Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you ill? 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. (James 5:13-15, NIV)
I grew up in the tradition that, in dealing with ‘Divine healing’, as we used to call it, we had to ‘pray’ for the sick. Having seen over the whole period of my ministry some outstanding miraculous healings, including my own two healings from cancer and one of my daughters from meningitis, I believe very strongly in the healing power of Christ. And over these last years working in Russia and Ukraine, I have been more challenged than ever.
In 1992 I was speaking to crowds of more than ten thousand in Mayaki, a village near Odessa, when the pastor asked me to go to another small town where there was no church, no Bibles and they had never even heard the name Jesus! The hall was packed with about eight hundred people almost all of whom accepted Christ after I had preached the Gospel to them. However, I was concerned that in their new belief, they actually needed a practical demonstration of who Jesus really is. For the first time in my life I said simply, but boldly to the crowd, ‘I can prove that Jesus is alive! If all the sick will come forward, I will put my hands on them in the Name of Jesus. If He is not alive no one will be healed, but if He is… then miracles will happen, because I will heal you in His Name.’ I was shocked by my own boldness! Tradition says that I must tell them, I will PRAY for you and then apologise and say, ‘I cannot heal you, only Jesus can.’ But before the meeting, I had been reading the words of Jesus in Luke 9:1-2 and 10:8-9, where He calls firstly twelve then seventy disciples and COMMANDS them to preach the Gospel and HEAL the sick – not ‘pray’ for them. Later I found that Matthew 10:1-8 is even stronger than Luke.
In the meeting that day hundreds came forward, and we recorded that almost every sick person was healed when I obeyed HIM in FAITH. Since then I have studied the commands of Christ to His disciples regarding healing and I cannot find one place in the four Gospels where Jesus ever tells His disciples to ‘pray’ for the sick! He always says either HEAL them or lay hands on them, as in Mark 16:17-18, where He says, ‘These signs will follow those who believe… they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.’
So where does the tradition of ‘praying’ come from? The main reference usually quoted is in James 5:14, ‘Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the Name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick.’ This is for the believers in the church, the ministry within the ‘body’. It clearly calls for the ‘elders’, the oil, praying in faith and forgiveness within the church.
All the other references in the Gospels, where Jesus is speaking, must be for the evangelist, as every reference in the commands of Jesus is to the disciples not to the church, which did not come into existence until Pentecost, and He always says, ‘Preach the Gospel… HEAL the sick.’
In order to demonstrate that Jesus is alive to unbelievers and to uplift and glorify the Name of Jesus we need to preach under a strong anointing of faith by the Holy Spirit which will bring signs, wonders, miracles and healings. We must have evangelism with power and fire to bring real confirmation of the truth we preach.
And in order to do this, we need two extremely important things, power AND authority. We know that the power is through the Holy Spirit but the authority?
The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. (James 5:16, KJV)
James 5.16 says, ‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.’ Powerful prayer works! The original Greek of the Bible often uses a special word for power: dunamis – it signifies miraculous, wonder-working power. From it we get the words dynamo (which generates power), and dynamite (the explosive). If you want prayer to work, to change your circumstances, then it must generate power. And it has to be like dynamite. If you put an ordinary explosive against a wall, its energy disperses into space. But dynamite does not dissipate its energy – it pushes the wall down! That’s what our prayer must be like. It’s got to move mountains! We must learn how to talk to God, until our praying will move every mountain, every obstruction, everything that stands between us and the fulfilment of God’s promises.