Faith Healers

How many of you have been to a faith healer? Have you witnessed people being healed through faith alone? By this, I am not so much thinking about people who have gotten well after prayers were said for them, but of pastors or faith healers who claim to be able to heal people and do so on stage, like Alan Watts, Benny Hinn, Baba Ram Dass, or others.

Other than Benny Hinn, whom I have seen on television, the only one I have come across was when I was a preteen or early teenager. Every summer, someone would arrange for a revival preacher to set up a large tent in Wallace, Michigan, where I grew up, and hold a week-long revival meeting. Usually, these were traditional preachers, albeit with more energy on the evangelistic side. However, one summer, they ended up with a faith healer. Everyone I knew was a bit put off by that, but it was still good entertainment, so the tent was filled every night.

He would invite people to come up and be healed of whatever ailed them. The problem was that very few, if any, local people wanted to do that, regardless of the problems they may have had. Nevertheless, people were hobbling up on walkers or wheeled up on wheelchairs, and there may even have been a blind person; they were being healed near the conclusion of every service. That led to another problem: pretty much everyone in the audience knew everyone else in the audience and was related to most of them. Still, no one knew any of the people being healed, so I think most of us assumed that these same people spent the whole summer being healed of their ailments from one little town to another. In other words, they were part of the show.

No, I'm not going to make fun of faith healers. I might do that later, but not in the opening post. I do not doubt that God can heal anyone and everyone that He wants to heal, and I don't see any compelling reason to insist that the ability of God's people to heal in His name ceased with the Apostles; although I sort of believe that, I won't insist on it.

 

Many years ago, I took a trip with my friend , Nyla, from Idaho to California, so that she could see her mother, whom she had not seen in several years.
On the way down, we chatted about all kinds of topics, and one of them was on physical problems that Nyla had.
When we arrived in California, one of the churches near where her mother lived was having a revival and we decided to go.

When the evangelist started calling people up for prayer, sometimes, he would just point at the person and ask them to come up front so he could pray for them.
He pointed at Nyla, and she went up, and he then proceeded to name off most of the ailments that she had been sharing with me on the trip down there.
We did not know anyone there, and they did not know who either of us was, and I have no idea how he knew what Nyla wanted prayer for.

I do not remember if everything was healed or not, but it seems to me that at least some of it was, it was just the amazement that he knew exactly what was wrong with her and I could not see any way for him to know that.

 

I've never been to a faith healer or to a big tent revival, although I would attend one if it were reasonably close. I imagine that faith healing may sometimes work in much the way that placebos do...however that may be. Perhaps the body's innate ability to heal itself is God-given, and faith opens us up to it.

Regarding healing ending with the Apostles...there is nothing I am aware of in the Bible that says the Apostles were given the power to teach others how to heal, but I found this series of quasi-relevant verses in the Book of James:

James 5:13 thru James 5:16
Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

James was admonishing the listener to live an obedient life. And there is healing on different levels, with the physiological being subordinate to the spiritual. As Jesus said to more than one person: It is your faith that has healed you. So if there is physical healing in some of the revival attendees, I would venture to say that the venue and the faith healer have little to do with it.

 

Yup. And in an appropriately succinct manner.