After all these years of ministry I have for the first time realized the vast difference between praying for the sick and ministering to the sick with the gift of healing. They are not the same. In fact they are as far apart as the east is from the west.When visiting the various non charismatic fellowships that at best expressed only a nominal belief in the miraculous, I was always concerned with why I went away feeling so grieved. They participated in what seemed to be just about every area of ministry and even had pictures to prove they visited the sick and prayed for them.
I often noticed that when they were praying for the sick their prayers would veer off into prayers for the sick person to be a witness in the hospital, to the nurses and for God to guide the hands of the surgeon. They were indeed praying for the sick but the anointing that comes with the gift of healing was missing.
For the most part they do not recognize the gift of healing as being upon any certain person. The individual gift in operation through any kind of uniqueness was rejected. I would have to agree that they do pray for the sick and so I would make excuses for them by making that claim, ‘yes they do pray for the sick’.
I have now learned that a ministry can think they have covered that base when in actuality they missed it completely. It is as if they are hitting home runs without scoring. You may think as I did, ‘well at least they are praying for the sick, after all we can’t make a miracle happen, all we can do is pray’. With that logic, I left off the pursuit of God for healing and just sort of fell in line.
Recently, God called me out of all that and I am determined never to conform to it again. Faith comes by hearing. The counterfeit comes by a teaching that sterilizes faith and reduces it to mere belief. That is another instance where I made excuses for non charismatic churches. They professed to believe that God could do anything. They would say, “I believe in miracles, I believe that God could move a mountain if he wanted to. God could raise the dead, He can do anything.” With that I was disarmed, after all they pray for the sick and they also believe in miracles. I found most charismatic churches to be non charismatic and several non charismatic churches to be very charismatic. It’s only names and titles.
Before church last Sunday up in Big Bear California, I was walking on a log in the parking lot and telling my friends “watch this” as I easily balanced on the log. Then I asked the question, why is it that it feels almost impossible to accidentally fall off the log when it is so close to the ground, but suspend it a hundred feet in the air or for that matter anything over about ten feet and my faith would be overcome with fear. I believed I could walk on the log with perfect balance. I saw myself do it, I believed. Faith and belief were only about ten feet apart and the higher I imagined the log the further I realized that belief and faith are not the same.
Belief may have an element of faith mixed with it, such as a passive faith. Passive faith would be more in the category of believe, whereas faith with action becomes an active faith. Faith is based on trust. Belief can be based on almost anything: ‘I believe because…’ Passive faith produces nothing in the realm of spiritual things. We must first believe that God is, and that he rewards those who diligently seek him. Our belief in God becomes faith in God only if we put our trust in him and then act upon it.
We trust in the salvation that God has provided through his son Jesus. Devils believe and tremble but we trust in God by faith. Healing becomes an extension of your faith when you first believe that God desires to heal you. Jesus expressed only the desires of his heavenly father. What he saw the Father doing, he did. He healed the sick in every case where faith was found.
In the absence of faith in his own home town he could not do many mighty works even though he wanted to. The will of the Father was to bless and heal but because of their unbelief they were unable to be healed. This is the case in many churches today. They see the Lord as Savior and they believe they are in his family ‘the body of Christ’ but as the Bible indicated even his own family rejected the supernatural.
Pastor Tilson
