How Healers Can Prevent Healing
How Healers Can Prevent Healing by A K Whitehead Do you have a
tendency to shift the vblame for things that seem to turn out
wrong? Most of us do! mThe occurrance of nonhealing in the
Christian ministry is no exception. Usually we shift the blame
onto the poor individual with whom we are praying.
Look at most books on healing. They will have a chapter on
nonhealing in which all the causes are attributed one way or
another to person being prayed with.
The problems are fairly common, in the sense of occuring quite
frequently. Ask yourself: which of the following is/are most
likely to apply to you? That will put you on the road to
significantly greater success in your praying for healing.
1.Everything In The Bible Is True But Not All Truth Is In The
Bible John said in his gospel that the world would not have
been large enough to contain an account of all the things that
Jesus did and said (John 21. 25). How big would the Bible have
to be to contain all truth?
We are concerned here only with healing. We can learn much about
how to pray with others for healing from the gospels. But can
the gospels tell us everything about it? Of course not. So we
need to use some commonsense and prayer, in relation to our
experience, to fill-in the gaps. If we are prepared to be self-
critical and learn from our experience, in this activity as in
others, we shall see a gradual increase in our success rate.
2. We Imitate Jesus But We Are Not Jesus In our book "The
Keys To Praying For Healing" my wife and I discuss this whole
reality. Everyone Jesus prayed with was healed. That is
atarget for us. It is not arule governing our
experience in praying for healing. Notice that even Jesus' near
disciples had difficulties in sucuring healing when praying with
others (e.g. Mark 9. 14 - 18). Since wew are not Jesus,
sometimes we shall fail.
This failure may well be due to our own deficiencies on
occasions. A deficiency is not necessarily the same thing as a
fault. For example, we can have a deficiency because of
ignorance. If we are ignorant of something, we cannot take it
into account. But in other cases we may be ignorant of something
weought to have known about. The we are at fault.
But read Acts and see how Peter learned from his observations of
Jesus (e.g. Acts 3. 2 - 8). Compare his approach to Jesus'
approach. Can we not do that same? Of course. And from that we
shall learn to increase our rate of success in the healing
ministry.
Yet we shall never equal the success rate of Jesus himself. So a
fundamental rule is: do the best you can at the time and do not
become discouraged by what might appear to be failure. Allowing
oneself to get down is a cause of failure we can (and certainly
should) avoid. No prayer can be categorised as complete failure
because God always responds to us in some way.
Is it not true that Jesus was sinless? certainly. Are you
sinless? Hardly! So there were no obstacles to the flow of the
power of the Holy Spirit through him. There ARE obstacles in us.
These come from sin and sin comes from selfishness. So we need
to concentrate our efforts on eliminating the latter. Greater
success will follow, albiet as a long term achiement.
3. Lack Of Attention To Basic Problems In The Sufferer
Do you know the person you are praying with? Sometimes, of
course, we know people very well. We need to make explicit use
of that knowledge to isolate any possible abstacles to healing.
What is their expectation of healing going to be? Have they any
experience of being prayed with? Do they remain still and
receive or insist on praying as well? Are there any serious ares
of sin in their lives of which you are aware which could
constitute an obstacle to sin? (But be very careful how you
approach these).
In some situations we may not know the person at all. When we
are praying with people at public Christian meetings, days of
renewal, conference and the like, we may often find ourselves
ministering to strangers. Follow any information path which
seems to be of possible relevance. There are often reasons for
nonhealing tucked away in peoples lives.
4. Lack Of Proper Diagnosis Would you be worried if your
doctor began proscibing medicine at your next visit without
asking about the problem or investigating its causes? We also
need to investigate possible causes. One of the most common
reasons for nonhealing lies with a failure to conduct a proper
investigation into the person's problem.
Do not feel that you have to get straight into the praying bit.
Take your time and don't let anyone hurry you unnecessarily.
5. Expecting God To Work Instead Of Ourselves Who
accomplishes the healing? God, of course. But does he choose to
do it independently of us? Obviously so in some cases. But often
he does not - or why do we bother praying with people for
healing? If we are in the healing ministry he expects us to do
that share of the work which he has entrusted to us. If we skimp
on it, if we do not do all that we can if, in short, we fail to
love our fellows, then we are at fault and healing will often
not occur.
We need to do all we can, as part of our ministry, to
ensure that healing happens. Always ask "why" when it does not.
If there is no obvious reason lodging with the person being
prayed with, perhapsthere is a fault which lies with us. If we
examine ourselves in this way, we may learn something new for
next time.