Healing Techniques

While reading the gospels recently, I have noticed that Jesus mostly healed people whom he encountered on the roadways and marketplaces as he was travelling around.

The Modern Church has changed that model.

• Most prayer for healing is done by itinerant ministers and pastors.
• Most prayer for the sick is done in public meetings and church services.
• Healing ministries identify people to pray for by using words of knowledge.
• The person identified is called to the front of the meeting and receives prayer for healing.

I cannot find an example of this kind of ministry in the New Testament. Almost everyone healed came to Jesus or his disciples in public places during the activities of everyday life. None were identified by a word of knowledge.

There are several problems with the modern model for healing via word of knowledge.

• The modern method turns the “word of knowledge” into a sign gift, which is harmful (I will explain this in a future post).

• The gift of healing only reaches believers and people who come to church meetings. In the gospels, many of the people healed were outsiders who experienced the grace and power of God when they were healed.

• Under the modern method, the gift of healing is limited to a few experts.

• Using the word of knowledge in the modern way tends to diminish and devalue it. It is easy for a person with a healing ministry to get a few useful words of knowledge.

  • Person with a sore back
  • Person with pain in their leg
  • Person on the left side of the room

  All these have been heard before, so they are easy to get without much prayer or long waiting on the Lord. Those who do it frequently will quickly learn what works and what does not.

• These words of knowledge are incapable of being tested. In any meeting of 200 people, there will be many sick people, especially if it is a “healing meeting”. It would usually be possible to find a person with pain in any part of the body that could be mentioned. I notice that the people in these ministries rarely admit that their word of knowledge is wrong. Instead, they do one of two things.

  • Admonish the unidentified person who does not come forward for rejecting God’s grace.
  • Widen the description given in the word of knowledge to make it easier for someone present to fit it.

• Testing these types of word of knowledge is almost impossible. The fact that someone comes forward indicating that the word fits them does not prove it came from God. If the meeting is full of people carrying sickness, it is highly likely that someone with the nominated problem is present. Some people will be tempted to make their sickness fit with the word of knowledge so they are selected to receive prayer.

• The inability to test these words of knowledge means that there is very little accountability. The people operating in this way mostly assume that their words of knowledge were mostly correct. This is risky. Since these words are rarely tested, there is potential for cheating using information from social media, etc.

• Dozens of people are usually prayed for during each meeting, so the prayer for healing has to be done quite quickly: Wham, bam and move on! Sickness can be hard to deal with and often takes time, so a quick prayer does not deal with many problems.

• The modern method allows the person doing the ministering to control the sicknesses that he/she gets to pray for. I have never heard a word of knowledge for a “person in a wheelchair who is paralysed from the waist down” or a “person with stage four cancer that has riddled their body.” I am sure that God often wants to heal these conditions, but the person controlling the ministry will tend to avoid them. Thus, the method works better for the minister than for the sick.

• I presume the reason for calling people out by a word of knowledge is to build up their faith for healing. A person whom God has selected for prayer will trust him more. But this is not necessarily real faith. If the word of knowledge is not real, the faith that is based on it will not be real.

• There is rarely any follow-up if the person who is identified and prayed for is not healed. This is sad.

• Very little thought is given to how a person feels if they are not healed, because the assumption is that people who are called out by word of knowledge will be healed. I never hear a leader identify someone by word of knowledge and say that God wants them to grow in maturity through the pain of their sickness. If they are called out by word of knowledge, the assumption is that God wants them to be healed. If they are not healed, they could feel like they have rejected God’s will.

• Most people who believe that God has selected them for healing by giving a word of knowledge will feel that there is something wrong with them if they are not healed. They failed to get what God wanted them to receive, so they will come under condemnation. I suspect that this condemnation is one reason for the lack of healing in the modern church. People have taken offence against God when they came under condemnation for not receiving a healing that was seemingly offered to them by the person at the front of the meeting with a word of knowledge.

• Itinerant ministries usually move on after the meeting.

  • No checking is done to establish that the people were really healed. When a person is selected by word of knowledge and prayed for at the front of their meeting, there is huge pressure for them find some reduction in their pain. If they say nothing has happened, they will look bad, so they will usually try to find some in improvement just to please the person praying. The proof of the pudding is how they feel the next day, but the itinerant minister will not know because they have gone.
  • No checking is done of people who are not healed. They rarely receive help. They are left to struggle on their own.
  • No checking is done to ensure that the words of knowledge were correct. This leaves the process open to cheating.

  The travelling minister may believe that they have had a successful meeting, but they actually don’t know.

• Jesus operated in the streets and marketplaces, where the people of the world could see. More critical eyes could test that everything was authentic. His opponents were always trying to find something wrong with what he was doing. He was always authentic, so that did not matter. The public scrutiny would also have kept his disciples honest when they were sent out in pairs to heal the sick.

I have seen people healed by the power of the Holy Spirit. I have seen him open up a situation powerfully by giving an appropriate word of knowledge. But turning the word of knowledge/healing into a standard technique is a mistake.

I love the gift of healing, but I believe that we would see better results, and perhaps have less controversy, if we operated more like Jesus.