By Kenneth E. Hagin
The Bible says the devil walks about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8).
You don’t have to let him devour you – not if you will use God’s Word and hold fast to that which thou hast!
There are some important truths from the Bible that you should know about divine healing that will enable you to keep your healing once you’ve received it.
One of the most important things you need to know about divine healing is that God’s method of healing is spiritual. You should also realize that even though you’ve received healing, you can also lose it” That’s
why you need to learn how to hold fast to that which thou hast!
First, let’s talk about the fact that healing is spiritual. I’m talking about God’s healing – healing that comes from God- God’s healing s not mental, as some cults and metaphysical teachers claim. And neither is God’s healing physical, as we think of it from the standpoint of medical science. God’s healing is spiritual because God’s Word teaches that when God heals, He heals through the human spirit.
Proverbs 20:27
The Spirit of man is the candle of the Lord…
This verse means that God enlightens you through your spirit. He’ll use your spirit to guide you. He contacts you through your spirit. God is Spirit (John 4:24). He doesn’t contact you through your mind or body.
Paul, writing to the Church at Thessalonica, distinguished between the spirit, soul, and body of man.
1 Thessalonians 5:23
And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole SPIRIT and SOUL and BODY be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
You see, as a Christian, your spirit has been recreated or born again. You’ve become a new man in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). It is to your spirit that God has imparted eternal life. And it is through your spirit that
God works.
Divine healing – physical healing for your body – starts in your spirit and works outwardly to your body.
Many times I’ve known that I had received healing for my body, and yet my body said, “You don’t have it.” But I knew it in my spirit, because that’s where you receive healing first. And although I looked at my
body, and my body said, “No, you don’t have healing,” I just laughed at that because I knew on the inside of me, in my spirit, that I had it. I had received healing.
I remember years ago down in east Texas, a woman had double pneumonia. This was before the days of miracle drugs, and pneumonia was a very deadly sickness. She was sick at home, and the doctor just finally said, “I’ve done all I can do.” He told her husband, “I don’t believe she’ll live past midnight tonight.”
Well, the husband got busy and got some of the church members praying for her in their home, and they had a real prayer meeting! The power of God fell upon them, and the wife sat up in bed and said, “I’m healed! I’m healed!”
You see, she knew it in her heart – in her spirit.
The doctor came back and examined her and said, “Her lungs are better, but they’re still congested.” Then he said, “But sometimes people get better before they die.” He still thought she was going to die.
But for three days she sat up in bed and thanked God that she was healed. And on the third day, she was all right. She was perfectly well.
She knew first in her spirit that she was healed. That’s where you’ve got to receive it first. You see, you can know in your spirit that God has heard and answered your prayer, and yet you won’t have the answer in the natural. It may be money you’re believing for. You look in your billfold and there’s no money there. You feel inside your pocket, and there’s no money there.
I’ve been there many a time. But I knew in my spirit – I knew in the inside, in my heart – it’s mine! And I declared, “It’s mine!” And the answer always came.
You see, I got the answer first in my spirit.
Now what you need to realize is that everything you receive from God, you receive first in your spirit.
And that includes divine healing.
Life’s greatest influences are spiritual. They are not material or natural or physical. Love and hate, fear and faith, joy and grief are all of the spirit.
It’s a remarkable fact that when Jesus came on the scene as the Healer, He demanded faith. You remember again and again in the gospels, Jesus declared, “Thy faith hath made thee whole.” To the two blind men Jesus said, “Believe ye that I am able to do this?” They said, “Yea, Lord.” And He said, “According to your faith be it done unto you” (Matt. 9:27-29).
Later He said, “..all things are possible to him that believeth” Mark 9:23). Then Jesus gave us that great classic text, Mark 11:24.
MARK 11:24
Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.
We could quote other statements Jesus made concerning faith and healing, but all of them prove one thing: All of Jesus’ healings were spiritual. He demanded faith, and faith is born of the Spirit.
A person receives his healing by acting on the Word. That action is called faith. In fact, the Word of God teaches us that without action, faith is dead (James 2:26). So faith is revealed in action. Simply put,
faith is an act!
I remember hearing that when Smith Wigglesworth ministered, he would sometimes run from one side of the platform to the other for up to ten minutes and say nothing but, “Faith is an act.” He’d run over on one side of the platform and yell, “Faith is an act.” Then he’d run back over to the other side of the platform and yell, “Faith is an act,” and he’d do that over and over again. He wanted to impress that fact on the folks.
Another preacher said, “Faith is just acting like the Word of God is true.
So we know that divine healing is spiritual and that it is received by faith – by acting like God’s Word is true. We also know that faith is of the heart and that once we receive healing, we have to hold fast to
that which God has given us.
My wife and I were holding a meeting in January 1939 in a church in the blacklands of north Central Texas. There was an older gentleman present who had been backslidden but had come back to God during that meeting. When he got right with God, he also got healed of arthritis. Before that, he’d not had a day without pain for twenty-five years.
About five months later, the pastor of this church left. He contacted me and said, “Brother Hagin, the church board asked me to contact you to see if you would be interested in pastoring this church.”
Because the Lord had already been talking to me about it before I ever got the message from him, my wife and I went there to pastor.
After we went there to pastor, I was walking to town one day to get my mail, and I saw this older gentleman who had been healed of arthritis. He was securing his cow to a stake in a vacant lot. I walked up and said something to him, and he grabbed ahold of me as he started to get up. I tried to help him, but he said, “Don’t! Just give me a minute; I’ll get up myself.”
He pulled himself up little by little, trying to hold his back straight, until he finally stood up. “What’s the matter?” I asked. I could see he was in a lot of pain.
“Oh,” he said, “That old arthritis has come back on me.” I said, “I thought you were healed.”
“Well,” he said, “I thought I was too.” I said, “Well, what happened?” He explained: “I’ve been fine since you laid hands on me last January. But three mornings ago, I was milking the cow, and the pain hit me in my right hand first and went up my arm and into my shoulder and then over into my back.
“Ever since then I haven’t been able to use my arm much. And when I get into bed, I can’t get out. I have to sort of roll out of bed and lie flat on the floor for a while before I can move.”
I said to him, “Do you know what you did? The minute that pain hit you in that hand, I’LL tell you exactly what you said. You said, `Well, I thought the Lord healed me, but I guess He didn’t.”
He looked at me sort of startled, and he said, “Why, that’s exactly what I said!”
I said, “When you said that, you opened the door to the devil. You might as well have said, `Come on back in, Mr. Devil. Put the sickness and pain back on me. And he obliged you.”
He answered, “But I believe that if God ever does anything, it’s just done permanently.”
“Well,” I said, “isn’t it strange that Jesus didn’t know that! He appeared in a vision to John on the isle of Patmos and gave him a message for those seven churches in Asia Minor. And to one of them He said, “Hold fast to that which thou hast.” Apparently, Jesus didn’t know they couldn’t lose what they had, so He told them to hold fast to it!”
REVELATION 2:25
But that which ye have already hold fast till I come.
Jesus said, “Hold fast to that which thou hast!”
Why would you have to hold fast to something? “Hold fast” means hold tight or hold on to it, because there’s an enemy who’s arrayed against you. He’s going to try to take your blessing away from you. That’s why you’ve got to hold fast to that which thou hast!
For instance, what would you think if I gave you the end of a rope and said, “Now you hold on tight.” you’d know exactly what I meant. Well, that’s what Jesus meant when He said, “Hold fast that which thou hast.” He meant “hold on tight to it”! He meant that you nay have to exert some vigor, vitality, and energy to do it. But, unless the Lord, hold fast to that which thou hast!
The same thing is true in the area of healing or any other blessing. We’re to hold fast to it.
After I quoted Revelation 2:25, this dear brother said, “Well, I may be wrong.”
You know, that’s what gets us in trouble – going by what we believe instead of what the Bible says. This man believed that if God ever gave him anything, he would just always have it. But the Bible says you’ve
got to hold fast to it.
I said to the man, “What you did was open the door and let the devil put that arthritis right back in you instead of your rising up and meeting the devil, the adversary, with the Word.”
Remember this: You’re no match for the devil any other way except with the Word!
Writing to the Church at Ephesus, Paul talked about putting on the whole armor of God, and then he described the armor. Then finally he said, “[take the]… sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”
(Eph. 6:17).
Notice in Ephesians 6:11-17, the word of the Spirit is the only weapon of the whole armor you have to fight with. The rest of the armor is defensive or protective.
That’s what you fight the devil with – the Word of God!
I said to this older gentleman, instead of rising up with the Word and commanding Satan and his symptoms to leave, you yielded to him. It’s that simple.”
Sometimes people receive their healing through gifts of the Spirit or through their own faith and the faith of other believers. In other words, everybody’s believing God together, and it’s easier to receive
healing.
But then the devil takes advantage of their own lack of faith. When he tries to bring the symptoms back on them, they are filled with fear instead of faith.
I continued talking to this dear brother. I said, “When the devil came around with his symptoms, you said, `Well, I thought I was healed, but I guess I’m not.’ You got into unbelief. You yielded to it because you didn’t know the Word as you should have.”
I just kept on talking to that man until I finally got him to see it. This time, he received his healing and held on to it. Praise God forevermore!
I asked him, “Now if any symptoms return, do you know what to do?”
“Yeah, I know what to do. I’m not going to accept them. I’m going to resist them with the Word.”
The Bible says, “….Resist the devil, and he will flee from you”(James 4:7). What are you waiting on before you start resisting the devil in your life?
I remember when I was six years old, I saw a cartoonist’s concept of the devil in the local newspaper. In the cartoon, the devil had long horns, like a Texas longhorn steer, a long tail, and he had a pitchfork
in his hand.
I guess maybe some folks are waiting for something like that to come along before they ever start resisting him. But, you see, anything that’s of the devil is from the devil, and you should resist it!
For example, fear is of the devil. It’s not of God. The Bible says, “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind: (2 Tim. 1:7).
And doubt is not of God; it’s of the devil. Unbelief is not of God; it’s of the devil. Sin is not of God; it’s of the devil. And sickness and disease are not of God; they’re of the devil.
Well, what do you do when those things try to come against you? You resist the devil!
You see, when you know that by Jesus’ stripes you were and are healed, and you know it in your spirit just like you know in your mind that two plus two is four, then the devil won’t have any more authority over you.
The way you are going to know the truth of God’s Word in your spirit is by meditating on it with your mind until it filters down into your spirit. And then you’ll be just as certain that Himself took your
infirmities and bare your sicknesses as you are that two plus two is four.
What if somebody came along and tried to tell you, “Two plus two is not four.” You’d laugh at them, wouldn’t you? Well, if the devil comes along and tells you, “You’re not healed,” laugh at him. If he tries to tell you that you’re still sick, you can say, “It is written: Himself took my sicknesses and bore my infirmities!” (Matt. 8:17).
When you know the power and the authority of the Name of Jesus, and you know that He has given that Name to believers, you can use that Name. Then when the devil lays siege to your life in any way and tries to fill you with fear, you’ll laugh at him and say, “Satan, did you know that you were whipped? Jesus whipped you.”
The devil knows that, but he doesn’t want you to find it out!
The Bible says Jesus spoiled principalities and powers – that’s the devil and all of his cohorts – and made a show of them openly Col. 2:15). You can say to the devil, “You leave my body in the Name of Jesus.”
Friends, no one can continue to maintain his healing unless his faith is developed through the Word. That’s why you need to develop your own faith in the Word of God and learn to stand your ground against the devil.
When you get settled and established in the Word, you will no longer be open prey to the enemy. You can boldly stand against him with the Word and hold fast to that which thou hast!
(The above material was published by THE WORD OF FAITH, July 1993)
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