The church's responsibility

When I attended a certain church, there was a special healing service at a church across the street. This church did not teach healing by God's standard (i.e., it was provided for all by Jesus Christ). They allowed healing to take place by the gifts of the Spirit, but they did not teach that healing was a covenant right.

There was a stir because a blind woman prayed for at the healing service at the other church instantly received her sight. Many of us, including me, were surprised, because we knew that this church was hardly a bastion of faith. Aside from the gifts of the Spirit, you would never get healed there. Some people at my church believed that healing was provided in Christ's atonement, but we had never seen a blind person healed. Thank God for his mercy.

According to the witnesses, this lady left the service saying, "I can't believe that this happened to me! I really can't believe that this happened!" Unfortunately, that was true, because three days later she went blind again and (as far as I know) never recovered her sight.


Was this the minister's fault? The Church's fault? At least indirectly, yes! The woman had no idea how to keep her healing. That is why it is so crucial that any ministry of healing be based on the Bible, not the gifts of the Spirit. Otherwise, you may get thousands of people healed, only to have them lose their healing soon afterward. What good is that? Then people come up with this "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away" attitude and make objections like the one being discussed here. Worse yet, they can become hardened to healing in general and be harder to reach next time!

Unfortunately, there are many "healing ministries" that do not provide sufficient instruction from the Word. The Bible pattern is to preach the Word and let the signs and wonders confirm it. The Word comes first; the signs and wonders come second. Although I saw people get healed at a service where the minister said, "Remember, God heals in his own time in his own way," that was definitely the mercy of God in action! There was no basis for faith preached, although there was a good basis for unbelief. God moved in spite of it.



Your responsibility

What some people miss is that you can be healed by the gifts of the Spirit without exercising any faith at all. Unbelievers have been known to get healed in healing services, and sometimes it seems that God favors them over those who have been "walking the walk" all their lives. (God expects less of them and meets them where they are.) However, even if you get healed with no faith of your own, you still need faith to keep what you got. Hence the need for proper instruction.

This is exactly what the religious world does not want to hear. This elicits comments such as, "If God really did the healing, it would be permanent! Guess it wasn't God!" Yet Jesus told the man at the Pool of Bethesda to go and sin no more, lest a worse thing befall him. Jesus admitted the possibility that the man could get sick again. Saul was refreshed and "made well" when David ministered to him in music. Yet Saul continually got sick again. This cycle in his life continued because of his lack of consecration to God. David ministered to him under the anointing, and as long as the anointing got on Saul, he was fine. But since Saul never changed on the inside, he slid right back once he was away from the anointing. God kept making him well, but Saul never managed to stay that way. So much for the idea, "If God did it, it would be permanent."


The anointing is a great painkiller, among other things. You can feel better while you are around the anointing, but if you don't take hold of it for yourself, you will feel bad again when you leave the service, and have Saul's kind of experience.

I can understand why some people object to the fact that people lose their healings. They point to the ministry of Jesus in the gospels and ministry of the apostles in Acts and point out that there is no record that anyone in those times lost his healing. This is cited as further proof that the miracles that happen today are not genuine, because the "genuine" miracles then were permanent, while ours today are temporary. That is sheer nonsense, of course, because there are plenty of permanent miracles going on today where people have kept their healing. If we were as diligent to magnify cases where people kept their healing, rather than magnifying failures, more people would have hope for their own healing.


Is being born again any less miraculous than a healing? Yet there are warnings all over the New Testament against falling away, as well as citings of individuals who did in fact deny the faith and apostasize. Does this mean that being born again is not genuine? Yes, there are surely many cases of people who turned back to the world, who once responded to an altar call or said a prayer but were never really born again to begin with. But if it were impossible not to lose your salvation, there would not be so many references to this in the epistles. The point is that you can have something miraculous and lose it later. Just because you lose something doesn't mean it wasn't genuine.

Peter walked on water. He was operating in the supernatural. Then he lost it when he let the outward situation mean more to him than Jesus' command. Did an act of God let Peter walk on water? Yes! But Peter lost it. It was God, but it wasn't permanent. If Peter could get something by faith and lose it later through unbelief, so can you.


Further proof of this is found in the parable of the sower in Mark 4. Four classes of people received the Word. Only one class of people got permanent results. Some of the others got temporary results, but then lost what they had. What they had was a genuine work of God, but they lost it because they were not "good ground." Jesus warned that if you do not have ears to hear, even what you have will be taken away from you. This fact alone contradicts the theology that God's gifts, once received, cannot be lost. Also notice that you can lose out even though there is nothing wrong with the Word or with the preacher! You can miss out despite the fact that the Word that was planted was genuine.

It is your responsibility, not God's, to make sure that your ground is good. You are the one who must guard the Word that is sown in your heart. God will not do this for you. God told Israel to break up its fallow ground (Jer 4:3, Hosea 10:12), which shows that this was the people's responsibility, not God's.


If everything God gives you is permanent, Jesus' command to the church at Thyatira in Rev 2:25 is meaningless. He said, "But that which ye have already hold fast till I come." If God's work were permanent, they would not have had to hold fast to it.

Jesus told the man who was healed at the Pool of Bethesda, "Behold, thou are made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee." Jesus plainly told the man that if he persisted in sin, he could end up even worse than he was and lose his healing. Jesus didn't say exactly what would be worse than being crippled for 38 years, but it would certainly not be good! It was up to the man whether such a worse thing would come upon him. Jesus did not say that God had anything to do with it. If the man chose to sin, he would lose his healing or get something worse.



Some parallels

If we are going to use people who lose their healing as an excuse that healing is not for all today, we should also raise the following complaints:

"Walking in love doesn't work. Some people go to services where they preach the love walk. They walk in love for a couple of days, but then they start acting mean again. Walking in love was just for the time of the apostles, not now."

"Tithing doesn't work. I know people who heard a message on tithing two weeks ago. At first, it looked like it was working, but then they got extra bills. So they stopped once they realized it didn't work."

"Bobby Backslider said he was a Christian, but now he's back in the world doing drugs again. The doctrine of regeneration was obviously only for the early church."



Doctrine from experience?

People's failures can never be used to prove or disprove doctrinal points. It is only the Bible, not men's experiences, that is profitable for doctrine (2 Tim 3:16). The fact that some fail to keep the promises of God does not negate them. Mathematically, 75% of the "ground" in Mark 4 got no lasting results. Should we pay more attention to the 75% that got no results or the 25% that bore fruit 30 to 100 times over? The Word was still genuine and of God even though the success rate was only 25%. I would not consider this arithmetically binding, but perhaps we should be extremely pleased if we get a 25% permanent success rate in healing services! Remember, it was not the quality of the Word that was the issue; it was the ground that received it. This is still true today. And it is also true that it is up to the individuals involved to be the good ground to receive the Word.


If Mark 4 is any indication, there will always be people who receive and then lose their healings. Like the poor, these people will always be with us. Rather than following and broadcasting their failures, find out what the people did who kept their healing and follow them!