What If I Lay Hands on People and They Don’t Get Healed?
One of my personal heroes, F. F. Bosworth, asked the Lord a question like this because he was concerned about what would happen if he held a crusade and people didn’t get healed. He said that the Lord’s answer was, “What would you do if you preached to people and they didn’t get saved?” Bosworth realized that the correct answer was that he would keep preaching the same message.
We preach the truth because it’s the truth, not because it’s “trending” in the polls today. We’re preachers, not worldly politicians.
My question would be, what if you lay hands on people and they DO get healed? Think how the kingdom of God would benefit!
The devil likes to torment people (especially preachers) with the thought that they will preach to the sick, then lay hands on them, and nothing will happen. But Jesus said that you will lay hands on the sick and they WILL recover. The devil always tries to get you to agree with thoughts that contradict Scripture. It is always better to act on what the Word says than to NOT act because of what the devil says! Heaven will back you when you act on the Word. Heaven has nothing to back if you do nothing due to fear. When a fear thought comes, do you really want to assume that it’s the first time that the devil has ever told the truth?
Will everyone you come in contact with get healed when you are out preaching healing? NO! They didn’t all get healed in Jesus’ ministry either. At Nazareth hardly anything happened (Mark 6:1-6). Jesus didn’t get frustrated and shut down his ministry. In a house meeting, only one person got healed while a crowd of religious people didn’t (Luke 5:17-26). And that was JESUS doing the ministry! Don’t think that you’re greater than He is. Jesus didn’t run off to a mountain somewhere for a week of introspection to try to figure out why His ministry was not as powerful as it had been in other places.
Not everyone that the apostles preached to received Jesus, either. Some believed and some disbelieved (Acts 28:23-24). That will just about always be the case anywhere. If some are not saved or healed, or even ALL are not saved or healed at some meeting, that doesn’t make you a failure. You’re only a failure if you stop obeying the Great Commission, and even then, you can become an un-failure by obeying it again.
If you see yourself as dead to the world and alive with Christ, living only to do His will, it will help you when you are confronted with the devil’s taunt that you’ll preach and no one will get healed. That is because the real point of the devil’s question has to do with YOUR self-image. He wants to put fear in you that YOU WILL LOOK BAD if you lay hands on people and they are not healed. With the devil, it’s never about Jesus – it’s always about you. His thoughts have nothing to do with having compassion on sick people. He wants you to “play it safe” and avoid personal embarrassment. Satan prefers having you be self-centered and hung up on your image. Fear of failure and subsequent humiliation could keep you from accomplishing anything. But I am dead with Christ. My reputation in this world is not what is important – pleasing God and obeying Jesus are all that matter.
But here’s what the Lord has had to remind me about – you have done your job if you preach the Word and make healing available. You will have a reward in heaven for doing that even if no one gets healed. Most of the people I’ve handed tracts to have not gotten saved as far as I know. I will still get a reward in heaven for making the words of eternal life available to those people whether they ever act on them or not. In fact, I will get a reward for the roughly equal number of times that I OFFERED someone a salvation tract and the person refused to take it. It would be unfair for God to judge YOUR success by the actions of others, which you do not control!
Don’t set yourself up for failure by letting the devil run his movies on a screen in your mind. Don’t let your mind be his sin-ema. Otherwise, he’ll keep playing “The Failed Healing Preacher” (starring you) in your mind. It is up to you to take the Word to cast down his imaginations. So remember that Jesus said that you SHALL do the works that He did (John 14:12) and that you SHALL lay hands on the sick and have them recover (Mark 16:18). See THAT happening instead! This is not a treatise on visualization – just visualizing something won’t help it happen if you have no faith attached to it. Visualizing without faith is just daydreaming or New Age junk. See yourself laying hands on the sick and having them recover rather than letting yourself be tormented by one of the devil’s favorite questions (the one we’re discussing here). That will make it easier when you are in a live situation ministering to the sick.
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