You didn’t believe. You didn’t have enough faith. That’s what so many people are told when they go up for healing during a prayer service and nothing happens. They’re told it was their fault. Sometimes by a friend or other church member – and sometimes by the minister! Besides being sad and offensive, it’s a short-sighted answer to something that isn’t quite that simple.
I thought it might be nice to provide a better answer to those who may have wondered why they or someone they know didn’t receive healing. So, what follows is a list of twelve possible reasons taken from a book I read a number of years ago. The author is Francis MacNutt and this is taken verbatim from his book “Healing”.
I found this book to be the most balanced teaching on healing that I had encountered. I should disclaim, however, that this is not an official promotion for this book. All too often people pay bloggers to write something nice about them or their product. This is not the case. I just hope this helps a few people. While most of this is taken verbatim, any italicized writings are mine.
7) Refusal to see medicine as a way God heals
As I have made clear elsewhere, I firmly believe that physicians and medicines are the instruments that God ordinarily uses to bring about healing. This is what most people believe and nothing should have to be said in defense of medicine… However, we still keep hearing about ministers of healing who persist in setting up prayer (the “supernatural”) in opposition to medicine (the “natural”). In past years we have heard of persons who are reported to have died of diabetes because parents or ministers encouraged them to stop taking their insulin as a sign of faith. Then the patients died. “By their fruits you will know them”: such actions are simply false doctrine unless a given person is genuinely inspired by God to rely solely on prayer and not to see a doctor. … This false opposition further damages the sick person and sets up a needless controversy with physicians that results in mutual suspicion between religion and science. I have abridged much of this section for the sake of brevity.
8) Not using the natural means of preserving health
Although most of us have a high estimation of the medical profession many of us neglect the ordinary means of keeping balance in our lives. If we neglect these we should not be surprised if we fall sick and prayer does not cure us. I find in my own life that if I come down with a cold or some other ailment when I am needed to give a conference, prayer always seems to cure the ailment. But if I have been working too hard and an open time in my schedule is available, the cold usually runs its ordinary course, rather than being immediately cured by prayer. It’s as if the body needs a rest and God is saying through these circumstances, “Put more balance in your life. Unless you take ordinary care of yourself do not expect to be cured of your sickness through extraordinary means. I want you to learn to keep your life in balance. You are sinning against your own body.”
Similarly, in more serious illness, if there is some natural factor underlying the illness that the patient should attend to, he cannot expect prayer to cure him. He should do something about putting his life in order. If I have headaches because I worry too much, or if I suffer from hypertension because I work up to my breaking point, I need to change my life before healing will take place. If you eat junk food, if you smoke, if you don’t exercise, you should not always expect that prayer will compensate for the lack of discipline that has led to your sickness.
I think I can personally attest to much of this.
9) “Now is not the time…”
For whatever reason there often seems to be the right time for a healing to take place. Christ urges us, like the importunate widow, to continue in prayer if at first nothing happens. There seem to be four basic tie sequences in praying for healing:
1) Some healings are instantaneous.
2) In some healings there is a delay. (I have prayed for a person on Saturday whose
healing occurred on the following Monday.)
3) Some healings occur in a process, gradually.
4) Others do not seem to occur, at least on the physical level, at all.
We need not be disappointed, then, if there appears to be no immediate answer to prayer for healing. Perhaps now is not the time.
10) A different person is to be the instrument of healing
Perhaps I am not the one who has the discernment to pray for this particular person. Maybe I don’t relate humanly to him, maybe I don’t have enough faith; maybe I don’t have a ministry in this particular area of healing: these are some of the reasons why I am not the appropriate minister of healing for everyone who is sick. At times, I must be ready to let someone else take over and do the praying.
This section also abridged for the sake of brevity.
11) Demonic interference
To the modern mind this may sound strange, but we have found that one reason physical and inner healing are blocked is because of demonic interference, especially if the person had been involved in the occult. Connected with this are two special blocks to healing: curses and generational bondage.
Curses. Again, this may sound medieval, but we have found occasionally that people – including good people who may not even be aware of it – have been cursed by witch doctors ad practitioners of voodoo.
One of the more remarkable instances of this occurred in England when our team was praying for a minister who had ringing in both ears (tinnitus) and pain in his right ear; we had prayed for about ten minutes, and nothing had changed. Then, one of the team members, who had the gift of discernment, whispered to me that he was oppressed by a spirit of infirmity. When we prayed to free him there was an immediate reaction. It turned out that he and his family had come home from Africa a few years earlier after being struck down with a medically unexplained illness. What had happened, apparently, was that the local witch doctor had cursed them. After several hours of ministry to the minister and his entire family, in which several spirits departed, all the ringing in his ears and the pain in his right ear ceased.
… Most traditional cultures are very aware of the power of the curse, and they expect Christians to be able to bring healing by breaking these powers that produce sickness and even death.
Generational bondage. Connected with some sicknesses are causes that seem to descend from generation to generation. Some are purely genetic, carried in the configuration of our DNA. With such diseases as sickle-cell anemia, we should pray not only for the ailment itself but pray to break the genetic predisposition to that disease in the sick person and also in her children and descendants. In some addictions, too, such as alcoholism, certain races and families seem to have a hereditary weakness that we should pray to break. (My Irish ancestry seems to fit into this, and I have prayed to break it in our family.)
A common example of this need for generational freeing is when someone in the family tree has been actively involved in the occult, such as a witch or warlock. The bondage seems to continue on, until it is broken and it may influence the health of the current generation. Once in my experience a woman was freed of severe emotional problems when we prayed to free her of the influence of a druidic priest in her family’s ancient past. In another woman the blockage to the healing of her problems went back to a Black Mass performed by an ancestor in seventeenth-century England.
Slightly abridged for the sake of brevity
12) The social environment prevents healing from taking place
Since we are meant to live in a community of love, some of the healing we need will not take place until our relationships and our society are healed. …Hatred and bad relationships cause all kinds of sickness and that sickness usually remains until the root cause is removed. When a married person suffering from depression or anxiety asks for healing and it is clear that part of the problem is caused by a tense relationship in the home, prayer can only deal with part of the problem; if a disturbed child is brought by its mother for healing, you know that you are only dealing with part of the problem until the entire family is brought into a more harmonious relationship. Much sickness in our society is caused by wounded relationships and will only be healed when the larger relationships are healed, and until we have Christian churches and communities where people can be loved into wholeness.
Beyond all this, there is a general weight of evil and sickness in our world that is enormous: the law of entropy, resulting I life eventually winding down in death. Even Lazarus, raised by Jesus from the dead, eventually died. During wars we pray for peace, knowing that peace is a Christian goal; yet we know that our lone prayer will probably need millions of other prayers added to it before peace becomes a reality.
Connected to this entropy, we experience the wearing influence of age and time upon our bodies. In this life we will not live forever. And yet, I believe that even here (and I have experienced it) prayer will give us greater health than we might otherwise expect.
Some diseases and infirmities, too, are more severe and require more prayer and more of a creative miracle: for instance, if your spine has been severed in a motorcycle accident, or if you have a child with Down’s Syndrome, that kind of healing occurs rarely and takes longer time. And yet this kind of profound healing can take place. (I personally know of two Down’s Syndrome children who were healed.)
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