Healing -- Dare To Believe

Many believers have experienced some type of supernatural healing in their body. That makes it easier for them to pray for the sick. It is easier to believe that God heals today when you have personally experienced healing. But not everyone has that type of experience. So, I'd like to share a story or healing from my own life to help build your faith. I know that God really does heal because I have experienced it.

I used to do a lot of skiing. We have this place about a four hour drive from my home called Tahoe, which is a major ski resort area. It is not as good as the ones in Colorado, but it is pretty nice. My husband and I had started to do some racing. I was not racing at that moment, but I was practicing on a course that we were going to race in a few days. It was steeper and faster and harder than I realized. All of a sudden I got out of control and fell and started tumbling down the mountian. When I stopped falling, the ski patrol came over and asked, "Are you ok?" I said, "Yeah, I think so I am just sore and shaking."

I went home and a couple of days later my neck was sore, and a couple of days later it went from being sore, to where I could not move it at all. My head tilted over and my shoulder went up. I looked like a hunchback, and it hurt so badly. So my husband took me to the doctor and he recommended I go to a specialist. The specialist said, "This is a bad one. The x-rays are a little fuzzy but it looks like it could be a very serious crippling type injury." They put me in a neck brace and in physical therapy. But the timing for this injury was incredibly bad; it happened just a few weeks before I was to go with Randy Clark to Russia. He was sponsoring a "Catch the Fire" conference in Moscow in February of 1996, and I was part of the ministry team.

This was not planned as a formal healing conference; it was intended more as a renewal conference. Even with the help of the physical therapy and the neck brace, it was still hard to move. I was thinking that I should not go this trip, but I felt like God was telling me that I needed to go. He gave me that verse "And they were healed as they went." It was from the passage where some lepers asked Jesus to heal them, and He told them to go wash in the pool of Siloam, "and they were healed as they went."

That verse gave me the expectation that I would get on the plane half crippled, but when I got to the New York airport with Randy, he would pray for me and God would heal me. Randy was already moving in healing at that time, so it seemed like a reasonable scenario to me. I got to the airport in New York and Randy walked up to me and said, "Wow, Teresa, you look terrible, what happened?" So I told him about the ski accident and he said, "I will tell you what, if we get anybody with neck injuries, I will send them to you for prayer." Then he walked off. I thought, "you forgot to pray for me!!" But I could not chase him because I could hardly move. So a couple of the other members prayed for me but nothing happened.

When we got to Russia, my neck was still injured, and I felt like God had shortchanged me. Most of the people on the team were from either Randy's church, There were three from my church, and a few people from Pennsylvania. Most of them did not know me at all. They thought, "What is she doing here? She cannot even carry her own suitcase; she is going to be a burden on the rest of us." I was also thinking, "God, what am I doing here? Was this a terrible mistake? Should I get on a plane and go home?"

The first two days were a very difficult time, and I was in a lot of pain. The first day we were there was a Saturday. On Sunday we went to some churches. I went with the team, but I was not really able to function or contribute. I sat there wondering what I was doing there. Sunday night we met together as a team, and Randy gave us instructions for the conference for Monday. Then he said, "Okay, guys pray for each other."

I was kind of an obvious "in need of healing" case, but nobody came to pray for me. That is probably because they weren't really focusing on healing on this particular trip. Randy was into healing but the team was not. They are praying "more Lord," and the Holy Spirit came and blasted them, filled them with power, broke oppressions off them. All kinds of things were going on. I got tired of being left out, so I walked up to this guy and said, "Can I pray for you?" He said, "Yeah, go ahead." So I just began to pray, "Lord, will You just begin fill..."

I had my eyes closed and then all of a sudden I heard this thud. I opened my eyes and he had fallen straight back and down, and there was no catcher. So I tried to kneel to see if he was okay. It turns out that he was out under the Spirit, laying on the ground shaking. I remember thinking, "I hope this is the Holy Spirit and not epilepsy!"

All of a sudden the power of God hit me and I started to be able to move my head freely. It was shaking violently from left to right. I thought, "This should hurt!" but it did not. Some people started noticing that God was doing something, and the power of God is on me, so they came over to me. I was shaking and God's healing anointing was all over me. People asked me what was going on, but I could not talk to answer them. But as the power of God hit me, my neck was healed.

The doctor told me not to go on that trip; he said that if I went, I would mostly likely come back permanently paralyzed. So when I got home, I took my neck brace in my hand, and went into the office. I said "Hey doc, look." He looked, and then he took X-rays. Then he said, "I cannot explain this." He was a Jewish doctor, and he refused to call it a miracle, but he said that my "recovery" defied medical science. He said, "I cannot offer you any explanation other than a supernatural miracle, but I do not believe in the supernatural, so I cannot offer that explanation either." Then he medically documented this as an unexplained recovery.

Do you know what happened to the team when I got healed? The next morning I did not wear my neck brace when I came down for breakfast. I said, "Hi everybody, how are you doing?" They are all going, "Wow, is that the same person?" Only about a fourth of the team had seen me that night when I was healed, so breakfast was a surprise for a lot of them.

What do you think that healing did for the faith level of the team? It caused their faith to soar. We saw healings at that non-healing conference in Moscow. Why? because God boosted our faith when He healed my neck. Does God heal today? I had a doctor that says He doesn't, but he cannot explain why I am better. God still heals today!

Yes, God heals today, but that doesn't mean He always heal everyone. We need to celebrate the healings that we see Him do, but we don't want to loose faith if someone who we pray for is not healed. The sad truth is that not everyone gets healed. Even Jesus, the greatest healing minister to ever walk the face of the earth, did not heal everyone.

Look at what happened to Jesus when He tried to minister in His home town. Mark 6:2-6 says that Jesus got up in the synagogue to preach like He always does. But this time He was in His hometown. This happened shortly after He was baptized with the Holy Spirit, and He started moving in power. He went out preaching, visited several places, and then He came home. From the perspective of the people who lived there, it was one of those "All of a sudden, a local boy makes good" stories, and everyone came out to see Him. He sat down at the local synagogue and He started to preach.

"2 When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying. "Where did this man get these things?" and what wisdom has been given Him, that He is able to do mighty works by His hands! 3 Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Are these not His sisters here with us?" And they were offended at Him." (This indicates that He was not readily received in His hometown.)

Let's read on from Mark 6. Verse 4 says, "But Jesus said unto them, 'A prophet is not with honor accept in his country, and among his own relatives and his own house.'"

Now here is the verse I am looking for, verse 5: " And He could do no mighty work there, except He laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them."

Most of us would go "Wow; healing a few people sounds like a pretty mighty work to me!" But, the poeple were offended at Jesus and they were not open to God's move. Because of their offense and disbeliever, verse 5 says that "He could do no mighty work there except a few healings."

We see Jesus' reaction to this in verse 6: "and He marveled because of their belief." In short, Jesus was astonished by their unbelief and how it effected His ministry. He said, "Whoa, tough crowd!"

Their faith (or lack thereof) played a role in healing. Jesus had faith to do the healing miracles. His level of faith did not go down, but the faith of the people receiving impacted His ability to do some miracles. This is a situation where people were trying to disqualify Jesus, and the disqualification lowered the level of anointing that he could move in.

Sometimes we try to disqualify ourselves, and that can pull our level of anointing down. Sometimes when other people try to disqualify us, that can also reduce our anointing level. In a way, that is almost good news. If you go to a certain place and you are not received there and you can't do much healing, this does not mean you are not anointed. It just means you are not anointed to minister there to those people at that time.

Of course, the devil will try to set you up for a failure. He will put you in a situation where you pray for a sick person and they are not healed. Then as you are walking away, a demon will run up behind you and whisper, "You cannot heal, you cannot heal, you cannot do it, you are no good, see, you failed." Satan is trying to set you up for a failure. Are you going to buy into the failure of the devil, or are you going to buy into the will of God? You have a choice.

We need to be sure that we do not disqualify ourselves. We also need to resist allowing other people to disqualify us. Someone else's lack of faith can make it much more difficult to see healing when you pray. But if a given prayer session doesn't work out because of someone else's lack of faith, that does not disqualify us; it just makes it harder for us to minister to that person (or group of people).

When Jesus left his hometown, He was able to do miracles again.