Faith and Healing

I studied 1 Cor. 12:4-11 which addresses the diversity of gifts from the same Holy Spirit:
the gift of wisdom
the gift of knowledge
the gift of faith
the gifts of healings
the gift of discernment
the gifts of tongues (and presumably interpretation of tongues)

Four of the gift topics are singular. They have no diversity within them. You either have it or not.
Two of the gift topics are plural. They have diversity within them, healings and tongues. A believer can have some from each of those topics and not have others.

I can attest this is true.

Matt. 7:7-11 addresses how to get good gifts from the Holy Spirit: Ask, seek and knock in prayer of faith for what you need.
James 1:5a "If any of you lack [the gift of] wisdom, let him ask of God." James 1:6a "But let him ask in faith with no doubting." James 4:3 "you ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures."

I can attest this is true.

Satan wants to reserve signs and wonders for only his agent, Jesus Anti-Christ, so he works to veer Christians away from them.

Things I learned from praying in Dead Churches

Being dead meant they were embarrassed about Jesus' signs & wonders. Since no one was really healed by prayer, don't raise false hopes by praying too specifically. If God was going to heal anyone, He would do it with or without us, so don't bother praying. Certainly don't say that God could heal through you. That is blasphemy, since only God can sovereignly heal - if & when he feels like it.

I would pray for people and they were healed by God. The church members would chalk that up as mere coincidence. God must have intended to, anyway.

So I was praying for people without anyone else praying. Thus the scientific method could be used in this situation. Prayer events could be “repeatable, isolatable and verifiable.”

As I prayed for sufferers, God healed some and not others. I noticed that some ailments were amenable to my prayer and some weren't. I would pray for the gift of healing of an ailment in the second category and, behold, God's healing took place when I prayed from then on. There must be gifts of the Holy Spirit for healing specific ailments. I wondered about that until I saw in Corinthians it mentioned 'gifts of healings.' Aha. It's not a one universal gift, like prophecy for example.

I prayed for cancer sufferers and they were healed by God simultaneous to my prayers. Months or years later, they got cancer again. I sought the Lord for wisdom about cancer. He told me poisons and radiation were damaging the DNA, causing new cancer. From then on, I prayed for God to also neutralize carcinogens and straighten out DNA damage before I prayed for the cancer. From there on, when God healed someone on behalf of my prayers, they stayed healed of cancer.

I learned the value of soaking prayer. If some prayer brought some healing, a lot of prayer would bring more healing, if not a complete healing. Even Jesus did this one time. (Mark 8:22-25) All healings happened while I was praying and not after. I would take on cases where I would pray for someone over a couple of weeks until the healing was complete.

You can do all these things and have the same results.

Prayer to God can heal, if we have the Gift of the Holy Spirit for healing that malady. 1 Cor. 12:4 talks about gifts of healings in the plural, meaning there are different gifts for different maladies. We need to pray for the gift to heal some disease before we pray against that disease. Jesus said, "ask - and it will be given you, seek - and you shall find, knock - and the door will be opened unto you." All God's promises are "yes" and "amen".

When a boy's mother wasn't healed of cancer by God although 17,000 Christians were praying for her, they had to say God meant it for something better, although they didn't know what that might be.

When I pray for cancer and see God heal the patients 90% of the time, I say that God is fulfilling His promises with signs & wonders. Would you like to know about this God of Love? I've done this around a hundred times through the decades. Most of the time, I was the only one praying for these people. In dead churches, I truly was the only one, guaranteed!
This webpage explains my years in the desert: http://orderofsaintpatrick.org/3/pray-dead-church.html

Having hundreds of Christians praying for someone increases the odds someone has that gift, but you wouldn't know who or why. When Doug Davis was healed of cancer, all traces of the cancer were gone - the gift of miracles. Who has that? We likely will never know.

The Order's theology of faith for healing (and everything else)

The one I espouse goes like this. God is absolutely sovereign, but He has given us His exceedingly great and precious promises. His general promises in the Bible and Logos are in general true. Through His divine guidance He gives us His rhema (spoken word) which is specifically true.

We need to be walking in the positive promises of God and avoiding the negative promises. God blesses those who obey Him, who are kind, who rest in faith, who ask, etc. God doesn't bless those who are faithless. God curses those who do the opposite.

As we intercede for someone (or ourselves) with God's general promises (ask, seek, knock in prayer), God may give us His specific promise of healing in terms of peace or assurance (Heb. 11:1). This is known as the Gift of Faith (1 Cor.12:9). Or He may tell us to try another means with the implied specific promise of healing (Matt.17:21). When it is done and healing is on its way, the Gift of Faith is given to us. Or we may never be given the faith, because He is not going to answer the prayer for His own sovereign reasons.

Another flawed theology of healing that is common in Charismatic circles:

Another Hindu flavored theology I've heard preached goes like this. You pray and get yourself to believe that God will answer, so that He will answer your prayer. But as evidence that you are doing the requisite believing, you can't say you have the ailment, even though it is evident to everyone around you. If real healing doesn't immediately occur, the answer is either that you haven't believed hard enough or God is just testing your faith. Keep claiming your healing until God comes through with it. (Bunk!)

Unfortunately, I knew a man afflicted with MS who did all that and died anyway. The intercessors changed their tack and said he was healed in heaven. But that is not what they had originally promised. It wasn't true, anyway. My friend's spirit & soul didn't have MS to begin with. His body is rotting in the grave with the MS. No healing for spirit, soul or body of MS.

Other questions come to mind.... Why wasn't my friend physically healed by the faith of the intercessors? What was the matter with them? Did they not really believe what they were preaching? Did they think it was all hypnotic power of suggestion and therefore it was entirely up to him to believe it?

I visited a Charismatic Christian ministry in August, 2006. They first showed me a video that taught this theology. Then they spent time teaching it in the prayer room. They also taught that they used prophecy to determine the root cause of the illness and to know exactly what to pray for. They said when they did so, God would act on my behalf. After a couple of minutes of rummaging through books, they said they got it. They prayed accordingly. Nothing happened. "Well," they said, "God is just testing your faith. Keep praying and claim your healing and keep coming back and God will come through." I'd heard those lines with my friend who had the MS. And with another friend who had died of cancer of the spleen.

Sometimes their Christian prayers have coincidentally lined up with the will of God. Ding! Immediate healing. But when healing doesn't immediately occur, that's when our theologies diverge.

How to pray for healing, guidance, protection, provision, transformation, godliness, fellowship, agape love and salvation from sins:

pray to God generally for the topic you want.
Ask God, "Teach me what to do, so that I might act according to your will and see results." (1 John 5:14)
Listen quietly for the guidance, however He gives it to you. Usually, it is prayer or deliverance.
Obey His instructions.
When the peace descends, stop praying and see what the Lord has done!

Doing these steps I have seen numerous, immediate healings of cancer, arthritis, paralysis, etc.

Sadly, I have also seen situations where I got no guidance and saw no healing. God is our sovereign Lord and we are his creatures. We know He is absolutely just and loving without hedging on either one of those.

edited: August 24, 2017 orderofsaintpatrick.org/heal/faith-healing.htm