Ministering to the Sick
It amazes me that the primary way we think we should minister to the sick is to pray for their healing in their absence, whether they know anything about it or not. There is no reason that healing, the physical side of salvation, should be ministered in any different way than the spiritual side of salvation.
If we ministered the new birth the way we typically “minister” healing, we would gather people around in a service to pray that the new birth would fall on Mr. X. We would pray that God would make Mr. X a new creation in Christ right there where he is (probably at the strip club; that is how he got the name Mr. X). We would “claim” his salvation “by faith” for him. Would this work? NO!!!
What would you pray for Mr. X? Scripturally, you would pray that he would see the light of the glorious gospel. You would pray for laborers to go into the harvest and tell Mr. X how to be saved. Someone would share the gospel with Mr. X, faith would arise in his heart, and he would receive through his own faith something that was already bought for him.
It makes sense that if you want someone to be healed, you would pray that laborers would go into the harvest to share the good news of healing with him. You would consider going yourself. If the gospel is not preached to the sick person, there will be no basis for faith. Even if the healing anointing “falls” on the person, he won’t know what it is or how to cooperate with it. He will probably lose whatever he gets in short order. The sick person needs to hear the good news about healing before he can have a basis for faith. If he has no basis for faith, he cannot pray in agreement with you for his healing. God may show him mercy, but to stay healed, the man needs to be able to stand on the Bible on his own.
Probably the #1 difficult type of prayer request I have received in my experience has been people wanting prayer for Aunt Glarda in Montana who is sick and has never heard the gospel. The requester wants healing to fall out of the sky so that Aunt Glarda will be instantly healed. That isn’t usually how it works! If I could make that work, I would. Usually, I ask if anyone is going to share the gospel with Aunt Glarda, and in almost every case, no one is going to even attempt to tell her about Jesus, let alone divine healing. (Aunt Glarda is a mean old bat and no one wants to talk to her about anything. So everyone hopes there will be a way to get her healed without actually talking to her.) Then I encourage the person to share the gospel with Aunt Glarda or find someone else who can do so. Many times, when people find out that boldness and some time commitment may be involved, they back off, because they wanted a quick fix with no effort on their part. Ministry involves sacrifice and love, not just faith and power!
Then someone will say, “Well, we can pray the prayer of agreement here for Aunt Glarda. Let’s agree for her healing now!” If you can make that work, please follow it up with a prayer of agreement for Aunt Glarda to get saved without anyone talking to her. Good luck. The prayer of agreement in ministry situations is great – as long as the person with the need is one of the people in agreement! Otherwise, don’t count on any results. Aunt Glarda might not want to be healed. She might be afraid she’d have nothing to complain about, and she might hate the idea that she might have to work instead of collecting disability payments. You won’t do healing ministry too long before you start to encounter those types of people! If they don’t want to get healed, there is literally nothing you can do for them until they have a change of heart on the matter. I remember refusing to minister healing to a man who asked if I would pray that he’d be healed enough to not be in pain but not healed enough to lose his disability check. We aren’t partially healed by the stripes of Jesus. I’m not mean, but I don’t like wasting my time. This person’s root problem was lack of understanding of God’s financial provision and a fear of lack; these can’t be solved just by ministering the healing anointing. Such people need some good Word teaching concerning money.
Since we’re on that subject, there is a saying that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Ministering to a seriously ill person may involve some serious time commitment and no small amount of patience, since people usually don’t “get it” the first time around. If their head is cloudy from drugs, it’s even more of a challenge. If you simply come in and blast away with your Scripture shotgun, the person may reject your message because he feels that you are just there to preach Bible verses at him. Jesus was moved with compassion, and unless you demonstrate the compassion of God as well as His power, the person may not want to hear from you at all.
You may not be there to discuss the weather or what sports teams are winning, but you may have to engage in some small talk before the person is comfortable with you. You need to prove that you care, and that you are not just looking for a great look-how-God-used-me-glory-to-me testimony on Sunday morning. You will turn people off if you get preachy. It will not help to simply tell the person how sorry you feel for him, but it is not wrong to show sympathy for his condition. You don’t have to encourage self-pity, but you can let the person know that you understand that his situation is difficult. Of course, you don’t have to listen to senseless rambling all night, either, as some people’s mouths don’t seem to be equipped with “off” buttons.
Beware of anything smacking of a critical attitude. No one will want to listen to you if you come across as saying, “Healing is yours in Christ – why can’t you get that through your head, stupid?” You probably didn’t get it the first time, either. Also remember that drugs can mess up people’s minds and make it harder for them to understand what you are saying, although the Holy Spirit can and does break through that at times. We have seen cases where someone seemed “fogged in” until his spirit man kicked in, and suddenly the person was able to talk about the things of God with us.
Don’t give up. The person may suddenly get a revelation of what you’re talking about just as you’re ready to give up in exasperation. If the person is open to listen to you, keep planting the Word in him. If he doesn’t want to hear any more, you are out of line trying to force anything on him. As discussed in one of questions in the Questions section, some people just decide to die and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it once they make up their minds that they want to go.
I think the biggest thing people need to know is that it is definitely God’s will for them to be well. So many people think that God is punishing them or teaching them something, and people have to have their minds renewed to the truth before they will be able to receive anything. It doesn’t take much to prove this point. You can point to the miracles in Jesus’ ministry and then show that Jesus is the same today (Hebrews 13:8). You can show that Jesus healed those who were oppressed by the devil (Acts 10:38). As long as the person thinks that sickness might be a good thing after all, he is in no condition to receive healing. There is no basis for faith until you know what God wants to do. Otherwise, your prayer will contain mere wishful thinking and hoping, not faith.
You can point out that Jesus took our sicknesses and pains as punishment for our sins (Isaiah 53:4). It is probably better to just say that than to open to Isaiah and whip out your laptop computer, open this book, and prove that the Hebrew word used for griefs in the King James Version of Isaiah 53:4 means sicknesses elsewhere in the Old Testament.
You can point out that sicknesses were part of the curse of the Law (Deuteronomy 28:61), and Jesus has redeemed us from them (Galatians 3:13). You can show that disease is a penalty for sin, and Jesus’ blood has redeemed us from the penalty for sin. Stress that Jesus bore our punishment, including sickness, in our place. He took a physical beating and took on our sicknesses to redeem us from having to be sick because of our sins.
If you can, give the sick person some good literature about healing. The person isn’t going to get well watching people run a ball up and down a field between beer commercials. He needs the seed of the Word to be planted in his heart to produce a harvest of healing.
You can turn to Mark 16:17-18 and tell how Jesus’ followers can lay hands on the sick for their recovery, and offer to do so. I would suggest that you wait until after you have shared the Word before doing this. This gives the person an opportunity to hook up with you in faith. If you will have multiple opportunities to see the person, you might not want to pray at all the first few times unless he says that he is ready. The best way to minister healing is to minister the Word so that faith can arise in the sick person’s heart. As much as you might want to, you cannot permanently receive a healing for someone else. They may temporarily get supernatural relief as a result of your prayers, but unless the person is able to stand in faith on his own, the devil may steal his healing.
I’m not saying not to pray; the person may be very encouraged by how God answers your prayer. However, you must be prepared to help the person stand on his own two feet, spiritually speaking. What good will you do if you get a hundred people healed when you pray, and they all get sick again? If anything, they can be very hard to reach next time. Ministering to the sick is not a hit-and-run affair. It will require time and patience on your part. Are you willing to spend the time to help the other person understand what you understand?
A really good way to hook up with someone who does not like Bible verses is to share your own testimony of healing. The best kind of testimony is how you believed you received when you prayed and got healed, because the other person is able to do the same thing. If you just share about being healed through the gifts of the Spirit in a church service, a person who is not in good shape to go to a church service may not be able to see himself in your shoes, receiving healing the way that you did. And there is no guarantee that anyone in particular will receive healing through special manifestations of the Holy Spirit.
Faith comes from hearing the Word, not from testimonies, but I have found that I can mix the Word with my testimony. I explain that I believed what Mark 11:24 says. (I don’t usually cite the reference; I just say that Jesus said that.) I have been amazed at how quickly some people have latched on to this and “gotten it” themselves after I shared how I got healed.
Don’t allow yourself to consider yourself a success or a failure based on what happens, or think that you must keep going back endlessly until the person is healed because you are solely responsible for seeing that person healed. You’ll know in your heart when the effort is paying dividends and when it isn’t. Sometimes you can be disappointed to learn that really deep down, the person just wants to go be with Jesus. That’s legitimate; people can choose that, and it doesn’t mean that you failed.
Finally, ministering healing is a great way to find out how much you really believe in your heart, and how much is just head knowledge to you. When the sick person starts asking you questions about healing, you’ll find out in a hurry what you really believe!