“saved, Delivered And Healed” I Believe, I Receive, I Am!

“Saved, Delivered and Healed”

I believe, I receive, I am!

Have you ever seen a child in a store that wanted a certain item or toy?

Maybe some of you can even relate to this situation and have been the victim, or the recipient before of it.

Anyways, we’ve all seen it a hundred times before, and we know that child has decided their going to get there way,

Scream, gouge, chew, kick, whatever it is that they have to do, even if they have to tear the place down,

One thing is for certain, they are going to walk out of that store, head held high with what they want, or their not leaving until they get it!

To them, it really doesn’t matter whether mom or dad have the extra money to buy them something or not.

Even though when I was a child, I knew better than to throw a fit in a store,

I can remember suggesting to my father on at least one occasion to write a check, when he said we didn‘t have that kind of money to throw around.

Now a days kids would say, just put it on your credit card, you know charge it.

Kids can be very, very creative, thinking of all kinds of solutions and doing whatever it takes to get what they want.

How about this one, I’ll work for free all summer, or I’ll give up my allowance for the rest of my life.

Most parents have probably heard those arguments more than once, but my point is,

Those are learned behavioral traits, kids don’t know those things when their born, they pick them up along the way.

We learn at a early age and society teaches everything and anything, can be accomplished and controlled by self effort,

and there are some pretty amazing things that have been achieved by self effort.

Take for example sports, particully track and field, take for example the mile.

Amazing efforts have been made, great races have been run, great times have been achieved, records have been set and broken,

Did you know, that the world record for the mile is 3:43.13?

and it was set by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco, in Rome Italy on 7 July 1999.

Ill. Quite an amazing feat, because for decades prior to this record, back in the early 50’s,

track-and-field experts proudly declared that no runner could break the four-minute-mile barrier.

It was said that a human being couldn’t run that distance that fast.

"Experts" conducted all sorts of profound studies to show it was impossible to beat the four-minute barrier.

And for years, they were right. Nobody ever ran a mile in less than four minutes.

But one day a young man came along who didn’t believe the experts’ opinions.

He didn’t dwell on the impossibilities, he refused to let all those negative words form a stronghold in his mind.

He began to train, believing he was going to break that record and sure enough,

he went out one day and broke the four-minute-mile barrier, he did what the experts said couldn’t be done.

His name was Roger Bannister, and he made sports history.

Now, here is what is so interesting about the Roger Bannister story...

Within a month, the Australian runner John Landy had broken Bannister’s record,

but Bannister had the satisfaction of beating Landy at that summer’s British Empire Games in Vancouver.

In a race billed as "The Mile of the Century," both runners beat the four minute time, but Bannister came in first at 3:58.8 to Landy’s 3:59.6

Within ten years after Roger Bannister broke that record, 336 other runners had broken the four-minute-mile record as well!

Think about that. For hundreds of years, as far back as statisticians kept track-and-field records,

nobody ran a mile in less than four minutes;

then, within a decade, more than three hundred people from various geographic locations were able to do it.

What happened? Simple. The barrier to running a four-minute mile was in the athletes’ minds.

For all those years, runners believed what the experts were saying. They were convinced that it was impossible to do things differently.

You know, that’s what the people thought back in Jesus day too.

For thousands of years, they were told and taught, that you had to make an atonement for your sins,

You had to make a sacrificial offering to wipe away your sins, for another year.

If you needed healed, you had to be the first one to jump in the water, when it started to ripple,

Or you needed to find someone like Elisha, and hope that he hadn’t used up,

his double portion of anointing, that he got when his mentor, Elijah was translated to heaven.

Oh ya, there was just one other huge obstacle,