How Healers Can Prevent Healing by A K Whitehead Do you have a tendency to shift vblame for things that seem to turn out wrong? Most of us do! mThe occurrance of nonhealing in Christian ministry is no exception. Usually we shift blame onto poor individual with whom we are praying. Look at most books on healing. They will have a chapter on nonhealing in which all causes are attributed one way or another to person being prayed with.
The problems are fairly common, in sense of occuring quite frequently. Ask yourself: which of following is/are most likely to apply to you? That will put you on road to significantly greater success in your praying for healing.
1.Everything In The Bible Is True But Not All Truth Is In The Bible John said in his gospel that world would not have been large enough to contain an account of all things that Jesus did and said (John 21. 25). How big would Bible have to be to contain all truth?
We are concerned here only with healing. We can learn much about how to pray with others for healing from gospels. But can gospels tell us everything about it? Of course not. So we need to use some commonsense and prayer, in relation to our experience, to fill-in gaps. If we are prepared to be self- critical and learn from our experience, in this activity as in others, we shall see a gradual increase in our success rate.
2. We Imitate Jesus But We Are Not Jesus In our book "The Keys To Praying For Healing" my wife and I discuss this whole reality. Everyone Jesus prayed with was healed. That is atarget for us. It is not arule governing our experience in praying for healing. Notice that even Jesus' near disciples had difficulties in sucuring healing when praying with others (e.g. Mark 9. 14 - 18). Since wew are not Jesus, sometimes we shall fail.
This failure may well be due to our own deficiencies on occasions. A deficiency is not necessarily same thing as a fault. For example, we can have a deficiency because of ignorance. If we are ignorant of something, we cannot take it into account. But in other cases we may be ignorant of something weought to have known about. The we are at fault.
But read Acts and see how Peter learned from his observations of Jesus (e.g. Acts 3. 2 - 8). Compare his approach to Jesus' approach. Can we not do that same? Of course. And from that we shall learn to increase our rate of success in healing ministry.
Yet we shall never equal success rate of Jesus himself. So a fundamental rule is: do best you can at time and do not become discouraged by what might appear to be failure. Allowing oneself to get down is a cause of failure we can (and certainly should) avoid. No prayer can be categorised as complete failure because God always responds to us in some way.