I’ve Stood for a LONG Time and Nothing Has Changed. Now What?
Keep standing! It’s way better than the alternative – quitting and never having any chance to receive anything.
It’s great when a healing manifests instantly, but I have seen cases where parents have stood for YEARS for their children who had severe mental and physical issues. But at the end of those YEARS, the children were completely healed! It was a long stand of faith for them, but it was well worth it! Through faith and patience, we inherit the promises (Hebrews 6:12). Just understand that patience is not passive resignation, but rather a tenacious holding on to something despite all appearances.
My advice to you is as follows:
1. Make Sure That You Understand How Healing Really Works.
Reading this book can help you identify whether there are any areas in which you think you’re standing in faith when you really aren’t. I have talked with people who said they were standing for a long time, but they were actually lying down for a long time! They had resigned themselves to “waiting for God to do something” rather than continuing in active faith. There’s a difference!
2. Make Sure That You Are in Faith, Not in Resignation.
Real faith does not throw up its hands and say, “OK, God, whenever you’re ready, this is your issue now! I did all I could.” Real faith continues to affirm and act on the truth that you or your child were legally healed by the stripes of Jesus.
3. Encourage Yourself in the Lord and Resist the Temptation to Quit.
At Ziklag, David had no one else to offer encouragement. In fact, his team of mighty men wanted to kill him, which definitely did not constitute encouragement. So David “encouraged himself in the Lord” in a situation where everything had been lost – all goods, all family members. He recovered ALL of them! He resisted the temptation to quit in a situation where probably few people would have blamed him for quitting. You should likewise resist the temptation to quit. Keep building yourself up in the Word.
4. Follow in Abraham’s Footsteps.
It was MANY, MANY years between God’s promise of a son and the birth of Isaac! Abraham, after some stumbles, finally got to the point where he believed that God was able to perform what he promised. He started giving glory to God instead of questioning His promise. He didn’t receive the promise right away, but when he did, it changed the history of the world! That was well worth the wait! Keep giving glory to God because He keeps His Word. Let praise, not discouragement, come out of your mouth.
5. Pray in the Holy Spirit.
When you just don’t know what to do, the Holy Spirit does, and He will never pray through you in unbelief when you yield your tongue to Him! You can’t let the Holy Spirit do all your praying through you, though – you should follow the Word and pray both with the understanding and with the Spirit (1 Corinthians 14:15). You can certainly ask for His help concerning the matter.
6. Remember That God is For You, Not Against You or Upset with You.
Satan would love for you to believe that God sees you as a spiritual flunkee because you haven’t seen any results yet. He’d like it even better if you think that God is mad at you for not believing His Word. He isn’t! God always wants to encourage you, not beat you up. The voice of beating up and condemnation is from the devil, not God. God is FOR you (Romans 8:31) and He wants to help you! Believe that if there are any issues, God will reveal them to you. (He promised that if you are not “minded” the way you should be, pressing toward the prize, forgetting that which is behind, etc., He would reveal that to you – Philippians 3:15.) Remember, the Holy Spirit is your Helper! He wants to help you receive what Jesus paid for you to have!
7. Don’t Use Circumstances to Question Whether Divine Healing Is Yours – Stay with the Word!
When you’ve stood for a while, it might even be tempting to surf the internet and visit some “Why divine healing doesn’t really work” websites that are full of objections like the ones answered in this book. (That’s where a lot of them came from!) You might look for a reason that you’ve been believing wrong all this time. But when you believe the WORD you are NEVER believing wrong. If your faith was in the fact that someone else, such as your pastor, your favorite TV teacher, or even the author of your favorite healing book, says that healing is yours, you are on shaky ground to begin with. The job of any Bible teacher is to show you from the WORD that healing is part of your divine benefit package in Christ. If you can’t say “I KNOW it because the WORD says it right here…” you are like the sons of Sceva who tried to cast out a demon by “Jesus whom Paul preached.” But when you know it because the WORD says it, no one will be able to shake you. We walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), so we must NEVER let circumstances – especially our own – determine our doctrine. Only the WORD determines doctrine! Always act and speak in accordance with God’s Word in spite of any contrary circumstances. When you’re really in faith, it doesn’t matter how long something takes because you know that what you’ve received is yours and it has to manifest. You keep thanking God for that.
8. Find Other Believers Who Will Stand with You.
You are part of a BODY – you are never alone. When you’re struggling, get around other believers who will encourage you, not discourage you. There is no shame in admitting to someone else that you’re struggling; just make sure that the person will help you and agree with your stand of faith rather than just commiserating with you.
9. Don’t Play the Blame Game.
I guess it just must be part of human nature to try to assess blame for a condition. That’s nothing new.
John 9:2-3:
And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
Jesus didn’t waste His time playing the blame game, and neither should you. The issue is not WHY you are sick; it is that Jesus has provided healing for your condition regardless of why you have it! Even if it’s your own fault, you can still be healed (Psalm 107:17-20).
Here are some thoughts you should reject: “Maybe the person who prayed for me wasn’t in faith. Maybe I wasn’t really in faith. Maybe I don’t have enough faith. Maybe a baby crying grieved the Spirit in the service and the anointing left – it’s the parents’ fault! Maybe people making bathroom runs during the healing line grieved the Spirit and the anointing had lifted by the time hands were laid on me – it’s their fault! Maybe I should accept that I’m reaping what I sowed, and that’s fair – it’s my fault. Maybe sin brought this on and I need to repent before I can get healed.”
The common thread behind all these thoughts is that they assign blame for your sickness. Jesus does not require you to assess blame to be healed. Stop focusing on the BLAME and start focusing on the NAME – the mighty name of Jesus that forces all sickness to bow its knee. Believe that His name works even when it doesn’t look like anything is happening.
You can’t find even one account where Jesus had to determine whose fault a sickness was before healing someone! For further proof, consider that ANYONE could have touched Jesus’ clothes without ANY verbal interaction with Jesus! Jesus and the woman with the issue of blood never exchanged any words before she was healed. It didn’t matter what the cause was; it mattered Who the CURE was! That needs to be your focus. Call off your witch hunt and get your focus on the Lord where it belongs.
1. Never Back off Divine Healing
You may have to endure taunts from unbelievers and unbelieving believers. “See, you aren’t any better because that stuff you learned from that of-the-devil faith cult just doesn’t work. Told ya.” NEVER back off your stand on divine healing to please people, even people who are close to you. NEVER back off your declaration that God backs His Word and that His Word is working in you mightily. Doing so forfeits any chance of letting your healing complete itself.
2. Keep Hearing the Word, but Don’t Get Obsessive
On the one hand, it’s important that you keep hearing the Word about healing to keep your mind where it should be, which is difficult when your body is sending contrary signals. You want to keep yourself in an atmosphere of faith.
On the other hand, you can get so obsessive about your healing that you fail to hear the Word on anything else or even “have a life” – which leads to imbalance. While I would keep hearing the Word about healing, I would NOT take the approach that all you will do all day is feed yourself healing Scriptures until your healing manifests, especially if the condition isn’t life-threatening. Once your healing manifests, you need to know how to live your healed life, and that means knowing the other things the Bible has to say.
You can take any good thing, even healing, and push it to such an extreme that it becomes bondage. If you take the nothing-but-healing-all-day approach, I am quite sure that you aren’t even in real faith. We who believe enter into rest (Hebrews 4:3). Frantically gobbling up all the healing verses you can is not rest. It smacks of a works-based approach – if YOU hear enough Scripture, you’ll be healed. But you do not get healed based on how much Scripture you hear – you get healed based on how much Scripture you ACT UPON. If you really “get” just one healing verse and act upon it, you will be healed.
Also, if you start getting “worksy,” see if your attitude is like the following: “See, Lord, I’m doing everything humanly possible all day long, so you HAVE TO cause my healing to manifest.” It is possible to do an “all-out” healing Scripture binge out of frustration with God for not being healed! Remember that any attempt to move God or force His hand is doomed to failure.
Faith receives and then rests – before the result is manifested. Flesh keeps trying and trying to receive and never rests. A person at rest praises God for the outcome before seeing it, being certain that God never fails to keep His word. The goal of hearing healing Scriptures should be to get to that place; it is not an end in itself.
See also: