A misconception about the promises of GOD

There is a verse for every need, for every problem, in the Bible.  The more promises you know, the more powerful your prayer will become. 

So the question then is why don’t the promises always work? 

I was reading about a man who was a diabetic and he read the verse, “If you ask anything in MY name, I will do it.”  John 14:14.  So he said, “GOD, I’m going to ask that YOU cure me of diabetes,” and he threw away his insulin and three days later he died.  What happened?  GOD promised.  Why didn’t it work?

The fact of the matter is there’s a misconception people have about the promises of GOD.  It’s this:  You cannot automatically claim a promise that’s been given to somebody else in the Bible unless the HOLY SPIRIT gives it to you. 

To understand what we’re going to talk about here about coming to GOD with a problem, you must understand that GOD speaks to people two different ways.

1.  Universally – to everybody.

2.  Personally – to individual people, specific messages for specific situations at specific times.

The New Testament was originally written in Greek.  In the Greek there were two terms used for the term “word”.  “Logos” and “rhema”.  Whenever you hear the phrase, “the word of GOD”, sometimes it’s the logos of GOD and sometimes it’s the rhema of GOD. 

The logos is the word of GOD to everybody.  That’s the Bible – everything from Genesis to Revelation, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the Twenty-Third Psalm. It is GOD’s word to everybody.  It is the foundation for the second type of word of GOD which is the rhema. 

The rhema is the word of GOD to you personally, a specific word, a promise, to a specific person in a specific period of time, for that time only.  We can only claim a promise when it is a rhema to us, when it’s the specific word to us.  I’m going to share with you how you get that.

Just a thought from the front porch..