20 of the most common limitations to healing.

1. Unbelief.

2. Faith can only go as far as the promise.

3. Health is to the extent of your natural life on earth. Ps 55:23; 90:10

4. Touching forbidden fruit, wander outside the sacred circle.

5. Age of miracles is passed?

6. Apostles were different?

7. Paul's thorn in the flesh:

• No proof it was a disease. It was an affliction, not sickness.
• 3rd heaven experience and made to keep quiet about it. So if we claim a sickness is to us in like manner – have we been to 3rd heaven "and to hear things unlawful for a person to utter"?
• Paul gives account of his healing 1Cor 1:8-11 by believing prayer and faith.

8. Healing not always instantaneous:

• Miracles – sudden and stupendous.
• Gifts of healing – simple and gradual.
• Defective knowledge, or unbelief, or disobedience.
• Rm 3:4"Let God be true...."

9. Doctors: not seen in all the time of the Patriarchs.

• Job – vivid details, everyone else is described but the doctor, and everything in the Universe but medications.
• Job – recovers and finds his true place of humility to God and love to man.
• Leprosy in Leviticus – no mention of drugs or physician.
• Drugs came with the Egyptians godless culture and science.
• King Asa, dies under the stigma of unbelief. 2Chron 14
• NT woman who touched Jesus abandoned medical science.
  NOTE THESE:

• God has not prescribed medicine.
• God has provided another way of healing, His name as Healer, Atonement, Ordinance for its application.
• He has commanded it and enjoined it.

10. The medical profession is not sinful or the use of "means " (medicine to help healing) always wrong.

• There will be, and always will be instances where faith cannot be exercised.
• Natural means have a limited application.

11. In our age of rationalism – unbelief is constantly endeavoring to eliminate all traces of all direct supernatural working from God. Higher industry is diluting the supernatural from our Bibles, and removing the divine from our lives.

12. "The miracles of Jesus and his apostles were designed to establish the facts and doctrines of Christianity we do not need their continuance"??

Heb 11:39 The purpose of miracles?

• The miracles of Christ and the apostles were designed to establish the facts and doctrines of Christianity so why do we need them still.
• New generations, new countries, establishing of divine facts all made credible by divine acts.
• Every generation needs a loving Christ and every new community needs "signs following" to confirm the word.
• Until Christ returns, the world will never cease to need the touch of his power and presence. Heb 2:4
• Jesus is true yesterday today and forever, he has born our sons and sicknesses and suffering, and he will always be the same.

13. "For this cause many weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. For if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged." 1Cor11:30-31

Here is a definite and unchangeable law of God's dealings with his children. When we are judging ourselves, we shall not be charged. While we listen and obey, he "will put none of these diseases" upon us that he "brought upon the Egyptians". Ex 5:23

Affliction and Sickness or not the same:

Affliction is suffering –

• Ja 5:13 – let him pray. (grace +strength)
• It is suffering with Christ. Jn 16:33

Sickness –

• Ja 5:14 – call for the elders.
• To pray for healing, effect fervent prayer
• Heb 7:5 "was heard because of His godly-fear"

God's desire for his children is that they may

• "prosper be in health, even as their sole prospers". 3Jn2 His will for them is to act in the things according to his word. He wants for the,
• "the good pleasures of his goodness" 2Thess 1:11 and
• "that could, and acceptable, and perfect, would have God" Rm 12:2
• "many", it is true, "the afflictions of the righteous." But it is also true that "the Lord delivers him out of them all. He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken." Ps 34:19-20

14. Knowing His will:

Be consistent with God's will:

• At Bethany – the raising of Lazarus. Jn 11:41
• At Gethsemane - submitting this will. Mt 26:39
• An abiding will – Jn 15:7 continuous.

15. Cases of failures:

Paul's thorn in the flesh:

• Not a definite disease
• It was healed and more than healed, whatever it was, that it brought the power of Christ to rest on him so mightily that he was abundantly in able for all his labors in duties.
• Before people can claim that this sickness is a heavenly visitation like Paul's, they would need to have been up in the third heaven and to hear things are lawful for a person to utter.
• Paul does give us elsewhere the account of his healing, 2Cor 1:8-11

Epaphroditus, was healed through God's mercy.

Trophimus, was healed - yet with delay.

Healing is not always instantaneous:

• The are "miracles" and "gifts of healing", one sudden and stupendous, the other simple and probably gradual.
• Instances of failure may be accounted for

• through defective knowledge or unbelief, or
• through disobedience to God in some way.
• There may be failure to follow consistently the teachings of the Word and spirit and
• they are failures in the spiritual life from the same or similar causes.

These failures in no way disprove the reality of the divine promises or the sufficiency of Christ's grace.

16. If these things are so, people should never die.

• Why should Faith go further than the word?
• Anything beyond that is presumption.
• Sufficiency of health and strength for a life work are within your limits.
• It may be longer or shorter but we need not live out less than half a days. Ps 55:23
• Job 5:26 Should be the result of a full season of life.

17. The Bible mentions a few doctors:

• In the whole history of the patriarchs no mention is made to the use of medicines.
• Job being the classic, everyone has been described but not a doctor. There is no physician in attendance.
• In Leviticus, in dealing with the disease of leprosy, there is not even a remote intimation of a doctor or a drugstore.
• After Solomon, and of Egypt's godless culture ensigns it is being redefined the first definite case of medical treatment will stop King Asa, the patient dies... and dies under the stigma of unbelief and declension from God.
• In the New Testament, medical practice is not found.

• God does not prescribe medicine
• God has prescribed another way of healing in the name of Jesus.
• God has provided for it in the atonement,
• Has appointed an ordinance puts application,
• Has commanded and enjoyed it.

• All the provisions of grace of our faith, not by works or "means".

18. Recognize "The Law of faith":

• There always will be instances where faith cannot be exercised.
• Natural means have a limited value in the treatment of disease.
• The trusting and obedient child of God will always find a more excellent way, that his work has clearly prescribed.
• Higher criticism is industriously taking the miraculous from our Bibles, and a lower standard of Christian life is busy taking all that is divine out of our lives.

19. Divine healing exults the physical body and directs the minds of people from the chance in the interest of the immortal soul, promoting fanaticism and leading to other evils.

• The doctrine of Christ's healing power is closely linked with the necessity of holiness and the deeper truths and expressions of the spiritual life.
• The spiritual results far outweigh the temporal.
• Divine healing is one of the most powerful checks and impulses in the lives of those who have truly received it.

20. The true doctrine of healing through the Lord Jesus Christ is most humbling, and practical.

• It exalts no man.
• It offers no promises to the disobedience.
• It gives no strength to selfish indulgence or worldly ends.
• It glorifies God. It inspires us all with faith in power.
• Its summons to a life of self-denial and holy service.
• It awakens a slumbering church and an unbelieving world with a solemn signal of a living God and a risen Christ.

Let the ministers of the Lord Jesus answer these evils by claiming and exercising, in the power of the Holy Spirit, the gifts and offices once delivered to them.

Malachi 3:18, let the people of God in these perilous times "discern between the writers and the wicked, between him that serves the Lord and him that serves him not."