Faith Bible Study Guide
You need to understand that your will and your believing have a lot to do with your receiving healing or whatever it is you need from God. If you don’t believe the Word or you don’t want to be healed, then God won’t push healing off on you. You have a part to play in receiving from God too. God doesn’t override your will in the matter.
Let’s look at it from the natural standpoint. Doctors today don’t just say to people, “This is what’s wrong with you. Take this medicine and you’ll be healed.” It doesn’t automatically work that way. In fact, the doctor can’t help anyone without the per-son’s cooperation. For instance, the doctor could write someone a prescription, but if that person didn’t fill the prescription and actually take the medicine, he wouldn’t get well.
Well, if the natural physician can’t help you with-out your cooperation, how is the Heavenly Physician going to help you without your full cooperation? He won’t be able to. God has certain rules and laws that He works by, and even those to whom He gives the healing ministry don’t go around pushing healing off on folks. There has to be cooperation on the part of the people receiving healing. So many people have thought
that if someone would just pray the prayer of faith for them, they would automatically be healed, whether they themselves believed anything or not. But even if these people did receive healing by someone else’s faith, it would not be permanent. For example, I’ve seen people temporarily helped, but later they lost what they had received because they didn’t know how to hold on to their healing through their own faith.
If you are going to receive any permanent help, then you are going to have to act in faith yourself. You must practice God’s Word for it to work for you. As long as you hold on to the confession of weak-ness, sickness, and pain, you will still have weak-ness, sickness, and pain. You may search for some man of God to pray the prayer of faith for you, but it will be of no avail, because your unbelief will destroy the effects of his faith. It’s true, however, that baby Christians can be carried for awhile by other people’s faith. But the time comes when even they have to begin to exercise and develop their own faith.
That’s exactly the reason people receive their healing and then lose it. They have been in a service where there was mass or corporate faith and they received healing. But when they got on their own, Satan took advantage of their unbelief and put the ailment back on them because they didn’t know how to stand against him with their own faith.