What Does It Mean To Have Faith For Healing? Series

What Does It Mean To Have Faith For Healing?

Supernatural, Part 5

This is the last week of our series on the Supernatural,

We’ve looked in past weeks at the topics of

spiritual warfare, how we’re part of a battle

that goes on all around us,

between God’s kingdom,

and the kingdom of darkness.

We don’t see this battle,

because our perception of spiritual things is very poor,

we need to have our spiritual eyes opened,

but this battle actually affects every part of our lives.

We looked the second week at the Holy Spirit,

how he fills us,

and guides, encourages and empowers us.

The third and fourth weeks we looked at demons and angels,

and the part they play in spiritual warfare,

and how they affect our lives today.

This week we’re going to zero in on

one of the most important areas to our daily lives,

but it also can be one of the most controversial,

it’s the whole subject of healing:

Does God still heal people today,

am I wasting my time when I pray for somebody to be healed,

and if not, if God does heal,

then how do I get in on that,

how can I grow in faith,

so I can see people around me, or myself, healed.

There was a story in Christianity Today a few years ago.

A father named David Gilmore

told about his 15-month old son’s illness.

His little boy named Dustin came down with a sickness

that appeared to be like a flu.

At the time they went to a church

that believed that

faith alone heals any disease

and if you look elsewhere for help,

in other words if you go to medical doctors,

that shows that you lack faith in God.

David and his wife took the little boy to the church

and the pastor prayed for him.

Over the next few weeks they continued praying for him at home,

but Dustin’s temperature kept climbing,

so they started fasting as well.

Then they noticed that after a few weeks

Dustin was no longer responding to sound,

and a few days later little Dustin went blind.

One morning, the day after their pastor preached an

especially inspirational sermon about faith,

the Gilmore’s went into their son’s room

and found that their little boy’s body had turned blue,

and little Dustin Gilmore, age 16 months, had died.

Well again, they prayed

and the church believed that little Dustin

was going to be raised from the dead.

But he wasn’t, he stayed dead.

The autopsy revealed that

Dustin died from a form of meningitis

that could have been easily treated.

Does that story describe what real faith for healing looks like?

Most of us would say,

no way, that wasn’t faith,

that was stupidity!

So what does faith for healing look like?

The Bible has a huge amount to say

about the importance of faith.

One of the most quoted scriptures is

Mark 11:22-24

“Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and do not doubt in your heart but believe that what you say will happen, it will be done for you. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Now, that sounds pretty clear.

If you just believe,

if you just have enough faith,

you can ask for and get whatever you want.

But that’s not the only thing the bible says about prayer,

and we can’t just pick and choose the verses we like,

and ignore the rest.

We need to take into account all that the Bible says,

to really understand prayer.

In fact, if faith and prayer always did work like that,

and we had power over everything,

if we just simply believed, then its done,

if it really worked that way,

and we could literally get anything we wanted.

it would turn into a bunch of little monsters

As self-centered and prideful as people are,

even most believers,

This world would be a wreck,

if we could have that kind of power,

and get anything we wanted.

So we get a balancing scripture in

1 John 5:14-15

This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.

That is still an amazing promise,

but we realize here that

our faith has to be in line with God’s will.

Its not anything I want,

its what God wants

that determines power in prayer.

Now, here’s the problem with faith.

On the one hand

we have preachers on TV and in churches all over this country,