Objection: Faith Healers Take Credit for Cures of Things That Would Have Gone Away on Their Own Anyway

I’m sure that people can find “testimonies” of healings that would have happened anyway through natural means, but I wouldn’t consider those to be convincing testimonies either.  Jesus said that SIGNS would follow us, and it isn’t a SIGN if a condition is cured that would have gone away anyway even if the person were an unbeliever who never went to a healing service.  This should be a warning to those in healing ministry to be careful about promoting such testimonies.  Claiming that a “flu” was healed within 2 weeks after you laid hands on someone would be a laughable example.

However, when something would have gone away over time anyway, but it’s INSTANTLY cured, that IS something worth reporting.  For example, a woman with a sliced hand was INSTANTLY cured in one of our meetings so that you couldn’t tell that anything had ever happened to it.  The same result probably would have occurred over a period of weeks or months, but it would NEVER have occurred naturally in an instant.

I had my wisdom teeth out many years ago and I was in a LOT of pain afterward.  The day after the extractions, I went to a famous healing evangelist’s service.  The pain left and never returned, and I was plenty hungry because I hadn’t been able to eat for a day and a half, so I “pigged out” pain-free after the service.  Now the problem WOULD have gone away naturally over time, but it wouldn’t have been an instant thing.

You may wonder, “Well, if you’re such a faith guy, why didn’t you believe to save those teeth so that they didn’t have to come out?”  That’s just not where I was at the time.  Much later, I was able to believe God and keep a tooth that the dentist told me would have to come out within a week at an oral surgeon’s office or I would be in excruciating pain begging to have it yanked.  (That was years ago when I lived in Maine.)  I wasn’t just trying to save money because I was a Yankee – I was trying NOT to be a Yankee.  (The oral surgeon would have been the Yanker and I would have been the Yankee.)  The bigger issue was that I had lost other teeth and I was just tired of losing teeth!  Sometimes when we get more desperate, we start seeing better results because we really mean business!

I agree with the objector that we should not attribute “cures” to miraculous power when they would have happened anyway in the same amount of time.  But some “self-curing” conditions can be healed in a miraculously short period of time, and that is worth reporting.

As one final note, we should give JESUS the credit for any notably miraculous healings anyway.  While we do have authority to heal the sick, and it is actually perfectly biblical to say that you healed a sick person, we should emphasize that it is only through Jesus’ power that we can do anything.  After all, we preach Jesus, not ourselves, as Paul said:

2 Corinthians 4:5:
For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.