Healing For Today

How do we pray for health, healing, or deliverance?
Is there a balance between faith and presumption?

We at  “Word of Faith Christian Fellowship” try our best to teach a balanced life.

Who can wonder why people don't pray? If healing is a wild goose chase, then let's forget it. So often, prayer for healing ends up as a last-ditch proposition, an expression of resignation to fate, an assignment of blame to the Creator. So who needs it? The only reason to pray under these circumstances would be to placate a God who taunts us from on high, to kneel before a vicious deity lest we further incite His wrath.  This is the prayer of the heathen, groveling before gaudy idols, hoping for a little luck in exchange for incense burned.

Let's get three things straight:

First, God is a good God.

Second, sin and Satan - flesh and hell - have fouled up God's intended processes for mankind.

Third, the redeemed-those who have received God's gift of life in Jesus-are His main channel of His dealing in grace and goodness on this planet.

We must smash the image of a frowning God, brooding in anger, perched on the edge of a 10 mile high cliff, and ready to hurl a quiver of lightning bolts at the unsuspecting and the helpless. The beauty of the Father’s personality was so perfectly mirrored in Jesus, that the Savior declares, “If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father” (John 14:9).

God is good.  God does good. He cannot even be tempted to do otherwise (James 1:13). Further, it is the will of God to heal and deliver the sick and tormented.  All sickness and pain are adverse to His will.

However, the Father has appointed multiple havens of refuge from sickness and pain:

• through natural recuperative processes;
• through climate and diet;
• through the charitable efforts of mankind
• by hospitals, doctors, and medicine;
• and through the divine means of healing gifts distributed by the Holy Spirit and ministered in the Name of Jesus.

Sin and Satan work disorder and destruction. God doesn't. He shows us how to surmount our heartbreaks and our tendency to fail, and helps us to overcome the slings of satanic fury bent on death and destruction.

You and I can help decide which of these two things - blessing or cursing - will happen. We can determine whether God's goodness is released toward specific situations or whether the power of sin and Satan is permitted to prevail.

Prayer is the determining factor.

I believe in the power of Jesus Christ to heal the sick and afflicted and to break any bondage of satanic sorts when His Name is invoked in any circumstance. I believe His power is as consistently available today as during His own earthly ministry and that, through His Cross, He has provided the grounds for us to expect and receive healing and deliverance as surely as we may receive forgiveness and sanctification.

Prayer can change anything. The impossible doesn't exist.

His is the power.  Ours is the prayer.  Without Him, we cannot.  Without us, He will not.

Because I believe this, I accept the ministry of healing as a part of the Lord Jesus Christ’s commission that the Church go to the whole world with the Gospel. This includes proclaiming God’s will and power to heal, and in Jesus’ Name instruction that the prayer of faith be offered, that confession of sins be made unto deliverance, that elders anoint with oil, and that hands be laid on the sick that they may recover.

I believe in the power of God’s Word and Spirit to sustain and supply health to those who walk simply and humbly before Him in faith. I believe the fruit of such faith will be manifest in love and patience.

So I reject any system that produces lovelessness or induces guilt when a believer in Jesus does not seem to be able to receive physical healing or personal deliverance from sickness or any other torment.

Committed to these beliefs, we can withstand every evidence of pain, suffering, sickness, disease, bondage, or torment, convinced that the good fight of faith will prevail unto health. And we can be equally convinced that, in cases where victory is not apparent in the way that we wish, a victory of another order is being brought about by the divine grace of Almighty God.

How then can we be healed and bring about healing in others?

I believe in divine healing- not in faith healing.  What is the difference?

"Faith healing" is a catchall phrase generally used by the media and others who are without discernment- who cannot tell the crucial differences between spiritual phenomena which emanate from the human spirit, the Holy Spirit, or some hellish spirit.

The differences between faith healing and divine healing are vast.

Divine healing has as its focus the person of Jesus Christ, while faith healing looks inwardly to human potential or outwardly to some human agent. Looking unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of our faith (Heb. 12:2), we make Him the center and source of healing gifts and miracles from God. Faith healing finds its energy in self-generated, personal dynamism that claims to tap hidden resources within the individual or released through the "healer."

Divine healing is ministered by the power of the Holy Spirit through divinely ordained promises, provision, and providence. God’s healing grace and goodness span the realm of the medical as well as the miraculous. Because God’s Word holds forth resources of health, healing, and deliverance, our first point of appeal when sickness strikes should be to come to Him. Divine healing is never a last resort for a final crisis - but a first resort to request and receive the Father’s touch and wholeness in Jesus’ Name.

Divine healing comes about in balanced living without fanaticism. Our victories come through faith in Jesus Christ without pride over our "faith-power." In rejoicing, we receive God’s provisions without legalistic insistence on human formulas or devices.

Divine healing comes amid praiseful worship to God, the Author of all gifts of healing, who is glorified as the giver of health and power. Faith healing, on the other hand, glorifies some human personality operating at the center of a healing or miracle.

As we pray for divine healing, remember that God’s healing never postures itself in such a way as to deny or impugn a person who seeks medical counsel, treatment, or help.

As a recipient of both miracle and healing graces over the years and as a teacher of the truth of divine healing, I encourage a bold belief without falling prey to an uncompassionate or critical "faith-ism." We should always be people who pray in faith for others without becoming people who push faith on others.

Assuring and affirming those for whom you pray is the truest manifestation of the Spirit you can offer when you stand beside someone who is sick or in pain. Friends who suddenly begin exhorting or challenging the quality of faith or the quality of living in the afflicted one are generally more of the spirit of Job’s "comforters" than of the Spirit of Christ.

Sick people need your acceptance more than they need your analysis. If God gives you discernment as to a sick person’s spiritual lack or need, take it as a directive to private prayer, not necessarily as an occasion to barrage them with words.

We also should always be people who know the receiving of medical help is not a rejection of divine healing. There is an unmasked fear still blinding some dear saints who want to "receive God’s best" and who somehow have deduced that the employment of professional physicians is a renunciation of the Great Physician. And as surely as I am convinced that sickness should be brought to the Lord first; I am not convinced that "real" answers to praying faith preempt the involvement of a doctor.

There is a notorious imbalance in some segments of the Body of Christ today, arrogantly reasoning that God would call men and women and equip them for medical ministries, then designate them "second best." I praise God that He has enabled man to learn something of how to alleviate pain, mend bodies, and save lives. And I praise Him that being under a doctor’s care is neither a retreat from faith in God nor a removal from being under His healing, sustaining hand.

We should always be people who know the difference between our human frailty, redemptive grace, and the divine will of God.

The same imbalance is found in the proposition that "God sometimes wills the sickness for the good that it will accomplish." I reject that idea because it smacks more of human philosophy than of biblical revelation. I hasten to add that I do believe sickness is normative to a fallen race. But so is sin. I don’t think you’ll find perfect health in this lifetime any more than I believe you’ll attain sinless perfection. Yet I do withstand both - sin and sickness - on the grounds that the salvation we have been provided in Christ brings dominion over the curse incumbent upon us in man’s fall.

The fact I may not master the use of all the keys of the Kingdom in this life doesn’t keep me from taking them in hand and trying the locks. Often we can discern how to release His power and, even when the sickness prevails, we can experience the entry of His grace redeeming the afflicted situation - lessons are learned, understanding is gained, and people are touched.

"All that glitters isn’t gold," observes the old proverb. Similarly, all that manifests in healing isn’t necessarily divine. Wisdom prescribes that we keep our focus clearly on Jesus Christ, God’s Son, and that we remember the power flow emanates by His Spirit according to His Word through Jesus’ Name and authority.

Wisdom requires that we view the full balance of God’s healing through natural, medical, and miracle means, and understand that any healing must culminate in adoration of Him.