Living Boldly for Christ: Daily Reflections on Faith, Prayer & Spiritual Life by David Hathaway
Isn’t sickness part of the cross we must carry? The cross that Jesus carried was not sickness but rejection, torture and death. The cross He asked us to carry is not sickness, but the persecution, hardship, rejection and even death that follow being His disciples and preaching His Gospel (Matthew 10:38; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23; 14:27).
How do you recognise God? How do you find Him? What is the evidence of God’s existence in the Bible? It’s the fact that He’s a God of miracles, who answers prayer, when it takes a miracle! This is the reality! This is the God we’re looking for: a God who answers all who call on Him, by miracles, by signs, by wonders. This is the evidence! Take the miraculous out and you destroy the reality of who God is. You make Him no different to men!
We’ve got to search for God and find Him right where we are! If you think my life as an evangelist is easy, I can disillusion you! Some people say they want to be like me, but if they knew the truth, they wouldn’t want to! When I had the lung cancer I had a very busy schedule – don’t ask me how much I fasted, how much I prayed. When you know you have only a short time to live, you learn how to pray!
If you want to meet with God, you don’t have to wait until you have done this or that. I would never have become an evangelist, never seen a miracle of healing if God had waited until I was perfect before He answered my prayers. I call on God, He deals with me where I am. That’s why I was healed, not because I was ‘holy’. What God looks at is the deep desire of your heart.
It is easy for us as believers to read and hear about the stories in the Bible without personally identifying with them. But if God did these things in the past, why not believe for them today? Some Christians would dismiss miracles like speaking in tongues and healing by saying either that these were in the past, or that they were ‘dispensational’, that they can only happen at certain times! The real truth is that they do not want these things to happen, it would disturb the religious ‘order’ of their lives!
Everything in the Bible can happen today! Don’t limit God. I want to challenge you to a new kind of faith. We are commanded to go in and possess all the blessings which God has promised. Get into the Word of God, search for and mark every promise that you want in your life in red – then every promise you don’t want, cross it out – no, NO!! I want you to have the faith to go and take them ALL! I hear Christians saying I can’t – but my Bible says I can do all things through Christ.
God has given us so many promises, it is not presumptuous to accept them by faith, then go and take them. Too many sit and wait, asking, and never receiving. I remember as a boy the time when I wanted to be filled with the Holy Spirit. The old believers said, ‘Wait, we must have waiting meetings.’ But I am impatient and soon became tired of waiting. I said, ‘Easter is coming, I will go to London to one of the big conventions and not return until I receive.’ With that positive attitude I went – and received.
I have Christ IN me and I have the Holy Spirit IN me! That is the secret of fifty years of miracle ministry. I do not want any new Gospel – I want the Bible-believing, miracle-working, powerful Gospel according to God’s Word! You can pray for an easy life, ask Him to prevent the problems, ask for a quiet time... but that means where there are no problems, there are no miracles!
I am calling you to do something, which I Myself am going to make absolutely impossible! I will cause him to refuse you, and make him stronger than ever in his anger against you – why? So that I can then demonstrate that I am God by destroying the power of Pharaoh and delivering My people – and this will not be with human power.
God chose a baby, born to a slave woman, who became the son of the king’s daughter by the plan of God. Later, he saw an Egyptian beating one of his fellow Israelites and killed him. As a result, he fled Egypt to escape justice; married, had a family, looked after sheep and worked for his father-in-law until he was 80 years old; now suddenly God called this man, saying, ‘Go back to the place that you came from, challenge the greatest leader in the world, the most powerful nation on earth, demand that they release your persecuted, suffering people, command Pharaoh to let them go!’
I want to share with you something that God has been saying strongly to ME since 1992 and which is powerfully motivating MY life. And I want to give YOU the same strong spiritual challenge which Moses gave to Israel in Deuteronomy 4:32 – ‘Ask now of the days that are past, since the day that God created man on the earth, and ask from the one side of Heaven to the other, WHETHER THERE HAS BEEN ANY SUCH THING AS THIS GREAT THING IS, OR HAS BEEN HEARD LIKE IT?’
What God could do 2000 years ago, He can do the same today. He can even do more. It was the same when I was healed from throat cancer in the 1960s. I carry in my body the mark of God's Hand! Somebody said to me recently about my healing from throat cancer, "You put your life on the line! If your faith wasn't going to work, you were going to die!" But God didn't fail me. And when the doctors examined me, they said, "Somebody has cut the cancer out with a knife. We can see the scar tissue. Tell us the name of the doctor and the hospital!" I said simply, His Name is Jesus!
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