The Power of Right Believing: 7 Keys to Freedom from Fear, Guilt, and Addiction (31 page)

What Are You Hearing about Jesus?

Perhaps like this woman (whose story you can read about in Mark 5:25–34), you are facing an impossibly hopeless situation in your life. Maybe you are struggling with a debilitating sickness, marital situation, financial crisis, or prolonged challenge. In the natural, the future looks dismal and there appears to be no reason to hope. If that is you, I want to encourage you to believe that you too can experience the kind of breakthrough this woman experienced.

Imagine: for twelve long years, she had watched helplessly as her condition went from bad to worse no matter what she tried. Most of us would have thrown in the towel and given up on hope.

How did this woman find hope in the midst of her hopeless circumstances?

What was the turning point for her? What gave her the courage to hope again?

I believe that the secret to her faith can be found in the first five words of this verse: “She had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him through the crowd and touched his robe” (Mark 5:27
NLT
).

All the Word of God records for us is that “she had heard about Jesus.”

What do you think she heard about Jesus?

This is an important question because whatever she had heard about this Jesus imparted an audacious sense of Bible hope and confidence in her. And this imbued her with a boldness and tenacity to risk everything just to touch the hem of His garment. She knew well the religious laws concerning unclean persons such as herself and had fought against the thought that if she were recognized or found out, she would be subjected to public humiliation and, very possibly, violence.

So for her to have ventured out and pushed through the crowd to get to Jesus, clearly she must have had no doubt in her heart that she would be completely healed the moment she touched the hem of His garment.

Now remember, she was not hoping to be healed from a common cold or passing headache. She was believing to be completely healed from a condition that had plagued her for twelve years, a sickness that every physician she had seen had pronounced incurable.

The Bible doesn’t go into detail about
what
she heard about Jesus, but I submit to you that she must have heard story after story
of how Jesus healed the sick everywhere He went, how He didn’t despise even the unclean lepers who came to Him, and how good and gracious He was to those who were down-and-out. What she heard about Jesus produced hope. It produced in her a positive, confident expectation of good, which we can see in what she declared: “If only I may touch His clothes, I shall be made well.” This hope then resulted in a faith that was effortless.

Faith as defined in God’s Word is “the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen” (Heb. 11:1
NLT
). In other words, the hope that she had in the goodness of Jesus became faith, and this faith gave her the boldness to press through the crowd and receive her healing from Jesus.

Hearing Right Produces Right Believing

Hearing plays a huge part in right believing. You cannot believe right unless you are hearing right. Man, that was good! I don’t want you to miss that.
You cannot believe right unless you are hearing right
. I believe the woman with the issue of blood began to believe right when she began to hear right. God’s Word tells us that “faith comes from hearing, that is, hearing the Good News about Christ” (Rom. 10:17
NLT
).

What you hear is vital. If you are believing God for a breakthrough in your life, pay attention to what you are listening to.
Are you hearing messages that are full of the good news of Jesus? After you listen to these messages (or read these resources), are you filled with the heavy sense of what
you need to do
? Or are you filled with the empowering sense of who Jesus is in your life and everything
He has done for you
at the cross?

This woman certainly didn’t hear about the law. The law would have drained her of all her hope and faith. The law would have exposed her and pointed out just how unclean, unworthy, and disqualified she was. If she heard that Jesus was no different from the religious Pharisees of her day, there was no way she would have had a positive expectation of good, much less have the gumption to push through the crowd to touch Jesus. Based on the law, an unclean person would be entertaining a death wish by just mingling with the rest of society, much less touching the garment of a clean person.

Under the law, when the unclean touches the clean, the clean becomes unclean. Under grace, when the unclean touches the clean (Jesus), the unclean becomes clean! This woman didn’t defile Jesus with her uncleanness when she reached out and touched His garments. Neither did the leper, whom Jesus touched after He had preached the Sermon on the Mount (see Matt. 8:3). On the contrary, both of them were infected with Jesus’ health and wholeness. Both of them were made completely whole. Oh, the beauty and the depths of God’s amazing grace!

What have you been hearing about Jesus? Are you hearing about a hard, legalistic, and religious Jesus that is demanding, harsh, and unforgiving? Or are you hearing the true good news of His love, grace, and tender mercies toward you?

The true gospel of grace always imparts hope and faith to you to believe in Jesus. Because when you hear right about who Jesus really is, you’ll know that He doesn’t look at you to embarrass you and to point out all your uncleanness, addictions, and sins. No, He sees you as someone precious, as someone He loves personally, intimately, and infinitely. He sees you as someone He suffered and died for at the cross. When you believe this and see His love, grace, and goodness toward you, it will build hope in your heart. So keep hearing and hearing the good news of Jesus!

No matter how long you have been struggling or how long it has been since you saw any results, I want to encourage you to fill your ears, eyes, and mind with the good news of Jesus. Trust me, when you incline your ear to messages that are all about His grace, you will inevitably begin to have a positive, confident expectation of good. When your heart is filled with hope through hearing all the amazing stories about Jesus, like the woman, you’ll reach out in faith. Beloved, reach out and receive your miracle and freedom from your loving Savior!

The Power of Hearing Right about Jesus

Not too long ago, I received an email from George, who lives in California. He shared that he had been diagnosed with Evans syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease where a person’s antibodies attack his or her own red blood cells and platelets. At one point, this brother had to be rushed to the emergency room because he was at risk of spontaneous bleeding. His blood platelet count had dropped dramatically to just 4,000/mcL. The normal range for a healthy person is between 150,000 and 400,000/mcL.
¹
This is what he wrote:

The doctors administered infusions of blood products and had me on super-high doses of steroids. The steroids, which I reacted terribly to, made me so depressed that at one point I even had to tell my wife to hide the guns in our home because I couldn’t get the terrible thought of using them on myself out of my mind.

Due to taking the steroids, I couldn’t think or even have normal conversations. I cried constantly. Our three kids didn’t know what to think of what was happening to their daddy. It was very hard on our family. I actually started telling people that God was punishing me for things I had done.

Every time I received an infusion and the doctors upped my steroid dosage, my platelets went up to a normal range, but it would never last for very long. My immune system continued attacking and destroying my
platelets no matter what treatment I was getting. I was constantly getting my blood drawn, constantly checking to see what my count was, constantly aware of all the symptoms Evans was causing and the side effects of the steroids.

Then, somewhere in the middle of all of this, the Holy Spirit led me to your television ministry. By the grace of God, I ended up on a channel I had never turned to before and saw the Grace Capsule. The lady on the phone told me that it would take one to three weeks for it to arrive, but guess what? It came in two days! It arrived right before my wife and I had to go on another trip to the hospital, which was a three-hour drive away.

And let me tell you, your Grace Capsule was a gift from God. Through your teachings, Daddy God showed me His love. I went from feeling condemned, like God was punishing me, to beholding the finished work of Jesus on the cross. He miraculously took all the bondages in my life away—the cigarettes, the pornography, the marijuana, everything that had been a struggle.

I had back pain and acid reflux for years, but by listening over and over again to your sermons and hearing and hearing them constantly—at home or in the hospital, all through the night—the pain and acid reflux went away. It is now four months later, and PRAISE BE TO JESUS, I still have no acid reflux or back pain!

Three months ago, my spleen was removed with the hope that the Evans syndrome would go away, or at least
be lessened. But even after the surgery, my count dropped again. The only two options for treatment were more severe in our minds—one of them being chemotherapy. By this time, I’d been listening to the Grace Capsule for about a month, and finally I decided to give the Evans syndrome to God. I stopped doing blood counts, stopped giving weight to all of my symptoms, and started thanking the Lord for my complete healing.

Now Jesus has restored everything to me better than it was before. He has given me more strength, more energy, and a lot more love. I thought I understood love before, but now I know what true love is because of my Father’s love and Jesus’ love for me. I haven’t had a count done in months. My wife and I take the Lord’s Supper every day. We thank Jesus every day for healing us with the stripes He bore for us.

The Lord is using both my wife and me to reach others, and the Holy Spirit is doing amazing things through your materials and the drastic transformation they see in me without a single effort from me because Jesus has done it all for me. All praises be to Him!

Wow, all glory to Jesus! I can’t express how excited I was when I read about George’s amazing journey. No matter how bleak and hopeless your situation is, I want to encourage you to listen your way out of all your troubles like this brother did. You can’t worry your problems away, but I believe that you can certainly listen your problems away.

George listened radically. He kept on listening and listening to messages that were all about Jesus until he got better. Faith indeed comes by hearing and hearing the good news of Christ!

The Fight to Hear

You may be wondering what the Grace Capsule is. It’s an MP3 player preloaded with more than seventy hours of messages that I had personally selected from my message library. Each message is full of the person of Jesus and His grace. I believe that innovations in technology, be they MP3 players, smartphones, digital downloads, or podcasting, are all tools that we can use to get into the habit of hearing about Jesus and God’s amazing grace. Today there is so much we can do on our mobile devices. But while it’s great to play games, listen to music, or read the news on these cool gadgets, I want to encourage you to make listening to the good news of Jesus a daily priority.

Listen, I know there is a fight involved with so many things clamoring for our attention the moment we open our eyes. There is always a phone call that we need to make, an email that we need to reply to, somewhere that we need to be, and something else that we need to do. Before we know it, the day is over and we have heard nothing about Jesus. The Bible remains on the shelf, the Bible apps in our phones remain unopened, and we wonder why at the end of the day we feel empty, stressed out, worried, fearful, and depressed.

My friend, Jesus is the bread of life and the living water. No matter how busy we get, it is prudent not to neglect feeding on His person. I know that in the natural, this can sound simplistic. You may be asking yourself, “How can simply listening about Jesus change things in my life and circumstances?” The truth is, the things of God are really not complicated. Just think about the woman who suffered from hemorrhaging for twelve years. Simply hearing about Jesus and His grace infused her with so much hope, so much faith, and so much courage that she was able to receive the healing she had started to believe for. Don’t underestimate the power of hearing about Jesus just because it sounds simple.

Redeem All Lost Time

There is a beautiful verse in the psalms that says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12). Do you want to know the secret of numbering your days and not allowing a single day of your life to be put to waste? The key is found two verses down where it says, “Oh, satisfy us early with Your mercy” (Ps. 90:14). The word “mercy” here is the Hebrew word
hesed
, which means God’s grace.
²
God is telling us to be satisfied every day with His grace.

This means that before you do anything—read the papers, check your emails, get started on your to-do list, or even drink
your morning coffee—start the day with Jesus and be satisfied with His grace. You can read a devotional about God’s grace, feed on the Father’s love, meditate on His grace, listen to a message that is all about Jesus, and open up His love letter—His Word—to you. Start your day being satisfied by His grace.