Praying prayers for healing. There is a lot of misunderstanding in this area, and a lot of desperation. The only one who has the power, authority and ability to heal is Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit will give the gift of healing to individuals, but the individuals have no power in and of themselves to heal – they must ask in Jesus name and if it is in accordance with the will of God, healing will be provided.
God does promise to heal, just as he promises to give strength and wisdom and provide for our needs. However, the healing he wants to provide may not be the healing we are looking for. Where we seek to meet the needs of our physical bodies, God is always seeking to fulfil those of our spiritual selves.
This does not, of course, mean that God will not heal our bodies when we ask him to. When Jesus was on earth, he never turned away any of the sick that came to him, he freely healed them. In the book of Acts, we see the apostles doing the same. However, when Jesus performed a miracle, his end goal was not the miracle itself. Instead he often commanded the person to, “go and sin no more.” The apostles modeled the same thing, using the miracles they performed as a gateway to build up the person’s faith and to spread the gospel about the Kingdom of God.
Today, we see many who need healing all around us but when we pray for them, or even when they pray for themselves, their prayers for healing seem to fall on deaf ears. Why? They may have all the faith in the world, but God still has not healed them. One reason we ask and do not receive may be because we simply ask with the wrong motives. The motivation must be the glory of God and the furtherance of the Kingdom, repentance from sin and a desire to love the Lord with all the heart and mind and soul. God must not be just a means to an end but rather the beginning and end and everything in between.
Prayer does bring healing and praying prayers for healing for ourselves or others is necessary and encouraged by God. But when we pray for healing, we must make sure that we have the glory of God as our motivation – not our own glory or our own comfort.
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