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. Here is why they won't get healed. Don't let this happen to you!

These 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 for. They want the gifts of the Spirit to operate for them, but they ignore the fact that God "sends his word and heals them." They forget that God's Word is "health to all their flesh."

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.


These people will be prayed for and will receive nothing, which means that they receive exactly what they were truly expecting. Then they will complain that the healing minister has no anointing, because if he did, surely they would have gotten something. Yet even when they complain, they will be back every service to get their healing prayed for again. They will express their problems (if allowed to) the same way every time, like a broken record. 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 have to pray something to be polite; this will be more to keep the flow going for others than any belief that anything will happen to the person.


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. For some reason, healing services seem to draw out the flakes who don't even attend a church with a real pastor. Such people have problems that a quick prayer from the healing minister is not going to 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 and tune you out or even literally fall asleep. 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.) You can't help these people. Barring a sovereign act of grace, they will never get healed. That's just a fact of life. You have to go on and help the people that you can help who will hear the Word of God.


I suppose that you could resort to preacher tricks like 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.) 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. If he doesn't get anything, it will be because he really wasn't expecting anything anyway and he had a ho-hum attitude toward the service. Anyone who thinks it's up to the preacher should read the accounts of Jesus at Nazareth and the stories of those who were healed by their faith, which you can find elsewhere in this book.


There are churches full of people like the ones I have described, and the best thing you can do if you're preaching there is to remember that you're preaching to the ones (maybe the one?) who will listen and benefit from what you say. 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.