Can I Believe God for a Partial Healing?
Sure. You can believe God for anything that you are willing to stand in faith for.
In most cases you are believing for a partial healing anyway! You believe that a certain condition must cease, but you may have other conditions that are not as drastic that you are not standing in faith against right now.
What about one certain condition? Can you believe God for improvement of that one condition as opposed to total healing?
I realize, and so should you, that Peter and Isaiah agree that you were healed by the stripes of Jesus, not partially healed. So it might seem that you cannot believe for a partial healing, because you would not be standing on the Word.
However, in most cases, I would not take that view. It is a fact that Jesus paid for your total healing. But you can have as much or as little of it as you want, or none at all. You can still exercise faith for some portion of your healing. You can also believe for a speedier-than-humanly-possible recovery after human medical intervention. It all depends on where your faith is. Find out what you can believe and have people agree with that. Even if others are pressuring you to believe for total healing of everything, if you aren’t ready to stand for it in spite of any circumstances that might arise, you should not “agree” with them, since you would not truly be in agreement. You would just be trying to do the right thing as a “faith person” but not be acting on what is real to you in your heart.
In fact, you are making a mistake attempting to “believe God” for something that is beyond your heart knowledge of the Word. Even if you know some things in your head, you really can’t believe past what has become real to your heart. This takes time in meditation on the Word. If you have never heard about healing before and you want to be healed of deafness and quadriplegia, it may take you a while to get to the point where the Word is more real to you than the conditions that constantly confront your five senses. It isn’t technically necessary to wait for any particular amount of time because healing for both conditions has already been paid for, but in practice it can take a while if you’re not used to believing and receiving. You can do yourself a disservice by attempting to extend your faith beyond what you are really comfortable receiving. You will get so frustrated that you may just give up. At worst, you’ll be the next chapter in one of those ubiquitous “I tried that faith stuff, and it didn’t work” books.
I have seen some VERY serious problems healed over a period of time as the people got around the Word more and more. An instant miracle would be nice, but eventually getting a full-blown miracle beats keeping a serious problem for the rest of your life.
It is far better to believe and receive some specific phase of your healing than to give up and not pray at all because you don’t feel ready to receive total healing. Some people have found that as their faith grows, they get colds for fewer and fewer days until they can run them off immediately. Your faith walk has to grow just as your love walk does. You don’t start out being an expert overnight. I can play the piano practically in my sleep now, but I have been at it for almost six decades at this writing. I did not perform with a symphony orchestra the first year I started lessons. (I have soloed twice with a symphony orchestra, but I had to practice a lot to get to that point!)
So maybe you can start by just believing God for a good night’s sleep. (See Condition: Insomnia for some good Scriptures to stand on for that.) Then work your way up. Nothing is wrong with this. It is actually a wise way to work your faith.
It works the same way with finances. I once heard a woman state that she was believing for one billion dollars and she got lots of amens and encouragement, but not from me. If you’ve been sowing five- dollar bills, you won’t reap one billion dollars. If you hardly even know how to believe God to pay your rent (which was her case), I don’t think you’re ready to believe for a billion dollars.
Likewise, if you’ve never used your authority to make a headache or some other non-life-threatening condition go away, you are probably not in a condition to run off two-weeks-to-live cancer by faith yet. Even David killed a lion and a bear before killing Goliath; he wasn’t a total novice at believing God when he took out his sling.
So if you’re unable to believe for hair to grow back when you’ve lost it, you could at least start by believing that no more hair is going to fall out and that whatever is causing that problem must cease operation in your body. Then you could get to believing for the hair to grow back at a later time, citing God’s promise to renew your youth (Psalm 103:5).
Even if you believe for a partial healing, at least keep as your goal believing for a total healing. Once you get rid of the “I can’t live with this” condition, determine to get rid of the “I can live with this” condition. God hasn’t limited the health that we can enjoy right now thanks to Jesus.
In the Bible, a king could realize that calamity was coming upon Israel, but decide that he was okay with that as long as it would come after he died. That wasn’t a total solution to the problem; it was a partial solution. Many of the kings abolished certain abominable practices while permitting others to remain. That was better than nothing, but those were also partial solutions. One king could have believed for a total rout of his enemies but settled for a partial victory. In many other cases in Israel, most of the enemies were wiped out, but some remained, resulting in only a partial victory. It wasn’t God’s best, though it was better than having no victory at all. So it is possible to believe for and achieve a partial victory. Always remember, though, that total victory is God’s perfect will for you.
Having said all this, there is a certain type of “partial healing” that I wouldn’t agree for. I’ve been asked if I could pray for enough healing so that someone’s pain would go away but not so much healing that the person would lose his disability check. If you minister to the sick long enough, you will at some point encounter such a case yourself. I won’t waste my time with people who aren’t serious. There’s just a certain dishonesty that I find annoying about wanting to stay sick so that you can collect money from the government. If people don’t know about divine healing (most don’t), that’s one thing; it’s another to know that you can be completely healed and deliberately want to stay sick enough to live off other people’s money rather than working – and say so!
I thank God for a woman I know who was on disability and almost helpless for close to 30 years. After she was dramatically healed in one of our meetings, she went to the disability office and let them know she didn’t need disability payments anymore because she wasn’t disabled anymore! She went out and worked. On the other hand, if you’re going to be a cheat and keep receiving disability payments when you don’t need them anymore, you risk losing your healing because your public “confession” before the government is that you’re still disabled! You can ask Ananias and Sapphira if they think lying is a good idea. In fact, you might even ask them in person sooner than you’d like!
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