Sound of Faith

Sharon Hardy Knotts: Greetings friends and new listeners and welcome to the Sound of Faith. I'm Sharon Knotts, thanking you for tuning in today because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Today's message is very important and pertinent to anyone who has struggled with the need of physical healing. This message is not something I've read about or heard about, but one I have lived through and still apply every day for my own physical healing, Walking in Healing by Love.

R. G. Hardy: So we have to—let's take this now in the spirit. We need a good spiritual diet. We need a good spiritual diet. We need to be built up on nutrients from God's word. We need to hear good preaching and good teaching and good reports to build us up. Amen.

We need to feed ourselves outside of church. We need to be in the word of God. You need to eat every day. And if you're looking for healing or a miracle, get all the verses in the Bible and go through the Gospels, especially the book of Mark, and read them over and over again, or get them on CD or whatever, or MP3, and listen to them. And build your faith up with the good report. You're taking your spiritual calcium and your spiritual Vitamin D and Vitamin K and boron and all of these things that are important for you to have strong, healthy bones. Amen.

And if you will do that, you are going to find out that you are not going to be coming under those sicknesses and diseases. Amen. Wear and tear? This body has got to be changed. It's getting older and things happen as you get older. Things wear out and when they wear out, it gives—sometimes things go wrong and cells go crazy and mutate and all of that. But I'm talking about what we can control. Amen.

Quickly turn over to the book of Job. I want to show you something interesting in the book of Job. Job 21:23. "One dies in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet." Oh, wow, that's the way a Christian should go. Being wholly at ease and quiet or being peaceful. Verse 24 goes on to say, "His breasts are full of milk and his bones are moistened with marrow." But another dies in the bitterness of his soul and never eats with pleasure.

Now think about this. He's contrasting. We're all going to die. How many know that? If Jesus comes in the rapture, then we won't die. We will be caught up and be changed. But if he doesn't come in our lifetimes, we're all going to die. I want to be like the first guy or the first lady. Amen. I want to have my breasts full of milk. And we're not talking here literally about a lactating mother with child. We are talking about it is a metaphor for good health. That's what it means, a metaphor for good health.

So this one dies with his or her, whichever the case may be, with their breasts full of milk and their bones are moistened. Their bone marrow is moistened. Amen. They've got life. They're not dried up with bitterness and envy and jealousy. They're healthy. They die from natural causes. Amen. The body wears out. It's their time. But they die full of peace and tranquility. That's a beautiful way. Amen. They die and they've got rest in their soul. They're at ease.

I have stood at the bedside of those who were ready to go to heaven, children of God, and there was just a spirit of peace there. And what I did was just read to them out of the book of Revelation where they're get ready to go, the city of God and what it looked like and no more tears and no more death. You know, it was like Sister Juanita when I went to see her just before she died and I sang that song where the roses never fade. I'm going to a city where the roses never fade.

And she had been totally oblivious to anybody being there. She didn't recognize anybody. Murph didn't think she even recognized him. Did you, Murph? You weren't sure. It didn't seem like she did. She kept her head turned one way, just sort of looking with a glazed look on her eye. And Murph happened to be standing there on that side that she was looking at. So I'm on the other side. Now she's looking away from me and I start singing the song where the roses never fade.

I felt led to do it. Something in my head kept saying, "Don't sing this song. You don't want to sing this song. No, you can't sing this song." But I finally thought, "I am going to sing this song because it won't stop telling me to sing it." And I don't claim to be a singer by any means. And I just felt led to sing it. And I sang it and I'm not exaggerating. Murph is here to be my witness. She turned her head and looked straight in my eyes.

And it was a purposeful move. And then as we were leaving, twice she tried—now she had had a stroke and she was not able to use her limbs, but she tried twice to raise her hand off that bed. She got it about that high to tell us goodbye. And to see a child of God who's ready to step in that portal of glory that I told you about a few weeks ago. But I've also stood at the bedside of someone who had never surrendered to the Lord.

And not only that, they had opened their home up to the demonic by letting a fortune teller come in there and do a séance. And it was a neighbor so I felt compelled out of decency to go and see him. And when I tried to tell him, "Let me pray for you," he said, "I don't believe that stuff." And he was jerking and jerking and doing all this. It was awful to stand there. And then the next day he died.

Oh, let me tell you something. When you walk in the love of God, when you walk in God's peace, when it's your time to go, amen, you're going to go with the peace of God upon your life. And many of you've said goodbye to loved ones and it broke your heart to say goodbye. But you knew that you knew that you will see them again. They were stepping in that portal of glory. Amen.

So the difference between one or the other. This is what while we were in Proverbs, this is what he said in 3:7. He says, "Don't be wise in your own eyes, but fear the Lord and depart from evil. It shall be health to thy navel and marrow to thy bones." Your navel. What is that? We don't talk about our belly buttons much. I don't think we pay much attention to them. We don't think about them. But the navel is where the umbilical cord connected the baby to the mother.

And that's where the baby was getting the nutrients and the life. Amen. Only once the baby is outside of the mother can that cord be cut. And that is the life. He says it's going to be health to your navel. It's going to be life. It's going to be marrow to your bones. Amen. And that's what we want. You know, I just mentioned it in passing last week, so I'll just mention it quickly in passing.

You can read Isaiah 58 where God said if you will stop pointing your finger at people and if you will stop speaking vain words, then he says your health is going to break forth speedily. The blessings of God are going to break out on you speedily. Amen. But what about those people that are hard like that, like my neighbor I just described to you a moment ago? You know, there's a story in the Bible. Let me paraphrase it quickly.

The man's name was Nabal. And you know what his name means? It means fool, F-O-O-L. He was a fool. He was very rich. He had much cattle. And of course back then that's how they determined their wealth, through their cattle. He had thousands of cattle and thousands of sheep. And of course when you have a lot of sheep, they have to be taken where they can get enough grass to be fed. So he of course had hired men who would take the sheep out.

And then once a year the sheep have to be shorn. It's great to be a shepherd in the sense that you shear the sheep, you get the money from the wool, and you still got the sheep. So it was shearing time and they were—his men had their sheep out there and it happened to be in the same area where David, who at the time was running for his life from King Saul who was trying to murder him.

And David had picked up along his way 600 men. And these men were the outcast, the ragtag men that nobody wanted to be with, but they were loyal to David. And David loved them and they were out there. And they came upon Nabal's men with the sheep. And what they began to do was at nighttime they would surround them to protect them because of course there's going to be thieves and marauders, those who want to come and steal those sheep. So David's men were doing them a service, protecting them every night from thieves and marauders.

Now when it was all over with, David sent one of his men to ask Nabal, saying, "We have protected your sheep, we protected your men, and we would like to ask of you—I have 600 men, they need food. Would you be so kind as to feed my men?" Now first of all, Eastern hospitality would require to do that. Those people were just hospitable. Amen. But this man rose up ugly and mean and he said, "Who is David?"

Well, everybody in Israel knew who David was. He was the giant slayer. He was the hero who took down Goliath. But he was being sarcastic and mean. He would not do it. And so David, when the word came back—David on one of his few times that his temper almost made him sin and cause a catastrophe—he said, "Well, after the good we did to him, well we're going after him. We're going to kill the whole bunch of them."

And news got back that David and his men were on their way and it was going to be bad when they got there. Well, this Nabal, believe it or not, was married to a beautiful woman named Abigail. The Bible says she was both smart, wise, and beautiful. What a catch. So you're thinking to yourself, "Well how in the name of heaven did this mean, nasty man get such a beautiful woman?" Well, he was rich, which meant he could pay a big, fat bride price to Abigail's father.

So Abigail hears what's happening. She quickly gets her servants and gets a lot of food and she goes to meet David. And when she gets to where David is, she apologizes for her wicked husband. She apologizes for how he acted and said, "If I had known that you needed food, I would have taken care of it. And here, I'm blessing you. I'm giving you this food." She goes home. Her husband Nabal is in a drunken stupor. She just leaves him alone.

The next morning he's sober. He wants to know what's going on, where she's been. So she told him how that she went to placate David, because if she didn't, they were all going to be killed. He went into a rage of temper and when he did, the Bible says his heart turned to stone. In other words, he had a major heart attack. And 10 days later he was dead. All because he had this anger problem.

Because when people become angry, your blood pressure goes up, your pulse goes up, your muscles—they intensify. Amen. And then when that happens it affects your lungs and your breathing. Amen. Being an angry person all the time will do you great harm. Chronic anger will do you even greater harm. Amen. Because your body is always in that worked-up mode. How many know I'm telling the truth? You know when you get angry you feel your—these here get big and all and up here they start bulging out.

Take your blood pressure then and see what it is. Amen. The Bible says in Proverbs 27:3, that anger is like carrying around a heavy stone or a bag of sand. Johns Hopkins did a study on how that the immune system is affected by anger. And they specifically did it on men. And they found that it contributes to heart attacks in men. In a fit of anger, the body secretes negative chemicals and it takes 24 hours for them to subside.

So if you're angry every day and you're angry all the time, then your body is constantly under that harmful pressure and those chemicals being secreted in your body. Amen. It's happening all the time. So if you're an angry person, and believe you me, there are many, many verses in Proverbs that talk about anger. It's over a dozen. Get your concordance and look up anger and related words.

And one of them is, "A man of great wrath shall suffer punishment. For if you deliver him, yet you must do it again." In other words, a person who's got an angry disposition, you know they blow up, they have a problem, you step in, you fix it, you get it all calmed down, you work it out. And guess what? They'll do it all over again. How many know you work with people like that?

And you're always stepping in. You're always trying to smooth things over. You're always trying to explain why they're acting the way they're acting. Amen. He said get away from those kind of people because no matter how many times that you try to step in, you're going to have to step in again and again because they have a problem with a bad temper. Amen. And it says and they will suffer punishment.

They may eventually lose that job because people are not going to put up with that all the time. Marriages break up because every time that husband goes off in that fit of anger and then he may even start to become violent. And a woman will take it so many times then one day something clicks and she says, "He's never going to change. If anything, it's escalating." And it always does escalate when there's spousal abuse if they don't get help. It will only escalate. Amen.

And then we see on the news that he walked in on the job and shot his wife on the job. Amen. That anger that's seething in there. So it's causing the body to be in a perpetual state of this muscles being tight, you know, and all of this is going on. It's a perpetual state. And the antidote to that, how many want the antidote? I'm going to give that to you in a moment.

Now last week I told you about—and I won't go through it—about how that I had so much oppression on me that I was walking around the house going... How many remember I told you that? Because I felt like a weight was on my chest. Well another thing that was taking place in my body was—I didn't realize it at the time—I was walking around all the time with my jaws clenched. All the time. Even when I slept at night, my jaws were always clenched and I didn't even know I was doing it.

Now you know this doesn't sound very pretty, but I was one of those people that when I slept—I'm not going to demonstrate it—but I slept with my mouth wide open. How many know there's people that sleep with their mouth open? That means you are totally relaxed. I saw two hands. You people are not fooling me. I know better. I'm saying this. When you sleep with your mouth open it means you are totally relaxed. You're sleeping good.

But you see, I didn't realize I wasn't sleeping with my mouth open anymore. I had my jaws clenched. Not only that, I was sleeping in a fetal position on my side. I literally had my arms turned in like that on my chest. And I was—that's how I slept all the time because I was in so much pain and I was all the mental and emotional things that I was going through. All the time that's the way that I slept. And it was a vicious cycle that I was going through.

Now at the time we still had the campgrounds down in Fruitland, Maryland, The Master's Retreat. How many remember that? And this was after I'd hurt my back. We still had it down there for two years. And one night after church, after the service, everybody wanted to go out to Denny's to eat. Normally I wouldn't go out because I just had to go get in bed. But I went. I don't know what we got on. I don't know what we talked about.

I'm sure Shirley will not remember this because it probably didn't mean anything to her. But we got downright silly. Shirley and me and Benny. We were getting so silly and we were cracking up laughing. I was laughing and laughing from my belly. And I had not laughed in so long and I surely hadn't laughed like that. I just didn't laugh anymore. And I hadn't laughed like that. I was laughing.

I felt my face tingling, getting warm and tingling. I began to feel just good all over and I thought, "Oh, this is wonderful." It was a beautiful feeling. It felt so good. I felt so relaxed and so light. And the pain was like it wasn't there. All because of just letting loose and letting go and laughing like that. Amen. The scriptures knows what it's talking about when it says laughter does good like a medicine. Amen.

Because laughter does things for your physical body. You know when the children of Israel got out of Egypt, you know what they said? They said that our mouth was filled with laughter. That was one of the first things they testified. And they said, "We were filled with singing. We felt like we were in a dream. We couldn't believe we were feeling so good and laughing so much." And that's what God did for me that night.

And laughing relaxes tight muscles. And all the muscles in my back were always in spasm. I had learned to pick my fights with my kids because every time that I would have to get into a confrontation and start, you know, hollering at them and disciplining them, boy my pain would go through the roof. So I learned to stay away from arguments, fights, strife. I wouldn't get on the phone if people started going down that. I'd say I got to go because it only made my pain worse. And I was looking for ways to get out of pain.

And so laughter is one of the ways you can do it. Here's what laughter will do for you. Think about this. You got two people, one on each side. They're trying to pick up a heavy, heavy box and bring it over here and raise it up and put it on this pew. So they both have an end and they got it up in the air and they're on their way. And somebody says or does something funny and they start laughing.

What will they do? They'll put that—they'll drop that box. You know why? It's impossible for them to keep carrying it. You know why? All of the major muscles here that they need have now because of laughter, they have relaxed. And they physically cannot carry that box and keep laughing hard. Now let's take that in the spirit. If you got a heavy load that the enemy is trying to put on you, or if you have a heavy load that right now there's nothing you can do about it, you got to carry it. Amen.

It's something that's come into your life. But you know what? If you will let the joy of the Lord let you laugh in the spirit, let the laughter of God come. Amen. It will lighten that load. It will lighten it. Laughter strengthens your immune system because when you laugh hard, you produce immunoglobulin. And this is one of your body's defenses against upper respiratory disease.

If you have asthma, bronchitis, anything to do with your lungs, you need to start getting a lot of things going on that make you laugh. You need to laugh your way into health. Amen. And it will help to fight those things because it improves your circulation. It causes more oxygen to go to your brain. And last but not least, remember how I said I always felt like my chest was so tight and a heavy thing?

How many have felt your chest tight when you're under pressure? There's a reason for that. Right here you have what is called the thymus gland. It's located at the upper chest. And it's a major gland that contributes to the well-being of the immune system. When we are stressed out, it actually shrinks. And when it shrinks, you get the tightness in your chest. You feel it there.

It's literally something that you're feeling because the thymus gland is shrinking from all of the pressure and the stress that's on your body. When we laugh, the thymus gland begins to produce good hormones that strengthen our immune system and makes us feel good. Amen. And then when we get to laughing the brain begins to release endorphins. You heard of them, haven't you?

Endorphins make you feel happy, make you feel good. They're better than any drug you ever took in the world. Amen. Endorphins, not only that, when you get those endorphins, they are nature's painkillers. I'll have a couple more doses, Lord. Amen. Laughter causes—you know how many know a good massage feels good? Laughter massages your internal organs. All of these things and it will make you feel happy and hopeful and light.

But somebody here might be saying, "Sister Sharon, I get everything you said. It all makes sense to me, but I just don't feel like laughing. When I'm going through right now, I just don't feel like laughing." Well you know what my advice to you is? Fake it 'til you make it. I said fake it 'til you make it. And there is also a reason for that medically. Because the diaphragm down here, once you trigger it with laughing, it's just a stupid muscle.

It doesn't know if it's a real laugh or a fake laugh. It doesn't know the difference. Just trigger it and once you trigger it and get it to going, it'll continue to do it. You say, "What do you tell me to do?" I'm telling you to fake it. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I just felt that right here. I felt it right here. Amen.

How many of you have started laughing and then you couldn't stop? Not because the funniest thing was continuing, but you just started something there. You heard somebody else laugh and they have a goofy laugh. And their laughter made you laugh. Amen. And it's contagious. Isn't that right? Oh, you can get it started. You can start it when you feel that you're down. Amen. Oh, when you feel that you've been under that black cloud. The devil doesn't want you to get joy because the joy of the Lord is your strength.

Sharon Hardy Knotts: Amen. What an insightful and invaluable word for us today. Walking in Healing by Love. Do you know that in the book of Acts, the chronicle of the early church, the term "love" is not used once? However, the terms "in one accord" and "in one mind" are found 13 times in the first few chapters. You see, it was not necessary to have to keep talking about love when they were all walking in love.

His great teaching on the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, Paul stopped midstream to write Chapter 13 on the role of love in the operation of the gifts. He made it clear that unless love is the motivator for the gifts, I am nothing, I convey nothing, and I gain nothing. Not even mountain-moving faith can operate fully without love.

Because—and this is the key to getting healed and staying healed—faith works by love. Paul concluded that there now abides faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love because love never fails. But without love, faith fails and hope dies. This is why it is impossible to walk in faith and not walk in love. And it is why some Christians do not receive their healing and or keep it.

Walking in love is both vertical and horizontal. When we know how much God loves us, we believe his word to heal us and we don't allow fear to paralyze our faith because perfect love casts out fear. We must also walk in love towards others in the body of Christ. So if you have done all you can do to purify and strengthen your faith and you feel your faith is rising and yet still you have not received your healing, it's time to check your love walk.

Where there is bitterness, criticism, judgmentalism, jealousy, a lack of faith is not the problem, but a lack of love. I learned all these things on my journey to healing that I still must apply every day. And this groundbreaking teaching is a 2-CD set and can be ordered for a love gift of $15 or more for the radio ministry.

To order Walking in Healing by Love, mail to Sound of Faith, P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland 21203, or shop online at soundoffaith.org where it's also available on MP3s. Until next time, this is Sharon Knotts saying, Maranatha.