judgmentalism, jealousy, a lack of faith is not the problem, but a lack of love. I learned all these things on my journey to healing that I still must apply every day. And this groundbreaking teaching is a two-CD set and can be ordered for a love gift of $15 or more for the radio ministry. To order Walking in Healing by Love, mail to Sound of Faith, P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland, 21203. Or shop online at soundoffaith.org, where it’s also available on MP3s. Until next time, this is Sharon Knott saying, Maranatha.