Discerning the Body of Christ
Let me tell you how important it is to learn to discern the Body of Christ. Sometimes our very life can depend on how well we have learned to hear the voice of God through the Body. Let me tell you my personal experience.
My father died of diabetes. His sister, my aunt, died of diabetes. His next sister died of diabetes. His third sister also died of diabetes. All the family I knew from my father’s side died of diabetes. But there was no diabetes on my mother’s side. One day my brother came to me and said, “Ces, we are in trouble. We have to get to the doctor and make sure that we get this diabetes business under our feet.” I said, “I rebuke the thought in the name of Jesus.” He was very unhappy. He thought I was rebuking him, but I wasn’t really rebuking him. I was rebuking the spirit of diabetes that was coming at us. Well, he went to the doctor, got tested, and sure enough, he had diabetes. He began to get treatment, insulin and all that is related to it. Yet, I kept on my merry way.
One day, a brother from the fellowship called me and said, “I had a peculiar dream about you. In the dream I saw you sitting at a table eating. You were preparing yourself to go down into a valley to fight a giant. As you ate, the voice of God spoke that on this particular day you would not win the battle but the victory was for another day. I then found myself standing at a postal mail case where I heard this loud noise. Someone had slammed their hand down violently upon the metal case. I looked at the address where the metal had been dented and it had your address on it. I then turned around to see who did it and to my surprise it was your Brother Frank.” I said, “Oh! It is nothing but the diabetes!” I knew God was saying to me, “It is your time to fight. It is your time to go against this thing.”
I did not go against it only in the spiritual. You know, some of us are so spiritual that we say, “Oh, we will just rebuke this devil and everything will be all right!” I did rebuke the devil and it kept away for some time, but I also ran to the doctor. Do you know what I ran there for? I wanted to see for myself if this demon had come my way. And so I got tested. Sure enough, he was there. In a very small way, but he was there. The doctor said, “Oh, oh, oh, you have to get injections…” I said, “Not me, sir. I am going to deal with it in the way God showed me.” I began to watch my eating, I began to watch my behavior, and I have been keeping the demon off since then. I stopped using sugar; I would not eat any chocolate or anything sweet. Any time before that when I went to Europe, I would always come home with a lot of chocolate. They have really good chocolate in Europe! But I had to make an end of it. And my sugar level went right down.
It is not only that God is saying to us that we must fight our diseases in the spirit, but we must also fight them in the natural. If I went out of the doctor’s office, ate everything as I did up until then and didn’t care, I would also become a victim, because I would have disobeyed the basic law of heaven for me. And the law for me was – don’t eat any sweets!
This is just an example of what is happening in the Body of Christ. All of us have some kind of spiritual attack coming upon us, because Satan will use anything he can use. God is expecting us, in wisdom and in spiritual strength, to fight and win.
Why am I saying all this? I am saying that if I did not believe that this brother in the Lord had the particular gift of dreams and visions, I wouldn’t be alive today. You see, the prophetic gift manifests in different ways and dreams and visions are part of it. I want you to know that I got deliverance because I believed in the Body of Christ. God said in 1 Corinthians 11:29-30, “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.” Many are weak and sick and many sleep because they do not discern the Body of Christ. Brethren, let us discern what God has given us in one another.
