Healing and Obedience

The blessings in the Law of Moses were promised to those who obeyed God.  The curses were promised to those who disobeyed God.  It is an insult to God to expect Him to remove curses and bestow blessings in your life if you are purposefully disobeying Him.  This disobedience could take two forms – refusing to repent of sin that is declared as such by God’s Word, or refusing to cooperate with the Holy Spirit’s personal instructions for your life when you are already sure of what they are.

If you aren’t willing to do what God tells you to do, regardless of “what others might think,” you are in no position for healing.  Some people in the Bible were healed only after they obeyed God’s instructions.

In John 9:1-7, Jesus told the blind man to go and wash in the pool of Sent.  If you were in his shoes and were sent to Sent, and you didn’t go where you were sent, you would have missed out on your healing.  The lepers in Luke 17:12-19 would most likely not have been healed had they not heeded Jesus’ command to go and show themselves to the priests, which indicated that their healing would manifest while they went before they got to the priests.  Naaman the Syrian almost missed his blessing when Elisha did not meet him in person and instead sent instructions to wash in the Jordan River seven times.  When he obeyed, he got healed.  Had he not obeyed, he would not have been healed.

The Bible never promises healing to the willfully disobedient.  Make sure that you are willing to obey God no matter what He asks you to do – not just in the things that you wanted to do anyway.

This doesn’t mean that you have to live a perfect life.  If you are honestly living for Jesus and not violating your conscience, you have confidence to come get what you need from God (1 John 3:21-22), including healing, even without being perfect.

Paul said that “woe” would come upon him if he did not preach the gospel (1 Corinthians 9:16).  He knew what God’s will was, and to deliberately avoid it would have opened himself up to bad things, even though he was a forgiven saint.  As forgiven saints, we should heed this warning too.

For more elaboration on this topic, see Mistake: Disobedience.