TWO VERY DIFFERENT VOICES
A testimony from Ray Mossholder
"My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me" (John 10:27)
The following is how I came to recognize the awesome power of the truth behind I Corinthians 2:14-16 as Christ healed me of cancer without need for surgery.
God was taking me through three healings for cancer of the lower tract when He led me to these verses during the first of the three encounters. This was very soon after I had gone to a Kathryn Kuhlman meeting at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles “to prove she was a fake” and God turned the tables on me and showed me healing was for today. Directly after watching her minister and hearing her say, "I don't know if I have 'the gift of healing.' I don't even know what 'the gift of healing' is," I entered into the healing ministry myself.
It was a really traumatic time in my life because I came home to Daly City, California, all excited about meeting her, seeing all the Lord did through her and having her talk with me afterward. I was the youth director and spoke that Sunday night – sharing all I’d seen and heard in Miss Kuhlman’s meeting. Afterward the pastor said gruffly, “Come to my office!” and read the riot act to me. He said, “I’m not going to have you lie to my people like that. You’ll either theologically agree with me or resign! You’re going to have to renounce what you’ve said you saw at that woman’s meeting. Go home and pray with Arlyne, then come back and tell me you’ve repented.” This pastor believed in all of the gifts of the Spirit, he simply didn't believe women should at all be in a speaking ministry.
I came home and told Arlyne we needed to pray and how angry the pastor was with me. I told her he said I had to renounce what I’d seen. We knelt down and I didn’t even begin praying. We instead laughed. It was ludicrous. We got up off our knees fully aware that I couldn't renounce what my eyes had actually seen. So I went back to the pastor and was fired for insubordination.
Arlyne, our three little ones, two teenagers we were raising and I wondered what would happen to us with no more money and no idea of where God wanted us to go.
That next weekend I was teaching at a camp full of Chinese teenagers from Chinatown in San Francisco. After an evening session I went to the bathroom and passed blood. I was shocked, prayed, but then went to sleep fitfully. The next morning a demon spirit woke me and was saying audibly as I came out of slumber, “You have cancer. You are going to die. And what will happen to your wife and children now? You’ll leave them penniless and make them a laughing stock!” Instantly that voice was replaced with a voice I knew was Jesus Christ Himself, my Shepherd (John 10:27-29). He said, “Peace, be still. Peace, be still” and absolute calm came over me at once.
I did a final morning meeting and camp was over. The campground was near Sebastapool, California, and a friend of mine who lived there had given me a box of apples to take home to my family. It was sitting next to me on the front seat of my Volkswagon and when I climbed in to drive home I laid the Bible I’d taught from that morning, the Living Bible paraphrase, on top of the apples. I was very uncomfortable, a gnawing pain inside me near my waist wouldn’t stop.
I turned on the radio to get my mind off the pain and the blood I’d passed. I found just the right programming - a Giant-Dodger baseball game. I was a rip-roaring Giants fan at the time and when I began to listen, the Dodgers were leading 7-2. As I drove, the score began to change…7-3, 7-4, 7-5, 7-6. I was deeply engrossed in both the game and the driving when I heard a voice again. The voice commanded, “Turn off your radio!” I felt a tug of reluctance because I was so much into the game, but I obeyed. Instantly the voice spoke again: “Command the hand of God to heal you!” Again, I instantly obeyed. I said audibly,“I command the hand of God to heal me!” The pain was gone.
Immediately fear replaced the pain. I thought, “Who just spoke to me - God or the devil - who just told me to command God’s hand to heal me? Have I just committed a terrible sin? Who am I to command GOD to do ANYTHING?”
At almost the same moment, I realized my Bible was sitting on the apples. I prayed, “Oh God, I’m sorry if I just obeyed the devil. I’m terribly confused. Please give me a word to know if that was Your voice I obeyed.” I reached over and picked my Bible up while pulling the car over to the side of the road so that I could read. Opening the Bible at random, my eyes saw the latter part of 1 Corinthians 2:12-16. What I read at that moment thrilled me. It has ever since. I’ve often commanded healing ever since with great results.
Here's what 1 Corinthians 2:12-16 says in the Living Bible (and it is the only version of the Bible that says it exactly this way, so think of the odds of that!): "And God has actually given us His Spirit (not the world's spirit), to tell us about the wonderful free gifts of grace and blessings that God has given us. In telling you about these gifts we have even used the very words given to us by the Holy Spirit, not words that we as men might choose. So we use the Holy Spirit's words to explain the Holy Spirit's facts. But the man who isn't a Christian can't understand and can't accept these thoughts from God, which the Holy Spirit teaches us. They sound foolish to him, because only those who have the Holy Spirit within them can understand what the Holy Spirit means. Others just can't take it in. But the spiritual man has insight into everything, and that bothers and baffles the man of the world, who can't understand him at all. How could he? For certainly he has never been one to know the Lords thoughts, or to discuss them with Him, or to move the hands of God by prayer."
The pain was gone and stayed gone for several days. I thought for sure I'd been healed. I had no idea God was going to take me through two more encounters before erasing the cancer forever, but He did.
One afternoon I passed blood again and the pain was back too. That week I went to Kaiser Hospital and a doctor, after a thorough examination, told me I had cancer of the lower tract. He scheduled me for surgery. But that evening I sat in church with my wife and heard the pastor refer to "the Holy Spirit within us." Suddenly the Holy Spirit amplified that simple phrase as He so often amplifies a certain Scripture verse you or I are reading. I got a silly thought. I thought if my back itched and I asked my wife to scratch it, she would do that even in church. So since the Holy Spirit is within me and is closest to the cancer in my body, and since Jesus loves me, I could ask the Holy Spirit to take away the cancer. So that's exactly what I did. Instantly the pain that had been stronger than before was gone entirely. It stayed gone for nearly a week. During that time. I assumed I was healed. But then I passed blood again and the pain was back yet again. Now surgery seemed inevitable.
The night before the surgery was to take place I was prayed for by a group of my Christian friends with the laying on of hands. The next morning I went to the hospital for surgery. I had no pain that morning but my doctor had said to come. Funny how we Christians so often believe human doctors rather than the Great Physican's own words(John 14:12-14.)
A doctor greeted me and said, “I need to take two more X-rays. I want to be absolutely certain where I should cut.” I praise God to this day that he did that. He came back an hour later. I was sitting on a gurney. He was a Chinese doctor at a San Francisco Kaiser Hospital and said, “A busy day like this and they send a man like you here. You don’t have cancer. Go home!”
But what of commanding God’s hand to heal, the direction I received in my car? Again, here are the final words of 1 Corinthians 2:16as written in the Living Bible paraphrase: For we Christians actually do have with us a portion of the very thoughts and mind of Christ.
The above is both strong and weak. The New American Standard Bible says pretty well the same thing in 1 Corinthians 2:14-16: "But a natural man does not accept things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one. For WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, THAT HE IS WILLING TO INSTRUCT HIM? BUT WE HAVE THE MIND OF CHRIST.
Only the words in Verse 15 seems to me to obscure the full and breathless wonder of these verses. Unless you are in certain occupations, the words "appraises" and "appraise" aren't common in a Christian's vocabulary, though the very point made in the Living can certainly be understood from it: “FOR WHO HAS KNOWN THE MIND OF THE LORD, THAT HE WILL INSTRUCT HIM?”
The only question left here is: is the Lord in that verse instructing the spiritual man, or is the spiritual man instructing the Lord, i.e, commanding the Lord? The answer is in the very next words: BUT WE HAVE THE MIND OF CHRIST.
A footnote under Verse 14 in the New American Standard Bible published by Zondervan, underlines the whole point. It reads: "Natural man. Described in Jude 19 as one who is "worldly-minded" (cf Romans 8:9). The non-Christian is basically dominated by the merely physical, worldly or natural life. Because he does not possess the Holy Spirit, he is not equipped to receive appreciatively truth that comes from the Spirit. Such a person needs the new birth (John 3:1-8; Titus 3:5-6).Foolishness (see 1 Corinthians 1:18.)
What joy to know the living Creator God in three Persons, speaks to us today. Oh, what a difference it will make in our lives when we hear Him!