[Lesson Index] [Healing-School Mini-Series Index] [Prev Lesson] [Next Lesson]
God designed and created us, so He knows us very well and He is familiar with all aspects of how we work. He knows that things are not always the way they appear to be. God knows that at times we think we are sick, but physical sickness is not really the problem. There are times that people come to us for prayer with what looks like a routine physical problem, but no amount of physical healing prayer will help them because what they really need is inner healing and mental wholeness.
Doctors agree that Our mental and emotional state has a very direct effect on our physical health. The medical profession has even come up with a term for this: "psychosomatic illness." They use that term to refer to a sickens that is cased by emotional and psychological factors instead of straight physical ones. Some medical journals attribute over half of our present-day illnesses to psychosomatic causes. Other medical journals say that even when the illness has a purely physiological cause, the state of the patients mental and emotional health will determine how fast and now well that patient will recover.
The basic premise is that if the person doesn't want to get well down deep in their innermost being, they won't recover very well. That is not only true for when doctors treat us, it is also true when we pray for healing. If we pray for the physical roots of problem that is caused by emotional roots, the person probably is not going to get healed.
Let me give you an example from Scripture. Do you remember the story of the paralytic who's friends let him down through the roof in Matthew 9:1-8? (It is also told in Mark 2:1-7 and Luke 5:17-25.)
There was a man who had a real tangible physical problem--he was paralyzed and could not walk. Normally paralysis is caused by things like nerve damage, deterioration of the skeletal system, atrophy of muscles, etc. Usually when you pray for a paralyzed person, you would do things like command the nerves to regenerate, speak strength to the skeletal system, etc. However, when Jesus prayed for this man, he did not do any of those things. That is because Jesus discerned that the man's problem was psychosomatic, not purely physical.
Yes, the symptoms were physical, but the underlying root was not. The man suffered from guilt from sin to the point where it has completely disabled him. That is why Jesus addressed the emotional side of the problem before He addressed the physical side. That is why He said, "Your sins are forgiven you," instead of simply commanding the man to walk.
Jesus' approach raised quite a stir among the Pharisees. They had grown used to Jesus healing physical bodies, but they had a serious problem with His pronouncing sin forgiven. Jesus did not say this just to annoy the religious leaders of His day; He said it because He perceived it was necessary for the main's healing. The man laying before Him was wrecked with sin and guilt, and the Lord choose to heal the heart/emotions before He healed the body. Personally, I am not sure if the paralyzed man would have been willing to receive a straight physical healing from Jesus. I think the sin and guilt he suffered would have prevented his faith from engaging enough to receive his healing, and that is why Jesus pronounced him forgiven before He pronounced him healed. Jesus did not just deal with the physical condition, He dealt with the who person.
There are times when we need to do the same thing Jesus did. Some people are in need of a simple physical healing, they need a deeper touch from God. I remember one time many years ago when I was ministering to a man who had crippling arthritis. I did not know anything about praying for physical healing at that time, but I knew how to minister inner healing. His wife sat in on the ministry session because he believed that some of his issues were sexual in nature, and he wanted her present and aware of anything that surfaced.
It turned out they were not really sexual so much as shame based over a single rather "innocent" sexual incident that happened back when he was only five years old. His parents separated and his father bought him a tricycle as a parting gift. The little boy had wanted a tricycle for a long time and was anxious to ride it the next morning. In fact, he was so anxious to ride it that the did not bother to get dressed before he went into the front yard to ride his bike. His mother woke up to find him riding his tricycle around the front yard, completely naked.
Admittedly, five is a little old to be in the front yard in the buff. But it was not a sexual thing for him, it was about riding his new tricycle around the yard.
The problem was in how his mother reacted. She yanked him off of the bike and spanked him within an inch of his life. She yelled at him for hours and accused him of being a wicked, dirty, evil little boy. She suggested that the devil was going to poke him over and over again with his pitchfork as punishment for this shameless crime. (It is not surprising that he developed arthritis later on, which feels like being stuck with a pitch fork in the joints.) The mother's reaction evoked a very deep shame in this little boy, on that he never overcame even as a fifty year old adult man with grown children of his own. The man deeply believed that he was bad and wicked and deserved to be punished over and over again for his childish intercession. In fact, he was sure that both his wife and I would be horrified when we heard his "deep dark secret." He could not believe that we did not think that what had been his greatest and most secret shame for all of these years was not such a big deal. I think that was very healing in and of itself in breaking the power of shame.
But since this was such a big sin to him, I led him to through repenting and renouncing and receiving God's forgiveness. Personally I don't think he had done anything he needed to be forgiven of as five year olds are not expected to have adult judgment and maturity. But it was a very big deal to him and he needed to deal with it before the Lord. Once he had confessed his "sin" and received forgiveness for it, this amazing thing happened. The pain went away almost immediately and over the next few days, the swelling in his joints began to go down as well.
The thing that had been causing his physical problem was not physical in nature, it was brought on by guilt and shame and an untrue belief that he needed to be punished. When God healed the inner thing, the physical healing took place as well.
There are many people like him today--their real problem is not the physical symptom, it is an inner issue that God must heal before they are willing to become well. If we just pray for the physical symptoms, we can pray until we are blue in the face, and we probably won't see a healing. My doctor once told me, "You have to treat the right problem to get the cure." When the problem is inner, then no amount of straight physical healing prayer is going to fix things.
The Bible has many verses that let us know that God likes to heal the whole man in order to bring us physical health. There are many verses that talk about emotional and mental things that make us sick. In fact, it spends a great deal of time instructing us to forgive others, because God knows that unforgiveness and bitterness can make us very seriously sick. In fact, God counts it as a sin when we hold unforgiveness in our heart towards others, and unrepeated sin can cause sickness. That is why James 5:16 says, "Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."
Unforgiveness is a very important factor in physical healing. I have taught on this a lot in other courses, so I am only mentioning it briefly here. If a sick person holds unforgiveness sin their heart, that (in and of itself) can be enough to prevent the person from getting healed.
Let me illustrate with the parable of the unforgiving debtor from Matthew 18:21-35. This is one of Jesus' most famous teachings on forgiveness, and it is very powerful. He tells the story of a man who fell into a great debt, pleaded for mercy and was just a king's ransom of debt. Then he ran into a fellow debtor who owed him a much smaller amount and threw him into debtor's prison. The king heard about hit and got made. He threw the man into prison because he wouldn't forgive the other debt after having just been forgiven such a big debt of his own.
Do you remember what Jesus said at the end of that parable in verses 34 and 35? He said that if we do not forgive, then our Heavenly Father will deliver us to the torturers until we should pay all the debt (e.g., until unforgiveness runs it's full course in our lives). That is basically saying that if we have unforgiveness in our heart, then the devil has a legal right to torment us, including things like physical sickness, financial ruin, etc. If a person has been delivered to the torturers for unforgiveness, then no amount of healing prayer is going to help them if they won't forgive.
But unforgiveness is the only relational thing that can make us sick-- there are all sorts of them: stress in relationships, fear or rejection, arguing and contention, etc. Bad relationships/interactions with others can make us sick, and good ones can bring healing to us. Here are a few verses from Proverbs just to illustrate the point:
So what is the main point of this lesson? It is to make us aware that God's agenda for the person may not be what it first appears to be. God wants to heal the whole person, not just their physical infirmity. He wants them to walk in forgiveness, peace and love. God knows that there are times when the sickness isn't really a physical problem at all, but an inner hurt that must be resolved before physical healing can take place. If we don't pay attention to what God wants to do in the person's life and we just try to heal the physical problem, we may miss the mark entirely. Some physical conditions can only be healed when God works with non-physical factors in the person's life.