Healing Tidbits
or
Miscellaneous Teachings On Healing

The good news is that God has been doing a lot of supernatural healing in past recent years. It is becoming common for people to come to church with health problems, to get prayed for, and to go home healed.

Twenty years ago, most believers felt that "healing the sick" was reserved just for a "select few" people who had the "gift" of healing. But that has been changing, and now many of us "everyday" or "average" believers have experienced God heal the sick though our prayers. In fact, many of us have gotten very used to praying for sick people and seeing God heal them. It might not happen every week, but it happens several times a year.

Believer's expectations have been changing. Many of us expect to participate with God in supernatural healing, so we have started praying for the sick. That is a good thing, because it agrees with God's intent and desire for us, and it matches what He has said in His word. Jesus said in Mark 16:17-18, "And these signs will follow those who believe: ... they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover." He also said in John 14:12, "Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also."

John Wimber, the founder of the Association of Vineyard Churches, was one of the people who God used to change how the church views healing. He expanded the concept of the "priesthood of all believers" to mean that everyone (not just the pastors and super stars) can pray for the sick and see them healed. I sat under John's ministry and teaching for a while, and he was a big influence on my life. John had two sayings that I loved, because they inspired me. The first was, "We get to 'do the stuff'" (meaning the miracles of Jesus). The other was, "It should be natural for us to walk in the supernatural." When he first started saying these things, most of us did not think that way.

Back when I was a teenager and young adult, almost no one in the church believed that they could pray for the sick and see them get healed. Now a lot of us have embraced this thinking, and others are starting to embrace it. Many churches today have prayer teams comprised of members of the congregation. At the end of service they pray for people, and it is not uncommon for someone to get healed on any given Sunday. There are also organizations run by people like like Randy Clark, who take teams of everyday believers to the mission field and have them pray for the sick as part of their ministry assignment. Hundreds of people get to go on these type of trips each year, and experience God do miracles and healings through their hands. When they return home, they find that they can continue to pray for the sick and see healings.

Over time, we have come to expect God to heal the sick as part of our day-to-day reality. More recently, God has been releasing a lot of "quick healings" (e.g., instant and complete). Those fast healings are beginning to feel "normal" to some of us. In fact, some of us are starting to take healing for granted, becoming almost too used to it. We have seen God do a lot of instant supernatural healings, so it is easy to think of that as normal and forget some of the basics of healing prayer.

One of those basics is that many healings are not instant. Some healings start when you pray, and they take some amount of time to complete. Just five or six years ago, the people traveling in "healing circles" used to distinguish between "Miracles" and "Healings" by the amount of time it took to complete. If the person was completely and totally healed during the prayer time, it was a "Miracle Healing." If the healing started at that time and took some number of hours or days to complete, then it was a "normal healing." But both of them are the supernatural power of God coming down in response to our prayers to make a person well.

Jesus was our role model in healing the sick, and we strive to follow His example. Jesus did have some complete and instant healings, but not everyone He prayed for was instantly healed; some of His healings took time to complete. The healing started when Jesus prayed, but it did not complete for hours or even days. Let's look at a couple of these from the bible.

Do you remember when the woman with the flow of blood for 12 years touched the hem of Jesus' robe, and He felt the healing virtue go out of Him. That lady was healed, but it wasn't an instant healing. Look at Matthew 9:22, "But Jesus turned around, and when He saw her He said, 'Be of good cheer, daughter; your faith has made you well.'And the woman was made well from that hour."

That phrase literally means, she started to get well at that instant, but it took some time for the process of "getting well" to complete. We know from the passage that the time delay was more than an hour, but we don't know how long it was. It might have been five or six hours, or it might have been five or six days.

There is another example of non-instant healing in Matthew 15:28, when the Samaritan woman asked Jesus to heal her daughter. "Then Jesus answered and said to her, 'O woman, great is your faith! Let it be to you as you desire.' And her daughter was healed from that very hour." (The healing started when Jesus spoke those words, but it took a while for it to complete.)

Another example of a gradual healing is when the epileptic boy was healed through deliverance. That takes place in Matthew 17:18: "And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him; and the child was cured from that very hour." The demon left instantly, but it took some time for the sickness that demon had caused to completely leave the boy's body.

There was even a time when Jesus had to pray twice for the same person. He prayed the first time and the person was partially healed. He had to pray a second time to see the healing complete. We find this story in Mark 8:22-25:

22 Then He came to Bethesda; and they brought a blind man to Him, and begged Him to touch him. 23 So He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the town. And when He had spit on his eyes and put His hands on him, He asked him if he saw anything. 24 And he looked up and said, "I see men like trees, walking."

25 Then He put His hands on his eyes again and made him look up. And he was restored and saw everyone clearly.

Jesus is the greatest healer who ever lived and He is our role model in praying for the sick. If some of His healings were not instant-- e.g., they took hours to complete), then we should expect that we will have the same experience.

Not everyone you lay hands on and pray for will be healed the instant that you pray. Some healings start small, and you may not even be aware of it at first, but over time the full healing manifests. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that if you don't see a complete healing the instant you pray, that nothing has happened.

God does heal the sick. Sometimes He does it instantly, but many times He chooses to do it as a process, taking a period of time to complete.