The Healthy Living Handbook

Simple, Everyday Habits for Your Body, Mind and Spirit

C.N.C. Smith

• Publisher: Chosen Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780800797881
• eBook ISBN: 9781493411702
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology

Simple, Everyday Ways to Lifelong Health for Your Body, Mind, and Spirit

These days we are living longer than ever, yet we're more run down, anxious, overweight, exhausted, stressed out, depressed, and all-around more unwell than ever before. The quantity of the days we live is up, but the quality of those days is down. Way down.

What if there were a simple, everyday way to change this? What if a healthy life were easily within your grasp--body, mind, and spirit? The good news is that it is!

Going beyond over-hyped diets and complicated exercise routines, spiritual wellness expert and certified nutritional counselor Laura Harris Smith distills the essence of a healthy life into one simple, practical idea: change your habits, change your life. By showing that a truly healthy life is more than physical--it's mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual--Smith gives you easy, everyday ways not only to live well, but to live better, in every area of life.

Accessible, practical, and grounded in real life, The Healthy Living Handbook is not a major lifestyle overhaul; it's just full of simple course corrections that will bring you the peace, rest, energy, connection, and clarity you've longed for. When you live from a place of true health, you will love more deeply, engage more fully, and participate with others more wholeheartedly.

Section 1: The Top 10 Healthy Living Habits for Your Spirit

1
Be Naturally Supernatural

Something in you longs for the supernatural because a supernatural God created you. You will never be content with your life if it is devoid of supernatural activity—or if you dismiss its authenticity, period. You will never fully look like Jesus, as you are praying to do, if you do not include the supernatural in your life, for the supernatural was and still is a part of His everyday experience. So what is the “supernatural”? According to Merriam-Webster’s, it is “departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature.” So if you never like to depart from the norm, then you will never experience the supernatural. It transcends the law. It is “above the law.”

To be more blunt, the supernatural is a law-breaking blessing. By law a leg should not grow as you hold it, allowing the man you are praying for to stand up straight after living for decades with one leg inches shorter than the other. But it happened to me. That afternoon in 1993, the supernatural broke the laws of nature and, frankly, blew my mind. The man returned to his longtime tailor, who could not figure out why his legs were measuring the same length for the first time since he had known him. Months later, the man invited us to his home—and into his closet—to show off all his new pants with matching leg lengths. He was grinning from ear to ear! I, of course, was crying.

The next time the supernatural broke the law in my world was later that year when I prayed for a man diagnosed with HIV and he was healed, later confirmed by blood work. It was the first time I had been asked to be on the healing prayer team, and the night before I had knelt in my closet to pray, telling God I did not know what to pray or do to get a miracle. I had my faith and the healing Scriptures, but I did not know if I needed to take any steps to activate the supernatural. All I heard God say was, Heal the lepers. I told God I did not know any lepers, and I wondered if I was off the hook, since surely no lepers would come to church in the morning. But when the first man in my line told me he had HIV, I knew this was the “leper” to whom God referred. So I took a chance. I broke out of my norm. With an authority that came from God’s directive to me the night before, my husband and I laid our hands on this man, and the supernatural transcended the laws of nature in his body. He was healed. I had walked with Jesus for seventeen years before experiencing the law-breaking blessing of the supernatural like this, but I have never been the same. That was many miracles ago, but I will never forget those first few because of how they convinced me there was more to Christianity than just receiving grace to live a natural life.

Because you are made in the image of this supernatural God, if you settle for only that which is natural and logical, your life will eventually become dull and unfulfilling, even though you may not be able to put your finger on why.

If you never take risks, you are never using your faith, because faith involves risk. Not irresponsible risk, God-inspired risk. You took a risk when you chose to become a Christian. You take a risk every time you choose to give someone the fifty dollars you are going to need next week. I guess you could say I even took a risk by laying my hands on a man with HIV because in the early nineties people still had a lot of fear that they could catch HIV by just being near someone. It is reputationally risky every time you choose to test God’s power and ask people if you can pray over them. The supernatural is not “safe” to your flesh, but your spirit is right at home with it. If you would rather live a comfortable, predictable life that excludes risk and faith, you will never tap in to the supernatural side of God. If, on the other hand, you want to believe (and behave) in the supernatural but are not sure how to get rid of your flesh that prefers its comfort zone, I find that it only takes one good total food fast. You must decrease so He can increase (John 3:30), and fasting accomplishes this. I will say more about that in our Top 10 list for the body, under number 9, “Live Life in the Fast Lane.”

There is never a dull moment with the supernatural. The Holy Spirit will whisper things to you like Your boss needs healing prayer and I need your hands. Are you willing to look foolish so I can draw him to Myself and answer his prayers? Or He may say, Do you really want to marry someone who does not share your life values, or can you trust Me to take care of you and lead you to someone who deserves you? Or maybe, You were created for more than this hamster wheel you are on. Want to step outside of your comfort zone and find a better life? God can make the supernatural manifest itself in many different ways in your life, but the key is to learn what it is (and what it is not) so that you never miss it—Him—when He calls your name.

Sid Roth is the creator and host of It’s Supernatural!, a show that focuses entirely on being “naturally supernatural” (his opening quote in each episode) in everyday life. He goes into 2.2 billion homes around the planet on various secular and Christian networks. Sid and his staff have invited me on twice, once with my book on dreams, Seeing the Voice of God: What God Is Telling You through Dreams and Visions (Chosen Books, 2014), and once for The 30-Day Faith Detox. Both times I was blown away by my experience.

Turns out this wildly popular anchor desk–guest interview show, which soundly educates billions of people about the supernatural, is just the outside wrapper for Sid’s amazing ministry, called Messianic Vision. Sid is a Jewish believer in Yeshua and funnels much of the proceeds from It’s Supernatural! back into Israel and the ministry he has established there to accomplish the great end-time harvest of Jews (Romans 11:26, “All Israel will be saved”). He holds rallies in Israel and the Jews come to Jesus—by the thousands, they come to Jesus—because of the supernatural. With his gentle and meek demeanor, Sid, now in his late seventies, takes the stage and asks those who need physical healing to stand, and he prays one prayer for them all. He takes a faith risk, as I described before, knowing that God will back him up, and God always does. Then he asks for a show of hands for those who just experienced a healing change in their bodies, and the hands fly in the air. He then tells them it is Yeshua who has done this for them and invites them forward to receive Him as their Messiah. The thousands of Jews who have been saved through Messianic Vision have done so largely based on an encounter with the supernatural. It is exactly the same risk-taking miracle ministry Jesus had when He was on this earth—employing the supernatural to transcend the laws of nature as a means of fostering faith. This is evidenced in John 10:38 (NLT), when Jesus says, “But if I do his work, believe in the evidence of the miraculous works I have done, even if you don’t believe me. Then you will know and understand that the Father is in me, and I am in the Father.” In other words, “If you don’t believe in Me, at least believe the miracles! Then you will understand who I am and believe it all!”

I have very high regard for Sid as a visionary pioneer who expresses the supernatural in the earth. He does it with humility and uncanny excellence in a day when the supernatural is scoffed at, misused or forsaken. He does it through his show, which educates billions, and through the “treasure inside the wrapper” (Messianic Vision)—and now through the It’s Supernatural! Network (ISN), which, in case you are interested in growing in the supernatural in your life, is available free on every iPhone, Android phone, iPad, tablet and computer in the world. (Just go to an app store and type Sid Roth, then download the ISN app.)

Hence, I knew exactly whom I wanted to survey for this section of The Healthy Living Handbook—none other than Mr. Supernatural himself. So I interviewed him. He was gracious enough to answer my two gnawing questions: first, “What is the supernatural’s greatest enemy?”

We know who its greatest enemy is: Satan. The enemy does not want you to experience the supernatural, because he knows that once you taste it, you will never settle for normal again. But the question was not who, but what, and here was Sid’s response: “The supernatural’s greatest enemy is lack of knowledge and operating by previous bad experience instead of the Word of God.”

I concur with this answer. For years I avoided the supernatural because my opinion of it had soured, both through bad experiences of praying for miracles that did not manifest due to spiritual warfare (which I did not know how to engage in) and through poor media representations of the supernatural. I equated miracles and “miracle workers” with dishonesty and lack of character. How sad, now knowing what I know and having seen the miracles and healings I have! I cannot believe how many years I allowed a few poor representatives of the supernatural to outweigh all the pure ones throughout history and Scripture. Once I resolved my lack of knowledge by learning what the Word of God says about it (versus what others, the enemy or my own experiences shouted at me), my faith was finally able to match the power available to us through our mighty and generous God.

My second question for Sid was, “What is the supernatural’s greatest friend?”

Again, we know who is its best friend: the Holy Spirit. But what is its greatest ally? Sid’s response was unexpected, and yet I wholeheartedly agreed with it! Conveniently, it was also the topic of our next healthy living habit, “Pray Tell,” so I am going to wait and give you Sid’s answer there.

Perhaps by now you are asking, “Why begin a health handbook with a lesson in the supernatural?” The short answer is that spiritually healthy people believe in the supernatural. The fuller reason, however, is still very simple: If I can get you to believe in the supernatural and to become a naturally supernatural person, then every other life-changing healthy living habit in this handbook will be a piece of cake for you. You know—a mouthwatering piece of double–chocolate chip cake made with almond flour and stevia dark chocolate.

Healthy Habit Helpers

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Intro
• Section 1: The Top 10 Healthy Living Habits for Your Spirit
• Section 2: The Top 10 Healthy Living Habits for Your Mind
• Section 3: The Top 10 Healthy Living Habits for Your Body
• Outro
• About the Author
• Back Ad
• Back Cover