Jesus paid the price in full, but believers have to apply what He did. In this guest message at NTC Ministries, Dr. Carol Elaine teaches that just as we receive salvation and healing by faith, we must also apply that Christ became a curse for us. She walks through the purpose of each place He shed His blood, names three faces of the curse (poverty, shame and trusting in man), and shares how she was set free from a season of torment in her mind.
Below you will find the full video, a structured summary of the sermon, the Scripture behind each point (linked to the New King James Version on Bible Gateway), a table of what she teaches each wound of Jesus purchased, a timestamped outline, and practical steps you can take this week.
Sermon at a Glance
This message was preached at NTC Ministries in Merrill and posted on February 24, 2021. It runs about 45 minutes. Dr. Carol Elaine describes it as a sober-minded word she believes the Lord gave her, an unusual message, she says, but one that will change lives. It closes with prayer for salvation, for those battling torment, and for those hungry to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
She opens with some news. She and her husband had just handed over a work in Las Vegas, including the only Christian television station there, after laying its foundation, and they are seeking God about what comes next. She also runs an online Bible school, Christ Exalted Seminary, and travels to preach and write. That morning her truck got stuck in the snow, and her brother-in-law drove her to church. Her steps, she says, were still ordered of the Lord.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Speaker | Dr. Carol Elaine (guest speaker) |
| Series | Stand-alone guest message |
| Main text | Galatians 3:13, Isaiah 53:4–5 and Proverbs 26:2 |
| Key theme | Applying that Christ bore the curse, as we apply salvation and healing |
| Length | About 45 minutes, ending with prayer |
The High Priest of Our Confession
Dr. Carol Elaine begins by having the whole church stand and declare Scripture, because decreeing and declaring is extremely important before God. Jesus is the High Priest of our confession (Hebrews 3:1), she says, and He is drawn to what we speak when we speak His Word.
She watches what comes out of her mouth. If she is tempted to gossip, or to pour out a woe-is-me story to someone, she arranges her schedule so she does not see that person for a day or two until she has control of it. Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and we eat its fruit (Proverbs 18:20–21). God framed the worlds by His word (Hebrews 11:3), and she teaches that we can frame our world the same way.
The declaration she leads thanks God that our names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, that Jesus came to give abundant life (John 10:10), and that our steps are ordered by the Lord (Psalm 37:23). It ends by standing on the promise that the Spirit of truth will guide us into all truth and show us things to come (John 16:13).
She then speaks about time. God has given every person a gift called time, and once it is wasted, it can never be made up. She remembers visiting a gifted doctor, an award-winning artist and writer, who sat in front of the television nonstop. Grieved, she felt the Lord tell her to speak to him in love about wasting his gifts.
She does not want to waste anyone’s time either. Her prayer is Moses’ prayer, “teach me to number my days” (Psalm 90:12), which she says carries the sense of organizing her days. She asks God for daily bread and divine connections, and that morning she asked Him for a word in season for the weary (Isaiah 50:4).
Carol Elaine on Applying What Jesus Paid For
She asks how many have ever thought they were under a curse. Then she tells her brother’s testimony. He had already lost one child to the same severe seizures that began attacking his son as a little boy at a swimming pool. For eleven years the seizures came, at times almost every hour.
The young man was brilliant and became an intern in Washington, D.C., but when he began having seizures on the steps of the Capitol, he came home asking for surgery because he could no longer drive or live normally. Through it all, her brother held to the word of faith, telling his son that by the stripes of Jesus he was healed and would have a quality life.
Eventually the son was hospitalized and the doctors could do no more. The Lord told her brother to arise and rebuke the evil one. He went in with the power of God and did so. As Dr. Carol Elaine tells it, her nephew has never had another seizure since, and today he is married with a child.
Meditating on that testimony in Las Vegas, she turned to the curse described in Deuteronomy 28. She was asking God why major doors kept opening and then closing in her own life. The Lord answered with Galatians 3:13–14: cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. “I hung on a tree,” she heard Him say, and He bore the curses of the law so she would not have to.
Then came the key point. Just as her brother had to apply what Jesus did in bearing sickness, and just as she had to apply that He was wounded for her transgressions (Isaiah 53:4–5) to receive salvation, she also had to apply that He bore the curse. “I was blown away,” she says. She had never thought about the curse that way before.
She saw it in her own family. Her great-grandmother, grandfather and mother all had Alzheimer’s, a pattern she calls a generational curse; Scripture speaks of iniquity visited to the third and fourth generations (Exodus 20:5). She told her worried children it was broken. When they insisted on a DNA test, she took it, and she reports that it showed no Alzheimer’s gene. She sent them the result: the curse has been broken, for her and for them.
Proverbs 26:2 says a curse without cause shall not alight. She teaches that we open the door to it through sin and through not applying what Jesus Christ has done for us.
Every Place He Shed His Blood
Most of the church, she says, knows about three things Jesus did on the cross, but He did much more. When we take communion, we are told to remember Him. Every place He shed His blood was for a reason; nothing is happenstance with God. We overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony (Revelation 12:11). The table below follows her teaching on each wound.
| Where He shed His blood | What she teaches it purchased |
|---|---|
| Crown of thorns on His head | Freedom from tormenting, destructive and fearful thoughts; the mind of Christ and a blessed memory |
| Nails in His hands | That God would prosper the work of your hands, and that you can lay hands on the sick and they recover |
| Nails in His feet | That your steps would be ordered of Him and you would walk in the Spirit |
| Wound in His side, near the heart | That you would be made whole, with His Word written on the tablets of your heart |
| Stripes on His back | Healing: by His stripes you are healed |
For the crown of thorns she points to the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16) and the promise that the memory of the righteous is blessed (Proverbs 10:7). For the hands she cites the believer’s commission to lay hands on the sick (Mark 16:18).
For the feet she connects ordered steps with walking in the Spirit rather than fulfilling the lust of the flesh (Galatians 5:16). Laughing about years of squeezing her feet into tight high heels, she still looks at them and declares how beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel (Romans 10:15).
On the stripes, she notes that people say today that diseases fall into thirty-nine categories, and she sees meaning in the thirty-nine stripes laid on His back for our healing (1 Peter 2:24). Yet she observes that the church usually applies salvation fully while healing is “half and half.” God’s answer to that, she says, is that He paid the price in full.
Then He became a curse. She teaches that God laid on Christ our sins, judgment, diseases, death, afflictions, failures, shame and poverty, and in exchange clothed us in His righteousness and the sure blessings of Abraham. Those blessings were so important that Moses had the tribes stand on two mountains in the Promised Land, half reading the curses and half reading the blessings (Deuteronomy 27:12–13), so they would walk in blessing through obedience.
Three Faces of the Curse
When she kept asking why she would reach the edge of something wonderful only to see it close, the Lord said: apply that I paid the price in full for the curse of the law, as you did for salvation and as you would for healing. Studying it, she found three areas the curse touches in daily life.
The first is poverty. She has a friend who works harder than anyone she knows and is always in lack, just as her parents were. However hard she works, the poverty remains. But Jesus became poor so that we through His poverty might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9), and God supplies all our needs according to His riches in glory (Philippians 4:19). If a curse of poverty is over you, she says, it needs to be broken.
The second is shame. As a teenager she made a mistake everyone seemed to know about, and she felt she had humiliated her family and ruined their good name. She condemned herself, until the Lord told her He had hung on the cross naked and taken her shame. She had never thought of that, because crucifixes always show a loincloth. He paid for our shame, so we do not have to carry it.
The third is trusting in man. Jeremiah 17:5–8 says cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, but blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord. Walking the floors in Las Vegas, she told God she did not want to be someone who trusts in man. Now she starts each morning by saying, “God, I trust You.”
She sums up the curse for breaking God’s commandments as threefold: poverty, sickness and spiritual death. The sure blessings of Abraham are the opposite: riches, health and abundant life. Those, she says, are what God imputed to us. The body of Christ, the Lord told her, is missing the best of it by taking a little here and a little there, when “it’s a done deal” and He paid the price in full.
Winning the Battle for the Mind
Dr. Carol Elaine says you would be surprised how the enemy finds an open door. In her early twenties she became so absorbed in a daytime soap opera that she cheered on the characters’ adultery. The battlefield is the mind, and before long she was thinking like the world and was tormented by ungodly thoughts for about six months.
She kept hoping a pastor would discern it and take authority over it, but no one did, and she was too embarrassed to tell anyone. Fear involves torment (1 John 4:18), she says, and there is a spirit of torment connected with it. At about twenty-one, she went into the family room, shut the door and told God she was not coming out until she was free.
She cried out and prayed in tongues for what may have been hours. Then she felt it break. It had been like a vise around her head, oppressing her rather than living in her, and she knew the moment it left. Satan comes to steal, kill and destroy, she says, but the anointing within us teaches us (1 John 2:27).
The Holy Spirit then asked her if she wanted to stay free. The answer was to renew her mind every day with the Word of God (Romans 12:2), which is why she began the service with declarations. She listened to teaching tapes while getting dressed and filled her mind with Scripture.
She recalls hearing John Osteen tell how the enemy once whispered to him to jump from a high building. Ridiculous thoughts come. Later, as she put on makeup, a thought told her to look in the mirror and laugh like a crazy person. This time she recognized it, rebuked it in Jesus’ name, and resisted the devil, and he fled (James 4:7). That was the last time.
When her son, now a preacher, was about six, he told her at a theme park that he felt the sky and buildings were going to fall on him. She recognized a spirit of fear, took authority over it, and he never had that thought again. Satan is no respecter of age or person, she warns. She learned to cast down imaginations and every thought against God (2 Corinthians 10:5), and today she is free indeed (John 8:36).
If you are battling your thoughts in secret, she urges, you are not the only one. Tell your pastor or another believer who will stand in the gap for you. In closing she invites people to receive Christ, to raise a hand if they are going through torment, and to receive the Holy Spirit, who prays through us beyond our understanding so that all things work together for good (Romans 8:26–28).
Applying the Cross This Week
Here are the practical steps drawn from this message by Dr. Carol Elaine:
- Start the day with a declaration. Speak Scripture aloud each morning, as she led the church to do, because Jesus is the High Priest of your confession.
- Guard your tongue. If you are tempted to gossip or rehearse your troubles, step away until you have control of your words.
- Apply the curse as you applied salvation. Name the area where you see a pattern of loss, and declare that Christ became a curse for you.
- Say “God, I trust You.” Begin each morning by putting your trust in God rather than in people or circumstances.
- Close open doors. Notice what you watch and dwell on, and cast down thoughts that do not line up with God’s Word.
- Do not fight alone. If you are tormented in your mind, tell a pastor or trusted believer and ask them to stand in the gap.
Timestamped Outline
- 0:00 Decreeing and declaring God’s Word
- 1:14 A morning declaration
- 2:56 A new season after Las Vegas
- 4:09 Stuck in the snow, steps still ordered
- 5:07 Time is a gift from God
- 7:24 Teach me to number my days
- 10:05 Have you ever felt cursed?
- 11:32 Her nephew’s eleven-year battle
- 14:02 Cursed is He who hangs on a tree
- 15:49 A generational curse broken
- 18:14 Proverbs 26:2 and the purpose of His blood
- 19:51 Thorns, hands and feet
- 21:38 His side and His stripes
- 23:05 He became a curse; the blessings of Abraham
- 24:52 The curse of poverty
- 26:18 The curse of shame
- 28:51 Cursed is the man who trusts in man
- 30:08 An open door to torment
- 32:35 Shut in until set free
- 34:58 Renew your mind daily
- 37:11 Resist the devil and he will flee
- 39:45 The threefold curse and Abraham’s blessing
- 41:29 Invitation and prayer
- 43:42 Power to overcome through the Holy Spirit
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a curse rest on a believer?
Dr. Carol Elaine teaches from Proverbs 26:2 that a curse cannot alight without a cause. She says the door is opened in two ways: through sin, and through not applying what Jesus Christ has already done. Christ became a curse for us, so the answer is not fear but faith that applies His finished work and speaks it over your life.
Does this mean believers should refuse medical care?
The message does not say that. She speaks warmly of a doctor who helped her, and in her own story she agreed to the test her children asked for, while standing in faith that the curse was broken. Her emphasis is on applying Christ’s work by faith and declaration, not on rejecting doctors.
What if I am struggling with thoughts I am too embarrassed to share?
She says you are not alone, and that she fought the same kind of battle in secret for six months. Her counsel is to find a pastor or believers who will stand in the gap for you, to get into the Bible and gather Scriptures to stand on, to take authority over the thoughts in Jesus’ name, and to be filled with the Holy Spirit, who gives power to overcome.
Scripture References
All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:
- Galatians 3:13–14 — Christ became a curse for us
- Isaiah 53:4–5 — wounded for our transgressions
- Proverbs 26:2 — a curse without cause
- Deuteronomy 28 — the blessings and the curse
- 2 Corinthians 8:9 — He became poor that we might be rich
- Jeremiah 17:5–8 — trusting in man or in the Lord
- Hebrews 3:1 — the High Priest of our confession
- 2 Corinthians 10:5 — casting down imaginations
How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.
Watch More Messages
If this message encouraged you, there are many more teachings from NTC Ministries and its guest speakers waiting for you. Browse the full sermon archive and keep growing in the finished work of Christ.
