God’s Prescription for Divine Health

Chapter 1: God’s Prescription for Divine Health
There is a medicine so powerful it can cure every sickness and disease known to man. It has no dangerous side effects. It is safe even in massive doses. And when taken daily according to directions, it can prevent illness altogether and keep you in vibrant health.

Does that sound too good to be true? It’s not. I can testify to you by the Word of God and by my own experience that such a supernatural medicine exists. Even more importantly, it is available to you every moment of every day.

You don’t have to call your doctor to get it. You don’t even have to drive to the pharmacy. All you must do is reach for your Bible, open to Proverbs 4:20-24 and follow the instructions you find there:

“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 are life unto those that find them, and health (Hebrew: medicine) to all their flesh. Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far from thee.”

As simple as they might sound, those four verses contain the supernatural prescription to divine health. It’s a powerful prescription that will work for anyone who will put it to work.

If you have received healing by the laying on of hands, following this prescription will help you maintain that healing. If you have believed for healing, but are experiencing lingering symptoms, it will help you stand strong until you are completely symptom-free. And if you are healthy now, it will help you stay that way–not just for a day or a week, but for the rest of your life!

Powerful Medicine
To understand how this prescription works, you must realize that the Word of God is more than just good information. It actually has life in it. As Jesus said in John 6:63, “It is the spirit that quickeneth [or makes alive]; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”

Every time you take the Word into your heart, believe it and act on it, that life of which Jesus spoke, the very LIFE of God Himself, is released in you. You may have read the healing scriptures over and over again. You may know them as well as you know your own name. Yet every time you read them or hear them preached, they bring you a fresh dose of God’s healing power. Each time, they bring life to you and deliver God’s medicine to your flesh.

That’s because the Word is like a seed. Hebrews 4:12 says it is “alive and full of power–making it active, operative, energizing and effective…” (The Amplified Bible). It actually carries within it the power to fulfill itself.

When you planted the Word about the new birth in your heart, then believed and acted on it, that Word released within you the power to be born again. By the same token, when you plant the Word about healing in your heart, believe and act on it, that Word will release God’s healing power in you.

In Isaiah 55:10-11, the Lord describes the process this way: “For as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, and do not return there, but water the earth, and make it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater,so shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.”

Add to that the promise in Jeremiah 1:12 where God says, “…I am alert and active, watching over My word to perform it” (AMP bible), and you can be certain God’s Word is powerful medicine you can count on to produce results every time.

Chapter 2: Before Your Eyes and In Your Heart   
“But,” you may say, “I’ve met people who know the Bible (academic/intellectual understanding – KH) from cover to cover and still can’t get delivered or healed or blessed!”  No doubt you do. But if you’ll look back at God’s prescription, you’ll find it doesn’t say anything about “knowing” the Bible. It says, attend to the Word.

When you attend to something, you give your attention to it. You make it top priority. You set aside other things so you can focus on it. When a nurse is attending to a patient, she constantly looks after him. She doesn’t just leave him lying alone in his hospital room while she goes shopping. If someone asks her about her patient, she doesn’t feel it’s sufficient to say, “Oh, yes. I know him.”

In the same way, if you’re attending to the Word, you won’t leave it lying unopened on the coffee table all day. You won’t spend your day focusing your attention on other things. On the contrary, you’ll do what Proverbs 4 says to do. You’ll continually incline your ear to God’s Word.

Inclining your ear includes more than just putting your physical ears in a position to hear the Word being preached (although that, in itself, is very important).  It also means opening the ears of your understanding by meditating on and pondering that Word. To truly hear, you must listen with the ears of your spirit to what the Holy Spirit is saying to you through the written Word.

Mark 4:23-24 puts it this way: “If any man has ears to hear, let him be listening, and let him perceive and comprehend…. Be careful what you are hearing. The measure [of thought and study] you give [to the truth you hear] will be the measure of [virtue and knowledge] that comes back to you—and more [besides] will be given to you who hear” (The Amplified Bible).

It also requires you to actively engage with God’s Word, to believe it and obey it.  In fact, The Amplified Bible translates Proverbs 4:20, this way: “My son, attend to my words; consent and submit to my sayings.” Submitting to the Word means making adjustments in your life. Say, for example, you hear the Word in Philippians 4:4 that you are to “rejoice in the Lord always.” If you’ve been doing a lot of griping and complaining, you’ll have to change in order to submit to that Word. You’ll have to repent and alter your behavior.

In addition to inclining your ear to the Word of God, the Proverbs 4 prescription also says you must keep it before your eyes and not let it depart from your sight. In Matthew 6:22-23, Jesus reveals why that’s so important. He says, “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”

Your eyes are the gateway to your body. If your eye (or your attention) is on the darkness, or the sickness that is in your body, there will be no light to expel it. If, however, the eyes of your heart are trained strictly on the Word, your whole body will eventually be filled with light, and healing will be the result.

Take as Directed
Granted, it isn’t easy to keep your attention centered on the Word like that. It takes real effort and commitment. It may require getting up a little earlier in the morning or turning off the television at night. But I urge you to do whatever it takes to take God’s medicine exactly as directed.  It won’t work any other way!

That really shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, we wouldn’t expect natural medication to work for us if we didn’t take it as prescribed.

No rational person would set a bottle of pills on the night stand and expect those pills to heal them. No one would call the doctor and say, “Hey, doc! These pills don’t work. I’ve carried them with me everywhere I go–I keep them in the car with me, I set them on my desk at work, I even have them next to me when I sleep at night–but I don’t feel any better.”

That would be ridiculous. Yet, spiritually speaking, some people do it all the time. They cry and pray and beg God to heal them, all the while ignoring the medicine He’s provided. (They might take a quick dose on Sunday when they go to church, but the rest of the week they don’t take time for the Word at all!)

Why do people who love God and believe the Bible act that way? I think it’s because they don’t understand how putting the Word in their heart can affect their physical bodies. They don’t see how something spiritual can change something natural.

If you’ll read the Bible, however, you’ll see that spiritual power has been affecting this physical world ever since time began. In fact, it was spiritual power released in the form of God’s Word that brought this natural world into existence in the first place.

Just look at Genesis 1 and you can see that for yourself. It says:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light…. And God said, Let there be a firmament…. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together…. And God said, Let the earth bring forth…. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night…. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly…. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind…. And God said, Let us make man in our image….”

Now, in the light of those scriptures, can you believe that God’s Word—the force that originally brought into being everything you can see and touch, including your physical body—is still capable of changing that body today? Of course you can! It makes perfect sense.

John G. Lake says this about divine healing and divine health: “Divine healing is the removal by the power of God of the disease that has come upon the body, but divine health is to live day by day and hour by hour in touch with God so that the life of God flows into the body, just as the life of God flows into the mind or flows into the spirit” (John G. Lake—His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith, p. 9)

Chapter 3: What’s in Your Heart?
“I’d have no problem at all believing God’s Word would heal me if He’d speak to me out loud like He did in Genesis,” you might say, “but He hasn’t!”

No, and He probably won’t either. God no longer has to thunder His Word down at us from heaven. These days He lives in the hearts of believers, so He speaks to us from the inside instead of the outside. What’s more, when it comes to covenant issues like healing, we don’t even have to wait on Him to speak.

He has already spoken!

He has already said, “…By [Jesus’] stripes ye were healed” (1 Peter 2:24).

He has already said, “…I am the Lord that healeth thee” (Exodus 15:26).

He has already said, “The prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up…” (James 5:15).

God has already done His part. So we must do ours. We must take the Word He has spoken, put it inside us and let it change us from the inside out.

Everything–including healing–starts inside you.
Your future is literally stored up in your heart.

As Jesus said, “A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things” (Matthew 12:35).

That means if you want external conditions to be better tomorrow, you’d better start changing your internal condition today. You’d better start taking the Word of God and depositing it in your heart just like you deposit money in the bank. Then you can make withdrawals on it whenever you need it. When sickness attacks your body, you can tap into the healing Word you’ve put inside you and run that sickness off!

The great thing about your heart account is that, unlike your bank account, there’s no limit to the amount you can put into it. You might run out of money to deposit, but you’ll never run out of Word. You can put in as much as you want.

Of course, it takes time to make those deposits, but you’re the one who decides how much time you’re going to spend in the Word. It’s entirely up to you!

Some people are hesitant to spend great amounts of time putting the Word about healing in their hearts because they think their investment might not pay off. They think they might make sacrifices to attend to the Word and end up sick anyway. But Galatians 6 :7-9 puts such concerns to rest:

“Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life. And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.”

This is the unchangeable law of God. Whatever you sow is what you will reap.

If you sow cotton, you won’t reap peanuts. If you sow peanuts, you won’t reap doughnuts. If you steadfastly sow the Word of Life into the soil of your heart, you won’t end up with sickness and death. You’ll end up with a harvest of divine health. The New Testament in Modern English by J.B. Phillips says, “A man’s harvest in life will depend entirely on what he sows” (Galatians 6:7).

Keep Your Fountain Flowing
Actually, the Life of God in your heart will not only heal you when you get sick, if that Life abides in you fully, it will continually keep you in divine health. The Proverbs 4 prescription for healing says it this way: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (verse 23).

What are the issues or forces of life that flow out of your heart when you’re feeding on the Word and fellowshipping with God? They are things like “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance” (Galatians 5:22-23). The Bible calls theses forces the fruit of the spirit. They are the life of God flowing from your heart in abundance. You’ll find it is as hard for you to get sick as it used to be for you to get healed. The devil might try to bring sickness on you, but he won’t be able to make it stick.

Years ago, the Lord showed me an illustration of that principle I’ll never forget. I was in the Philippines, preparing to preach in a meeting at the time and I’d been studying the fruit of the spirit. As I looked out the window of my hotel room, the Lord brought to my attention a fountain in the courtyard below. He pointed out to me that as long as water was flowing from that fountain, no trash could remain in the mouth of it. Someone might toss some trash in, but the force of the water would just push it right back out again.

I realized then that our hearts are like that fountain. As long as the forces of God’s Spirit are flowing out of it, we’ll be free from the devil’s junk!

How can we make sure those forces keep flowing from our hearts? We must watch over our hearts with all diligence. When we’re tempted to get into bitterness or unforgiveness, we must refuse that temptation and instead yield to the fruit of the spirit: Then we must turn the water of Life up higher by (you guessed it!) turning our attention back to the Word.

The forces of life and power coming out of your heart will be
in direct proportion to the amount of Word that goes into you.

Chapter 4: Faith In Two Places
What happens when your heart gets so full it starts to overflow? Look at Matthew 12:34 and you’ll see. It says, “…out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”

So the last step of God’s divine prescription is to speak, not words of sickness and disease, discouragement and despair, but words of healing and life, faith and hope.  You are to “Put away from you a deceitful mouth, and put perverse lips far from you.” (Proverbs 4:24). In short, you are to speak the words of God.

Initially, that may not be easy for you to do. If you’re like most people, you’ve probably spent years talking about how bad things are. At the first sniffle or sneeze, you may be likely to say, “I must be catching a cold. I get one every year!” You may not even mean it. But you’ve spoken like that for so long, it’s become habit.

What’s more, people are comfortable with that kind of talk. They’ll jump right in and say, “Yeah, the same thing happens to me.” But when you start speaking the Word, you’ll sneeze and say, “I resist you, cold! I call myself healed, in Jesus’ Name! I believe I’m taking healing!”

That will sound so different to other people. That’s OK. Talk the Word anyway because for faith to work it must be in two places—in your heart and in your mouth. “For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:10).

Some people say faith will move mountains. But, the scriptural truth is, faith won’t even move a molehill for you unless you release it with the words of your mouth.

The Lord Jesus told us that “Whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith,” (Mark 11:23). Notice the word say appears three times in that verse while the word believe appears only once. Obviously, Jesus wanted us to know that our words are crucial.

It’s also important to note that He did not instruct us to talk about the mountain, He instructed us to talk to it! If we’re going to obey Him, we must talk to the mountain of sickness and cast it out of our lives. The Lord told Charles Capps, I have told My people they can have what they say, but they are saying what they have! Instead of saying, “I’m healed,” most Christians say, “I’m sick,” and reinforce the sickness or disease.

Be Like Abraham
“But it bothers me to say I’m healed when my body still feels sick!”

It shouldn’t. It didn’t bother Abraham. He went around calling himself the Father of Nations for years even though he was as childless as could be. Why did he do it? Because “he believed…God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were” (Romans 4:17). He was “fully persuaded that, what [God] had promised, he was able also to perform” (verse 21).

You see, Abraham wasn’t “trying” to believe God. He wasn’t just mentally assenting to it. He had immersed himself in God’s Word until that Word was more real to him than the things he could see. It didn’t matter to him that he was 100 years old. It didn’t matter to him that Sarah was far past the age of childbearing and that she had been barren all her life. All that mattered to him was what God said, because he knew His Word was true.

If you don’t have that kind of faith for healing right now, then stay in the Word until you get it! After all, “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). Read, study, meditate, listen to CDs, watch videos of good, faith-filled teaching, and watch our weekly and daily television broadcast EVERY DAY until God’s Word about healing is more real to you than the symptoms in your body. Keep on keeping on until, like Abraham, you stagger not at the promise of God through unbelief but grow strong in faith as you give praise and glory to God (Romans 4:20, AMP Bible).

Notice that last phrase there doesn’t say you give praise to God because you’re strong in faith. It says you grow strong in faith as you give praise to Him. I like that particular translation because I’ve found it to be true. Praising God for your healing is one of the most powerful things you can do.

In fact, Psalm 103 commands us to do it. It says, “Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy dis­eases” (verses 1-3).

Having Done All…Stand!
As you put God’s prescription for health to work in your life, don’t be discouraged if you don’t see immediate results. Although many times healing comes instantly, there also are times when it takes place more gradually.

So don’t let lingering symptoms cause you to doubt. After all, when you go to the doctor, you don’t always feel better right away. The medication he gives you often takes some time before it begins to work. But you don’t allow the delay to discourage you. You just follow the doctor’s orders and expect to feel better soon. Really you are “treating” your soul to be renewed and come into alignment with the Word that is the source of supernatural life and health for your physical body.

When the devil whispers words of doubt and unbelief to you, when he suggests that the Word is not working, deal with those thoughts immediately. Cast them down (see 2 Corinthians 10:5). Speak out loud if necessary and say, “Devil, I rebuke you. I bind you from my mind. I will not believe your lies. God has sent His Word to heal me, and His Word never fails. That Word went to work in my body the instant I believed it, so as far as I am concerned, my days of sickness are over. I declare that Jesus bore my sickness, weakness and pain, and I am forever free.”

Then, “having done all to stand, stand” until your healing is fully manifested (see Ephesians 6:12-14). Steadfastly hold your ground. Don’t waver. For as James 1:6-8 says, “…He that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed…. Let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”

If your condition is serious, you may also have to resist the temp­tation to worry. The devil will try to use anxiety over your situation to choke the Word in your heart and make it unfruitful (Mark 4:19), but don’t let him succeed. Just trust God, “casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you” (1 Peter 5:7) and constantly keep in mind these wonderful words from Hebrews:

He Who promised is reliable (sure) and faithful to His word…. Do not, therefore, fling away your fearless confidence, for it carries a great and glorious compensation of reward. For you have need of steadfast patience and endurance, so that you may perform and fully accomplish the will of God, and thus receive and carry away [and enjoy to the full] what is promised (Hebrews 10:23, 35-36, The Amplified Bible).

Above all, keep your attention trained on the Word–not on lingering symptoms. Be like Abraham who “considered not his own body” (Romans 4:19). Instead of focusing on your circumstances, focus on what God has said to you. Develop an inner image of yourself with your healing fully manifested. See yourself well. See yourself whole. See yourself healed in every way.

Since what you keep before your eyes and in your ears determines what you will believe in your heart and what you will act on, make the Word your number one priority. Keep taking God’s medicine as directed and trust the Great Physician to do His wonderful healing work in you!