Modes of Healing

by John G. Lake

There are four modes of healing, and more than that, but four principle modes taught in the Word of God. The first is the direct prayer of faith of those, who just like the leper, come to Jesus and say, “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.” Jesus answered the leper, “I will; be thou clean” (Matthew 8:2–3; Mark 1:40–41; Luke 5:12–13). And His “I will” has rung down through the ages, for He healed all who came to Him. (See, for example, Matthew 4:24, 8:16; Luke 6:19.) He never turned one of them away. And in healing all that came to Him, He demonstrated forever what the will of God concerning sickness was.

“But, brother,” you say, “are all the people healed whom you pray for?” No, they are not, and it is my sorrow; for I believe that if I was in the place before God where old Peter was and Paul was, bless God, all the people would be healed. And it is the purpose of my soul to let God take my soul into that place of real communion and consciousness of the power of God, through Jesus Christ, where all the people—not just some of the people—are healed.

However, beloved, I want to say that God made me too much of a man to try to dodge the issue and throw the responsibility off on God. My! How the church has worked at this acrobatic trick of throwing the responsibility over on God.

These signs shall follow them that believe:…they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
(Mark 16:17–18)

Now, here is a sick man, and here comes the minister. As he gets close to him, the minister sees he is pretty bad. He is in trouble. He says to himself, “If I pray for him and he is not healed, the people will think I have not much faith in God.” So he does the acrobatic trick and says, “It may not be the will of God that you should be healed.” Do you see it?

How many did Jesus heal? All who came to Him; and in healing them all, He gave to mankind forever the finality concerning the will of God about healing the sick.

There is no further point to go in demonstration than Jesus went on the subject of the will of God. If He had ever turned one poor fellow away and said, “No, it is not God’s will to heal you,” then there could be a question mark set up; but having healed them all, He left the will of God concerning sickness forever settled and indelibly stamped forever on the human mind.

I am glad we know that kind of a Christ. An awful lot of people have been sent down the broad way through that old lie about the will of God and sickness.

“Well, brother,” you say, “how are you going to get the people to heaven, if they are all healed? Why, they will live forever.” Well, bless God, I am going one step further. However, we have not reached the place of faith yet where it is applicable in our lives. We are still discussing healing for the body.

Jesus said,

Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever.…And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?
(John 6:49–51, 11:26)

And many of His disciples turned away and walked no more with Him. (See John 6:66.) They said, “This is an hard saying; who can hear [receive] it?” (verse 60).

The faith of the church has never reached up to the place where we could dare to claim it. But beloved, I praise God that an ever-increasing number of men and women are rising up every day, who will enjoy stepping over the boundary into that hundredfold consecration, where they will consecrate once and forever their bodies and their souls and their spirits to God. Blessed be His name.

The consecration of the body to God is just as sacred as the consecration of the soul. No man can understand what the Christian life ought to be, what Jesus intended it to be, until the person sees the consecration that He made of Himself to the will of God. It is a pattern consecration for every other Christian. He was the first Christian, blessed be God. He consecrated His spirit to God, His soul to God, His body to God. Each was equally precious in the sight of God. Think of it!

Suppose that just once in His lifetime, when in trouble concerning the things of the Spirit, He had gone to the devil for help. Would He have been the spotless Lamb of God? Never! He would have been blemished. Suppose that in His mental distress, He had turned to the world for help and accepted the spirit of the world as His comforter. He would have been blemished in His soul life. He would not have been the spotless Lamb of God. Suppose one morning you would see the Lord Jesus sneaking around the back door into a drugstore to get ten cents’ worth of pills for His body. Can you imagine such a thing? It is too horrible to imagine. If He had, He would never have been the spotless Lamb of God. He would have been blemished in His faith for His body before His Father.

But because the Christ demonstrated His power to trust God for His spirit, for His soul, and for His body, He became the author of eternal salvation and was able to present Himself to God a spotless conqueror and unblemished sacrifice.

And the hundredfold Christian, who received through the Holy Ghost the power of God and the dominion of the spirit, will present himself to God in the same manner—body and soul and spirit—unto God, a reasonable sacrifice and service. (See Romans 12:1.) Blessed be His precious name.

Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you? (1 Corinthians 6:19)

Shall I take this temple that I endeavor, by the grace of God, to lend to God for the purpose that He may dwell in my life by the Spirit, and fill it up with cocaine or digitalis or some of the other thousand and one damnable things that destroy human life and produce abnormal conditions in the system? Never, if I am a hundredfold child of God!

Here again is the ministerial acrobat with the gifts of the Holy Ghost.

To one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; to another faith by the same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy; to another discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another the interpretation of tongues.(1 Corinthians 12:8–10)

Paul said correctly that not all have these various gifts. That is perfectly correct. But beloved, the subject of gifts has nothing whatever to do with the principle of faith in God. The gifts are entirely extraordinary. The normal life of a real Christian with faith in God commands the power of God for his own need through faith. Have you ever noticed that the anointing with oil and the prayer of faith that saves the sick (see James 5:14–15) have nothing to do with the gifts of healing? It is an entirely different operation of healing. The elder or the priest comes in the name of Jesus. He anoints the man with oil and prays the prayer of faith. The prayer that expresses my faith in God that He will raise this man up is the prayer of faith. It is not the gift of healing at all, but simply the prayer of faith.

How far is it applicable? Jesus said,

If two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 18:19)

The first healing I ever knew was the healing of a Roman Catholic girl who had formerly worked for my wife. Seven members in her family had died of consumption between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. She was the last of the family. At the age of twenty, the disease appeared in her likewise. She was engaged to be married to a splendid fellow, but day by day she withered away, just as the others had done.

In those days I knew nothing about healing through God. A friend came to her and said, “Mary, let us observe a novena.”15 That is nine days of prayer. These two women, without any help from anyone, and who knew little or nothing of the Word of God, believing in the Christ as their Savior, began to pray throughout the nine days that God by His mighty power would raise the woman up. Her friend said, “When the Lord heals you, get up and come to my house.” So on the ninth morning, when the time was complete and Mary did not appear at the friend’s house, she got troubled and started down to see about it; and on the road, she met her coming. God had met the faith of two poor, simple women who had no teaching whatever on the subject of healing.

Among all the classes of people who come to our healing rooms, we find that Roman Catholics receive healing more readily than any other particular class of church people. You ask me why. They are educated to have faith in God. They are not educated to doubt Him. A great deal of modern preaching is an education in doubt concerning God. If you cannot explain the thing and you cannot demonstrate it, over you go, turn a somersault, and tell them it means something else.

A friend of mine in the city, who is a ministerial brother, used to be my pastor in the Methodist church when I was a young man. He was assistant pastor. Now he is one of the great ecclesiastical lights. I remember a sermon of his. He was explaining the fall of the walls of Jericho. Paul16 wrote: “By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were compassed about seven days” (Hebrews 11:30). “By faith,” by the united faith of the people who dared to believe God, the very walls crumbled and came down. Their instructions were to encircle the city seven days and on the seventh day to go around it seven times; and when the final march was completed, the priests, with their trumpets and their rams’ horns, were to sound a blast of triumph to God, and the people were to give the shout of faith. When they had sounded, the walls came down, by faith.

My friend very wisely said, “Every structure has a key note, and if you just find and sound the key note of the structure, down it will come. The wise priests sounded the key note and down the walls of Jericho came.” That was his vision; Paul had a different one. He said, “By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were compassed about seven days.”

Faith is not always characterized by beautiful phrases or sweet prayers. I had a minister in my work in South Africa, a very strong, vigorous man. He had a military training background; he was an officer in the army during the Boer war. His name was W. I had another minister who was a nice, sweet, gentle, tender man named J. He had none of the strong qualities that W. possessed, but he loved God and had faith in Him.

One evening a Church of England minister sent in a call about his wife, who was dying of a cancer. The doctors could do nothing more, and now they wanted to trust God. That is where a lot of people get to. May God almighty have mercy on you. They are what we call “last resorters.” We have an expression among ourselves: “Is he a last resorter?”

I reasoned that it would never do to send Brother W. down to that house, because he was such a strenuous man. He was likely to shock them. I said, “I will send Brother J. because he is one of those nice, polished men.” So he went down and prayed for quite a long time. The rector knelt reverently at the foot of the bed and prayed with him, but there was no evidence of a real healing. After a while the telephone rang, and Brother J. was on the line. He said, “Brother Lake, I wish you would send W. down here; I cannot get the victory, and I need help.”

I said, “Surely, I will.” So I told Brother W. to go down and help him. He said, “All right, I will go,” and away he started. When he arrived, he said, “What is the trouble, Brother J.?”

He said, “I do not know.”

W. said, “Let us pray again.” As he prayed, he said, “You damnable cancer, get to hell and out of here, in the name of Jesus Christ.” The Spirit of God flamed in him, and the power of God fell on the woman. The cancer withered, and the woman was healed. After a while the telephone rang again. Brother J. said, “It is all right, Brother; she is healed, but the rector has not recovered from the effect of Brother W.’s prayer yet.”

Bless God! There is something better than polished phrases. It is the faith of God that permits a soul to break through the darkness and the doubt that the devil and the world and the unbelieving church has heaped upon the souls of men.

It takes the power of God and the faith of God to break the bands that bind men’s souls and get them through into the daylight of God. That is where healing, real healing, is found. I wish I could take a whole lot of you sick folks and get you broke through into the presence of God. You would not have to come to the healing rooms day after day if you did.

I have a conviction that there are mighty few Christian ministers who can tell you what divine healing is. In the world at large, I know there is a great deal of confusion. There is natural healing, medical healing, psychological healing, and there is divine healing. I am quoting my brother Beatty now. We recognize them all, but I want to tell you, beloved, the real Christian, the hundredfold Christian, the person who gives himself to God and receives the power of God, is not fooling around with medical healing, and not psychological healing either. They are good enough in their place, but God has given a better way and a higher way. There is as much difference between spiritual and psychological healing as there is between natural or medical and psychological healing. It is a higher plane and the higher life by a higher power, the power of God through the Holy Spirit.

Jesus demonstrated that to us so beautifully. He was walking down the road, and a poor woman, who had an issue of blood for twelve years, said within herself, “If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole” (Matthew 9:21). You say that was faith. She could have had faith in a bread pill, because the doctors tell you if you have not faith in them, their drugs will do no good. You see, the virtue is not located in the remedy. It is in what you think of the doctor and your confidence in him. Every good doctor knows that fact.

It was not her faith in the sense we usually talk about faith. It was the virtue that was in Him. “If I could just touch the hem of His garment, I would be healed.” How did she know it? Because she saw that those upon whom He laid His hands received virtue and were made whole. The virtue that was in Him flowed out and healed them. So she stole up in the crowd and touched the hem of His garment; and, bless God, His very clothing was filled with the virtue of God, and it flowed from the garment to the woman, and she felt in her body that she was made whole, and Jesus felt it too.

Peter said, “Master, don’t You see the multitude that is thronging You, and yet You say, ‘Somebody touched me’?”

“Yes, but I perceive that virtue hath gone out of me.” Hers was a different touch. It was the touch that received the life of the Christ into her own being. (See Luke 8:43-48.)

Divine healing is life, the life of God. Healing is transmitted into your being, whether it comes from heaven upon your own soul or is transmitted through a man of faith. It does not make any difference. It is the touch of the living Christ.

But you say, “Jesus was Jesus. Other men did not have that virtue.”

Do you remember Paul, when they brought handkerchiefs and aprons in order that they might touch his body? (See Acts 19:12.) Then they were taken to the sick, and the sick were healed. Here is dear old Paul. A mother comes to him. “Oh, Paul, I have a sick boy at my house. He is dying of epilepsy, or typhoid fever, or cancer. Paul, here is my apron. Take it so that the Spirit of God will flow into it from your being.” Then she takes the apron home with her and puts it on the boy, and the power of God that was in the apron flows out of it into the boy, and the boy is healed. That is divine healing.

So it is with every man who is really baptized in the Holy Ghost. Last Wednesday night, as our service was about to commence, I laid my Bible on the table. A man came in and took up the Bible and dropped it as though it was hot.

Then a woman sitting nearby reached out and took it up, and the power of God came upon her and she commenced to shake. They said, “Isn’t that strange!” Not at all. That is the Bible over which Brother Westwood and Brother Fogwill and I kneel in the healing rooms and ask God to open its blessed pages, that we may understand the Spirit of the Word of God and receive the power of God that makes these people well. I believe the very paper becomes saturated with the power of God.

Both animate and inanimate objects can become filled with the Spirit of God. Even the bones of those who have trusted in the living God have retained their virtue. The old prophet [Elisha] had been in his grave many a day, when one day in their haste to bury a man, they opened the same grave in which the prophet’s bones lay. But when the dead man touched the bones of that Holy Ghost-filled man, he became a living man and rose up well. (See 2 Kings 13:21.)

Oh, the most vital thing in all the universe is the Holy Spirit. It is more real than electricity, more powerful than gravity. It is more subtle than the ether in the air. It contains more energy than any natural power. It is the vitality of the living God, the fire of His soul, the very substance of His being. Bless God! Open your nature to God. Receive the Christ into your heart. Confess your sins and acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior. Receive Him as your Savior and Healer now, and God will bless you.