Breaking Expectation Barriers In Healing

I want to quickly review what we have been doing, so that we can add to it in this lesson. We have been looking at different things that make people sick and how to pray for them. At the same time, we have been trying to identify and break past our expectation barriers in those areas, so that we don't limit God in terms of how He may want to heal.

We have looked at a two different types of sickness so far. The first is the easiest type to understand and pray for. It is what I call "natural sickness"--e.g., sickness which is purely physical in nature, a result of simple cause-and-effect. Let me give you a few examples: you get in a car accident and you break a bone. You get around someone with something contagious and you catch it from them. You consume carcinogens in your diet and you get cancer. All of these are simple cause and effect, and most of them have routine medical treatments. But God can also heal these things. Jesus did that when He walked on the earth.

If Jesus healed someone who had one of these simple physical conditions, He prayed simple and straightforward prayers. He did things like commanding the disease to go, commanding a damaged body part to function properly, commanding the person to do the thing they could not do before, etc. There was nothing for Him to address other than the physical problem itself, so that is all He addressed.

But not all illnesses that Jesus healed were that simple and straightforward. Some sicknesses are more complex because they are caused by mental and/or emotional factors. (This includes things like stress, fear, shame, guilt, relationship problems, unforgiveness, unconfused sin in our lives, etc.) These non-physical problems produce real physical symptoms and cause tangible illnesses. But if you just address the illness they cause, you won't make much progress in seeing the person get healed. These conditions are a bit harder to pray for, because you have to deal with the emotional and/or mental component as well as with the physical problem.

Jesus ministered to sick people in the Bible had this added level of complexity. He always seemed to know what the problem was and how to pray for it. When He prayed for people who had the mental or emotional component, He did not ignore that part of the problem. He addressed the concerns of the whole person, not just their physical illness. For instance, we looked at one such prayer in the previous lesson: the paralyzed man whose friends let him down to Jesus through the roof. The man needed to walk but that was not all he needed. He also suffered from intense guild and sin issues. Jesus dealt with the other issues first, then He healed the man's physical body. (I went on to suggest that when emotional or mental issues cause a physical problem, you probably need to address them to make the person "willing" to receive their healing.)

So far we have looked at two dimensions of healing: illnesses that are purely physical and those which have mental and/or emotional roots. That is complex in and over itself, but healing prayer is "three dimensional," so it needs to get even a bit more complex. The other dimension that we need to deal with is the spiritual dimension. By that, I mean demons and the realm of the demonic.

This area should not come as a surprise to you. The Bible tells us that there are demons who specializes in causing physical sickness and disease. It refers to some of them as "spirits of infirmity." It also names certain types of disease-producing spirits by the name of the physical problem they cause: "mute spirits," "deaf spirits," "blind spirits," etc. The Bible makes it very clear that demons cause physical problems and sicknesses. I think that most believers are aware of this; pretty much anyone who prays for the sick believes in demons and realizes that some of the sicknesses they pray for are caused by demons.

But I think that many of us tend to underestimate just how big or a role those demons play in a person's health. Many of us don't realize how important deliverance can be in obtaining healing. This is particularly true in Western thinking, because we have been trained since infancy to have a scientific "mindset." That mindset makes us tend to discount the demonic anytime that there is another logical explanation. We give the demons credit when there isn't another logical explanation, but we tend to have a bias towards science over spiritual causes. And because of that, there are times when we don't rebuke demons or spirits of infirmity, and we can't seem to get the person healed.

I was curious about how people think, so I did a survey one time. I asked people what percentage of sickens they thought was caused by demons. Most of them felt that it was very low--somewhere between 10 and 25%. Most of the people acknowledged the role of demons in sickness, but they felt it was the exception rather than the general rule.

My own thinking started along the same lines. I knew that demons caused sickness and whenever God would show me the activity of a demon in illness, I would rebuke it. My thinking was that demons were active maybe 10 to 15 per cent of the time. But as I would pray for the sick at various meetings, I noticed that God seemed to lead me to rebuke demons for more than half of the people I prayed for. That seemed like a lot to me, and I did not want to fall into a pattern of wrongly blaming demons for everything. That motivated me to do some very simple research on the topic. I was trying to answer the question, what per cent of the time did Jesus heal someone by casting out a demon.

I did not have a lot of time to sit down and collect every healing passage in the Bible and analyze it, so I decided to take a "short cut." I used Bible software to search the gospels for passages about healing and for passages about deliverance. I thought that maybe I would find a four-to-one ration or a five-to-one ratio (e.g. 4 or 5 regular healings for each deliverance.) But to my surprise, I found 84 verses in the gospels that contained the word "heal," and I also found 84 verses in the Bible that talked about demons and unclean spirits. I was shocked to find that the gospels spend as much time about demons as they do about physical healing. They were not precisely the same verses--sometimes demons were mentioned outside of the context of healing and sometimes healing was mentioned without a reference to demons. But most of the time, the two were mentioned together.

I was a bit surprised at my findings...I thought maybe it would talk about deliverance 1/3 as much as it talked about healing the sick. I was wrong--the gospel talks about demons and casting them out just as much as it talks about healing the sick. There is not a one-to-one correlation. I am not saying that every single healing Jesus did was also a deliverance, because some of them clearly were not. But a lot of them were. I don't know the exact percentage of times that Jesus or the disciples healed someone by casting out a demon, but it seems to be at least half of the time.

The bottom line is that there is a lot of demonic activity that causes physical sickness! We may need to revise our thinking and put more of our time and energy into dealing with the demonic. We might start seeing more healings if we do that. But at the same time, we must not assume that all sickness comes from demons.

Let me illustrate from the Bible, where Jesus healed some speech impediments. The first was a man in Mark 6:32-24. In this case, Jesus spit on the man's tongue and commanded his ears to be opened. The deaf man started hearing and speaking clearly. It was a straight physical healing. But the Lord ministered to another man in Luke 11:14. That time He handled it by casting out a "mute spirit." The passage reads, "And He was casting out a demon, and it was mute. So it was, when the demon had gone out, that the mute spoke; and the multitudes marveled."

In both cases, we have the same physical problem, a speech impediment. In one case it was caused by a demon and in the other case it was natural causes. I don't want us to get carried away and blame demons for everything. But I do want us to give credit where credit is due, and respond by getting rid of any demon that is making someone sick.

When we deal with demons, we need to be aware that not all demons are the same. Some are relatively weak spirits that specialize in "infirmity" and they tend to be very easy to get rid of. Others specialize in a specific type of illness and some of those can be very strongly attached and quite difficult to get rid of.

The most common type of demon is the "spirit of infirmity." In general, these demons go quickly, often without any inner healing ministry and with just a single command. I believe that this is the type of demon that Philip cast out in Acts 8:6-8. The passage reads, "6When the crowds heard Philip and saw the miraculous signs he did, they all paid close attention to what he said. 7With shrieks, evil spirits came out of many, and many paralytics and cripples were healed. 8So there was great joy in that city."

The fact that the demons came out "of many" with shrieks suggests that the deliverance was either done corporately (Phillip prayed over the people as a group) or very quickly in one-on-one situations. There is no suggestion of him spending a lot of time with each person. The results were that as demon's left, people were healed of the physical problems that the demon had caused. (A lot of paralysis was healed in this particular case). It must have been a glorious healing meeting and I wish I could have been there to experience it along with Phillip. God's main emphasis was on providing a testimony of Jesus and He was backing up the proclamation of the gospel with healings. That is why there were so many of them and they came so fast.

If we lift the sheet and look behind the scenes, I think we will find that God caused many who had those simple easy-to-get-rid-of spirits of infirmity to come to Philip's meeting. Then God asked Philip to speak forth His authority and command the demons to go, and they could not leave fast enough. I am sure there was an added measure of God's power and authority on Philip, but I also believe that for the most part he was dealing with the low level spirits of infirmity that are easy to get rid of. And the result was massive healings.

The Bible also gives some examples of more strongly attached demons, ones who require longer ministry time and who don't go out as easily. The most famous case of that comes from Matthew 17. A father brought his epileptic son to the disciples for healing. The disciples discerned that it was a demon, but they were unable to heal the boy. The father appealed to Jesus in verse 16, saying, "I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal him." Jesus had to pray minister deliverance to the boy. He rebuked the demon (verse 18) and the boy was healed. Later on the disciples gathered around Jesus and asked Him why they could not get that demon out. Jesus said that faith was a factor, but also this particular demon "does not go out except by prayer and fasting" (verse 21). IN other words, Jesus said that some demons are harder to get rid of than others.

Jesus Himself spent more time delivering some people than He spent on others. Some demons left with just a single command, but not all of them. One example is the tomb-dwelling demoniacs who called themselves "Legion" in Mark 5:1-15 and Luke 8:26-36. Jesus had a more involved confrontation with those demons, it took Him longer to set the demonized man free. Also, the demons seemed to be a bit more out-of-control when they were cast out. They came out in a demonstrative way that ended up getting Jesus expelled from the area so that He could not continue to minister there.

What have we learned so far? We have learned that demons are a factor in sickness and must be dealt with. You can't heal a demonized person's disease if you don't get rid of the demon. Also, some disease-causing demons come out easier than others. some come out with just a word and others require an in-depth ministry session.

There seem to be a lot of spirits of infirmity floating around, causing health problems. Perhaps they get away with more than they should because our westernized societies don't believe in demons or recognize the role that they play in sickness. It seems that demons are responsible for (or involved in) about half of the medical problems I pray for. That is why I have started to make it a general practice to rebuke any spirits of infirmity any time I am not sure precisely what is going on. Those spirits come out so easily that if they are there, the catch-all prayer usually gets rid of them.

However, if there is a more strongly attached demon, then a simply global rebuke prayer won't get rid of it. In those cases we need to hear from God and break the demon's stronghold over the person before we can get rid of it. Occasionally I will spend 15 minutes or so with an individual at the end of a meeting, but most of the time I schedule a private appointment when more involved deliverance ministry is needed.