Healing

Two more contributions from netfriends:

I just read one article of Andrew Wommack’s on Faith for Healing and i must confess I thought it appalling.

Some bits include: “… one of the most important things the Lord has ever shown me: God has already placed His healing power within us, and it is now under our authority. It isn’t up to God to determine who receives healing; it’s up to us!”

” It’s never God’s will for us to be sick; He wants every person healed every time. That’s nearly-too-good-to-be-true news, but that’s the Gospel.”

“What’s the bottom line on God’s will for our healing? His Word reveals that to us in 3 John 2″

That latter text is a greeting — “I hope you’re goin’ OK, mate” — in a casual letter; it implies nothing at all about God’s will for our healing or our prosperity, tho it is usually trotted out for both since Kenneth Hagin discovered it while doing a concordance search trying to find a verse to support his belief in prosperity as part of the Gospel.

And if the other two statements are true, I’ve never understood the gospel or read the Bible. They come from TV-preacher-land which has a different form of reality, is all I can conclude.

But I don’t want to be too dismissive; I know that as an honest pastor, you will be wrestling with the issue and with your people seeking God’s ways for them. And I know God keeps teaching us all as we are honest with The Word and with life.

Another:

Great discussion here folks, which makes this line so valuable in sharing our questions, experience and insights on mysteries such as this. While I can’t resist mentioning the pessimist’s get-well card: “I hope you’re only feeling half as bad as you probably soon will be!” I’ll toss in a couple of suggestions….

It’s much easier to have an itinerant ministry of healing than to link it with localised pastoral care among ‘unhealed’ people with as much or greater faith than those who are restored.

I believe very strongly that healing is God’s will, but since he is on about relationships more than performances, he knows the best method and time to bring his healing about.

So I pray regularly for people to be healed, taking care to give God the freedom to show his preferred method of healing, and for our openness to recognise how he reveals his miracle or how long he takes to do it. In hospitals, I pray that God will perfect his strength in their weakness and use their attitude or limited conversations to speak to other patients with extra credibility or to express the blessing of appreciation to the medical and domestic staff. Feedback has always been positive, even from those who are puzzled by the prayer.

The value of the extreme ‘travelling salvation show’ approach – that borders on dualism and (perhaps) unwittingly slips into guilt production if there are no micro-wave results – has limited value. Yet it is there (to a degree) in scripture. The faith of the Roman centurion was based on strict military training: that orders exist to be obeyed, so why wouldn’t his servant get healed if Jesus gave such an order? (SIR!!!!!)

This choleric mindset embraces the declaration approach to healing – and to most other aspects of ministry. It works for and among those who think and act this way, but it can by default be a bruising encounter for anyone who moves at a different pace or direction.

Those of us not blessed or hampered by this temperament will experience healing and release healing in different ways.

It’s always a good idea to check the variety in Jesus’ approach, as we serve him among people with various personality types and a huge range of experience and insights. A we allow him to minister through us, we will more readily move beyond our personal experience, preferences or personal comfort zones to become more effective agents of his blessing for others.

I want to mention Francis McNutt’s excellent book: “Healing,” which I must have some time ago lowned to a very appreciative person whose name now escapes me. (lowned is a word I’ve coined to describe how property may find a new home without any formal agreement or transaction about its price or its return.) It may still be available from Ave Maria Press or on eBay.

In it he includes the illustration of a family breakfast, where one of the kids is ignoring something that has cut across plans to go on a picnic, and loudly insists on the picnic: “Because you promised! You promised! You promised! You promised!”

A sibling quietly accepts the father’s reasons and doesn’t complain, because he/she knows that dad wants to take them and he will at a better time; or maybe somewhere far better.

McNutt concludes the story by saying that the picnic may actually go ahead, but if it does, manipulation wins at the expense of any deepening in the relationship among the kids.

He includes a chapter listing eleven reasons why people are not healed, which I feel expresses a depth of insight and pastoral care for those who apparently miss their miracle. They are as follows, I think:

1. Lack of faith in those prayed for.

2. Unconfessed sin in the one being prayed for.

3. Lack of authority on the part of the person praying.

4. It is God’s will for the person to be taken home, where the healing will be permanent

5. Demonic activity not being discerned

6. Demonic activity being blamed when the illness has not been caused by demons

7. Redemptive power of illness for the victim. (The clearest indicator of this being their positive attitude – rather than the morbid thrill of dying that keeps them alive.)

8. The illness is a tool to reach someone who is/will be in the victim’s circle of influence – who cannot be reached through any other way.

9. Refusal to accept any need for behavioural change

10. Refusal to accept medical expertise within the healing

11. Unwillingness to let go of medical treatment

Widening the eighth reason is how God’s grace works to defy the gravitational emotional suction of prolonged illness, to anoint ministries to others with similar complaints, so they may sense and respond to God’s offer of new life and hope through Christ right where they are.

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• Theologians, like parents, are invited to be humble as well as (frequently) ignorant…
• The Jesus Driven Life
• INCARNATION
• Virgin Birth: ‘God degraded Mary?’

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