Healing
We all know that God has the power to heal. But we often question if it is His desire to heal. We know that God wants us to persevere through suffering and assume therefore that through sickness we can grow more Christ like. This leads to uncertainty – ‘God may want to heal, but He may have loving reasons not to heal’. So when we pray for God’s healing, we pray our best prayer and then trust the outcome to God’s sovereignty.
Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom has had a profound effect on my life in recent years. Not just on my understanding, but on my faith and my practice and my experience of God.
During worship, pray for the sick. Those healed stand one side, those not healed stand with the worship band.
We all know that God has the power to heal. But we often question if it is His desire to heal. We know that God wants us to persevere through suffering and assume therefore that through sickness we can grow more Christ like. This leads to uncertainty – 'God may want to heal, but He may have loving reasons not to heal'. So when we pray for God's healing, we pray our best prayer and then trust the outcome to God's sovereignty.
In this section we look at the practicalities of ministering healing. I start with a short Quick-Start and Trouble-shooting section making short assertions which I frequently remind myself of to steady my faith for healing and outlying my approach if nothing seems to have happened. This is followed by a longer section looking at the ways Jesus ministered healing, at the significance of Jesus statement, 'According to your faith you will be healed', and finally looking in more depth at dealing with disappointment.
The first question we tend to ask when hearing of a miraculous healing is, 'How did you pray?' We want to reduce healing to a formula. The standard content of these formulae are: praying in Jesus name, applying the Blood (whatever that means!), commanding sickness to leave, rebuking Satan, confessing healing, declaring God's promises, claiming the atonement and such like. We should be very wary of this tendency which treats healing as the result of manipulating supernatural powers by our words. This is in fact magic or sorcery and the scripture warns us very sternly to avoid such things. Healing does not come through our words, but through our passions.
Paul teaches that there are special gifts of healing that not all believers have:
This section delves more deeply into the biblical foundation for confidence in healing. Although the bible does not assert the simple equation of 'if you are sick it is because you have sinned' it does make the important equation 'sickness is because of sin'. This gives rise to a connection between healing and the Atonement. Sickness came into the world because of the fall and because of the combination of global, national, community, family and individual sin, we commonly suffer sickness. The Atonement dealt with the curse and power of sin, so healing has its roots in the Atonement.
In this section we look at some of the wider aspects of living in the Kingdom of God in this broken world. We consider why Jesus healed the sick but did not teach basic hygiene and we consider the issues of medicine, pain and suffering, and death.
**Mt 8:16** He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick.
**Mk 16:18** They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.
**Lk 9:1** Then He called His twelve disciples together and gave them power and authority over all demons, and to cure diseases.
**Ac 10:38** God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him.
**Mk 16:18** They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.
**Lk 9:1** Then He called His twelve disciples together and gave them power and authority over all demons, and to cure diseases.
**Ac 10:38** God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, who went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with Him.
We all know that God has the power to heal. But we often question if it is His desire to heal. We know that God wants us to persevere through suffering and assume therefore that through sickness we can grow more Christ like. This leads to uncertainty – 'God may want to heal, but He may have loving reasons not to heal'. So when we pray for God's healing, we pray our best prayer and then trust the outcome to God's sovereignty.