Thread: Praying for Sick Believers

Originally Posted by victoryword

One of the problems I have with people who criticize Word of Faith is that since they do not listen to all that has been taught and make too many assumptions then they start to have problems with Word of Faith.

Take for example when you say, "I'm not sure that this topic should be an either/or type of thing. One of the small issues I have with WOF is that you have to erase, ignore somwe scripture to validate key teachings." This is based on the assumption that Word of Faith has made this an either/or thing which is entirely FALSE. No one in the WoF denies that the minister of healing must have faith. Kenneth Hagin taught it all of the time. The problem has been for the recipient of healing to be in AGREEMENT with the minister (Matt. 18:18-20). If the minister believes God will heal but the recipient does not then healing may not take place.

If anyone has made it an "either/or" thing it has not been the WoF but its critics. But just like those liberals in the News Media, our critics claim things about us that only they are practicing.

My contention is that by calling on the elders, the recipient has indeed acted in the requisite faith.

BTW, there is no need to conflate the statement I made "small issue" with "critic". No doctrine is perfect and I think everyone can gain by being exposed to WOF, It's just not the whole counsel of God, nor is any other doctrine.

Originally Posted by victoryword

If the minister believes God will heal but the recipient does not then healing may not take place.

The experience of many is that God will heal non-believers who have no faith and use that as a sign to stir them to faith. If faith explodes the power of God as the guy who was a driver for Kenneth Hagin and then became a minister once said then that means that such a healing requires more power. My idea of this is that (active) unbelief has the opposite effect of faith, it shuts out the power of God. Not that God cannot do anything in the face of (active) unbelief but it would no longer be within the medium of grace.
Let's say believers have prayed down God's power to heal and it operates through the power gifts. Now if the recipients mix personal faith into receiving then that same power will produce more results. If they are full of (active) unbelief then it will produce almost no results.

Originally Posted by Ezekiel 33

I'll go along with "Calling for the elders" as being an act of faith. God's word says to do it, and when the sick person does it they are showing faith. They are believing God's word.

While it is good to claim that everything Jesus paid for is yours, I cannot go along with claiming you are healed when you are in fact still sick.

You can believe in faith that your healing is already paid for without claiming the manifestation of that healing has already taken place if it hasn't.

It can amount to nothing more than a religious act as well. Within Catholicism the anointing of oil on the sick person has become part of the last rites to be performed shortly before death, which implies that there is no faith for healing involved in doing so, it has become merely symbolic. Faith requires an act but the act in and of itself doesn't necessarily signify faith.

Why doesn't someone head over to the James Randi foundation and work a miracle there ? Isn't their faith sufficient ? I don't think so because that place is a bastion of unbelief. It has to do with spiritual climate and it has to do with the hearts of the people who run it.

Originally Posted by victoryword

Faith RECEIVES what God has given. If there is no real faith required on the part of the recipient then either they will never receive of if they do (in the case of the gifts of healings) they will not keep it and they will lose it.

There are zero examples in the Word of someone losing a healing after Jesus ministered it to them. He does discuss evil spirits leaving someone then returning later to find their former house vacant then reentering the house along with seven other spirits. This leads me to believe that a spirit of infirmity may return after having been cast out if the person isn't in right standing with God but this has nothing to do with "continuing in faith for healing". It has to do with getting born again, staying out of sin and resisting that spirit if it tries to return again. Resisting it would imply not letting it in, it would not imply watching it return and then "resisting" it by claiming in faith that it is not there when it is. I believe this is what may have happened in the account Ari posted from Trinidad and Tobago where people were miraculously healed then returned to their previous state some time after - the spirit of infirmity was allowed back in. In many other cases it may not have amounted to a healing rather it was emotional, it could even be adrenaline kicking in and making things feel a bit different for a while. So they didn't really lose their healing rather it was never there to begin with.

When I wrecked my back in august 2015 I asked God in faith to heal me. I felt his tangible power connect in there and right something. I could still barely walk and there were parts of the back that I couldn't twist at all, literally. This lasted for five days and then it was suddenly okay and I immediately started lifting large weights again, including doing squats. It seems that God corrected the problem but he didn't tell my body to quit shutting the area down and to untangle itself so I had to walk in faith for that time before it corrected itself again. The people at work thought I was crazy and waited for things to get worse and were shocked when I was suddenly okay again. Did someone there take up the faith some time after that ? Yeah and that may have been part of why.

John 5:13-14 is interesting but it doesn't say exactly what this "worse thing" amounts to. He could be talking about hell. There are still zero examples of someone losing their healing that they once received which is in stark contrast to what people claim concerning healing today, some practically teach as a rule that people should expect to lose their healing or appear to lose their healing (even in the absence of living in sin) and then they will have to fight in faith to resist the sickness once again. This is found nowhere in the Word.

There are examples of people becoming sick and dying because of living in sin but it isn't connected to losing a healing, just to getting sick in general.