About six weeks after a meeting conducted by a leading
evangelist in the early 1950s, a survey was sent to several
thousand persons asking two questions: Did you receive healing
when this man laid hands on you and prayed? Are you still
healed?
Approximately 6,000 cards were returned, and out of that
number only 3 percent of the Full Gospel people said they got
healed. But 70 percent of the denominational people were
healed, and 70 percent said they still had their healing six weeks
later.
What made the difference? God expected more from those
who had been taught. God expects people who know the full
Gospel to operate their own faith. Yet many times they want to
remain babies.
In one church my wife and I pastored, we had a healing
service every Saturday night. One of our members was a woman
who had arthritis. Her body was stiff as a board. If you took her
out of the wheelchair and stood her on the floor, it would look
like she was sitting down; her body was that stiff.
Although she was confined to a wheelchair, she was able to
cook her meals and do her housework. If she caught the flu or
had any minor ailment, we could pray for her, and she would get
healed.
Finally, one day we went to her house to pray, determined to
see her delivered from that wheelchair. As we prayed, the power
of God came on her and lifted her out of that chair—into the air
—out in front of the chair!
"Oh, oh, oh" she began to say as she reached back with those
little, crippled hands and pulled that chair up under her. She fell
down in the chair.
I pointed my finger at her and said, "Sister, you don't have
an ounce of faith, do you?" (She was saved and baptized with the
Holy Spirit, but I meant she didn't have faith for her healing.)
Without thinking, she blurted out, "No, Brother Hagin, I
don't! I don't believe I'll ever be healed. I'll go to my grave from
this chair." She said it, and she did it.
We weren't to blame.
We had prayed the healing power of
God down on that woman. If she had believed and received that
power, it would have loosed her and healed every joint in her
body. That's the reason we have seminars and other meetings—
to teach people so they can grow in faith.
Years ago, I learned that my sister had cancer. I went to the
Lord in prayer on her behalf. I battled with the devil for her life.
The Lord told me she would live and not die. The cancer was
curtailed, and she had no more symptoms. Five years passed,
and then she developed an entirely different form of cancer in
another part of her body. There was no relation to the first
cancer; it was of a different type.
My sister got down to 79 pounds. The Lord kept telling me
that she was going to die. I kept asking the Lord why I couldn't
change the outcome. He told me she had had five years in which
she could have studied the Word and built up her faith (she was
saved), but she hadn't done it.
He told me she was going to die, and she did. This is a sad
example, but it's so true.
If the church is growing, there will continue to be new
babies in Christ. But if everybody in the church stayed babies, who would care for these new ones?
To be continued!!!
FFT: Spiritual maturity in faith is an indispensable element of the kingdom! don't remain a babe, grow!
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