God 39;s Medicine Bottle Pdf
Tiana Dubree
Because I am British, I served in the British Army as a medical orderly (what the Americans call a hospital attendant) with the British Medical Services for five-and-a-half years during World War II. For the first three years of duty, I was stationed in the deserts of North Africa: first in Egypt, then in Libya, and finally in the Sudan.
In the desert, the two things that we were exposed to more than anything else were sand and sun. I spent nearly one entire year in the desert without ever seeing a paved road. We traveled in sand, we slept in sand, and very often we had the impression that we were eating sand. We were exposed to it day and night. Combined with the sun, it had a very harmful effect on certain people whose skin could not protect them adequately from that kind of exposure. I was one of them. It manifested itself primarily in the condition of my feet and my hands, where the skin broke down. I became incapacitated in many ways.
The officer in command of my particular unit struggled to keep me from being admitted to the hospital because he knew if I were admitted, he would lose me from the unit. Consequently, I spent several months hobbling around trying to do my military duties. However, in the end he had to let me go into the hospital. I went to three or four different military medical facilities, and I was in the hospital for a year. During that time, I met soldiers there who'd been two years in the Middle East and spent eighteen months in the hospital with similar conditions.
The doctors gave many elaborate diagnoses of my problem. Each name tended to be a little longer than the previous one. Eventually, my condition was diagnosed simply as chronic eczema. I received the best medical treatment available, but it really didn't help me.
I saw many other soldiers with similar conditions who also were not helped. Those with really serious problems, burns and so on, were usually shipped to South Africa. However, my condition wasn't considered to be that serious, and my services to the British Army were not so valuable that they were going to waste a passage on a ship to South Africa for me. So I just lay there in bed, day after day, wondering what my future would be. I'll tell you, when you spend an entire year in the hospital, it seems like an eternity!
Shortly before this time, I had come into a real personal relationship with the Lord, had been born again and received the filling of the Holy Spirit. But I was very ignorant about God's Word then, not having had any background in biblical instruction. I had a Bible and really had nowhere else to turn for help but to God and His Word.
In desperation, I began to search the Scriptures to see what they could tell me about my physical condition. I didn't have any theories about Biblical healing; I just knew I needed it. I had the Bible and plenty of time to read, since there was very little else to do. So I searched through the Bible for something that would show me if I could really trust God for the healing of my body.
One day I came across some verses in the book of Proverbs that I learned to call "God's Medicine Bottle." I'm quoting from the King James Version, which was the version that I was reading in those days and which is extremely vivid and forceful:
It was that last phrase, "health to all their flesh," that caught my attention. I understood that "all their flesh" meant the total physical body, which is the way more modern versions translate it. I reasoned with myself, "Health! If I have health in my whole body, then I have no room anywhere for sickness. That is what God is promising me!"
Then I happened to look in the margin of my Bible and saw that the alternative translation for the word health was the word medicine. That seemed to be even more appropriate for my condition. God was promising me something that would be medicine that would bring health to all my flesh. I thought to myself, "That's precisely what I need." So I went back and read those words over and over again. I saw that, in essence, God's offer was being made to me through His Word.
Verse 20 says, "Attend to my words; incline your ear unto my sayings." Then verse 22 says, "For they [that's God's words and God's sayings] are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh." So somehow life and health are in the words and the sayings of God. I didn't know how that could be, but I knew God was promising it.
When I saw the phrase, "those that find them," I realized this process was more than just reading the Bible. It was reading the Bible in such a way as to find out how to receive what God was offering.
All the medical attention that was available in those conditions had not helped me. So I made a decision, a very naive decision in a way. I decided I was going to take God's Word as my medicine. That was a very crucial point in my life in many ways. When I made that decision, the Lord Himself spoke to me. Not audibly, but nevertheless very clearly, I heard Him say, "When the doctor gives a person medicine, the directions for taking it are on the bottle." Then He instructed, "This is My medicine I'm giving you. The directions are on the bottle. You better study them!"
I cannot go into detail about all that followed, but I began to bow my head over the Bible three times every day after meals, because that is how people normally take medicine. I said, "God, You have said that these words of Yours will be medicine to all my flesh, and I'm taking them as my medicine now, in the name of Jesus." Within a few months, God's medicine, taken that way, achieved the result God promised. I was totally healthy in every area of my body.
A good many years ago, I recorded this experience on a tape. Just recently, in London, England, I met a young man from Pakistan who told me that he'd become a Christian and that he had suffered for more than twenty years from eczema. One day he heard my tape and decided to do what I had done. In his case, he was completely healed within two or three days. So that is an up-to-date testimony that the medicine still does what it claims to do.
We need to understand that when God speaks to us, He requires our undivided attention. If Almighty God is willing to speak to us at all, surely any sense of propriety would indicate that we need to listen to God with our full and respectful attention. Sadly, that's not really the attitude of many people today.
Because of the tremendous proliferation of the media--radio, television, and so on--and because of various factors in our contemporary culture, we have almost cultivated the practice of listening to two different things at one time. We suffer from a disease that could be called divided attention. I'm amazed when I go into a home and see teenagers doing their homework while watching television at the same time. They're not giving full attention to either one or the other.
In many places now, we have what is called background music. We carry on a conversation, but at the same time, with one ear we're listening to the music in the background. I have to say that for me, personally, this is intensely frustrating. I'm the kind of person who desires to concentrate on something without dissipating my attention. I think that's a characteristic God has conditioned in me that I am not willing to relinquish. If I'm having a conversation, I want to listen to the person who is talking. If I'm listening to music, then I want to listen to the music. I love music. When I listen to it, I listen to it with my full attention.
But you see, all through the Bible, the primary key to healing from God is hearing. Let me say that simply: The key to biblical healing is hearing. It's what we listen to and how we listen that are so essential.
"If you diligently heed the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in His sight, give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have brought on the Egyptians. For I am the LORD who heals you." (Exod. 15:26)
Notice that final statement. It goes right along with the medicine bottle instructions: "I provide the medicine, and I am your Physician." In modern Hebrew that's exactly how that word would be translated: "I am the Lord, your Doctor." God says to His people, "I'm willing to be your Doctor, the Doctor of your physical body. However, there are conditions." Conditional because He begins the statement with an if.
The first condition, the basic one, is: "If you diligently heed the voice of the LORD your God." You see, what we listen to is very important. The Hebrew word that is translated "diligently heed" is a repetition of the verb "to listen." It goes something like this: "If you [listen listeningly to] the voice of the LORD your God." The complete emphasis is on listening.
God gave me an answer to my question. He said, "You've got two ears, a right ear and a left one; to listen listeningly means to listen to Me with both ears, with your right ear and with your left. Don't listen to Me with your right ear and something else with your left because the result of that will be confusion."
The emphasis is on attending to God, listening for Him, giving God your undivided attention. That is the primary instruction on God's Medicine Bottle. It matters what we hear and how we hear. This is not only the key to being healed, it's also the key to receiving faith. Of course, they go very closely together. It's faith that enables us to receive the healing that God has provided and to benefit from the medicine.
One of my favorite Scriptures, which was also made real to me during this long period in the hospital, is the following: "So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." (Rom.10:17)
One day, as I was reading my Bible, my eyes fell again on Romans 10:17: "So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." There were two words that leaped out from the page at me: "faith comes." In other words, you don't need to despair. Maybe you don't have faith, but faith comes. If you don't have it, you can get it.
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