How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me?

How can you be sure that it’s God will to heal you? Some claim that you can’t be sure. Others even claim that God no longer heals people. But what does God’s Word really say? Learn more in this Little Lessons series with David Servant!

How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me? (Part 1)

I have just completed five little lessons asking the question “is healing in the atonement?” If you didn’t hear those ones, you might want to watch them before we start this particular series because I want to talk a little bit more about how we can know if it is God’s will to heal us. This is an important topic. You may have some hesitation and some resistance. I just ask that you shift into open mindedness and soft heartedness because I’m doing this because I love you. I’m not trying to make a point or prove that I’m right and somebody else’s wrong.

My motivation is that God has revealed himself in the Bible cover to cover as the healer. Anyone who’s read the Bible knows that. My goodness, you might have not paid attention to it, but oh my goodness, God has revealed himself in the Bible as the healer. We need to get to know him as the healer and you need to find out if you’re ill or sick or diseased, is it God’s will for me to be healed? Now some people of course will say, a lot of people in fact, will say, “Well, if it’s God’s will for you to be healed, you’ll be healed because God’s will always comes to pass.” I think I challenged that on our last little lesson, that the truth of the matter is God’s will rarely comes to pass. This is why we pray every morning, perhaps, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This prayer implies that God’s will is really not being done on this earth as it is in heaven.

Think about this. Here’s one way to look at it. Every single person who’s currently in hell, it was God’s will for those people, all those people to go to heaven. And that’s irrefutable. I mean, God desires for all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. God’s not willing that any should perish. Jesus is the propitiation, not just for our sins, but for the sins of the entire world. I could go on and on. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Again, I know that if you’re a Calvinist, you’re not going to agree with me there. I don’t have time to go into all that, but the fact of the matter is is that it was God’s will for all the people in hell to be in heaven.

It was God’s will for all the children of Israel who wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, it was God’s will for them to not wander in the wilderness for 40 years, but to enter into the promised land. Now, even the Calvinists have to agree with me on that one. That’s not up for debate at all. It’s so plain and clear from scripture. God’s will was not done. It was not God’s will for Israel to have a king, but they petitioned God for a king. Eventually he gave in. He said, “All right, you want a king like all the rest of the nations? You’re going to have a king and you’re going to regret it. But you don’t want me as your king? Okay, you can have your king.” He gave them a king. It wasn’t God’s will. It wasn’t God’s perfect will. It was his permissive will.

Everything that happens, of course, is God’s permissive will, but not everything that happens is God’s perfect will. And healing, to make the assumption, well, if it’s God’s will for me to be healed, I’ll be healed. So nothing I need to be thinking about. What if he did that about salvation? What if he did that about forgiveness of sins? Well, if it’s God’s will for me to be born again and go to heaven, I’ll be born again and go to heaven. Nothing I need to do about it, and think about it. What? You know that’s crazy. You have to do something about it. It’s God’s will for you to go to heaven, but you have to do something about it to experience God’s will to go to heaven. You’ve got to believe in Jesus. Right? Right.

People can’t be saved without believing in Jesus. They’re not going to go to heaven, even if it’s God’s will. I mentioned to you in those little lessons there in the last couple of months, think of all the people that Jesus said to them after he healed them, “Your faith has healed you.” Think about all those cases. If you just read that through the gospels one time, they popped up all over the place. Right? Right. Jesus credited their faith for healing them. Nobody can argue, unless you want to argue against Jesus. Why were they healed? Because they had faith in Jesus as the Healer.

Well, what if they wouldn’t have had faith? Unless Jesus is a liar, they wouldn’t have been healed. Right? Right. But it was God’s will for them to be healed. Right? Right. Because he healed them. These are irrefutable facts.

I’m going to just do a little survey of the scripture to find out, is it God’s will for you to be healed? Is there any evidence in the Bible for that? There’s so much evidence I’m going to have to limit myself. I’m going to limit myself. If you need healing, wow, this is going to be a real faith booster for you, a huge blessing for you. If you don’t need healing, maybe you can learn about God the Healer, get to know him as the Healer so you can maybe help somebody else. How about that?

What a shame it is when people say, “Well, it’s not relevant to me so I’m not interested in it.” Well, you’re not the center of the universe. Maybe God will want to use you to be a blessing to somebody else. So even if you’re not sick, you listen to this and you help somebody who is sick. You can show them the same scriptures that I’m going to show you, or maybe you might get sick some day. So this could be kind of building your faith up as a preemptive faith builder.

The evidence that God wants you healed and healthy is absolutely overwhelming in the Bible, overwhelming. You’ll see that as we begin to go through some of these scriptures.

But let me say, we only have a few seconds left on this little lesson, do you ever think about this? God who created your body, your body always fights and resists sickness and always makes an attempt to get healed if it’s invaded by sickness. Do you ever think about that, that that’s how God made us to resist sickness and to be healed? If you cut yourself and it bleeds, well, God’s designed this miracle that goes to work and over after a couple of days, man, you can’t even see that you were cut. If you get a cold and something, you get the flu, you get a stomach virus, all these things God’s built into our bodies to expel the bad guys and to get you back in health again.

Well, that right there is just overwhelming evidence that God’s a healing God. You say, “Well, yeah, but sometimes sickness wins the battle.” Well, yeah, okay, I know that. But I’m just giving you one very evident bit of information that shows you that God’s in the healing business and he’s probably already healed you multiple times before you’re watching this right now. All right, so I’m out of time. I’m over my time. So I guess the next lesson we’ll finally get into the scripture on this. Thanks for joining me.

How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me? (Part 2)

What precipitated me wanting to talk about God’s will to heal with you is because I have a dear, dear, dear friend, a saint, a man of God, a guy who’s been preaching the Gospel for decades, and decades, and decades, whose body is deteriorated. He’s about as old as me and he’s dying. He had to go on dialysis because of diabetes and so forth, and on dialysis ultimately for most of the day. Wearing him down and just decided to go off dialysis.

But he said, “I’m just going to put myself in the hands of the Lord. If God wants to raise me up, he’ll raise me up. If not, he’ll take me home to Heaven.” I’ve watched this, I want to say a million times, over my Christian life of the last four decades or more, those people always die. I shouldn’t say always die, but mostly, the large majority of them die. If you’ve been a Christian for any length of time, you’ve watched plenty of people die who are praying for healing. The whole church is praying for them for healing and they still die, or don’t get any better and so forth.

The definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result. You just wonder when the church is going to wake up and say, “Maybe we need to stop and study the Bible on this subject and see if we can figure out where we’re missing it. Because there’s so much about healing and the Bible and we’re all praying like crazy here and the whole church is praying. We’re sending out prayer requests all around the world. People all around the world are praying and people are still dying. So there something we’re missing here, you know?” And there is.

So this dear, dear friend of mine, again, he’s a man of God, a preacher, and by the time you watch this, he’s in heaven, no doubt about it. He’s alive as I was recording this, but there’s just no doubt he’s on his death bed. He’s going to go to heaven and he’s got a reward laid out for him there, because he was an evangelist and a wonderful evangelist. I had him preach in my previous churches, and he’s preached for Heaven’s Family, just a dear, dear man of God.

But one of the last things he did, he put a teaching out. He wrote it out and published it on Facebook, and it was titled something like healing’s in the atonement, but it’s not guaranteed. So he agreed that healing’s in the atonement, something that I’ve been talking about in the last previous little lessons, but it wasn’t guaranteed. Then he began to make a list of why he was sure of that. The majority of his list consisted of stories of people who were famous preachers who even preached about healing and they got sick and they didn’t get healed and that supposedly proved that it wasn’t God’s will or just didn’t work for them for whatever reason.

He did have some scriptures. He quoted a few things about Paul told Timothy, “Use a little wine, drink some wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments so forth.” He had those scriptures. But I just felt so bad, because the overwhelming majority of scripture is pro-healing, not anti-healing. You can get your faith built up in the Bible much more to be healed than not to be healed, right?

Some folks will go to Job and say, “Well, let’s look at Job, there’s an example. I’m just like Job. Well, I got you, because Job was healed.” When you say, “I’m just like Job,” well, okay, maybe you are. Maybe you are the greatest example of holiness on the planet right now, and so God and the devil got into an argument about you, maybe, but I doubt it.

But anyways, even if you are the holiest person on the face of this Earth and you’re being tested, because God and the devil have an argument. In the end, Job got healed. So Job’s story is not a story of a guy getting sick and dying, it’s the story of a guy getting sick and God healing him. Then somebody else will drag up something, “Oh, but the Apostle Paul, he had a thorn in the flesh, he asked God to heal him. God said no.” Well, you’re going to wish you hadn’t said that, because that’s not true. Paul, yeah, he had a thorn in the flesh. Yeah, he talked about the thorn in the flesh, but he told us exactly what it is and it wasn’t sickness. He never said sickness, never said disease, he never said illness.

He said, “It’s been given to me, a thorn in the flesh.” In the new American Standard, my Bible I got here, it says, “A messenger of Satan.” You go into the Greek, find that word messenger, what it actually is in the Greek, and it’s the word Angelos or Agelos. I forget if it’s got the N in there, but it doesn’t make any difference, because anybody can figure out real quick that, “Oh, that’s actually the word angel in the Greek.” If you look for that word elsewhere in scripture, it’s always translated angels. So Paul’s thorn in the flesh was an angel of Satan sent to buffet him. Concerning it, that demonic angel, I entreated the Lord three times that it, not sickness, not disease, not illness, it, the angel of Satan, might depart from me, but the Lord said, “No, my grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.”

So therefore Paul said, “I’ll most gladly boast in my weaknesses.” Then Paul lists all these things he’s gone through. He never mentions sickness, never mentions illness, never mentions disease, persecution, affliction, just stress, hardship, all these things, and we’re not exempt from persecution. Oh, no, no, no, no, not exempt from persecution. But suffering sickness, Paul wasn’t saying, “I suffered sickness for the glory of God.” Oh, no, no ma’am., no sir, au contraire, monsieur. No, no, no. He never said, “I was sick.” He never said, “I prayed to be healed,” and he never said, “God said, no, I won’t heal you.” That’s not in the Bible.

If you’ve heard a sermon about that, then I’d run from that church, because you’re listening to a guy who’s twisting the word of God.

Okay. So, anyways, you can drag up scriptures, and maybe I’ll touch some of those as I go through some of these things. But I’m looking for the faith building scriptures, the one that revealed to me that God is the healer and God wants me healed and healthy, and praise God I am. Amen.

That doesn’t mean I’ve never been sick. Yeah, but that’s one of the benefits. Bless the Lord. Oh my soul, let me not forget any of your benefits. Who forgives all my inequities, who heals all my diseases. Right? Since I’ve been a Christian, I’ve committed some sins and I’ve been forgiven of those sins and since I’ve been a Christian, I’ve been sick and I’ve been healed of those sicknesses. Okay? So let me build your faith.

Here I am, I’ve been going seven and a half minutes and haven’t gotten the to Word yet. Well, okay, real quick. As we close this little lesson, let me just read one faith building scripture to help you understand that God wants you to be well. So look at this in Exodus chapter 15 and verse number 26, God said, “If you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord, your God,” talking to the people of Israel now, “and do what is right in his eyes and give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of these diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians for I am the Lord, your healer.”

Now you say, well, that sounds pretty good. You’re doggone right it sounds pretty good. Sounds real good. But this is a contingent promise, isn’t it? Sure. You can’t expect God’s best unless you’re giving him your best. You know, it’s hard to pray for healing when you know you’re not obeying the Lord. I am the Lord, your Healer. Literally in the Hebrew it says, “I am Jehovah Rapha. I put my name together into the word Jehovah and healer. I’m the healer. God,” is what he’s saying, right? Get to know him as the Healer God, and that’s a great blessing.

Okay. We’re way out of time. I hope to see you next time. God bless you.

How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me? (Part 3)

How do I know if it is God’s will to heal me? Part Three.

How do I know if it’s God’s will to heal me? Well, the only way to find out God’s will is to hear from Him, right? Right. And unless God speaks to you from heaven or somehow He speaks to you in your heart, because if you’re a believer in Jesus, He lives inside of us, right? We are indwelled by the Holy Spirit.

The only other way to hear from God is to go to the Bible and look at His Word. And of course, you’re not going to find your name in there anywhere. So if it’s God’s will for you to be healed, you’re going to have to find something general that applies to a group of people, of which you are included in that group. Okay?

Now, as I’ve already said, some folks would say this is not relevant to me because I’m healthy. Great, great. But this could be faith building as a preemptive thing if you do find yourself facing illness, to get to know the Lord as your healer. Sure, sure. Or you might know somebody who needs healing and you could help them to find out what God’s will is for them concerning healing, as you share with them what I’m going to share with you. All right?

So the Bible is overwhelmingly pro healing. And that’s just irrefutable. And so I’m limiting myself, I’ve said, to 10 Little Lessons. I could go on and on and on, way beyond that, but I’m just going to look at 10 Little Lessons and we’ll look at some scriptures.

And so our very first one, we mentioned this one briefly in our last lesson. This is early on in the Bible when God is revealing Himself to the children of Israel. And in Exodus chapter 15 and verse number 26 He says to them, “If you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in His eyes and give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes.” And He said that, here’s the promise. “I will put none of these diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians. For I, the Lord, am your healer.”

Now we can learn a lot about that from that one verse of scripture in Exodus. And I’m not all that interested in the Israelites myself. The people that He was talking to back then are all dead and gone. I’m interested in me. I’m interested in you. I’m interested in us. We’re the ones who have a relationship with God on the earth now.

And you know what? People say, “Well, that’s under the Old Covenant. God made that promise to them.” Okay, I’m glad you’re acknowledging that. That’s under the Old Covenant. But God hasn’t changed. Do you really think that God, since that time said, “Well, I’ve changed. I used to love keeping my people healthy. And when they got sick, I used to love healing them. But no more.”

This is the God that the Bible says does not change. Because you see, when you’re perfect, you don’t have any need to change. God never woke up one morning and said, “I need some self improvement here.” Or “I’ve seen things a little differently now and I need to adjust.” No, no, God’s perfect. And God is love.

And of course God loves to heal people. He loves His children. These people He’s talking to here weren’t even His children. They were the people of Israel. They were His people, but they weren’t His children. And they had this provision for healing in their covenant.

And if you were with me in those previous Little Lessons, not the last couple, but I did five before then asking the question, is healing in the atonement? Talking about our covenant through Jesus, which the book of Hebrews says, “We’ve got a better covenant established on better promises,” I’m wondering how our covenant wouldn’t include some provision for health and healing when the old covenant did, and we’ve got a better covenant? See that’s just one of a zillion faith building truths.

And so there’s a lot we can learn about healing and God. God reveals that healing is really part of who He is. He said, “I am the Lord your healer.” Literally, in the Hebrew it says, “I’m Jehovah Rapha.” So, I’m the healer God, I’m the healer.

Do you know God is your healer? Well, you should. He’s probably healed you many times over your life. Just the natural healing process he’s put into your body. He’s big enough to do that. He’s big enough to take care of what maybe your body’s not able to successfully counteract. God’s bigger than all that, right?

Now we also learned from this that there is a contingency for the Israelites to be healthy and to be healed. And that is they have to be obedient. They have to listen to God. And that theme is pretty easy to find all through scripture. There is a relationship here between walking in divine health and being healed and being obedient.

And I was telling you in my last Little Lesson about what precipitated me talking, I wanted to talk about this to you. Because a dear friend of mine just passed away. Went to heaven, a man of God, a preacher for decades. Good preacher, holiness preacher, dedicated, devoted man of God. Wonderful, wonderful family. But he contracted Type 2 diabetes and it got worse and worse, progressively worse. And he’s on dialysis and then finally decides I’m not going to go on dialysis any longer. I’m going to just trust the Lord. If He wants to heal me, He’ll heal me. If not, He can take me home.

Well, I’ve noticed anytime anyone does that, God takes them home. And I’ve been around for decades watching this. Okay? So it’s not working. It’s not working. And I told him that. I wrote to him a long text, and I said, “Brother, brother, brother, you’re listing examples of people’s human experiences.”

He made a list of all the preachers who preach about healing who got sick. And many of them, I knew enough about them to know that their problem was obedience. Yeah. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand something about the Bible, about healing. But there were blatant, blatant things wrong in their ministries that anybody could see, who isn’t gullible and naive and knows a little bit of the Bible. Right?

When you’re preaching that bizarre prosperity stuff where God wants everybody to be fabulously wealthy and wear designer clothes and designer shoes and have the luxury car. And that’s God’s will. “Look at me. It’s working for me.” The guy that takes up an offering from all these stupid people every week. “Look at my car, look at my clothes.”

You see, well, you can’t preach that stuff and stay healthy. Come on, give me a break. Give me a break. Where’s that in the Bible? Yeah, God supplies all of our needs. Yeah, God prospers us. He blesses us to make us a blessing so we can care for the poor, not so you can become more greedy. Come on. Greedy people go to hell, the Bible warns.

So, telling me about prosperity preachers who are also health and wealth preachers who got sick and didn’t get healed and who died. And that’s proof to me that God doesn’t want me healed. Well, I’m not a prosperity preacher. I’m not a nutcase, telling everybody that they should give to my ministry so I can buy a bigger jet.

So those guys don’t apply to me and they don’t apply to you either, unless you’re one of them. And if you are one of them, then I encourage you to repent and maybe you’ll get healed.

All right, well, we’re out of time. We’ll come back to this on our next Little Lesson. Okay. Hope to see you then. God bless you.

How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me? (Part 4)

If you are sick, this is an important question for you. And if you ever might be sick, this is an important question to you. If you know anybody who’s sick or diseased, this is an important question for you too, because maybe you could be a blessing to them and encourage them to have faith. And we cannot deny that faith is part of the equation. Right?

Jesus did say, in Matthew 21:22, “Everything you ask in prayer, believing you will receive.” So the antithesis of that is everything you ask in prayer that you don’t believe you won’t receive. James echoed that. He says, “Does any of you lack wisdom? Let them ask of God who gives to all men generously and without reproach and it will be given to him.” But that’s not where James ends. He says, “But, let him ask in faith, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the waves.” Now listen this. “Let not that man expect that he will receive anything from the Lord.”

You see, people get mad about that, but okay, you’re getting mad about the Bible. James, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said that. You don’t have faith, don’t expect you’ll receive anything from the Lord. But all things are possible to him who believes. And so if your understanding of healing is all based on the experiences of other people, good people who didn’t get healed and health and wealth preachers who didn’t get healed. As I talked in that previous little lesson, you’re making a big mistake. Look at what the word says.

Here, we read from Exodus 15, verse 26. God says, “If you’ll diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His eyes.” So here’s the obedient stuff. Right? “And give ear to His commandments and keep all His statutes.” So this is a pretty straight line thing too. It’s not like just be casual in your relationship and in your obedience to me, man, get with the program buddy, get with the whole program buddy. If you’ll do that, I will put none of these diseases on you, which I put on the Egyptians, for I the Lord am your healer. So there’s a relationship between health and obedience, and obedience and health. And again, people get mad about that too. Well, I’m sorry, I’m just reading from the Bible. Don’t get mad at me, I’m just the messenger boy, I’m the newspaper delivery guy. I didn’t write it. Okay?

And so, if I would get sick right now and die, live on this camera, that doesn’t change what we just read there. You can assume that I missed it somewhere. Don’t assume that, “Oh, it wasn’t God’s will for David to be healthy. It must’ve been God’s will, God’s sovereign, you know.” And so, I guess it was His will for David to die, right then. Come on, come on. Wise up. Look at what the Bible has to say. God cannot lie.

And so, if any Israelite found themselves sick, what they needed to do was examine themselves and see, am I diligently listening to the voice of the Lord my God? Am I doing what is right in His eyes? Am I giving ear to His commandments? Am I keeping all His statutes? And if they come up with the answer, no, I’m not, then what should they do? They should repent and straighten it out, and then God is good, God is gracious, God will keep his promise to them, because He’s not a liar. They be healed then if they do that. Didn’t Jesus say to one guy one time after He healed him, “Go and sin no more that nothing worse may befall you.” Is that in the Bible anywhere? Yeah.

So am I telling you that, “Oh, the reason that you’re ill is because you sinned.” No, what business do I have to tell you that? But I can tell you that it could be. It could be. And you need to take a look at yourself, examine yourself. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, let’s go further. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, and he said, “For this reason, many among you are weak and you’re sick, and a number of you sleep.” Why? Because you didn’t judge yourself. You didn’t do what I just said the Israelites needed to do. Judge yourself. And so, he said, “So therefore you get disciplined by the Lord.”

So God’s discipline can come in the form of weakness, sickness, and premature death. And from that verse in Corinthians, it becomes obvious, Paul considered that not to be God’s best, that’s not normal. That’s not the normal Christian experience. That’s the abnormal Christian experience, because we’re supposed to be obedient. We’re supposed to be following Jesus. We’re not supposed to be weak and sick and dying because we didn’t judge ourselves. But if we refuse to judge ourselves, examine ourselves and repent of what we find ourselves guilty of, well then we’re not in position to receive God’s best. Yeah, sure.

So, again, I’m just telling you what the Bible says. So I, the Lord, am your healer. But it’s contingent. You experiencing me being your healer is contingent upon you doing what I say. Amen.

And we got these guy’s preaching about healing and they make it all about faith. And there is no doubt, faith is a component. But they’re oftentimes preaching to people who are not a positioned to receive healing, not because of any faith problem, but because an obedience problem. They’re doing what they know they shouldn’t be doing, or vice versa, they’re not doing what they should be doing.

And, hey, we’re all in this together. And I’ve certainly fallen short myself many times. And I’ll tell you what, but when I find myself sick or, again, when I get a cold I realize that oftentimes I just got a cold. Or if I cut my finger or something. But if it’s something serious, I seek the Lord. And I have had a couple of serious things at times, and I seek the Lord. “Oh, Lord, I want to be in your will. I want to be in a position for your blessing. So show me.” And of course God shows us. You don’t have to drag anything up for yourself to condemn yourself. God shows us. He loves us. God loves us.

All right, well let’s look another promise. This is a faith building promise from Exodus chapter 23, again to the Israelites, but this is from the God who never changes. He said, “You shall serve the Lord your God.” Exodus 23:25, “And He will bless your bread and your water and I will take sickness away from you.” Why? Well, He’s the healer. He’s the healer. Nothing’s too hard for Him. He’s the healer.

Well, look at Deuteronomy chapter seven in verse number 15. Again, a promise to the Israelites. “And the Lord will take away from you all sickness, and none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which you knew, will He inflict on you, but He will lay them on those who hate you.” So, once again, a revelation under the old covenant of Jehovah Rapha, the God who is the healer. And when Jehovah Rapha showed up on the earth in the form of the person Jesus Christ, what was He doing? He was forgiving sins and He was healing people, and He healed a lot of people. Okay? So let your faith be encouraged today by this. Okay? Look to the Lord as your healer. Oh, my goodness, He’s good. And His mercy endures forever.

I hope to see you next time. God bless you.

All right, hope to see you next time. God bless you.

How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me? (Part 5)

We’re asking the question, “Is it God’s will to heal me?” We’ve been looking at Scripture, because we’re interested in what the Bible says, because so many times the foundation that Christians have laid in their lives, or had laid in their lives sometimes inadvertently, is a foundation that’s not built on the Word of God. It’s built upon somebody’s experience.

Anytime you talk about healing, inevitably, someone brings up the topic of, “What about so-and-so? They didn’t get healed.” Well, okay, that’s a valid point, because we’d expect that if healing is God’s will, that people would be healed, especially wonderful Christians and so forth. But yet, that’s not the final word on the subject, right? Just because somebody failed, for some reason or another, to make a connection to receive healing from the Lord doesn’t mean that it’s not God’s will for you to be healed. Okay? And it doesn’t mean it wasn’t God’s will for them to be healed necessarily, either. Because we certainly have, I think, delved into that idea several times here now.

We can’t determine God’s will by experiences. If that was true, if that was the case, if that was a valid means of determining God’s will, we could determine God’s will was that for most people to go to hell, because most people have gone to hell and are going to hell. But we know it’s not God’s will for anyone to go to hell, unless you’re a Calvinist, of course. But I’m no Calvinist, and I’m always trying to persuade people to not believe the Calvinistic idea that God wills for some people to be saved and other people not to.

But there’s many other examples of scripture that even Calvinists can’t deny. I’ve mentioned previously, of course. It was God’s will for all of the children of Israel to enter into The Promised Land, nobody can deny that. But they didn’t benefit from the promise that God had given them because they didn’t mix God’s word with faith. That’s what the Bible says. They failed to enter because of their unbelief.

And Jesus told people many times, “Your faith has healed you.” Sometimes he got mad at the disciples because they didn’t have faith and failed to do something that they could and should have done if they would have had faith. Okay, so this is in the Bible. Without faith, it’s impossible to please God. I’m not going to try to figure out what happened to everybody else. I’m going to be concerned about what the Bible says about me.

So the Bible lays this bedrock foundation of revealing God as the healing God. Jehovah Rapha. Early on in the Bible, we studied that scripture. We looked at a number of scriptures already, make it very clear that healing was contingent upon their obedience and so forth. There were many stories in the Old Testament of God healing people.

Then we go into the Psalms and there’s promises of healing. Even Proverbs has a promise of healing. I might get a chance to read that to you, and the stories of healings amongst the prophets. Jesus appears on the scene. He’s healing people like crazy. Then we come into the epistles and there’s stuff about healing in there. “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church”, and so forth. Paul writes and says, “God’s working miracles among you because of your faith”, and so forth. In the book of Acts, there’s all kinds of healing.

I mean from cover to cover, God reveals himself as the healing God. That ought to be the bedrock foundation of our understanding of healing. But too many times, there is no bedrock, or if there is, it’s this bedrock, this thin little bedrock that’s based upon somebody experience or one scripture. Like someone recently was telling me, “Well Paul told Timothy to not drink water, but to drink wine for the sake of his stomach and his frequent ailments. So there you go. That proves that healing’s not for everybody, because you just can’t believe and have faith, because Paul didn’t tell Timothy to have faith. He told him to use some medicine, to take some wine as there’s some medicinal benefits there. So that’s how God’s working.” Building a whole foundation, a whole theology of healing on one scripture where Paul told Timothy to drink a little wine for the sake of his stomach.

Well, that’s such an easy one to explain within the context of the whole rest of scripture. Believe me, one little scripture doesn’t undo the whole Bible. To take that one scripture and say, “Well there. That’s everything the Bible says about healing. Our entire foundation of healing is based upon one sentence. Paul told Timothy to drink a little wine for the sake of his stomach and his frequent ailments. Well, there it is. That does undoes everything else in the Bible that God says about healing.” Come on, come on. Come on. We’re smarter than this.

So why did Paul tell Timothy to drink a little wine? That’s not all he said. He said, “No longer drink water”, he said. That’s what it says, “But drink wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.” So what does that tell us? That tells us that the water that Timothy was drinking was giving him stomach problems. “No longer drink water.” Of course, if you study it out, Timothy was far from home. Back in Timothy’s day, anywhere you went, there was a unique bacteria in their water. The local citizens were immune to that bacteria because their body has built up an immunity. But a stranger coming in from a foreign place would drink the water and get really sick. Of course he would get better eventually, because his body would build up the same immunity.

Well, I’ve traveled all over the world for decades. I’m in the Democratic Republic of Congo right now. Am I drinking the water? I never drink the water. I always drink bottled water because I’ve learned my lesson. So what Paul told Timothy, it was good wisdom for any missionary to follow from then on. Paul may have even been giving it by divine revelation to Timothy. “Here’s the solution to your problem. You keep poisoning your body with this polluted water. So stop drinking the water. Drink wine.” The wine that has the alcoholic content in it, kills the bad bacteria and so forth, comes out of grapes, So you’re much safer drinking the wine than drinking the water.

So don’t base your whole theology of divine healing on one little verse in the Bible where Paul told Timothy to drink wine for the sake of his stomach. I would tell you there’s many natural things we could talk about regarding healing. My dear friend who just passed away, I told you about in previous little lessons, he had Type Two Diabetes. Well that’s adult onset diabetes. You can reverse Type Two Diabetes by changing your eating habits. That’s a fact, a scientific fact. He didn’t. I sent him books years ago to try to help him. But I don’t know if he never read them or something. But again, you can’t be looking to the Lord for healing while you’re abusing the temple of the Holy spirit and digging your grave with your teeth. Sure. There’s natural laws of health and healing that you can’t violate if you expect to be healthy. Drinking poison regularly in a foreign country is not a good thing.

All right. Well we’re out of time for today. Thank you so much. Hope to see you on our next little lesson. God bless you.

How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me? (Part 6)

Today we’re continuing to look at what the Bible has to say regarding God’s will for healing. If you haven’t listened to the first five Little Lessons, you’re probably making a mistake. Go back and watch the earlier lessons that I did working up to today because I’ve covered a lot of objections and I know that sometimes emotions can get running high on this subject and I just want you to know I’m not trying to win an argument. I’m not trying to make you believe what I believe. I’m trying to help people understand what the Word of God says, rightly divide the word of God, take the whole of scripture, not just one little verse pulling verses out of their context to convince you that God loves you and he not only wants to forgive you of your sins, but he wants to heal you of your sicknesses and your diseases.

Now, there might be some qualifications behind that. Obviously, it doesn’t happen automatically. It’s pretty easy to see that, but we’ve seen a theme running through Scripture that there’s the stipulation of obedience. You can’t claim God’s best when we’re not giving him our best, and then there’s also the stipulation of faith and not just any kind of faith believing that God will heal you because that’s not really faith. That’s actually hope. I don’t know if you realize that or not, but this is a major problem I think in our understanding. People are substituting hope for faith, and hope always leaves room for the possibility that what I want, I may not get it. So, people have strong hope. Oh, I believe God’s going to heal me one day when it’s his will. I’ve watched a lot of people say that and they never got better.

Faith, Hebrews tells us, Hebrews chapter 11 verse number one, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. The assurance of things hoped for. So if you’re hoping you’re going to be healed, well then you’re not meeting the condition to have faith to be healed. Okay? And I didn’t write the Bible. Okay. So, don’t get mad at me. Nothing wrong with hope. Hope is great. Hope is great, but Jesus never said to anyone, your hope has healed you. He didn’t say to some guy, keep on hoping and you will see the miracles. No, it’s faith.

In fact, I was just reading a scripture here before I was getting ready to talk to you. In the New Testament, Galatians chapter three in verse number five, the apostle Paul in the New Testament writing to the Galatians says, “So then, does he who provide you with the Spirit and works miracles among you…”. So, the Galatians were experiencing miracles among them. Does he who does these things does miracles among you “do it by works of the law,” which of course, you know the answer is no, “or by hearing with faith?” So, Paul is saying, “God has given you the Spirit because of your faith. God’s working miracles among you because of your faith.” That’s the key.

Jesus said in Mark 11:24, “whatever you desire, when you pray, believe that you have received it and you will have it.” So, a lot of people are making a mistake there. They’ll believe when they have it, but Jesus said, you’ve got to believe before you have it. You have to believe you receive before you have any other evidence for it other than God’s Word. I know people have taken that to the extreme and do all kinds of nutty things. But nevertheless, that’s what Jesus said. So, there’s a scripture to hone in on. Okay?

There’s so many scriptures. The Bible lays this bedrock foundation of Jesus, the Healer, a God as Jehovah Rapha. Here’s one I’ve already quoted to you from Psalm 103 in verse number two. “Bless the Lord O my soul and forget none of his benefits.” I would say a lot of Christians have forgotten the sum of God’s benefits. “Who pardons all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases.” See, this Psalmist knew the covenant that Israel had with God that he promised. “If you’ll obey me, listen to me, I’ll take sickness out of your midst. I’ll put none of the diseases upon you which I put upon the Egyptians. I’ll fulfill the number of your days.” We read a lot of those ones already in these little lessons. Okay.

Even in Proverbs, I found a promise for healing. Proverbs chapter four in verse number 20, “My son, give attention to my words.” See, there’s the key. You got to know God’s Word in order to know what his will is in order to believe and receive. That’s how salvation works, right? Yeah, sure. You had to hear the gospel. You had to know it was God’s will for you to be saved and have your sins forgiven before you could believe it. “My son, give attention to my words. Incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your sight. Keep them in the midst of your heart…” “Because it’s with the heart, man believes”, Paul wrote to the Romans. “…for they are life to those who find them.” No Christian would disagree with it’s in God’s Word that we find life, eternal life, but look at the second part of the promise. “… and health to all their body.”

So, the key to health and our body is found in God’s words, and by knowing his promises, knowing his will, and keeping that in our heart, believing it, that’s where you find life and that’s where you also find health to all your body. That’s why I’m giving you the Word of God. I’m trying to get it into your heart, so that it’ll bring health to your body. I love you. Okay. So, you might not like me because you’re saying, oh, you’re one of those preachers who preaches about healing. Well, forgive me for being like Jesus, and Paul, and Peter, and James and John. Forgive me, I’m sorry.

Yeah. Speaking of Jesus. Not only did Jesus heal people like crazy, but he said, “I only do what I see the Father do.” So, Jesus was the exact representation of the Father’s nature. Every person that Jesus healed, it was because God the Father wanted that person to be healed. The Bible says oftentimes Jesus was moved with compassion and then he healed people. See, he was motivated by his love and compassion, his mercy upon people. People will say, well, during Jesus’ ministry he was trying to prove he was the Son of God. Now that’s proven. He’s not healing anybody anymore. Where’d you get that? Where’s that in the Bible? Show me a verse in the Bible where it says, Jesus healed people to prove his deity and now that he has proven his deity, he doesn’t need to heal anybody anymore. Where is that? I double dog dare you to show me a verse in the Bible that says that.

Au contraire, monsieur. Let me read to you from Mark chapter 16, verses 16 through 18. The Lord Jesus Christ said, this is in red in your Bible:

He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned. These signs will accompany those who have believed: in My name they will cast out demons, they will speak with new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.

Is that in your Bible? Yeah. Sure it’s in your Bible. It’s in every Bible. That’s one of the signs that will follow the believers. If they’ll lay hands upon the sick, they shall recover. It doesn’t say that they would get instantly healed necessarily, but they shall recover.

So, every believer can have that kind of a healing ministry of laying hands upon the sick and asking God to do a miracle that they would recover. And of course, it’s not just the faith of the person doing the handling, but there’s also the faith of the person having the hands laid upon them. Okay. We’ve talked about that a little bit. All right. That’s not the entire revelation on healing in the Bible.

Okay. We’re out of time for this little lesson. I’m so sorry that time goes so quickly. I’m going to pick up right here on our next little lesson and delve into this, because I know what some people are saying and I’m going to answer that objection. I’ve heard them all. Okay. Love you. I hope to see you next time. God bless.

How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me? (Part 7)

I’m so blessed to be able to share God’s Word with you on the subject of healing. And I know there’s a bunch of old complainers and fault finders and mockers and so forth, who would never even watch this video because they’re so embalmed in unbelief. God have mercy on their wretched souls. Amen.

My Bible reveals God as the Healer. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God says, “I don’t change.” You know, God is love. Man, I love my kids. I love my grandkids. I want them healthy. There’s not a single one of them I want to be sick. And when they are sick, man, you know, I don’t like that. And I pray for their healing and I’m so happy when they’re better.

All right. So God is a good Father. Oh my goodness, he’s better than any earthly parent ever dreamed of being. And so it shouldn’t surprise us that the Bible is chock-full of healing promises, healing revelation, healing stories, healing testimonies. Oh my goodness, it’s just cover to cover. There’s the bedrock of God’s healing revelation in the Bible. We’re looking at some of it.

I’m limiting myself to 10 Little Lessons. I could do it probably for 30. We left our last Little Lesson in Mark chapter 16 where Jesus said, “Go into all the world, preach the gospel. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved. He who does not believe will be condemned or damned.” Then he goes on and says, “These signs,” the very next thing Jesus said, “These signs will follow those who believe.” Who? Those who believe.

And then he lists five signs that will follow the believers. “They will, in my name, cast out demons,” he said, and the second thing he said is, “They will speak in tongues.” Well, goodness gracious, read the book of Acts. This is exactly what happened. The believers cast out demons. We don’t see a whole lot of that. But, you know, there were definitely demons being cast out. They were speaking in tongues. Oh my goodness. You find that in the book of Acts, you know, at least three instances in the book of Acts where the Holy Spirit fell upon believers when they spoke in tongues. And millions and millions of people, Christians all around the world today have experienced that. I’m one of them. Okay? And so if you’re one of those people that says the miracles have ceased, well, you’re wrong.

That’s like saying God is dead, to say miracles have ceased. You might as well say God is dead. What do you mean miracles have ceased? What planet are you living on?

He said they will pick up serpents. Well, there was one case in the book of Acts where Paul was bitten by a serpent on the island of Malta and he shook it off and suffered no harm. I don’t think Jesus was talking about having snake handling services. He might have even been speaking symbolically there of just having authority over the devil. I don’t know.

If they drink any deadly poison it won’t hurt them. If, if, if, if. There’s no example of that in the book of Acts. But again, not having services where we drink poison to prove our faith, if they try to poison you.

But here’s one that’s easy to see in the book of Acts. They will lay hands on the sick and they will recover. And so that’s something that every believer can be involved with. So this is another example that it must be God’s will to heal people, and for you, a Christian, to be healed because he wants you to not only to be healed, he wants you to lay hands on other people and for them to recover. Well, can you imagine laying your hands on somebody and saying, “Now I’m going to lay my hands upon you and you’re going to recover.”

Are you ready to receive healing? They’re going to say, “Who are you, buddy? You can’t even get healed yourself. How are you going to ever lay hands upon me? And I’m going to be healed?” Right? So that’s just one of a zillion proofs.

Now, I know someone’s going to put a little comment down the bottom here on the YouTube comments section, they’re going to say, “Well obviously David Servant doesn’t know that Mark 16 in verse number 17 isn’t contained in some manuscripts, and so it’s it’s questionable that these are even inspired verses in the Bible. Well, I knew you were going to say that and I’m ready for you. Okay?

It’s in every Bible. You see, it’s in enough of the manuscripts that it’s included in every Bible. Now, some will put a little footnote there and take you to a little note where they say “this verse is not found in some of the ancient manuscripts.” And some of them will even be so bold to say some of the most reliable ancient manuscripts, you know. But folks, it’s in every Bible and it also agrees quite well with what we see in the context of the rest of scripture. Right?

In the book of Acts, the believers were identified by supernatural things, like these things. Speaking in tongues and casting out of demons and healing miracles and so forth. And so you can discount it if you want. Fine. Because these are not the only verses. We could eliminate these verses entirely and it wouldn’t change my theology in the least. Because I got the whole rest of the Bible. 33,000 more verses in the Bible.

I heard a funny story years ago about a woman who was listening to her preacher and he was one of those negatron preachers, who are always telling you what God won’t do, and how come you can’t have any of the promises, why they won’t work for you. Negatron preachers, I don’t even know why they’re in the ministry. They ought to just get out and go drive a bus or something like that. Not that there’s anything wrong with driving a bus by the way. I have some friends who have bus drivers and they’re great followers of Jesus, right? I’m just saying, if you’re a negatron preacher and you’re always telling people why the promises of God are not for them, well, get out of the ministry.

So this minister was up there and he came to Mark 16 verse number 17 and he was saying, “Well, that’s not for today. And the reason I know that is because it’s really an uninspired verse.” And a lady out in the congregation started saying, “Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!” And he said, “Ma’am, sister, I’m not sure what you’re so excited about but I just told you this verse that says that, ‘They’ll lay hands upon the sick and they’ll recover and they’ll speak in tongues,’ that wasn’t part of the original Bible. It’s not an inspired verse.” And she just started saying, “Praise God! Hallelujah!” And he said, “What are you so excited about? I’m not getting this.” And she said, “If God can do all of that with an uninspired verse, think what he can do with an inspired verse!” That’s my kind of sister in Christ.

Okay. So even the uninspired verses. But I don’t believe this is uninspired. I believe Jesus actually said this. It’s in your Bible.

Okay, well that’s it for today’s Little Lesson. I hope your faith is growing. There’s more yet to come. We’ve got three more lessons where we’re going to try to build your faith for healing. Don’t miss them. God bless you.

How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me? (Part 8)

Is it God’s will to heal me? We’re looking at Scripture which reveals from cover to cover that God is the Healer. He’s in the healing business and it’s normal to be healed and to be healthy if you’re God’s children. If you meet the conditions, and of course, we’ve seen some scriptures and we’re going to see one today. Obedience is part of the healthy package here. That’s right. That’s right, and so is faith and not just hope, strong hope, but faith, believing you receive when you pray.

Anyway, here’s a verse today, James 5 and verse number 14. This was written by the apostle James. It’s in your Bible, in the new Testament. James asks a question in James 5:14, “Is any…” did you hear that word? “Any among you sick?” Well, what should he do? James tells him what to do. Then, he must call for the elders of the church because the elders are the leaders strongest, spiritually. At least they’re supposed to be, many times they’re not. I’d advise you not to be calling the elders if they’re going to pray a prayer, “Lord, if it’s your will, please heal this dear Saint.”

Because they don’t know what God’s will is. They can’t pray in faith. Sure, it’s okay to pray if it be thy will if you don’t know his will, like “Lord, if it’s your will, I’ll go to the DR Congo to be a missionary.” Well, that’s a legitimate prayer, but it’s not a legitimate prayer to pray “Lord, if it be your will, please, forgive me of my sins,” because we know God’s will is revealed.

Well, cover to cover, we figure out God’s will about healing. He’s a healing God. He loves everybody. “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church and they are to pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” Now James, stop right there. We might be scratching our hands a little bit, but he goes and gives us a little more revelation here, “and the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick.” Notice, it’s a restore, not necessarily an instant miracle. Restore the one who is sick and the Lord will raise him up.

James, don’t you know that it’s not God’s will for everyone to be healed and who are we to ever presume on this thing? What’s wrong with you, James? Well, James would say, “Hmm, what’s wrong with you, modern-day professing Christian? This is what we believed in the early church and we didn’t believe that the secret ingredient was the elders or the oil. No, no, we listened to Jesus who said everything you ask in prayer, believing you shall receive and whatever you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive and you will have it. We listened to Jesus and we believed Jesus and so, this is a no brainer.”

Are any among you sick? You need the prayer faith and of course, there’s some faith here on the part of the sick person too, isn’t there? Yeah. Because the sick person is responsible to call for the elders of the church to pray over them.

Now, I remember listening to a guy (I’d tell you his name, but I’ll just spare you that for right now) who was used by the Lord to heal tens of thousands of people, documented miracles regularly happening throughout the decades of his ministry and he said his practice quite often, when he had the time, if someone asked him to pray for their healing, he would always ask them before he prayed, will you be healed when I pray?

Then, he’d listen for their response. He was checking out their faith and if they’d say, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s the Lord’s will or not.” He’d say, “Well, you won’t be healed then when I pray, because you have to have faith. Jesus said to people, ‘Your faith has healed you.'”

One time a guy did come to Jesus and said, “Lord, if you’re willing, you can heal me.” Jesus said, “I’m willing,” and then he healed and it was just that fast and simple. I’m willing. Let me fix that in your mind real quick. I’m willing. I love people.

Or he would say, “Will you be healed when I pray for you?” And if they’d say, “Well, I sure hope I will.” He’d say, “Well, you won’t.” He’d try to shock them a little bit to get them to wake up. “What do you mean I won’t?” “Because you don’t meet the conditions. Jesus said, ‘It’s the prayer of faith’ and we’re agreeing in prayer here. You’re asking me to pray with you. If two of you agree about anything, if I have faith, but you don’t have faith, we’re not in agreement. You’re in doubt, you’re in hope. You’re not in belief, and so there’s no agreement. You’re not going to be healed.”

And he said, “but when I ask them, ‘Will you be healed?’ and they say, ‘Yes, I will. Just lay hands upon me or just anoint with oil. I’m getting out of this wheelchair. I’m getting off of this sick bed. I’m getting rid of this sickness and this disease. Lay your hand on me. Hurry. I’m going to be healed because that’s what the Bible says'” He said, ‘Oh, it was fun to pray for those people,’ because they would be healed.”

That’s the problem so often, even if you call the elders of your church today, they’ll be praying, “Lord, if it’s your will.” A lot of them won’t even come. They’re so afraid to be exposed. Elders have a responsibility to teach. That’s one of their primary responsibilities, teaching people what Jesus said.

We’ll look at this in our next Little Lesson in detail, but Paul was one time preaching the gospel in Galatia and he looked out on the crowd and it says he saw a man who had faith to be healed. I don’t know how he knew the guy had faith, but you can tell when people have faith because they’re generally happy people, and they’re smiling, and they have expectation. If you’re crippled and you think, “I’m not going to be crippled much longer because I’m about to be healed, you’ll be smiling ear-to-ear.” You might be praising God. And he looked out in the crowd and he saw a man who had faith to be healed, and he said, “Stand up right,” and the guy leaped up and walked. I think that was the guy who hadn’t walked for like 30 some years. Faith, once again, mentioned as the key ingredient, okay?

All right. Well, we’re out of time for today’s Little Lesson. We’ll pick up right here on the next one. Hope to see you then. Thanks for joining me, and God bless you.

How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me? (Part 9)

This is number 9 in the series of which I said I’m going to limit myself to 10 Little Lessons. We’re talking about God’s will as revealed in the Bible concerning healing and health. And if you missed the first eight, you need to stop this video and go back and watch those ones. We’ve laid a foundation, and I’ve answered a lot of objections and tried to straighten out a lot of wrong thinking on the subject, because I’ve been studying this for decades and heard people talk about it for decades. And I’ve heard all of the arguments against it, and so forth. And I’m still persuaded of what I’m persuaded, and I think I have a good reason to be persuaded because I’m taking the Bible, not people’s experiences and so forth.

Anyways, there is just so much in the scriptures that would build our faith for healing if we’d study the subject. And I’m not doing, by any stretch of the imagination, an exhaustive study on the subject. Before this series on, we addressed the question, “Is healing in the atonement?” We’re going to look at a scripture today that lends itself to the argument that, yes, healing is in the atonement. We already had a pretty solid argument we looked at before, but here’s one more I didn’t even talk about.

This is in Acts chapter 14, the Apostle Paul, the good old Apostle Paul, what a great guy he was. And he was up there in the general region of Galatia, which, there were numbers of cities in Galatia. You remember, he actually wrote to the saints in Galatia, and in Acts chapter 14, in verse number five, it says, “When an attempt was made by both the Gentiles and the Jews, with their rulers to mistreat and to stone them, they became aware of it and they fled to the cities of Lycaonia, Lystra and Derbe, and the surrounding regions.” So these are Galatian cities. And it says this.

Now, this is verse number seven, very important. “And there they continued to preach the gospel.” So Paul was preaching the gospel. No, no, you can’t debate about that unless you’re going to argue with the Bible. “And at Lystra,” so here’s one of the cities where Paul was preaching the gospel, “And at Lystra a man was sitting who had no strength in his feet, lame from his mother’s womb who had never walked.” Wow! “This man was listening to Paul as he spoke, who when he had fixed his gaze on him,” that is Paul fixed his gaze upon this guy who’d never walked, “And had seen that he had faith to be made well, said with a loud voice, ‘Stand upright on your feet.’ And he leaped up and began to walk.”

Now, this man was just like so many people that Jesus healed, healed by his faith, because Paul saw his faith. How did Paul see his faith? I talked about this in the last Little Lesson. You can tell when people have faith, they’re happy, they’re excited, they don’t have a downcast look on their face. They look like they’re ready for a miracle. And how did this guy get faith? Here’s the big question. Where did this guy get faith to be healed? If all Paul was preaching was, “Well, Jesus died for our sins, and if you make him your Lord and the Savior you’ll be forgiven of all your sins.”

Would that have been enough to give this guy faith to be healed? I don’t think so. No sir. No ma’am. No, no, no. Had to be more that Paul was preaching, at bare minimum, he was preaching that Jesus healed people, proving that he was the Messiah and Jesus is still healing people because it’s happening all the time in my ministry. And at a bare minimum, that’s what Paul had to have shared, that this guy, he had to get faith from something that Paul said. Right?

And so, in Paul’s message, there had to be something about Jesus the healer. And who knows, maybe Paul went in and said Jesus bore our iniquities, and maybe Paul said he also bore our diseases, like Isaiah said. And like Matthew said Isaiah said. Remember, we studied that when we were studying healing and the atonement?

This guy had faith to be healed and he was healed, it was an instantaneous miracle. He never walked, and he leaps up and he begins walking.

And when the crowd saw what Paul had done, they raised their voice in the Lycaonian language saying, “The gods have become like men, and they’ve come down to us.” And they began calling Barnabas Zeus, and Paul Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. And their pagan understanding of God, and God the gods, they’re assigning titles to, names to Paul and Barnabas when, of course, you know the story.

Now, I just can’t resist saying this, because there’s these theologians, God bless the theologians. The Bible is so plain, it takes a theologian to misunderstand it. And so, some theologians say, “Well Paul, he had that thorn in the flesh. And we believe that was an eye disease called ophthalmalgia. Because one time Paul said to one of his letters, he said, ‘See with what large letters I write.’ So there’s the proof that Paul had an eye disease.” Oh and one time Paul said to the Galatians, “I bear you witness that, if possible, you would have plucked out your eyes for me.” And so that proves that Paul had an eye disease. You can’t make these things up.

Oh well, can’t you imagine Paul preaching here in this city of Lystra with an eye disease? The theologians say it was running sores of pus running out of Paul’s eyes. Because he said, “See with what large letters I write.” And, he said one time, “I bear you witness, you would have plucked out your eyes for me,” so that proves Paul had ophthalmalgia. Again, you can’t make this stuff up.

Can you imagine Paul preaching in Galatia, preaching the gospel, telling about the healing Jesus, enough revelation about Jesus the healer that a guy who’s never walked could get faith to be healed. And can you imagine that happening if, as he was preaching, there was pus running out of his eyes, and he kept having to wipe his eyes. “Jesus will heal you. Oh, yuck. Jesus will heal you. He’s the healer.” And that guy saying, “Oh yes, I believe, I believe.” How did Paul even see that the guy had faith if he had pus in his eyes? That’s another question for the theologians.

Oh my goodness, and these people would call themselves ministers. You’re not a minister. You’re the opposite of a minister when you’re robbing people of their faith to receive from God what he reveals from cover to cover is something he does all the time. Shame on you. Shame on you. Repent.

All right, so there you have it. Paul was preaching the gospel and a guy got healed.

I’ll just close on this. Have you ever heard the phrase “full gospel”? We’re a full gospel church, or those are full gospel Christians? That’s where that phrase comes from, because there’s a percentage of Christians that believe that healing is in the atonement and that healing is available just like forgiveness of sins is. And if you’re preaching that Jesus will only forgive your sins, that’s not the full gospel, but we preach the full gospel.

We tell people God will forgive them and God will heal them, okay. I don’t think anyone should ever use that phrase myself, “I’m a full gospel Christian,” because it’s a little bit demeaning to the half gospel Christians, and so forth. But, just in case you ever wondered, “What do they mean I’m a full gospel Christian?” That’s what they’re talking about. They’re talking about this gospel that apparently included healing for Paul, because a guy got faith hearing Paul’s gospel to be healed and walk, a guy that never walked. So I guess we could say Paul was a full gospel preacher.

Okay. That was number nine, I’ve only got one more. And we could go on for a long time on this. Okay, thanks for joining me. Hope to see you next time.

How Do I Know If It’s God’s Will to Heal Me? (Part 10)

Thank you so much for joining me. We’ve been talking about healing and looking at the Bible and I’ve got one more lesson, because I said at the beginning I was going to limit myself to 10 little lessons on healing and there was much more we could say but I wanted to cover one area of healing that I think people are sometimes confused about.

Jesus healed people by different methods and means and we could break them down. I only have eight minutes here. So I’m going to break it down into two categories and I could break it down no more. But just for simplicity sake, he healed people by two methods. One was through their faith and them believing and they received by faith.

And you know this from the Bible, Jesus often told people he healed “your faith has healed you” or he mentioned faith as a component. But Jesus also operated as a prophet, as a man even because he was 100% man. But he was of course 100% God. But in his ministry, he didn’t heal people by virtue of the fact that he was God. And of course, God can heal anybody. Jesus operated as a man, anointed by the Holy Spirit. That’s why Jesus didn’t do any miracles until about age 30 after he was baptized in the Jordan river by John the Baptist and the Holy spirit descended upon him. And from then on we see a supernatural element in his ministry. He said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he’s anointed me.” And so he was an anointed man of God, minister.

And because he had stripped himself, Paul said in Philippians of certain prerogatives that he would have by virtue of being God, he wasn’t omnipresent anymore when he became a man. Jesus was not omnipresent. He wasn’t everywhere. And it’s very clear he wasn’t all powerful. Neither was he all-knowing as a man. Okay. He stripped himself of those things. And so when Jesus knew something about somebody, like the woman at the well, you’ve had five husbands, that was revealed to him by the Holy Spirit and spontaneously at that moment that was a manifestation of the spiritual gift of the word of knowledge. Okay.

And Jesus said, “I can do nothing of myself. I can only do what I see the Father do.” So again there’s so much proof that Jesus in his ministry operated as a man, anointed by the Holy Spirit.

So another method he used to heal people was through gifts of healings. And like the man at the pool of Siloam, he wasn’t healed by his faith. He got zapped by the Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “Will you be made well?” He said, “I’d like to get well, but when the angel stirs the water here, I can’t be the first one in the water. And so someone beats me to it.” Well Jesus said, “Take up your pallet and walk.” And the guy was instantly healed and he really didn’t even know who had healed him. Because later on the Jewish leaders asked him, “What happened? And what are you doing carrying your pallet.” And so forth. And so he wasn’t healed by his faith in Jesus. He was healed through gifts of healings, gifts of healings according to 1 Corinthians and according to Hebrews, operating as the Spirit wills. Nobody understands it. You’re never going to figure it out with your brain or my brain.

It’s as the Spirit wills, but God heals people sometimes just sovereignly, zam and they get healed. And Christians who see that think, “Oh well we never know when God’s going to heal somebody.” Because they see God heal somebody through a gift of healing. But not everybody gets healed that way. Only a few actually get healed that way. If you study the ministry of Christ, the majority of people were healed through faith. The minority were healed through gifts of healings. Okay, so gifts of healings, don’t wait around for them. It may never come for you. Now, they may, God may send some anointed prophet or whatever, or God might give your pastor the gift of healing for you or something.

You may, you may. And that happens, praise the Lord. But God’s doing those things as signs and wonders to get our attention and to build our faith because faith is what pleases him. He doesn’t just want to be sovereignly healing everybody all the time. Apparently he wants to heal some people that way sometimes to spur on the faith of everybody else. So they’ll say, “Hey, God’s still in the healing business. And let me dig into the Word to see what his will is on this subject and let me build my faith and let me stand on his promise and take him at his word and receive what God has provided for me and promised me.”

That’s what God’s up to. Okay. So when you don’t understand that and you just think, well back in the ’70s during the charismatic revival, a lot of people were being healed back then and that’s how God was moving back then.

But it’s kind of waned and it’s not happening now, so we can’t expect it. So I’m not expecting it. You see, you’re making a mistake. That’d be like saying, “Back when Jesus was on the earth, boy God was moving then, there were lots of miracles, but it’s not available now.” No, no, no, no. Jesus came to the earth. Yeah, he ministered for three and a half years and he revealed God’s will over and over again through his healing ministry. 1/10th of everything that’s been written about Jesus in the four Gospels concerns his healing ministry. And so he revealed himself once again as God the Healer, trying to build our faith so that we will reach out to him as God the Healer. You got it? Okay. And God does anoint certain ministers today with gifts of healings. Sure. That can happen.

And a percentage of people, I’m going to tell you the truth. A small percentage of people will be healed that way, but the majority won’t because they weren’t under the ministry of Jesus. And so don’t wait around for that special sovereign healing gift that God sometimes manifests on this earth. You think about it at the pool of Siloam there all those people, sick, blind, diseased, sitting around the pool of Siloam every once in a while. Not every day, not every hour, not even every week. Every once in a while an angel would come down and trouble the water and whoever was the first one, and God healed. That’s a sovereign act of God, see. Still required something about a part of the people. But when people say, “It’s God’s will to heal some and not all.” Well, think about this case that it was God’s will to heal the first person who got into the water.

So it’s up for grabs. It wasn’t a sovereign’s selection by God to say, “I like you. I’m going to heal you.” It’s, “I’m going to stir the waters and whoever gets in first gets healed and I’m trying to show all the rest of you that I’m a healing God because every single person sitting in that circle around the pool of Siloam, they could read their Bibles and find that God said, if you’ll obey me, I’ll take sickness out of the midst of you and the number of your days I’ll fulfill.”

See they had a covenant with God that they could have laid hold of by faith. And you say, “Are you implying that they weren’t obedient? And that’s why they were sick?” Actually, I am. Because I think it was to the guy that Jesus healed later on when he found him, he said, “Now go and sin no more that nothing worse may be fall you,” implying the reason you got in that shape the first time buddy is because you weren’t obedient and so you opened the door to your illness. But I came along and mercifully healed you. But this is not a guaranteed permanent healing because the Bible hasn’t changed. Health and healing is contingent upon obedience. And if you’re going to go back into your sin, I can’t guarantee your health buddy.”

But all those people who saw that miracle could have said, “Why didn’t Jesus do that for me? Is he partial? Does he love that guy more than he loves me? Well, wait a second. I hear the news that everyone is being healed by Jesus, who touches the hem of his garment and comes to him by faith, and he tells people all the time, your faith has healed you.” See, he’s trying to stir them up and stir their faith up just like I’m trying to do with you.

All right. We’re out of time on this little lesson. Once again, thank you so much for joining me and for being with me for these last 10 lessons on healing. Hope to see you next time. God bless.