Healing Tidbits
or
Miscellaneous Teachings On Healing

We started talking about enemy counter-attacks in our last lesson and we are going to talk about them some more in this one. We will look at how the enemy may "attack" us because we minister God's healing to others, and we will look at what we can do to counter that attack.

In our last lesson, we laid a biblical foundation for the concept of spiritual warfare. We launched from there into some principles that are not explicitly spelled out in the bible. (Remember that the area of spiritual warfare is controversial, because the bible only talks about it in generalities and omits specific how-to types of instructions on this subject. When we want specifics and how-tos, we need to get them from people with experience/training, or else get them by direct revelation from God, or by a combination of the two.) That is why this is considered a controversial area.

I will be speaking mostly from my direct experiences in warfare, along with revelations that the Lord gave me in this area, which usually came during the heat of battle, as I'd start to ask the Lord for direction. I can't support the specifics I will share directly from the Bible, but none of it will contradict the Bible. I invite you to chew prayerfully on what I share. If you have checks in your spirit (e.g., if the Lord doesn't confirm it to you), then feel free to spit it out (or reject it).

Last week's teaching was mostly general. I talked about the concept that enemy counter-attacks against healing prayer, but I did not give a lot of detail. What I'd like to do now is to share some the ways that enemy counter-attack might play out in a person's life.

One of the most common forms of counter-attack is to try and get the person who ministered healing to get sick themself. Sometimes it is with the same thing that the person they prayed for had, but they could just as easily get sick with something else. E.g., sometimes when you pray for a person and set them free from a spirit of infirmity, the enemy counter-attacks you by assigning a spirit of infirmity to harass you.

You may be healthy, but after you start praying for the sick, you start developing some health complications of your own. You might even seem to "catch" the very things that you saw healed when you prayed for someone. Or you might get something else. It could be something serious, where the onset happens shortly after you pray for someone to be healed. Or maybe instead of a major sickness, you get a whole bunch of little things come at you, one right after the other, so that the cumulative effect takes you out and makes it hard to function.

Here is an example. An acquaintance of mine prayed a man who suffered from really bad migraine headaches. She prayed once a week for two months, and the man was completely delivered of migraines. But about a month into that, she started developing bad headaches of her own. At first, the headaches came the day after she prayed for the man with the migraines. They were mild at first, but gained in severity and started happening more frequently. By the time the man with migraines was healed, the lady praying for him had developed migraines of her own.

They continued to get worse until she was too sick to pray for anyone. She came to me for healing from the migraines some time later, after suffering from them for about a year. When I prayed for her, the Lord showed us that she did not really have a physical condition at all. Instead, a demon (one that causes migraines) had been assigned to harass her because of the time she'd prayed for the man with migraines.

Once God revealed it, we treated it the same we we'd treat a spirit of infirmity. (She was a very godly woman and committed Christian, and in her case, the "spirit of migraine" did not actually inhabit her, it just followed her around and attacked her from the outside.)

The prayer strategy was to come the authority of Jesus Christ and cancel the assignment of that spirit. I cut off their access to her and commanded them to leave her, and to take their symptoms with them. The demons obeyed--they had no choice in the matter, because Jesus' authority is much greater than theirs. And when they left, the painful migraines she'd been suffering from left as well. She hasn't had any bad headaches since that prayer.

Of course, not all enemy counter-attacks will be health-related. They can take on many other forms, including sudden problems in important relationships, financial, experience one calamity after another, unfair persecution and being suddenly and constantly misjudged or misunderstood, etc.

Let me give you an example. Lois accompanied me on a mission trip to India, where she prayed for a lot of sick/oppressed people and saw a God heal a lot of people. She came home from the trip to discover that she'd been laid off from her job while she was away, and the loss of her income created serious financial issues for her family. Also, she couldn't seem to find a new job for a while, even though she had marketable skills that were in demand in her area. It looked like an unfortunate coincidence, but when Lois and her church sought the Lord on it, the Lord revealed that her job loss was enemy retaliation because of her ministry in India. The church prayed and interceded over Lois for a season, and the attack was broken. Lois got a job. And, to Lois's credit, this attack hasn't kept her from going on other mission trips.

In fact, one of the best ways to keep from getting counter-attacked frequently is to demonstrate to the enemy that this strategy is not effective against you. If you waiver and stop serving God when you are attacked, then the enemy takes that as a sign that counter-attack is a good strategy, and he will use it against you more often. But if you stand firm and don't waiver under enemy attack, you will eventually overcome through the power and authority of the Lord. Then the enemy will realize that counter-attack isn't so effective against you and he won't use it quite as often because he knows it is not likely to keep you from doing what God is doing and building His kingdom at the expense of the devil's kingdom.

Finally, some enemy attacks are more psychological or "mind games" than physical attacks. The devil is known as a deceiver, and he will try to deceive us into thinking that he has authority to harm us in a certain way when we "bother him" by healing the sick and advancing God's kingdom. The truth is that the devil doesn't really have that authority, but he will do all he can to convince us that he does in hopes that we will become afraid of his retaliation and stop praying for the sick. Let me share an example from my own life to illustrate this...

There was a Chinese lady who was a very strong believer and an elder in her church. She suddenly came down with crippling back pain and the pastor of that church asked me to go pray for her, accompanied by himself and the other elders. When we got there, she was in so much pain that she could not sit in a chair or bend over at all. She had to alternate between laying down and standing; she could not remain in either position very long because it would get too painful and she'd have to switch to the other. We prayed for her and she had considerable relief from the pain, but she wasn't 100% better. The pain continued to drain from her body over the next 48 hours until she was completely and totally healed.

But something odd started happening in my body. I started getting the pain that was leaving her. I realized that it was probably a spirit of infirmity that had been assigned to counter-attack me because of her healing. So I took authority over the spirit, using the authority Jesus gave me and commanding it to leave and to take it's back pain with it. I only got a few moments of relief until the pain returned. So I tried it again...and again. That type of authority prayer always worked in the past, but it wasn't working now. I began to think that I'd somehow lost my authority in Christ (which was probably the enemy whispering in my ear). I couldn't see how the authority prayer couldn't work because I understood how Jesus had earned all authority in Heaven and earth when He rose from the dead. But it did not appear to be working.

The pain was so bad that I couldn't think clearly, and it was becoming almost crippling. After several days of this, I finally went to my pastor for prayer. The pain cleared up as soon as he prayed, and it remained gone for a couple of days, allowing me to go on a short ministry trip that was about a four-hour drive from my house.

The enemy continued to whisper in my ear. He told me that I'd lost my ability to take authority in Jesus' name. He pointed out how the authority prayer had worked for my pastor, but not for me. He almost had me convinced, so I started asking God to show me what went wrong (or what I did to displease Him so that He took away my authority). I searched my memory and mentally reviewed my past several days, but I could not think of anything that God might be upset about.

The searing back pain came back when I returned from the evening meeting to my hotel room. I tried authority prayer, but it did not give me any relief at all. I rebuked the spirit of infirmity 7 or 8 times and I commanded the pain to leave (all in Jesus' name and through His authority). But nothing happened. The enemy used that experiences as "proof" that I'd lost my authority in Christ. Spiritually I felt horrible, and I was in a great deal of physical pain.

I tried authority prayer a few more times, to no avail. I finally cried out to the Lord in frustration, pleading with Him to please show me what was going on. I assumed He would show me some horrible sin I'd repressed from my memory, that needed to repent of, or something like that.

But God did something totally different. He opened my eyes to see in the spirit. I was standing in the middle of my hotel room and there were a whole bunch of demons (spirits of infirmity) all standing in line waiting for their turn to jump on me. Each time that I'd pray in Jesus' authority and command a spirit of infirmity to leave, it was forced to go. But the next demon in line would immediately jump on me and cause the same affliction. The reason they were doing this was to try and deceive me into thinking that I'd lost my authority in Christ so that I stopped trying to use it against them.

When the Lord opened my eyes to see the line of demons and revealed the devils strategy to me, I got really mad at the devil. I turned to face the line of demons (who were standing on my left side). I rebuked the whole line of them and forbade any of them to attack me with the backache. My back stopped hurting at that instant, and I was totally and completely better. I was able to finish my ministry trip and drive home with no absolutely no back pain.

The point of the story I just shared is that at times the enemy's attack is filled with deception and trickery. It may feel like a physical (or emotional or financial) attack, but it is really the devil trying to convince you that you are not qualified to resist him. He does that in hopes that you will give up, stop using the authority that Jesus gave you. If you give up and stop warring in Jesus' power/authority, then you really will come under the devil's power. He wants you to be afraid to "get him upset"--he wants you to think that if you bother him, he will bother you back, but if you leave him alone, he will leave you alone. That is another one of his lies, but it is amazingly effective on many believers.

The bottom line is that we must not be afraid of obeying God and advancing His kingdom because we are afraid the devil will counter- attack us. Our authority comes from God, and He is much more powerful than the devil is. The safest place place we can be in in the center of God's will. We should never be afraid to obey God and pray for the sick. But at the same time, we do need to be aware that counter- attack may come, so that we can know how to deal with it.