Authors: Praying Medic
I saw cancer as a stronger adversary, for some reason. But as I prayed with more cancer patients and saw some of them healed, my confidence for healing of cancer began to grow quickly. I don’t yet have the same confidence for cancer or ALS that I do for joint injuries, but the more I lay hands on people with those conditions the more my faith grows.
My faith, like the faith of Jairus, was strengthened by watching the power of God at work. Faith can and must grow. Seeing people healed is one of the keys to growth. I don’t think there is a substitute for witnessing the power of God at work.
The strategy for growing your faith is to start with a generalized belief that God heals. From there, you simply lay hands on whomever you can and eventually, you’ll see some of them healed. As you do, your weak, generalized faith will become more specific and stronger. As you continue in healing, you’ll see different types of diseases and injuries healed. You’ll develop more faith for specific conditions. If you continue laying hands on people, the strong faith you have for a few things will broaden into a strong faith for many things.
There is a popular teaching that says some people have an “anointing” for healing certain conditions such as back pain or migraines. In reality, there is no specialized anointing. They’ve simply recognized the fact that they have greater confidence (or a lack of doubt) for some conditions than for others. If they continue to pray with faith for other conditions, they usually develop confidence for them as well.
It has often been noted (primarily by skeptics) that no one has produced a medically documented case of an amputee who has had a limb restored through prayer. They use this as an argument against healing. In light of all the other valid testimonies of healing it seems like a weak argument. But the question deserves to be answered, “Why aren’t amputees healed in any significant numbers?”
I believe the lack of healing we’ve seen regarding amputees is due to nothing more than our corporate lack of faith
specific
to amputees.
We look at the amputee as an impossible assignment. Torn rotator cuff? No problem. Multiple sclerosis? Yes, we can do that. HIV? Sure, we’ve seen a lot of people healed of that. But when we face the man or woman with a missing limb, and we’re asked to heal them, we don’t have the faith (confidence) for it. When YOU believe (when you have a confident expectation) that God will heal a certain amputee through YOU, it will happen.
Jesus commented about the faith of the Roman centurion, calling his faith “great.” I never considered myself to be a person of great faith. I thought that if I had great faith, every person I laid hands on who had missing limbs would have them grow out. I’d be able to walk on water and do many other signs and wonders if I had great faith. And since these things weren’t happening, I concluded that my faith wasn’t very great.
I had a dream one night about faith that changed my understanding of what it is and how it works. The dream was about a man who had great faith. His faith was so great that it could heal the entire city that he worked in. I didn’t realize it at first, but understood later, that the man God showed me in the dream was me. What struck me most was the idea that it wasn’t the man or even God that held the potential to heal all those people – it was the
faith
he had which held the capacity to heal an entire city.
In the dream, God revealed something I didn’t know. He explained that my choice to continue praying with people, in spite of dismal results, was really the process of watering and nurturing the seed of faith that He gave me, which grew into faith that today has almost unlimited potential. I don’t expect to heal an entire city, although that would be a great testimony to God. Such a feat would require me to stay awake for weeks or months on end and it would require that everyone in the city would
want
to be healed. God wasn’t speaking about actual healing, but the
potential
to heal. He was saying that my faith had grown to the point where I had the potential to heal thousands, if I chose to operate in a way that tapped into the faith I now had.
We know that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (see Heb. 11:1). Faith has substance. It’s tangible and it does things, like heal the sick. I see faith as something like the currency of heaven. When we begin our journey in the kingdom, most of us have small faith. Our bank account of faith upon which we can draw out the resources of heaven is small. But as we walk with God and get to know His ways, we begin to trust Him more. As our faith in Him grows, so does the balance in our account. The more we step out and exercise our faith, the more we get to watch God at work. The more He works the more reason we have to trust Him. And trusting Him brings more faith into our account.
Unlike the balance in our bank account, which decreases the more we use it, the balance in our faith account increases the more we use it. Those who have great faith are those who exercise it often. Many of us underestimate what is possible with the faith we now possess. It’s good to know that whatever level of faith we have today, it will increase if we exercise it.
One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the gift of faith (see 1 Cor. 12:9). The gift of faith is like a deposit into our faith account. When God wants to accomplish something through us that we don’t have enough faith for, He makes a deposit of faith into our account and with the sudden increase in faith, His will can now be accomplished.
Jesus healed people who had different levels of faith. Let’s look at some healing encounters and discuss how faith works.
The Roman centurion had great faith, which Jesus commended. But the centurion wasn’t the one being healed; he came on behalf of his servant. The servant was healed, though he may have been unaware that the centurion had asked for his healing (see Mt. 8:13).
In Mark chapter 9, the Lord delivered a boy with a mute spirit whom the disciples couldn’t heal. Two things are worth noting here; Jesus rebuked the disciples for their lack of faith (verse 19) and the father admitted he also had little faith (verse 24). In spite of this, Jesus cast the spirit out. It’s apparent that no one except Jesus had the faith required to remove the spirit or heal the boy.
In a third account, a woman with chronic bleeding pursued Jesus in a crowd. She grabbed onto the hem of His garment and power flowed out of Him, which healed her. He recognized that power had left Him and said that it was her faith that healed her (see Mt. 9:20).
In Matthew chapter 20, we read that Jesus found two blind men who cried out for Him when they knew He was approaching. He asked what they wanted. When they asked to have their sight restored, He healed them (see Mt. 20:30-33).
In the fourth chapter of Luke, Jesus cast a spirit out of a man without making any comments except that He commanded the spirit to be silent (verse 35). At the bedside of Peter’s mother, Jesus rebuked her fever and it left. He then healed a multitude of people by laying hands on them (verses 39-40).
In looking at this sample of healings, we see some principles emerge. In some cases, the faith of the healer was the key, and in others, the faith of the sick person was the key element to healing. The healing of the woman with chronic bleeding required faith on her part. She knew that Jesus had the power to heal. Convinced that she would be healed if she just touched His garment, she pursued Him. The faith of the healer is not involved in this type of healing. It’s a matter of God honoring the faith of the person in need. We may run into situations like this, but it’s likely we won’t be aware of them until after the healing happens, because we’re merely acting as a conduit of God’s power.
In contrast, other examples show that as healers we are expected to have faith for healing. The faith of the one who needs healing isn’t important in these cases. What matters is
our
faith. When faith goes into action, the power of God is released and healing occurs. As our faith for healing grows, we can expect to see more consistent healing and more miracles. Once we have sufficient faith, Atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, and people of any religion or world-view can be healed with equal success.
M
OST OF US HAVE BEEN
taught that healing comes when we ask God to heal someone who is sick or injured. We pray and God hears our prayer and based on His knowledge of the situation He decides to either heal them or not. If this is how you believe healing takes place, I would ask you to set aside your beliefs for a while as we examine what the Bible teaches about the process of healing.
Most of us were taught how to pray by someone we respected. That first prayer may have sounded something like, “God, please bless mommy and daddy and our dog, Buster… in Jesus name I pray, Amen!”
When we became older, our style of prayer probably changed. Some of us developed a bit more desperation; “God I really need this job! You know how much this means to me, so please hear me and make this job happen wow… in Jesus name I pray, Amen!”
Some of us believe there is virtue in accepting the outcome of a situation, regardless of how it works out. “Lord, if it’s your will, please heal grandma of cancer, but if it’s not your will, give us the grace to accept her sickness and death.”
I don’t mean to be critical of those who offer such prayers in earnest. But most of us who pray this way seldom see people healed. After trying this approach and praying with hundreds of people but seeing almost complete failure, I discovered a better, more biblical approach. I suppose there’s nothing more insulting than to be told we don’t know what we’re doing when we pray. As people of faith, we pride ourselves on our prayer life. But we should ask ourselves if our prayers for healing are effective or not.
Over the last year, I would estimate that about 80 percent of the people I have prayed with have been healed. In a week when my faith was operating consistently, about half of them were healed instantly. In a typical week I might pray with as few as ten or as many as 30 people for healing of different conditions. Occasionally, in a particular week, everyone I prayed with was healed. You must understand that this kind of success is not guaranteed and my results from week to week may vary greatly. I have some weeks, where the success rate may be closer to 30 percent, but that happens only rarely. A number of friends have reported a 100 percent healing rate for a particular weekend of ministry. The success we have is the result of using a different approach to prayer .
At this point, you may be wondering why we aren’t setting up camp at cancer clinics if we have this kind of success. Unfortunately, it’s incredibly difficult to find anyone in health care who will take you seriously when your specialty is faith healing. Supernatural healing is not yet accepted as a valid form of treatment by most hospitals and clinics. Even when hospitals employ chaplains, they don’t expect them to work miracles. Their role is primarily emotional support and grief counseling. (I’ll discuss divine healing in the setting of health care in more depth in a later chapter.)
On September 2, 2010, I had a dream in which I was standing on the edge of eternity with a group of friends who operate in healing. Pete Cabrera and Jessie Campbell were two of the people with me. While I gazed into eternity, Jessie approached and handed me a scroll. I knew what was written on it. It had a declaration that said, “You have been given authority over all the power of the enemy.” I took the scroll and wrote the words down. Then I approached another person and read the declaration to him and he wrote it down.
The dream was a revelation of an eternal promise given to those who want to heal the sick. We know that some forms of sickness are planned and carried out by the enemy. But we have been given authority over sickness, disease, trauma and all other powers of the enemy.
Largely due to the teaching of men like Andrew Wommack and Curry Blake, many believers have begun to see the kind of success in healing achieved by Jesus and His disciples. These believers have a confidence and tenacity you won’t find elsewhere in the Church. They tend to function as a kind of spiritual police, arresting sickness and disease and enforcing the principles of God’s kingdom.
The truth about healing will come as a shock to most Christians and it will challenge their theology. When you review the individual healing accounts recorded in the New Testament, you’ll find that not once did Jesus or His disciples ask God the Father to heal a sick or demonized person. A few people begged Jesus for healing, but Jesus never asked His Father to heal them, nor did the disciples. That fact ought to make us reconsider how we approach healing. If it wasn’t His approach to ask His Father to heal the sick, what approach did Jesus use? Let’s have a look.
When Jesus was summoned by the Roman Centurion to heal his servant, the soldier recognized the authority He had over sickness. Here is one of the keys to healing – it’s a matter of authority. Because the Centurion understood how authority works, his faith was able to apprehend healing for his servant. No prayer was involved; Jesus spoke a word and the servant was healed. It was a simple transaction involving the faith of the Centurion and the authority of Jesus. There are a number of other healings that occurred in this manner, recorded in Matthew chapter 8.
Although He used slightly different approaches in each encounter, Jesus usually spoke a word of healing, touched the sick person or in some way transferred power to them. He didn’t ask His Father to heal them. A few passages from the New Testament when taken together reveal the plan Jesus had for His disciples in regard to healing and deliverance. It’s actually a simple outline for operating in healing.
As recorded in Matthew chapter 10, Jesus chose twelve disciples and commissioned them to go out to the cities of Israel. These were His instructions to them:
“And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand. ’ Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons. ”
MT. 10:7-8