DAY 18 Power to Heal and Deliver

I have experienced countless people healed as I’ve laid hands on them and prayed for them. As I’ve given God the opportunity to move I’ve witnessed him heal people of things like colds, the flu, severe back pain, arthritis and migraines. I’ve prayed for many who manifested demons and seen God deliver them completely. I have personally experienced God's faithfulness to his promises in his word regarding healing and deliverance. God is not only able to heal and deliver but he willingly chooses to use his people to heal and deliver through the power of prayer.

However, for every person that I've seen healed there are people I prayed for that weren’t.  For a long time, when people didn’t get healed it really messed me up.  I would be majorly discouraged and it would really shake up my faith. It didn’t make sense and it made me want to stop praying for people. If you’ve ever been there, hopefully this encourages you. These are some of the reasons why I continue to pray for sick people:

1. Not everyone will be receptive to the gospel.  If I share with 10 people and only 1 gets saved, was it worth it? Absolutely! I will preach to 100 to if it means one of them will spend eternity with Jesus. Just because some don't get saved doesn't mean I'm going to abandon preaching the gospel. Likewise, just because some people don't experience healing doesn't mean I'm not going to abandon praying for the sick. For the sake of the ones that do get healed I’m going to keep praying for healing!
2. As much as I want God to heal, it’s not up to me. God is the healer. My job is to give him the opportunity to heal by offering to pray for every sick person I come in contact with.  What I will be held accountable for is not how many were healed but how many I was obedient to pray for.
3. As we read in Mark 9 today, certain healings and deliverances come only as a result of prayer. I recognize that the more I abide in Jesus and spend time in prayer, the more frequent and extravagant the healings become. (This is one of the reasons I’m so excited to be fasting and praying all month together… all the abiding, the pressing in, the cutting things away to spend more time in prayer; it’s cultivating a relationship with the Vine that is going to produce major fruit and I believe it will result in a breakthrough of healing for many sicknesses and physical problems we've been praying for for a long time!).
4. I choose to believe God's word. The scriptures in the devotional today tell us that God is willing to heal, he heals in response to the prayers of his people and the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. Do you believe those biblical truths? Will you have more faith in God's word or in your experiences that appear to contradict it? 

“If people are not being healed, I will not supply a rational so that all those around me remain comfortable with the void. Instead, I will pursue the healing until it comes or the individual goes to be with the Lord. I will not lower the standard of the Bible to my level of experience. Jesus healed everyone who came to him. To accept any other standard is to bring the Bible down to our level of experience, and deny the nature of the One who changes not.” - When Heaven Invades Earth by Bill Johnson