A Beginner's Guide To Healing

In the last lesson, we looked at exercising our God-given authority over the enemy to break the yoke of sickness and infirmity off of people. We examined anointing with oil and deliverance. We are going to continue looking at authority models of healing prayer. In this lesson, we will study:

• Commanding the person to be healed. (Luke 18:41-43)
• Command body parts to work properly. (Mark 7:32-35)
• Commanding the person to do the impossible. (Matt 12:9-13)
• Forcing the person to do the impossible. (Acts 3:2-8)

These prayer methods fall into what I call "intermediate" and "advanced" prayer techniques. You need to hear clearly from God or be led of the Spirit to do these. If you do it when God is not leading you, you could cause some harm or do some damage. If His anointing and His power are present, then God will do a miraculous healing and He sometimes expects us to use these prayer techniques. But you don't want to do them when God is not doing them. For instance, you do not want to make a practice of dragging people out of wheelchairs unless the Lord shows you to do that. If you did that "on your own" you might harm or injure the person, the might end up in worse condition than before you prayed. We must never be hurtful or abusive in our healing ministry. We need to be led of the Lord and we need to do what He directs us to do. But we need to be careful not to do the things in this lesson if God is not doing them with us.

While I am on the subject of avoiding "abuse", I would like to touch briefly on one other thing. If you pray for a person and the Lord does NOT heal them, do not accuse them of not having enough faith. It may be that God is doing something that requires soaking prayer over a period of time (we will talk about this in a later lesson). Do not do anything to damage or tear down their faith or to make them feel bad about seeking God for healing. Instead, build them up in faith. That way, they will have even more faith for healing the next time that they are prayed for.

Now, let's look at these authority healing models.

Commanding The Person To Be Healed

A lot of Jesus's healing prayers were more like commands. He would tell one person to "see" or tell another to "rise up and walk." Jesus would command a person to receive their healing or to be healed. The person had the option to say "no" and refuse His command.. but since they were there to be healed, they had no intention of purposely chosing to disobey Jesus. Here is an example of how Jesus commanded people to be healed. It is from Luke 18:41-43:

41 "What do you want me to do for you?" "Lord, I want to see," he replied. 42 Jesus said to him, "Receive your sight; your faith has healed you." 43 Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus, praising God. When all the people saw it, they also praised God.

Likewise, there will be times when the Holy Spirit moves us to command that a person be healed. We will be speaking in His authority when He has us do this, so the anointing will be present to heal the person. God will make it possible for them to obey that command, providing He is the one who originated it.

Command Body Parts To Work Properly

This is very similar to commanding a person to be healed. The difference is that instead of talking to the person, you talk to the body part. We see Jesus do this in Mark 7:32-35:

32 There some people brought to him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged him to place his hand on the man. 33 After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man's ears. Then he spit and touched the man's tongue. 34 He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, "Ephphatha!" (which means, "Be opened!"). 35 At this, the man's ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly.

Now, ears (and other body parts) do not have a will of their own. The ear cannot decide whether or not to engage it's faith, because ears don't have faith. The ear cannot decide whether or not to obey the command. The man in Luke 18 could have said "no, I will not receive this healing." He could have refused it and then he would not have been healed. But the ear had no such choice. Jesus did not command the deaf man to receive his healing. Jesus did not offer him a choice. Instead, Jesus commanded the ear to "be opened." The the power of God on the ear and made it possible for the body part to obey the command. In this case God did not offer a choice, His power came on the body part and it had to do what God commanded.. it had to be opened, it had to start functioning correctly.

I had my first exposure to commanding body parts when I took that healing class at Fuller seminary. Peter Wagner was praying for someone with chronic lower back pain. He had them sit down and measured their legs to find that one leg was a full inch shorter than the other. So he commanded the shorter let to grow, and it did, right there in front of all of us. We watched as the leg lengthened and became the same length as the other.

Since this was a class, we were all eager to imitate what had been modeled. We all went out of our way to find people who had one leg shorter than the other. Personaly, I found three such people that day. In all three cases, I sat them squarely against the back of the chair, just like Peter had done. I held their legs up (e.g, straight knees), allowing both legs to rest on in my hands. I looked at their heels to see the difference in leg length. The difference was usually about 1/2 inch. Then I commanded the shorter leg to grow in Jesus' name. In all cases, I did not move my hands in any manner. I did not pull on the short leg, I merely commanded it to grow. And in all cases, the leg lengthed until the heels were even. At the time it was a "big wow!" to me. In all cases, the people I prayed for got back to me later on to report that their constant back pain had totally disappeared as well. Apparently the back pain was caused by strain on the back from having different length legs.

Most of the people in the class had a similar experience to mine. To this day, I still find "leg lengthening" to be the easiest healing for me to see God do. I have never seen a leg refuse to grow when I commanded it to do so.

There have been times when God has told me to give commands to other body parts. When I do this at God's command, then the body part always seems to do what I tell it to do. However, I have tried commanding body parts a few times when God did not direct me to do so, and then nothing happened. When God is the source behind the command, the body part has no choice, it must obey. Blind eyes see, deaf ears hear, damaged nerves regenerate, feeble legs are strengthened and become able to walk. God is well able to command broken or defective body parts to start working correctly.

Commanding The Person To Do The Impossible

9 Going on from that place, He went into their synagogue, 10 and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, they asked him, "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?" 11 He said to them, "If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? 12 How much more valuable is a man than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath."

13 Then he said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other.

The person who most sticks out in my mind is Charles N'Diffon. Charles will often say, "OK, do the impossible, just do it and God will heal you as you do it." Once he told a lady with an injured shoulder to raise her arm over her head. She replied, "I can't do that, my arm won't go higher than shoulder level. See?" She began to demonstrate, by raising her arm.. to her surprise it went clear over her head and straight up. Her eyes got big and she said, "Wait a minute.. this should hurt, but there is no pain!" God had healed her as she obeyed the command to raise her arm. She did not have great faith, she did not expect to be able to do what she was commanded to do. But she had enough faith so that she tried it. And God healed her!

By Forcing The Person To Do The Impossible

I have never done this, but I have seen it demonstrated before. I remember when a friend had a whiplash and was in a neck brace. A visiting minister prayed for her. I can't remember who that was, it might have been Kim Clement. He was anything but gentle. I remember feeling concerned that he might hurt her because he was a bit rough and her neck was so injured. Then he did something that horrified me and made me mad. He grabbed my friend's head with both hands and began turning her head strongly from side to side. The first few seconds, she screamed in pain. A man near me began to get out of his seat to go put a stop to this. I did not think this was God's leading, I thought she was being abused. I was wrong. Suddenly she said, "The pain is gone!" She was healed as he physically forced her to turn her head. She removed her neck brace and never needed it again.

In this case he had heard from God and God's power came as he forced her to do the impossible. The apostle Peter had a similar experience in Acts 3:2-8, when he dragged the crippled man to his feet.

2And a certain man lame from his mother's womb was carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful, to ask alms from those who entered the temple; 3who, seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, asked for alms. 4And fixing his eyes on him, with John, Peter said, "Look at us." 5So he gave them his attention, expecting to receive something from them. 6Then Peter said, "Silver and gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk." 7And he took him by the right hand and lifted him up, and immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength. 8So he, leaping up, stood and walked and entered the temple with them--walking, leaping, and praising God.