When facing a life threatening disease like cancer, one can be left feeling helpless and thinking ‘why me’. Two women we all know and love, Darlene Zschech and Joyce Meyer, have opened up about their battles with breast cancer and how they turned to God to give them strength.
In the YouTube video below, Darlene appears on an episode of Joyce Meyer’s ‘Everyday Answers’. The video intertwines Joyce’s sermon with Darlene being interviewed by the show host.
Darlene describes the moment her doctor told her she had cancer. “When I was diagnosed I was 48, and my father had died of cancer at 50. I had that nagging in the back of my head all the time, so one minute I was great, and the next minute I was sobbing. There are days, I still can’t put words to it, and I still get quite teary, it’s a frightening thing.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mh7cZMS2Jo
The episode then cuts to Joyce Meyer on stage talking about letting God fight our battles. “God has a battle plan. Anytime we get in a battle we need to know the way God wants us to fight. We have weapons, but the weapons of our warfare are not carnal weapons….they are spiritual weapons.”
“The Word of God is not just any word,” Joyce continues. “It is a Word that changes lives.”
On battling her own fears Darlene says, “I just had to learn to keep replacing thoughts, you know I could do that. I’ve become disciplined over years, you know to take every thought captive, but at this level I had to learn it in a whole new way. When I couldn’t read the Word, I was listening to the Word, or in worship. It’s quite magnificent, I don’t know how people do this without Jesus.”
“Twenty-five years ago I had breast cancer,” Joyce tells the audience. “It was a very fast growing type of cancer. The tumour was very small, but back then they did more radical surgeries. So I had to have a very radical type of surgery right away, because [the doctors] said I would be playing Russian roulette with my life if I didn’t get it out of me.”
Joyce then goes into detail about her own internal fears. “So naturally, cancer is a frightening word. I remember being so frightened; this fear would just overwhelm me. Then I would confess the Word, and I would feel stronger again, and I would trust God, and then here would come that fear again.”
“About 3 o’clock one morning. I heard so clearly in my spirit, “I will take care of you.” Five hundred other people had said that to me, I had said it to me, [but] when God said that to me, it was like then my faith rose up. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God,” Joyce says quoting Romans 10:17.
Watch the full 30-minute episode in the YouTube video above where Joyce and Darlene share more insights into giving all our fears to God.