Recently, I was heartbroken upon hearing about a pastor who had made a public announcement regarding an aggressive cancer that was likely to take his life unless he received a miracle. The announcement of his illness was heartbreaking, but his theology and the way he requested prayer from his friends, family, and church members may have been even more heartbreaking. Of course, when you are facing a prognosis such as his, it would be completely overwhelming. There was essentially no hope from a medical standpoint. He said many things that were powerful. He said he was going to fight. He said he was going to do everything medically possible to get better. (I am always positive about people doing everything in the natural world along with prayer. I believe that anything that fights against sickness is of God; therefore, I am always for doing everything medically possible). However, in his kindhearted attempt to comfort others during his own storm, he said these words: “My life is His, and whatever the outcome of this is, we are trusting Him.”

At first glance, that does not sound like terrible theology. Also, it is easy to critique someone’s words when they are going through the problem, and you are not. I went through and watched many updates from him, his wife, his church family, and read many of their comments and even sermon series about going through difficult situations to try to get a grip on his theology. When asked how people should pray, he didn’t say, “Pray that I live and not die and that I overcome this illness through the Word of God and the name of Jesus, which has promised me total healing.” He more or less asked for strength to endure this no matter the outcome, and he asked for prayer for his kids to be strong during this trial.

I want to be incredibly careful, as this wonderful man is still going through this trial, and the story is not yet over. I am hoping and praying that he is filled with the knowledge of God’s will so that he will accept God’s total will to heal him. I do not want to be insensitive, but at the same time, I want to boldly say what needs to be said. So many people are afraid to directly deal with this because it might offend. Let me tell you something, if I am dying of something and I wrongly believe there is no cure, (even though there is) even if I am totally convinced there is no cure and your idea is just plain false, I want you to keep telling me about it, demonstrating it to me, and sharing success stories; even if I am being stubborn about it. Who knows? One day, maybe the light bulb will go off, and I will get it. If you love me, you will tell me the truth, even if I don’t want to hear it.

Did you know that it is always God’s will to heal? Many do not know that. They get weird ideas from people who base their theology not on the Bible but on experience. There are two types of Christians. One group takes their experience and lowers the Bible to the level of their experience. (The Bible should always have the preeminence over your experience). The second group will look at the Bible and compare it to their experience. If their experience does not match the high standards of the Bible, they will ask the hard questions: “If Jesus is truly alive, and He promised that He would never leave us nor forsake us, then why does it seem that I’m alone?” They will ask, “If the Bible promises me healing, then why is my experience not in line with God’s promise?” They will not settle for less than God’s best. They refuse to lower the Word of God to their experience and try to explain away the hundreds of passages that promise divine healing. Instead, they do as Abraham did, and they refuse to consider their own bodies. As my Dad would say, it is not that Abraham pretended that he didn’t have an old body when He accepted God’s promise. The Scripture says that he considered not his own body. What does that mean? It means that he took God’s promise as higher evidence, and he refused to consider his own body as higher evidence than the promise of God [See Romans 4:17-21.]

We must do the same thing. If God’s Word promises us divine healing, but our bodies say we are sick, we do not consider our body as enough evidence to doubt the promise of divine healing. So, let’s answer some hard questions. Why? Because these are life and death questions. The difference between whether you live or die when you face a circumstance like this is based upon what you believe the answers to these questions are. I know this, not because I studied a book, but because God raised me up off the death bed. I’m glad I had the right answers to these seven questions. If not, I would not be alive to write this.

I was on the mission field when suddenly an unknown disease hit me. It made me go totally deaf. I went into total kidney failure. I went into total liver failure. I had a massive heart attack. My lungs were under attack. I was down to seventy percent oxygen, and my brain was being attacked by meningitis as I battled a fever of 105.5. The doctor told me I would not survive the weekend, and there was nothing he could do about it. But amid this storm, I refused to consider my own body or the report of the doctor. I went to war, speaking God’s Word over my body. I also had a broken ankle that happened six days before this experience.

Six days after being told I had a death sentence, I walked out of the hospital with no heart damage, no brain damage, no liver damage, no kidney damage, and no lung damage. I was totally healed. As a bonus, they checked my broken ankle to see how it was doing before I left. It had been in a cast for 12 days and was supposed to need 6 weeks. It was totally healed, and I left the hospital with no cast and healed of a deadly disease. Did it come easy? No, I had to fight for my life. I prayed through. I spoke the Word. I refused to accept the news of the doctors.

It took three days for my kidneys to be healed from kidney failure, which shocked the doctors. It took three more days for my liver to be healed from liver failure. I had to speak the Word of God all day and night for six days until total healing came, but my belief was founded not on my feelings or my experience but on the Word of God.

How you answer the following questions could one day mean life or death for you. And so, I have written this book.

What are the questions? They are:

1. Is healing truly for all? 

2. Why do some who really have faith not get healed? 

3. Does God heal some people by taking them home to heaven instead of healing them on earth? 

4. Can sin keep a person from being healed? 

5. How does one get faith to be healed? 

6. Is it possible to have plenty of faith to be healed and yet fail to receive from God? 

7. Is divine healing provided in the atonement at the cross for everyone who believes? 

It is our belief that Jesus provided healing for everyone at the cross. It is our hope that every person who reads through this book is filled with faith and will receive divine healing in his or her physical body from whatever ails him or her. Our official stance is that healing is for everyone just like salvation is. In this book, we will answer in detail the questions mentioned above, using Scripture. We welcome your questions, rebuttals, different points of views, and we will do our best to answer your questions.

Psalms 103:2: “Who forgives all my sins and who heals all of my diseases.” Psalm 107:20, “He sent His word and healed them.” 1 Peter 2:24, “By whose stripes we were healed.”

When I ask the question, “Is healing for all?” I’m being very specific. I don’t mean this in the broad, religious sense. I’m not talking about when the preacher needs something that sounds smart and religious for the funeral of a child who left us too young, so he makes a blanket statement to try to defend God while simultaneously trying to make sense of a senseless tragedy. Sometimes the best answer is to love the ones who are hurting and not use this time to talk about something the speaker really does not know much about. I would venture to say that most poor theology about healing, lack of healing, premature death, the will of God concerning sickness, and belief about fate was passed down – not by those who studied the Bible deeply or who were taught by many generations of sound Bible teachers in their family –by those grasping at straws at times like these. Famous sayings start at one time or another from someone making a statement that just stuck. It was passed along, and after decades, it became accepted to be almost as true as the Bible itself.

Have you ever heard these statements: “Cleanliness is next to godliness” or “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop” or “God helps those who help themselves”? How about this one: “God will never put more on you than you can handle”? If you asked the average Christian how many of these statements were in the Bible, a large percentage would say they all are. I would be willing to bet that 9 out of 10 Christians that go to church every Sunday would tell you that at least one of these four statements is in the Bible. Case in point, entire messages have been preached on generational curses, yet the phrase generational curse is not even in the Bible.

Would it surprise you to know that not even one of those four statements that I asked about are in the Bible. In fact, they aren’t even true. It’s interesting how we will believe things just because it’s been passed down for generations.

There are many times I do know the answer to why a person died before their time when I’m preaching the funeral. Sometimes it is clear, but I realize that a funeral is not always the time to share my belief that will go in the face of their long-standing incorrect beliefs about the will of God and God needing another angel in Heaven (That’s another strange thing people say. People don’t become angels when they die, but I don’t correct them when they are going through the pain. That is for another time). Even though I do not correct them at that time, I do not lie about it just to make them feel better. I find the middle ground. These long-standing beliefs need to be addressed in order to answer why it is God’s will for every person to be healed. I believe God does want to heal everyone every time, but to teach this, I have to deal with the false teaching which people have had shoved down their throats for generations.

At funerals, all kinds of lies are told. One person will talk about how good the corpse looks, knowing full well that the person in the casket doesn’t look at all like themselves. When I was just seventeen, I had the misfortune of seeing my grandfather in the casket. Up until that point, I had seen people lying in those boxes before, but not one that I knew like the back of my own hand. I knew everything about this man. The way his eyes sat away from his nose. I knew his skin tone. He always wore glasses, and he wasn’t wearing them in the casket. It didn’t seem like they had his skin tone right. I studied him for a few minutes, and I had to take others’ word for it that my grandfather was indeed the man in that pine box. My grandfather, some of us called Diddy, had manly hands. His hands looked skinny and useless. You get the point. It was a lie. He didn’t look good at all. But one by one, people would walk up to Grandma Walker and say the same words, “He looks like he’s just sleeping peacefully. He looks great. He was a great man.” And on and on, they went. That’s human nature, of course. People aren’t sure what to say, but they feel the need to say something.

My grandaddy was a great man, but I have been to other funerals where the preacher and everyone there would go on about how great a person was when everyone there knew he was a scoundrel. I have even been to the funeral of a wife-beating drunk who was as lost as a ball in high weeds, but the preacher tried to preach him straight into heaven. I don’t blame them. Who wants to be the preacher who gets up there and says, “Beloved, we are here to celebrate the life of this reprobate who lived his whole life for Satan, and now he’s getting what’s coming to him. He rejected Christ in this life, and now God has eternally rejected him. He died, and after that is the judgment. He heard the words that no one wants to hear, ‘Depart from me. You worker of iniquity. Enter into hellfire, prepared for the devil and his angels.’” I have never said it like that, of course, but even as a young man, I vowed not to preach them into heaven as if there was no difference between the lost and the saved. I didn’t preach them into heaven. I focused on the good stuff they did on earth, told everyone that no one knows if a person got right before God except the person themselves, and used that opportunity to let folks get saved.

Why did I go into all of that? People are always looking for excuses for why bad things happen to good people. They often lie about bad people and preach them into Heaven. In the same way, well-meaning preachers in pulpits often lie about why good people get sick. I have heard it said, especially when a person dies of the illness, “God needed another angel in heaven.” Like that’s going to comfort some seven-year-old, telling them that God needed their loved one more than the seven-year-old did. No wonder the seven-year-old grows up with resentment to God for taking his dad! If a person gets cancer and dies, someone will say, “God needed them to go to Heaven and help take care of the flower beds in Heaven.” I hate to be crude, but even a little kid would know better than that. Doesn’t God have lots of angels that could do that? Plus, do flowers even die in Heaven? I thought there was no death in Heaven and no weeds? After all, there is no curse in Heaven. God doesn’t need my family members up there. I need them down here. Also, did he need them to suffer with cancer for two years before taking them to help with the garden? The theology just doesn’t make sense, so let’s talk about what the Bible says.

GOD ANSWERED THE QUESTION OF HIS WILL ONCE AND FOR ALL TIME

In Matthew 8, we read an interesting story. It’s the only place where anyone ever asked Jesus directly about God’s will. One of the most faith-killing prayers you can ever pray is “If it be thy will.” Jesus never prayed this way when He was praying about sickness, trouble, or pain. In fact, Acts 10:38 said, Jesus “went about doing good and healing ALL who were oppressed by the devil” (emphasis added). We are told plainly here that Satan was oppressing people, and Jesus was removing the pain. Sickness is called the devil’s work in Acts 10:38, and Jesus treated sickness like his enemy.

I have been trying to find a single verse anywhere where Jesus once ever treated sickness as his friend, like something he wanted to keep around in case he needed it for a good cause one day, but I simply cannot find it. In fact, EVERY SINGLE TIME sickness and Jesus had a confrontation (which is many times), Jesus talked mean to the sickness. He often called the sickness by name. Other times, He even named a demon spirit after a sickness. That doesn’t seem like something you would do if you intended to use the sickness later in a positive way. Why would you name demons after illnesses if you intended to use the sickness in a positive way later like to “teach someone a lesson” or “make them stronger” (things often attributed to God’s use of sickness). Typically, He rebuked illness and disease, and He commanded it to leave people, and sometimes, he seemed quite angry at the illness.

Back to Matthew 8. . . there was a leper that begged Jesus for help. In verses 1-3, he said to Jesus “IF YOU ARE WILLING, you can make me clean.” Isn’t this what most people ask today? No one would ask if God was able to heal, but they aren’t quite sure of God’s willingness to do so. Since we only have one place where someone asked Jesus about his will to heal, we should likely pay attention to His answer. Especially since God’s word itself says, “God is no respecter of persons.” What He does for one, it seems that He desires to do for all. The Bible says that God wants “all men to be saved and come into the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Interesting that no one would argue with that. The word “saved” here is the word sozo in the Greek. It always means “saved from sins, healed from diseases, delivered, protected, preserved and made whole in every way.” In fact, the word sozo is the Greek equivalent to the Old Testament word shalom which means “nothing missing, and nothing broken. Total peace and prosperity.” So, the Scriptures clearly say that God wants “all men to be saved, healed, delivered, protected, preserved, and made whole.” That’s right.

He is clear that it is His desire for ALL men to be sozo’d. Nothing missing and nothing broken. He wants everyone to come into the knowledge of this wonderful truth. You know, I have been studying very closely, and I can’t seem to find a single place where Jesus refused healing to someone who came to him in faith whether it was a Jew or Gentile. It’s man’s hellish doctrine that keeps people in the darkness and keeps them from the knowledge of the truth of what belongs to them in Jesus. Jesus wants us healed and whole. Hebrews 1:1-3 teaches that Jesus is the express image of the Father. He is the perfect picture of God, how the Father thinks and acts. This is why Jesus told Philip, “When you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” If you want to know what the Father thinks about healing, ask Jesus! Look at Jesus’s life. Jesus said, “I never do anything that I don’t see my Father do. It is the Father that does the work!” WOW! Jesus was saying that it wasn’t even Him that healed the people in one sense. The heavenly Father through Jesus was healing the people and forever let His will be known forevermore.

In this book, we are looking at seven questions that if answered wrongly can be deadly because it can lead to disease, sickness, pain, and even premature death. In one of these teachings, I hope to share with you how getting these questions right and putting God’s word to work saved me from the death bed in full, but I will share pieces of my story as we go. I don’t have time for the entire story now, but I will tell you how important these questions are. Not long ago, I was in ICU in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Recall that earlier I told you that I had an unknown disease. Another missionary had the exact same symptoms after swimming in a lake. He had a rare disease called leptospirosis. Only about 1 in 100,000 contract it, but out of the ones who get it, less than 10% turn fatal. If it does turn fatal, it happens very quickly. They usually go into kidney failure and liver failure. This is what happened to me, and based on the identical symptoms, leptospirosis was the likely culprit. My oxygen was at 70%. They told me that if I went to 69%, I would have to go on a ventilator. I kept looking at the monitor. It would go up to 72%, then 71%, and then 70% again. I would speak to the machine, like a crazy person and say, “In Jesus name, you will not go below 70%!” I battled this for two hours. It kept almost coming close, but it never dropped below 70%. Finally, it went up to 78%, and I went to sleep. Praise God! I Told you that I had a massive heart attack, a stroke, and meningitis in my brain, but I had also gone totally septic due to the liver and kidney failure. The doctor said it was too late to save me. Multiple specialists told me that. They said that the failure in my kidney and liver was so severe and had progressed so fast that they could not run the dye to see how much damage had been done to the heart. I could have been bleeding internally. There was nothing else to do except say my goodbyes.

I took hold of the principles I will share with you in the following pages, and I applied them to my life. With the little bit of faith I could muster, I spoke God’s Word of healing over myself. I was left to die. They were giving me no life-saving measures, as they said I would be dead over the weekend. God’s Word brought me back to life. After declaring healing over my kidneys for three days, they suddenly jumped up to 86%. The poisons that were in my liver were at 14,000. On Day 4, they went to 10,000. Day 5, they went to 5,000. Day 6, they went to 18, which is normal. The doctors could not find heart damage after three heart tests, including two echocardiograms. They could not find the evidence of the stroke that had been seen days earlier. I walked out of the hospital in one week totally healed in Jesus’s name. It’s all documented. How you answer these questions can mean life or death for you! I didn’t wait until I got in this situation to find the answers, I already knew it. You need to know what God’s word says so that if you ever get in a life-or-death situation, you will know what to do.

Have you ever heard these statements: “Cleanliness is next to godliness” or “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop” or “God helps those who help themselves”? How about this one: “God will never put more on you than you can handle”? If you asked the average Christian how many of these statements were in the Bible, a large percentage would say they all are. I would be willing to bet that 9 out of 10 Christians that go to church every Sunday would tell you that at least one of these four statements is in the Bible. Case in point, entire messages have been preached on generational curses, yet the phrase generational curse is not even in the Bible.

Would it surprise you to know that not even one of those four statements that I asked about are in the Bible. In fact, they aren’t even true. It’s interesting how we will believe things just because it’s been passed down for generations.

There are many times I do know the answer to why a person died before their time when I’m preaching the funeral. Sometimes it is clear, but I realize that a funeral is not always the time to share my belief that will go in the face of their long-standing incorrect beliefs about the will of God and God needing another angel in Heaven (That’s another strange thing people say. People don’t become angels when they die, but I don’t correct them when they are going through the pain. That is for another time). Even though I do not correct them at that time, I do not lie about it just to make them feel better. I find the middle ground. These long-standing beliefs need to be addressed in order to answer why it is God’s will for every person to be healed. I believe God does want to heal everyone every time, but to teach this, I have to deal with the false teaching which people have had shoved down their throats for generations.

At funerals, all kinds of lies are told. One person will talk about how good the corpse looks, knowing full well that the person in the casket doesn’t look at all like themselves. When I was just seventeen, I had the misfortune of seeing my grandfather in the casket. Up until that point, I had seen people lying in those boxes before, but not one that I knew like the back of my own hand. I knew everything about this man. The way his eyes sat away from his nose. I knew his skin tone. He always wore glasses, and he wasn’t wearing them in the casket. It didn’t seem like they had his skin tone right. I studied him for a few minutes, and I had to take others’ word for it that my grandfather was indeed the man in that pine box. My grandfather, some of us called Diddy, had manly hands. His hands looked skinny and useless. You get the point. It was a lie. He didn’t look good at all. But one by one, people would walk up to Grandma Walker and say the same words, “He looks like he’s just sleeping peacefully. He looks great. He was a great man.” And on and on, they went. That’s human nature, of course. People aren’t sure what to say, but they feel the need to say something.

My grandaddy was a great man, but I have been to other funerals where the preacher and everyone there would go on about how great a person was when everyone there knew he was a scoundrel. I have even been to the funeral of a wife-beating drunk who was as lost as a ball in high weeds, but the preacher tried to preach him straight into heaven. I don’t blame them. Who wants to be the preacher who gets up there and says, “Beloved, we are here to celebrate the life of this reprobate who lived his whole life for Satan, and now he’s getting what’s coming to him. He rejected Christ in this life, and now God has eternally rejected him. He died, and after that is the judgment. He heard the words that no one wants to hear, ‘Depart from me. You worker of iniquity. Enter into hellfire, prepared for the devil and his angels.’” I have never said it like that, of course, but even as a young man, I vowed not to preach them into heaven as if there was no difference between the lost and the saved. I didn’t preach them into heaven. I focused on the good stuff they did on earth, told everyone that no one knows if a person got right before God except the person themselves, and used that opportunity to let folks get saved.

Why did I go into all of that? People are always looking for excuses for why bad things happen to good people. They often lie about bad people and preach them into Heaven. In the same way, well-meaning preachers in pulpits often lie about why good people get sick. I have heard it said, especially when a person dies of the illness, “God needed another angel in heaven.” Like that’s going to comfort some seven-year-old, telling them that God needed their loved one more than the seven-year-old did. No wonder the seven-year-old grows up with resentment to God for taking his dad! If a person gets cancer and dies, someone will say, “God needed them to go to Heaven and help take care of the flower beds in Heaven.” I hate to be crude, but even a little kid would know better than that. Doesn’t God have lots of angels that could do that? Plus, do flowers even die in Heaven? I thought there was no death in Heaven and no weeds? After all, there is no curse in Heaven. God doesn’t need my family members up there. I need them down here. Also, did he need them to suffer with cancer for two years before taking them to help with the garden? The theology just doesn’t make sense, so let’s talk about what the Bible says.

GOD ANSWERED THE QUESTION OF HIS WILL ONCE AND FOR ALL TIME

In Matthew 8, we read an interesting story. It’s the only place where anyone ever asked Jesus directly about God’s will. One of the most faith-killing prayers you can ever pray is “If it be thy will.” Jesus never prayed this way when He was praying about sickness, trouble, or pain. In fact, Acts 10:38 said, Jesus “went about doing good and healing ALL who were oppressed by the devil” (emphasis added). We are told plainly here that Satan was oppressing people, and Jesus was removing the pain. Sickness is called the devil’s work in Acts 10:38, and Jesus treated sickness like his enemy.

I have been trying to find a single verse anywhere where Jesus once ever treated sickness as his friend, like something he wanted to keep around in case he needed it for a good cause one day, but I simply cannot find it. In fact, EVERY SINGLE TIME sickness and Jesus had a confrontation (which is many times), Jesus talked mean to the sickness. He often called the sickness by name. Other times, He even named a demon spirit after a sickness. That doesn’t seem like something you would do if you intended to use the sickness later in a positive way. Why would you name demons after illnesses if you intended to use the sickness in a positive way later like to “teach someone a lesson” or “make them stronger” (things often attributed to God’s use of sickness). Typically, He rebuked illness and disease, and He commanded it to leave people, and sometimes, he seemed quite angry at the illness.

Back to Matthew 8. . . there was a leper that begged Jesus for help. In verses 1-3, he said to Jesus “IF YOU ARE WILLING, you can make me clean.” Isn’t this what most people ask today? No one would ask if God was able to heal, but they aren’t quite sure of God’s willingness to do so. Since we only have one place where someone asked Jesus about his will to heal, we should likely pay attention to His answer. Especially since God’s word itself says, “God is no respecter of persons.” What He does for one, it seems that He desires to do for all. The Bible says that God wants “all men to be saved and come into the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Interesting that no one would argue with that. The word “saved” here is the word sozo in the Greek. It always means “saved from sins, healed from diseases, delivered, protected, preserved and made whole in every way.” In fact, the word sozo is the Greek equivalent to the Old Testament word shalom which means “nothing missing, and nothing broken. Total peace and prosperity.” So, the Scriptures clearly say that God wants “all men to be saved, healed, delivered, protected, preserved, and made whole.” That’s right.

He is clear that it is His desire for ALL men to be sozo’d. Nothing missing and nothing broken. He wants everyone to come into the knowledge of this wonderful truth. You know, I have been studying very closely, and I can’t seem to find a single place where Jesus refused healing to someone who came to him in faith whether it was a Jew or Gentile. It’s man’s hellish doctrine that keeps people in the darkness and keeps them from the knowledge of the truth of what belongs to them in Jesus. Jesus wants us healed and whole. Hebrews 1:1-3 teaches that Jesus is the express image of the Father. He is the perfect picture of God, how the Father thinks and acts. This is why Jesus told Philip, “When you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” If you want to know what the Father thinks about healing, ask Jesus! Look at Jesus’s life. Jesus said, “I never do anything that I don’t see my Father do. It is the Father that does the work!” WOW! Jesus was saying that it wasn’t even Him that healed the people in one sense. The heavenly Father through Jesus was healing the people and forever let His will be known forevermore.

In this book, we are looking at seven questions that if answered wrongly can be deadly because it can lead to disease, sickness, pain, and even premature death. In one of these teachings, I hope to share with you how getting these questions right and putting God’s word to work saved me from the death bed in full, but I will share pieces of my story as we go. I don’t have time for the entire story now, but I will tell you how important these questions are. Not long ago, I was in ICU in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Recall that earlier I told you that I had an unknown disease. Another missionary had the exact same symptoms after swimming in a lake. He had a rare disease called leptospirosis. Only about 1 in 100,000 contract it, but out of the ones who get it, less than 10% turn fatal. If it does turn fatal, it happens very quickly. They usually go into kidney failure and liver failure. This is what happened to me, and based on the identical symptoms, leptospirosis was the likely culprit. My oxygen was at 70%. They told me that if I went to 69%, I would have to go on a ventilator. I kept looking at the monitor. It would go up to 72%, then 71%, and then 70% again. I would speak to the machine, like a crazy person and say, “In Jesus name, you will not go below 70%!” I battled this for two hours. It kept almost coming close, but it never dropped below 70%. Finally, it went up to 78%, and I went to sleep. Praise God! I Told you that I had a massive heart attack, a stroke, and meningitis in my brain, but I had also gone totally septic due to the liver and kidney failure. The doctor said it was too late to save me. Multiple specialists told me that. They said that the failure in my kidney and liver was so severe and had progressed so fast that they could not run the dye to see how much damage had been done to the heart. I could have been bleeding internally. There was nothing else to do except say my goodbyes.

I took hold of the principles I will share with you in the following pages, and I applied them to my life. With the little bit of faith I could muster, I spoke God’s Word of healing over myself. I was left to die. They were giving me no life-saving measures, as they said I would be dead over the weekend. God’s Word brought me back to life. After declaring healing over my kidneys for three days, they suddenly jumped up to 86%. The poisons that were in my liver were at 14,000. On Day 4, they went to 10,000. Day 5, they went to 5,000. Day 6, they went to 18, which is normal. The doctors could not find heart damage after three heart tests, including two echocardiograms. They could not find the evidence of the stroke that had been seen days earlier. I walked out of the hospital in one week totally healed in Jesus’s name. It’s all documented. How you answer these questions can mean life or death for you! I didn’t wait until I got in this situation to find the answers, I already knew it. You need to know what God’s word says so that if you ever get in a life-or-death situation, you will know what to do.

This is a tough one, but as always, we look to the Bible as our answer. Too often you hear a person say, “I know this person believed. You can’t tell me they didn’t have faith. They were full of faith, but God didn’t heal them.” There are several factors involved here. First, only God knows a person’s heart. Just because you feel that someone had faith doesn’t mean the person did. You weren’t around this person 24 hours a day to hear his or her words. I remember a man who was dying of cancer. He had wasted away to nothing by the time I reached him. He hadn’t eaten or drunk in several days, and they were waiting on him to die. I spent an hour in the Bible with Him teaching him about healing, and then I laid hands on him. He got full of faith and began to receive healing. In fact, he asked to sit up in bed and be brought something to eat. He kept eating and eating for days. The problem was that one person in his life kept talking doubt and unbelief to him all day long. I only got an hour with him; this other person was with him for 23 hours that day and for 24 hours a day the next six days. He was supposed to be dead within a few hours – a day at most – when I visited him. He was still alive a week later, but he had lain back in bed and stopped eating again. I asked if it was okay if I shared with him again. He said yes and was excited. After thirty minutes of teaching on healing, he sat up and asked for food again. He praised God and confessed he was healed in Jesus’ name. He kept eating and was full of faith and joy again. He even worshiped God. He kept eating and getting better for many days after this experience. Unfortunately, once again, someone else was in his life speaking doubt and unbelief all the time. This beautiful man started saying “I don’t want to be a burden to you. I can just go home.” He began to be snared by the words of his own mouth and the unbelief of the person closest to him that surrounded him daily. Within another week, he succumbed to the sickness and died. All I had done was buy him three weeks. I had only been with him twice, and just the little bit of word on healing that he got in that short time lifted his spirit and caused him to get better, but I couldn’t stay with him 24 hours a day to keep him confessing God’s Word over himself and staying in faith. I wish I could have. Even Jesus couldn’t do any miracles in his hometown around people who were familiar with him because of the unbelief of those who were around the sick people.

What does the Word of God say about having faith yet it not benefiting you? It can be found in James 2:17, “So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds (works), it is dead and useless,” and again in verse 26, “Just as the body is dead without breath, so also faith is dead without good works.” You can have enough faith to move a mountain, but it won’t help you if you do not add works to your faith. Speaking the Word of God is a way to act on faith. Getting up and doing what you were unable to do is an action you can do, but faith must be put into action. Having faith doesn’t always equate to receiving from God. You must add actions to your faith, and sometimes, those actions have to do with persevering over time.

The Parable of the Unjust Judge

Luke 18:

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’ For some time, he refused. But finally, he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’ And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you; he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?’”

Matthew 7:7 is another verse that goes along with this, “Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.”

Sometimes it is a matter of refusing to quit. The Bible says, “We will reap if we don’t give up.” I wonder how many miracles were lost just before they were to manifest simply because someone gave up. Satan wants you to give up on your miracle, but God wants you to persevere. Some people have faith, but they don’t have works; others have great faith, but they give up just before they reap what they have sown.

I am convinced that the number one reason people who have great faith often do not have faith to receive is that they waver in the words of their mouth. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” the Scripture says. You can have faith, but are you speaking it? Do you continue to speak it? Do you waver by speaking things that are contrary to the truth? Do you question yourself and begin to vacillate between two opinions? James says that a person who doubts is like a person being tossed about in the sea. He goes on to say that a person who wavers should not expect anything from the Lord.

When I pastored in Alabama, there was a family who believed in healing, but had wrong ideas about it. Someone had prophesied that in the future, the woman would receive a dramatic and sudden healing from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. I talked to them all the time about what the Bible says about healing, but they kept saying, “God’s going to heal her. It’s coming in the future. God promised it from a prophet.” I said to them, “You don’t need some word from a prophet to receive healing. The Bible says that Jesus already bore your sickness, and he already took your pain. Faith is not in the future; faith is right now!” They would argue with me and say, “But we know she will get healed in the future. It’s coming.” I would say, “Stop saying that it’s coming and start saying, ‘It’s mine. I have it now. Jesus paid for me to get it. I am healed by His stripes.’” It was too late. Their minds were convinced. She died in less than a year. Her husband got angry at God and said, “The prophet promised she would get her healing.” Once again, faith is now; it is not in the future. He was still talking about how they were looking for healing to come in the future. They weren’t in faith. They were in hope. His anger caused him to backslide, leave church, curse God, and a year later, he died a horrible death from a malfunction of a piece of lifesaving equipment he had. His anger towards God kept him from receiving his own healing as well. Faith works by love. He didn’t have love in his heart anymore. He was angry at God, and he opened the door for Satan to steal from him.

So, is it possible for someone with great faith to fail to receive healing? Most definitely. Faith without works is dead. Wavering in your words and actions can kill your faith. Giving up before the time can steal the healing as well. Stay strong. Keep on knocking. God is not a man that He should lie. He will do what He said, and healing is something He promised all of us.

1

Who has truly believed our revelation?

To whom will Yahweh reveal his mighty arm?

2

He sprouted up like a tender plant before the Lord,

like a root in parched soil.

He possessed no distinguishing beauty or outward splendor to catch our attention

nothing special in his appearance to make us desire him.

3

He was despised and rejected by men,

a man of deep sorrows who was no stranger to suffering and grief.

We hid our faces from him in disgust

and considered him a nobody, not worthy of respect.

The Sin-Bearer Servant

4

Yet he was the one who carried our sicknesses

and endured the torment of our sufferings.

We viewed him as one who was being punished

for something he himself had done,

as one who was struck down by God and brought low.

5

But it was because of our rebellious deeds that he was

pierced and because of our sins that he was crushed.

He endured the punishment that made us completely whole,

and in his wounding we found our healing.

6

Like wayward sheep, we have all wandered astray.

Each of us has turned from God’s paths and chosen our own

Way; even so, Yahweh laid the guilt of our every sin upon

him.

The Surrendered Servant

7

He was oppressed and harshly mistreated;

still he humbly submitted, refusing to defend himself.

He was brought like a gentle lamb to be slaughtered.

Like a silent sheep before his shearers,

he didn’t even open his mouth.

8

By coercion and with a perversion of justice

he was taken away.

And who could have imagined his future?

He was cut down in the prime of life;

for the rebellion of his own people,

he was struck down in their place.

9

They gave him a grave among criminals,

but he ended up instead in a rich man’s tomb,

although he had done no violence nor spoken deceitfully.

The Servant’s Reward

10

Even though it pleased Yahweh

to crush him with grief,

he will be restored to favor.

After his soul becomes a guilt-offering,

he will gaze upon his many offspring and prolong his days.

And through him, Yahweh’s deepest desires

will be fully accomplished.

11

After the great anguish of his soul,

he will see light and be fully satisfied.

By knowing him, the righteous one,

my servant will make many to be righteous,

because he, their sin-bearer, carried away their sins.

12

So I, Yahweh, will assign him a portion

among a great multitude,

and he will triumph

and divide the spoils of victory with his mighty ones—

all because he poured out his life-blood to death.

He was counted among the worst of sinners,

yet he carried sin’s burden for many

and intercedes for those who are rebels.

Thank you for taking time to read these lessons. I hope you have enjoyed the teaching. God led me to study about healing for a year before I needed it, but maybe you are facing sickness and issues now. Maybe life and death situations are happening right now. Don’t give up! Listen to what I am teaching. Put it into practice, and God will step in, and your situation can change in Jesus’s name!