Have you ever had to do something so that when the time came when you “needed” to do it you would have the necessary knowledge to complete it? I remember as I was growing up how my dad would have me do these “learning experience” things.

To be honest, I always thought there was a major flaw in this strategy because the things I would have to do was never what I would consider as being fun. In my youthful thinking, I said, “Since I don’t want to do it anyway, why don’t I wait until I’m faced with the situation, and then I will learn how to do it.”

Stop and think about it for a minute. It makes perfect sense because if I am never faced with the situation, I will never have to do this unpleasant task. Obviously, now that I am older, the skills developed in doing things that I didn’t want to do prepared and helped me become successful in many ways that I had never considered.

Many times as Christians, we develop this same type of thought process. We don’t want to do the unpleasant things. We serve a God who states that nothing is impossible with Him.
We then translate this into an ideology, which believes that if I need something, I can get God to do it. If we have a financial need, we say, “Lord, we need money.” We have all heard testimonies of when a check came in the mail that wasn’t expected. That’s great!

Yet so often, we hear great testimonies like this and then set our faith in a welfare mentality that someone will send us money unexpectedly. What about health? We may have a physical condition and need a touch in our body, so we stand on the scripture, which states that by His stripes we have been healed, and we look for total restoration but never consider changing the lifestyle that caused our sickness.

In Isaiah, we read,

Thus saith the LORD, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; I am the LORD thy God which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by the way that thou shouldest go.
(Isa. 48:17)

There are two areas of this scripture, which I feel are very important to the believer. First this word “Redeemer.” The definition of this word according to our dictionary is; to regain; to ransom; to recover.

According to the Word, Christ “redeemed” us from our sinful nature, but as our Redeemer, He has done more than that. When Adam relinquished all that God had bestowed upon him, there was more than a sin nature that came on him.

The ability to walk in the authority of God, to live in divine health, to prosper in everything touched, and to have dominion over all things was stripped away.

Understanding this, “The Lord our Redeemer” is the One who has paid the price so that we can now have His righteousness, once again live in divine health and prosper in all that we do, and also walk in the dominion and authority that He created us to walk in.

He then goes on to describe Himself as the One, “which teacheth thee to profit.” We have a tendency to think of that word “profit” as only dealing with financial gain. However, “profit” can apply to any area of life. If you are oppressed and subsequently released from oppression, you have profited.

If you were sick and now you are well, you have profited. So, we can easily see the redemption process being perfected in learning how to live our lives according to the Word. The Lord stated that he will teach us how to profit from the redemptive price that He paid for us.

First John tells us that,

…this is the confidence that we have in him, that if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us: And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.
(1 John 5:14-15)

This is a very powerful promise with the condition of faith and asking according to His will. What is the will of God? Many have defined this as not asking for sinful items.

However, the will of God is not defined as “not sinning.” The will of God is to walk with Him or according to His statutes, which in turn gives us the power to not sin (Gal. 5:16). In order to ask something according to His will, you must ask how to live according to His will.

It is obvious that His will is for us to walk in divine health because He has redeemed us from sickness and disease (Isa. 53:5; 1 Peter 2:24). In order to walk in divine health, we must learn to walk according to His statues, which govern divine health.

Too many times we retain the welfare mentality of, “Give me something I need.” Is it wrong to come to God to receive healing when we are sick? Absolutely not! He states in Philippians 4:19 that He will meet our needs.

But we also need to incorporate into our prayer that He teaches us how to retain and live according to the redemption that He has provided for us in all areas of our life.

There is a way to make money. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have figured this out. There is a way to live month-to-month, and many Christians have figured this out. The Lord has redeemed us from every difficult and oppressive situation that we will ever come against. What we need to do is learn to walk in it.

There is an old saying, which says, “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.” Too many Christians have lived a life of receiving a fish in a time of need. They are satisfied until another need comes along. We need to learn to fish by learning how to walk in our redemptive rights.

Our prayer should be, “Lord, teach me to profit and show me the way that I must go!”

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