Are You Living In God's Reality?

We looked at "reality" in our last lesson, and we discovered that our world is comprised of two different realities that both exist together: the physical realm and the spiritual realm. If you take just one without the other, you get an incomplete (and wrong) idea of what reality looks like. The goal of this teaching series is to help us "rethink" our picture of reality to include a better understanding of the spirit realm, so we can live in the fullness of all that God has for us.

We discovered that our western culture tends to disregard the spirit component of reality. It prefers to deal only with what it can observe, quantify and measure in the physical world. That leaves out an important piece of "reality," and it makes us "live a lie."

One part of that lie is has to do with the realm of healing. It reduces "healing" just to what medicine and science and what doctors can do for us. That is not good, because there are so many things that modern day medicine cannot deal with very well: cancer, nerve damage (that leaves a person blind, paralyzed or deaf), degenerative diseases such (as muscular dystrophy), brain damage, etc.

Modern day medicine has come a long way and I am very grateful for it. But there are still more things that modern medicine cannot fix than then are things that it can fix. If all healing was limited to what medical science can handle, it would make for a very sad world. Medicine is good, but it is not the whole picture.

In order to see the whole picture, we have to include the spirit-realm piece of reality, because it offers us solutions to many problems that medical science can't fix.

Unfortunately, most of our thinking is defined by the "scientific" view of reality. That thinking creates a problem for us. Even though we want to have faith, a big piece of how we think is limited to the what we see and hear and feel and sense in the physical realm. We want to have faith, but something inside of our thinking shouts that it we can't see it and measure it, then it doesn't really exist. We live this "lie" (that reality is limited to just our physical world), and we become trapped in wrong thinking. This handicaps us, making it harder for us to operate in the spirit portion of our world, and we have a hard time moving into the realm of miracle-producing faith.

The problem doesn't go away when we see our first miracle. Our faulty view of "reality" still interferes with faith, making it hard for us to believe that God will do the same miracle again the next time we pray. Let me give an example of what I am talking about.

In September of 1994, I prayed for a deaf lady at a meeting, and she was healed. God opened her ears! You would think that experience would have instantly given me faith to pray for any other deaf people who came my way. But my view of "reality" was still limited to the physical world and not the spiritual one. I wanted to believe that God would heal all deaf people, just like He healed that lady, but the scientific mindset of our culture hindered me. It screamed in the back of my mind, "That was an exception. Deaf people don't usually get their hearing back. That miracle was the exception, not what normally happens. It probably won't happen again, because it is not normal for deaf people to hear."

That wrong thinking had been engrained into me by our culture. As a result of that, I had to wait another two years before I saw the next set of deaf ears open.

Part of my problem was that I believed that healing came by faith, but I did not understand what faith was. I had a misconception that faith was convincing your self to really believe something that you knew to be "not really true." Let me give you an example of what I mean.

Have you ever been in a meeting where someone in obvious physical pain gets prayed for. When the prayer is over, you can tell from their body posture and facial expressions that they are still clearly in pain. But they claim to be healed, "By faith." If you press them, they will admit that they still have all of the symptoms, and nothing has changed. But they claim to be healed because they have faith that God will heal them. If you check back with them two weeks later, none of the symptoms have changed and they've gone to the doctor to get medicine for temporary relief from the symptoms until the "manifestation of their healing" kicks in. But they claim to be healed, despite all the physical evidence to the contrary.

That type of attitude was always problematic for me. I am a prophetic person so I put a very high value on "truth." If a person claims to be healed when all evidence says they haven't, that looks and feels like a lie to me (or at least a denial of reality.) It sounded to me like that type of faith was simply self-deception. I couldn't imagine why the God of truth would ask us to lie in the guise of faith. The concept of 'faith' in the context of healing, was confusing and problematic for me for a long time.

One day God finally explained it to me. There are two realms. I was trying to have faith based on the physical realm, but faith was a spirit realm thing. Faith is not blindly denying the physical facts around you in hope of what you want to have faith for. Faith is seeing into the spirit world and basing your behavior on that "reality" instead of on the physical realm reality. Faith is not based on what you wish (or hope) God might do for you; it is based on what He is actually doing. Most of the time, we can't see what He is about to do by observing the physical reality; we have to look at the spirit reality because God is spirit, and He operates in the realm of the spirit.

2 Corinthians 4:18 explains faith this way, "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" (NIV). Hebrews 10:23 tells us that we don't put our faith in this thing or in that event--we place it in God. It says, "Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful." Hebrews 12:2 tells us to look "to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith."

Thus faith is not hoping something will happen so hard that we somehow make it happen. Faith is the ability to see into the spirit world, to find out what God is doing, and then to act accordingly. Hebrews 11 is the famous "faith" chapter. Most of the verses in this chapter start with the words "By faith..." and go on to describe an action that was taken because of faith. In each case, the person looked past the physical reality into the spirit reality and saw what God wanted to do, then they based their behavior in the physical realm on what was going on in the spirit realm.

Hebrews 11:1 tells us, "Now faith is the...evidence of things not seen." I don't think it is saying we make something up and it happens because of our great faith. I believe the "unseen" in this verse is referring to the spirit realm--which is completely real, but it can't be seen or measured by physical world. Verse 3 goes on to clarify this a little. It says, "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible." In other words, faith starts by seeing what God is doing in the spirit reality, and somewhere along the line, that things transitions into our physical reality.

"Reality" is not the enemy of faith. To the contrary, faith is based in reality--but it is based in the spirit reality, not the physical one. Faith pulls things that God is already doing in the spirit reality into our physical reality. Once they arrive here, then they can been seen and felt and heard and measured.

Let's apply this back to physical healing. Let's take the case of a deaf person. If we look in the natural, we can easily establish that the person is unable to hear...we can measure and quantify it if the person is partially deaf instead of completely deaf. Doctor can look at nerve functioning and determine that the optic nerve is not carrying sound impulses to the brain.

There is a type of blind faith that just looks at the physical reality and says, "This person is deaf. Jesus healed deaf people on this earth, so maybe He will heal this person." If the faith doesn't see into the spirit realm of what God is actually doing, then there is not a lot of substance to it. If you pray for the person and they claim to be "healed," but they still can't hear anything--well, I am not sure that is faith. That might be denial. The problem is that no one crossed over into the unseen spirit realm to find out what God is doing in this case at this moment. Sometimes God is gracious and heals just because the person is desperate to be well. (God is nice and He likes to heal.) But there hasn't been a release of true faith that sees what the Father is doing and does it with Him.

But when we learn to stop limiting ourselves to only our physical reality, then we can press into the spirit reality and see what God is doing. Once we see Him heal in the spirit reality, it is easy to carry that over into our physical reality. And once the faith has been carried over into the physical realm, then we can see and measure the healing. James 5:15 tells us, "the prayer of faith will save the sick..." That healing is not a future-tense "I might be healed if I keep claiming that I am healed." No, that healing is observable and measurable. You can whisper in the previously deaf person's ears, and they can hear you and repeat back to you what you said.

Faith is not claiming a "lie" from our physical surroundings in hope that it somehow becomes real. Faith is looking past the physical realm into the spirit realm, seeing what God is doing, then acting according in response to what He is doing.

There is no conflict between faith and reality--we just have to be mindful of which reality that faith operates in, (e.g., the spirit reality) and focus on that reality when we are praying for the sick.