Breaking Expectation Barriers In Healing

We have just spent the last 13 lessons looking at our expectations about how God heals. We did this with the understanding that we may need to adjust our expectations to match what God wants to do. When we minister healing, it is not about trying to convince God to do something that we want Him to do; it is about seeing what the Father is doing and doing it with Him. Jesus described it this way in John 5:9, "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."

As it turns out, God is a healing God. So if we do what the Father is doing, that will include healing sick people. Why? Because it is part of His very nature and character to heal the sick. We looked at that in lesson 5, and we found that one of God's personality traits is compassion and healing. We saw that healing was a part of the salvation that Jesus bought for us on Calvary. We saw that God ties physical healing into the sacrificial suffering and death of Jesus in both the Old and the New Testament. Isaiah 53:5 says, "But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed." 1 Peter 2:24 says, "He Himself Bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness--by whose stripes you were healed."

praying for the sick. Knowing God's character and nature helps us when sick people ask us the age-old question, "Is it God's will to heal me?" There are occasionally times when God requires something of us before He heals us, such as turning from sin or disobedience, but most of the time the answer is a hands-down, "Of course He wants to heal you, He is a healing God." Matthew 4:23-24 tells us, "Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about Him spread all over Syria, and people brought to Him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and He healed them." Jesus was all about healing the sick and Jesus only did what He saw the Father doing.

God is a healing God, it is part of His very DNA.

The problem is that God doesn't always heal the way we expect Him to heal. Sometimes our expectations can actually get in the way of healing. That almost happened to Naaman in 2 Kings 5:1-14. Naaman had lepers and the king sent him to the prophet Elijah for healing. Naaman had this grandiose mental image of how God was going to heal him, which involved Elijah coming out to meet him and calling on the name of his God in some mystical way, waving his hands all over the place. But instead Elijah sent is servant out to tell him to go wash in the Jordan river seven times to be healed. God's method did not match Naaman's expectations and Naaman almost refused to do what God asked. If he had refused, he would have not been healed. Finally someone talked him into doing it God's way, and he was instantly healed. But his expectations almost prevented him from receiving his healing.

Expectations still get in the way of healing today. In fact, one of our most troublesome modern-day healing expectations is that God either heals supernaturally or not at all. We saw in lessons 2 to 4 that God sometimes chooses to heal through doctors and medicine and medical procedures. In fact, God built healing into our bodies when He created us. He made us to be as resilient to sickness and self-healing as possible. He gave us immune systems to fight off germs. When we get cuts, our body heals itself. Broken bones grow back to form a solid piece. Our skin and organs constantly refresh themselves by producing new cells to replace damaged ones. God created our bodies to self-heal as much as possible because healing is part of His very nature, and we are created in His image.

I believe He created medicine for the same reason, because healing is part of Who He is. God has built medical properties into herbs and the Bible talks about that. For instance, Revelation 22:2 says, "In the middle of its street on either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations."

We must not discount God's role in healings that are not instant and not obviously supernatural. God heals miraculously and God also heals through medicine. It is not an "either or" choice between God and medicine, God can choose to heal through the medical route.

In fact, I have a friend named Urlinda who is a nurse in a hospital. She dispenses medicine and she prays for this sick. I talked to her husband yesterday and he told me that she had recently prayed for someone at her hospital with lung cancer, and that person was miraculously healed. She prayed for them shortly before they went in to have a surgical procedure to remove the cancer. The doctors got in and opened the person up, but they could not find the cancer. The person tested positively for cancer the day before the surgery, but after Urlinda prayed, the tests could not find cancer any more! Imagine that--God used a nurse to pray for someone in a hospital to supernaturally heal that person of cancer! (Sometimes I think that God enjoys showing His sense of humor as He heals the sick.)

Another modern-day expectation is that only people with the gift of healing can heal the sick. It is true that the Holy Spirit does give the gift of healing and that certain people are exceptionally gifted at praying for the sick and seeing them recover. But God never limits Himself to only heal through those people. Jesus expected that each and every believer would lay hands on the sick in His name and see them recover. (If you don't believe that, then read the last chapter of the book of Mark.)

If you belong to Jesus, the you should expect God to heal the sick through you. That is not to say that each and every sick person you pray for will be healed. That is not to say that you will see someone healed every day of week of every year. But God expects you to pray for the sick and He expects to heal them through you. The big problem that gets in the way of that is that our expectations don't match His. The average believer does not expect God to heal through them, so they don't pray for the sick. If we don't pray for someone because we don't feel qualified, we may be short-circuiting God's will to use us to heal that person.

Another wrong expectation is that God only heals through the laying on of hands. That is not the case. God can heal through straight prayer and intercession. (We looked at that in lesson 7.) You can pray for someone who is physically far away from you, and God can (and will) heal them that way. God is not limited by distance or by physical touch. It is possible to intercede for a sick person and to see God heal that person's body in response to your prayer.

Another wrong expectation is that if we are sick, we need someone else to pray for us in order for us to be healed. We looked at that expectation in lesson 8. God doesn't just answer prayers prayed on the behalf of other people. He also hears and answers prayers that go like this: "Lord, I am sick, please heal me!" In fact, we have examples in the Bible of God healing a sick person when they for themselves. We looked at an example of this from King Hezekiah's life in 2 Kings 20. Hezekiah had finished all of the tasks that God had for him and God said it was time for him to come home (e.g. to Heaven). So Hezekial contracted a fatal boil. When in inquired of God, God told him that it was his time to die. But Hezekiah did not want to die and he began to pray and plead with God to heal him. God listened to Hezekiah's prayers and added 15 years to his life. The bottom line is that God listens and hears us when we pray for ourselves. Many times He will heal us when we ask Him to.

Another wrong expectation is that all sin is of the devil and the sick person is always an innocent victim. There are times that this statement is true, but not all of the time. The Bible tells us that physical sickness is one of the curses of breaking God's law. There are times when a person's sin or rebellion is what is making them sick. It doesn't matter how well and how long you pray for them--they are not going to be healed until the deal with that sin (or that disobedience).

Lesson six gave an example of that from Aimee McPherson's life. She went to China as a newlywed with her husband. He died on the mission field, and she came close to dieing herself. She came home with an infant baby and married another man. God called her to preach the gospel, but her husband did not want her to do this. She had to choose between obeying God and obeying her husband. At first she choose to be a good wife and to obey her husband. God was not pleased. He began to pressure her, but she continued to refuse His call. She finally ended up in the hospital on her deathbed. No amount of healing prayer would have helped her at that point. Why? Because the issue was disobedience and the only way that she could be healed is if she repented and choose to obey God.

As it turned out, she was on deathwatch, where she was in a private room and being supervised by a nurse tasked to make her last few moments on earth as comfortable as possible. She was not expected to live more than a few hours, and was quite literally waiting to die when God spoke to her. He gave her the choice one last time to obey Him and preach the gospel. She realized that she would die if she said "no" because she had been disobeying God. So she repented and committed to obey Him. God healed her instantly. She sat up in bed and gave the death watch nurse quite a shock.

She went on to become a very powerful evangelist and healing minister. In Aimee's case, her sickness was a result of her deliberate choice to disobey God. As soon as she repented of it, God healed her. Not everyone is sick because of the devil. Some people are sick because God's hand is on them. When that happens, no amount of healing prayer will help them. The only way they can get well is if they respond to God by doing what He wants them to do or by repenting of whatever sin is making them sick.

Another misconception that many of us have is that when we pray for healing, we are dealing with something that is purely physical in nature. There are times when that is the case, but often there are psychological or spiritual factors that cause the physical problem. We looked at that in lessons 9 and 10. We saw that when Jesus ministered to someone, He ministered to the whole person and not just to their physical condition. We looked at the paralytic in Matthew 9:1-8, and saw that his condition was brought on by guilt over some past sin. Jesus ministered to the guilt first by forgiving his sins. Then Jesus healed his physical body.

If we pray for someone who is sick because of mental, emotional or psychological factors, we usually need to minister to those factors before the person can receive healing. Likewise, if the sickness is caused by a demon, we need to get rid of the demon before we can get the person healed.

Finally, we looked at the role of faith in healing (lessons 11 to 13). We saw that faith plays a very complex role in healing. Some people teach that you cannot heal unless you have perfect faith. Others teach that the only faith you need is enough faith to be willing to pray for a sick person. There are many different expectations about faith, but faith turns out to be a complex subject. We saw that faith is necessary for healing, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the faith of the person who is doing the praying. It can be the faith of the sick person or the faith of a friend or relative.

We also saw that lack of faith can act as a barrier to prevent the healing and we learned that at Jesus actually manipulated His environment to remove disbelief. There were times when He controlled who was allowed to be present at the ministry session, eliminating those who were steeped in disbelief. There were also times when He would intentionally move a person out of an geographic area that had a stronghold of unbelief and pray for them outside of that stronghold. We learned that it is not enough just to have faith, we may also need to control our prayer environment to try and eliminate things that inhibit faith.

The bottom line is that we should expect God to heal the sick, because He is indeed a healing God, and we should expect Him to heal them through us. But we don't want to try to dictate to God how He should heal. We don't want our expectation to get in the way like Naaman's did. We don't want limit what God can do through us or in our lives. We want to be open to whatever God wants to do and we want to be yielded to Him. In fact, we want to be like Jesus, who watched what the father was doing, and then went and did it with Him.

So I would like to close this teaching series with a simple prayer:

Heavenly Father,

Please open our eyes to see what You are doing. Please begin to remove any wrong expectations from us that limit us and that hinder us from doing what You are doing with you.

Please begin to release greater measures of Your power and anointing in our lives. We want to see what You are doing and we want to do it with You, in Your power and anointing. Please work in our lives to make that possible.

Thank you Lord. Amen.