Taking God's Word As Medicine

The British Army sent me overseas to North Africa, and I spent the next three years in the deserts of North Africa. During that time, I became sick with a condition that the doctors could not heal—a skin condition. If you get the little book God’s Medicine Bottle, it’s got my personal testimony and how I eventually received healing.

Well, I was moved from one hospital to another, and I ended up in a British military hospital in a place called Al Ballah on the Suez Canal. There was a very unusual lady at that time, and then she began to speak in a tongue, and of course, I knew what that was. After the message, or the utterance in tongues, this lady came out with what I knew to be the interpretation. In the course of this interpretation, she said these words, which I have never forgotten. They are as clear to me today as they were in 1942.

These were the words, and I want you to listen to them because they had a life-changing impact on me.

“Consider the work of Calvary, a perfect work, perfect in every respect, perfect in every aspect.”

Now, you’ll agree that is very elegant English. Most people couldn’t create a sentence like that.

Furthermore, it spoke to me particularly because I had studied Greek for many, many years, and I was familiar with the Greek of the New Testament. If you read your New Testament in English, you’ll find that one of the last utterances of Jesus on the cross was, “It is finished.” But in the Greek, that’s one single word: tetelestai. And it’s the perfect tense of a verb that means to do something perfectly. So, you could amplify it:

“It is perfectly perfect. It is completely complete.”

And so, when the Holy Spirit said, “Consider the work of Calvary, a perfect work, perfect in every respect, perfect in every aspect,” my mind said, “That’s the Holy Spirit’s commentary on ‘It is finished.’” I realized that the Holy Spirit was showing me that if I could understand what had been accomplished by the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross, all my needs could be met. There was nothing that I could not receive that I needed. That was a revelation. I got out of that car just as sick as when I got in, but God had showed me where the answer to my problem was.

And that’s what I want to share with you tonight. God does not heal everybody miraculously in a service. There are many different ways to appropriate healing. I received my healing after that revelation. I was healed through Proverbs chapter 4, verses 20 through 22:

“My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings. Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart. For they,’ God’s words and sayings, ‘are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh.”

The alternative reading in the margin for health was medicine. I said to myself, “That settles it. If God, through His words, has provided health or medicine for all my flesh, there’s no room for sickness.” I was very simple. I decided to take God’s Word as my medicine. I was an orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps, so I knew how people take their medicine: three times daily, after meals. That’s how I took God’s Word as medicine: three times daily, after meals. It did the job. It healed me completely and permanently in one of the most unhealthy climates in the world.

So, what I’m saying to you is, God has His way to heal you. But whatever way healing comes, the basis is what was done by Jesus on the cross. I’m not going to offer you just an orange; I’m going to invite you to the orchard. Once you get in there, you can wander around and help yourself to all the oranges you want. You’ll never strip God’s orchard bare.