Andrew Wommack - God Wants You Well - Part 11

Welcome to our Monday’s broadcast of The Gospel Truth. Today I’m beginning my third week of teaching on God wants you well, and I tell you, I’ve already covered a lot, a lot of materials. I have this teaching in CD form and also DVD form and there are four parts to this. Today is going to be my last day to teach on the second part which is talking about Paul’s thorn in the flesh. The very first part of this teaching I talked about how that healing is a part of the atonement. It’s not optional: it’s not something that God can do if he wants to do. He’s already provided healing in the atonement of Jesus as it states over in 1 Peter 2:24, by his stripes we were healed. It’s already been done.

It’s not a question of will God heal, he’s already done it. He placed this power on the inside of us and gave us the authority so that we can release this power. If people aren’t being healed today, it’s not because God isn’t healing them, it’s because God’s people aren’t appropriating and using what God has given us. So, that’s the first point I made, and then I began to start talking about Paul’s thorn in the flesh because people use this to teach that God put sickness on the apostle Paul and Paul asked three separate times for God to take it away and God wouldn’t do it, God wanted him to be sick. That is not what those verses say. If you haven’t heard this, I encourage you to please get these materials.

I’m not going to take time to go back over it, but that is tradition and doctrine of men, but the scripture, he said very clearly, 2 Corinthians, chapter 12, verse 7, that there was given unto me a thorn in the flesh, comma, the messenger of satan, a demonic power from satan, to Buffet him, and this terminology, thorn in the flesh, pricks in the eyes, is an Old Testament terminology that I used three scriptures in numbers, Joshua and judges. Three different times he used the terminology that if you don’t drive people out, people will be thorns in your sides and pricks in your eyes, so it was a terminology that people were used to. Anyway, my point is, I’m not going to go back and re-teach all that, but it wasn’t sickness and God didn’t put it on him, it was a messenger of satan, and you cannot hide behind Paul’s thorn in the flesh because first of all, it wasn’t sickness.

I’ve already dealt with that. Let me just say this that Paul made it very clear, he linked his thorn in the flesh to the abundance of Revelation that he had. Now, Paul in the first part of 2 Corinthians, chapter 12, he talks about a man who, whether he was in the spirit or in the flesh he couldn’t tell, but he was caught up into heaven and heard unspeakable things that you can’t utter and he says, I’ll glory of that man but not of myself. Some people think he was talking kind of, I don’t know, in a symbolic way about himself as if it was somebody else to deflect attention away from him. I mean, it doesn’t matter if it was him or somebody else: nonetheless, the apostle Paul had huge revelation from God. He wrote half of the New Testament.

God gave him revelation and he said, the reason his thorn in the flesh came was because of the abundance of revelation. So, his thorn in the flesh, even if you believe it was sickness, which it obviously was not, but even if you believed it was sickness, it came because of the abundance of revelation, so, unless you have revelation that equals the apostle Paul’s, you’ve got no business hiding behind his thorn in the flesh because it was related to the abundance of revelation. I’ve had people come to me before and say, oh, this is my thorn in the flesh, and the person doesn’t have any revelation, they aren’t walking with God, they’re living a life of rebellion, they don’t have any power of God manifest in their life and yet they’re quick to claim Paul’s thorn in the flesh.

Even if you believe it was sickness, it only came for the abundance of the revelation to keep him from being exalted and you haven’t got that problem, you’ve got no right to be laying claim to Paul’s thorn in the flesh, amen. That usually goes over about like that. I can tell some of you are shocked, but again, this is just tradition and doctrines of men. It is not founded in scripture. If you were to just read 2 Corinthians, chapter 12, and take it for what it says and not have been prejudiced by teaching that said all of these other things, you wouldn’t come up with some sickness, some runny eye disease that Paul had that God gave him because he wanted him to be that way, it’s not what it says.

You know, while I’m talking about this, let me just bring up a couple of other instances that people also have thrown at me and they use this to basically say that God, you know, put sickness on people or he didn’t heal people in scripture, so therefore it’s not his will to heal everybody. Here’s another one, in 1 Timothy, chapter 5, the apostle Paul is speaking to Timothy who was ordained the first bishop of the church at Ephesus, and he’s giving him instructions and he says in 1 Timothy, chapter 5, verse 22, he says, «Lay hands suddenly on no man, neither be partaker of other men’s sins: keep thyself pure».

Verse 23, «Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities», and I’ve had people before say, well see, Timothy was sick all of the time. It says, «Often infirmities», and in this case I believe it is talking about some kind of a sickness, that type of an infirmity, and so they say, Timothy had sicknesses and so you know, he was the associate of the apostle Paul, if anybody was going to be healed, it should have been Timothy. This proves that it’s God’s will not to heal everybody. Well, I could say a lot of things about this. First of all, let me just say that, you know, I believe in healing real strongly. I’ve seen my son raised from the dead: I’ve seen blind eyes open, deaf ears open, I’ve seen a lot of miracles, but does that mean that because somebody works for me that they’re just automatically going to get healed by osmosis?

You know, I’ve had people before look at somebody on my staff who was sick, who had something wrong, and they think that that’s some kind of a reflection on me. First of all, that is just totally illogical to believe. You know, we’ve got 270 people working at this office here in Colorado springs, and to think that everyone is going to be in perfect health because I believe in healing, you just don’t understand squat about how the Kingdom of God works, amen. It doesn’t work that way. I can’t get people healed just totally off my faith: they don’t get healed by association, by osmosis. They have to believe to receive. Just because somebody who was associated with the apostle Paul had some type of a sickness does not prove that God doesn’t want to heal people, because he certainly would have healed any associate of the apostle Paul.

That just doesn’t make sense, and right here, the apostle Paul said, don’t use water anymore, don’t drink any longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake. So, he even is specifying what kind of infirmity he had. He had some kind of a sickness that was associated with the water and instead he needed to drink wine that had, of course, there’s fermentation in it and it killed impurities and you wouldn’t get sick, you wouldn’t have these stomach or intestinal problems if you drank wine instead of water. So, he limits it to what kind of sickness it was and it was a sickness that came specifically from drinking contaminated water. That’s real simple.

Now I travel all over the world and you can go to nearly any place in the world and drink the water nowadays: things have changed a lot, but even if the water isn’t good to drink out of the tap, you can always get a water bottle so it’s not a problem, but when I first started traveling, I remember in 1968 I went to Europe and all across, and I mean, in most of those European countries you could not drink the water, you would get sick. I think it was about 1980 I went to India and you know, it’s a long story, but it was under martial law, they stuck me in this hotel room, padlocked it from the outside and for three days I didn’t see anybody. I didn’t have anything to eat, but you know, I did drink the water out of the tap and it was just a crisis situation and I did it and didn’t even think about it.

Later, I found out, one of the Indians told me, he says, you can’t drink the water out of the tap, it’ll kill us, you can’t live. I flew home with a guy who had lost 30 pounds in 30 days and two of the people in his five, out of his seven, group of seven, two of the seven died because of drinking the water and that was back about 1980, and so I’m aware that when you go to these foreign countries, still there’s some of them, but you can get sick drinking the water. In Mexico, they call it, Montezuma’s revenge, and on and on. Every place has a story about that and you can get sickness from drinking the water. All Paul is doing is telling him, don’t drink that polluted water: drink wine instead. We don’t know why Timothy wasn’t aware of this, but all this says to me is that even though you’re walking in the power of God and you’re believing in healing, you can’t go out and just do things that are stupid.

If you know that the water is contaminated, quit drinking it. Drink something else, and that’s all that Paul’s saying. This is not some kind of a stamp of approval on sickness and that, you know, Timothy, this great man of God, the first bishop of the church at Ephesus couldn’t be healed and so this is proof that God doesn’t want us healed. No, it just shows that you drink polluted water, you’re going to get sick, so quit doing that. Somebody says, well, can’t you believe God for Mark 16, and drink any deadly thing and it shall not harm you? Well, I did, and in India I drank the water for two weeks and instead of me getting sick or dying like these other people I talked about that were there at the exact same time, I gained ten pounds in two weeks.

I think it was all the amoebas in the water, I don’t know, but you know what, God says, he preserves the simple. I lived through it, it didn’t affect me, and so yes, I believe it can happen, but you know, if somebody would have told me, this was one of my very first trips overseas and if somebody would have told me, this water is polluted, you can get sick if you drink it, don’t drink it, drink something else, here’s something else instead, I would have done that because to me that’s tempting God to just go out and do something that you know is going to cause problems, and I believe that that’s all the apostle Paul was saying.

Let me point out this one other thing. I’ve actually had people before say, well, this is God’s stamp of approval upon medicine because drinking wine meant that it had medicinal qualities and they talk about the virtues of wine and they say, this is God’s stamp of approval on medicine. This is not what this is saying. I’m not against medicine, but I’m saying that that is a total misrepresentation of scripture.

If you interpret this verse to say that God wants you to drink wine because it’s got medicinal qualities, if you interpret it that way, you can interpret the Bible to say anything you want to say. He’s just making a simple point. Timothy was drinking polluted water: Paul in instruction says, quit drinking the water, drink wine, you won’t have these intestinal problems, it’s that simple. This is not a great Revelation and it certainly isn’t any scripture that a person should be building a doctrine on that God wants you sick and that it’s God’s will for you to be sick because Timothy had often infirmities.

Here’s another passage of scripture. Over in 2 Timothy, chapter 4 this is in, you know, ending, Paul was winding down his letter and he was just greeting different people and saying some things, and he said this in 2 Timothy, chapter 4, verse 20, he said, Erastus abode at Corinth: but Trophimus hath I left at Miletum sick, and some people again, it’s this exact same logic, they think, well, Trophimus was one of Paul’s companions. He was a part of his team and Paul left him sick. If it was God’s will to get healed, then why didn’t he just get healed? And so they assume, they extrapolate from that that God wants some people to be sick.

Again, that is such weird thinking to think that if somebody travels with me and if they get sick and don’t get well that somehow or another it’s an indication that I must want them to be sick or I would have got them healed off my faith. First of all, you can’t just get other people healed off of your faith, they have to believe. I’m going to be talking about this in more depth when I get into reasons why people aren’t healed and I’ll show you that in Mark, chapter 6, verse 5 it says that even Jesus could do no mighty works because of their unbelief. The only thing he could do was just lay his hands on a few sick folk or a few minor sicknesses, not because he had any problem but because the other people did.

So, it’s totally erroneous for us to think that if somebody travels with me and gets sick and I leave them and they’re sick, they don’t come to the meeting because they’re too sick, that somehow or another that’s proof that I didn’t want to get them well. If I had really wanted them well, I could have just prayed for them and got them healed. That’s not the way that it works. Personally, I don’t know exactly what this me, it’s possible that Trophimus was believing God: sometimes it takes a period of time for your faith to manifest a healing. Jesus spoke to the fig tree in the eleventh chapter of the book of Mark and he commanded it to be dead and to never bear fruit again.

It was nearly 24 hours later that the disciples saw that fig tree and they said, Lord, it’s dried up from the roots. It was dead the moment that Jesus spoke to it, but it took about 24 hours for that death that was in the roots to come up through the branches and to manifest itself in that fig tree. So, there is a principle here that sometimes you can be healed progressively. The ten lepers that went to the priest, it says, as they went, they were healed. In other words, it wasn’t just instantaneous, but as they went.

Now, that doesn’t mean it was a long period of time, but it could have been an hour or 30 minutes or something like that, and as they went, they were healed. If you are praying and believing for a healing, it doesn’t just always happen instantly. I believe it can, but it doesn’t and there’s things that you can do, I’m going to teach you some things that will shorten and speed up the manifestation of your healing, but if a person doesn’t get healed immediately, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t God’s will.

So, what if Paul prayed for Trophimus, but Paul he had, you know, he had a desire to go ahead and preach the gospel and he wasn’t just going to sit there for a week or whatever until Trophimus got over it. He was just going to go ahead and told Trophimus, catch up when you can, or whatever. Is that some indication that God didn’t want to heal him? He might have been in the process of receiving his healing. I don’t know that that’s what happened, but you don’t know that it’s what didn’t happen. It’s also possible that Trophimus, maybe he just did get discouraged and he quit believing in the healing power of God and so Paul just left him there and says, man, if that’s what you’re going to believe, well then just stay here, you aren’t traveling with me.

I need people that can stand and believe God and help me pray for people and see them healed. I don’t know exactly what the scenario was, but just because it says, Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick, does not mean that Paul approved of the sickness, that it was God’s will, that God put this on him. It’s amazing to me how people grasp at these straws trying to come up with something that will disprove healing. There are just so many obvious statements. I’ve already used a bunch of these. Isaiah, chapter 53, verse 5, by his stripes we were healed. Matthew 8:17 comments on it, this is a fulfillment of that prophecy of Isaiah, that he himself bore our infirmities and carried our sicknesses.

1 Peter 2:24, by his stripes we were healed. 3 John, chapter 1, verse 2, beloved, I wish above all things that you prosper and be in health, even as your soul prospers. Acts, chapter 10, verse 38, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost, with power who went about doing good, healing all that were oppressed of the devil: for God was with him. He healed all of them, and then you could just go on and on and take all of these examples. I read this out of this little pamphlet, that there were 17 times Jesus healed every single person that was present. There were 47 other times where he healed one or two people at a time.

There is not a single instance in scripture where Jesus put sickness on a person to bless them or to punish them or to teach them something, or there is not a single instance where Jesus refused to heal somebody because they hadn’t learned their lesson yet and they needed to suffer a little bit more. Those things are just wrong. The scripture is so obvious with healing, and Jesus even said this in John, chapter 14, verse 12, he says, «Verily, verily», that means, truly, truly. In other words, everything Jesus said was the truth, but when he started it with, truly, truly, it’s because he was going to say something that seemed too good to be true, it was hard to believe, and he wanted to validate, that I’m telling you the truth. He said, verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also: and greater works than these shall you do, because I go unto my father.

What works did Jesus do? He went about doing good, healing all that were oppressed of the devil, and if you are believing on Jesus, you should be doing the exact same works. That’s so clear. You read the New Testament, it just, it’s everywhere. James, chapter 5 says that if anybody’s sick, call for the elders of the church: and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith will save the sick, not just prayer, but a prayer of faith will save the sick, and that word «Save» there is «Sozo» talking about the same word that we use for forgiveness of sins. Healing is a part of the atonement and it is very clear in scripture.

People that would take Paul’s thorn in the flesh, Trophimus being left at Miletum sick, Timothy using a little wine instead of drinking the water because of his often infirmities, people that would take those and somehow or another try and twist that and say that God doesn’t heal today, that God even wants you to be sick, it’s God’s will, are just totally, totally not being honest with scripture. You know, actually I believe that most people’s resistance towards healing is not based on scripture. They go to things like this and the twist them and try and use it as a proof text to prove something they already believe.

The real motivation for people to stand against healing is because if what I’m saying is true and God wants you well, then when people are sick and when people die prematurely, it’s not God’s will and that means that some people think, so, are you somehow or another saying that I missed God? Yes. I’m not saying that you’re a terrible person: all of us miss God in some areas. Every one of us at times don’t listen to God and we make mistakes and we bear our consequences and God still loves us and I still love you, but I am saying that God wants us well and that if we were really tracking with the Lord and operating in the word the way that he wants us to, I believe healing would be the norm instead of the exception.

It is God’s will for you to be well, and for you to start seeing this supernatural healing power of God operate in your life, you’ve got to come to this conclusion that healing isn’t optional, it’s not just for certain people, it is always God’s will, it’s a part of the atonement, and you’ve got to know that it’s God’s will so that when you pray, you believe that you’ve received right then, and then future, you shall see it come to pass, but you’ve got to believe without wavering is what it says in James, chapter 1, and I tell you, there’s not a lot of people that are like this.

I was talking with the pastor of my church just last week and he was telling me about how sick he had been with the flu and all of this and I didn’t say anything, I’m not mad at him, I’m not condemning him, I don’t feel like he’s an inferior person because he got sick. It happens. I didn’t say a word, and then he says, have you been sick with the flu? I said, no, I don’t get sick. I don’t believe in getting sick, and he just looked at me like, what? You can’t do that, and I said, I can do it. And so that kind of ended it. Later, one of the other guys, one of the other pastors says, you don’t get sick? And I said, it’s been 40 something years, and I said, I have fought sickness a few times, the closest I’ve been to being sick is because of my own stupidity because I just wore myself out, but I said, as far as just getting sick, I’ve had sickness come at me, but I overcome it. I don’t get sick.

I don’t believe in being sick, and people just can’t accept that, but I believe that that’s what Jesus purchased for me. I don’t do it perfectly, but I guarantee you, I do it better than most people and I’m not saying that to pat myself on the back, I’m just saying it to prove that the word works, you can believe God, you do not have to be sick, you do not have to go through flu season and through all of these allergy seasons and stuff like that, you can walk in divine health. If you want to be sick, God loves you, I love you. You can still go to heaven and be sick, and you can get there quicker. You know what, God loves you. I’m not against you, but I’m telling you, if you want to receive it, God wants you well, and we’re going to start teaching you how to receive that healing and how to activate it.