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We have spent the last lessons looking at things that can prevent healing. I want to back up a second and remind us that in many cases we can and should expect to see people healed when we pray for them.
I was asked to preach a revival in Arizona in April of 2003, at a traditional Southern Baptist Church. I preached 16 times that week and they just wore me out. We had noon meetings, evening meetings and I had a Men's Breakfast and a Pastor's Breakfast and then on the National Day of Prayer they had a Mayor's Prayer Breakfast. There was a city-wide prayer breakfast and everybody in the city was invited and I was the guest speaker.
Most of the people were older, I think I was one of the youngest guys up there (and I'm in my late 40's). Well, maybe there were a few couples there younger than I was, but not very many. I talked about healing -- well, really I talked about advancing the Kingdom, but you include in there casting out demons, praying for the sick, that kind of thing. It was a lot of fun and they really embraced this and we saw some pretty good healing there. For instance, one lady had arthritis in her fingers and she played the piano on Sunday mornings three times, at a mission and then at a couple of churches. She had arthritis all throughout and her fingers were swollen and there was pain in her neck from a car wreck she had when she was sixteen, so she had pain for about forty years. For the first time she was pain free in her neck and shoulders and the swelling went down in her fingers. She said the next day she cleaned house and it was just so exciting to be able to do that pain free! Usually she would play on Sundays and then she couldn't do anything for about three days, so she was really excited about her healing.
Some of the older people got aches and pains healed. There were three people who had cancer that we were praying for and, of course, we didn't know what was going on because we aren't doctors and we didn't have x-rays or anything. But God was showing them and touching them and giving them peace about where they're at with God or just encouraging them. It was fun, I went to the hospital several times and prayed for the sick; this pastor started taking me everywhere. We were going to people's houses praying for them and to the hospital, praying for them. One lady had diabetes and the doctors were considering amputating her foot, it was so bad. So we went and prayed for her and they decided not to amputate it. Instead, they operated and scraped the bone. The doctor was surprised at what good shape her foot was in. They didn't amputate her foot and she came home in a few days.
We had a lot of fun. The people there got really excited about this kind of thing because God kept showing up on people. It was really funny, I'd start praying for somebody and the peace of the Lord would come on them and they would just start to melt through the peace of God. They would say, "Whoa, what was that?" and I would just say, "I think that was the Holy Spirit coming on you and giving you peace. How does it feel?" They would just say, "Wonderful!" You know, they were experiencing the Holy Spirit, some of them for the very first time. I was having fun watching them do this and they were not used to seeing this through the Spirit of the Lord. God is a healing God, and He will even move and heal in settings where we might not expect it, like in a traditional Southern Baptist Church.
We pray for the sick and we expect God to heal them, and many times He does. So we always start there... we ask God to heal there. Sometimes God heals instantly. Sometimes, He comes to you and you just wait and linger and spend some time with God. And the Spirit of healing begins to come and God just flows through the body and heals and it's really wonderful to see when it happens instantly. But, it doesn't always happen that way. So, what do you do if it doesn't happen that way?
Well, if healing doesn't immediately take place then we just go to God and pray and ask how we should proceed to pray for healing. We ask Him to show us the next step. Ask Him what we should do here, should we continue on doing what we're doing? Maybe we just didn't keep praying long enough and we need to pray some more. Or maybe there is something we need to address or take care of before healing can take place.
In that inquiry process we ask ourselves several questions. First, we ask if this is a situation like a seed, which needs to be nurtured in prayer, a seed that needs to be guarded and contended for. Sometimes God will give a measure of healing; He doesn't give the whole healing at once. He starts you off to get you going and then you continue to pray, to contend for this, continue to fight for this, you continue to persevere in all of this. That could be the situation you are in. If so, you just need to keep at it, keep hanging in there, keep contending for it, keep fighting for it. My mother had multiple sclerosis and we got the word God had healed her. She had some immediate healing, but it wasn't the full dose. It took a couple years before she had complete healing. It wasn't an immediate thing for her.
Heidi Baker experienced the same thing in her life. God gave her a word for her healing, she continued in contend for it in faith over a period of a couple years, and then God healed her completely. Sometimes it works like that -- God gives you a little bit and then you contend, you fight for it. And there is a sense of saturating and soaking yourself in the presence of the Lord and healing will take place.
Second, we must ask ourselves if this is a situation where we must take back ground from the devil. Maybe we need to remove the right of the demonic to inflict there. Maybe it is a spirit of affliction we have to address and sometimes those can come out very quickly. But sometimes they don't come out very quickly. But we need to address that spirit, or maybe it's a stronghold or something that's an inroad by the devil some way and we need to address that specific area. Or it could be a situation where there is a spiritual root that needs to be removed. The spiritual root category is one of the most common reasons why people aren't healed. When you command healing and cast out the spirits of infirmity and they still are not healed, there is probably a spiritual root you have to deal with. This basically means the foundation of a sickness is spiritual in nature, so we need to take care of the spiritual side of things first before the healing can occur. If the root is spiritual in nature, you are not going to heal unless you deal with it from a spiritual standpoint, otherwise, all you have is basically "disease management." And you can just manage the disease and that's what we sometimes try to do. If the root is spiritual the only way to get rid of it and to cure it, is to deal with it from a spiritual perspective and approach it that way.
Now I already talked about three things that prevent healing. If these things are present, it's very difficult to find healing at all. Omar Olier from Argentina was the one who gave me these three things. He told me that whenever he sees these things, he has to deal with them before any sort of healing can take place. The first is curses. If the person is under a curse you must break the curse to see a healing. The second inhibitor is when the person has some sort of pact with the devil. And the third is if the person is under the judgment of God. We looked at these three things and went into great detail about what fits under these categories. Most of the items that fit under these are things we do to pull ourselves away from the grace flow of God.
We also discussed the spirit of unbelief and the struggle we have with faith and unbelief. Now we will look at the areas that hinder healing, when they are not the big, major ones. They are things that are just kind of there, in the way. If healing is not coming and you've addressed everything you know to address, you've covered the "big three" and maybe you've addressed some areas of faith. If none of those fit but healing still isn't coming, it doesn't hurt to look at some of the residue things. There may be a few other things we want to look at that may be impeding or hindering healing.
Let me start by identifying them for you: