Grace Revolution: Experience the Power to Live Above Defeat (32 page)
Read Grace Revolution: Experience the Power to Live Above Defeat Online
Authors: Joseph Prince
Tags: #Religion / Christian Life / Personal Growth, #RELIGION / Christian Life / Spiritual Growth, #Religion / Christian Life / Inspirational
LIVE WITH FULL ASSURANCE OF FAITH
I
n the previous chapter, I talked a little about how the Lord showed me that the “now word” for the grace revolution is found in Jeremiah 23:4, where the Lord says, “I will set up
shepherds
over them who will
feed
them; and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, nor shall they be lacking” (emphasis mine). God is setting up shepherds who will care for, nourish, and
feed
His sheep, not beat, threaten, and intimidate them.
God is setting up shepherds who will care for, nourish, and
feed
His sheep, not beat, threaten, and intimidate them.
This is happening all over the world today, from Australia to America, from Asia to Europe, and from Africa to the Middle East. Shepherds are rising up and proclaiming the gospel of grace with great boldness and we are seeing lives transformed by the power of our Lord Jesus Christ. Notice that the verse talks about “shepherds,” plural, who will bring about sweeping changes across the world. It’s not
about one ministry or church. Our Lord Jesus has raised and will continue to raise many shepherds. This is the grace revolution that began with our Lord Jesus and all that He accomplished for us at Calvary!
These are the exciting days of grace we live in. Under the grace dispensation, we are living in the season of
dektos
, defined as “that most blessed time when salvation and the free favors of God profusely abound.”
1
My desire for you as you come to the closing chapters of this book is that you experience the profusely abundant favor of God in every area of your life. I pray you will experience the power of living above defeat through His grace and gift of righteousness. The grace revolution is a revolution of restoration of everything the enemy has stolen—your health, your provision, your confidence, even your meaning and purpose in life. Our Father in heaven will restore to you and rebuild you from the inside out.
The grace revolution is a revolution of restoration of everything the enemy has stolen—your health, your provision, your confidence, even your meaning and purpose in life.
As you saturate yourself with the good news of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, take a moment to be inspired by this amazing testimony of restoration from Marcus, a precious brother from Houston, Texas. Marcus suffered excruciating pain in his body for twenty years until he had an encounter with our Lord Jesus through the preaching of the gospel of grace:
I injured my back when I was ten years old. My older brother had dared me to do a flip, which I thought would be fun and easy to do. I tried doing the flip, didn’t make it, and landed flat on my back. That’s when I started to have a serious problem with my back and really bad back pains for the next twenty years.
Shortly after my fall, I noticed that breathing brought on pain in my sides. My mother, who was greatly alarmed, took me to chiropractors, who thought it was only a matter of making adjustments regularly to my spine. Well, after numerous adjustments over the next few years, the pain didn’t go away. All the chiropractors and doctors that I saw couldn’t tell me what was wrong with my back. The chiropractors kept telling me all I needed was more adjustments while the doctors told me to expect more pain the older I got “because the spine degenerates as you get older.” Basically, nobody had answers or a cure for me.
As I grew up, I lived with pain as a constant companion. It was hard to get up and walk around. It was painful to sit up and stand up. Some days, the pain was so intense it hurt even to breathe—every little movement gave me pain. Even on “better” days, I couldn’t exercise and driving was hard because I couldn’t turn my head or move my body without pain shooting through my body. Sometimes, the pain would take me down for days to weeks at a time.
I hated the fact that I couldn’t experience the kind of success I wanted in my family life and career. I knew my wife and two beautiful kids wanted a husband and a dad around to do fun stuff with, but I just couldn’t do those things. I couldn’t take them to the park and play with them like I wanted to.
Work was also frustrating because often I had to call in sick. I wanted to be able to go to work, to do all I needed to do, and just be successful at my job, but I felt so limited because I had to deal with the pain all the time.
I hated not being able to enjoy my family or my job, but I didn’t know how to change things. Medicines weren’t working—they only made me nauseous, tired, and drowsy, and gave only very temporary pain relief. Even though I was in church, I wasn’t sure God loved me or that He would heal me, because I wasn’t perfect. In fact, I was quite sure He would not heal me because I had messed up and hadn’t done enough or made enough sacrifices to please Him. Some days, I was so depressed, I even wondered if God was real.
Things pretty much stayed the same until early 2013 when I started to listen to Pastor Prince’s television broadcast. From his preaching, I found out that because of what Jesus did for me at the cross, God still loves me and was there for me even when I messed up. That was such a huge comfort and assurance for me that I wanted to hear more, so I started to record every single episode that came on.
A few months later, I tuned in to Pastor Prince’s program when I had to call in sick again because of the pain. I lay on the couch and watched him teach on healing. I heard him say again that even when I have failed, God still loves me and He can still heal me. Pastor Prince taught how Jesus was the final sacrifice for us and how only through Jesus Christ, we are righteous, and through Jesus Christ, we are healed. And the more he broke it down using Scriptures, the more I saw that Jesus alone—not what I did—made me eligible for God’s healing.
During that broadcast, Pastor Prince asked everybody who had a condition whether in the congregation or at home to stand up while he prayed for them. Before he prayed, he said, “Lift up your hands and pray with me. God is going to touch you.” As he was praying, he suddenly stopped and said, “There is a man at home who is suffering pain in the right side of his back.” Then, he snapped his fingers and said, “God has healed you.”
I’ll never forget it because immediately, I felt a warmth, a relaxation in my muscles that I hadn’t felt since the accident, and I knew that God had healed me. Right in front of the TV, I started bawling. I couldn’t believe it! One moment I couldn’t move without pain, and the next moment, I was bending and I could feel the muscles in my back stretching… and there was no pain. The feeling was so indescribable that all I could do was cry for a while, before I called my wife to tell her what had happened.
Since that day, the pain has not come back and everything has changed. I can run around with my kids. We go to the park now and run and play, and I don’t come back with any pain, nor does the pain show up the next day. I no longer feel pain when I stand, sit, or breathe, like I used to. I’ve started exercising and can even run through an obstacle course now. Work has become a joy too—my company has been experiencing success and I know it’s because of God’s favor bringing in the sales.
It’s been amazing and I’m so grateful to Pastor Prince for preaching the truth about God’s grace, and I’m so grateful to God for healing me, for showing me He still loves me, and for changing my life so tremendously!
Marcus, I am rejoicing with you and your family at the breakthroughs and restoration that you have experienced. Isn’t our Lord wonderful? All glory and praise to our Lord for this powerful healing testimony!
We are living in the days that Jeremiah prophesied about. We have read so many praise reports of God’s beloved children experiencing abundant restorations, miraculous healings, and freedom from sin and addiction. And these are just a handful of the many testimonies that have been e-mailed to my ministry office.
Let me draw your attention to what Marcus experienced when he began tuning in to the preaching of the gospel of grace. In just a couple of weeks, he discovered what our Lord Jesus had done for him on the cross and especially His love for him even when he had messed up. Marcus shared that there was “such a huge comfort and assurance” for him. I thought that was a very appropriate choice of words because the grace revolution is a revolution of
assurance
and
peace
.
The grace revolution is a revolution of
assurance
and
peace
.
Romans 10:15 tells us that those who “preach the gospel of peace” are those who bring “glad tidings of good things.” When you hear about our Lord and what He has done for you at Calvary, it imparts deep shalom-peace, comfort, and rest to the innermost recesses of your troubled heart. From that position of rest, Marcus received
complete and total restoration of his health. The severe back pains that plagued him for twenty years are now totally gone. Hallelujah!
Our heavenly Father wants His beloved children to live with great assurance—assurance of their salvation, assurance of their forgiveness, and assurance of their righteousness in Christ.
Our heavenly Father wants His beloved children to live with great assurance—assurance of their salvation, assurance of their forgiveness, and assurance of their righteousness in Christ. Unfortunately, there are certain sectors in Christianity that believe keeping believers insecure about their salvation and forgiveness will help them to be more holy and zealous for the Lord. They don’t realize that what they are doing is actually counterproductive and producing just the opposite effect. Love and insecurity cannot coexist in a healthy relationship. Our Father in heaven wants us to “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Heb. 10:22). And the Word of God is intended to impart this full assurance of faith. Just read these Scriptures:
“God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that
you may know that you have eternal life
, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God.”
—1 John 5:11–13 (emphasis mine)
Read it again.
These words are recorded in the Holy Word so that you may
know
with absolute certainty that you have eternal life as a believer in our Lord Jesus Christ. Faith doesn’t deal with conjectures and uncertainties; it deals with the “full assurance of faith”! Today it is my desire that you be established in this assurance of faith. If assurance has been stolen from your heart, I believe that you will experience complete and total restoration as we delve more into the Word of God. Amen!
So what is the foundation we can stand on to have the “full assurance of faith” mentioned in Hebrews 10:22? Several truths are laid out for us in Hebrews 10, so let’s go slowly and look at what this chapter says one step at a time. To make it easier for you, I’ll be outlining three
W
’s that work together to give us the full assurance of faith.
The chapter begins by talking about how the law had only a
shadow
of the good things to come. In other words, the law did not have the real thing. It was only a shadow of the new covenant of grace. All the offerings required under the law—the burnt offering, meal offering, peace offering, sin offering, and trespass offering—were shadows of the substance. The substance is our Lord Jesus Christ—His perfect offering on the cross is the only offering that could take away all our sins once and for all. All the other offerings failed, for “it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins” (Heb. 10:4).
Next let’s see what our Lord Jesus said to the Father in verse 9:
“Behold, I have come to do Your
will
, O God.” He takes away the first that He may establish the second.
—Hebrews 10:9 (emphasis mine)
We have just seen the first
W
—the
will
of the Father. Now, what was the will of the Father? The Father’s will was to send His only begotten Son to take away the first covenant, which is the covenant of law, and to establish the second covenant, which is the covenant of grace. In fact, just two chapters before this, the Bible tells us that God found fault with the first covenant of the law: “For if that first covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second” (Heb. 8:7).
Why did God find fault with the first covenant, that of law? The first covenant is filled with “Thou shall not,” “Thou shall not,” “Thou shall not.” If you are able to fulfill all the
not
s, you are blessed. But if you break just one law, then you are guilty of breaking all the laws (see James 2:10). This also means that you cannot pick and choose which laws you want to keep. Under this system, failure is guaranteed. Always remember that under the first covenant, the law
always
disqualifies you.
Under the law the Lord told Moses, “Command the children of Israel that they put out of the camp every
leper
, everyone who
has a discharge
, and whoever becomes
defiled by a corpse
” (Num. 5:2, emphasis mine). Anyone who was “unclean” was rejected and disqualified. But under grace, we see every disqualification reversed! Look at three miracles that are frequently preached from the Gospels. When our Lord finished preaching the Sermon on the Mount, a
man with leprosy
came to Him, asking Him to cleanse him, and He did (see Matt. 8:1–4). Then, in Capernaum, a woman who had had a
discharge
for twelve years touched the hem of His garment and was completely healed (see Mark 5:25–34). Following that He went into Jairus’s house, held the hand of Jairus’s daughter, who had
died
, and raised her back to life (see Mark 5:35–43).
Isn’t this amazing? Our Lord Jesus, the very personification of
grace, came and qualified every one of the three types of people disqualified under the law! That’s the will of the Father that our Lord was sent to fulfill. In these three instances, we see how He took away the first covenant that He might establish the second—the new and better covenant of grace. And by this will of the Father, “we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Heb. 10:10). Hallelujah!