POSITIVE WRITTEN SERMON – NEW ERA – NEW FREEDOM – NEW HEALTH!

POSITIVE WRITTEN SERMON - NEW ERA - NEW FREEDOM - NEW HEALTH!

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Positive Written Sermons is a FREE service of Positive Christianity to those ACTIVE IN CLERGY MINISTRY to ease your burdens in ministry. Each positive sermon is non-denominational; feel free to tailor to your denominational needs, or personal style. We consider our sermons to be 90% complete; they await your personal stories and anecdotes.

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Bridges are important in the development of humankind. Bridges cross over the formerly un-passable ways. Bridges also take a person from where they think they’re trapped, over to a new belief system. I pray that, this morning, you walk across a bridge created in your belief to an area of total acceptance of God’s perfect health.

You may be walking from a place inside of you towards healing; you may have believed that you were stuck in sickness and you could not be healed.

Faith will take you from where you are to where you want to be.

Many are stuck in such a place where they don’t know where to turn, and then they take God’s hand and spiritually walk across the bridge to a new awareness. Often, when they get to the middle part of the bridge, a thought inside of them says: “God, I really didn’t know that I had the power to get this far up on this small hill of this bridge, but here I am. I’m walking with my faith power. I don’t know God how You’re going to do this, I don’t know God how You’re going to heal me, but I’m going to keep on walking, because I know that’s my part to do. I’m going to go across this bridge of faith.”

Sometimes, when you’re walking across to health, you are walking with great pain in your physical body temple. You have this pain, and all you are thinking about is one thing – being healed. There have been moments when you have said to yourself, “Well, I probably never will be healed. I hurt and I’m probably always going to hurt.” But in this moment, thank God, your faith has come back. Thank God you have come to that point where you say, “Dear, God, I know You are real. It’s true, I’m hurting right now, but I know that You are going to come through me, and heal me.”

So often, the public’s focus is on sickness. Our nation listens to prescription medication advertisements on television and soon believes it has the ailment described. We need to walk across the spiritual bridge to health, from talking and listening about sickness, to talking and listening about health, and then stay there, burning the sickness bridge behind us, so we are not tempted to go back to our old ways of talking to our bodies about ill health and disease.

Jerome K. Jerome writes this; “One day I had a finger that ached at the joint. I decided promptly that I had arthritis. I went over to the public library, got a medical book, and looked up arthritis. By the time I got through reading two pages, I had arthritis in every joint in my hands and my knees besides. It scared me. I turned the pages and there was leukemia. I read everything about it, and before I finished I knew I had leukemia. I turned the pages to ulcers, and I said, ‘So now I know what’s been causing that pain in my stomach.’ I turned to all the other pages and realized that I had those diseases too. The only thing I didn’t have was “housemaid’s knee” and I wondered why I didn’t have that.

“I went to my doctor who had cured me thousands of times before. I took the book with me and told the doctor that I had all these things, and that I would certainly die before morning. I felt so sick and weak. The doctor wrote out a prescription for me. I took it to the drugstore. The pharmacist opened the prescription slowly, read it, and scratching his head he said, ‘Well, I don’t have this in my drugstore.’

I said, ‘What do you mean you don’t have this in your drugstore? You’re the largest drugstore in this area of town, aren’t you?’

The pharmacist said, “Yes, I am, but I don’t have this.

“The pharmacist handed me back the prescription. I opened it up and read these words: ‘Every day, walk eight miles. As you are walking, tell your body how glorious it is. Every day, talk to the different parts of your body. Praise your joints. Praise your heart for beating so well through the night. Praise your lungs. And every day new vitality will come to you.’

I’ve done this every day since I received the prescription. I feel better now in my fifties than I felt in my twenties.”

You can do that, too. We have to change the thoughts in our minds and tell the listening audience of the cells in our body that today we can become anew. We can become new. The Creator is not done creating us yet. God’s not finished.

Faith will take you from where you are to where you want to be.

We must work with God. When we focus on healing, when we talk about healing, do you know who’s listening? Our minds and bodies are listening. I want you to imagine for a minute that I am the mind and you’re my body. This is a great illustration because you are like the cells in my body. Right now, when I talk to you, the cells are listening and they’re feeling what I’m thinking. They are responding. You, as an individual cell, are willing to go either way as you are directed. But I am now standing up inside of myself and saying, “I’m going to go God’s way. I’m going to walk across that bridge of faith to health and I’m going to allow healing to happen inside of me.”

I have permission to share a letter a woman wrote to her minister.

“Last Saturday, a healing took place, a healing that you and I were part of. I want to share what happened so you may share the great love of God. On the previous day, I had a hysterectomy. The anesthesia was very hard on my body and I had a terrible reaction to it. Likewise, the pain medication and the medication for the extreme nausea were having adverse effects on me. By Saturday afternoon, I was in such pain and misery that I was truly in a state of despair. Nothing seemed to alleviate my suffering, no medication, no change of position. I couldn’t even cry because it hurt me so much to do so. Then, on that evening, my daughter contacted you for prayer. You prayed, decreed and affirmed with wonderful words of prayer and healing. Before we hung up from the prayer call, I felt the pain gradually beginning to leave my body. It was a wonderful and inexplicable feeling. The pain was leaving and I was going to be free.

“In a short time I was totally pain free. I slept through the night.

“When the morning shift arrived, the CNA and the nurse who had assisted me the previous day came in. They could not believe how good I looked. They got me up without the terrible pain I had previously experienced. They had me up and walking. The doctor came in and saw a smile; he breathed a sigh of relief. He ordered my IV’s to be removed. I felt so wonderful, both physically and spiritually; it’s hard to describe. After we prayed, it almost felt like someone opened up a tiny door in my abdomen and told the pain to slowly and quietly leave on tiptoe. Its departure was so gentle, yet I felt it leave. I was released and I went home the next morning. Monday, after a day without pain, I am home feeling better every day. I have personally experienced the miracles of God’s love.”

The real joy of being in ministry is being an active witness of God’s healing love, witnessing people knowing again, like they have known so many times in the past, that God is real, that God is a real presence to be proved right here and now. God is not something to be experienced years later in an after-death experience; God is a right-now God.

God’s a right-now God, wanting and willing to help. We walk across the spiritual bridge to health together, and we believe. That’s what I want you to do this day. I want you to believe again that you can be healed. I want you to believe that you can feel young again, and I want you to believe that you can feel dynamic just as you felt on the best day you had in your entire life. You can. Age does not limit you. The power of God is the real life that is inside of you. It’s not the age of your body. It’s not the thoughts you have held about yourself in mind. The real grace of God is when you have that power come through you, and you know that you know that you know that God is with you and that you are being healed.

An article in “People Magazine” talked about Dennis Byrd. He was a 270-pound football player who had a collision with another football player. After he had the collision, he lay on his back and tried to move, but he couldn’t. All the feeling in his body had left. He was not in severe pain like he should have been. His buddy came over and said, “Come on, Dennis; get up.”

He said, “I can’t.”

He tried to move his neck for a minute, but when he moved it he could feel the dislodged bones in his neck. Dennis Byrd lay there on that football field, not being able to move, just looking up at the clouds as they moved by in the sky. He was intensely aware of what had happened to him. It was a football player’s greatest nightmare. He lay there paralyzed.

His wife came by. She was crying. He said to her, “Angie, all my life, football has been the only thing that I have been concerned with; it’s been my number one priority. But now, with my whole life slipping in front of me, all I’m really thinking about is holding you, Angie, and our son, Ashton.”

He lay there, and tears streamed down his face. She grabbed his hand, but he couldn’t grab hers. He was lifeless. He was crying as he said, “I want to hold you so badly.”

His wife said, “Don’t you worry, honey. We’ll hold you instead.”

They hugged on that field. She got as close as she possibly could and tried to give him a kiss, but the face mask on his helmet kept her from getting through. They brought over a yellow body board and strapped him onto it. They took him in the ambulance for a forty-minute ride to Lennox Memorial Hospital where the doctors would look at him.

He said that at Lennox Memorial it was just like a scene from all the movies. He was lying there on his back; the lights were rushing by; doctors were running around him. He just knew that he was paralyzed. He was there, in that hospital, for hours as they examined him and performed CAT scans on his head and neck. He realized, in mid-afternoon, (almost as if God had given him the message), after he prayed with Angie, that he was going to have to talk to his body in a new way; that he was going to have to think in a new, positive direction, if he was ever going to be able to move anything again.

That night, he heard the truth that he had broken his C-5 vertebrae and they were going to have to put on a very special device called a halo vest. The doctors came in and gave him a shot of xylocaine at each spot – two spots in the front of his forehead and two spots in the back of his forehead. They then started to screw metal pins through the halo vest into his head to keep his head from moving. He was very aware of what was happening, and all the time, he kept his thoughts on God and what God could do.

He talked about how he was so aware that he can still hear the sound now. It wasn’t a crunching sound, but a squeaking as it was screwed into his forehead. This is graphic so you can know just how serious this was. He was not able to move at all, not even his head. Two metal bars blocked his field of vision, so he could only see straight up onto the ceiling.

These are his own words: “Now time was coming on Christmas. Each day it seemed as if God was blessing me with another gift.” (Do you see the attitude here?) “My legs were starting to gather strength. I had been able to move the big toe on my right foot. I could sit upright in a wheelchair for forty-five minutes without feeling dizzy. I was able to hold my own brushes and silverware because of thick foam handles. Though fear, doubt, and depression were constantly beating at my door, I had more reason to hope than to despair. Despite the limitations of my fingers, I had begun to feel a tingling deep inside of them.” Listen to what he says next. This is the key.

“I would lie in bed at night, stare at my forefinger or my thumb, and I would talk to it. I would tell it, ‘Hey there forefinger (or thumb), you can move. You have the power of God in you. You have a power that is beyond myself. God can rebuild my body just like God did originally in nine months when I was a baby. God can cause you to move again with the perfection that I always had.’

“Then, two nights before Christmas, I was awakened by a tingling feeling in both of my hands. On Christmas Eve, my finger moved. It was barely a wiggle, but it moved. My therapist came in, jumped with joy, and ran to get the doctor.”

In January, Dennis Byrd was able to take that first step. He was, right then, three months ahead of schedule. The doctors couldn’t believe it; they couldn’t understand how this was possible. There is a power greater than the human is. That power that is working through us is the powerful, the dynamic, the incredible life of God. Nothing bad inside of your body temple can stand up to this perfection. This perfection regenerates and creates anew.

Norman Cousins said, “Never deny a diagnosis, but do deny the negative verdict of that diagnosis.” Melvin Morris, M.D., in his book “Closer to The Light” said: “Several excellent research studies document the effects of emotion upon disease. For example, if an anesthesiologist whispers in the ear of a patient during surgery, “You will get well soon,’ that patient leaves the hospital on a national average of two days earlier than the control group that did not have the tender loving words spoken.”

Faith will take you from where you are to where you want to be.

You’ve all been referred to specialists. Today, I’m going to refer you to the master physician. You are going to read God’s prescription to yourself: Listen to this, my wonderful body, I am a child of God, therefore you are built in the perfection of the image and likeness of God. You ARE going to be made anew – not just as good, but better than before. It is so!

May God bless you!

PRAYER / MEDITATION_________________________________

Right where you are, the presence of God dwells. Inside of our body, the presence of God is alive. In this moment, we are touching the hem of the spiritual garment. In this moment, our faith meets our healing. And in this moment, God is coming through us in a dynamic way bringing a new degree of health.

The words of this prayer time are true for every individual person. The power of God is with you now. The power of God is coming through your human brain, giving you the healthful thoughts to think. There is a release of all the thoughts that have held us down, and trapped us in the bondage of sickness.