Prognosis -- E-day minus four

I heard an interesting true story the other evening. The man who was relating the story is acquainted with a woman who, six years ago, was diagnosed with fourth-stage cancer. She was told that she had six months to live. That, as I said, was six years ago. He said that today, she lives without pain, without growths, and with fourth-stage cancer. His point? It is not cancer that kills people; they die because they believe the prediction that they will die. This particular woman did not believe the prognosis, and thus has not been affected by it.

That reminded me of a story I had read years ago, about a man who died in the refrigerated car of a train. The man had found, in the car, some means of writing, so when they found him, they were able to discover that he had, in his own estimation, frozen to death. The problem? That car had never gotten below about 40* F. He died because he believed that he was freezing to death.

Romans makes a mind-blowing statement about believing. It says that if you believe something is sin, to you it is sin. Do you realize what this means? This means that you could die of the guilt of having sinned, while, in God’s eyes, you hadn’t sinned. And if you think I’m exaggerating, I’m not. Guilt is literally self-destructive and can cause any number of physical ailments, any one of which could quickly enough kill you! That would be bad enough, but all that could possibly be the result of having done something that didn’t offend the Lord at all.

I’m not actually sermonizing on the power of positive thinking (which, in my experience, tends to be extremely disappointing). Instead, I want to warn us all to be careful what we believe, because a lot of what happens to us will be a direct result of what we believe. Don’t believe me? Look at Hebrews 11. What a list of people who experienced good things because they believed and thus cooperated with God! Noah wouldn’t have saved his family if he hadn’t believed God—and it wasn’t enough to believe that there was going to be a flood. Noah also had to believe that God was giving him a way to save his family.

In the past couple of weeks, the Lord has … predicted … some very good things about my future that are in direct conflict with the way I have always thought. If I don’t believe Him, I will continue down this same frustrating road. If I do believe Him, I will have to think differently. It will not be enough, either, to think differently. If I really, truly believe Him, I will do things differently, too. This is what living faith is.

So in this time of predictions everywhere about everything, remember that your future depends largely on what you believe about your future.

Will you believe man? Or will you believe God?

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