What about mercy? Let’s talk about mercy for a while. If you sin, you seek forgiveness, which is available through grace. Grace is unmerited favor. If you are sick, you desire healing – you are not looking for forgiveness unless sin was involved.

Actually, what you desire is mercy. Mercy is different from forgiveness. I’ll give an example. You hit a person’s car and you’re in the wrong. He tells you, “I forgive you”, but holds you liable and takes you to court to recover the damages to his car. He forgave you, but did not have mercy on you. It was the same with David, after his sin with Bathsheba. God forgave him, but the child died anyway.

To put it another way, forgiveness washes your sins away – a spiritual action with spiritual outcomes; mercy is a tangible action with physical outcomes. Not convinced? Let’s take a look at what Bartimaeus cried out in Mark 10,

46…a blind man, Bartimaeus (that is, the Son of Timaeus), was sitting by the roadside begging. 47When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48Many rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

This is similar to the man with the epileptic son in Matthew 17:15:

“Lord, have mercy on my son,” he said. “He has seizures and is suffering greatly. He often falls into the fire or into the water.

Do a word search of “mercy” in the gospels and you’ll see it used many times in the context of healing. The healings of the Canaanite’s daughter (Matthew 15:22), Elizabeth’s barrenness (Luke 1:58) and of the madman of Gadara (Mark 5:19) were all described as acts of mercy. The Good Samaritan was also described as the one who had mercy, when Jesus asked in Luke 10;

36″Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.” Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

What’s my point? When we ask God for healing, it is important to know what we are really asking for. We are really asking for mercy, regardless of whether we have sinned or not.

If your illness has resulted from sin (e.g., poor lifestyle choices), you need forgiveness of sins, but more than that, you need mercy. This not limited to healing, even though that is our focus here. Many enter financial or relationship ruin because of bad decisions. They often ask for forgiveness, but not mercy. They receive forgiveness, but not mercy. Is that possible? Yes, it is, just look again at King David. He actually had it happen not only with Bathsheba, but when he performed an unauthorized census of Israel.

Moses had the same thing happen when he struck the rock twice. He received forgiveness, but mercy was unavailable in regard to his entering the Promised Land. God was merciful enough to let him go up on the mountain and see it, but he never entered it. The deeper your experiences and maturity with God, and the more you partake of the Holy Spirit and of the powers of the coming age, it seems to me that mercy is less available if you play the fool. This writ is not for everyone; those at that stage in their walk know who they are. A scripture that underlines this is James 3:1:

Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.

To conclude, ask for mercy in addition to forgiveness when you seek healing for sickness that may be partially or wholly due to sin. Ask for mercy even if there is no sin involved. Realize, as many did in Jesus’ day, that healing is a mercy of God. Grace gets us into right standing or favor with God, but mercy obtains for us healing and other interventions in our lives. This is really what you are asking for when you ask for healing—you are asking for mercy.

God is rich in mercy (Ephesians 2:4). May you be recipients of God’s mercy today and for the rest of your life, through Jesus Christ. Amen.

11God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, 12so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.

Those who are familiar with healing and deliverance ministry understand the significance of touch and how the anointing can be released through touch.

On one hand, we can look at this scripture and say: “well, this was specific to Paul as a healing method and nothing is said about its generalizability to other ministers”. They would recall when a dead body was thrown into a cave in which Elisha had been laid and the dead one came back to life on contact with Elisha’s corpse (2 Kings 13:20, 21). Surely, we would not introduce that as a general form of ministry, would we?

However, there are other precedents that seem to me to permit this form of healing ministry. Elisha (2 Kings 4:29) had his servant, Gehazi, take his staff to lay on the face of a dead boy for healing (although unsuccessful in that instance). Most important though, the woman with the issue of blood was healed by touching the hem of Jesus’ garment.

Clearly it is not the cloth itself that heals, but the Holy Spirit’s anointing from the individual that impregnates the cloth. With these examples, I suggest this is a viable method of ministering and receiving healing today. However, as practiced today, this method is dramatically unsuccessful or at best, “hit-and-miss”. Why?

I believe the major reason is that we have little understanding in our churches about who has what kind of anointing, calling or gifting in any area. We just gather around en masse, lay hands on the cloths and send them out “on a hope and a prayer”. It is almost ritual now.

As an aside, I have been in meetings where twenty believers gather around a sick person and begin to pray. This irritates me, quite honestly. That is dignifying sickness and ascribing importance to the demonic activity behind some sicknesses. Why are twenty Christians needed to pray for healing for one person? Am I the only one to whom this seems ridiculous? The Greater One lives in us, doesn’t He? If one Christian can change a light bulb, one believing Christian should be able to pray successfully for a sick person’s healing.

Anyway, back to anointing cloths. What would it take to have a better success rate? Teaching and recognition of spiritual gifts…much more of it. Are we an army? Yes, but an army of specialists. Pilots fly planes, tank drivers drive tanks, engineers build bridges. This is important. You have this gift, I have another. Those who have this gifting and success in it should be doing it, not everyone. We just don’t operate like an army and so become largely ineffectual in warfare, particularly when contending for healing.

To conclude, I suggest that anointing cloths are a method by which God heals. Trained and anointed ministers in this area can have great results that glorify God and get the sick healed. Please tell us about your own experiences in this area.

2 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda[a] and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. 3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed and they waited for the moving of the waters. 4 From time to time an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first one into the pool after each such disturbance would be cured of whatever disease he had

Some manuscripts do not have the underlined portion, but it is not needed if you read on—the meaning is clear. From time to time, God would stir the waters and heal the first person who entered. How does this relate to the way God heals? Well, this may sound strange, but He often heals just because He wants to. Not because anyone prayed or because anyone fasted – He is a healer and on occasion, He will heal—a God-initiated healing. I listened to a pastor once who quoted Psalm 115:3,

3 Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him.

I love this scripture. In other words, God does what He wants, he neither needs our permission nor our activity to show mercy. This makes sense, for “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us..” No one interceded for God to send His son to save us, yet He did so all the same. Many of us were trained in the Word of Faith school where we unconsciously believe that there must be a whirlwind of prayer before God acts. This is not always the case.

‘Well,” someone from the Faith school might say, “thanks for the non-actionable piece of information”. I know it sounds that way…if there’s nothing I can do, and it’s all up to God, it’s just another interesting fact. That’s not totally true however. Although this was God healing spontaneously, notice that there was something that the sick people did—they hung out at the pool.

What am I saying? I’m saying, if you are sick, do the same thing as they did. Attend healing meetings where the power of God is active. Also attend meetings where there is intense praise and worship, and where healing is preached. There are many accounts of people are healed at meetings where no one laid a hand on them. The secret is that where God’s Name is glorified, He is often active in mercy.

This then, is another method by which our Lord heals—God-initiated healing, in other words. May we see and hear of more God-initiated healings in our day as we lift up the Name of Jesus. Amen.

It seems to me that today, the onus is more on the individual seeking healing, as opposed to their church or cell group. You have to look far and wide to find others who believe, and those who hold large-scale meetings with tangible results are few enough to be counted on the fingers of two hands. That just grieves me.

Thankfully, we have the Word and we have online access to many resources about Christian healing. Use them, as I have at different times. Seek out like-minded believers and encourage each other, especially if healing is neither taught nor practiced in your church community. I also keep a list of friends and pastors I have met or known over the years that I can reach if I need to.

Back to the individual path. Of all the means by which God heals, several are God-initiated, others are initiated by us. What I mean is that you can pray or lay hand on yourself etc. You initiate those. Gifts of the Spirit on the other hand, are initiated by God through others. You cannot force them in any way. All you can do is eagerly desire spiritual gifts, and have a clean vessel to receive them.

In ministering to yourself, rule out the use of spiritual gifts anyhow, because as the Word says, they are given for the common good, not yours (1 Corinthians 12: 7),

Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.

So that means that if you are sick and ministering to yourself, you can:

1. Pray for yourself
2. Declare your healing
3. Lay hands on yourself
4. Anoint yourself with oil
5. Perform self-deliverance
6. Take Communion

Is there a recommended order or sequence? Thankfully, not. The more you are in prayer and the more you seek Him, what to do next will come naturally. Personally, I give a petition a little time for results to appear. If not, I’ll minister to myself again. I just keep at it until relief comes. We inherit the promises through prayer and persistence. If relief is not forthcoming, then I will seek the assistance of others, which is when the other means of healing come into play.

By the way, if I need a painkiller, I’ll take it with no qualms. I’ve never equated testing my pain tolerance with faith. Tylenol never healed you of anything anyway. It just stops the pain from reaching your brain. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve never been afraid to go to the doctor for a diagnosis, as well as for those important regular checkups.

That concludes my line of thought about the individual path to healing. Was it helpful? Next, I will look at how churches can become “healing organizations” and prepare themselves for more effective healing ministry.

Typically, I will then ask a seeker if they are a Christian. Have they confessed the Lordship of Jesus as Savior and Lord and have they believed that He died and was raised from the dead for their justification? Very often, seekers have simply never heard the gospel presented clearly and I have seen many led to the Lord this way.

Of course, if they are hesitant, I will immediately proceed to prayer. Jesus Himself healed some who did not believe in Him and in one case, He healed the man born blind who didn’t even know who He was, in John 9,

35 Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, and when he found him, he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 36 “Who is he, sir?” the man asked. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.” 37 Jesus said, “You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” 38 Then the man said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.

Notice that the man didn’t recognize, know, or worship Jesus until after he was healed. As a pastor once said, “Healing rings the dinner bell for salvation.” Most people will readily accept Christ after they are healed.

Once we are at this point, I listen acutely to God as to how I should minister to a seeker. Often, I’ll receive a leading to pray, or perhaps make declarations over the person. Other times, I will be led to anoint with oil. The most important thing here is to be led by the Spirit. Will you always receive an impression? Probably not, if you are like me. In that case, you may simply pray for the person or get into agreement with them regarding their case.

Be very watchful and observant. I cannot stress this enough. Sometimes you will see something happen to assist your next action, other times, you will just sense it. Also, try to keep your eyes open when you pray. This is for two reasons. Sometimes people will fall under the power and you might have caught them if your eyes were open! Also, if people begin to manifest demonic activity, it is useful to have your eyes open or you might not notice.

The last point I’ll make is that I almost always have the seeker sit down. I do this for two reasons. The first is to get it clear in the seeker’s mind that falling is not the same as being healed. We have this thought in the Pentecostal church especially, that makes us seek to fall under the power of the Holy Spirit, or failing that, just fall. A lot of folks fall of their own accord, so I just take this out of the equation by having them sit. Then they can focus on the healing, not falling.

Second, these days, too many healing ministers are looking for seekers to fall, as a sign God is working through them. Just sit the person down. I’ve picked up too many people who stayed sick. Some ministers even pray for sick people to fall when they minister! Don’t laugh, it’s true… I just pray that the person is healed, not that they fall. OK then, I will conclude the individual path to healing in my next post.

If these actions don’t fix the problem, then it is time to begin ministry proper. It is still not quite time to go hammer and tongs at the physical or emotional ailment but to address a set of common obstacles to healing or even causes of sickness. In ministering over the years, I’ve found a major obstacle to healing to be unforgiveness. I’ve discussed this in another post (here), so I won’t spend too much time on it in this post.

I will say though, that it never ceases to amaze me how the most gentle, refined Christians can often have such pure hatred for certain people in their lives. There is often a real reason why –a woman who broke up the seeker’s marriage, an uncle who abused an individual years ago. You must seek God’s grace to enter the healing ministry because of what you will invariably hear.

Unforgiveness blocks healing, there’s no two ways about it. You must forgive all who have sinned against you, individually and by name if you can remember. You must then pray for these individuals, release them and thus remove the barrier to the flow of God’s grace into your life. Jesus Himself mentioned this obstacle to healing in Mark 11,

And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”

After dealing with unforgiveness, I typically seek to discern whether there is an ancestral element to this disease, especially if we are dealing with substance abuse. “My mother and father were alcoholics, and their parents before them,” is usually a clue that the cause here may be a curse or curses over that family lineage that needs to be broken. It may also be the case with a physical or mental disease that has run rampant in a family through many generations.

If you discern this is the case, then ask the Lord to provide you with the information needed to break the curse(s) in the Name of Jesus or deal with one or more familiar spirits that have grown comfortable in a family tree. They only continue through ignorance. Once you understand your authority in Jesus Christ, it is straightforward to cast these spirits out in Jesus Name. You may also have a trained Healing Rooms worker do this for you.

The next step is to find out whether the seeker has had involvement with the occult. You will find a connection often between occultic involvement and a host of physical and mental illnesses. It may not be direct worship of wooden idols; in the Western world, it is a lot more subtle. It can involve astrology, palmistry, tarot cards, Dungeons and Dragons (and similar games), ouija boards, horoscopes, séances, certain types of music and so on.

An interview with a seeker will often unearth this gateway through which the enemy has access to their lives, if it exists. Once identified, repentance and renouncing of these activities are necessary and then their power and influence can be broken in Jesus Name. To be continued in my next post…

Let’s therefore assume you have this foundation under you. You have a healing lifestyle, the healing scriptures are not strange to you, and you spend time with the Lord. What then? One of the first things to find out is exactly what the ailment is and to get it diagnosed. There’s no use praying for cancer when all you have is gas. If you’re not a doctor, don’t pretend to be one. Get diagnosed correctly.

After you fully (or better) understand the problem, examine your lifestyle to see whether you are your own worst enemy. Are you getting enough sleep, are you eating right, are you under stress, do you smoke? Think about it for a second. What’s the point asking for healing when your lifestyle will likely bring it all back in a hurry?

Next, examine your environment to see if it is making you sick. We live in a polluted world, with ‘sick neighborhoods’, ‘sick buildings’, and ‘sick homes’. Sometimes, you may need only to put in a new air filter in your heating unit or test and find carbon monoxide is being released to recover. You may only need to check the expiration dates on your vitamins to stop poisoning yourself.

I know all this may not sound very spiritual to believers who are chomping at the bit ready to bind, loose and hammer the enemy down in prayer. Relax, there’s always time and opportunity for that. But let’s use Godly wisdom to see there are many avenues to our healing. Paul said to Timothy (1 Timothy 5:23)

23 Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.

Wine was actually safer than water back in those days before piped, chlorinated water came to each home. So even Paul used this wisdom that we speak of here. I’ll continue down the individual path to biblical healing in my next post.

I find the ministry of Jesus incredibly fascinating. There are 26 instances in the gospels where Jesus healed sick individuals (there were other mass healings). In all of the 26 instances, He never refused anyone, everyone was healed. Some may ask, “what about the Canaanite woman’s daughter in Matthew 15?”, but you know what, he healed her too. It just took a clarification of His mission and her persistence to receive her daughter’s healing. I love it when Jesus reaches forward into one dispensation to give us a gift in another dispensation, but that’s just how He is.

I’d like to continue along the lines however, of the the 12^th and 13^th ways by which God heals, namely: through a response to a Prophetic Word and through a Word of Wisdom. In Matthew 8:5-13, a centurion approached Jesus for the healing of his servant who was suffering greatly at home. Jesus volunteered to go and heal him, but the centurion demurred, asking Jesus just to say the word and his servant would be healed.  This is what follows:

10 When Jesus heard this, he was astonished and said to those following him, “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. 11 I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. 12 But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 13 Then Jesus said to the centurion, “Go! It will be done just as you believed it would.” And his servant was healed at that very hour.

There are so many aspects here we could talk about, such as the centurion’s faith and how he understood authority, but my focus here is on how God heals. Notice what Jesus said:

“Go! It will be done just as you believed it would.”

This is an example of a Prophetic Word. God often heals through this means. It differs from a Word of Wisdom in that it has no instructions for the supplicant to perform. Notice he was not sent to dip himself or his servant into the river seven times as was Namaan the Syrian. It was simply a declaration of what would take place. Thank God for the Prophetic Word. Do you have to be a prophet to minister healing in this way? No you don’t. You simply have to have the prophetic gift in operation in your life. In the next post, I’ll look at the other related way God heals—through a Word of Wisdom. Have you seen or experienced healing through a Prophetic Word?

When Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his robes, he sent him this message: “Why have you torn your robes? Have the man come to me and he will know that there is a prophet in Israel.” 9 So Naaman went with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha’s house. 10 Elisha sent a messenger to say to him, “Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed.”

Naaman was told by the prophet to perform a specific act, washing seven times in the River Jordan. This was the Word of Wisdom, or taking a specific action i.e., “Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan”. He did as he was told and received his healing, through the prophetic word i.e., “…your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed..“

Interestingly, the approach taken in the ministry of Jesus and the apostles was typically one or the other of these approaches  i.e., either a prophetic Word or a Word of Wisdom. I will discuss this in my next post. Have you seen or experienced healing through either  a Prophetic Word or a Word of Wisdom?

22 They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. 23 He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?” 24 He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” 25 Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.

If the blind man had been a modern-day charismatic, his response to the question, “do you see anything?” would have been, “I’m healed, Hallelujah!”, and he would have left only partially healed. The reason is that some believers think that any discussion of your actual condition – if it’s not restored – is a lack of faith.

Clearly, this is not sustained by this and other scriptures. I have interviewed many in healing ministry, who you have to painfully extract the actual condition from. “What is the issue?” you ask. “I’m fine and blessed,” they say. Well, you are blessed, but if you were fine, you’d be at home with your feet up instead of here, seeking healing.

As a prayer minister, I was careful to ask individuals how they felt during ministry – exactly how they felt- not using “modern-day faith-speak”. Paul writes in Romans 4:17:

As it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations.” He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.

Notice that he did not say “calls things that are as though they were not”. This scripture relates to Abraham, who in verse 19, faced the facts, but still believed God’s intention to fulfill His promise,

19 Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. 20 Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, 21 being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised.

If you feel pain, you feel pain, and you can tell Jesus, the minister, or the doctor about it. If you tell me that the pain is gone and it’s not, I’ll smile and say goodbye even though the ministry and God’s work in you may not be completed. Do you see this?

However, you can and must also speak the reality of God’s Word into and over your situation. You can add: “I believe that this pain is dealt with and overcome by the Word of God and by Jesus’ wounds”. The pain is not yet gone, but you can speak a pain-free reality into your life by the Word and expect to see it happen.