Healing Tidbits
or
Miscellaneous Teachings On Healing

You have probably heard the term, "physician, heal thyself." Literally, it means that if a doctor is any good, he shouldn't get sick himself. Or, if he does get sick, he should know what medicines to take in order to get better quickly, so that he doesn't stay sick.

But the term is often used in a broader sense, meaning that if anyone is trying to help or serve someone else, they should first that master that particular area (or problem) in their own life. The thinking is that a person is not qualified to help someone else with something before they haven't totally mastered it themselves.

That thinking has filtered into the arena of healing prayer. There are people who feel that a believer cannot pray effectively for others to be healed if they have any sickness or infirmity in their own body.

This thinking is not from God. In fact, it comes from the devil, and he designed it in an attempt to keep you from praying for the sick. The devil doesn't want you to pray for the sick because God just might answer your prayer and heal that person. So he will do whatever he can to make you think you are "disqualified" from praying for the sick. And the "physician heal thyself" thinking is one of the tools he loves to use to "disqualify" you. He wants you to believe that you cannot pray for the sick unless you are totally healthy yourself, then he will do what he can to keep you from being totally healthy. That way, you never pray for anyone and he is able to keep people in bondage and oppression longer.

There are a whole bunch of reasons why this "physician heal thyself" thinking is faulty. Let me list five of them for you:

1. That thinking assumes that the power to heal comes from the person praying instead of from God. But the truth is that God does the healing, and at times He chooses to work through "weak vessels" so that He gets all of the glory.

2. There is no place in the bible where it says that personal wellness is a criteria for healing the sick. But on the other hand, it gives an example where Paul had an affliction, but he healed the sick and cast out demons.

3. That thinking doesn't take spiritual warfare and enemy counter- attacks into consideration.

4. Faith to heal others is different than faith for your own healing. We'd all like to have both, but you can have one and not have the other.

5. There are many places in everyday life where someone who is "in the process of gaining victory themselves" helps or mentors someone further behind them in that same process. This includes things like 12-step programs, support groups, and student mentoring programs. These programs have proven track records of success, even though the person giving the "help" is in process themselves, and they haven't fully mastered the area where they are helping someone else.

Let me expand this in a bit more detail. I will do so by looking at the underlying concepts that this thinking challenges.

1. Healing Comes From God, Not From Us

In and of ourselves, we have absolutely no power or authority to heal the sick. That power/anointing comes from God is and intended to be used only to accomplish His purposes. (I develop this extensively in other teachings, but I am only going to touch on it a little in this teaching.)

When Jesus walked on the earth, He laid aside His own God-power and was empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit to do the works the Father was doing--and healing was one of those works. That is why the Bible does not show Jesus doing any miracles before He was baptized and the Holy Spirit ascended on Him in the form of a dove. Jesus even admitted that He did not do things on His own, but He only did what God the Father was doing. Look at John 5:19, which says, "Then Jesus answered and said to them, 'Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.'"

When Jesus rose from the dead, the Father restored His God-authority that Jesus had laid aside to become a man. We see that in Matthew 28:18, "18 And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, 'All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth."

When Jesus ascended into Heaven, He gave that authority to His church. His intent was for them to use it to accomplish God's purposes on this earth--and one of those purposes is to set people free from the enemy's bondages and heal the sick. The Father did that repeatedly through Jesus when He walked the earth. Now that He is back in Heaven, the church is Jesus' body, and we are expected to carry on Jesus' task of doing what the Father is doing.

To put it another way, God wants to do that same work that Jesus did on this earth through us today (because we are Jesus' body here on earth). That is why Jesus was able to say in the great commission of Mark 16:17-18, "17 And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons...[and] they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover."

All that is to say that the power to heal the sick does not come from us, it comes from God. He moves through us when we yield to Him and obey Him, and when we pray for the sick, He heals them through us. Since God is the one doing the healing and the authority to heal that He gave us doesn't come from us, we don't have to be "perfect" to tap into it.

2. God Likes To Work Through Weak Vessels To Show His Glory

1 Corinthians 1:27 puts it this way: "But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty."

If God heals only through perfect vessels, then people will be tempted to look to that person (vessel) instead of looking to God. There are times when He works through those who have their act totally together, but there are also many times when He works through those who still have flaws or weaknesses in their own lives--because that demonstrates that the power to heal comes from God instead of from the one doing the praying.

The apostle Paul got a taste of this in his own life. God worked very powerfully through him, but allowed him to have a "thorn in the flesh" (which many interpret as a physical infirmity) while he ministered. When Paul asked God about that, the Lord explained that He is gloried when He works through weak vessels. Let's look at this in Paul's own words from 2 Corinthians 12:7-9:

7 And lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. 8 Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. 9 And He said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness." Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

The bottom line is that God receives glory when He allows you to minister in His power while you still struggle with an area of weakness or infirmity in your own life. That is because it demonstrates that you are not doing the healing through your own power, but through His.

I cannot talk about this without remembering back to my first mission trip to Africa, where I had the opportunity to live out that verse. I was a part of a team of 4, and we had a series of meetings in the Coloured part of Capetown. God moved powerfully in those meetings and a local mini-revival broke out, which lasted for over a year. One night in the meeting, we did corporate spiritual warfare over the area. It was more powerful than I can describe and it actually brought changes to the area including reduced crime. The main thug in that area was a very violent drug-lord. He died violently that night and his replacement was much less violent, so both the crime rate and the violent murder rate for that area both went down noticeably.

We did not even know about this criminal or his activities--we just knew that the Lord told us that He wanted that night's meeting to war over the area for spiritual breakthrough. At one point in the meeting one of our team was beating a war dance on the drums, and the spirit came on me, and I started doing the local tribal war dance (which I did not know in the natural). As I was doing it, I had a vision that I was dancing on this giant green snake and trampling it. In the vision,the snake rose up it's head and bit my right leg. At the same instant as I saw this in the vision, my achilles tendon (which attaches my calf muscle to my heal) snapped in the natural, and I had to hop off of the stage on my good leg. The team prayed for me to be healed, but no healing came. I finished out that crusade on crutches, and when I got home, I had to undergo months of physical theraphy.

But here is the odd thing--even though I was on crutches in the remaining two meetings, God still used me to heal the sick. People would come up to me for prayer. I'd stand there on my crutches and pray for them, and they'd get healed. But I remained sick. I remember going back to my room in great pain that night and crying out to God. I was frustrated because He was healing others but He would not heal me. When I asked Him about it, this was His reply: "Teresa, I let you stay on crutches so that everyone can see that your ability to heal doesn't come from you, since you can't even heal your own leg. This way they know that it comes from Me."