Dear Friend,

I am so glad to be writing to you this month. I pray that your year has been blessed so far and that you are just experiencing an outpouring of God’s peace and wisdom in your life right now! That said, I also know that life can get difficult sometimes, and it might be hard to see the way ahead. If that is how you are feeling right now, then I know this letter will be an encouragement to you.

I want to start by sharing with you about a struggle I faced recently.

I had watched a dear friend of mine — a woman who I loved like a daughter — fight as hard as she could against cancer for four years, but it was so heartbreaking because her health just kept on going downhill. Eventually she got so sick that she didn’t even want to see anybody anymore.

Friend, I just didn’t know what to do. Maybe you’ve been in a situation where you can’t understand what’s happening. You can’t explain it with your mind, you don’t even want to think about it, and of course you can’t go to all your painful emotions, so you just feel stuck and lost. Friend, that’s how I felt, but God showed me that there was still one more place I could go.

[If you started reading in your email, begin here]

As I was preparing to film some programs one day to get my mind off my poor friend, I opened my Bible up to Mark chapter 2, and all I could do was stare. Right there in front of me was Mark 2:5: “When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven you.’”

You probably know the story of Mark 2: four friends carried their paralytic friend to the roof and opened a hole in it to lower him down in front of Jesus. It is such a beautiful story of God’s healing power, but what I want to focus on today is that statement at the beginning of verse 5, “When Jesus saw their faith….”

This was such a dramatic moment, so Jesus could have noticed many things about the situation. This verse could have said, “When Jesus saw the hole in the roof,” or, “When Jesus saw everybody screaming and pointing at the man coming from the ceiling,” or even, “When Jesus got bothered by the particles that were falling down on Him from the roof.”

But this verse doesn’t say any of those things. There was one thing that Jesus saw in that moment — their faith.

Friend, I want to tell you that faith interrupts. When that man was lowered down by those four friends, their faith interrupted the whole teaching session. Your faith can interrupt too. It can interrupt sickness, poverty, depression, fear, or terminal disease. It can interrupt your confused thoughts or your pain from being betrayed by someone you loved. It can interrupt anything that the enemy tries to use to take you down, and that interruption will take you out of the horrible reality you are in and into a new reality!

Think about the reality of those four friends and their paralytic friend. That morning, that paralytic probably woke up the same way he always had, laying on that mat, in the midst of this horrible disease or injury that was just stealing his life. It was stealing his joy and his peace, and he might have been in pain all the time, and all his friends could do was watch and maybe try to cheer him up or make him more comfortable. That was their reality.

But they were all moved into a new reality that day. Thanks to their faith in what Jesus could do for their friend, that paralytic was about to pick up his mat and walk himself home! He must have been so happy to be healed, he probably skipped all the way home. And it must have been such a relief to those friends’ hearts to see him so filled with joy, no longer in pain, totally able to walk and dance and carry his mat home!

Friend, they all started that day with the horrible reality of sickness and pain — but they ended that day with rejoicing, with their paralytic friend skipping home! What I want to remind you is that the bridge between those two places was faith, faith that Jesus’ power could provide what they needed. They moved into that place of faith, and they stayed in it so that it strengthened them to do what they had to do.

When the house was too crowded for them to get in, they moved in faith up to the roof. Even though it seemed crazy to open up a hole in the roof and lower their friend down, they moved in faith that everything would work out and that they wouldn’t drop him and hurt him worse. They moved in faith that even though Jesus was teaching, He could and would stop and help this paralyzed man. They moved in total faith, and it interrupted their friend’s disease and totally changed their reality!

Friend, as I was sitting there thinking about my friend, reading my Bible, trying to prepare myself to teach from the Word of God, my mind was asking all the usual questions: “Why is my friend dying? Why hasn’t she been healed? Does she want to go? Does she not want to go? Why doesn’t she want to see anyone?” I was thinking about how much I loved her and how much I was going to miss her, but when I read that little phrase — “When Jesus saw their faith….” — I said, “Lord, my mind’s not doing me any good. My emotions aren’t doing me any good. I’ve got to use my faith.”

I didn’t have answers to my questions. I didn’t have a fix for my emotions, but I had my faith, and it gave me peace of mind, purpose, energy — everything I needed to get up from that place and go teach the Word of God.

I want to tell you, friend, our lives aren’t always going to be smooth, there will be difficult things that happen to us and to people who we love, but our faith can pull us through. Our faith can completely change the situation that we are in.

If you need someone to stand with you and help you stand in faith through your struggles, then I hope you’ll contact our prayer team. We would be so honored to pray with you and see what the Lord does in your life, so please call us at 1.844.473.6637 or email denisesocial@renner.org.

Before I finish, I also want to invite you to my program, TIME with Denise Renner. I feel so blessed to have the opportunity to open up the Word of God with you each week, so I hope you will join me on Monday at 7 AM CT on both Facebook and YouTube, or on Facebook Wednesdays at 12 PM CT. I pray that these teachings are such a blessing to you!

We are moving forward together,

Denise Renner