Healing Is Not a Formula
I am not knocking anyone in particular who teaches three steps to this and seven steps to that. The only caution I have for you is that you can’t set hard and fast rules that will apply to everyone in a few steps. People need the whole counsel of Scripture. You can’t just break the Bible down into a few little nuggets and have that be enough for everyone.
When it comes to ministering healing to others, it would be nice if there were a little formula that you could follow with everyone so that everyone would get healed. But there is no such formula, and there never will be one, as I am about to prove from Scripture!
I’ve handed out a lot of different original gospel tracts, and I used to try in vain to come up with the “perfect gospel tract” that would reach everyone better than the tracts I had written so far. But then I encountered this passage in Jude, and it disillusioned me!
Jude 22-23:
And of some have compassion, making a difference:
And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.
According to Jude, you have to take different approaches with different people. Some people need to be loved into the kingdom and some need to be scared into the kingdom! I was in the latter category. I was a hard-core atheist. People would tell me how loving Jesus is and I would say, “That’s nice for YOU – you and Jesus can have a nice time, but I don’t want Him.” (I didn’t believe that He was who the Bible says He is anyway.) It was only when someone told me that I was headed for an eternal hell that I got serious about finding out if Jesus really was who the Bible says He is. The stakes were too high if there was even the tiniest chance that I was wrong!
That is why simplistic evangelism scripts don’t work with everyone. You can’t take the Holy Spirit out of evangelism and expect the results that you would get if you allow the Holy Spirit to lead you. If you could do it all with a script without the Holy Spirit, Jesus would have changed His instructions to say, “Don’t wait for the Holy Spirit before you go into all the world. You don’t need Him. Just go, and here’s a script you can use that will reach everyone successfully without you having to involve the Holy Spirit.”
Worse yet, I’ve seen a “scalper script” designed to get quickie “decisions for Christ” in 30 to 60 seconds so that you can go on to the next person and win a whole boatload of people in a single afternoon – supposedly. The problem is that you have people making “decisions” who don’t know what they’re doing and haven’t counted the cost. They fall away easily, assuming that the original “decision” wasn’t a false conversion to begin with, which is all too easy to see with “assembly line” evangelism efforts.
I believe that the same principle applies to healing. There are so many different places people can come from regarding healing! No one tract about healing will be able to “reach” everyone, and no “formula” for sharing healing will work with everyone, either. I certainly don’t have anything even close to a “healing script” and I wouldn’t want to encourage that kind of ministry.
As far as receiving healing goes, your flesh would like a little 3-step healing formula that you could work every time and receive your healing. The reason your flesh would like this is that then you could “work a principle” independently of God and you wouldn’t have to base any of it on a relationship with Him. You could just go out and sin any way you want and work your little formula to receive healing. God has no interest in having you turn Christianity or even part of it into a formula. The Pharisees were adept at turning living Scriptures into lifeless formulas, and Jesus pronounced hideous woes upon them. They lived their lives based on certain selected Scriptural principles, but they had no real love for God or for their fellow men. They failed to walk in the blessings that belonged to them as God’s people.
Besides that, the Sons of Sceva tried operating a formula outside of a relationship with Jesus – and you can read where that got them (Acts 19:13-17)! Just copying what someone else did is not God’s idea of walking with Him. The issue for the disciples when they could not cast a demon out (Mark 9:17-29) was lack of prayer and fasting. The problem wasn’t lack of prayer and fasting about the demon, which was impossible given that the events were a surprise that came up without warning. The issue was that their lack of prayer and fasting made it too hard for them to keep their flesh under, and they were moved by what their flesh saw. If you want to just walk after the flesh all the time, NO formula will get you consistent results.
People got healed in all kinds of different ways in the Bible. Thank God, they weren’t all thinking in terms of formulas. Healing is centered on the work of the Healer Himself. If you’re having trouble receiving your healing, pray and ask the Holy Spirit to help you. What helps you might not be what helps me or someone else. He knows what you need to hear. It’s all the same Word, but He knows how to make it come alive to you and communicate it so that you “get it.” That is part of the Holy Spirit’s job – to take the things of Christ and reveal them to you (John 16:14-15). He was given to let you know the things that are freely given to you by God (1 Corinthians 2:12). Let Him do His job! Ask Him! Don’t go it alone. God didn’t give you the Holy Spirit so that you could ignore Him and try to figure out everything yourself.
Some false cults believe in some form of healing, and most of them base the healing “formulas” they use on the Bible! Jesus said that whosoever speaks to a mountain and believes that it will move can move it. He did not restrict this statement to believers. I read a totally satanic book once by an author who specialized in testimonies of people who used Mark 11:23’s “formula” without Christ and got results! However, these folks will still burn in the lake of fire unless they repent of rejecting Jesus. Jesus said that people would even do works in His name without knowing Him (Matthew 7:21-23)! That should highlight the risk of using principles rather than living a life led by the Holy Spirit.
You can indeed “get” some things using principles, but still end up empty. Mormons are not Christians (despite their claims to the contrary – they are actually Latter Day Sinners), but they tithe, and they do well financially as a group, probably for that reason. Other unbelievers have tithed and experienced great increase because of it. They still suffer eternal fire if they die without Christ, even if they successfully work a biblical formula.
Healing is always God’s will, 100% of the time. You do not need to be “led by the Spirit” to discern whether healing rightfully belongs to you as a Christian – it does. I suppose that you could see “believe that you receive when your pray” as a formula. However, if you don’t follow the part of Jesus’ instructions to forgive others, you haven’t really followed His teaching if you just stick to “believing that you receive” and make that your formula.
If you really want to walk in health, keep the Word – not just a formula – before your eyes (Proverbs 4:20-22). The same could be said about prosperity in general. Make no mistake about it – God wants you to be in health and prosper (3 John 2). However, God didn’t tell Joshua that he would prosper if he worked a prosperity formula or just meditated on prosperity Scriptures. He would make his own way prosperous by learning and acting on all that God said, not just a few selected verses (Joshua 1:7-8).
Spiritual Laws
Now having said that healing is not a formula, God HAS established spiritual laws, so there actually is a sense in which you could argue that healing IS based on a formula. God does not make case-by-case decisions about whether to apply the law of lift to each flight out of town. We can depend on the law of lift as well as the law of gravity and many other natural laws. Spiritual laws are just as immutable. God does not make case-by-case decisions about His spiritual laws, which work for “whosoever.”
You reap what you sow. You have what you say. You can transmit the anointing through your hands.
Applying these laws might sound like working a formula to some readers, but you CAN apply these laws and get known, predictable results. If you sow large amounts, God does not decide to make you a big receiver – YOU decided to make yourself a big receiver. You applied His law to your advantage.
The point of this article is not that spiritual laws don’t work for everyone, but rather that you should be led by the Spirit about how you minister healing to different individuals. In some cases, you will actually show people how they can be on the right side of God’s spiritual laws. Just as the quadratic formula will work for anyone who uses it to factor second-degree expressions, having what you say will work for anyone who believes something in his heart and says it with his mouth.