Why Some People Will Never Get Healed
It has been well said, “All sickness is curable, but not all sick people are curable.” Some people will never receive their healing even though they go around to healing crusades seeking it. Probably the hardest truth I’ve had to learn in the ministry is that there are some people whom you just cannot help no matter what you do. You want to help everyone, but you can’t.
Some people do not have any faith built up in the area of finances, and they fear losing their government disability payments if they get healed. Such people will not get healed.
Some people just like to complain about their ailments. Such people will not get healed. I actually challenged one such person, “Let’s talk about something other than your pills and your pains,” and the person actually told me, “I guess I don’t have anything to talk about, then.”
Other people want someone to lay hands on them and make their sickness go away, but they do not want to take the time to study the Word for themselves. They do not even want to hear preaching at a healing crusade. They just want to get down front and get prayed over. They want the gifts of the Spirit to operate for them, but they ignore the fact that God “sent His Word and healed them” (Psalm 107:20). They forget that God’s Word is “health to all their flesh” (Proverbs 4:20-22). They want the preacher to do all the work for them. When you lay hands on them, you can see “Make it happen, preacher!” written all over their faces.
Every now and then you’ll even get someone who comes in just to prove to himself that the whole healing business is fake. He isn’t there to receive; he’s there to criticize, and like his counterparts in Luke 5:17-26, when “the power of the Lord is present to heal them” he will most likely get nothing. (On rare occasions, the Lord may heal such a person as a sign, but you have no guarantee that He will do that. I know of a case in Australia where a reporter went to the meeting of a well-known healing evangelist to expose him as a fake, got healed, and reported to everyone that the evangelist was the real deal.)
Ignoring God’s Word and just looking for a special manifestation is no different from getting a doctor’s prescription but refusing to take it because you want an operation instead.
The people who want the preacher to make something happen will be prayed over and will receive nothing, which means that they receive exactly what they were truly expecting. Then they will complain that the healing minister had no anointing, because if he did, surely they would have gotten something. Yet even though they complain, they will be back every service and they’ll get in line again. They will express their problems (if allowed to) the same way every time. Although they get no results, they will not change what they are doing. They will just get more upset with the minister for not waving a magic wand and making something happen. The minister will think to himself, “Oh, no, it’s that person again, the one with whom it’s like laying hands on a brick wall.” He’ll probably have to pray something to be polite and move on as quickly as he can to someone who is ready to receive.
If you’re the pastor, you may find it useful to give some people “homework assignments” (this could be reading Scripture or a book, listening to or watching an internet teaching) and then see if they do them. If someone never does anything you say, you’re obviously wasting your time.
Some people are nothing more than sympathy seekers, whose “I want help” really means “I want attention.” You cannot help people like that. And they’ll probably blame you and say that you’re mean because you won’t pray for them once you realize the futility of doing so. Solving people’s loneliness and boredom issues is not your job. People do this to secular hospitals too; I knew people who would call the ambulance and go to the hospital when they felt lonely and wanted attention even though nothing was seriously wrong with them. The hospitals have a hard time trying to turn these people down, but they know who the “frequent flyers” are. (The local hospital started making it a habit of making one of these people wait hours to be treated, but it finally got so ridiculous that the ambulance crew refused to pick up that person anymore!) Likewise, there are prayer line “frequent flyers” who run around to various meetings “looking for the anointing.”
There are lonely single people who just want a physical touch from someone of the opposite sex and their honest main reason for being in the healing line is to get that. They aren’t really there for healing to begin with. One woman was making the rounds with the ministry team I was part of, trying to get someone to hop in bed with her for “spiritual” reasons that “God gave her.” You can’t get cynical but you do have to be careful; not everyone in your audience will have pure motives. I even had one lady try to grab my hand and put it where it shouldn’t be. That’s why if you’re ministering to someone of the opposite sex, your hand shouldn’t be anywhere near such locations!
Then there are thrill seekers who just want to feel the power of God and/or fall over because it feels nice. I’m sure it does, but such people are a hindrance in a healing line because they short-circuit the power that is manifesting to heal people, not provide them with a spiritual thrill ride.
You can’t do a thing for a person who will not reverence the Word of God and give it first place. There will be spiritual butterflies who flit and float from meeting to meeting and never get anything. Like the poor, they will always be with us. In my experience, miracle services also seem to draw out flakes who don’t even attend a church with a real pastor. Such people usually have issues that a quick prayer from the healing minister will not fix.
Jesus is the Word made flesh. If you do not reverence the written Word of God, you do not reverence Jesus Himself. If you say that you love Jesus but you do not love God’s Word, you lie. Some people say that Jesus means a lot to them, but when you try to get them to hear the Word, they sit there and stare into space, pass notes, tune you out, literally fall asleep, or even worse, have sneaky text conversations on their cell phones without turning off the little notification beeps, at least before the ushers intervene (you hope!). Sleepers usually like to sit in the first few rows so that you can’t miss them. (I have never figured out why this is, but it’s been a long-standing pattern. Maybe the devil just likes to try to annoy preachers by putting snoozers down front.) You can’t help these people. You have to press through the distraction and help the people whom you can help who will hear the Word of God.
I suppose that you could resort to preacher tricks such as yelling, running around the room, stopping every two minutes to tell people to say something to each other (which is often preacher code for “Wake up, for crying out loud!”), asking for shows of hands for things all the time (see previous comment), and so on. (I would avoid deliberately misquoting Scripture to see if anyone is awake enough to correct you. This will backfire if no one is actually paying attention, and besides, they won’t be able to trust you after that. They’ll think you’re out to trick them, which I guess would be true at that point. Some might even believe that your fake Scripture is the real thing.) Unlike one preacher I’ve seen, I don’t kick the sleepers and shock them awake. If they have no more sense than that, I can’t help them, but I don’t want to come across as mean to the rest of the people, some of whom may have very receptive hearts. Ultimately, you can lead a Christian to living water but you can’t make him drink! If anyone gets anything, it will because he wanted to get something. People with a ho-hum attitude don’t get anything. Anyone who thinks it’s up to the preacher should read the accounts of Jesus at Nazareth and the stories of others elsewhere who were healed by their faith, which you can find elsewhere in this book.
Some places have people with the attitude, “I’ve heard all the best preachers, so I don’t think you are going to tell me anything I don’t already know.” I’ve challenged people sometimes that if they already know everything about divine healing, why aren’t they already in perfect health? Faith comes by hearing the Word, so if such people really knew the Word at all, they’d be happy to hear its principles again. Maybe they’ll pick up things that they missed the first time.
Some churches encourage people to have a cavalier attitude, openly inviting people to go get themselves a coffee in the middle of the service whenever they want, in an attempt to be trendy and “casual.” To me, all this does is train people to be disrespectful to the things of God. If you saw Jesus in the flesh at the podium, would you tell him you’ll be right back to hear Him some more after you get a cappuccino to sip on? Well, He walks in the midst of His churches (Revelation 1:20 and Revelation 2:1), so don’t you think He’s there?
I have seen people healed in places where you would never believe that anyone could get anything, because someone chose to hear and believe the Word while the others were nodding off. At Nazareth, at least Jesus healed a few people who didn’t need dramatic miracles. But as the Nazareth incident shows, if people don’t respect the minister, not very much will happen no matter how good a preacher he is. Jesus was a good preacher, and you can’t expect greater results than He got in similar circumstances.
If your self-esteem is based on whether or not people get healed when you minister, you will probably have very low self-esteem after going some places. Remember, do your best, and what people do with it is between them and God, not between you and God. You get credit for putting the Word out there, not for with what people do with it. Keep sowing the Word even though it falls onto different kinds of ground! Some people are ground similar to an expressway and they’ll never get healed, but one person just might get healed and then bring a dozen people to Christ and add them to the church because of his testimony.