Objection: People at Faith Churches Are Just as Sick as Everyone Else

Many anti-healing writers like to cite congregations where “healing in the atonement” is taught and it seems that everyone is just as sick as anywhere else.  When this year’s latest “bug” goes around, they miss work like their worldly counterparts.  When cancer rears its ugly head, their best “testimony” is that the Lord helped someone stay peaceful through chemo or radiation treatment.  And let’s be clear – getting healed through chemo or radiation treatment definitely beats dying, although it’s not a divine healing testimony.  (If it’s a method that a SINNER could use to get healed, you won’t impress anyone with a testimony about it, as many bar-hopping, income-tax-cheating sinners get healed the same way.)  In some cases, the anti-healing writer attended such a church and became disillusioned.

I have been to some of those places too.  Unlike James, you almost have to ask, “Is any among you NOT sick?”

But this generalization does not apply to all faith churches!  We have had wonderful miracles at our churches that rattled doctors.  Almost every person who has come to our churches has gotten healed of something through faith in the name of Jesus!  I don’t claim to have a perfect track record, but I’ve had a lot less sickness than most people!  I’ve “run off” plenty of those kinds of things that those obnoxious “It’s flu season!” TV commercials show (where someone has a Mount Everest of tissues next to his bed while he hacks and coughs and can’t sleep and makes his wife miserable in the process).  So the claim that preaching “healing in the atonement” produces no tangible results is bogus.  The objectors just aren’t going to the right places!  There are plenty of witnesses to real miracles all over the world.  I have spoken in other churches where miracles are downright normal!  The objectors just don’t believe that and they don’t want you to believe that.

As I mention elsewhere, the problem that some of these “same as the world” churches have is not allowing the Holy Spirit enough leeway in the services.  Some people will be healed through the proper teaching of the Word, but we will see more miracles when the Holy Spirit is truly allowed to be Lord over all aspects of the service.  That means that His lordship supersedes (gasp) the pre-selected song set and even (multiple gasps) the meticulously prepared message that matches the Scriptures that are queued up on the “media machine.”  Otherwise, you can have doctrinally correct but dry-as-burnt-toast services.

But let the Holy Spirit move, teach the Word, and you’ll see plenty of healing testimonies where THAT becomes the norm rather than suffering through the junk that the sinners put up with.  This can become a good snowball, because the more miracle testimonies there are, the more other people will be stirred to believe as the testifiers did.

As far as the objection goes, it’s another let-people’s-experience-determine-your-doctrine objection, which is always flawed for that reason.  You get your doctrine from the Word even if NO ONE else seems to be walking in it.  Jeremiah kept speaking for the Lord despite the fact that it seemed that NO ONE wanted to listen to him.  These very objectors would cite Jeremiah’s unpopularity as proof that he was missing God.  That doesn’t mean that what he preached was wrong.  You can’t judge a preacher’s doctrine by the hearers’ actions or by the size of his crowd.