Big Healing Book - Don't Be a Healing Hermit

Don’t Be a Healing Hermit

I define a Healing Hermit as someone who is so obsessed with the manifestation of his healing that he shuts himself away all day, doing nothing but digesting healing teachings, determined to continue doing so until his healing manifests.

It’s good to hear the Word and read good books on healing, but it is actually unhealthy for you to turn yourself into a Healing Hermit. Now you might think that Proverbs 18:1 encourages this practice, at least if you have a King James Bible.

Proverbs 18:1:
Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh and intermeddleth with all wisdom.

“So,” you think, “I have a desire to be healed, so I am separating myself so that I can seek and mingle with all wisdom.”

But you should know that many other translations of Proverbs 18:1 say that whoever isolates himself rages against sound wisdom (or something to that effect), which actually tells you you’re unwise to become a Healing Hermit. The original Hebrew is somewhat ambiguous, so I won’t use it as a proof text.

But let’s call being a Healing Hermit for what it is – complete selfishness! By focusing only on yourself, you actually hinder your healing by acting contrary to the love nature of God that is within you. Love looks out for others. Love doesn’t say, “I’ll be a useless lug as far as anyone else is concerned until I get what I want.” It’s harder to receive from God when you’re committed to not acting like God.

Remember that Job was healed of all his horrific conditions when he prayed for his friends (Job 42:10).

It is a huge mistake to stop going to church and just listen to a certain healing preacher. Disobeying Hebrews 10:25 will not get you well! You need the company of fellow believers to encourage you. One of them may even have a key to your healing that you’re overlooking. Being in a corporate anointing in at atmosphere of corporate faith can help you in your healing quest.

Also, being a Healing Hermit is almost a sure sign that you are overcomplicating healing! If you think that healing is so complicated and difficult to receive that you must immerse yourself in healing teachings every waking hour before you can rise to the place where you can be healed, you have missed it already. It is more Gnosticism that Christianity to think that there is some big secret to healing that you can only grasp with constant Word bombardment.

I actually did a variation of this in my younger years. I thought that because faith comes by hearing the Word, it was up to me to build my faith more and more by hearing the Word more and more. If a little was good, a lot was better, or so I reasoned. I binge-read Scripture with the idea that faith comes by hearing the Word, so the more I read the Word, the more I could build my faith to the point where I would be healed.

I’m glad I’ve learned some things since then! One thing I learned for sure is that binge-reading the Word does not get you healed, noble as it sounds. I didn’t know at the time that I WAS able to believe God because of my new nature and the faith God had already deposited in me, not because of the hours I clocked reading the Bible.

A Healing Hermit is convinced that the key to healing is to know as much more as possible about the Word. But that isn’t the case at all! The key to healing is ACTING on the Word. Any “faith” you “work up” that doesn’t involve action is nothing more than intellectual agreement with God, which by itself is a dead end. The man in Acts 14:7-10 had faith to be healed, but his healing did not manifest until he acted on what he heard Paul preach. If simply hearing Paul were enough, the man would have been walking without Paul telling him to put some action to his faith.

The blessings you get to enjoy are based on how much of the Word you ACT ON, not how much of it you KNOW. You need to change your focus to acting on the Word instead of just binge-hearing the Word.

It is obvious by the healing of the multitudes in Jesus’ ministry that receiving healing can’t be something so difficult that you have to listen to non-stop teaching about it for months. In fact, if you study Jesus’ messages, He said very little that pertained directly to healing! He didn’t tell His followers to preach healing to the exclusion of everything else; He told them to preach the kingdom of God (which includes healing but is much broader in scope) as He did.

It is notable that Jesus preached God’s love for us. It’s easier to receive healing when you know that a loving God has provided it. It is also better to focus on Him than to focus on your condition.

If you’re having trouble receiving, here’s a radical thought. Don’t you think that the Holy Spirit knows where the issue is or whether there even is an issue? (Some things just take time.) Why not ask Him to help you see whatever you’re missing! It is possible to inundate yourself with God-breathed Scripture while never interacting with the God who breathed it!