How Healers Can Prevent Healing

Jul 22
21:00

2003

A K Whitehead

A K Whitehead

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How Healers Can Prevent ... A K ... Do you have a tendency to shift the vblame for things that seem to turn out wrong? Most of us do! mThe ... of ... the ... ministry

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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,How Healers Can Prevent Healing Articles 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.

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