Healing Tidbits
or
Miscellaneous Teachings On Healing

Some people ask for healing prayer and then get offended when you minister healing to them, even if you do everything perfectly and minister in love. The reason they get offended is because a lot of people have misconceptions about healing, or about the way that healing prayer should be ministered.

I would like to share an example with you from a real-life situation. The situation happened in a prophetic chat room that GodSpeak sponsors. Both of the people involved are godly and faith-filled believers, but they hold slightly different theologies on healing, and have different ideas of how it should be ministered. I don't want to use their real names, so let's call them Dick and Jane. Dick ministered using an interactive model that many healing ministries advocate, except that he put a bit more emphasis on faith. I thought he did a good job of ministering healing prayer in love, respecting the dignity of the person he was praying for. If I were grading him, I would give him an "A-" for this ministry session.

However, Jane (the lady who he was ministering to) came way feeling deeply offended by Dick's ministry. In fact she felt so offended that she came to me to complain about him. Let me share the incident with you in some detail. [I haven't actually talked to Dick about this incident. I will be filing in some of Dick's thinking/reasoning based on what I know about healing and how I would have interpreted the events.]

Jane had asked Dick for prayer for something unrelated to healing, and he prayed for her. When he finished, he asked, "Do you have anything else you need prayer for, like maybe some sickness that needs healing?" He was probably operating in word of knowledge at this point, having sensed that she needed a physical healing of some sort. Remember, this was done in a chat room where the people cannot see each other--all they see is what ever the other person types into the room.

Jane replied, "Two things! Well three."

Dick said, "If you believe that Jesus can heal you, you can share them with me and I will pray for you."

Jane said, "I believe in Jesus...that's the faith." Then she went on to list what she needed prayer for. "First, I have problems with my back. Second, I also have problems with my jaw...my jaw is crooked. And third is my eyes."

Dick said, "Ok. Jesus paid the price for your healing, and its a free gift...God has no purpose in you hurting or being in pain. In fact, He wants you to be well even more than you want to be well."

"Amen," said Jane.

"And the Bible says He took our pain and carried our sicknesses..."

"That's true."

"...and by His wounds, healing is ours right now. So I am going to pray for you now, and the Lord will touch your. Your part is to believe that you are receiving from the Lord by simply looking to Jesus, and trust by faith that He is touching you."

"Yes," said Jane.

Then Dick began to pray. He invited the Lord's presence and asked for a release of healing anointing. Then he started to pray for the back first. I believe he would have prayed for the other two things systematically after he finished praying for the back. But offense entered in before that, so he never got the chance. When Dick prayed for Jane's back, he commanded the pain to leave, and he asked the Lord to come and touch her back with His healing. After praying for a short while, he stopped to check for feedback.

"So anything happening? Do you notice any difference in your back?"

"No," Jane said, "sorry but I can't notice anything."

Dick said, "That's ok." He would have begun to pray some more for the back, but Jane was unaware of how the interactive prayer process worked, and she assumed that the prayer was over and that she'd not been healed. She wanted to be kind and say something to make Dick feel better.

Jane said, "I guess it isn't God's time yet."

With that statement, Dick knew that any faith that Jane had for healing at that moment had just left. She had decided that the healing prayer was over and did not work. And she was no longer open for the Lord to heal her during this prayer session. Dick knew that he needed to rekindle her faith and expectation for God to heal her, or he would not see results from any subsequent healing prayer.

"No," he said, "sometimes we just have to work things out when it comes to healing. There might be certain doubts in our heart that hinder us. When you say, 'Its not God's time yet,' you are actually saying perhaps God has some mysterious reason for wanting you to be in pain, like maybe He wants to teach me a lesson or something. But that is not how He works. God never teaches us anything by making us sick, and it is completely the will of God for you to be well."

Jane did not agree with this. She pointed out that I had recently sent out a teaching where I shared an example how God had met me in my sickness. [The teaching series was on encountering God, and the purpose of my example was not to advocate sickness over healing, but to share that no matter how bad things get for us, God is able to meet us in our circumstances. I shared an example about how I'd gotten salmonella from some tainted chicken that I'd eaten, but I thought it was something else that caused the sickness, so I ate the chicken a second time after the symptoms went away. I got even sicker the second time, and was out of commission for something like 48 hours. I was alone in the house, as my hubby was away on a trip, so there was no one to help me. I cried out to God to heal me but He did not do so instantly. When I did finally start to recover from the unpleasant symptoms, I was able to press into God and He met me there. He even spoke to me and showed me an object lesson from my sickness underscore a spiritual principle.]

I never intended to imply that God wants us sick so He can teach us a lesson. What I was trying to share was that even when bad things happen to us, God can reach in and meet us there, and somehow manage to bring His glory into our situation.

But Jane said, "Haven't you read the lessons of this chat room? Teresa had a very recent example of her being sick. God asked her why she ate the chicken a second time, and He taught her a lesson through sickness."

Dick said, "I will have to disagree. What do you think God's purpose is for you to have back pain?"

Their conversation went on a little longer. Dick wanted Jane to expect to receive a healing, so that he could keep praying. But Jane had moved past the point of being willing to have her faith activated. Dick kept trying to get her back on board and Jane became offended.

In fact, she was so offended that she sent me an email complaining about this encounter. She indicated that Dick was just plain wrong, and she felt that it was totally inappropriate and offensive for him to try and instruct her on faith. She thought he was misguided and wanted to alert me to him so that I could discipline him.

Before I continue, I want to point out how Dick might have been able to prevent this problem if he'd done things a little bit differently. I feel he could have done a better job of explaining the prayer process to Jane up front, before he started praying. He could have told here that his prayer style is interactive, and that from time to time, he will pause during the prayer to check with her for feedback. Then he uses the feedback to determine how to pray based on what was happening. That would have set Jane's expectations to not assume the prayer was over (and did not work) when he stopped to check for feedback. If he had done that, then perhaps her faith for that session would not have died, and this particular offense might have been prevented.

Anyhow, Jane was offended. She felt that Dick was out of line to try and instruct her about faith when he was supposed to be praying for her.

I wrote back, explaining that healing prayer tends to be interactive. I also shared a little about why faith is important for healing, and that was why Dick was trying to encourage her faith. I will share more of what I said to Jane, along with her reactions to it in our next lesson. But I want to keep the point of this lesson on how we can end up inadvertently offending people when we minister healing prayer.

At times, that offense comes a difference in theology about healing, and there is not much you can do to avoid that type of offense. But at other times, the offense comes from not understanding the prayer process, or having different expectations about how the prayer session should go. And we can prevent that type of offense by briefly sharing what the prayer time will look like before we start praying, so that the person knows what to expect.