I had written about a message by Charles Stanley two years ago on this day, Tonight as I was reminded of it I realized I had almost the exact conversation with a discipleship student this afternoon!
What do we do when faced with the consequences of a faith failure? God’s greatest blessings come when we trust him and move forward even when things look impossible…Stanley’s text was the twelve spies’ report after scouting out the Promised Land. Ten reported back with fear. Two reported back with faith. The people gave into the “majority report” and failed in their faith.
What happened?
1.)They developed a distorted view of their circumstances. How quickly they forgot what God had done for them! When we back off from God’s blessing, we insult God’s grace, goodness, mercy, kindness and blessings. To doubt God and living on a level less than what he’s planned for us is a faith failure.
2.) Others suffer because of our failure. Even the tribes of Joshua and Caleb had to endure the forty years of trials in the wilderness. Hundreds of thousands had to die in the wilderness before the Hebrews got a chance to go back to the Promised Land. Only Joshua and Caleb were spared that consequence.
3.) Things can be made worse by trying to correct our disobedience and avoid the penalty. We can’t erase consequences, but we can make them worse. Some decisions only get one chance. Once you step across that line, certain other options are lost to you. God’s perfect intentional will is no longer available. But his redemptive will is always available. Can the consequences be removed? It depends upon the sin. He forgives the sin, but he does not always erase the consequences. He does promise to stay with us and cautions us to “not turn to the right or the left” but to follow all his commands and we will have success.
This same notion of intentional will versus redemptive will and natural consequences that we’ll still sometimes have to endure even after God’s healing had come up today in the context of a report of a young lady’s fear about a potential recurrence of an illness that she had previously been healed from several years ago. Someone with me had a word from the Lord that she believed had been given to her in prayer for this burdened mutual friend. As I listened to her explain how this had come to her in prayer and how urgently she felt the need to share it with our friend, the words that stuck out to me were these,”Walk in your healing.” There were other words this lady felt needed to be conveyed to our friend, but it seemed to me that the rest of what she was saying was more a personal testimony of how she had walked in her own healing during a time of crisis and doubt.
As I thought about our mutual friend in a new crisis of health and faith, I realized that her original healing experience had occurred at a time when she was seeking substance abuse recovery. She had drawn close to the Lord about five months before the original health crisis became obvious.
She was walking with the Lord and was well prepared to trust the Lord when the need for healing occurred. After her healing she had relapsed in several aspects of her recovery and had only recently drawn close to the Lord again in the last year before this recurrent threat arose.
The Lord seemed to confirm in my spirit that this is an attempt by the enemy to disrupt her in her restored walk with Christ by bringing another very similar health challenge as before…. Having experienced healing once, can she walk in her healing and trust God now? Or does she feel guilt for prior relapsed behavior and fear that God is now going to exact consequences that He previously did not. I felt a strong urging in my spirit that she is to “walk in her healing” and do not doubt…. we called to share that word with her after we’d prayed. i
This felt for all the world that we were being drawn into agreement in prayer on behalf of our friend.