If you haven’t been feeling well, perhaps you believe sickness or disease has come upon you. Well, if you don’t know Jesus as your Lord and Savior, then even though He bore sickness and diseases in His own body for everyone , you cannot lay claim to that unless you belong to Him. If that is your case right now, I’d like to invite you to take the first step toward your healing, and get in covenant with Jesus by making Him your Lord and Savior.
Having done that, you need to know the difference between “sickness” and “symptoms”. As your Lord and Savior, Jesus took all your sicknesses, diseases, calamities upon Himself, and paid for them in full so you would not have to bear them. So to a child of God, sickness is taken care of. It’s history, a thing of the past. However, the devil still comes with the counterfeit, which is symptoms.
As with everything God does, or delivers from, the devil tries to make a counterfeit. How can you tell the difference? By appearance, they look one and the same. Symptoms hurt, can make you sick, just like the real sickness. Only difference, sickness is real, and symptoms are a lie. They are both of the devil, but if Jesus took all your sicknesses and diseases, then that means you have none, right? We are to use our authority that Jesus gave us to rebuke the symptoms. If you look at 1 Peter 5:8, it says, “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
Take a real good look at that verse. It doesn’t say the devil is a roaring lion, but is as, or like a roaring lion. There’s a huge difference between a roaring lion and something like, or appearing to be (like a shadow). By the way, have you ever been bitten by the shadow of a dog? It also says he walk about seeking whom he may devour, not whom he can devour. “May” is a permissive word, and “can” means to be able to. In as many words, the devil is faking himself to be a roaring lion, asking if he may devour you. Can he? Not if you say no. And besides, what is a fake lion going to devour? Nothing.

 One day a dear friend of mine went to a doctor because of chest pains. He called and asked me to pray for him. He had been coughing a lot, and was sick. He went to the doctor, who suggested an X-ray. They told him he had a dark place on one lung, suspected it was cancer and wanted to do tests and surgery. I told him NO! It’s a lie of the devil! There is absolutely nothing wrong with you, but the devil is fishing to see what you will accept. Thank God, he listened to me and refused. He stood fast with me believing he is healed by the stripes of Jesus, just like I do, against the advise of his doctor, and the doctors at the hospital. Another X-ray soon after revealed absolutely NOTHING there. And that has happened to several people we have ministered to. He got hit with “symptoms”, that which appeared to be something it was not. It couldn’t have been sickness or disease, because he had been delivered of all that by Jesus. So the devil was hitting him with symptoms to see if he would accept sickness. And he almost did because he didn’t know any better.
You see, that’s the difference between sickness and symptoms. We don’t have to accept sickness, and we don’t have to accept symptoms, either. If it’s of the devil, it doesn’t belong to you. Don’t take it. Refuse it just like you would refuse a shipment of scorpions brought to your door. You aren’t “denying” sickness. You can deny you have a flat tire, but that doesn’t change the tire, does it? It’s still flat. Denying the fact at hand does no good. But rather, you believe and speak what the truth is, that you are healed by the stripes of Jesus, so by the authority of the word of God, you are denying sickness it’s right to be in your body.

 You aren’t denying sickness the right to be in your body based on anything you have or have not done, but rather on what JESUS did. That’s your authority to operate in. That’s scriptural. Then it has to go.
Don’t be deceived. Sickness and symptoms are not the same. So many people suffer needlessly because they don’t know what belongs to them. Don’t you be one of them!