The Time I Called My Doctor a Liar

This concept of imagination should not be foreign territory for Christians. We deal in “things unseen” all the time. We believe in a God and a heaven we’ve never seen. We stake our eternity on the words of an ancient book. And we believe that a Man we’ve never met paid the price for our sin 2,000 years before we were even born! To the natural mind, this sounds crazy, yet it’s true.I was listening to the radio recently and heard a talk show host discussing a moral issue with his audience. One of his listeners called in to counter what was being said. “The Bible says—” the listener began, but the show’s host interrupted, “We aren’t dealing in the Bible. We’re dealing with reality. We don’t want any ideas or beliefs. We want reality.” I got so mad, I started yelling at the radio, “The Bible is more real than anything you can see, taste, hear, smell, or feel!” The physical world, what most people refer to as “reality,” was created by the spiritual. Hebrews says:"Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." (Hebrews 11:3)The Word of God created everything we can see with our physical eyes. The Word is real, but it’s not a reality that can be experienced with our natural senses (1 Cor. 2:14). It cannot be seen with our eyes or touched with our hands. It, like the rest of the spiritual world, must be experienced by faith.During the “Great Recession” in 2008, when stock prices went down 50 percent and the housing market crashed, the Lord spoke to me about building a world-class Charis Bible College campus. Since that time, we’ve purchased and begun development on 493 pristine mountain acres in Woodland Park, Colorado. We’ve spent over $70 million above my normal expenses building a 70,000-square-foot building called The Barn to house our Charis classrooms and a 140,000-square-foot building that includes a 3,200-seat auditorium, our phone center, and our Charis offices. And we have renovated another 60,000-square-foot building on the property for our AWM offices and television studio. All of this was done debt-free.While everyone else was struggling and just barely getting by during the “Great Recession,” we were prospering. We were building. There’s no natural explanation for this. We didn’t take out a loan or tap into investor funds. We didn’t have a huge amount of savings to draw from. All we had was God’s Word. We let the Word of God paint a picture of what was possible, of what we could do, and that picture has become so clear and so strong that we can no longer live outside it. We’ve become narrow-minded in pursuit of God’s will!

You see, faith and imagination work hand in hand. You can get so focused, so narrow-minded, on Scripture that you can’t see anything contrary to it. That’s a positive thing!

Years ago, my board sent me to the doctor for a stress test. (The insurance policy we were applying for required one.) As the doctor began prepping me for the treadmill, his nurse asked if they could shave the hair off my chest to give the electrodes a place to stick. “You can’t shave my chest,” I said. “This is virgin hair. It’s never been touched!” They honored my request and tried to stick those things to my chest without shaving it, but about thirteen minutes into the test, they started falling off. In order to finish, I had to hold two electrodes in place, the nurse held two, and the doctor held two more. When I finished running, the doctor looked over my results. Then he started grunting and writing on my chart. When he finally looked up at me, he said, “Here’s the name of a doctor I know. He’s a specialist. I want you to go over there and get tested right away. We may admit you into the hospital for open-heart surgery before the day is over.”I was shocked! I didn’t feel ill. The only reason I went to see the doctor was for that insurance policy. How could I need open-heart surgery? As I sat there for a second looking at the doctor, I began thinking about the image of health and strength God’s Word had painted inside me. And I said to him, “That’s a lie. I don’t believe it. You look at that readout again and tell me that it says I have a heart problem.”The doctor just looked at me (I guess he wasn’t used to people calling him a liar) and said, “Well, it doesn’t really say you have a heart problem. It just says that there was an abnormality during testing. It may be nothing, but it could be something serious. We need to get you tested.” He didn’t think about the fact that those electrodes were falling off my chest! “That’s not what you told me,” I said, getting mad. “You told me I might have to have open-heart surgery before the day is over. You lied to me!”“Fine,” he said, tearing up the paper. “You’re on your own; get out of here.”Later that day, on my way home, a woman’s car died. It was blocking the road, so I got out and pushed it to the nearest pull-off. I pushed it up the hill and around the corner—by myself. Not bad for a guy who was supposed to have open-heart surgery that same day!My point is, the Word of God has the power to change what you see. My dad died when I was twelve years old. He had heart problems. He actually died twice, once in 1952 and again in 1962. The first time he died, the hospital pronounced him dead, covered him with a sheet, and put him on a gurney in the hall. It was about two o’clock in the morning. Our pastor back home was leading an all-night prayer meeting for him. At the same moment the male orderly came to push my father down to the morgue, our pastor stood up back home and said, “Either God has done what He said and healed him, or he’s dead. Either way, I’m done praying; I’m going home.” Next thing anyone knew, my dad was raised from the dead. He kicked off his sheet, and the orderly wet his pants right in the middle of the hospital corridor! Because of my dad’s heart issues, every time I go in for a checkup, the doctors start projecting his problems onto me.I could behave like the rest of the world, giving those words weight. I could let the doctors’ words intimidate me and influence the way I see myself. Instead, I stand on the Word of God that says Jesus purchased my healing at Calvary (1 Pet. 2:24). I trust that God’s Word is flawless, that He is “a shield unto them that put their trust in him” (Prov. 30:5) and that no plague can come nigh my dwelling (Ps. 91:10). I believe that “the joy of the Lord is [my] strength” (Neh. 8:10, brackets added). I encourage myself with scriptural examples like Moses, who, on the day he died at 120 years old, climbed Mount Nebo. The Bible says that “his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated” (Deut. 34:7). I break the doctors’ curse by saying, “Fifty percent of me is my mother. She lived to be ninety-six and was as healthy as a horse. Why don’t you look at her side?” At the time of this writing, I’ve outlived my dad by more than fifteen years. And according to my last nuclear stress test, I have the heart of a teenager!After the doctor in Colorado Springs flunked me, my friend (a doctor on my board) invited me down to his place in Louisiana for a nuclear stress test. He said, “Those treadmill tests are wrong 50 percent of the time. Never base a health decision on one of those tests.” So, they injected me with some kind of dye and took pictures of my heart at rest and after exercise. My friend told me, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You have the heart of a seventeen-year-old.”Brothers and sisters, you don’t have to let your genes, your education, or your past dictate your future! Give yourself permission to become narrow-minded in the Word. Change your imagination.