13.What are gifts of healing? .

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They are supernatural abilities given to some members of the Body of Christ so they may be able to minister physical healing to those toward whom they are directed by the Lord Jesus.

The healing of the sick was one of the outstanding characteristics of the ministry on earth of the Lord Jesus Christ. Even with the increase of medical knowledge there seems to be just as much need for Divine healing today as there was two thousand years ago. Christ still heals today just as He did then.

Cancer, for example, is a major concern today. The surgeries and therapies employed by medical doctors are often effective, but sometimes they are not. The side effects of such treatments can be unpleasant.

When the Lord heals cancer—and there are numerous documented cases of the complete healing of cancer in our own day—there are no side effects. The cancer is passed by the body or disappears.

The most notorious plague of our day is AIDS. AIDS is a horrible disease which often accompanies promiscuity or the injection of drugs. The Lord Jesus is as able to heal AIDS as He is cancer, tuberculosis, diabetes, or any other ailment.

No member of the Body of Christ ever becomes a healer, ever becomes permanently wise—able to provide solutions at will, ever becomes a giant of supernatural knowledge. This is not how the gifts of the Spirit operate.

Rather, the gift is suddenly demonstrated, for the first time, in a person’s life. It may come in connection with a Divine calling or a filling with the Holy Spirit. It may come after prayer and fasting or suddenly appear as an added part of a saint’s ministry.

Other people will testify, and the believer will come to realize, that the Spirit indeed has added to his spirit a supernatural enablement by which he is able to enrich the Body of Christ.

Now he or she is a steward of what has been given. There is a gift present in the personality and it is to be stirred up and utilized in faithfulness and diligence as the Lord directs.

It is not that the believer can use the gift at will like the ability to play the piano. Rather, it a supernatural expression that can be "stirred up" in the Lord. It is a channel through which the Holy Spirit can glorify Christ. It is "subject to the prophet" but it is not part of the personality of the believer so that he himself becomes wise or knowledgeable or a healer. The "prophet" himself always is to be subject to the Lord Jesus.

We have never known of a saint who possessed the gifts of healing to claim to be a "healer" or a "faith healer." Those with genuine gifts, such as Dr. Charles Price, Smith- Wigglesworth, William Branham, Kathryn Kuhlman, never referred to themselves as healers. They specifically and continuously advised their audiences that they possessed no healing powers and could not heal anyone.

Their reason for such repeated denials of healing virtue was twofold: saints of such experience in the Lord know the penalty for taking to themselves the glory that belongs to God alone; also, they were telling the truth. They in fact did not possess any healing virtue. They were helpless channels and depended on the faithfulness of God to demonstrate His power in their ministries.

"Gifts" (plural) of healing are given to "another," that is, to one individual.

Evidently some aspect of the healing ministry is plural in number. Some have said that each healing is a gift. Others have noted that those with healing ministries are stronger in some areas of affliction than in others: one will have notable success with back problems, another with tuberculosis, another with blindness and deafness. This may be why it is "gifts" and not "gift" of healing.

In the ministry of the Lord Jesus there was a fullness of the anointing such that all were healed of every disease. But we Christians "prophesy in part."

The Lord Jesus did not minister by the gifts of the Spirit but by the fullness of God. Some day we too will possess the fullness of God; but in the present hour we operate with fragments of the Spirit. We see through a glass dimly.

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