What Are the Differences Between the Gift of Faith, the Gifts of Healings, and the Working of Miracles?
These are the three so-called “power gifts” found in 1 Corinthians 12:8-11. Paul does not elaborate on them, so the distinctions are somewhat open to interpretation. Before I try to categorize them, please realize that you don’t have to pigeonhole a gift into a certain category to flow in it or receive from it! The same Holy Spirit works all of these manifestations. I will also say up-front that the distinctions I draw here are more a matter of experience and personal opinion than Scriptural argument, since you won’t find much Scripture to define these gifts. You may feel free to disagree with my definitions; I won’t consider you a heretic.
The most important thing is to obey the Holy Spirit’s promptings, not to categorize them. Take the healing of the beggar at the gate in Acts. You could make a case that this was “gifts of healings” at work because Acts 4:22 calls it a miracle of healing. You could also make a case that this was “working of miracles” at work because Acts 4:22 calls it a miracle of healing. Finally, you could attribute this to the gift of (special) faith because Peter said that the faith which is by Jesus gave the man perfect soundness (Acts 3:16) (though this is a more debatable assertion). But any way you define it, the man was healed!
The Gift of Faith
The gift of faith is sometimes called “special faith,” and rightly so. All believers have faith. God has given you the measure of faith (Romans 12:3) and you had to have faith to be saved (Ephesians 2:8-9 and many other references). Faith for specific things contained in your salvation package comes by hearing the gospel. The man at Lystra received faith to be healed by listening to the gospel (Acts 14:7-10) and you can get faith to be healed the same way. So the gift of faith cannot mean faith in the general sense or even faith for specific things that are already promised to you in the New Testament. The “faith” in 1 Corinthians 12:8-11 is given by the Spirit to certain people for certain situations. Faith in general is for everybody. You cannot use 1 Corinthians 12:8-11 to prove that only certain believers can have faith! (You needed faith to become a believer in the first place!)
Perhaps the best way I can describe this gift from experience is that this is a “know-so” faith, the same as you could exercise for any Bible promise, but without a specific Bible promise to back it up. (If you have a Bible promise to back you up, you can always receive whatever it is without any special manifestation of the Spirit, so that can’t be what this gift is.) You have a revelation in your heart that God will do something in particular, and you are responding to a specific word from God to you as opposed to His general Word to all believers. There is no doubt that you have received your answer even though you cannot quote a particular Scripture for it. Of course, the word from God will never contradict Scripture!
This special faith receives from God just as general faith would, but there can also be an added element of unusual boldness. When this comes on you, you feel like some invincible comic strip superhero. You just know that you will get results. There is no question about it. You declare boldly what God is doing. Let anyone say otherwise, and you’ll just feel like laughing. You realize that a supernatural boldness has come upon you.
I remember a time when I was in charge of the PC’s at a business and a woman’s PC wouldn’t even boot up. When she referred to her PC, she kept doing so in a way that sounded like she was asking God to “curse” her computer. (She actually used a different but similar word but I know some readers would get upset if I repeated the actual word here.) When I told her that she should stop asking God to do that, she was upset and said that it was just a figure of speech. I told her that God heard what she said and that it looked as if He had done a pretty good job of doing exactly what she said. She got even more upset and said, “Just fix this (you can guess what goes here) computer!” The gift of faith came on me and I said, “Okay, watch THIS!” Without even touching the computer, I walked over to it, pointed at it, and said loudly, “God BLESS this computer!” Then I just turned it on. It worked perfectly from that day forward. And the woman, while she didn’t get saved on the spot, at least changed how she referred to her computer.
It’s a fun story, and it was fun to do it! But I don’t want to mislead you into thinking that I am Mr. Megafaith who just goes around doing things like that all day. The anointing came on me to do it. I was sure that it would work, although it seemed like a rather outlandish thing to do. That’s the thing about the gift of faith. When you’re flowing in it, the outlandish becomes easy and seems normal.
Later when I was running my own computer business, I had set up a client on a new system that cost about $100,000 at the time. It was my job to transfer all the data from the old system to the new system over the weekend via those big 9-track tape reels. (Obviously, this was not a recent event!) It was going to take most of the weekend with little time to spare, though I MADE time for church. (If you’re wise, you’ll do that too!) But Saturday afternoon, the new tape drive attached to the new system stopped working. There was no way I’d be able to get a repair person in there with enough time to spare. I had a serious problem! I tried and tried, and that drive just wouldn’t work. My next thought was that I should speak to that new tape drive and command it to work in the name of Jesus. But I also felt that it would be a bit beyond what I could believe with 100% assurance. Faith is the assurance of something unseen, not the 90% probability that it will happen! So I prayed in tongues for a while since I was the only one in the computer room and I sought the Lord for His wisdom on the matter. After some time, I felt the Lord instruct me to lay hands on that drive and command it to work in the name of Jesus. Now I had boldness and an assurance that it would work. So I laid hands on it and commanded it to work in the name of Jesus, and it started working. I got the conversion done that weekend. Not many minutes before, that was “over my head” but when the gift of faith kicked in, it was suddenly easy.
I was preaching at a certain church and found out that a woman there had been telling the pastor, “Don’t invite him in. He’s not anointed.” At the end of the service, that very woman came up for prayer for a busted ankle. Thank God, I remembered to walk in love rather than saying what my flesh would have loved so say to her just then. (Namely, “YOU tried to get me uninvited here and now you want ME to pray over YOU! Hah!”) For all I knew, she had come up just to “prove” that I wasn’t anointed! I laid hands on her and the gift of faith rose up and I COMMANDED that ankle to be healed in the name of Jesus. The power of God knocked her onto the floor. I told her, “You’re healed!” Now normally you wouldn’t do that, since it will depend on whether that person received or not, but “I knew that I knew” that she was healed because it was an operation of the gift of faith. When she could finally get up, her ankle was indeed completely healed. She told the pastor that she had never been knocked over by the power of God like that in 15 years as a Christian, and that he should have me back because I was really anointed. Walking in love produces much better results than walking in the flesh!
I was ministering to a woman with really bad arthritis overseas. This gift came on me and I pried her clenched hand apart. It was healed instantly. Normally I do not go around just prying arthritis-crippled hands open, and I wouldn’t recommend that you do it, either, but the gift of faith manifested and a supernatural boldness came on me.
It’s a blast when God uses you in this gift! I can at least share something that will help you about this and the other power gifts – when you do what YOU can do, God can kick in and do what you CAN’T do. Most of the manifestations I’ve seen of the gift of faith happened after I was already laying hands on someone solely based on faith in the Word. I doubt that those manifestations would have happened if I had not been willing to “do my part” first.
As my computer examples illustrate, this gift of faith can apply to things other than simply healing.
As a final Bible illustration of the gift of faith, I believe that it was in operation when Paul commanded Bar-Jesus go to blind for a season (Acts 13:6-12). Jesus said that we could heal the sick, but He never mentioned that we could sicken the well. Thus, there was no specific Scripture for this action. In order for Paul to command it in faith, he needed a faith to rise up in him that was different from the general faith by which we live our lives.
The Gifts of Healings
This is perhaps the most obvious of the three because the result is healing! One important point that is lost on many people is that you don’t need a special gift of healing to minister healing to the sick! All you need is the name of Jesus, and you have the right to use that name because you are a believer. You can command sickness to leave in the name of Jesus, and it must obey you.
Being bold to use the name of Jesus and lay hands on the sick and see them recover is Scriptural, but it does not constitute the gifts of healings! It can’t, because those who believe (all believers including you) can lay hands on the sick and expect them to recover, and the gifts of healings are only in operation through some people. (Anyone could be used in this at one time or another, but no one is used in this all the time. Some preachers who have a ministry along this line flow in a fairly consistent manifestation of these “healing gifts,” but even they cannot control when they manifest.)
The gifts of healings go beyond a simple prayer of faith or the taking of your authority in the name of Jesus. They involve a tangible healing anointing. People can be healed without a tangible anointing simply by using the name of Jesus, but when this healing anointing is present, people who would not normally receive by faith, including unbelievers, may get healed. The people healed may be taken by surprise! Sometimes, so may the preacher!
The gifts of healings may manifest in various ways. Probably the most common is through laying hands on people who come forward for healing. Another common way is for the minister to have a “word of knowledge” and announce that God is performing a specific healing. The healing power falls on one or more individuals right in their seats. There can be as many variations on this as there are ministers. The Holy Spirit is creative! I have seen people healed for no apparent reason when I ministered in music (with or even without words). The power of God just hit them. I am sometimes one of the last people to find out what went on; I find out after the service! The power of God can also just “fall” on people without any altar call, announced word of knowledge, or any other particular thing. In some cases, God’s glory just visits the place and people just start getting healed in the presence of God. God is not boring. Thank Him for variety!
Laying hands on the sick in the name of Jesus does not require that you or the person prayed over “feel” anything at the time. However, it is common for the gifts of healings to kick in once you have already committed yourself to use the name of Jesus to command healing. You may start feeling nothing, but suddenly the power of God manifests itself and you and/or the person being prayed over feels it. You won’t always feel a tangible anointing when you lay hands on the sick in the name of Jesus, but you certainly won’t feel anything if you don’t lay hands on the sick in the first place. That is the #1 reason why we don’t see more of this today – people think that it doesn’t work, so they shy away from laying hands on the sick completely. It's a shame. In some cases, the fear of man that brings a snare (Proverbs 29:25) enters in, and the believer becomes more concerned about what will happen if it doesn’t work than what will happen if it does!
One often-asked question is why this “gift” is put in the plural. I don’t know, but my best guess is that some ministers have a gift for certain conditions, and God uses them consistently in healing certain conditions. I heard a preacher who specialized in teeth once. I know someone who got a cavity filled in one of his services, a fact that was attested to by his dentist, who was actually angry because he was sure that this person had gone to another dentist to get the filling. (Why didn’t God just heal the tooth? I don’t know; you can ask Him about that if you want. That’s just how He did it in this case. It was a sign and a wonder.) I knew someone else who seems to have success with back problems. Another minister that I knew had very good results with tumors, blind eyes and deaf ears. Why is this? I don’t know! Ask God! We do have the New Testament example of Philip the evangelist, who seemed to have special success with paralyzed, lame and demonized people.
“Healings” is also in the plural in the Greek in the three places where it is found in 1 Corinthians 12. Why this is plural is perhaps more obvious. “Working of miracles” is not “working of miracle” because the person performs more than one miracle over time. “Gifts of healings” are not “gifts of healing” because more than one healing is performed. At least that’s my opinion on it; I don’t claim to have the definitive answer. I use the phrase “gifts of healings” in this book to be technically correct, but surely, everyone would understand that you meant the same thing if you said “gifts of healing” or even “gift of healing.”
The Gift of Working of Miracles
This gift involves some kind of action that supersedes natural laws. Examples of this include Jesus’ turning of water into wine, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes and walking on water. I won’t fight you if you want to include the supernatural blindness that came upon Bar-Jesus in Acts 13:6-12 as an example of working of miracles instead of special faith. I would consider this gift to be involved in the cases of the raising of the dead. (See Condition: Nonviability for a list of cases in the Bible where people were raised from the dead.)
This gift can go beyond physical healings. I have seen God fix bad computer equipment when I spoke to it. I actually started getting an interesting reputation when I used to just go over and touch broken computer terminals and they would start working again. I would feel power go out of my fingers into the terminals. At times it felt like a big electric shock. (It was rather shocking to the people who saw these incidents, too!) If I could just do this as a covenant right all the time, I could make a business of it and put computer repair centers out of work. This kind of thing happens as the Spirit wills, not as we will. Some of us will be used more in “working of miracles” than others. It became consistent enough that I was willing to make some trips to seemingly hopeless situations because God used me that way so much. A certain millionaire had a computer with a floppy drive that wasn’t working. I took the computer apart and couldn’t see any way to fix it myself. I didn’t have a spare floppy controller card for it. I ask the Lord what to do, and that gift came on me again. I laid hands on that controller card, and it started working. It kept working, too – Jesus does all things well! Now my dilemma was what to write on the invoice. I hadn’t swapped out any equipment or tweaked any settings or done anything to the software on that PC. What do you write on the bill when all you did was pray? Being an honest Christian, I did the only thing I could – I actually wrote on the invoice that I had prayed for the floppy controller card and that it was fixed! Since the PC worked, the client didn’t really care if I had spun it around on the ceiling; fixed was fixed.
A church that I attended many years ago had a computer that stopped working. I laid hands on it and it started working. Then a minister who was a friend of the church asked if I could come lay hands on his hard drive that wasn’t working right. I went to his house and laid hands on it and it started working. My wife’s brother-in-law had left his laptop in a convertible in a rainstorm, and it just wouldn’t work anymore. Without getting out any rice or hair dryers, I laid hands on it and it started working again right in front of him and a couple other family members. So there are plenty of opportunities for miracles to manifest that don’t involve healing. However, we don’t control the manifestations of any gifts; we can only make ourselves available. If I were presented with a broken PC and that anointing did not come on me, I would be as helpless as the next person.
God describes what happened to the beggar at the gate called Beautiful as a “miracle of healing” (Acts 4:22). So miracles do encompass healing. These would be instantaneous miracles involving a dramatic physical change, not just a recovery from an illness. For example, if you don’t have a right arm, and you suddenly grow one when hands are laid on you, that is a miracle, not a healing. Your right arm was not healed because there was nothing to heal! You needed a creative miracle to get a new arm. (I am speaking hypothetically, as I have not seen that particular manifestation in person yet.)
General Truths About the Gifts of the Spirit
The gifts of the Spirit (or “manifestations of the Spirit”) manifest as the Spirit wills, not as we will. God has left Himself an open door through the gifts to move in ways other than simply responding to faith in His Word. However, faith in God’s Word always works, while you cannot count on a gift of the Spirit manifesting to meet your particular need. You do not “own” or “have” a gift in the sense that you can control its operation. However, you may be consistently used by the Spirit in certain gifts as He sees fit. You cannot “claim” a gift and operate in it “by faith!”
Never attempt to “operate” a gift of the Spirit “by faith” without specific direction from the Lord! Some bad teaching going around says that you can just do it by faith and expect the gift to manifest as you step out. That is presumption and it is extremely dangerous! You can end up having the devil accommodate you since you have ceased to flow under the direction of the Spirit in the gifts of the Spirit. Don’t try to “use” the Spirit. The Spirit is supposed to use you!
I have met people who say, “Open your mouth and believe that God will fill it. Once you’re prophetically activated, you can prophesy to anyone!” Well, I don’t believe that you can prophesy on demand to everyone (and have it really be God), and Peter didn’t believe it either, because he said, “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). If it isn’t something the Holy Ghost moved you to say, don’t prophesy! And besides that, there are no Bible instructions to “activate” someone prophetically anyway. (Now this can just be a matter of semantics in some places. If “activating people prophetically” simply means providing believers with an opportunity to prophesy, I have no problem with that.)