Why are some people not healed when we pray with them?

This is one of most recurrent questions in Christian healing ministry. Everyone who has prayed with others for their healing has experience apparent lack of response to their prayer. Yet gospels lead us to believe that Jesus wishes everyone to be healed. Why, then, are some not healed?

In book I wrote with my wife, "The Keys To Praying For Healing", we discuss this at some length. There is no simple answer to that question. A range of possible answers lies both with pray-er and with prayed-for. This article briefly considers latter.

Investigating these sets of causes will greatly increase your effectiveness in praying with people for healing.

1. The Cause Can Lead To The Cure This can often be closely related to latter point. Find out all you can about how condition came about. For example, were other people involved? Are they being blamed? Is God himself held to be blamed? The latter is not uncommon. Frequently key to healing lies in cause of complaint.

Check-out as many possible factors like these as you can. Often time is very limited, of course. But some occasions do permit time for more thorough investigation. This is especially so if you hold healing sessions at home or through church facilities. There is no need to be crude about this. Just keep such possibilities in mind as you question person.

2. Lack Of Belief By The Suffer While this problem is most likely to arise in expected instances, there will also be unexpected ones. In former case, one might expect "marginal" Christians to have little expectation of healing.Yet sometimes these people are remarkably open to healing love of Jesus. They may seem to us to be on fringes of Christianity, but there are sometimes quite, at least to them, valid reasons for their apparent lack of involvement in Body of Christ.

When we pray, who does praying? Almost any knowledgable Christian will give same response to that question. In fact, it is a questions which separates knowledgable from less knowledgeable Christian.

The response, of course, ought to be that it is Holy Spirit who does praying, not us. For example, Paul tells us in Ephesians 6:18 that we should pray in Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. So however we are praying and whatever we are praying for, it should be Holy Spirit who is doing praying.

But is it?

Establishing Our Priorities Sometimes we are so caught up in our own problems and difficulties that we perhaps miss-remember what Paul tells us in Romans 8. 26. We behave as if he said that, when we do not know what to pray for, Holy Spirit will pray on our behalf.

In fact, when we think about it, that would be a contradiction of Ephesians 6. 18. Of course, what Paul actually says in Romans 8:26 is that "Spirit helps us in our weakness." This weakness is a general condition, not a specific one! For Paul goes on to say that "We do not know what we ought to pray for, but Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express." (New International Version).

Again note that there is a general statement here: "We do not know...", He does not say "On those occasion when we do not know what to pray for..."

We often think we know what to pray for. Some of us may consider that we always know what to pray for. We either ignore what Paul says, or we do not know what he says, or we do not want to meet what he says "head on", as it were.

In effect, we establish our own priorities in prayer. Moreover, we establish in them preference to whatever priorities of Holy Spirit happen to be.

Some Of Our Problems There are several important problems which we tend to have in allowing Spirit to establish his own priorities in our prayers.

1. We lack faith. We do have faith, certainly, but do we use it? If we don't, it will not grow. Here, we need to have sufficient faith to know that Spirit does hear us and responds to us.