Healing – Practitioners and Consumers

I received an email request for prayer the other day from a woman whose son is being tormented by evil spirits. She asked if I could heal him. I told her it depends. Does he want to be healed? (It’s surprising how often people expect God to heal someone who is content to stay just as they are—as if He’ll override their free will.)

The woman said her son wants to be set free. I told her he could be. And then I gave her some bad news. I suggested that she might need to become an active participant in the process. Deliverance is seldom done completely and successfully without emotional healing. And the distance between us will limit my ability to help him. I offered to give her some free information on emotional healing. She found that odd and asked if I wasn’t the man who healed a pastor who needed a new kidney. I told her I was. “Then I ought to be able to heal her son,” she replied. So I prayed for her son, though I don’t know if it will make much difference.

This woman perceived me to be a healer—a practitioner if you will—and herself a consumer. Her role is to ask for my services. My job is to deliver healing.

Most of the prayer requests I receive are like this. People insist that they are passive receivers who have no input in the healing process and no ability to do it themselves. Even though my books, articles, videos, and testimonies are designed to encourage others to become practitioners, most of the people who contact me prefer to see themselves as consumers.

Believers who see themselves as consumers must be content to go from one minister to the next hoping to find the one who has the cure. And they’re not allowed to ask why their healing didn’t happen for the same reason surgical patients aren’t allowed to attend mortality and morbidity reviews, where surgeons discuss why some patients have poor outcomes. Bad outcomes are discussed only among practitioners.

The consumer lifestyle comes with a guarantee of frustration. Thankfully, God didn’t intend any of us to live this way.

Healing isn’t a gift given to a few special people. If you’re born again, you have the Spirit of God living inside you. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. His Spirit empowers you to do the works that Jesus did. Healing, miracles, raising the dead—everything. Yes, it does take a little training to learn how to release that power, but healing and miracles are available to all believers. Even you. I’ve exchanged several more emails with the woman whose son needs healing. She’s beginning to see things differently.

I’ll pray for you and you might even be healed, but nothing would give me more joy than to see you healing others.

If you need instruction, I have plenty of articles books, and podcasts. And if you want to learn to use all the tools God has given us for healing, I have a video-based healing class that will get you going in the right direction. (Click on the image below to learn more.)