Healing -- Dare To Believe

In our last lesson, we talked about how Jesus wasn't able to heal people in His home town of Capernaum because of their unbelief. There are going be times when you are not going be able to do the stuff because of the response of other people. That does not mean that God yanked your anointing, saying, "You are no good, I am taking it back."

This is really important to understand. Otherwise when people start ministering in healing and they will get a big failure, then they will say, "That is it, I quit." Do not do that, because I guarantee you that somewhere along the line (especially near the beginning) you are going have a good failure. It is guaranteed. Even Jesus had some failures. He was shocked that He could only heal a few sick people, and that was Jesus! If Jesus had problems because of unreceptively of people, there is a good possibility that you might have similar problems.

Your success in healing is not based on your performance; it is based on the authority of God. You will have times and situations where you cannot do what you think you should do. There will be times when you really believe that you have the anointing for this healing and you pray for the person and they do not get healed. Don't give up; go pray for someone else instead.

Do you know that it is not always God's will to heal everybody in a meeting at a given moment in time? Sometimes God only chooses to heal a few. Do you remember when Jesus went to the pool at Bethsaida? That was a miracle place. Do you know how the Catholics have this place where people come to pilgrimage to them because they think they might get a miracle? It was one of those.

There was an angel and he would every now and then, come and stir the water. After he had made the water ripple, the first one in the water got healed from whatever they were sick with. It was sort of like the local hospital, a hangout for all the cripples, and all the sick people. If they needed a healing, that is where they went. They hung around watching the water to see if they could be the first one in.

So, there were lots of sick people there, right? And Jesus was only able to heal one person there. What about all those other sick people?

Now, if you have the gift of healing and you go to a place where there are a bunch of sick people, what is your expectation? Do you expect God to heal everyone there? (There are times when He does that. There are verses where Jesus healed everyone who came to Him.) But He was only able to heal one person at the pool of Bethesda.

Why do you think that is? It was because Jesus said, "I can only do what I see the Father doing." The Father was only healing that one person, then that is what He is doing at that moment. Of course, we want to see everyone healed. But who is in control, you or God?

There is going to be times that you really want to see somebody healed because you have a heart of compassion for him or for her, depending upon who you are praying for. There are times when you think, "God, if I could just have only one more healing like this in my life, let this be the one.: There will be times like you are going to feel that way. But that might not be the person that God wants to heal at that moment. It does not mean He will not heal them later. But right then at that moment, if He does not want to heal that person, you are not going to get that healing, because we do what the Father is doing.

I had one of those "times" early on in my healing days. It happened some years ago when I was at the San Francisco Vineyard. There was this lovely girl named Diane--she looked like she was the homecoming queen for her high school; she married a handsome man and they were just one of the most gorgeous couples. In addition, she was one of the nicest people I ever met. She loved the Lord, and she was a wonderful Christian. She was the kind of person that everyone looked to as an example, and everyone wanted to be like her. Diane and her husband were in their early twenties and they hadn't had any children yet.

Diane caught Melanoma, e.g., skin cancer. I met her in April of 1994, but her cancer actually started in 1993. She was a regular at some nightly renewal meetings. They happened six nights a week at the time, because God broke out at the church and it was incredibly powerful. We would sit there late night in the meetings and we would put our hands on Diane's lumps. W e would pray and we would rebuke the cancer, and the lumps would shrink under our hands as we soaked her in prayer for hours at a time. We could feel the heat, we could feel the anointing, and we could feel the power of God. We could also see His healing at work because the lumps were disappearing. One lump was gone in an half an hour and we would think, "God, wow!" God healed her and she went into remission, so we stopped praying for her. But after a while, the cancer started coming back. She came out of remission. By then we only had one renewal meeting a week, so she did not get soaked in as much prayer as before. Sometimes some of us would go over to her house and pray for her.

If there is anybody that should have been healed this was the lady. There were prophecies about things that she and her husband were going to do together, so we felt it was not God's time to take her. She was one of the nicest people I knew. She had faith, tremendous faith, and there was no reason she shouldn't have been healed. But God did not heal her and she died--and we were all in shock.

I remember being so mad at God. I sat there and I had my arms crossed. I had been in Toronto and I flew home from Toronto. As I got off the plane, I got a call on my cell phone that she had died while I was in the air. I crossed my arms, I went home and I said, "God what were this teaser healings? I do not think I want to pray for the sick anymore, You do not play nice."

If anybody should have been healed, it was Diane. But God did not heal Diane--she died and she stayed dead. She was buried, actually she was cremated, and it was over. (After a person has been cremated, there is not a whole lot of hope of raising them from the dead anymore.) I could not understand it. Why didn't God heal her? It did not seem fair. If I could have healed only one more person in my life, it would have been Diane.

Some of you may have had people in your life, either friend of yours, relatives, or maybe someone that you have ministered to and you have felt that way, and God has not healed them. How do you deal with that?

The way most people deal with that is they tell themselves, "Well healing is not really real for today." The expectation was to see healing, but the experience was the healing did not happen. So the expectation now drops to match the experience. Now what happens? There is a lower expectation. Then someone else comes along who needs a healing. They may not need as big of a healing miracle, but since the expectation is lower, the subsequent experience is lower too.

When this happens, you don't have faith for the types of healings that you used to see before. So you pray for someone with lower expectations and you only pray half-hearted because you do not really expect them to be healed. Guess what happens? They do not get their healing. And that causes your expectation to drop down even lower.

It is like a downward spiral--our expectation starts dropping to match our experience, and as our expectations drop our experiences drop. Sometimes it takes a sovereign work of God to break the expectation.

A lot of people choose to travel with a healing ministry to solve that lowered experience/expectations spiral. They sign up to travel as ministry team member with an anointed healer like Randy Clark or Todd Bentley, or someone else along those lines. They pray for the sick as part of the trip, and they see healings. That causes their expectations go way back up. and their experience rises up again to meet it.

There is another way to deal with low expectation problems. It is to repent before God and say, "God I have chosen to believe a lie. I choose to stop believing that lie and I choose to start believing You. Would You please give me experiences to match the expectations of what is in your Word?" Sometimes God helps by giving us an immediate experience of praying for someone who is healed, and that boosts our faith. Other times, we have to begin dealing with that we have chosen to believe the lie and we have to work our way back up because Jesus said we are supposed to do what He did.

We need to upgrade our expectations, but we need to do so reasonably.