What Can You Do for Comatose or Delirious People Who Cannot Believe God for Themselves?

(There are also people who are in such physical torment that even though they are not vegetables, they are basically unable to pray for themselves.  The same comments here would apply to those people.)

I have heard testimonies of people who went in and read God’s Word to people in both categories and they were healed.  God’s Word is spirit and life and there is something about it that gets into the person’s spirit even though his mind may not be operating much or at all.  Don’t sell God’s Word short.

One lady we prayed over who had “terminal” cancer ended up slipping into a coma and was never expected to come out of it.  But she did come out of it and she ended up singing in her church choir.  Another person who wasn’t expected to last another day in the ICU was discharged from the hospital the next day without having to be moved to a less-intensive-care room after we went in there and laid hands on her.  Just because someone is in desperate straits doesn’t mean that the Word won’t work.

We prayed over another man who couldn’t talk anymore, and he died.  (I need to include experiences like this, too!)  We found out later that he wanted to die, but his wife wanted him to live.  She didn’t tell me or the other healing evangelist who was with me that her husband wanted to die until later.  You can’t override someone else’s free will.  I recently (at this writing) visited the home of a man in very bad shape at his family’s request, but he didn’t even want prayer.  He wanted to die.  It doesn’t matter who you are; you will never raise everyone up off of deathbeds because some people don’t want to be raised up.  Your faith cannot override their free will.

The prayer of faith can be prayed over “any sick among you” (see James 5:14-15), not “any who are sick, but not too terribly sick, among you.”  In this case, obviously a family member would be making the call to the elders, not the comatose person, unless the person made the call before going into a coma.

As long as the person doesn’t want to die, God will honor YOUR faith, since the other person cannot be expected to exercise any faith at all.