Sadly, most of us don’t pursue spiritual healing until we have a major illness. Even if we are Christians, we first try conventional medicine, then perhaps alternative medicine. We might ask people to pray for us. We eventually realize that we need to heal our spirit and mind if we ever expect to have true healing of our body.
The Bible has a lot to say about healing. A few years ago, I pursued faith healing, something I really believed in. This scripture was my starting point:
James 5:14
Is anyone among you sick? He should call for the elders of the church, and they should pray over him after anointing him with olive oil in the name of the Lord.
At the time, my church did not have anyone who was the slightest bit interested in spiritual healing (they still don’t). In fact, most churches focus almost exclusively on ‘saving the soul’ (and some don’t even do that), while not doing the rest of what Jesus instructed, which included teaching about God, healing the sick, loving your neighbor, loving yourself, taking care of the poor, the widows, and the orphans. The Holy Spirit was to empower all true believers and allow them to act as conduits for God’s power.
Healing was very much a part of the early Church. After the Romans decided that Christianity would be their official religion, Churches went from being filled with Spirit filled believers, to people who joined along for the the opportunity to be in positions of power, or for the wealth the Church could bring in, or to belonging because of social reasons, and so on. Some of course still joined because of the message and their faith, but not all of them. Gradually, the belief that it was the church’s job to heal the sick (and often take care of the poor) dropped altogether. People were typically spoon-fed what the church wanted them to believe, and were often not all that interested (even when Bibles became readily available in their language) in reading the scriptures for themselves.
Jesus healed everyone who asked. He never told anyone that God gave them a disease in order to teach them a lesson, or to help them grow spiritually. If Jesus had believed that, He would not have healed people, because it would have been God’s will for the person to be sick. But that never happened. Jesus wanted to free people of their sickness and demons, and he equated sickness with sin in the person’s life. He also didn’t tell older people that God needed them to suffer in order to end their life so that they could go to heaven. God does not need us to suffer from disease in order to get us to heaven. There are many accounts of God’s people simply ‘breathing their last’ in their old age. And healing did NOT die out with the early apostles. Healing was to be a sign that accompanied believers. It demonstrated the power of the true God to unbelievers, and it was a gift for believers.
Bottom line, we pretty much forgot how to heal the sick. A few people, ‘faith healers’ could usually be found, but some of them were focused more on their income or fame than on doing God’s work. Results were also usually very mixed, with only a few people healed. This gave faith healing a fairly bad reputation. After all, if you have ever prayed with all your heart to be healed, or prayed for someone else to be healed, and then nothing happened, you know what a blow to your faith that can be!
I myself made repeated trips for healing prayer, and usually this made me feel better mentally, but that was all. I did have a miraculous healing of a severed nerve in my arm though, after I prayed. I felt a warm tingling that can only be described as the touch of God, and I had no more pain in my arm, that had hurt very badly for over a year after surgery for cancer. Usually, we are told that we don’t have enough faith to be healed, or that it is not God’s will. While our faith can always grow, we only need a tiny amount of faith to be healed, and if you believe in God, you already have that much faith.
There has been something missing from the modern practice of faith healing, and that is explained very well in a series of 22 DVD’s that have been posted on YouTube, called ‘No Disease is Incurable’. The author is a medical doctor, Dr. Strydom. She based her series, as well as an 800 page book that she wrote, on the work of Henry Wright (A More Excellent Way to Be in Health), and Caroline Leaf (Switch on Your Brain), as well as her own medical knowledge. I respect her work very much, because for one thing, she truly does as Jesus would have wanted us all to do; she is making the teaching from the DVDs as well as her book available for free!
Dr. Strydom points out that many, probably most, of our illnesses and diseases are spiritual in nature. Disease usually results from sin, which essentially separates us from God. If, like I did, you think of sins as robbing a bank, killing someone, etc., it is eye-opening to learn that fear, anger, jealously, and lack of forgiveness to others are also sins. In order to start getting healed, we must repent of our sins. Confess them to God. And start to become sanctified, by first of all cleaning up your thought life, and connecting with God. A great starting point for connecting with God is by reading the Bible, and I recommend beginning with the New Testament, and through prayer. After all, how can you live the way God wants you to live if you don’t know what that is?
Most of us are in dire need of cleaning up our thought life. Do you find yourself going over and over what someone said or did to you that made you very angry? Or still being resentful and bitter about the way your parents treated you? Or angry about someone who drove like a jerk on the freeway? Or living in fear instead of trusting God? All of these things produce toxic thoughts, the Bible calls them ‘negative strongholds’, that can allow harmful chemicals to be released, and set you up for sickness and disease. I highly recommend that you take the time to watch the entire series of DVD’s on YouTube, they are well worth the time! The series goes much deeper into specific illnesses, and the medical and spiritual roots for them. For example, breast cancer might be caused by bitterness. She teaches you to recognize the cause of the disease, and repent of that.
Sin though, including sinful thinking, separates us from God, and sometimes ourselves and others as well. The Bible says that unless you forgive others, God will not forgive you! So you cannot really expect God’s blessings of healing, unless you are living the way God outlined, in the Bible, that you should live. Which means praying, reading the Word, and mainly Loving everyone as if they are Jesus himself. You really have to forgive others, because if you don’t, it is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to get sick from it!
I found I had a lifetime of forgiving to do. I thought I had forgiven people, but found that when I thought of incidents, even from decades ago, they still made me very angry. So I am trying to forgive everyone, ask God for His forgiveness, change the way I am being to be more like Christ, and becoming sanctified by filling my mind up with the Word of God.
So before you go to the elders of your church and ask them to pray for your healing, you must first make sure that you do not in fact have some form of sin blocking you from being healed. If you have any jealously, fear, bitterness, anger, lack of forgiveness, strife (including gossiping), or the more obvious sins like drinking too much, sexual sin, stealing, etc. you need to
1. Forgive everyone you have not forgiven
2. Confess your sins to God
3. Truly repent (change) the way you have been behaving. You must first change your heart and mind. Stop thinking about things that cause you to sin and fill your mind with God’s word.
4. Pray frequently and read the Bible. If you say you are a Christian, you really need to have a deep knowledge of what the Bible, especially what the New Testament, says.
5. Live the way Christ lived, the best way you can.
6. Go for healing prayer, and don’t forget to pray for yourself too!
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