The indescribable pain shocked me into wakefulness about 5:30 am on Monday, July 2, 2007 and I knew immediately what it was. I had felt this same pain once before, about 22 years ago when I had two heart attacks on the same day! Today, the pain seemed to begin just behind my left ear and radiated down my left side to just below my waist, but it’s not the pain’s location that warns you about what’s happening. It’s the pain’s indescribable intensity! I knew immediately that I was allegedly having a heart attack.
I say allegedly, not because the experience is not true, but rather because I knew what to do. Quickly I said, while slipping to my knees at the foot of my bed: “I am not claiming a heart attack! I am healed in the mighty name of Jesus. Father, you promised in Exodus that you will not put upon any of Abraham’s descendants the diseases of the Egyptians. You declare in Psalms 103 that you forgive all my iniquities and heal all my diseases, and finally in Isa. 53:5, you say, without equivocation: ‘By His stripes I am healed.’ Therefore, God I stand today on your powerful word because you declare that your word will not return to your void, but will accomplish what you sent it forth to do. I just returned your word to you; therefore, I am healed.”
Immediately, the pain disappeared. I got up, took a shower, dressed and went to my office in the next room and began to meditate on this most recent experience, seeking the lessons to be learned. I knew in July, as I had learned 22 years ago that the heart attacks were not about me dying, but rather about me learning how to live by faith more effectively. Yet vast differences existed between my experience in July 2007 and January 1985.
It was a typically warm winter day in Durham, North Carolina as I drove home for lunch from the office where I worked as editor of a local weekly newspaper. The pain exploded out of nowhere that day, seeming to begin at my right jaw line and radiating rapidly to engulf the entire right side of my body. I was just turning off Fayetteville Road onto Highway 54 about one and a half miles from my home on Flint Lane. I do not remember the remainder of that ride. I made it home and collapsed in the floor of the living room. My wife called a friend who was a registered nurse and described my appearance and what I was able to tell her about the pain. Our friend recommended that my wife take me to a hospital immediately. My wife drove me to a nearly Urgent Care Center where a doctor put two tablets of nitroglycerin under my tongue, noting that if the pain subsided I had had a heart attack. The pain subsided. He called for a local rescue squad that transported me to the hospital.
As I lay on one of the hospital’s examination tables, I watched a phlebotomist as she readied herself to take a blood sample from me. Suddenly, again without warning, the pain crashed against my consciousness and I blacked out. When I opened my eyes, I saw a doctor with two flat things in his hands, saying “Clear.” I said: “Clear what?” The doctor replied: “Oh, he’s back!” Minutes later, connected to an IV, and a heart monitor, I lay in a private hospital room where I hurt all day and night Thursday. The nagging pain left about sunrise Friday and I began praying, seeking God’s will about my life. God’s word to me was simple: I wanted to pursue my ambitions, but God had called, developed and trained me for His purposes. That day, in that hospital bed, I committed myself irrevocably to God’s purpose and will for my life, whatever that was. Monday, after going through the release procedures, which includes drinking some foul tasting stuff called barium, I learned from the doctor assigned to my case that their tests saw no residual evidence of the two hearts attacks they were certain I had suffered on Thursday. She said: “I don’t know what to tell you Mr. Jordan except go home and have a good life.”
So here I was 22 years later with a similar, though amazingly different experience. What was different? Twenty-two years ago I didn’t know what the pain was. That day in July 2007, I knew. Twenty-two years ago, though I knew, at least intellectually, the same “healing” scriptures, I did not have the absolute confidence in them that I now have.
That’s the key to accessing God’s power through spiritual principles–Confidence!
God’s word is absolute! God’s faith, which He gives each of His born again children, is as powerful as it needs to be. Our confidence in God’s word, however, often mitigates against us being able to immediately access the absolute truth of God’s word by faith! The key descriptor is absolute. God’s word is absolute! God’s faith is absolute! Our confidence in God’s Word and His faith must also be absolute!
Doubt, reflected in hesitancy, questions, and adjectives, etc., reveals the presence of unbelief. Jesus illustrated this point in an experience with nine of his disciples who had failed to cast a demon from a young boy during the time that Jesus was on the Mount of Transfiguration with three of his disciples. This incident is reported in Matt. 17:14-21. When the disciples asked Jesus why they couldn’t cast out the demon, the Christ replied: “Because of your unbelief.” In a similar conversation, this one reported in Mark 11:22-25, Jesus said: “Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray believe that you have received them, and you will have them.” That’s the point! You have what you say you have!
In light of those spiritual principles, let’s review my two experiences with so-called heart attacks. In 1985, the doctor said that if the nitroglycerin relieved the pain, I had had a heart attack. So what did I think I had? A heart attack! What did I believe I had? A heart attack! What didn’t I believe? That I was healed! Remember, as a person thinks in his heart, so is he!
Now, 22 years later, July 2, 2007 the same pain hit, but now I have different, knowledge, understanding and thinking. Thus I have a new belief system, completely confident in the power of God’s word! I said: “I am not claiming a heart attack! I am healed in the mighty name of Jesus. Father, you promised in Exodus that you will not put upon any of Abraham’s descendants the diseases of the Egyptians. You declare in Psalms 103 that you forgive all my iniquities and heal all my diseases, and finally in Isa. 53:5, you say, without equivocation: ‘By His stripes I am healed.’ Therefore, God I stand today on your powerful word because you declare that your word will not return to your void, but will accomplish what you sent it forth to do. I just returned your word to you; therefore, I am healed.”
So why do some sincere people pray to God for healing and stifll suffer, even die? The answer is level of confidence. As God’s children, we exist in two realms. The Bible says that God has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love. (Col. 1:13). Again, the Bible says: ” . . .God . . .made us alive with Christ . . .and raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” (Eph. 2:4-7). The Bible also says that God’s children are new creations (2Cor. 5:17) and Jesus used the same language to described the power-inducing born again experience that Gabriel used with Mary, the mother of Jesus. Gabriel said: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Highest will overshadow you; therefore, also, that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God.” (Luke 1:35). In Acts 1:8, Jesus told his disciples: “But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you . . .” So, as Jesus explained to the Pharisee, Nicodemus, God’s “born from above” children are born of spirit and are spirit. But we continue to be housed in this fleshy existence as well. Therefore, what happens instantly in the Spirit realm, takes time to manifest in time and space where we exist physically. Our confidence in that manifestation often determines how much time it takes. In others words, if you have low confidence in God’s word and its power, you experience slow manifestation. When you have high confidence, you experience faster, sometimes immediate manifestation.
So sometimes, faithful people pray, continue to suffer, even die because their thinking and their belief is governed more by the limitations of their five senses–what they see, hear, touch, smell and taste rather than the limitless power of faith. Faith provides evidence and substance of reality, without the need for physical manifestation. Another way of saying this is: faith provides reality! Manifestation produces testimony!
So can you have this confidence? God summarizes the answer in Philip. 1:6 ” . . . being confident of this very thing,that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.” So if you know–without doubt–that God has begun a good work in you–the work of prefecting you into the image of Jesus, the Christ (see Rom 8:29; and 1John 3:2)–you begin your confidence with the knowledge that to launch this work guarantees its completion. So with this guarantee, you can live daily in the unyielding confidence that all that God says is yours!
See you at success!
