Hope this encourages someone

I was just now trying to sort some old emails and came across one that encouraged me and hope it may encourage someone else.

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Thank you for praying for me, I could feel the prayers. Yesterday I started feeling really good and then last night all of a sudden it went down into the top part of my chest and my voice is hoarse and it is uncomfortable to take deep breaths. Yet at the same time I KNOW that the Word of God works and I KNOW that He sent His Word and His Word does not return void. And last night He brought the scripture to me about Him completing the work that He began in me that He will finish it. I have always taken that scripture on a much broader sense, but it dawned on me, ANY work He starts in me regardless of how big or small whether it is to complete the work to take me to maturity in Him or just something as simple as healing any infection or bacteria in the body, whatever He has started He is well able to finish the job and He will complete that work. So I DO receive my healing and I will stand with you as well with your healing. And we have a wonderful “doctor” with an incredible bedside manner who understands our weakness, yet says, “Let the weak say I am strong.” And who says in Psalms 41, ” The Lord sustains them on their sickbed and restores them from their bed of illness.” So physically, I don’t feel like much at all, Yet I am standing on what I DON’T see as of yet, but know that I have received it regardless of whether I feel it or not. The battle is the Lord’s! And I win because I am an overcomer in Christ. This is a minor skirmish in a spiritual war trying to overcome a cold, but I still like taking home a trophy and I mentally see me holding up mine, saying, “See, devil, you lose. No weapon formed against me shall prosper and every tongue that rises against me I condemn. I have a covenant of healing and His Word sustains me and is life to those that find them and health to all their flesh. Ha Ha, take that, “sickness”, you have no hold on me! Jesus reigns in me, and every knee shall bow at His feet. The Word says I overcame you by the blood of the Lamb and by the Word of my testimony, and that I loved not my life even unto death. I take authority over you in Jesus name and you must flee for it is written, ‘Submit to God, resist the devil, and he must flee,’ and ‘they will come against you one way and flee before you seven ways.’ By the blood of Christ, I am the redeemed, the healed of the Lord!”
So anyway, I take the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, and go after the devil. If he was wanting a fight with me, he is gonna get one, I know the Sword doesn’t just make little pinpricks on the enemy when used effectively. The Sword of God has no comparison. I saw one day a little vision (this was many years ago). I lived in a different house at the time and I saw in the vision that I had gone to the front door to open it. (I don’t recall the reason or even if there was a reason understood.) As I opened the door, immediately a long snake tried to slither in the door opening. (Whether this is in regards to us opening a door to Satan or whether it just states that Satan will try to maneuver into a situation and take opportunity regardless of whether we “allow” it or not, because he clearly tried to take opportunity even with Jesus in the wilderness, so that matter is not the main emphasis in the vision). Anyway, this snake immediately tried to slither in to come into my house. And the snake was very skinny but very long, and he moved incredibly fast, and I was thinking that the snake was too fast for me to try to catch and there was the understanding that the snake was very dangerous. So even as fast as thoughts race through your head, even as the snake was trying to enter and my thoughts were even in the midst of recognition…a sword appeared so fast and swiped through the air and cut the snake clean in half. I am not talking cutting the snake head off its body or taking a swipe and cutting the top half from the bottom half, I am saying this sword cleaved the snake all down the middle of its entire length from its head to its tail, the snake was cleaved into two. This snake had been so fast and was skinny and slithering, yet this magnificent sword had moved so swiftly and immediately took the snake right out of the picture of any harm to my life. And God reemphasized to me, that the Word of God is SO POWERFUL, (QUICK AND POWERFUL) SHARPER THAN ANY TWO-EDGED SWORD, DIVIDING ASUNDER ! We have no idea of the power He has invested in us and allowed us to use through the Word He gave us. If we had a clue, we would be walking in so much more authority; yet even I am still not walking in all the authority I should be and am amazed when God shows me the power made available to me. I myself need reminded again and again all that God has done and made available to me and need encouraged again and again in the inheritance laid up in heaven but also walked out in this life as Sons of God. But praise God, He loves to encourage us and has given us brothers and sisters who will stand strong with us in battles knowing that greater is He that is with us than he that is in the world, and that it is this that overcomes the world, even our faith, so daily we encourage one another to lift up the feeble hands and them that are cast low and to hold them up before God in prayer knowing our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed, and WE ARE OVERCOMERS!