Big Healing Book - I Have an Engagement to Preach Healing Somewhere, but I’m Really Sick

I Have an Engagement to Preach Healing Somewhere, but I’m Really Sick Myself! What Should I Do?

The devil wants you to accept an image where you stand before a congregation, sick as a dog, seemingly a walking advertisement against the very message you’re preaching. Then he wants you to accept the image that you will make people sick by laying hands on them instead of getting them healed! I’ve been in this predicament. I think every other healing preacher probably has been there at one point or another.

This is another matter that ends up being between you and God. Remember, the fact that you preach healing to others gives you no advantage when it comes to believing for your own healing. You have to practice what you preach!

I know of two people who came to preach at the church I was attending and threw up shortly before preaching! (One had to stop the car on the way over; one had to make a dash for the bathroom.) They preached anyway and you would never have known from their ministry that anything had been wrong. Thank God for the anointing!

Let me tell you what I would do. If the condition were anything that didn’t require an immediate visit to the emergency room, I would do anything to drag myself to the service. Chances are, once you get there, the anointing will hit you and you’ll be able to preach, lay hands on the sick and feel great. You may not feel good after you leave, but you’ll probably feel good during the service!

I was going to a church to preach on healing and a couple of hours before the service, I was so sick that it took me several minutes just to drag myself out of bed. I had believed that I had received my healing, but my condition was getting worse. I could hardly walk or talk. I had a fever, a brutal headache, a cough, and a messed-up voice. I felt rotten all over. I knew I had a decision to make. If I called and said that I couldn’t do the service, I know that they would have understood. (The devil wants you to think that the pastor would never want you back to preach healing if you canceled due to sickness, but most pastors are more compassionate than that, and they’ve probably been in that position themselves.)

I won’t preach my personal convictions as doctrine, but let me explain what I did and why. I took some generic medicine for these kinds of things but still did not feel much better. I forced myself to go to that service, knowing that I’d never be able to preach in the condition that I was in. I walked in sucking on a cough drop and trying to hold back coughs and sniffles. After some mercifully short preliminaries, I got up to the pulpit and sure enough, the anointing hit me! I was able to preach a full message, sing, and lay hands on the sick, and a tangible anointing to pray over the sick was present. Thank God, it got on me, too. I doubt that anyone there would have suspected what I had gone through to get there, and I didn’t tell anyone. By the way, I felt lousy after the service was over, but not nearly as much as before the service.

One reason I did this was that I am determined to preach healing. I was not about to allow Satan, the author of disease, to stop me. I still had authority over him and ALL his works (Luke 10:19).

One advantage of being married to a preacher is that if worst came to worst, I could have her get up and preach the whole service. But I’ve never had to resort to that, easy as it might be on my flesh.

I also remembered some past experiences. I was playing the piano with a 103-degree fever one time, and the anointing came on me and God really used the music to minister to people that evening. I was in a similar condition leading worship at another church and saw the power of God move through me in a way I rarely experienced when I was well! I was getting sicker and sicker one afternoon due to food poisoning, and I was supposed to play the piano for another preacher who was frequently used in gifts of healings. About five minutes before the service started, I was in the men’s room having things rapidly come out both ends. I had believed that I had received my healing, but my flesh was telling me I would get the runs or throw up in front of everyone and embarrass the other preacher. But I was in the whole service and had no trouble either during the service or afterward. I believed that once I stepped into the anointing, I would be all right, and I was. I was fine afterward, too. Such stories are more fun AFTER the fact than when you are living them out.

You can preach healing when you’re sick because it isn’t your ability doing the healing anyway! That really becomes obvious to you when you’re in a condition like this. You know full well that it’s the Word and the gifts of the Spirit in operation and not your personal wonderfulness. God’s Word works anyway; it’s not limited by your current physical condition!

You aren’t sick anyway; your body is sick. That is an important distinction to remember, because the things of God flow from your spirit, not from your flesh. Your spirit isn’t sick, so why should anything work any less effectively? The rivers of living water Jesus spoke of come from your belly, meaning your inner being or spirit, through the Holy Spirit. They have nothing to do with your body. Your spirit can minister just fine when your body is sick.

Paul admitted to the Galatians that he was not in good condition when he first preached there (after being stoned at Lystra, which is part of Galatia). Paul did not allow his physical infirmities to stop him from preaching; he preached while he was obviously hurting! I figured that if it didn’t stop Paul, it shouldn’t stop me, either. I wouldn’t want to compare “tough situation” stories with the apostle Paul!

I’m not giving you a pat answer on this question because it really depends on where you stand in your faith walk and how you like to do things. You’ll have to make your own decision. I just want to encourage you with the fact that you can get to the service, have the anointing hit you, and have no trouble at all preaching. Of course, this is easier if you are preaching at a church or meeting that is boldly in favor of divine healing, as this place was. They were used to seeing the sick healed and there was a lot of faith as well as a strong pull on the anointing. I suppose that I might think twice if I were going to preach healing in a “dead” place and felt that badly. You can leave some churches feeling “beat up” even if you were doing fine when you went there! Even for Jesus, I’m sure Nazareth was tremendously frustrating.

God can still use you to preach healing and lay hands on the sick even when you feel as if everyone else should be laying hands on you! In fact, you can ask people to lay hands on you before the service. Don’t be too proud to do that!

I once was so sick while I was going to the airport to preach healing in another country, I was extremely concerned that if the airline people knew how bad I was, they might refuse to let me onto the plane! I had another one of those difficult decisions to make. I hid my condition as well as I could, and managed to fly to the other country to preach divine healing. I saw a lot of miracles and got healed myself.

We had a preacher come to our church who was having such severe back pain, you could see him wince every time he moved. And this was someone who flows in divine healing! He “toughed it out” and he did get healed of that condition. A friend was in dire shape minutes before preaching a large service. He called someone he knew who really knew how to pray in agreement with him. The power of God hit him, and once he got out there, he was fine.

Finally, I want to cover a separate moral issue associated with this. If you have a contagious disease, is it wrong to have a ministry line and lay hands on people? If there could be live germs on you, are you to be blamed for possibly allowing your healing service to become a sickening service?

Here’s my answer. Think about it in natural terms. Suppose that you are healthy when you call a healing line. After you lay hands on the first person, there is a risk that there are live germs present on you! Even if you did not walk in with a disease, the sick people who want prayer definitely walked in with diseases! So there is the possibility that a disease could be transmitted from any person with a contagious disease to any other person through you. There is also the possibility that the people in the line could give each other their colds.

Don’t be in bondage about this. If you just look at things in natural terms, no one will get healed anyway and a healing line is a waste of time. A healing line is supernatural. It transcends natural laws. Jesus did spray himself with disinfectant after touching each sick person. He definitely ministered to people with contagious diseases – leprosy is contagious and it is mentioned specifically. He healed ALL diseases, including contagious ones. Because the anointing was on Him to destroy disease, people did not get each other’s diseases – they got healed! Don’t miss God by looking at this from a purely natural viewpoint. Jesus didn’t say, “They shall lay hands on the sick, and the sick will get sicker by getting the sickness of the person laying hands.” Nor did He say, “They shall lay hands on the sick, and spread the sicknesses of the sick around.” He said, “They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover” (Mark 16:18).

Satan tries to work on preachers with thoughts like the following: “You don’t even believe your own message! You’re not working it, so how is anyone else going to work it? If you get up there sick preaching healing, you’re the biggest hypocrite in the room! You have no business getting up there if you can’t even get healed yourself!” Please be assured that that is not God’s language and He will never speak words of discouragement like that because He is FOR you, not AGAINST you (Romans 8:31). I’d just resolve to preach anyway and believe that the WORD will work in people, because it will! I’ve seen people greatly blessed when if I went by my feelings, I would have driven home and crawled into bed – at least at the beginning of the service. We are told to preach the WORD, not our EXPERIENCE, anyway (2 Timothy 4:2).

The most recent case (at this writing) where I had to make this kind of decision was when I was about to start the first of a series of Sunday morning healing classes at the church I was attending. I had almost no voice the day before that class, and it just so happened that my wife had to leave that morning to go out of state to attend a conference, so she couldn’t pinch hit for me. I was in miserable shape. The thought DID occur to me that I could call the church and have them get someone else to teach the class that morning. That wouldn’t have been a problem because that church had a lot of good preachers who could teach a healing class. But who wants to start a healing class by not showing up due to sickness? How much confidence would that have given anyone else to receive what I had to teach about divine healing? When it was obvious that I was struggling Friday night before the class, I had my wife lay hands on me in the name of Jesus and I believed that I received my healing when she laid hands on me. I didn’t feel better on Saturday, but I chose to “dig in” and affirm that I HAD received my healing when she laid hands on me and that I WAS recovering, despite appearances. The class went fine and no one ever knew (until I shared the experience in a later week) that I had been in such bad shape the day before the first class. Satan meant to ruin my healing testimony, but this incident just gave me another testimony to encourage others that God’s Word really DOES work – even when it looks at first as if it isn’t working!