Facing Discouragement About Healing

Previously, I shared how I became convinced of God’s will to heal. (Also check out 13 Solid Scriptural Proofs of God’s Will To Heal.) After seeing so many miracles, I constantly shared testimonies and asked people if they needed to be healed of something. Many miracles happened when I laid hands on people, but it was so frustrating when nothing seemed to change!

It’s hard to explain the emotional pain I sometimes faced due to that frustration. Once, I was at McDonald’s and prayed, commanding a friend’s eyes to be healed so she wouldn’t need her thick glasses. Her eyes went in and out of focus as if the knob on a pair of binoculars was turning back and forth. They became more focused each time until she saw much better without her glasses than with them.

But a few days later she felt something funny in her eyes and put her glasses back on. When she did, her eyes completely regressed! That seems like a little thing to get down about, but it felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I got very discouraged and 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 that happened, I laid hands on people but I felt tired inside. I needed the Holy Spirit to strengthen and refresh my heart.

Even when I felt discouraged, I couldn’t stop going. I knew what I’d seen was real. It didn’t make sense to stop because of what was not happening, because people were still being healed! Again and again, the Holy Spirit strengthened me and lifted me when I needed help, and the miracles continued.

Trying To Learn More About Healing

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

Many things confused me. I didn’t read about Jesus having counseling sessions with people to get them healed in the Bible, but it seemed that many more experienced people were digging deeper. 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 could only do a few miracles in Nazareth because of their unbelief. 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.

I knew I needed better understanding. In general, I 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 it 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 led them through visualizing Jesus on the cross carrying their sickness or led them in prayers of forgiveness. I especially did that when somebody wasn’t healed the first time. I figured that I needed to get any hindrances to healing out of the way. A few people were healed like that, 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, 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 the unbelief of others could dull the effectiveness of my faith, it was hard to not feel frustrated with people when they showed unbelief. Even though I never told anyone it was their fault that they weren’t healed, it was all too easy to wonder if a person wasn’t healed because they still had not forgiven someone else or truly repented from some sin.

Sometimes I even felt angry when I heard someone express unbelief. Yet many of those people had never seen a miracle before and didn’t 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. With the emphasis on dealing with “hindrances to healing,” I was starting to think as if there were hoops that people had to jump through to be healed. Such thinking didn’t produce grace in my heart towards people. It just hindered me and 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’ll share what Dan taught me. In part 3 I will share 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!