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Let me summarize what we have discussed in the past 13 lessons. We learned that God expects all Christians to pray for the sick and see them healed, and that He has given each of His disciples His authority to heal the sick. We can pray for the sick and expect God to heal them, and He will. However, this does not mean that every single person we pray for will be instantly healed. When it comes down to it, our job is to pray and it is God's is to heal.
We also learned that faith is important in healing, and we grow (or mature) in our faith as we pray for the sick and see God heal them. We looked at the "mustard seed" principle where we start small (headaches, flus, arthritis and back problems, etc) and then our faith grows as we see God's power heal the sick. Then we are better equipped, faith-wise, to handle the bigger things like blind eyes, deaf ears, people in wheelchairs, cancer, etc. Matthew 17 shows how the disciples did not have enough faith to heal a certain boy at one time, they had to bring the boy to Jesus for healing. But later on (Acts) the disciple's faith had grown and they were able to move at a higher level of healing anointing.
We discovered that God heals in a variety of ways, including natural healing, or working through medicine and doctors. He also does spontaneous healings in corporate worship. Or sometimes God gives words of knowledge (supernatural revelation) about conditions He wants to heal to build the person's faith, and then heals the people with those conditions through follow-on prayer. Other times God heals through prayer and laying on of hands. And He heals in a variety of other ways. God is a very creative God and He enjoys using a wide variety of ways to heal people.
Then we spent several lessons looking at different types of healing prayer modeled in the bible. We covered:
Then we examined some practical models/tools commonly used in healing prayer today. We learned the Vineyard 5-step model. The five steps were:
We also looked at various ways that God gives words of knowledge: seeing a picture, hearing Him tell you about a condition, feeling it briefly in your own body or just knowing about a condition that He wants to address. We discovered that we could ask God for additional details. And the more detailed the word is, the more it increases the faith of the person with the condition, as well as raising our own faith as prayers. We saw that we can either have the one who gave the word pray for the person who responded, or we could have members of a prayer team pray for those who respond to the words of knowledge. In other words, God can heal through word of knowledge even when one person gives the word and a different person prays for healing.
Then we collected several healing "tools" for our "ministry tool belt", including:
We followed that by looking at how physical ailments are sometimes (but not always) enemy attacks against what God doing in the person's life, such as vision or ear problems effecting those who He is gifting in the prophetic, knee and back problems for intercessors, feet problems for those with the gift of evangelism, etc. When that type of thing is going on, it is most effective to bless bless the gifting that God is putting in their life instead of addressing the sickness. We also looked at blessing prayers in general, as they are a powerful prayer strategy in their own merit. God wants to bless His children in many ares of their life: health, personal happiness, finance, family, interpersonal relationships, material possessions, friendships, growth opportunities and their spiritual well being.
We looked at the causes of sickness: strictly physical, emotional, spiritual or sometimes a combination of these. We saw that if the cause is strictly physical, we simply address the infirmity. If the cause is emotional, we want to bring healing to the whole person, their emotions (e.g., inner healing) as well as the physical condition. And if the cause is spiritual, it may be God dealing with the person or it may be enemy activity.
If a person is resisting God in an area of their life and the person is in rebellion against Him, God will sometimes bring sickness. This is not intended as a punishment, but as a wake-up call. If God's hand is on the person because they are resisting God (disobeying Him), they already know what the area of resistance is. The ministry strategy for this type of condition is to get the person to repent and make a commitment to change their thinking and behavior to better line up with God's. Most of the time, God lifts the illness He has imposed as soon as they come into agreement with His will.
Or the sickness can be the result of demonic activity. Again there can be many factors here, each of which requires a different prayer strategy. The person may simply have a demon that entered through some sin or though a generational stronghold on their family line. Or a spirit of infirmity may have attached to the person because of some deep loss, trauma, unforgiveness or sin. If so, deliverance is required.. to get rid of the demon. And you may have to get the person to repent or forgive to close rid of the demon's entry point.
Or the sickness can be a result of spiritual warfare counter attack. In this case, the demon is not attached to the person, but demonic activity is strategicly directed against the person because of the person's activities in advancing God's kingdom. If it is a low level demon, you can just use your authority in Christ to cancel it's assignment and command it to leave the person alone. But if it is a high level demon, like a power or principality, then you should not try to deal with this your own, but to mobilize intercessors to cover this individual in prayer.
There is one more type of enemy attack that causes sickness, which is when the person has been "delivered to the tormentors" for unforgiveness and/or bitterness, as per Matt 18:32-35. In this case, you don't have authority over the enemy to stop it's attack, because God has given them permission to torment. Your prayer strategy must be to get the person to repent and forgive, so that they "tormentors" no longer have a legal right to hold this person. After this legal right has been taken away from them, the healing prayer becomes very trivial and easy. But until the tormentor's authority is taken away, e.g., until the person forgives and repents, you won't be able to obtain any lasting results from healing prayer.
The prayer strategy we select will depend on what is causing the illness. That is why it is important to listen to God to hear what He wants you to deal with in prayer and what prayer strategy to use. We should be in the regular habit of asking God to show us how He wants us to pray each time that we are in a position to pray for a sick person.
And after we have prayed for the person, we must have them "test it out" and determine whether or not God healed them. We are to minister in love, and therefore should spend a little time doing post-prayer follow up with the person we prayed for. If they were healed, we want to teach them how to keep their healing. We must share how the enemy will sometimes try to bring the symptoms back to steal their healing, and teach them how to rebuke the symptoms and stand in faith. We encourage them to draw close to God and to be so filled with Him that here is no room for the enemy to come in with sickness. We encourage them to stretch their faith and pray for healing for others with similar conditions to what God healed them of. We also encourage them to look at their lifestyle and get rid of anything that might be conducive to bringing this disease back.. such as encouraging someone healed of high blood pressure to eliminate some of the stress and fast pace from their day-to-day life.
If the person was not fully healed, we want to encourage their faith rather than tearing them down. We should share how some healings are gradual rather than instant. So if they don't see a change in their symptoms now, they may see it within the next day or two. Jesus sometimes healed people in a gradual manner, "from that very hour" rather than instantly (Matthew 9:22, Matthew 15:28 and Matthew 17:18). Also talk about soaking prayer and how God sometimes likes us to receive prayer multiple times before He heals us. So encourage them to continue coming for prayer until they are fully healed.
I would like to close this series by passing on the challenge that John Wimber and Peter Wagner gave to me. "You must not say that you cannot heal the sick until you have prayed for 100 people in a row who have not been healed." So, I challenge you to try.. begin praying for the sick. I suspect that you won't even be able to pray for 20 people without seeing any results.. in fact most of you will see God do some sort of healing in response to your prayers by the first five or six times you pray, because God is a healing God. He loves to heal the sick. And He has already given those of us who are His disciples authority to heal the sick. So, as John Wimber would say, "Go do the stuff!"