Creflo Dollar - The Greatest Power
Christian people sometimes are made to feel like if they go through any sickness or a challenge in their health, they must ascend. Sharing this testimony today, is so vital to me because I learned that it's not a sin to go to the doctor, I learned that it's not a sin to have a medical procedure. I learned that I could stand in faith and trust and receive the promise of healing and the Word, and still not be afraid of having to stand strong on what the Word of God had to say.
I woke up in the middle of the night and my feet were hot. I mean, they were really, really hot. And the next day I went to the doctor to get a COVID test and found out that I had contracted COVID. And so, you know, I camped out in the basement and, you know, got my scriptures like I normally would do, and trust God and confess my scriptures, confess my healing, and did everything that I would normally do. Only this time, it was just a little different. I was actually in a fight. In fact, the fight became great. I discovered that I had micro blood clots around my lungs and they were closing in. My oxygen level had dropped so low that I should've been to the hospital.
And we contacted our doctor and they sent protocols out and they, you know, they were taking care of me but it started getting worst. I had really one, one bad night where, you know, the breathing was a little challenging but I can remember it was one night and God removed that. But I noticed that I was losing a lot of weight because part of it was I just wasn't eating because I was fighting this COVID. My hair began to fall fallout, and just mentally, I was trying to grasp, you know, just reality versus I just felt a little discombobulated, in most of those days. And I got down to 159 pounds.
You know, I had very weird things happen. Like I felt like I saw things in the Spirit that were rejoicing that I heard one of 'em say, "Hey, we finally got him," you know. And I came to a point in that battle where, you know, I saw this quiet space, and on the other side there was like a curtain and I wasn't allowed to look behind the curtain until I decided whether or not I wanted to go.
And I thought I was like ready to go, and I was like gonna make the decision to go and God said, "It took me 40 years to get you where I want you, and now you're there". And I'm like, "What? 40 years"? And I said, "I'm here". And he said, "Yeah, you're here". And I asked, "What it was". He says, "I finally got you delivered from people. And I now know that you, you'll do all the things that I will instruct you to do". And I kind of decided, "Well, wait a minute, you know, it took you all this time to do it, I wanna stay". And the Lord said to me, he says, "It's not hard to pass over, all you have to do is make a decision, and you're there".
What pulled you through your experience with Covid-19?
When my oxygen level dropped, fear started knocking on the door, "You're gonna die". And I knew enough about fear not to sit there and listen to it. So I got my scriptures out and started dealing with the fear first. And once I dealt with the fear and my faith began to rise, I knew what we were gonna get out. I knew we were gonna come out of it so it was a matter of being patient or remaining the same standing on God's Word and staying free from fear, standing on God's Word and staying free from fear. And I think that's something that goes on throughout any process. It's not saying something one time like it's a magic trick, it's getting your focus and I think that's the key, is focusing in on what you believe and not focusing in on what you don't believe because the thing you focus on the most, that's what you're gonna be more sensitive to and the thing you focus on, the less you're gonna be hardening your heart against it.
So I was literally trying to harden my heart against fear and becoming very sensitive to the things of God. So I really had faith in what I was doing that it was gonna work, and that God would take care of me at nighttime and wake me up in the morning. I learned little by little, and I think that's how God works. We look for God to just pour things down all at one time. We're looking for the big blessing pour it down, but mine was little by little and step by step. And actually, I feel like I'm in better shape now than I've ever been in my life. No sooner than we're out of that, I had a bout with the shingles. And I thought, you know, "What is this"? The perfect pattern from my spine across my chest and the shingles, the boils, the pain was the most excruciating pain I've ever, ever experienced. But I did question God like, "What's happening? Have I angered you"?
You know, and so I asked God, "Why'd you allow this to happen to me"? I'm like, you know, "I thought I was your man," you know, "What's going on"? You know. And at that point I knew in my spirit, I needed to understand what it meant for God's grace to be sufficient for me. I know what Paul said, but what does it mean for God's grace to be sufficient for me? And then finally, you know, no sooner than that was over with, I discovered I had cancer and I had three tumors in my body. And it was still standing in faith but going to get treatment, and I mean getting treatment like, what? Two or three times a week? And this is what really hit me.
After the treatment, everything looked great, it looked like we had it together, it all reversed, and only in one week's time, the numbers were worse than they were before. And I lost it. I broke down in tears in front of my youngest daughter, and Taffi, you know, she came and assured me, "You've done all you need to do, all you know to do, you didn't do anything wrong," because she knows that that's what the enemy will say to you. "You did something wrong". And she says, "But you know what you have to do now". And I knew it was time for me to get a medical procedure. And we got the medical procedure, all the tumors were gotten both inside and out and I'm healed and at that point, God was like, "Okay, you know, what have you learned"? And I learned so much.
How do you deal with sickness and still give God glory?
God definitely gets the glory out of the fact of, I had three tumors in my body and they're not there anymore and I'm healthy. And not only am I healthy, but I'm inspired to evaluate the wisdom that I got out of it. The wisdom I got out of it was, I said, "I depended on God, but I would take 80 supplements a day". I found out later that, you know, taking so many supplements might've actually had something to do with the situation. So I learned how to really truly depend on God. And out of that, that it's one thing to say I depend on God, it's another thing to walk a walk of depending on God. The glory that God gets out of it is that I learned the importance of understanding that his grace is sufficient, his grace is enough and in that grace, there's wisdom knowing what to do.
Does all sickness glorify God?
No, all sickness does not glorify God and I don't believe that God makes you sick or puts sicknesses on you. I just don't believe that. But if the sickness does come on you, God can get the glory when it leaves. And God gets the glory from all the things that he led you to do not to be a part of it. I don't want people to ever think that I'm saying, God makes you sick. And no, he doesn't. I don't think there're sick angels in heaven and I don't think God's making anybody sick. But what I think God is doing is, training us to understand that in our weakness he's still strong. Regardless of how we got there, when I'm weak, he's strong, when I was sick, he was strong. And so I came out with a greater dependence on God than ever before because I saw, like Paul said, "Now I know that when I'm weak, he is strong".
Did you feel like you did something wrong and that is why you contracted these illnesses?
I felt like, "Maybe I should've cast my care on God, maybe I was carrying some things that I needed to cast on him". Maybe, you know, so much stress, and maybe I'm out here trying to do something instead of trusting God to do it. I thought that you know, if you were living right and working for the Lord, then this stuff's not supposed to come on you. And I think that might've been one of the reasons I went through it to show me, "No, that's not it".
I mean, I know people today preachers even that don't even wanna let anybody know that they went to have a hospital visit because, you know, you're supposed to be a man of faith, and you're supposed to be a person of great faith so what's wrong with your faith? I tell you what, your faith is a lot greater when you're fighting something than when you're not fighting anything. And I found out that your faith has got to be more about trusting and believing God, rather than just using your faith to, you know, try to get something to satisfy what you want and now you're ready to do what God wants. It's not about me deserving to be healed or deserving not to be sick. That I'm gonna trust God, his grace is sufficient for me, in my weakness, he's made strong and my healing wasn't something I deserved in the first place it was something that was gifted to me through the grace of God.
When you were getting holistic treatment, what were you trying to accomplish?
I wanted to see the treatments work and I wanted the treatments to become the cure. And it was treating it, but still didn't cure it. And I know what everybody says about the treatment, "Well, you shouldn't expect it," but I wanted it to be the cure, I wanted to go in one day and the tumors are gone, the cancer's gone, no detection. But the treatments were just what they were, they were treatments. And while they kept me feeling good and the disappointment came when we reached a certain point in treatment and the numbers started going down, and, you know, I thought we were there.
And then we gave it a week off and in just one week, it jumped right back to the same place it was before we started the treatment. I thought, "God, let me down". I thought, "Are you", you know, "Do you want me to die"? I mean, you know, come on. I mean, I had a breakdown. It's like, I don't understand. I've been diligent about this, I've been trusting you, I'm not gonna stop trusting you, even though it happened but I did feel like I'm at the end of the rope and I need to go ahead and accept that, you know, I'm not gonna get outta this. And that's called panic and panic is groundless fear.
And I began to panic. And yeah, me, the man of faith, yeah, me, the pastor 'cause I felt like I had done all I know to do. I felt like my faith had failed. I know now, today it didn't but then it was 30 minutes of hopelessness that set in. It came in heavy, and I had a full-blown human moment. And something happened after I had that moment, it's like, "I'm never leaving Jesus, I'm never doubting or wondering, it's just something I don't know right now, it's something I might not see right now, something I don't understand but he got me he always has".
And then I just started going back. I said, "He had me here when I had meningitis, he had me here when I had cancer the first time, he had me here, you know, during the shingles, he had me here through all that". God had my healing taken care of 12 years ago. A man, a doctor friend of mine, who was a part of my first cancer treatment. We had kept in touch over all those years and he had been training in a new procedure, something that a lot of people don't even know about, and had become somewhat of an expert in the field on that. And God had that thing already set up. I mean, his grace was sufficient. When you've done all you know to do, that's when you go to God because maybe you didn't know enough and he knows more.
What was going through your mind the day of your procedure?
The treatment was amazing, the doctor was amazing, they shut everything down. They had no other patients to come in that day. They were all there, the entire staff was there to serve me. I didn't know what was gonna happen. I mean, there are a thousand things that could've went to the left. I mean, within like one little dot, when I came up outta anesthesia, I had been in a four-hour operation. The thought come across my mind, you know, this is Satan opportunity to just wipe you out, or something's gonna go wrong with the procedure. And then I just made my peace, I trust God. "There's no need of me going in this thing like this, I trust you, God, I trust you whatever, I trust you".
And I was able to lie down with peace and trust that this journey would go the way it needed to go and I spent Christmas recovering. You know, I shot a movie before the operation and one after and I was like trusting God. And I'm sharing this testimony because I want people to know it happened to a grace man, a faith man, somebody that's been teaching the Word for 40 years, and God's grace was sufficient. I'm here. And now that I feel like this other chance at life, I wanna live it. And a lot of people have life but they don't know how to live it. I wanted to share it because it's real, fear is like it's real. And every situation it showed up first ready to just chop on whatever I would yield to it.
But the glory of this all is that we sing this song, "The Greatest Power of All," I was confronted with the greatest power of all. I'm telling you the greatest power of all, God's mighty grace and love and it got better, and it got better, and I just want people to know it's gonna get better. But when you encounter Jesus, you encounter the greatest power of all. And I want people to understand that those three years and that was another thing. You know, we're used to going through things two days and it's over. It was a three-year period of one thing, after another thing, after another thing, and I can finally say in my lifetime that Jesus delivered me from it all. And so, yeah, what I would have to say to people is that God's real. His wisdom is available and his grace is sufficient.