“We are like a coconut,” our beloved team leader’s wife shared with the dark skinned Papua New Guineans sitting cross legged on banana leaf woven mats.   “We are body, soul and spirit.”

When we cut open a coconut, we have the husk, we have the meat and we have the water or the milk.

If someone were to cut us with a bush knife, (machete), your physical body would feel pain, your soul, (mind, will and emotions) would feel anger and this in turn would affect your spirit and your relationship with God.

You would need to use the power of your will to choose the spiritual principles of forgiveness, and also to keep your thoughts in line with God’s Word and not choose some sort of payback.”

This was possibly the sixth trip our leaders had made to PNG, but the first time they had brought an Australian team with them, and we had been hearing the fruits of their labours, people were choosing to forgive instead of payback, and others were asking questions and hearing about God.

An Aunty who was run over by a drunk driver and killed, had the relatives forgive the driver instead of chasing him down to kill him, and an adulterous wife was forgiven and restored to her husband instead of having her baby chopped out of her womb by an angry husband.

As a fourteen year old and then later as an 18 year old, these truths of forgiveness laid such an incredible foundation for me.

For years I was fascinated with the concept of body, soul and spirit, and even the testimonies of people who would be miraculously healed of some undiagnosable or incurable disease after forgiving someone, as recorded in the the book Gray Matter by Neurosurgeon David Levy.

HEALED OF AUTOIMMUNE ALLERGIES

So  are we all just coconuts?  It’s a Scriptural and interesting concept but how does this concept of spirit, soul, body actually play out in our lives?

Scripture says that the same power that raised Christ from the dead lives in us, but sometimes we wonder why that isn’t manifesting, especially if we are sick.

I want to share my journey of how I received healing from autoimmune allergies and began to see the power of God manifesting from my spirit, as I renewed my mind (soul) to the Word of God, into my physical body.  And let’s be clear, I’m not saying that I have the power of the universe inside of me, I’m saying that the same power that raised Christ from the dead lives in each one of us who have said yes to Jesus.

Let’s fast forward from those teenage mission trips to just after the birth of  our 2nd daughter when my health started on a downhill slide.  By the time she was one I needed to cut out all grain products and most dairy to prevent constant diarrhea.

We transitioned our family to a Paleo/Gaps diet and did begin to notice an improvement in the symptoms, but it was very limiting, however I thought God must just be teaching us to be healthier.

All the while I was madly racking my brains to see if there was anyone I hadn’t forgiven.

By the time our second daughter was 2, I was reacting to the GAPS diet and all fermented foods because of the high histamine content and was having shocking bouts of insomnia and the diarrhea had come back.    Through working with a naturopath and prayer, I was gradually able to go back to GAPS/ Paleo which included a lot of raw veg and nut based snacks, until I began reacting to nuts, then coconut, then raw veg, then cooked veg, to the point where I was only eating about 4 different cooked vegies/fruit and a lot of meat and bone broth without risking an allergic reaction.

The doctors didn’t know what to do with me, and I was no longer seeing any improvement with what the naturopath was giving me.

I would read Scriptures like Romans  8v11

And wonder what on earth I was missing.

I knew that God healed, I’d been the recipient of His healing power many times before in life, and recently I’d had multiple, ‘big name’ healing evangelists lay hands on me and pray with seemingly no results.

As a young married, because my Mum had a lot of trouble with pregnancies, I had dived into God’s Plan for Pregnancy by Nerida Walker, and learned that the price Jesus had paid on the cross was not just for our salvation but for us to walk in health and healing, and as I began to meditate on that my incredibly painful periods left and I had no further pain with my periods.

Although I needed a C-section with my first daughter, using the foundation I had learned from Nerida I kept commanding my body to come into line with the finished work of the cross and experienced a very quick recovery with  no after birth pains.  With our second daughter I walked through Gestational Diabetes but was able to have a pain free birth even though I was connected to an IV for an induction and lying on the bed.

I had asked people to be praying for specific elements of my birth but didn’t pray that I wouldn’t tear, and tear I did, badly and whilst having surgery to repair it, went into shock with an infection and coded by the time I got back to the ward.

Stephen stood up and told the multiple doctors he was going to pray for me and instantly my stats on all the monitors came back to normal.

However within a year my health was on a downward spiral, contributed to by mould in our air conditioning system.

I couldn’t understand why, when I’d seen so many miracles in the past, I could be so sick now, but I realised that I hadn’t kept sowing the Word of God and focusing on the fact that Jesus had already done it and was convinced that God must want to teach us a lesson about ‘being healthy’.

I fully believe that God does want us to steward our health and one time when my husband went forward for prayer for a sore between his toes, God said to him, “you’ve got minerals and vitamins in your cupboard at home that would heal this if you’d just take it.”

In fact I love this quote by Rick Warren:

I remember sitting and journaling the Scripture that the same power that raised Christ from the dead is in you and wondering why I wasn’t seeing that physically manifested in my body?

If we are Christians, we all have that living inside of us, but why do we see so little evidence of it?

I began to notice that when Paul prayed for the New Testament Christians he wasn’t praying that they would get more . . . but get a revelation of what they already had in Christ, or he was praying for himself to have boldness to speak to others.

I began to listen to life changing FREE teaching by Andrew Wommack, in particular, God Wants You Well, You’ve Already Got It and Body, Soul and Spirit, explaining that Biblically Jesus healed everyone who came to Him and that the Word says by His stripes we were healed, past tense, and that as we renew our mind to that, it releases the power of God that is in our Spirits, into our bodies.  I heard hundreds of testimonies of people who had been healed, not even by laying on of hands but just renewing their minds to the truth that they already were healed, including Maren, a girl with Lyme’s disease, several women with Fibromyalgia, another with blindness, kidney failure, and many other diseases. 

In the middle of all these allergies we went on a trip from SE QLD Australia to Port Macquarie in NSW to visit family for 2 birthdays and an engagement party and I was really unwell.  Every second day while my husband and girls were out visiting family I would be in bed, and I couldn’t go to see my in-laws because the cat hair even on their clothes when they came to our hotel apartment would give me instant hives in a 5cm radius where it touched me.

By the time we got home I was constantly dizzy, but we knew that God wanted me well so we prayed and I kept unpacking and by the end of the day I felt mostly normal again, and in a few weeks  I was able to eat all foods again.

It is as we renew our minds to Scriptural truth, the power that is inside our spirits is able to manifest to our physical bodies whether that is instantly or in gradual inclements.

GOD’S WORD PRODUCES A HARVEST.

Jesus often spoke in Parables referring to God’s Word as seed and our hearts as the soil.

Mark 4:26-29 Jesus also said, “This is what the Kingdom of God is like. _____ plants God’s Word in her heart. 27 Night and day, whether _____ sleeps or gets up, God’s Word sprouts and grows, though _____ does not know how. 28 All by itself _____ heart produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. 29 As soon as the grain is ripe, _____ puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.

Andrew Wommack says, “There are a total of forty-four verses in the New Testament where the Greek word “sperma” was translated “seed.” This is the same word from which we derive our English word “sperm.” To conceive and give birth to the miracles you need, you must first plant God’s Word like a seed in your heart. Conception cannot take place without first planting the seed.”

We must meditate and chew over and align our thoughts with what God says for our lives.

I heard Priscilla Shirer say the other day that there are around 8,000 promises in the Word of God, but most of them He has not put in our hand but in our reach. Like when God gave the land to Joshua, He said every place where you put your foot. It is our job to do the work of standing on God’s promises and possess the victory He’s already given to us.

As Stephen was praying one day the phrase came to him, ‘we cannot add to the finished work of the cross we can only activate it in our lives by verbally agreeing with it.’

Famous Australian tennis player Margaret Court, shares deep wisdom on renewing our mind and speaking out the promises of God in her  book, Train Your Brain.

One of my favourite quotes in this book is where she says that if we can have ungodly strongholds in our minds than we can also have strongholds of righteousness.

These are formed by renewing our minds to God’s Word.

“Meditation (of the heart) and confession (of the mouth) are our twin weapons in training the brain.  The more we confess God’s Word with our mouth, the more it shapes the meditations of our mind and heart.  And the more our mind and heart are changed, the more our words will conform to God’s truth.  It’s a continuous cycle.

Peter ‘wondered within himself’ and thought about the revelation in the vision he received regarding the eating of unclean animals.  That describes the mind part of meditation perfectly.  All we need for the supernatural to break in is for the Holy  Spirit to say something.  Then we wonder and think about what He is saying, letting it soak in like water soaking into dry ground – Page 62-63

She shares about when she had a torn valve in her heart how she found a picture of a healthy heart and declared over her heart for 6 months that she was healed and she began to notice an improvement and then within 2 years the doctors declared her heart completely healthy after saying she would be on heart tablets for the rest of her life.

(I totally didn’t plan it, but I actually really love how this photo is on my daughter’s school desk, with all her learn to read bits around, because just as we can train our minds to read, we can also train our mind’s with God’s Word.)

As I’ve shared before, faith is like a seed, the Bible actually says we all have the measure of faith, it’s not that some of us have more and some have less, we all have the same.

“For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.” –Romans 12:3, KJV

How we grow our faith from a seed to a tree is to speak out the word of God.  It could also be compared to a muscle; we all have the same number of muscles, but when we train them, they become much stronger.  So sometimes while we are growing our faith we need to use wisdom with our diets and medications until God clearly tells us to come off them or our bodies obviously don’t need them, but during seasons in pregnancy where I need to be on iron tablets, I would pray over them and bless them to do me good and not harm and whenever I did that they would not cause me nausea.

When we realise that our healing was already paid for at the cross it becomes easier because we aren’t trying to get God to do something He hasn’t already done, we are just learning to cash the cheque he has already given us.  My husband Stephen shares in this video how as he explained this truth to another believer in his workplace, she was instantly healed from debilitating back pain, which  has happened other times with quite a few unbelievers too.