“The Bible says I will run and not grow weary,” I told my doctor. “I’m a runner, so I’m going to run.”
He looked at me—a person who had already undergone foot surgery, X-rays, a painful cortisone shot, and now, custom orthotics—and said, smiling, “You can bike and not grow weary. You can swim and not grow weary.”
He was being patient with me. He and I both had seen my X-rays; the unnatural curvature of the bones had had years to move and to set in that position. He tried his hardest to convince me that I’m not cut out to be a runner. My feet were not runner’s feet. But I knew in my heart that God’s Word is true, regardless of the shape of my bones or the tightness of my tendons. If God says that I can run and not grow weary (Is. 40:31), then it has to be true. I decided that I would believe Him and His Word.
My doctor is a good doctor and a Christian. I had no doubt that he wanted the best for me. But he was working with the knowledge that he had. He didn’t know what God’s best for me was. That’s what I love about teachers like Andrew Wommack—they understand that God’s best is far greater than the world’s view of what’s best. Andrew teaches that it’s God’s will for us to be healed. It takes a lot of guts to teach something that flies in the face of so much religious doctrine and so many excuses as to why Christians are still sick.
But it’s amazing to me that people can still fight this truth when there is so much evidence in the Bible that it is always God’s will to heal. In his book, God Wants You Well, Andrew says,
In the Gospels alone, there are seventeen times where Jesus healed all of the sick that were present. . . . Jesus did heal them all, and He hasn’t changed
(p. 81)
Hebrew 13:8 tells us that
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever
(New Century Version)
What this means to me is that it is forever God’s will to heal. So, even though I sat in that doctor’s office with valid foot problems, it didn’t mean that I had to stay there—or stay seated! If I truly wanted to, I could run. This leads me to the next point: once we know it’s God’s will to heal, we must act on that knowledge. Knowing something but not doing anything about it is useless. On the Gospel Truth broadcast, Andrew says,
Sometimes we’re afraid to act because it’s just not traditional; it’s not the way that other people are telling you to do it. . . . You’ve got to get beyond that. . . . You’ve got to start using your body as a weapon against the devil and start acting healed to the degree that you can.
So, I ran by faith. I left that doctor’s office with nothing noticeably different about my feet. But my heart knew the truth: by His stripes, I’ve been healed (1 Pet. 2:24). I signed up for another 5K shortly after that visit. Now, I run regularly (well, regularly-ish), and I take care of my feet. With each step, my feet continue to grow stronger. Sometimes the familiar symptoms try to come back, but knowing who I am in Christ Jesus and speaking out His Word inevitably overrides the symptoms. And then I run another mile and another mile . . . (or I run home to the water faucet!).
