Andrew Wommack - God Wants You Well - Part 19
Welcome to our Thursday’s broadcast of The Gospel Truth. Today I am continuing to talk about, God wants you well, and I tell you, we have covered a lot, a lot of material. This is nearing the end of my fourth week of teaching on this and so I can’t go back and summarize everything, but again, I would really like to encourage you to take advantage of all of the materials that we’re offering. We not only have teaching that is directly on healing, but we have a lot of things, like this little digital thing that you plug into your computer has over 40 hours' worth of teaching on subjects related to healing such as, of course, I have God wants you well, but I’ve got you’ve already got it, on here which, if you saw the testimony of Mike Hoesch, the man that had this cancer on his chest and he was healed of that, that’s the teaching that set him free and got him healed was the teaching on, you’ve already got it.
It’s already got teaching on here on how to receive a miracle, how to flow in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, this is really beneficial when it comes to healing because the Holy Spirit could show you things and give you specific words of wisdom and knowledge about what is causing this problem: how to receive God’s best, spirit, soul and body, which teaches that you’ve already got everything in your spirit and it’s just a matter of renewing your mind and releasing things into your body: a better way to pray, which most people, the way that they pray for healing is not scriptural at all, and I tell you, that teaching on, a better way to pray, will ring your bell: the creative power of words, which is a very important part of you receiving your healing.
I’ll be talking about some of that either today or tomorrow, into next week as we deal with some of this, death in other people’s words: we’ve got a thing on here that is nothing but healing scriptures that are read to background music playing and a lot of people use this just to get the word in their heart: and then we have some testimonies on here, Niki OchenskI’s testimony of being healed of fibromyalgia, the doctors sent her home to die and she was healed, Lisa Paxton’s testimony, which she was healed of cerebral palsy, was never supposed to live and she had a miraculous healing, it’s awesome: what to do when your prayers seem unanswered, grace and faith in healing, and I tell you, these are just powerful things that I won’t be able to cover in this series, but all of this is available when you get this little digital thing that plugs into your computer.
So anyway, we’ve been teaching that it is God’s will for you to be healed. I’ve been countering objections to it and now I’ve been talking about, for the last week or so, about reasons why people are not healed, and I’ve already made this point, I’m not going to go back through and teach all of these things, but in Matthew, chapter 17, when Jesus came down to his disciples, there was a man who had brought his son to the disciples, he actually brought his son to Jesus, but Jesus was up on this Mount of Transfiguration with Peter, James and John, and he wasn’t present, so this man asked the disciples of Jesus if they would cast the demon out of this boy. It says that he was lunatic is what it says here in the King James version.
Most people believe that this was some type of a seizure is the way that it’s described, and over in Mark, chapter 9 the exact same thing is recorded and there it shows this boy literally having a seizure and convulsing and falling on the ground and wallowing and foaming at the mouth, and so most people believe that what the King James calls, lunatic, is just some type of a seizure thing and it was caused by a demon, and so this man had brought his son to Jesus' disciples to cure his son and they couldn’t do it and when Jesus found out about this, he was displeased, and he said, you faithless and perverse generation, how long am I going to be here? How long am I going to, you know, put up with this? The Lord wanted his people to be able to meet this need, and I believe that today the Lord is not pleased…
Now, I’m not saying he’s mad. Praise God, the Lord has a good disposition, he can handle it, he loves us, he is not condemning anybody, but it isn’t God’s will for the church to be so ineffective and not ministering to people today. I believe that just as he rebuked these disciples and said, you faithless and perverse generation, I’m not going to be here forever, you need to get to where you can do this, likewise, the Lord is not pleased with our inability to minister healing to people today. This is something that is really at a deficit in the body of Christ and we need to learn how to walk in healing and that’s the reason I’m teaching on television about this and offering all of these materials.
I have seen thousands and thousands and thousands of people who received these truths and now are walking in healing. It’s not something that you have to have a special gift for. There are special gifts of healings and gifts of miracles. I’m not talking about that, but all things are possible to him that believes. If you learn how to believe, you can walk in supernatural health whether you have a gift of healing or the gift of miracles at all. You can get anything that you need in the area of health by faith, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, Romans 10:17, so these products that we’re offering are just Chuck full of the Word of God and it’s to help you walk in healing.
So, why is it that some people are not healed? One of the obvious reasons, and I want to, you know, I dealt with this last week and I don’t want to go back and say all of these things over again, but you really need to get this in its context because I gave more explanation last week, but unbelief, or let me rephrase that, there’s many people that just don’t believe that it is God’s will to heal, so therefore they are not going to receive if they don’t believe. Faith has to be present to receive healing.
Now again, there’s people that’ll counter this because if you say that, there are some people who are believing with everything that they know, they’ve got, they are trying to believe God, they are awesome people, they love God, they’re seeking God, they may have even seen other people healed, and yet they themselves are dealing with a problem, and if you say that you have to have faith and that healing comes when we believe for it: if you don’t believe, you won’t receive, well then, there are immediately people who look like to us that everything is just perfect and this is going to cause them to feel, you’re saying that I’m not believing God, when they know in their heart that they are believing God, and they take offense at this and they just immediately reject it. Let me try and balance this, that it is not the only reason that people aren’t healed, but it is one reason.
Now, this is important that you understand this. I am not saying that every time a person doesn’t manifest a healing it’s because they don’t believe, but I can say this, if they don’t believe, they will not manifest a healing. Healing is dependent upon the person who is receiving the healing having some degree of faith. You know, if I had more time I could go through and teach this at length. Again, this is one reason you need to get these materials because I actually spend more time on this, but there are different types of faith.
There is what I call an aggressive faith or a strong faith that reaches out and just takes healing. Jesus told a number of people, according to your faith be it done unto you. There were people that got healed without Jesus even knowing that they were getting healed. It wasn’t his faith that was producing it, these people reached out and took faith, and I’m going to use in my next segment that I do on this, talking about the laws of faith, I’m going to show you some of these examples, like from Mark, chapter 5 and other places. So, there is this strong aggressive faith that reaches out and takes healing, but every person who receives healing has to have what I call, at least a minimum of a passive faith. It may not be the type of faith that reaches out and can get it on their own so that according to your faith be it done unto you, but if I believe for you and if I intercede and pray for you, you have to have at least a passive faith that will receive this healing.
Now, that’s a huge statement right there and I know again, this is offensive to some people because they just don’t want to believe that the faith on the person’s part who is receiving the healing is even a factor. I’ve had people bring up, Jesus raising the widow’s son from the dead, I think that’s in Luke, chapter 7 and they say, what faith did he have? Well first of all, you are supposing that a dead person doesn’t have any choice. That’s a human perspective from our side, looking from only this realm that we live in. We think that when a person is dead, that they’re gone, that they’re non-existent, they have nothing to do with it.
The scripture shows us that you’re still alive: you just go to be with the Lord. Your soul and your spirit separate from your body, but you still exist, and to suppose that a person who’s dead has no choice in the matter is a supposition that you cannot base on scripture. I can’t tell you based on scripture that you know, the person who’s dead has to believe, but you can’t tell me they don’t have to believe, that they don’t have a choice in it. We just don’t know that for sure, but even in that example over in Luke, chapter 7 you find that Jesus walked up to the mother of this boy and told her not to weep.
If he really wanted to see her just totally not weep and come out of her grief, why didn’t he just raise the boy from the dead? Why did he come to her and tell her not to weep? Because he needed somebody who was involved in this miracle to believe and this woman responded positively to him. So anyway, if we had more time, I could go through every single instance where it looks like or some people say that you don’t have to have any faith to believe, it’s just all on the person who is doing the healing, and I could show you that in every single case there has to be some degree of faith.
You know, here’s one verse that I think just makes this point in a way that I don’t know how anybody could dispute this, but in Mark, chapter 6, Jesus was in his hometown and he was preaching and they got offended at him, and here’s what they said in Mark, chapter 6, in verse 3, is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Judas, and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him. But Jesus, said unto them, a prophet is not without honor, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could there do no mighty works, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief.
Now it says that he couldn’t do, not that he wouldn’t do it, he could not do many mighty works. He just laid his hands upon a few sick folk and it says, he marveled because of their unbelief. If you put this together with Matthew, chapter 13, which is the exact same instance, it’s just recorded by Matthew instead of Mark, here’s the way that it says it in verse 58, it says, he did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief. And so, this shows that Jesus, he was operating in the power of God perfectly. He did not have any limitations on him. He was God in the flesh. He saw every single person healed in other situations, but because these people and their unbelief, he could not do many mighty works.
Now, if Jesus was limited by the people he was ministering to, and if their lack of faith or unbelief limited him, who do you think you are that you can somehow or another do things better than Jesus and you can just go into a hospital and empty the whole hospital because you’re believing? I’m telling you, a lack of understanding this has caused a lot of people to receive these truths about it’s God’s will for us to be well, that he wants every single person well: like it says in 3 John, chapter 1, verse 2, beloved, I wish above all things that you prosper and be in health, even as your soul prospers, there’s people that get a revelation of that and then they just go out and start praying for everybody expecting them to get healed on their faith, they don’t even take into account the person that they’re ministering to.
I promise you, if that’s what you do and if you don’t understand that there has to be faith present on the person’s part who is receiving, either this aggressive faith that can get it just by their faith, or at the very minimum, a passive faith that will accept and receive it when it’s ministered to them, if you don’t understand that, then you are going to go out and start trying to minister healing to some people, you aren’t going to see every single person respond and either your faith is going to be damaged, thinking, God, you know, I was believing. How come this didn’t happen? And it’s because you just ignorantly didn’t understand that other people also have to agree, or you are at the very least, you are going to misrepresent the Lord and you’re going to tell people, you’re healed and then they go ahead and because they didn’t believe, they don’t see the healing manifest and they’ll think, well, see, this healing stuff just isn’t real.
I believe that if we were really strong in the Lord and operating the way we should, there’s a lot of people we should not pray for because they aren’t ready and we ought to tell them that you know what? You need to believe and we ought to try and build them up. Matter of fact, you know, when I’m ministering to people one on one, this is the way that I will often approach healing, is rather than just, you know, somebody tell me, I’ve got this wrong, would you pray for me? Boom! I just pray for them and you’re healed, I’ll nearly always start trying to find out where this person is, are you believing God? Like, I just had a meeting and I had a person come to me with cancer and it was a severe cancer and they were far gone and they were pretty bad shape and so I started asking him, where are you?
Are you terrified by this, are you discouraged, are you encouraged, are you standing in faith, are you believing, and I started asking them questions, and you know, if you talk to a person, it doesn’t take very long to find out where they are, and so, depending on where they are, I will minister to them according to where their faith is. If they’re strong in faith and if they’ve been resisting and if they’re doing everything that they know and everything that I know and they are just fighting this thing, well then, I’m quick to agree with them and put myself in agreement and mix my faith with theirs, but there’s a lot of people that are just, I mean, they don’t understand faith, they aren’t believing God, they are doing everything wrong, they’re confessing all of the wrong things, they’re operating in total fear, et cetera, et cetera, and when I discern that, I’ll start trying to minister to them.
I had a couple that was working on our building up in Woodland park, some of the construction people, and they had some problems and I got to talking to them and they said, would you please pray for our marriage, would you please pray for this, and they were asking me to just pray for all of these things, and I said, you know what would do you a bunch more good than just praying for you is, you need the word. You need truth. They were having marital problems and I said, I’ve got teaching that will teach you how to deal with these marital things, what it is that causes strife. They had physical problems in their body and I said, you need to learn what the word says, and so I never did pray for them.
I’m not against praying for people, but I’m saying that people just default and think, pray for me, and they don’t even take into consideration what they’re believing. The Bible says in Proverbs 23:7, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. Your life is going the direction it’s going because of the way you think, and when it comes to ministering to people who are sick, there is a reason why they aren’t receiving their healing and you’ve got to find out what that is. Do they even believe it’s God’s will? If they don’t, minister to them on that level. If they do believe it’s God’s will, but maybe they’re thinking God also punishes me and maybe I deserve this, then you need to share with them the gospel and tell them about the grace of God and you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you believe through Jesus.
If they have bitterness and unforgiveness that has allowed this stronghold in their life, you need to counter that and have them renounce that. There’s just a lot of things that you need to take into account. So, I’m talking about reasons why people aren’t healed and the very first thing I’m talking about is, there has to be some faith present on the part of the person who’s receiving the healing, but let me also say that many people have taken these truths that I’m talking about and they say this is the only reason that people aren’t healed is because they just didn’t believe, and that’s too simplistic.
I can give you specific examples in my own life where I believed for healing and yet I did not see the right results, not because I didn’t have faith, but because there’s other things. It’s more detailed than that, it’s more complicated than that, but all that being said, I’m going to go on and talk about these other things, but the first thing is, you’ve got to realize faith does have to be present, some measure of faith. If you’re strong in your faith, then you can overcome a lot of problems in another person, but if they just are not believing, it won’t work. You know, I liken it to this, that if you are in a car and if your car was dead, if you put that thing in neutral and take your foot off the brake and take off the emergency brake, then I can push your car.
It may take a lot of effort, but I can push it and the more I work at it and the more pressure I put to it, the faster I can make it go. But if you have your foot on the brake or if you have it in park or if you have your emergency brake on, I cannot push you when you have all of those things stopping. Likewise, when it comes to spiritual things, if a person will put themself in neutral, if they will say, well you know what? I’m having trouble believing, but I will receive if you will pray for me and help me, then I will believe. If a person will put themself in neutral, well then I can overcome a lot of things. I’ve seen people healed that from the outside people may think that they weren’t even believing God.
Well, they weren’t believing God to the degree that they could have got the healing on their own, but they had faith that when I prayed that God would respond to me and they put themself in neutral and they let me pray for them, and I’ve seen lots of people healed like that. I remember one example where there was a guy, it’s a long story, but his wife had been born again and she was coming to church and he was coming to church with her, but boy, he was, I mean, a very rebellious guy and he was making no bones about it, he wasn’t saved, he wasn’t sure about all this stuff, and his wife was praying for him.
Anyway, we believed and got him a job, he started to work and within just a few days of working, he had ulcers and so they laid him off of work and because he had only been working just a few days he didn’t have any benefits, they needed the money, his wife brought him over to a house that I was painting and she says, you’re going to pray for him and he’s going to get healed. We need this money, we need this job.
So, I talked to him and I said, his name was Doss, and I said, Doss, are you believing that God is going to heal you right now? And this guy wasn’t saved, but you know one thing, he was honest, and he says, no, I cannot believe that God’s going to heal me right now. He says, I don’t believe it’s going to happen, and I said, well, let me rephrase this. I can believe that God’s going to heal you, and if I believe and if this healing manifests and if all of your pain goes, will you accept it and believe that God has healed you? And he said, I could do that. Now see, it wasn’t this active faith that reaches out and takes a healing, but when I believed, he was going to accept it.
So anyway, I prayed for him and then he had these stomach ulcers and he was having terrible pain. He was bent over, and after I prayed for him, I hit him in the stomach and this guy fell to the ground and he wasn’t saved and he was rough around the edges and he got up and he reared back ready to hit me and he just stopped and he says, the pain’s gone, and he realized that he had been healed, and you know what? He got born again that night. It’s a great story, but see, that wasn’t the kind of faith that reached out and took the healing on his own, but when I believed and released it towards him, he accepted it by faith, and I believe that you do have to have faith present.
So, reasons why people aren’t healed, people don’t believe God. That’s not the only reason. You can believe God and still not see the manifestation, I’m going to deal with that on our program tomorrow, but it is true that you do have to believe, and so when it comes to ministering healing to someone else, don’t ignore this. Don’t just think that you’re going to get everybody healed off of your faith: you need to try and solicit a response of faith. Jesus did this constantly with the people that he ministered to.