Different Ways to Get Healed
There are different methods of healing in the Bible. This may have made you wonder what the proper way to get healed is. The good news is that there is more than one way to get healed, and all of the methods work! Some are easier than others. God has made provision for healing for everyone from the newest believer to the most mature Christian. These are roughly in order from the easiest methods to the methods that require you to exercise the most faith.
Manifestations of the Holy Spirit
Sometimes the Holy Spirit uses a believer as a vessel to heal someone who is not exercising faith for his healing. The Bible describes gifts of healings as a manifestation of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians 12:8-11 and 1 Corinthians 12:28-30.
Sometimes even unbelievers receive healing this way. The gifts of healings operate as the Spirit wills, so you cannot “claim” that you will be healed by a special manifestation of the Holy Spirit. However, you do not necessarily need to exercise any faith to receive this way. This is probably the easiest way to receive a healing.
At other times, there may be a word of knowledge for a certain illness, and you may be asked to come forward in a service to have hands laid on you. You may need to exercise some faith to receive from the anointing. Sometimes the anointing can be so strong that you won’t need to apply any faith. The stronger the anointing, the less faith you need to use. If there were no healing anointing at all, you could still receive 100% by faith, as pointed out below, but if it was really God giving the minster a word of knowledge, He would not tease you by calling out your condition and then not making healing available if you’ll respond.
This can be linked closely with the laying on of hands (covered separately below), although it is possible to be healed through the gifts of the Spirit without hands being laid on you. For example, I have had people get healed spontaneously while I played the piano or sang. I never laid hands on those people. Some ministers announce healings through the word of knowledge without touching people. Sometimes people come forward and the anointing is so strong that they can't even walk up to the minister to get hands laid on them. Occasionally, the anointing may be so strong that the minister can’t get off the floor, either. It happened in Solomon’s temple under the less glorious covenant, so why not now under the more glorious covenant (2 Corinthians 3:7-11)?
God’s Glory
In services where Jesus is worshipped in spirit and in truth, God may manifest His glory in the service. When this happens, people sometimes get healed spontaneously, whether they were expecting anything or not. At other times, the minister may direct those needing healing to just believe that they receive while God manifests His presence. It is easier to receive your healing when the anointing is manifesting in a service. I have found that even if you don’t get healed, you may be pain-free as long as the anointing stays; the anointing seems to be a very effective painkiller. After all, the anointing removes burdens and destroys yokes (Isaiah 10:27).
I remember preaching a particular service overseas, expecting to have a time of laying hands on the sick at the end. That was my plan before the service even started. When we got to the end, I sensed that the healing anointing was in the room, but I had no leading to lay hands on anyone. The only thing I felt led to do was sing a worship song I’d written and play the piano. People were healed of serious problems without anyone touching them. To be honest, I almost freaked out. People started coming up and testifying about how God’s power hit them and they were instantly healed. They talked about feeling “lightning bolts” hit them. I was probably the most surprised one of the bunch, though I shouldn’t have been. I had become so used to laying hands on the sick at the end of services that I had slipped into a mindset that laying on of hands was the official way that God heals people at church services. Yes, it is one way, but God has other ways. A “no-contact” method is a lot easier on the minister. In large evangelistic crusades, God may have to move without the laying on of hands just because so many people need healing.
Believing + Medical Help
If you are not ready to simply believe for your healing, it is no sin to use whatever natural means you can to get healed or at least to get some relief for your condition until your healing manifests. This is not God’s best, but it beats suffering. You can ask God to give the doctors wisdom to figure out what to do about your condition. You can believe for a speedier recovery than usual. You can find something you can believe for even if you are not ready to believe for your complete healing.
I am not saying that you should believe that by Jesus’ stripes you were partially healed. That would not be true. But because healing is rightfully yours, you can legally believe for any part of it. Many times, you can have more than one condition, and you are ready to stand in faith in one but not the other. It’s better to be healed of one (for now) than to keep them both!
You can’t receive something you can’t believe for. If you can believe for wisdom for the doctors and a speedy recovery, but are not ready to believe for a complete healing, go ahead and receive what you can believe for. I’ve heard plenty of “supernaturally speedy recovery” testimonies over the years! We’re all growing in our walks with the Lord, and we have to operate where we are in our faith walks, not where we’d like to be someday. Don’t let anyone ridicule your faith if you trust God to guide the surgeon. I would rather hear that you believed God for a successful operation and had a supernaturally good one rather than hear that you died trying to believe God for a complete healing with no medical intervention. I got a testimony from someone who had an operation and said she would have died if it weren’t for my prayers about the procedure due to unexpected complications. I had agreed with her on her level, which is the wise thing to do, that God would protect her from medical mistakes during the procedure.
Intercession
If a sickness is due to a person’s sin, a believer has the right to petition God to suspend that sin’s consequences for a season so that the sick person can be healed. This idea and supporting Scriptures are developed in the separate discussion Temporary Cancelation of Sins’s Consequences through Intercession. A more mature believer will learn to appropriate healing for himself rather than depending on the intercession of others, but even a mature believer can in a predicament where he can’t even pray, so thank God for other people who know how to pray in faith!
Anointing with Oil and the Prayer of Faith
This method only applies to those who are too sick to go to church on their own. Please understand that this is a command, not an option. If you are in the hospital or laid up at home, you are supposed to call for the elders of the church to come and lay hands on you, anoint you with oil in the name of Jesus, and pray the prayer of faith over you (James 5:14-15). The Lord will raise you up. If you’re still an unbeliever, you will also be forgiven for any sins you may have committed that made you sick in the first place. (If you’re a believer, your sins are forgiven already – see Forgiven People Can Be Healed.) If you don’t have a church, we have just identified one problem you need to solve right away. A televangelist is not your church. He cannot come anoint you with oil in person. (I’m not against televangelists unless they try to tell you that you only need them and not a local church.)
If you just have a cold or something, there is no need to call the elders together! James 5:14-15 talks about a serious situation. If people called the elders every time they had colds, many elders would have full-time jobs just visiting people. If you can make it to church, go request laying on of hands there.
You can get healed this way even if you personally haven’t exercised mountain-moving faith. God honors the faith of the elders as well as your obedience to His command to have them anoint you and pray the prayer of faith over you.
By the way, do not get mad if the elders don’t visit you in the hospital if you never called and told them that you were there! Amazingly, some people really get mad about this; I guess they assume that if the pastor is really “in the Spirit,” he will just know that they missed church because they were in the hospital as opposed to being on vacation or something. It is a violation of this Bible command to wait for them to call you. You are commanded to call them. (If you are unable to even make a call, have someone do it for you.)
It is also biblical to have an anointed cloth brought to you from a service where the healing anointing was in manifestation. But if you do so, you must do it in addition to the command in James, not instead of following that command.
It is a crying shame that most churches do not believe and practice James 5:14-15. Instead of sending the elders to anoint with oil and pray the prayer of faith, the pastor (or whatever they call the leader of the church) comes out and prays for the sick person to have patience and peace in his trial. The sick person stays sick and is “remembered” (but not necessarily prayed for) on Sunday morning. This is simply disobedience to the Word. That’s tough, but it’s the truth. After all, how many ways can you interpret James 5:14-15?
You can even request laying on of hands if you’re an elder yourself and you’re in the hospital. Don’t be too proud to obey God’s command!
Laying On of Hands
This method is good for younger believers. Another believer (who believes Mark 16:18) lays hands on you in the name of Jesus, and you recover. This method of healing should be part of the basic education of every new believer. That’s not my private opinion; that’s God’s opinion, as expressed in Hebrews 6:1-2. The laying on of hands is one of the six fundamental doctrines of Christ for a new believer to know. Laying on of hands can impart more than just healing, and I’m not saying that laying hands for healing is the entire “doctrine of the laying on of hands,” but it is surely an important part. Jesus also laid hands on children just to bless them, to the consternation of the disciples (Matthew 19:13-15, Mark 10:13-16, Luke 18:15). So it is okay to have a time of laying on of hands just to bless people! Laying on of hands was also a way of installing people into ministry positions (Acts 6:5-6, Acts 13:1-3, 1 Timothy 5:17-22), imparting the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:17, Acts 9:17, Acts 19:6), and providing an opportunity for God to impart a gift (1 Timothy 4:14, 2 Timothy 1:6; the latter MAY be another reference to receiving the Holy Spirit in light of 2 Timothy 1:7, but you could take it either way.
This is one of the easier methods because someone else’s faith gets involved with yours. Not only do you believe that Jesus told the truth about laying hands on the sick, but the person laying hands on you does, too.
No wonder Paul used this method to heal the first person on an island when the rest had not seen God’s healing power yet; that healing encouraged the rest of the sick people to receive healing (Acts 28:8-9).
In fact, we see that at Nazareth, where unbelief prevailed, laying on of hands was the ONLY method that imparted healing to anyone (Mark 6:5). So we would be safe to say that laying on of hands works when nothing else does! Remember this the next time that you minister somewhere where there is a lot of unbelief!
Although laying on of hands is ideal for new believers, it is certainly not a sin for a mature believer to request the laying on of hands for his healing.
Communion
We’ve found that a disproportionate number of healings seem to happen during communion services. I believe that this was because we were deliberately remembering that Jesus’ body was broken so that our bodies could be whole. Our Law-stipulated physical punishment for sin was laid on Him so that now we are redeemed from sickness. We always preached this part of the Lord’s Supper along with Jesus’ shed blood – many people forget about His broken body and they don’t even know why His body would have to be broken. In fact, a good thing to ask opponents of divine healing would be, “If Jesus did not have to bear a PHYSICAL penalty for our sins, why did His body have to be broken? Why couldn’t He have just shed His blood to provide forgiveness for our sins?”
One reason there is so much sickness in the Body of Christ is that people don’t understand the significance of the broken bread, so a communion service is an ideal time to remind people that Jesus’ body was broken so that ours could be whole. (You might expect me to quote 1 Corinthians 11:27-32 to back this, but that passage is really more about sickness that fell as judgment on those who partook frivolously of the Lord’s Supper.)
I also believe that obeying the Lord’s command to “do this in remembrance of Me” is something that He blesses, so it is no surprise to see signs and wonders follow our obedience to receive the Lord’s Supper in remembrance of Him.
The Prayer of Agreement
Jesus gave us the right to pray in agreement with one or more other believers. He guaranteed that He would be “in the midst of us” when we gather in His name. This Scripture, Matthew 18:18-20, is sometimes misunderstood to mean that Jesus is present whenever we have church and it’s used to console each other when attendance is lousy at a meeting. But Jesus is present even if one person shows up, because Jesus lives in believers. He walks in the moment that you walk in! So it is bad theology to think that Jesus is not present unless you get two or three people together, at which point He shows up. That’s not what He was talking about. He was talking about gathering in His name to agree on something. He will be there in the midst of us to make it happen when we agree on it.
You and another believer can agree that you are legally healed by the stripes of Jesus and that sickness must leave your body. This takes a little more faith on your part than the previous methods. If you do not really believe that you can do this because Jesus paid for your healing, you are not in agreement, and thus you are not truly praying the prayer of agreement! However, it is still easier to have someone agree with you than it is to just do it yourself. Many times, the prayer of agreement will be prayed along with the laying on of hands.
If you are praying for a sick person, it is important to enter into agreement with him. There is no point in “agreeing” that the person will be miraculously healed if the person can only get in faith for a speedier recovery than normal using medical methods. You should share the Word with sick people. If they are not ready to believe for their complete healing, at least find something that you can agree on. Do this even if you would believe for more if you were in their shoes (or out of their shoes and in their bed).
The prayer of agreement will work if the person who needs healing is one of the people agreeing. Otherwise, you can’t force something onto someone by “agreeing” that he will be healed! Trying to “agree” that Aunt Dorothy in Alaska will be healed without her knowledge or consent won’t work any better than “agreeing” that she will be saved without her knowledge and consent!
Confessing Sins to Each Other and Praying for One Another
James goes on to say that we (believers) should confess our sins to one another and pray for one another, and the result would be that we would be healed. I don’t think that we can state confidently that James said to pray FOR one another’s healings in particular. Job was healed when he prayed for his friends, not by his friends praying for his healing. You can read James’s instructions in James 5:14-16. I believe what he’s saying is that if we are “real” with each other about our struggles and we pray for each other, this will result in healing. I don’t think he’s saying that we should “pray for one another’s healing;” I think the comma is where it belongs after “pray for one another.” In other words, we confess our faults to one another and pray for one another, that we may be healed, as opposed to saying that we confess our faults to one other and pray for one another that we may be healed (note the missing comma in the second version). The original Greek is unpunctuated, which gives you some liberty to punctuate it either way, but I believe that the first way is more consistent with the rest of Scripture.
I should also point out that I DO believe in praying for the sick, but not in praying for God to heal the sick. It doesn’t seem to me that James could be saying that we should ask God to heal each other because it is senseless to have other people “ask God to heal you” when His Word says that He has healed you, at least on a legal basis. We can, though, ask God to help others receive the healing that already belongs to them. We can pray that they will be illuminated to the fact that healing is legally theirs.
If you DO believe that this passage says that we should “pray for each other’s healing (and I can see how people might think that), you would need no other Scripture to prove that God wants us all well. God would never command us to pray a prayer that He would not answer, and His answer won’t be “No” or “Wait.”
I had an interesting experience along these lines when I had a headache off and on for a day and a half for no obvious reason. My wife and I were praying for a friend in person about a matter not even related to divine healing, and while we were praying, it felt like someone poured something warm and tingly all over my head. I was fine from that point on.
Touching a Christian
A sick person can be healed just by touching a Christian in faith. A Christian is part of the Body of Christ, the fullness of Him (Ephesians 1:23), so for us to be His fullness, we must be able to minister as He did. After all, He did say that we would do the works that He did (John 14:12). One of those works was having people go up to Him, touch Him, and be healed through the anointing that was on Him. If that happened to Him, it should happen to us as well. The reason we don’t see much of this isn’t because God is unwilling to use us this way; it’s because hardly anyone expects God to use Christians that way!
Speaking the Word
God’s Word is health (medicine) to ALL your flesh (Proverbs 4:20-22), so it makes sense that you should speak it and expect that your body will respond to it. Where the word of a king is, there is power (Ecclesiastes 8:4). God is the King in His Kingdom, and His words are powerful. As you reflect on God’s Word and speak it, you may find that healing comes without any other method being necessary.
As pointed out elsewhere, there is a confession unto faith, where you renew your mind with the Word, and a confession of faith, where you speak the Word that your mind is already renewed to. It is the latter that produces results because there is faith behind what you say.
Receiving by Faith
You can receive healing anytime, anywhere, without anyone else’s involvement, by following Mark 11:24 (believing that you receive when you pray). You first must understand that Jesus purchased your healing already and that God is just waiting for you to take it. If you feel that you must twist God’s arm to get Him to heal you, you are not yet ready to receive your healing in this way.
You are simply receiving a gift from God that has been reserved for you since Calvary. Contrary to what people might tell you, this is not a difficult thing to do. Let’s face it, the people in the Bible who touched Jesus’ clothes did not have the wealth of Bible teaching that we have today. Yet they managed to have it “done unto them according to their faith!” It didn’t take them years to figure this out, so it doesn’t have to take you years, either.
Besides, if you are saved, you already know how to receive a gift that has been laid up since Calvary. That is how you were born again. You are a believer. Your spirit has been created in God’s image in righteousness and true holiness (Ephesians 4:24). It just as natural for a believer to believe as it is for a sinner to sin!
The only thing that makes this hard is the enormous amount of junk teaching in the church world that makes fun of divine healing and those who practice it and leaves you with the mistaken idea that you cannot really practice Mark 11:24 and receive your healing.
Here is another passage that demonstrates that you can do this:
John 14:13-14:
And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.
You have the right to ask your Heavenly Father for healing in Jesus’ name and Jesus will take care of it. You might wonder why you can’t just ask the Father for healing without doing so in the name of Jesus. It is because Jesus is the One who gave you the authority to receive healing. He paid the price for you to have it.
You can’t just make a request because you feel like it; it must have a basis in God’s Word. And healing isn’t technically a request because you aren’t requesting that God do anything; you just need to receive from Him what He has already declared is yours. You are definitely not to “ask” for healing in the sense that you are leaving the decision up to God to grant it or not.
Another passage with a similar idea is:
1 John 5:14-15:
And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us:
And if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.
You can pray in faith to receive something when you know that God’s Word declares it to be your right.
Yet another similar passage is this:
John 15:7:
If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.
Once again, you need to know the Word before you ask for something. When you know what the Word says is legally yours, you can ask in faith for it. When you abide in Jesus, you won’t want something that is contrary to God’s known will.
Speaking to Your Condition
A related, but slightly different, method is to speak to your condition directly yourself and command it to leave in the name of Jesus. The basis for this is Mark 11:23, where Jesus said that you could speak to a mountain and it would be thrown into the sea. He said that if you say something with your mouth and believe it in your heart, you will have whatever you say. Prayer is not even mentioned in connection with this method. Prayer is not necessary to heal an illness; the exercise of your God-given authority over sickness as a believer is sufficient.
Jesus was not concerned with having you literally throw a mountain into the sea. That could cause trouble unless you also have the faith to stop the killer waves and other damage that could result from doing so. The point was that your words contain virtually unlimited power when faith backs them. You have the authority to speak a thing and have it come to pass.
Everyone uses this principle. The trouble is that the unbeliever and the immature believer use it against themselves. They get into fear and believe what the devil says instead of what God says. They speak what the devil says, and that comes to pass. They unwittingly give the devil permission to operate in their lives with their words. Jesus did not say that you would have whatever you believe and say as long as it is good. You will have whatever you believe and say whether it is good or bad! Unbelievers can do this because this applies to whosoever.
The people whom Jesus commended for having great faith were those who believed so much in the power of words that they did not need anything else.
In Matthew 15:22-28, a Gentile woman who was not under the Old Covenant persisted in demanding that Jesus do something about her demon-possessed daughter. Jesus merely spoke words. He did not visit the daughter. The woman believed the words that Jesus spoke and her daughter was healed. Jesus said that this woman had great faith.
In Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:2-10 you can read an account of a centurion who understood authority. He believed that Jesus could just speak words and his servant would be healed. He did not even ask for a personal visit. Jesus spoke words and the servant was healed immediately. Jesus marveled at this man’s great faith and said that He did know of anyone in Israel with such faith.
In John 4:46-53, a nobleman did request a personal visit, but Jesus simply spoke words instead. The man believed that Jesus’ words had authority, and the man’s son “began to amend” at precisely that moment. Jesus never visited or touched the boy.
Jesus demonstrated the power of words to His disciples when He cursed the fig tree. The next morning, there was visible proof that it was dead, although this process started immediately but invisibly. This is the context for Mark 11:23-24 as well as Matthew 21:18-22. This is a good lesson when you are using words to make the sickness in your body die. Like the fig tree, the sickness may not immediately appear to be dead even though it starts to die the minute you speak. After a while, as long as you stay in faith, what was once only on the inside will manifest on the outside. You can “speak death” to something as Jesus did. Death as well as life is in the power of the tongue (Proverbs 18:21).
We can surmise from Jesus’ statements about great faith that people who are experienced in walking in faith would use this method. A new believer would probably not receive his healing this way although he is legally entitled to do so as much as a mature believer.
Take Your Pick!
You can be healed in any of these ways. Use whichever you feel like using. If you don’t feel ready to use the more “advanced” methods, use the easier ones. The main idea is to get healed! In His mercy, God has given you many ways to receive your healing!