The All-Inclusive Promises of God
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believe and call your debts paid off while bills are still staring you in the face. You have to
believe you receive harmony in your home while there’s still screaming and furniture breaking.
Whatever it is, you can’t wait until you see and feel it before you’re going to believe it. It would
be too late to believe it. You believe it before you see it.
Read Mark 11:24 again. What did he say? “What things soever ye desire, when ye pray,” do
what? “believe,” and specifically, believe what? “believe that ye receive them.”
I’m believing that many who read this are going to get some things they have struggled with for
years. It’s clicking, and it’s getting in. You’re getting revelation and understanding. It’s not that
it’s so complicated, but the enemy tries to keep it from you. He tries to confuse you about it and
keep you blind to it. And this hasn’t always been taught to us. Other things have been taught that
were called the Word.
First Timothy 6:12 says, “Fight the good fight of faith.” What kind of fight would be a good
fight? “Lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good
profession before many witnesses.” Lay hold on eternal life. “Lay hold” is the same word that is
translated “receive.” If you look up the definition in the Strong’s Concordance and the Vine’s
Expository Dictionary, it literally means “take.”
A lot of folks don’t like this word in connection with prayer and faith. They think it sounds
presumptuous, not submitting to the will of God, and that’s where the problem comes in. People
have been passive with the things of God and aggressive with each other. They’ve been takers
from each other, but when it comes to God, they say, “Just whatever the Lord wants...”
That is exactly the opposite of what He told us to do. He said, “When you pray, whatever it is,
what things soever you desire, believe that you receive,” which means “believe that you take it,”
and “believe that you lay hold of it.”
Let me give you some combined definitions from Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon, Strong’s
Concordance, and Vine’s Expository Dictionary: “to take,” “to take with the hand,” “to lay hold
of,” “to take in order to carry away,” “to take what is one’s own,” “to take to one’s self,” “to
claim,” “to procure,” “to lay hold of,” “take possession of,” “appropriate,” “seize it.” Are you
getting the idea?
In Luke 16:16, when Jesus said, “The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the
kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it,” or takes hold of it, the word
violence
is used. Lots of people say, “What in the world is he talking about?” You have to
forcibly take hold of it.
Think about the people in the Gospel accounts who got their miracles and got their healings. The
woman with the issue of blood (Matthew 9:20-21) did not sit in the house and sing “Come by
here Lord...” What did she do? In her weakened condition, she got up because she had heard
Jesus was coming through. She pushed and she pressed. It was not easy. It was hard, but she
pressed in, and she kept saying to herself, “If I can just touch the hem of His garment, if I can
just touch the hem of His garment, I know I’ll be healed,” and she reached out, and she touched.
