The Sick Person’s Greatest Need

If you ask most Christians what a sick person’s greatest need is, they will answer without hesitation, “Prayer!”

And they’re wrong.

The sick person’s greatest need is to hear, believe and act on the Word of God concerning healing!

The church world’s “knee-jerk” reaction is to call as many people as possible to pray.  I am not saying that we should not pray for sick people, but we should not do it in the traditional way where we beg God to do something new about the person’s healing, when the truth is that He has already done everything that needs to be done.  A good prayer for the sick person would be that his eyes would be enlightened so that he can see that divine healing for every ailment has already been provided in Christ.  The sick person needs to see that healing has been provided, and then he needs to believe that he receives it when he prays.

If Uncle Jack Potts, a compulsive gambler, is unsaved, would it make sense that as many people as possible would pray that salvation just would fall on him while he’s sitting in front of a slot machine in a casino?  No, I’d hope that we would be asking God to send laborers to Uncle Jack who will tell him the plan of salvation so that he can act on it.  To paraphrase Paul, how can Uncle Jack hear without a preacher?  Someone has to tell him the good news or he will have nothing to believe and act on.  It is the same with healing.  If no one tells the sick person the truth so that he can know the truth and be set free, do we expect him to just figure it all out on his own?  He needs someone to tell him the good news about healing!

If churches spent more time teaching the Word about divine healing and less time praying the prayers they pray for the sick, they would find that many more sick people would be healed.

Prayer cannot be your greatest need when you’re sick yourself, because you can be healed without prayer if you take authority over sickness and command it to leave your body.  If you want to go the prayer route (which you can), you believe that you receive your healing when you pray.  But if you just speak to the sickness in faith, you can be healed without prayer.  However, you won’t be healed (barring some spectacular and unusual manifestation of the Spirit) unless you know, believe and act on the Word!  So this shows that the Word is more important than prayer if you’re sick.

The Bible never says, “He sent an army of intercessors and healed them,” but it does say, “He sent His Word and healed them” (Psalm 107:20).