Breaking Expectation Barriers In Healing

Controlling The Faith Environment

Our last lesson looked at how Jesus purposely manipulated His environment to remove doubt and disbelief when He wanted to do a big miracle. A little girl had died (before her time) and Jesus wanted to raise her from the dead. He only brought three of His disciples with Him because the other nine did not have the necessary faith. He arrived at the dead girl's house and found it full of doubters and scoffers, so He had them removed from the scene. Jesus went out of is way to create a faith environment before He did the big miracle. There may be times when we need to follow His example and do that as well.

There is a healing minister named Charles N'Diffon who sees a lot of big miracles. I have served on prayer teams at his meetings a few times. One time when he was in San Jose, I brought a sick friend to him for prayer. He surprised me by getting in to a very prolonged conversation with my friend. Among other things, he shared testimonies of people he had prayed for who had a condition similar to hers, and how God had healed them. This conversation went on for about 15 minutes while everyone else stood there waiting for their turn for prayer.

At one point he asked her, "Do you think that God wants to heal you?" Her answer was, "I don't think so, probably not." They talked some more, then shook hands and he began praying for other people. He did not pray for her.

I asked him about it later on that evening. "Why didn't you pray for my friend?" His answer was that she was convinced that God would not heal her, so praying would not only be a waste of time, it would also weaken her faith for healing--which was tenuously weak to begin with. She was not going to get healed if she was convinced God would not heal her. Then he gave me an assignment. My assignment was to talk with her and try to get her to realize that maybe God might be willing to heal her. He wanted me to bring her back to the next meeting if I could convince her of that. She did not have to have faith that she would be healed, she merely had to concede the possibility that maybe she might be healed. I had lunch with her the next day and worked on that point, discussing "Why wouldn't God want to heal you?"

The reason Charles had not prayed for her the first time was because he perceived an impenetrable disbelief barrier. He tried to get rid of that barrier by talking to her, telling her testimonies of similar healings etc. He even did a little exegesis about healing from Scripture. My friend's disbelief remained strong throughout the conversation, though she did enjoy talking with him.

At first I had been a little offended that he did not pray for her but she wasn't offended at all. It had been a good encounter for her and she viewed it positively. When I talked to her the next day, I realized that Charles had been right. My friend had been processing the stuff they talked about, and she is a slow processor. If he had prayed for her right then, while she was still steeped in doubt, she would not have been healed and would have taken the lack of healing as imperial evidence that God doesn't heal today.

But at lunch she finally conceded the fact that maybe God might want to heal her. She came back to the meeting with me that evening and she received prayer and she got a partial healing. Charles had done the same thing Jesus did. He found strong disbelief in the ministry situation, so he worked to overcome that disbelief before he ministered to her.

Let me share another story with you. This is a testimony I heard from someone on one of my ministry trips. There was a lady who went to the hospital to pray for her seriously sick mother-in-law. Both of the lady's sister-in-laws were there with their mother, and they gave her a hard time about praying for healing. The sort of made fun of her and the mother-in-law was hesitant about having prayer, and things did not go well. She did not see any evidence of any sort of healing. She left the room in tears, vowing to herself that she would never go pray for the sick again because it had been such a grueling experience for her.

God told her to go back the next day at precisely 3:00 PM. She did not want to, but the Holy Spirit really convicted her, so she went. When she got there, the mother-in-law was alone in the room, her daughters were not at the hospital. The mother-in-law apologized for the previous night, saying that she really wanted prayer but she was afraid to offend her strongly opinionated daughters. The mother-in-law asked her if she'd be willing to pray for her again--this time without the interference of "the girls," and she agreed to pray. The mother-in-law felt a pleasant warmth come over her as they prayed and the pain went away. She was very tired, so she left the hospital so her mother-in-law could get some sleep.

This lady got an interesting call that evening from one of her sisters-in-law. "I heard you went back to the hospital this afternoon, against my wishes, to pray for Mom?"

"Yes, I went to visit her and she asked me to pray."

"Well, whatever you did, it worked! The doctor said she has had a marked and unexplainable improvement, and she is being released tomorrow morning."

The prayer had been ineffective the first time, because of the doubt and hostility in the room. But when she went back the second time, the disbelief barrier been removed (e.g., the opinionated daughters were not present), and the prayer was effective.

You might want to think about disbelief barriers the next time you pray for someone who is not healed. Mentally re-check the environment and see if there was someone there who served as an obstacle to faith. Or perhaps the sick person needed a faith "booster shot." Maybe they needed to hear you say something to them to help build their faith before you pray for them. If you, you might want to build faith and then pray again.

Remember that Jesus manipulated His ministry environment to improve faith for healing. If He did it, then There might be times when you need to do it as well.

Territorial Spirits Of Disbelief

Let's look at one more example of Jesus controlling the faith environment. Look at the story of the blind man from Mark 8:22-25. "22 Then He came to Bethsaida; and they brought a blind man to Him, and begged Him to touch him. 23 So He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the town. And when He had spit on his eyes and put His hands on him, He asked him if he saw anything. 24 And he looked up and said, 'I see men like trees, walking.' 25 Then He put His hands on his eyes again and made him look up. And he was restored and saw everyone clearly."

This passage is a favorite of proponents of the "spiritual warfare camp." They suggest that there was a territorial spirit of disbelief over the city, and that Spirit inhibited the flow of the miraculous in that city. The spirit had a geographic area that it controlled, which matched the boarders of the town named Bethsadia. The spirit could effect people who were geographically inside of the city, but lost it's power when they left town. They suggest that Jesus took the man outside of the city gates to remove him from the influence of the territorial spirit of disbelief over Bethsadia. Once the man was free from this territorial spirit's influence, it became easier for Jesus to heal Him.

I think that is actually a pretty plausible explanation. In fact, it is the only logical reason I have heard for whey Jesus choose to take the man out of the city before healing him. There can be little "strongholds" of belief. If you pray for someone in one of those strongholds, you probably won't see nearly the same level as if you pray for them somewhere else.

C. Peter Wagner documents several cases of this sort of thing. I took a beginning spiritual warfare class from him at Fuller Seminary, and one of the examples he gave in class really stands out in my memory. There was an evangelical outreach in this certain city in Argentina. People there seemed to be extremely resistant to the gospel and it was a total waste of time trying to witness to them. The team members were starting to get frustrated. Then this odd thing happened.

One of the team members had been witnessing to someone who dropped something. They noticed in on the ground and picked it up and followed the person across the street to return it to them. This same person who had been totally unreceptive to the gospel suddenly became very interested in it. They had a brief discussion and then the person prayed to receive the Lord.

The person told the team leader about that. The team leader got the idea that maybe the physical street also represented some spiritual barrier as well. Maybe the territory on one side of the street was controlled by a demon that made people resistant to the gospel, but the other side of the street was not. The leader decided to test his theory by repositioning his teams on the other side of the street. It was like night and day difference. Suddenly everyone was very open to the gospel and many prayed to receive the Lord. It turns out that they had been trying to witness in an area controlled by spirit that blinded people to the gospel, and they did not have much success witnessing . As soon as they moved out of the area of that spirit's control, then they started having all sorts of success in sharing the gospel.

The example I just shared is not about physical healing, but it illustrates how a given geographical area may be under the influence of a particular demon. The demon seems to be able to exercise some degree of control over what happens in it's area. If an area is ruled by a spirit of disbelief, it is going to be hard to get physical healings in that demon's territory. But if you move the sick person out of the demon's area of control to pray for them, then the territorial spirit is not able to interfere with the healing any more.

What does that mean to us when we have a sick person who we want to pray for? It means that if we pray for them and nothing happens, the problem might be environmental. You might be praying in an area that has a stronghold of unbelief. If that sick person is a friend or relative, you might want to try moving them to another area and praying for them there. Maybe you need to do like Jesus did and take them out of town (and out of the control of the spirit of disbelief). You might want to think about hopping in the car to go to a nice park that is outside of the city and pray there for ten or fifteen minutes. We need to do what we can to foster faith and to disable and overcome any disbelief that is interfering with the healing.