Healing the Sick

Here is an excerpt from my book Restoring the Ministry of Jesus about healing the sick:

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). He is still healing the sick and setting the captives free. God is awakening the church to its spiritual inheritance in Christ and His ministry is being restored.  Below is the powerful testimony of a good friend of mine named Melissa, how God healed her of three “incurable” diseases:

It was May of 2001 when I came to a collision with Truth. I met a man in a bright yellow shirt who told me that Jesus could heal me. He said it with such certainty that I wondered if he was talking about my properly stuffed-in-a-box-of-religion Jesus, or if perhaps he knew something I didn’t. It was worth finding out.

It had taken years for the doctors to give three names to my condition: Lupus, Fibromyalgia, and Hypoglycemia. While my immune system was at war with itself, and my legs frequently gave way to a wheel chair, my heart was slowly giving in to a life of grief, sorrow, pain, sickness, anger and despair. Until I met Him. The week following my odd encounter with this man, I began my frantic search through the Scriptures.  God, being totally awesome in His exact timing, had me house-sitting for my only Christian girlfriend whose house was laden with Bibles and books on God’s healing ways.

It was Isaiah 53:4-5 that especially broke through to my heart, and I thought, if Jesus already paid the price, then I am healed, and there’s no reason to hurt like this.  And I believed exactly what the Scripture said. I then began to speak the healing Scriptures over myself (especially Isaiah 53) as I forced myself to literally take steps and walk in pain. I did this day after day until all the symptoms and pain vanished; and then I shouted to the world what He had done! This included the judge who had been ready to award me disability for the rest of my life, my lawyer who could hardly recognize me after my healing, and my doctor who confessed with his own mouth that it must have been God who did it because there was no other way. This he said as he handed me my clean bill of health.  All I did was take Jesus at His word, apply it to my life and nothing has been the same ever since! This year I will turn 30 years old; an age that I never expected to reach. I praise God that He has healed me and given me new life!

 The Torch of Healing

The ministry of Jesus was not limited to proclamation and explanation; it was also full of demonstration. Healing the sick was a major emphasis of Christ’s ministry, and as said before, was one of the four major things that He did on a regular basis. Jesus walked the earth carrying a “torch” of healing so that everywhere He went the sick were healed. He cured the sick, restored the brokenhearted, and delivered the captive. This became so well known that those in need of healing would come to Him (or be brought to Him) from all the surrounding regions to wherever He was ministering.

Not only did Jesus heal, but He commissioned others to do the same. He passed on the torch of healing to the twelve apostles, then to the 70 who were sent out in Luke 10, and then to the whole church (See Mark 16:15-18). The early church carried on Christ’s ministry of healing as outlined in the book of Acts, but somewhere along the way we dropped the torch. Every once in awhile some saint of God comes along and picks it up, demonstrating the gospel of Christ with miracles and signs. Some of these torch carriers include John G. Lake, Smith Wigglesworth, and Kathryn Kuhlman. These are the “Joshuas” and “Calebs” who ventured into the “promised land” and brought back of its fruit for the body of Christ to see. We often look back on these ministers with awe, never realizing that we too are meant to enter in, pick up the torch of healing, and carry on the ministry of Christ.