Is healing a part of my church tradition?

Surprised by the Power of the Spirit: A Former Dallas Seminary Professor Discovers That God Speaks and Heals Today by Jack Deere

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

Oh yes, Divine Healing is pretty big in my tradition. It is one of four cardinal doctrines, right up there with Salvation, The Baptism in the Spirit and the Second Coming of Christ. I fondly remember extended times of prayer on Sunday nights when I was little. I’d walk around helping my dad lay hands on people kneeling at the front pews, often my little hand on a polyester clad buttock. I don’t know how many were praying for healing but I remember the desperation with which these old saints prayed.

The next big memory that comes to mind was a chapel service in college. There students crowding the altar, and I saw one big guy who had braces on both his knees. At once I felt slightly repulsed by him (he struck me as a lonely socially awkward soul like myself) and compelled to pray for him. I made my way to the altar behind him and placed a hand on the shoulder of one raised arm. I don’t remember how I prayed, only that I sensed that it was what God had wanted.

The next day at chapel this same guy stood there on the platform giving testimony to a complete healing of his knees, bouncing up and down. I started to wonder if perhaps God had given me the gift of healing…. Oh it was small infant gift to be sure, but one I could perhaps fan into flame?

Over the last few weeks I have been praying again with increased expectation, even keeping track of what happens. I have started to wonder, after I prayed nearly 20 times for healings and seeing nothing, if something is wrong with me. I wondered if I wasn’t holy enough, or if I was some how praying the wrong way, or if I was just kidding myself with this gift idea.

This is where Jack Deere’s book hit home for me, especially chapter 12, Pursuing the Gifts with Diligence. “Almost as soon as I began to ask God to give me a healing ministry,” he writes, “I began to pray for sick people. Most of the sick people I prayed for at first did not get healed…. But there is no other way to grow in anything apart from constant practice and risking” (166).

He goes on to give practical ways to practice. His cautions about motives give me appropriate soul searching to do while cutting the chi of arguments with which Satan has been plying me.

The bulk of his book was a treatise against cessationism. I bristle against any theology or system of thought that defines itself by what it isn’t and what it is against so I have little sympathy with cessationism. And as I have never been positively influenced by either dispensational or cessasionist theology, I had no great battle with his augments. Instead I followed along with his journey, with morbid fascination, cringing at his background, and watching as he was irresistibly drawn to the moving of the Spirit today.

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