Faith And Healing

In the last lesson, I mentioned a "bootstrap problem." That problem could be summed up in the following question: "If faith is required to see healings when I pray for the sick, am I going to get the faith necessary to start praying?" Many people consider this a dilemma and give up without ever actually praying for the sick.

As we learned in the previous lesson, God will sometimes orchestrate situations to build your faith. Salesmen call this principle "seeding the field." They give away free samples to get you to try their product, hoping that once you try it, you will want to keep using it and you will start buying it.

Sometimes God "seeds the field" with faith for healing. Sometimes He heals someone even when no faith for healing is present. He does this strategically to build faith in people because they just saw Him heal someone.

Jesus did this with Peter's mother-in-law. He did not require anyone present to have faith for her healing, He just healed her. This was a seed that gave others faith to come to Him for healing. I am sure the word spread that she was healed and that is why others came to Him for healing later that same day. We see the story in Matt. 8:14-17. Most people read that as two separate stories and miss the relationship between them. But they are connected. Let's look at the passage.

Matt. 8:14-15, 16-17
14 Now when Jesus had come into Peter's house, He saw his wife's mother lying sick with a fever. 15So He touched her hand, and the fever left her. And she arose and served them.

16 When evening had come, they brought to Him many who were demon possessed. And He cast out the spirits with a word, and healed all who were sick, 17that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying: "He Himself took our infirmities And bore our sicknesses."

Jesus used the healing to spark faith in the people in Peter's hometown. Her healing gave them the faith to come and receive their own healing.

This was an important seed in building faith in Peter. Jesus knew that Peter was destined to have a strong healing anointing, so that one day Peter's shadow would heal people. Jesus spent a long time building faith in Peter and in each of His disciples. He gave the disciples several experiences designed to build their faith. We see one of them in Mark 11:21-23: "And Peter, remembering, said to Him, 'Rabbi, look! The fig tree which You cursed has withered away.' So Jesus answered and said to them, 'Have faith in God. For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, "Be removed and be cast into the sea," and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says.' "

And just as Jesus worked with His disciples and built faith in them, so He will do with us. One of my earliest exposures to healing came in a healing class I took in seminary, taught by Peter Wagner. Part of our homework was to find four or five sick people and pray for them, and then to follow up with that person and document what happened. I remember feeling relieved, when I saw the assignment, that we only had to pray for them and not to actually heal them. I was pretty sure that if I had to heal five people, I would fail the course. However, as it turned out, God healed all of the people I prayed for. Most of my classmates had similar results. Most everyone we prayed for was partially or completely healed. Why did God do this (honor the homework assignment by healing those we prayed for)? He did it because He wanted to build our faith. Most of us did not have any faith when we first started praying, we just prayed for people because it was a course assignment. But by the end of the assignment, many of us gained experiential faith that God heals the sick when we pray for them.

God will often work in many areas to build our faith, not just in the area of physical healing. You may find yourself in an impossible situation and call on God for help, and He miraculously comes through for you. That builds your general faith and confidence in God's faithfulness and power. That general faith will help you when you first start moving in praying for the sick. Or perhaps your prayer and intercession life will serve as a training ground to build faith. You may find yourself praying/interceding for a variety of things and see God answer your prayers. As you get confidence that God hears and answers your prayers that will begin to transfer over as confidence that God will answer your prayers when you pray for the sick.

What I am about to say may sound odd, but it is true. Our faithfulness to God in our finances is often a measuring stick of how effective we will be in seeing people healed when we pray for the sick. That is because we tend to trust in our own resources when we don't have adequate faith to trust in God. And finances (money) is the ultimate example of that. Do we trust God, that if we put Him first and give Him the first fruit of our income, He will make the remaining 90 percent stretch further than the 100 percent without His intervention? That is what tithing is all about. It is about putting our faith in God above faith in our own resources.

Jesus was very interested in making God first in our finances. He taught on this subject over and over again. Luke 16:10-11 records one of the things Jesus said about it: "He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much; and he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much. Therefore if you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon (money), who will commit to your trust the true riches?" I believe that the true riches Jesus refers to are the power and anointing of God, such as healing the sick, doing miracles, etc. I believe He is saying that we must have our finances under His Lordship if we want to move with Him in the power things like healing the sick.

Putting it another way, lack of faith makes us trust in our own resources. If we demonstrate faithfulness in small things (like money), then God knows He can trust us with the true riches (power, anointing, authority). Likewise, as we see God come through in the area of finances, our faith in Him grows, providing a faith foundation from which we can launch into praying for the sick.

Jesus is willing to meet us where we are and to help us get to where we need to be in faith. We see that He had to do this with the disciples. Luke 17:5-6 says, "And the apostles said to the Lord, 'Increase our faith.' So the Lord said, 'If you have faith as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, "Be pulled up by the roots and be planted in the sea," and it would obey you.' " In other words, Jesus said that your faith starts small but it grows as you exercise it.

In fact, early in their training, Jesus had His disciples go out and practice healing. This is recorded in Luke 9:1-6:

1Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. 2And he sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick. 3And he said unto them, "Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece. 4And whatsoever house ye enter into, there abide, and thence depart. 5And whosoever will not receive you, when ye go out of that city, shake off the very dust from your feet for a testimony against them." 6And they departed, and went through the towns, preaching the gospel, and healing every where.

Jesus sent them out and gave them some success experiences. It does not say that everyone they prayed for was healed, but obviously a lot of people were healed everywhere they went. The disciples' faith was built when they tried it (did what Jesus said to do) and it worked. And He will work with us today in a similar way. He will give us some early success experiences to build our faith. Does that mean everyone we pray for is healed? Of course not. But it means we will experience some supernatural healing experiences as we pray for the sick. John Wimber used to require that people pray for 100 sick people before they could say that God won't heal the sick through them. In his entire lifetime, not one single person ever got back to him and said that they'd prayed for 100 people and never saw a supernatural healing. In fact, most people could not pray for more than eight to 10 people before they saw someone healed supernaturally.

However, we need to use common sense in "getting started." We don't teach a child math by giving them calculus problems to solve before they have even learned to add. God wants to build our faith by giving us a series of faith-building experiences. That means we need to start with things closer to our measure of faith and then as we experience successes, our faith grows and we can tackle bigger things. In other words, start small, and when that works, tackle something bigger. Don't start with "super faith" stuff first, like wheelchairs or the blind.

I started with things like back problems, arthritis, carpel tunnel syndrome, etc. I had seen a lot of those types of healings before I saw my first deaf ears open or my first person get out of a wheelchair and walk.

If your friend or spouse has a bad headache, offer to pray for them. If your friend or child has the flu or a cold, pray for them. As you see God heal them of these little things, it will build your faith and you will be able to tackle bigger things.