Facing Discouragement About Healing

I wrote about how I became convinced of God’s will to heal in this post. (Check out 13 Solid Scriptural Proofs of God’s Will To Heal.) After seeing so many miracles happen, I talked about it all the time and I was always asking people if they needed to be healed of something. Miracles began to happen when I laid my hands on people, but it was very frustrating when they didn’t happen!

I think it is hard to explain the emotional pain that I faced at times because of that frustration. There was a particular time when I was in McDonald’s and began to command a friend’s eyes to be perfect so that she wouldn’t need her thick glasses. Her eyes began to go in and out of focus, as if the knob on a pair of binoculars was being turned back and forth. Every time, they came more into focus until she was healed of nearsightedness and didn’t need glasses!

However, a few days later she felt something funny in her eyes and put her glasses back on. When she did that, her eyes completely regressed! I know that this seems like a little thing to get down about, but for me, it felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I got very discouraged because of this and I didn’t see another miracle happen for a whole month. When people are healed it often feels like strength and love are exploding from my heart. But when this happened, I tried to lay hands on people but I just felt tired inside. I needed the Holy Spirit to strengthen and refresh my heart.

Yet even when I felt discouraged, I couldn’t stop going, because I knew that what I had seen was real. It didn’t make sense to stop because of what was not happening, because there were still people who were being healed! Again and again the Holy Spirit strengthened me and lifted me when I needed help, and more miracles kept happening.

Trying To Learn More About Healing

Because of the frustration when some people were not healed, I began to study healing even more. I listened to different teachers and I read books about healing. I studied everything I could about specific “spiritual roots” of various diseases. I learned about “removing hindrances to healing” by leading people in repentance from any sin that may be related to the problem, asking them if they had any unforgiveness that needed to be dealt with, and breaking “generational curses”.

There were many things that I was a bit confused about. I didn’t read in scripture of Jesus having counseling sessions with people in order to get them healed, but it seemed that a lot of experienced people were having more success by doing these things. Also, on one hand, I read promises of scripture like Mark 11:23.

Mark 11:23 (NRSV) “Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you.”

If this scripture was true, I should be able to speak to the mountain no matter what anyone else thought, and it would move. It didn’t say “If you speak to the mountain and get the other people around you to believe with you, it will be done for you”. Yet on the other hand, I read in Matthew 13 that even Jesus was only able to do a few miracles in Nazareth because of their unbelief. And why did Jesus so often encourage people to believe? Why in Mark 5 did he put everyone out of the house before he raised the girl from the dead? I had been taught that he was getting all the unbelief out.

Although I knew that there was something I needed to understand better, I generally thought  “The more faith, the better.” I felt like maybe if I had really strong faith, it could overcome the unbelief of others. Yet I also felt like the unbelief of others could hinder me from demonstrating God’s power. That was very frustrating, especially when if felt like everyone was against me.

I was mostly ministering to Christians. I often talked to them about how I became convinced that it was God’s will to heal everybody, and then I did things like leading them through visualizing Jesus on the cross carrying their sickness, or leading them in prayers of forgiveness. I especially did things like this when somebody wasn’t healed the first time. I figured that I needed to get any hindrances to healing out of the way. And there were people who were healed like this, yet something bothered me.

I did minister to unbelievers once in a while, but not much. I was a lot more timid about it. I saw in scripture that healing miracles were a sign for unbelievers, in order to lead them to salvation. If healing miracles were supposed to lead unrepentant and unbelieving people to repentance and faith in Christ, then it didn’t make sense that I should need to get them to repent or believe before the miracle could happen! The way I had learned about ministering healing made it very difficult to minister to unbelievers.

Getting Frustrated With People For Not Being Healed

I knew very well that I should never tell anybody “You weren’t healed because of your unbelief.” I was there to encourage people, not put blame and discouragement on them. Yet because I thought that the unbelief of others could dull the effectiveness of my faith, it was hard to not feel frustrated with people when they showed unbelief. And even though I never told anyone that it was their fault that they were not healed, it was all too easy to wonder if maybe a person wasn’t healed because they still had not forgiven a person or really repented from some sin.

I even felt angry sometimes when I heard a person say something that expressed unbelief. Yet many of these people had never seen a miracle before and did not have much reason to believe–in contrast to Jesus’ disciples, who had already seen great miracles and even healed many sick people themselves, but still showed unbelief. By the emphasis on dealing with “hindrances to healing”, I was starting to think as if there were hoops that people had to jump through in order to be healed. This kind of thinking did not produce grace in my heart towards people. It was just a hindrance to me and to my effectiveness in ministering to others.

I knew something was wrong. I needed God’s correction. That was when I met Dan Mohler at a weeknight gathering in a firehouse, somewhere between Lancaster and Reading, PA. Next week in part two, I will share about what Dan taught me. In part 3 I will share about some of the miracles that happened when my thinking changed.

If you liked this post, you may want to check out my Heaven Now book trilogy. It contains many similar insights into understanding simple gospel truths and exercising heaven’s dominion on earth. It’s also filled with testimonies of what happened when I put these truths into practice. I’m sure these books will encourage you and help you learn to walk as a heavenly person. Not only that, but your purchase supports our missionary work in Brazil and in every other place we go!