His Body Was Wounded to Give Us Healing and Health When I meditate on all that Jesus conquered on the cross, I marvel that literally everything was conquered in that victory. However, it makes me sad to see that only a small few take advantage of it to live supernaturally. As I mentioned before, the number of people who are sick in the church today is dramatic. They spend thousands of dollars on medicine and hospitals when Jesus already triumphed over sickness. He is the solution, not the doctors of this world. The big question is why the Church does not enjoy the health already purchased by her Savior? Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried; yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was pierced through for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed. Isaiah 53:4-5 The answer is again found in understanding Communion. In the passage of 1 Corinthians, chapter 11, we have been studying, Paul talks about health in relation to discerning Jesus’ sacrifice as we participate in Communion. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly. For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep. But if we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord so that we will not be condemned along with the world. 1 Corinthians 11:26-32 Taking Communion as a ritual, without weighing in our own lives what sin, rebellion and iniquity did to Jesus puts us in a dangerous position. Nothing causes me more pain than to think of my Lord being brutally tortured and crucified in order for us to live in health and holiness and seeing people, some running to medicine or worse, running to sin. This is like saying to Jesus, “I have better answers than yours for my health” or “I have better ways of living my life than what You designed for me.” I don’t want to condemn anyone with what I’m saying, since I didn’t know how to possess my health either. It was very easy for me to leave my sinful way of living because ever since I got saved I loved Jesus with all my heart. From then on, I did not want to do anything that would offend or hurt Him. But my health was a different matter. I had never seen anyone live in kingdom health. Everyone told me that God could use doctors, but something within me said that Jesus’ wounds had not been in vain for me. If He had paid to conquer my sickness in such a painful way, there had to be some way to succeed in living in health. Some theologians have calculated that the children of Israel lived around 450 years without a single person getting sick among them. This dates from the time of Moses, when they ate the bread that came down from heaven, until king Asa went to the doctor and the blessing ended. During these 450 years, radical judgments of God occurred in which God Himself caused death through sickness on specific occasions. We saw this with David and Bathsheba’s child or the plague that God sent because of the census carried out by the king. However, this was a rare occurrence among the people as they lived in health. In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa became diseased in his feet. His disease was severe, yet even in his disease he did not seek the Lord, but the physicians. So Asa slept with his father, having died in the forty-first year of his reign. 2 Chronicles 16:12-13 Jehovah had promised to keep His people, and He fulfilled His promise during this time. Wouldn’t this promise be even more effective after Jesus carried in His body our sicknesses? The Lord will remove from you all sickness; and He will not put on you any of the harmful diseases of Egypt which you have known, but He will lay them on all who hate you. Deuteronomy 7:15 And He said, “If you will give earnest heed to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is right in His sight, and give ear to His commandments, and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have put on the Egyptians; for I, the Lord, am your healer.” Exodus 15:26 I had read these passages many times. I had attended many healing crusades. I had seen God do many miracles. However, I didn’t know how to enter a level in which The Cross was the only thing I needed in order to live in health. When I received the revelation I’m writing about in this book, my life changed. I began to appropriate power from Jesus’ wounds for myself every time I ate of the bread.
In the spiritual world my spirit united daily with the body of Jesus, and He absorbed all my illnesses. One day we threw away all the medicine in the house and decided to live by the power of The Cross. Today, we don’t even need an aspirin. We learned how to believe and to possess our inheritance. Eating His flesh, discerning and appreciating what Jesus did for us, takes us to this level of health. The eternal life of the Almighty, living and manifesting in and through us is the true hope of glory. Our spirit, united to that of Jesus, conquers all sickness in our body. The kingdom of God subdues all matter and brings divine order to every organism. When I feel that a sickness wants to attack my body, I take Communion and have some quiet time, allowing the Spirit of God, which is life within me, to flood my entire being. I thank Jesus for allowing Himself to be wounded and for giving His life for me. I let Him know that this was not in vain for me. No doctor has a better answer than what He did for me. If the fact of not discerning His pierced body brings judgment of sickness and death, appreciating and valuing it brings life and health. Conquering an illness may take days, or weeks, but His power is real and His promise is true. His Body Is the True Manna His body is real food that sustains us and gives us strength. Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread out of heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread out of heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world.” John 6:32-33 Not only does the unity of our spirit with Jesus produce health, but we receive strength and vitality as well. Spiritual food provides supernatural strength in order to do great exploits for God. People who live in the natural world don’t understand where we get the vitality to carry out all the things we do in our ministry which is impossible in our own strength. We minister at conferences in around 40 countries each year. We are on television, we write books, we liberate cities, we do prophetic paintings and have recorded 10 musical CDs, and we feel 30 years younger than we are. In previous chapters, I spoke about spiritual food and how we have been sustained in unspeakable conditions. His Body Crucifies Our Flesh Perhaps the greatest problem of every Christian is crucifying his flesh in order to conform to the image of the Lord. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Galatians 5:24 In Jesus resides the power to put to death every worldly desire placing it at the feet of the Father. Jesus said: “For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.” John 6:38 Jesus is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. When He came to earth, everything within Him spoke to Him about sacrifice. His flesh was saturated with privation and obedience to death. When we eat of His flesh, this same feeling invades our heart and our emotions. His Spirit has supernatural strength that puts His desires in our soul and makes us detest everything that does not line up with His will. This is God’s seed that lives and operates through us when we feed from the true food contained in His flesh. No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. 1 John 3:9 His life within us separates us from evil, it annuls the works of the devil that were constructed within us, and it conquers temptation. It is possible to live a life of holiness. No one can offer us what our Creator gives us according to His perfect design. In Him we attain the highest purposes for our lives like fullness, joy, health, peace, prosperity and eternal life. The world with its corruption and darkness can never provide us with the things that only God can offer us.