“For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.” (Matthew 13:15)
We have allowed our beliefs to be grounded more by circumstances and experiences than by God’s Word. Indeed, the Prophet Jeremiah was right when he told us, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
Jack Deere, a former Dallas Seminary professor and author of Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, eventually lost his job when he realized that his beliefs had been shaped more from experience than from what God tells us. “I was one of those Christians who loved to tell themselves that they do not live by experience but by the Word of God,” Deere confesses. “My practice and my beliefs were determined by the teaching of the Holy Scriptures—or so I thought. Only in recent years has the arrogance of that kind of talk become apparent to me…Our experience determines much of what we believe and do, and often it determines much more than what we are aware of or would admit.”
My wife and I visited a large church in Lakeland, Florida recently. In fact, this church was so large that those members who desire the Lord’s healing touch have a room of their own where they can visit and speak with a pastor who will pray for healing, the same kind about which the Apostle Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 12:9.
I can’t tell you how uneasy I was when I first stepped into that room. It looked like a morgue. People were laying on the floor as if they were dead. I finally realized what was meant by the description, “Slain in the Spirit”.
I also realized that there is a lot more to the characterization of me as a Child of God than I had earlier thought. Just like a child, fearful of the environment in which he has found himself, I got as close to the wall as I could. I was afraid of what was going on in that room.
The pastor came over and introduced himself and said, “Your wife tells me that you have diabetes. Would you like for me to pray for the Lord to heal you?”
“No,” I politely told him. “It’s not that I don’t believe the Lord heals. I don’t believe he will heal me. You’d just be wasting your time. But thank you.”
I thought about that experience. The truth is I didn’t believe in healing. You see I have never been a member of a church that believed in healing enough to have a healing room or a healing service. That’s true for many of us, isn’t it? We pray for healing, but the only place where most of us are comfortable with the practice of healing is in the doctor’s office, not in a church. Have we allowed our beliefs about healing to be shaped by our experiences rather than Scripture?
The Bible teaches us that humans can have the gift of healing but that the recipe requires a small dose of faith, the size of a mustard seed. (Matthew 17:20) Matthew records that Jesus’ own disciples, to whom he had given the “…authority to heal every disease and sickness,” could not heal an epileptic boy. (Matthew 10:1, 17:16) Jesus healed the boy and later told his disciples that they couldn’t heal “…because you have so little faith.” (Matthew 17:20)
Faith is the bridge that reveals God’s will, unleashes his power, and allows us to really get to know who he is. Next week, I am going to share an experience with you that has opened my eyes, deepened my faith, and changed my opinion about healing.
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