By David Brandt Berg
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When you’re weak, then you’re strong, because His strength comes in.
1 Without the Lord, when people’s bodies get down, weak in health, it can drag their spirit down. Your physical weakness has a tendency to make your spirit weak.
The Devil hits you when you’re down. He deals dirty blows and works in the dirtiest possible way to fight. But when you’re down, the Lord comes to your rescue.
You can’t think every attack of the Enemy is necessarily your own fault. Sometimes we invite attacks by letting our resistance down. You really lay yourself open for attack in this way, because that’s when he likes to attack—when you’re at your weakest.
So in a way it’s partially our own fault; but on the other hand, it’s not always necessarily directly the fault of any great sin or weakness or not staying as close to the Lord as we should.
Remember, Jesus was even carried out into the desert and tempted by the Devil himself, and even His physical body was allowed to be put under the power of the Devil for a short time. Imagine! The Devil was allowed to really test Him, attack Him. But under the attack He resisted the Enemy with the Word of God and refused to yield, until the Enemy saw Jesus wasn’t going to give up, and then he quit.
2It was the testing time before the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and was preceded by 40 days of fasting and prayer. We know Jesus was perfect and didn’t bring these things on Himself by sin. The Lord allows these things as tests to strengthen our faith.
With my mother, there was never a time that she was about to give her testimony of how she was miraculously healed from almost total paralysis that she didn’t go through a terrible test and attack of the Enemy.
On the last night of her meetings she would always give her testimony of healing and salvation, and that life story was one of the most powerful things she had to give. It won many souls and inspired so much faith in people.
Yet I hardly remember a time when the Enemy didn’t try to stop her beforehand. She’d either get terribly sick or break her glasses or fall and hurt herself or something. The Devil really cut loose on all sides to try to stop her.
My mother used to say, “It’s the witness the Devil fears,” and you can’t give that kind of witness and testimony unless you are living it and practicing it.
One time, only about a year after she had been saved and healed, as she was sitting on the platform waiting to give her testimony, all of a sudden she felt the paralysis strike again, and she couldn’t move her legs.
She was paralyzed for a moment and glued to her chair. She couldn’t budge, and she thought, “Lord, what is this? What in the world is the matter?” Immediately the Lord gave her the answer in a very strange scripture: “It is lying vanities.”
3So she said: “Oh, You mean this is a lie of the Devil? He’s trying to make me believe I’m paralyzed, but it’s not really true!” She rebuked the Devil, and just then they announced her name and she shot out of the chair and into the pulpit and gave her testimony in greater power than she ever had before.
My mother had already learned that the Enemy does not give up easily, after having been in bed for five years and being so miraculously healed instantaneously. When she found she was healed and called for help to sit up in her bed, which she had not been able to do for five years, the doctor gave orders to the nurse to “Hold her down. It’s the death walk!”
Mother said, “Listen, you get out of God’s way!” and she got the maid to help her sit up. She had been unconscious much of five years and had not even been turned on her side, or her heart would gradually stop beating.
Now all of a sudden she was going to sit up. That of course was a real step of faith. Even if there had been nothing wrong with her at all, to suddenly sit up after five years in bed would have been a tremendous strain on her heart.
So while sitting there on the bed, she suddenly had a lung hemorrhage and keeled over on the bed unconscious, and woke up in a pool of blood. She said, “Lord, what’s the matter? I thought I was healed! Why did I have this terrible hemorrhage?”
Immediately a scripture came to her. Although she was pretty ignorant of anything like healing, because she did have a knowledge of the Word, the Lord could answer her with scripture, and two scriptures came to her.
One was to show her why. “The enemy goes about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour!”
4 The Lord was telling her the Enemy was fighting her.
And the other scripture was for her encouragement. “When the enemy comes in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will raise up a standard against him!”
5 Then she realized she should directly rebuke the Enemy.
Then another verse came, “Resist the enemy and he will flee from you.”
6 And so then she began to really fight the Enemy. She knew very little about these things, so it was really the Spirit of God.
The victory didn’t come without a real test and an attack of the Enemy, even after she was healed. But when my dad came home, she finally got up without his help and walked unaided for the first time in years!
The Lord tests us to get an even greater victory out of seeming defeat, because it causes us to draw closer to God and cry out to Him and really seek Him. Otherwise we have a tendency to just rock along. It causes us to rely more on the Lord. When you finally get the victory over the Enemy, the Lord can come through in full sway.
What the Enemy ignores and tries to help you forget so that you won’t claim the Lord’s help is: “When I’m weak, then I’m strong, for His strength is made perfect in weakness.”
7 I’ve known many times when I was weakest in the flesh that I was strongest in the spirit, because I just had to completely throw myself on the Lord. You don’t know how you’re going to make it, but He can make it for you.
Once I had an interesting dream. Maria and I and a few other people were sitting in the old-fashioned lobby of an old hotel writing letters at the desks and reading, etc. But apparently we’d struck up a conversation with the young blond-headed desk clerk in his late 20s.
We were witnessing to him about the Lord and love, but he seemed a little disillusioned and skeptical, a little soured on life and fed up, bored, not really sure there was such a thing as love.
So I said, “Of course there’s love! What everybody needs is love.” And I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “You need love just like everybody else.” And he looked rather embarrassed and said, “Yes, I guess I do. I wish you’d come home and talk to my wife. She needs God’s love, too.”
It was as though he’d finally found what he was looking for and he wanted to share it with his loved one. So we went to his house, and as we walked through his yard he apologized for all the junk lying around. There was a pile of wooden logs and odds and ends of furniture and bric-a-brac piled here and there.
He said, “I’m sorry, but you know how you accumulate things.” I said, “Well, that’s the way it is when you’re building a home. It seems you never get done, and it takes so much of your time.” I was trying to ease his embarrassment, since it was like he was ashamed of the fact that so much of his time was wasted on material things.
It’s funny how when you talk about love and the Lord and the real values of life, people begin to realize how worthless everything else is by comparison.
So we walked into his house, a large old-fashioned house, and were standing in the big old living room. He was talking about how he hoped we could help his wife with the Lord’s love that we were talking about.
Suddenly a stairway door on the right opened about halfway and I could see the back and head of this young girl, apparently his wife, in a silk dressing gown and fairly short dark curly hair backing into the room, almost as though she were surprised and embarrassed at being caught unprepared by guests and not properly dressed to greet us.
I had the impression she’d planned to try to slip through the room unseen if possible. But as I saw her trying to slip through the door I said, to sort of ease the tension and cover up the embarrassment, “Every little heavenly home has to have an angel, and this must be yours.” We all smiled and laughed as it broke the ice, and she saw that she was caught. So she turned around toward us and smiled, and we were absolutely stunned.
Her face was just one horrible mass of terrible acne, like small black boils or something all over her face and cheeks and forehead. This otherwise pretty girl in her mid-twenties was an absolute mess! Now she was even more embarrassed at our obvious awe at her terrible facial condition.
She apologized and said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve had this for a long time, and nothing seems to help.” But I said, “Well, the Lord can help, and nothing is impossible with the Lord. He can do even greater things than that. You just need to believe in Him and trust Him and pray for it.”
She acted rather hopeless, as if she didn’t feel there was anything that would ever be able to help her. But her husband seemed to have faith: faith in the Lord’s power to answer prayer and faith in us. So he said, “Yes, yes, please do pray for her, will you?”
So I walked up to her, facing her, and laid my hands on both sides of her face and prayed for her, asking the Lord to deliver her and heal her. I prayed very earnestly for her, because I felt this would be a real testimony to the young man and encourage his faith in all we’d been witnessing to him about.
When I’d finished praying, as I took my hands away from her face, it was absolutely totally clean and perfectly whole—just beautiful.
We were all amazed, praising the Lord and thanking the Lord for His faithfulness and His healing of this young girl as a testimony and witness to His power, particularly to the young man. But apparently she was so discouraged that she still wasn’t convinced, so she said rather despairingly, “Well, it’ll probably come back; it always does.” I told her she should thank the Lord and have more faith, and it wouldn’t come back anymore because the Lord had healed her. But she still seemed to have a “Well-I-hope-so-but-I’m-not-so-sure” attitude.
The young man was elated. He was absolutely thrilled to pieces, and he was chiding her for her unbelief and thanking us profusely. He was just radiant with faith, eagerly hanging on to every word we had to say and eating it all up, a spiritually hungry soul.
Among other lessons from the dream, I think I learned about faithfulness in witnessing. The Lord will always be faithful and follow through and do His part.
But of course the thing that impressed me the most in the dream was the outstanding miracle of healing, which we should have more of and have more faith for—and which we would have if we’d be faithful and simply believe, trust God, and pray for people as we should, and expect miracles as a sign and testimony to encourage faith.
The only reason we don’t have more miracles like that is that we just don’t believe God as we should and don’t challenge the Enemy, rebuke the Devil, and expect God to answer! If we would, we’d have a lot more miracles like that! I remember feeling ashamed that we don’t trust God more and expect more miracles like that. God bless us with more faith!
Expect miracles! And in Jesus' name you’ll get them! “Believe and ye shall receive!”
8Expect miracles!
Originally published July 1975. Updated and republished June 2012.
Read by Simon Peterson.
1 2 Corinthians 12:9–10.
2 Matthew 4:1–11.
3 Psalm 31:6; Jonah 2:8.
4 1 Peter 5:8.
5 Isaiah 59:19.
6 James 4:7.
7 2 Corinthians 12:9–10.
8 Mark 11:24.
