Some charismatic Christians believe that everybody should be healed. Can we fill-in the spiritual gap felt by some of the un-healed?
On keeping a balanced attitude to Christian healing
Roman Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, Methodists, Orthodox, House Churches and others; white, black, brown, African, Indian, Eastern, South American; from the poles to the equator, everywhere you look among Christians today, you will find men and women who have been renewed spiritually. They have had a fresh and re-freshing experience of personal and group religion and have a joy in being christian which bubbles out of them!
One of the first ways that this re-vitalised Christianity showed up, (in this 20th century), was in the re-discovery of the Church's Ministry to the sick and troubled.
What I would ask you to think about now is: How do we keep a positive, sensible attitude to the claim that Jesus heals today, and how are we to regard people who are not healed?
Let me put it to you like this:
We Christians believe that every human being is a mixture of body, (the part of us most like the animals); mind, (the part of us which is of more extensive ability than the animals); and spirit, (the part of us which is not material and which can make contact with that wonderful non-physical Being we call God).
These three parts affect each other. A sick body may make a person depressed or unable to pray. A mind which dwells on bitterness and resentment may result in a skin disease or undesirable behaviour. A spirit or soul which neglects truth, beauty, goodness and God, may become lustful for power or unbalanced in bodily health and mental well-being. What all of this means is that, if anybody is sick, then the illness can be tackled either on the bodily level, the mental level, or the spiritual level; or on two of these, or even on all three at once. One of the commonest things to happen in a Christian group's or congregation's life is to pray for a person who is undergoing hospital treatment.
Whatever is done, any one part of our three-fold nature will affect the others.
On the whole, the doctor attends to the physical, the psychiatrist to the mental, and the priest or minister to the spiritual. But the spirit is within the whole person, for our spirits or souls include our character, personality and free will and are part of us. The soul is within the mind and body.
All of this means that it is perfectly sensible and reasonable for a physical or mental illness to be approached not only through the body or the mind but also through the spiritual side of human nature.
In what way ought Christians to exercise a spiritual ministry of healing for any type of illness?
Jesus Christ instructed us to use for healing three things:
1. Prayer - which may be silent or spoken.
2. The "laying on of hands", (which are usually placed on the head).
3. Anointing with holy oil. (This is blessed oil - like olive oil - which is usually put on the sick person's forehead in the shape of a cross).
How should we envisage this work of Christian healing? When you think about it, you realise that in each of us is an in-built ability to heal ourselves.
For example, we usually heal ourselves of a common cold or a cut.
Even when helped by a surgeon, his job is to do some advanced joinery, plumbing or sewing and then wait for the body to mend itself. (A broken bone or removed appendix are common examples of this.)
The gospels depict Jesus as a person with an exceptional gift of healing which He used not just to make a sick part of a body well, but also to make people whole, (that is, with a healthy soul, mind and body in harmony).
Consequently, the Church's special Ministry of Healing, (which may be done in conjunction with the work of the medical profession), is a spiritual one which ought to be done on behalf of Christ and in obedience to his command, "Heal the sick".
It follows, then, that when someone is ill and you pray, or lay on hands, or anoint with oil, (or, all three), you are asking God the creator, Jesus the healer and the Holy Spirit the giver of life, to come and add in Their divine contribution to the work of healing.
Before we go any further, may I explain that I prefer not to use the term "spiritual healing", because some people use these two words to refer to Spiritualists who may claim to heal with the help of some human person or persons who are no longer with us because they are dead.
"Christ-ian healing" has only one source and that is Christ Himself.
"Divine Healing" might be a good use of words because "divine" means "to do with God".
At weddings we often sing, "Love Divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down". In our ministry to the sick we could describe it as "Divine love, Healing from heaven, invited into our lives".
Perhaps the best way to define what we are doing is to say that it is the continuation of Christ's ministry of health and wholeness.
Some very enthusiastic, (and often charismatic),Christians will say that everybody ought to be able to be healed and that, if they are not healed, it is their own fault. (I think they mean that they believe the sick person may have unrepented sins or lacks enough faith.)
No doubt it is true that we need to receive forgiveness in order to approach God; but the thing that troubles many of us is the belief that serious lack of faith is what is "wrong" when some well-intentioned person is not healed.
What I am concerned about is people who are told "Jesus will heal you" and who then find they are not healed.
They are built up to great expectations and then feel badly let down when nothing happens.
Sad to say, many of us clergy have had to "pick up the pieces" of people who have been promised healing but not had it.
The first thing I want to say about it is this:
Some people are not healed of their bodily or mental illnesses, even though they may have had much prayer and also the laying on of hands or anointing. (Anointing is sometimes called "Holy Unction".)
In the Bible we hear about all those people whom Jesus healed, but there were thousands whom He did not heal. When He healed the man at the pool of Bethesda (see John 5) He (apparently) did not heal any of the other sick men and women who were there.
When St. Paul had something wrong with him, (which he described as a "thorn in the flesh"), he was not relieved of this problem even though he had asked God on three separate occasions.
It is also worth bearing in mind the fact that, although it was not the pain of an illness, nevertheless, when, in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed to be spared the agony of scourging and crucifixion, the answer was "No", and presumably the Father said, "My grace is sufficient for Your needs".
Those of you who knew or read about David Watson will understand how puzzling it was to many people that he should have died of cancer.
With all this in mind, ought we not to be perfectly honest and say that we do not know or understand why some people are healed by the Church's ministry of Healing, and some are not.
None of these considerations mean that the Christian Church should refrain from ministering Christ's gifts of wholeness.
People are right to say, "we should obey our Lord's command to heal the sick". It is right to follow St. James' instruction about this, (see his epistle, Chapter 5, from v. 14), and it is important to heed Christ's emphasis on the need for faith - even if our own faith is as small as a mustard seed!
But with this is the awareness that a whole person is not only someone whose body, mind and spirit are fully coordinated, but also it is someone who is fully in tune with God and His will.
Jesus said that He had come to do God's will, and we who follow Him are similarly called to do His wishes.
For all of us Christians, this means giving ourselves to God.
If we are to seek God's healing, I would like to suggest to you that we would do well to take much more time and effort about PREPARATION.
You will see more clearly what I think about the importance of preparation in a previous posting, but now I want to ask you to apply it to the ministry of Divine Healing.
What this comes down to is that the first step in preparing to receive healing is to make a fresh act of utter self-giving to God.
This might be done in the form of a prayer along these lines: "Lord, I bring to you my illness. You know that I long to be healed of it, but I ask only that you will do what you, in Your divine wisdom, know to be best for the well-being of my eternal soul".
(You will recall that this giving to God without demanding from Him was what my Father did just before I was born and what we did when the Tristan islanders were missing on the high seas.)
It is my experience that when people learn to do this, they always receive a gift of inner peace and interior relaxation.
They have put themselves into God's hands and are content to stay there.
It is after that kind of preparation followed by the ministry of the Church that some people receive grace to live with their disability or problem, some receive partial healing, some people's health improves at once or else some time later, and a few are healed at once.
But it is the experience of the new inner "peace which passes understanding" which brings the lasting joy and gratitude.
This is not a blog specially about the Ministry of Divine Healing and therefore I will not give examples of these differing responses, but I can assure you, from my Fathers', my own and other people's experiences, that that is how it works.
If this, then, is how the patient prepares, the preparation of the people who pray for the sick - the intercessors - will be similar.
If the person we pray for is very special to us, (like a wife, husband, child, parent or good friend), it is very hard to let go.
The trouble is that, just because we are praying for someone very special, we tend to try to bend God's will to our own desire.
Perseverance in prayer is excellent, but insisting on God "doing His stuff IN OUR WAY" is very different and quite wrong.
I am not happy with some people's approach to healing when they insist on God getting to work there and then.
I am afraid I do not agree with prayers such as "Holy Spirit enter into these damaged cells and drive out the disease and change them into healthy cells".
Also, I have doubts about prayers like, "Christ, we claim your healing for this person".
Do you know who started this idea of "claiming" gifts for people? (I do not.)
To me is sounds a bit like the announcement that No. 999 has won the raffle and will the holder of ticket 999 come up and claim their prize.
We humans are not in a position to make demands of God or act as if we had "rights" to claim. We can only look in amazement at His love and humbly respond to it.
God's method, it would seem, is to consider what is best for each individual person, (complete with "warts"), not just as of now, but in the context of the span of an earthly life followed by life eternal.
A main objective in healing should surely be for the person receiving the ministration to dedicate his or her life to God more deeply and thoroughly than before.
You may possibly ask a question like this: If healing was so simple and straightforward when first Jesus and then the disciples did it, why do we find it difficult and why are our results so mixed and why do we need all this careful preparation?
I think that much of the answer to this question lies in what has happened to the Church since our Lord's ascension into heaven.
The most obvious change has been the division of His Church into denominations, factions and separated sects.
As I said before, Jesus did not found Methodists or Roman Catholics or Anglicans or Baptists or Eastern Orthodox or such-like. He founded one "family" for all believers and called it His Church. His prayer was that we all might be ONE.
For the voyage through life to the "port of heaven" Jesus provided one ship and that was the "ark" of the Church. Contrary to His wishes, we have divided the ship's company up into umpteen boats and other vessels, each of which is plotting its own course to the same port.
Having weakened Christ's Church in this way, we have to make very great and extensive efforts to enable God's healing grace to come through to us.
In addition, we have to be aware of all the purely nominal Christians who have in past ages and do still exist today. In so many congregations faith and trust in Christ and His promises is very weak, and our Lord's healing work was always dependent on faith.
It is my opinion that the divided Church and the lack of faith are the two greatest hindrances to the Church today. "Lord, heal your Church."
To me, the marvel is that God can and does still work through the members of His fragmented Church.
If you had a radio with faulty parts and some of the circuits not properly joined together, you would not expect much by way of results.
How amazing that God can still work through a Church which is like that!
So let us be very thankful, and press on!
The letter to the Hebrew Christians tells us that Jesus is always praying for us.
Our job is to join our prayers with His and send them to the Father.
If we do this, we soon become aware of our unworthiness, our need of God's mercy, forgiveness and grace and this leads us to offer ourselves more completely in His service.
As my own father once said when he was speaking on healing in Liverpool parish Church, (in 1953):
"The aim and object of the Church is to bring persons to Christ as perfectly unified personalities, finding integration in and through Christ."
End
