Healing Tidbits
or
Miscellaneous Teachings On Healing

I have heard a teaching about healing over and over again, and it influenced my thinking about healing. There is a catch-phrase that goes with this teaching: "Use it or loose it." The idea is that healing is one of those spiritual gifts that you have to keep actively practicing, or you will loose it and not be able to flow in it anymore.

When was exposed to that teaching at the same time that I was exposed to the concept that I should expect God to heal the sick as I pray for them. I didn't know much about healing at that time, so I accepted that teaching as a basic principle of healing. I did not actively meditate on it and it was not in the forefront of my thinking, but it was built into my assumptions about praying for the sick, and as a result, it subtly effected my expectations in a way that wasn't good for my faith.

That assumption is harmless when you are actively praying for the sick on a regular basis. But if you've been through a season where you were "on the shelf" or in the "refiners fire" or if the Lord had you busy doing other things--then it is harder to have faith for healing when you start to pray for the sick again. There will be this little nagging thought in the back of your mind that you've "lost it" because you hadn't used it. You might not even be consciously aware of that thought, but it can negatively effect your faith and hinder your ability to successfully pray for the sick.

Basically what happened is that you bought into a lie of the enemy, and did not realize you did so. The lie doesn't effect you at first-- it only takes root after you go through a season where you don't actively pray for the sick. But that lie can (and often does) hinder you when you start praying for the sick again.

The Lord called this wrong thinking to my attention recently and challenged my assumptions. Let me share the process He took me through.

It started last November, when the Lord sent me to India on a mission trip. I have been to India a lot of times and the Lord frequently uses me in a healing capacity in those trips. I usually pray for healing for a whole bunch of people (believers and unbelievers) and God usually does a whole bunch of healing trough--more so than I see at home.

But this trip was different. God had a different agenda for this trip. His agenda was for me to prophesy and proclaim His breakthrough over the areas I visited--breakthrough in finances, breakthrough in difficult situations, breakthrough in seeing stubbornly unsaved family members come to the Lord, etc.

The jest of the message is that we must have faith to see breakthrough, but that faith is not faith for provision for this need or for that need; it is simply faith in God's goodness. In short, He is our loving Heavenly Father who likes to take good care of His children. And because He is our Daddy, He fully intends to take care of us in whatever our need and to give us breakthrough. That message included breakthrough for those in need of physical healing, but it was primarily directed at financial breakthrough and in breaking a spirit of oppression off of His people in the villages we went to visit.

God did some amazing stuff while I was there to verify and back up His message. Let me share one of them with you. The first district that He sent me to preach in was composed of several small and rather isolated villages, and the churches there were facing dire financial problems. The organization planting those churches and evangelizing that district was about to fold up shop and pull out of that area because of great financial lack. But when I shared the prophetic message on breakthrough, the Holy Spirit stirred people's hearts and began to activate their faith. God showed up during the corporate ministry time in a very tangible way, and many people had amazing personal encounters with Him. He also stirred the hearts of the leaders in charge of that district to trust Him for finances to continue the work. Then, the very next day, a mega church from Singapore telephoned them. They said the Lord directed them to give a very large amount of money to the leaders, so that they could evangelize this area. The money was enough to pay for training and a year's worth of salaries for 100 church planters and evangelists, plus it was also enough to pay to construct a simple church building in each village in that district. God invited them to trust Him for financial breakthrough, and when they did, He provided amazing financial breakthrough for them in less than 24 hours. Wow!

Since God's theme for the trip was on breakthrough, I did not get to do much healing ministry. I did get to pray for a few sick people here and there, and God healed them, but healing was not a big factor in this trip.

I got back from India just before Thanksgiving (late November), completely exhausted from a very demanding ministry schedule. The Lord spoke to me on the plane, and told me that He was going to bring me into a season of rest. The focus of that season would be on personal growth, not on ministering to others or doing "works" for the Lord. In short, He was "putting me on the shelf" to work on further maturing my character.

The net result is that the vast majority of my life and activity were pretty mundane for the next two months. It was the holiday season, so my focus was on family stuff for a while. But as time continued and I wasn't being given very many opportunities to do kingdom work with the Father, I started to struggle. I felt like God must be upset that I was not doing much for Him, and the enemy tried to move in with condemnation, but the Holy Spirit spoke to me very clearly about that. He explained that my value to God is not related to kingdom tasks that I do for Him, but my value is based on my relationship with God. I was a bit surprised at how hard it was to "do nothing" for two months and still feel that God loved me and was pleased with me.

I was in the center of God's will but He did not give me a chance to pray for the sick during that time. Since I was not actively doing healing ministry for several months, I thought that I might be loosing that gift. I had a mild concern about this in the back of my thinking, but it was not my main focus. Then one day I got an email from a friend who was recently diagnosed with a very serious disease, and my friend wanted me to keep her in my prayers.

Suddenly that wrong thinking which had been stirring in the background jumped to the forefront. I thought to myself, "I will pray, but it's not going to do a lot of good because I am so rusty in praying for the sick, and as a result, I don't have the same level of faith for healing that I used to have when I was doing it more frequently."

God spoke to me and told me that was "wrong thinking," but He did not explain why until days later. Even after hearing God speak to me, I was convinced that I'd somehow blown it--and if I hadn't lost the gift altogether, I was certainly doomed to operate at a lower level of healing anointing than I used to move in.

I felt guilty that I not been praying for the sick, even though the Spirit had not been leading me to do so. He had not been putting me into situations where I came across people needing prayer. I wasn't aware of the subtlety of the enemy operating there. God wasn't leading me to pray for anyone for healing, but I still felt guilty because I wasn't doing it.

God reminded me that I am responsible to do what He is doing at that moment, but I am not responsible to minister healing when He isn't doing that. He reminded me of Jesus, Who said that He only did what the Father was doing, and if the Father wasn't doing it, He wouldn't do it either. Jesus lived out what He said at the pool of Bethesda, where there were a whole bunch of sick people who needed healing. Jesus could have healed all of the--He frequently healed all of the sick people wherever He went to preach. But in this case, He only healed the one who the Father sent Him to. He ignored all the others, and He did not feel guilty about not praying for them.

I shouldn't have felt guilty about not praying for the sick for the past few months, because the Father wasn't sending me to do that at that time. But the devil had somehow managed to twist my thinking so that I bought into his condemnation strategy. When he told me that I "lost" my gift because I wasn't using it, I sort of believed his lie.

(By the way, I am not the only person who the devil uses this strategy on. You might want to run a quick self-inventory and see if he tries this same strategy with you.)

Anyhow, the Lord brought the subject up to me days later at church during corporate worship. He frequently speaks to me during worship, and He reminded me of the "use it or loose it" teaching that I'd bought into. He told me that it did not work that way and that I'd not lost any healing gifting or anointing. He liked it to something that I'd learned in an anatomy class years before.

My anatomy class taught that when a person gains weight, their body produces more fat cells, and each cell stores a certain amount of fat. When they go on a diet, they don't loose those fat cells, but each cell holds less fat and reduces in size, so they look thinner. But those "empty" fat cells remain in their body, just ready to be filled again. That is why it is easy for a person who lost a lot of weight to gain it back again rapidly. A person who has never been overweight doesn't have all those extra fat "empty" cells, and it takes their body a while to produce them, so they gain weight more slowly than someone who already has the cells in place.

God said that the healing anointing/gifting works sort of the same way. As you grow in your faith for healing and grow into greater measure, it is like you are creating a spiritual "fat" cell to store a portion of that gifting/anointing. If you stop using your gifting, then (just like fat cells) the spiritual cells shrivel up and become empty or smaller. You can end up looking spiritually smaller in your gifting, as they shrivel up and hold less faith/gifting/anointing. But those "cells" never go away, and you have the capacity to fill them quickly, just like the overweight dieter can quickly gain back the weight they lost.

Let me put it another way...

If you've gained more ground in healing that what you are currently operating at, you can regain that ground again much more quickly that it took you to gain it in the first place. You already have the capacity to move at higher levels of healing anointing, like you used to do; you simply need to quickly refresh what was lost. To use the fat cell analogy, you've already created the cells to hold a certain volume of faith, gifting, anointing. They have emptied out from lack of use, but they can be refilled much more rapidly than it took you to form them in the first place. So if you used to be a healing "heavy weight," but you got lean from lack of use, you can regain your original stature much more rapidly than it took you to become a "heavy weight" in the first place.