Is “Seeing Yourself Healed” a New Age Visualization Technique?
No.
Seeing yourself healed is a CHRISTIAN concept because it involves renewing your mind to God’s Word, which says that you WERE healed (1 Peter 2:24). You SHOULD see yourself the way God sees you despite outward circumstances.
Proverbs 23:7:
For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.
The way you REALLY are is how you THINK. If your thoughts are contrary to the Word, you will live and act contrary to the Word. If your thoughts agree with the Word, you will live and act based on the Word, which is far better.
The fact that some cults practice “visualization” scares off many Christians from the idea of seeing themselves well when their bodies are still sick. But seeing yourself well is NOT denying reality. It is having a mental picture of reality changing to line up with the Word as God hastens His Word to perform it (Jeremiah 1:12) and His Word works mightily in you who believes (1 Thessalonians 2:13). As you renew your mind with the Word (Romans 12:2), you will see yourself acting on the Word instead of contrary to it.
The occult kind of visualization generally consists of relaxing and emptying your mind before you do any other steps. That is NOT Christian “meditation,” which consists of FILLING your mind with God’s Word.
The woman with the issue of blood (Matthew 9:18-25) said “within herself” (in Matthew’s account) that if she touched Jesus’ clothes, she would be made well. This shows me that she was imagining herself being healed when she touched Jesus. She went and got the very thing that she imagined. Now suppose that she imagined herself touching Jesus and having NOTHING happen and being disappointed by yet another person who could not heal her. She wouldn’t have been healed!
Imagination has unlimited potential, as shown by this verse in the account of the Tower of Babel:
Genesis 11:6:
And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
If these people could do anything they imagined – even if it was evil – surely a Christian today can do what HE imagines and have nothing restrained from him.
A long time ago (before we met), my wife had to walk kilometers in 30-below-zero weather in Newfoundland to do ministry visits because she didn’t have a car. One day she went out and bought a key chain. That seemed odd, given that she had no car and no keys. But that was her step of faith – she bought that key chain because she would need it to hold the keys to the car that the Lord would provide. And He did provide that car! But that was after she SAW herself with a car that the Lord had provided on the inside – before she saw it on the outside.
Then, when the Lord called her to go to Bible school, she saw herself going there even though she had no money to pay for it. She was broke. A social worker assured her that the government would NEVER send her to Bible school. But she already had her things packed up and she had given her notice to her landlord because she was going to Bible school the next week. She told the social worker, “The Bible says that the wealth of the wicked is laid up for the just, and I’m the just!” (She agreed with Proverbs 13:22.) She had gotten a revelation of that. The social worker called back later that afternoon and said, “Go to Bible school! We’ll pay for everything.” And the government paid for ALL her Bible school expenses. I’ve never heard of the government there or anywhere else paying for someone to go to Bible school; that’s one of those things that “just doesn’t happen.” But it happened to her!
However, she didn’t even have enough money to get on a bus to GO to Bible school the next week. Then people started driving to her apartment and just handing her money, and it was enough for a bus ticket. While on the bus, where no one had to give his name to get a ticket, the bus driver called her name and said that there was a message that a package for her was waiting at the next stop. She got the package, and it had a lot of cards with money in them from people whom she had never met!
She didn’t allow the circumstances to paint a mental picture of never being able to go to Bible school because she was broke. She saw herself going! The revelation of that one Scripture sent her to Bible school when she first saw herself walking in the light of it on the inside. THEN she was able to see herself literally walking in it on the outside.
“Meditating on the Word” can involve you imagining your life lining up with the Word. We see that God is FOR this practice in Joshua 1:7-8 and Psalm 1:1-3, and He declares you BLESSED when you do it! God would never put His stamp of blessing on a truly New Age technique!
Seeing yourself with what the Word says you have is part of renewing your mind. The fact that New Age people have tried to corrupt the idea of imagining where you are going does not detract from the fact that it is a GODLY concept.