Big Healing Book - Luke 13:11-16

Luke 13:11-16:

And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself.
And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.
And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God.
And the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because that Jesus had healed on the sabbath day, and said unto the people, There are six days in which men ought to work: in them come and be healed, and not on the sabbath day.
The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?
And ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?

Notes on Luke 13:11-16:

Here Jesus said that the crippled woman was bound by Satan and ought to be healed. There are spirits whose job it is to make people infirm or sick. When this is the case, Jesus showed that you do not necessarily have to cast out the spirit explicitly. He only spoke that she was loosed and laid hands on her. There is no record that He said anything to the spirit of infirmity. But obviously, it left!

How sad that anyone would complain about a miraculous healing of someone who had been crippled for 18 years. Still, there are people like that today.

Notice that the reason she “ought to be healed” was that she was a daughter of Abraham. If you are in Christ, you are a child of Abraham by faith (Galatians 3:7, Galatians 3:29), so surely you ought to be healed, too!

Long before we met, my wife was bound for six years by a spirit of infirmity that kept her dependent on a machine to survive. She would sometimes be paralyzed and unable to care for herself. But Jesus delivered her, and she could sense that the spirit that had bound her was gone. She has never been bound since!

Once when I was on a mission trip, a woman suddenly came in desperate, trying as hard as she could to breathe. It was the kind of situation where you would call 911, but I didn’t know the number for “911” in that country at the time (it wasn’t 911, obviously!), and it looked as if we might not have time to wait for the paramedics to show up even if I called. The Lord told me, “That’s a spirit, not a physical illness.” So I commanded that spirit to leave her in the name of Jesus. She was instantly better, and that was the end of it. I actually saw the demon leave her, give me a hateful look and then go out the window. Sometimes a condition has nothing to do with an actual physical cause; a demon is behind it. In other cases, it really is something physical. Please don’t go around trying to cast a spirit of infirmity out of every sick person (as some people seem prone to do); you will only confuse people and embarrass yourself by doing that.

The Lord may reveal to you that a spirit is involved, but this passage shows that it is not technically required to explicitly cast out a spirit when you minister healing to an oppressed person.

This case of healing is interesting because Jesus both spoke about her being loosed and He laid hands on her as well. This shows that it is not a mistake if you do likewise.