In order to clearly understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ – the good news – we must also understand what the bad news was. When God first created man, he created him in His image, in His likeness. Man was created perfect and whole. We need to understand that God created man in His image and likeness spiritually and by doing so, man was a perfect creation. Man was born of the Spirit of God and he did not know lack, he was …
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It was a hot summer day in July of 2004 and I was remodeling our small farm house that we had just bought. While replacing the siding I stepped on an old rusty insulation nail that penetrated through my shoe deep into the sole of my foot. After managing to pull out the nail we treated the wound and even though I was in pain at first, we did not go to see the doctor. We did watch for signs …
Upon returning home, I went about my day with no indication that anything was abnormal. However, later that evening the stiffness in the jaw returned with double the intensity and twice as long. After looking up tetanus on WebMD it said that once the disease had been contracted and spread throughout the body, there is not much that can be done and the disease needs to run its course. Wondering if the hospital did everything they could, we called them and …
As I hung up the phone I had an epiphany. I saw myself at a crossroads with one of two roads ahead. I could either travel the wide and open road traveled by many. A road featuring many billboards promising answers. Signs pointing to solutions. Yet too often they would lead to a dead end. I could put my trust in a world system full of uncertainty, where the so called leaders of the system didn’t even believe me when I …
From that point on, we never looked back. We never looked to the world system for help, we never got treatment for tetanus or even visited another doctor. We never even went to the internet to research tetanus. Instead, we started to build a new identity, a spiritual identity in Christ based on what he accomplished almost 2,000 years ago. We sat down and studied the Bible like we never had before. We kept looking for passages that would strengthen our spiritual …
The more we built this new spiritual identity, the clearer we saw that everything that Christ did was finished, accomplished, complete and that the end result was perfect spiritual life for mankind. We realized that everything he did in his time on earth was a display of the power that we would possess once he completed His mission. We came to the conclusion that there is nothing more that we needed (not prayer to get healed, not laying on of …