Testimony of Receiving Healing
Directly from
the Holy Spirit Within
by Rev. Michael A. Brown, Pastor
Elim Pentecostal Church
Nuneaton,
United Kingdom
I have believed that
God heals all my Christian life. I was
brought up in church to believe this. My
mother was healed of MS in 1982 and has shown no symptoms of it ever since
then. Since beginning in ministry, I
have prayed with sick believers for God to heal them, and have often seen them
healed. After getting married in 1997,
my wife Suela and I committed ourselves to praying for the sick and to teaching
the promises of the word of God in regard to healing in our ministry wherever
we may be. Together we have seen many
cases of healing, sometimes instantaneous and sometimes progressive.
However, in the midst
of all this, even as a pastor/preacher I always seemed to have difficulty in
believing for myself to be healed. My
wife, through whom the power of God flows, has laid hands on me several times
over the years and I have been healed of various minor issues, again sometimes
instantaneously. But when it came to
believing for myself, it seemed there was always a blockage. Although I do thoroughly believe in
confessing the promises over myself, yet no amount of doing this seemed to
work. I struggled on this point for many
years. The penny dropped[1] for me when I finally realised
that the One who was living with and in me, the Holy Spirit, is a Person. Although I had known and taught this
theological truth for many years, yet the implications of this truth in regard
to physical healing had never really sunk in.
A while back when I had
a very bad and debilitating migraine, I was sitting on the sofa and in horrible
pain. It suddenly went through my mind that: “If the Holy Spirit is a Person
and is living inside me, and if my physical body is His temple, then He can
heal His own temple from within me!”
And in particular I thought: “If I am in ministry, then I need to be
healthy in order to do the work of God, so I need to be healed.”
In those moments, the penny suddenly dropped: my Healer lives within me, and that’s when things changed for me.
So I laid hands on
myself, prayed quietly to the Holy Spirit within me, told Him that my body was
His temple and is offered to God as a living sacrifice, and then very simply
asked Him to heal His own temple and to make me well, and I continued to trust Him and to stand on this for a few minutes. Within quite literally twenty minutes all the
pain had disappeared!
This was the first time something like this had
happened to me.
I believe I learned a
profound and powerful lesson that day. I
determined that I would from then on relate to the Holy Spirit within me and
release myself fully to Him and simply
trust Him to minister to me physically from
within me as well as through me as I lay hands on others.
What had for years been
a theological truth regarding the Holy Spirit as a Person, became true spiritual understanding that day in
terms of its life-giving implications for my body (Romans 8:11). Since then the same thing has happened in regard to lower back pain
(together with mild sciatic pains) and also then with some recent damage to
my left elbow. Both these healings
started immediately after I prayed but were progressive, and they both happened
in the same way: from within me by the Holy Spirit’s power, by
simply asking Him and trusting Him to heal His own temple.
For me, the issue of
personal healing has now become a matter of:
·
walking with the Holy Spirit in close fellowship,
·
entrusting the internal need of His own temple back to Him and
·
asking Him to give life
to any specific part that needs healing.
The Holy Spirit within me seems to respond very quickly to this
kind of praying... I am thrilled that I
have discovered this liberating truth that keeps my own body healthy every day,
a truth which was covered over for so many years with the dust of ‘theological
understanding.’
I have written out the following confession which helps me to
stand daily in this truth:
My Daily Confession for Physical Wholeness
·
I am a
child of God, born of the Spirit and washed in the blood. In Christ, I am the righteousness of God.
·
I am a new
creation, a habitation of God, a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
·
My body is
a temple of the Holy Spirit. I will
learn to live and to co-operate with Him.
I will not grieve Him or quench His Presence and working.
·
I will
honour God with my body.
·
My body is
for the Lord, and the Lord is for my body.
·
I will
offer my body as a living sacrifice; I will be transformed by the renewing of
my mind.
·
I will set
my mind on what the Spirit desires for me.
·
I will
believe the promises of God to me, because they are all ‘Yes’ in Christ.
·
God desires
to make me whole – ‘He is the Lord who heals me.’
·
Christ is
my life; his healing power is present within me.
Holy
Spirit,
I
invite and ask you to give life today to the whole of my mortal body,
in
Jesus’ Name.
Receiving physical healing directly
through the internal work of the Holy Spirit’s presence and power within us
Copyright © 2023 Rev. Michael A. Brown
‘He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal
bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.’ (Rom. 8:11)
When a person is born again, s/he becomes
a child of God and, when s/he is then filled with the Holy Spirit, s/he becomes
a habitation of God ‘in which God dwells by His Spirit.’ (Eph.
2:22). It is God’s intention in making
us partakers in his kingdom that we ourselves become his tabernacle, the place
which he indwells. So our physical bodies
become the temple of a divine Person, the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19). As Lake said: ‘God descends into man, man ascends into God!’[2] This is the glorious truth of the new
covenant in Christ, vis.
that as believers we become new creations which God himself indwells. God says that he will live with them
and walk among them (2 Cor. 6:16); that by His Spirit he will live with
and in them (John 14:17), and that the Holy Spirit will be like a spring
of living water welling up within them (John 4:14).
In terms of His indwelling believers, it
has been a theological error propagated through many centuries that, although
the Holy Spirit dwells within the spirit of a believer, and that He can cleanse
and strengthen the believer’s heart, and renew his/her mind (all of which are
true), yet His indwelling as the seal of the new covenant, to all
intents and purposes, has no consequences for the believer’s physical body in
the here and now. This is rooted in the
philosophical error of the ancient Greeks which created a dichotomy between the
spirit/soul on the one hand and the physical body on the other: the inner
spirit of man was seen to be good, but the body was seen as evil and so was
either neglected (through asceticism) or abused (through immoral and licentious
living). Although Christian discipleship
addresses the issue of licentious living (Acts 15:20), and although there were
several early Church Fathers who noted the ongoing practice of healing ministry
in the post-apostolic period, yet this error was nevertheless inherited and
perpetuated in a subtle form through the medieval institutional Church and
thence down into evangelical churches.
So, even today, many evangelicals speak of ‘the life of God in the soul
of man,’ but rarely if ever speak of ‘the life of God in the physical body
of man.’
So we have ended up with an evangelical
message of ‘salvation’ in which God ‘saves your soul,’ but yet leaves many
believers struggling with the issue of physical healing, with some sections of
the Church still even today denying this truth.
The ‘good news’ regarding our physical health is often shunted off into
some distant point in the future when our bodies will be resurrected and made
imperishable, ‘the redemption of our bodies’ (Rom. 8:23, Eph. 1:14). It is the teaching of the divine healing of
the body, taught and practised by pioneers of the Holiness Movement, pentecostals and charismatics, which has
restored to the Church the good news regarding God’s intention towards our
physical bodies in the here and now. The
indwelling of a believer by God through His Spirit has consequences and
implications for his/her physical body, not simply for his/her inner
spirit/soul. Our physical body is redeemed and is a member of Christ himself, and so
it belongs to God just as our spirit does (1 Cor. 6:14-15,20 AV). This
then means that God purposes for us to know the influence of his presence and
power in our physical body too. This
reflects a return to the biblical holism of the Hebrews in which God was viewed
as God of the whole being, indeed the whole of life. God was concerned with every aspect of
a person’s life and nothing was excluded from the caring authority of his
presence and power, including their physical health and well-being (cf. Ex.
15:26, 23:25-26). He would forgive all
their sins and heal all their diseases (Ps. 103:3). So, for example, we can read the testimony
about Moses who, even though he was a hundred and twenty years old when he
died, ‘yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone.’ (Deut.
34:7). He was still a picture of good
health even at that great age! God is
the God of our body, as well as of our inner spirit.
Hence, in terms of the new covenant in
Christ and our being indwelt by God through His Spirit, it is my conviction
that it is God’s full intention that believers experience His life, power and
blessing in every part of their life. He
intends and desires that His life and power should permeate every part of a
believer’s being, regenerating his spirit (Titus 3:5), renewing his mind (Rom.
12:2), cleansing and strengthening his heart (1 John 1:7-9, Heb. 13:9),
animating his being and empowering him for ministry (Acts 1:8) and also keeping
his body healthy: ‘He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life
to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.’ (Rom. 8:11,
2 Cor. 4:10-11; cf. Prov. 4:22).
It is clear that
Lake understood that the struggle that many believers have with divine healing
was rooted in the dichotomy described above.
For example, when he was once approached by a woman seeking him to pray
for her healing, he did not lay hands on her, but instead encouraged her to see
that the Holy Spirit who dwelt in her could heal her directly from within. Evidently, she had not realized before that
the Holy Spirit who indwelt her spirit and soul also therefore permeated every
cell of her physical body. He said to
her, “I want you to get well by realizing that right now that same Christ that dwells in your spirit and
your soul is in your bones and in your blood and in your brain.” He went on to relate that, ‘Presently, the
old lady hopped to her feet and said, “My God, He is.” She made it.
Christ had been imprisoned in
her soul and spirit. Now he was permitted to manifest himself
in her body.’
He went on to
say that, ‘Don’t you know Christians are stumbling every day over that
fact. You are doubting and fearing and
wondering if Christ is there [i.e. within you, Ed.]. Beloved brother and sister, give Him chance to reveal Himself. He
is there. Probably because of your lack of realization
your soul is closed, and he is not able to reveal Himself. You
know God is never able in many to reveal Himself outside of the spirit or soul’[3]
(underlining my own for emphasis).
Lake’s phrase about Christ being ‘imprisoned
in her soul and spirit’ is telling and it underlines the negative consequences
of the dichotomy described above. Many
believers have never really understood what God’s intentions for their bodies
are, and so confusion and ignorance reign.
They rightly see Christ and the Holy Spirit as being within them, but
the relation of this to their physical bodies is too often shrouded in
confusion. Hence, in daily living, the
actions and effects of the Holy Spirit’s working in them remain in their spirit
and soul (heart and mind), and the validity of any effects and actions of the
Holy Spirit through the members of their physical bodies such as free, open
praise (Eph. 5:18-19), speaking in tongues (Acts 2:4), the power of the Holy
Spirit to heal them from within (Rom. 8:11) and the power of God working
through them as they lay hands on others for healing, may be either not
understood (at best), discouraged and avoided, or simply denied and explained
away (at worst). Many believers remain
blocked and confused in this area and often have problems believing God for
their own or others’ physical healing.
The solution to this lies in
understanding the Holy Spirit’s relation to our physical bodies. Lake was clear that, if the Holy Spirit
dwells within a believer, then not only does He permeate their spirit and soul
with His life-giving presence and power, but He also permeates every cell
and tissue in their body. As he said
to the woman in the example above, He is ‘in your bones and in your blood and
in your brain.’ For believers to be
released from the blockage that many of them experience, this truth needs to be
proactively received, embraced and acted upon with faith. The presence and power of the Holy Spirit can
give life to their mortal bodies from within them and, as a consequence,
believers can remain healthy and healing can be received when it is
needed. Our Healer, the Holy
Spirit, lives within us. It is not God’s intention that the Holy Spirit
should be imprisoned in our spirit and soul, while our bodies remain bereft of
His life-giving influence. In Christ, the life-giving streams of God’s
presence and power have been restored to humankind and, in particular, to our physical
bodies. The life-giving presence and
power of the Holy Spirit within us is the secret, essential dynamic of physical
healing. As Lake affirmed: ‘Beloved,
all there is to divine healing, is that the life
of God comes back into the part that is afflicted and right away the blood
flows, the congested cells respond, and the work is done. That is again God’s divine science in
healing.’[4]
Understanding the relationship of the Holy Spirit to our physical
bodies is crucial to embracing this truth of receiving healing directly from
the Holy Spirit within. In Romans 8,
Paul describes the Holy Spirit as ‘the Spirit of life’ (8:2). This description sums up not only the nature
of the Holy Spirit as a divine life-giver, but also indicates the intention of
God in permeating our entire beings with His divine life through His
Spirit. We become the objects of the
active power of His divine life within us, including in our physical bodies. Again, our bodies are redeemed and they
belong to God just as our spirits do (1 Cor. 6:15,20 AV). So, further on in this chapter, Paul relates
the life-giving effects of the Holy Spirit’s working within us: ‘those who live
in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires’
(8:5); ‘the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace’ (8:6); we
become controlled by the indwelling Spirit of God (8:9); our spirit is ‘alive
because of righteousness’ (8:10), and ‘he who raised Christ from the
dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit, who lives in
you.’ (8:11).
So, we are made alive in our spirits, and we can overcome the bias of
the pull of our sinful natures which are now reckoned dead; our minds become
renewed and can learn to think according to what the Holy Spirit desires, and
as a consequence our minds become controlled by life and peace, rather than by stress and worry; and, furthermore, God also gives life to our mortal bodies
through his Spirit within us. The words
in Romans 8:11 do not refer to the future eschatological resurrection of our
physical bodies (cf. Rom. 8:23, Eph. 1:14), but to the daily intention of God
for us, vis. that our physical bodies will experience the ongoing, daily
working of the Spirit of God to bring life, and therefore health and healing to
them, just as our minds and spirits can experience this. The Greek adjective thneta used in this
verse does not mean ‘dead,’ but simply that which is liable or subject to death
(i.e. ‘mortal,’ and see its similar use in Rom. 6:12 and 2 Cor. 4:11), and the
verb zoopoiesei literally means ‘he will make life’ (and see its similar
use in 2 Cor. 3:6). So God by his Spirit
will ‘make life’ in our bodies while we are yet alive upon earth. In a word, therefore, our whole being can
and should, in the intention of God for us, experience the life-giving effects
of the Holy Spirit living within us.
Our salvation is holistic: it is for our spirits, our minds and
our bodies.
Towards the end of his argument in Romans chs.6-8 that sin has been
dealt with through Christ and that the Holy Spirit now indwells us, Paul begins
to draw his conclusion in Romans 8:12 – ‘Therefore, brothers, we have an
obligation…’, but he does not go on at this point to develop his
thought. He returns to it later on in
Romans 12:1 and this time he finishes his thought: ‘Therefore, I urge you,
in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and
pleasing to God… be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve
what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.’ This logical consequence of his argument that believers should learn to live by the
Spirit and not according to the flesh, was also
touched on briefly by Paul in Romans ch.6 where he exhorts believers to offer the
members of their bodies to God as servants of righteousness (6:13,19), rather
than continuing to live according to the sinful nature.
So, we
can discover God’s good, pleasing and perfect will for our lives as we
consecrate our physical bodies to Him as living sacrifices through which He can
then work out His purposes. This
discovery of God’s good, pleasing and perfect will includes the aspect of His
intention for our physical bodies in terms of health and healing. He is for our body (1 Cor. 6:13). So his intention is that, having come to
indwell us, He wants to give life to our mortal bodies in an ongoing way, but
He can only do this as we learn to offer our bodies as living sacrifices. Our physical body is His temple. So His good, pleasing and perfect will for
His own temple can be discovered, embraced, walked in and enjoyed as we
surrender it to Him, and live according to his word and ways, embracing his
life-giving intention for our body. In order to fulfil His purpose of giving life (and
therefore healing and health) to our physical body from within, the Holy Spirit
has to possess our body.
In recognizing and honouring the Holy Spirit’s
presence in our beings as His habitation, in offering our bodies as living
sacrifices, in generally learning to live ‘in the Spirit,’ and in learning to
trust Him to heal us directly from within, it should be self-evident that we
need to learn to live a surrendered life and to co-operate with this divine
Person who lives with us and indwells us.[5] We need to learn how to walk sensitively with
Him in daily life, to spend regular quality time in His presence, to not grieve
him (Eph. 4:30) or quench his working (1 Thess. 5:19). It is the development of this kind of
intimate personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, and actively trusting Him
to give life to our mortal bodies and to heal them whenever this is needed, which
is the inner secret of walking in divine health. Our experience of God answering our prayers
and doing ‘immeasurably more than all we
ask or imagine’ is related closely to the issue of His power working within
us (Eph. 3:20). His divine life within
us, permeating our physical bodies, can give us healing and keep us healthy.
So as new covenant believers, sealed and indwelt
by the Holy Spirit, we have the immense privilege of being able to trust and
believe the Holy Spirit to heal us directly from within ourselves. His presence and power can give life to our
mortal bodies as we proactively seek, ask and believe for Him to do this. Our Healer and His healing presence and power
dwell within us. Indeed, it would not be
going too far to say that the Holy Spirit waits and desires for us to relate to
Him personally with respect to our need for physical healing, rather than
simply and always depending on other believers to pray for us. We should learn not only to stand on and believe
the promises of God for our healing, but we should also learn to draw on the
well of salvation within ourselves (Isa. 12:2-3; John 4:14, 7:37-38), by asking
and committing our need for physical healing to the Person who dwells with and
within us. His power can then give life
and healing to the specific part of His habitation where it is needed. This is underlined by Paul’s
use of the Greek verb sunantilambanetai
in Romans 8:26 which is translated as ‘helps,’ but which literally means ‘to
take hold of together against.’ As we
entrust the needs of our physical bodies to Him, the Holy Spirit will assist us
by standing together with us against our sickness and taking hold of it to heal
it. Furthermore,
in standing on this experiential truth daily by faith and confessing it over
ourselves, we can be kept healthy.
This truth of trusting directly the Holy
Spirit within us to give us health and healing should not be isolated from
other truths regarding divine healing. It should be integrated with them. So there still needs to be an emphasis on
overcoming faith, the laying on of hands by other believers, believing and
confessing the promises of the word, walking in forgiveness, eating a healthy
diet, and so on. In particular, the
ministry of healing is often associated in the NT Scriptures with the laying on
of hands. We can see this in the ministries
of Jesus and the apostles, and it is taught in James 5:14-16. This method inherently involves the ministry
of the Holy Spirit to us through another person or people. Other people are necessarily involved. This interpersonal method is taught and practised
throughout the NT. Other people may need
to be involved because when we are sick we often allow ourselves to become the
victims of self-pity and unbelief. We
may struggle to believe the promises of God for ourselves. We can see this in the heart-cry of many
people who came to Jesus for healing. We
need other believers to join their faith to our own perhaps struggling faith,
and God can work in this way to bring the needed healing. However, in addition to this practice, we can
also learn to directly trust the Holy Spirit within us to bring healing and
health to our physical bodies.
A natural extension of this truth of
the life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit permeating our whole beings and
giving life to our mortal bodies, is that He can also actively work and
minister through our physical body to others who are in need. It is God’s purpose that the streams of His
life-giving presence should flow through us to others (John 7:38). We can see this clearly in the ministry of
Jesus. The power of the Holy Spirit flowed
through his physical body to bring life and healing to sick people. The woman with the issue of blood is the
obvious example. As she touched the hem
of His garment, power went out from Him through His physical body and through
his garment and into her sick body, healing her instantaneously (Mark
5:30). Luke also refers to this
phenomenon. Sick people wanted to
physically touch Jesus, because power was coming out of Him to heal them all
(Luke 6:19). Central to this phenomenon
is the issue of physical contact, of which another example is the laying on of
hands. The Holy Spirit’s life-giving
spiritual power can flow through a
believer’s body and into another person through the laying on of hands. He can use us today in the same way.
Theological Implications
The above
suggests the following theological implications:
a.
God
wants to heal the sick and actively desires for his people to walk in good
health. Healing is an integral part of
our redemption and so is a free gift of God’s grace to us. Our physical body is
just as much an object of redemption as our spirit. The Holy Spirit’s life and power can and should
permeate our physical bodies.
b.
The believer is the habitation of the Holy Spirit. He is perfectly willing to heal believers, as he is invited by them to do
this, responding actively to simple trust and faith in him in applying Christ’s
finished work to their body.
c.
The
ministry of healing is intrinsically linked to the person, power and working of
the Holy Spirit.
[1] The Oxford
English Dictionary states that this
phrase originated by way of allusion to the mechanism of penny-in-the-slot
machines. The OED’s earliest citation of
a use of the phrase with the ‘now I understand’ meaning, is from The Daily Mirror August 1939: “And then the penny dropped,
and I saw his meaning!”
[2] Copeland, G. “The
Baptism of the Holy Ghost: Sermon 1” in John
G. Lake: His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith, Fort Worth: Kenneth
Copeland Publications, Revised Edition, 1995, p.479.
[3] Liardon, R. “Christ Liveth in Me” in John G. Lake: The Complete Collection of His Life Teachings, Laguna
Hills: Roberts Liardon Ministries, p.355-357.
[5]
Intrinsic to this issue is the fact that the Holy Spirit is a divine
Person. Although we can often tangibly feel
His presence and its effects both within and upon us, particularly in meetings
or in prayer and worship times, we should be careful not to make the unconscious
mistake of effectively treating Him in practice as something impersonal. The Holy Spirit is ‘He,’ not an ‘it.’ If we unconsciously treat Him as an
impersonal force or presence, we may not realize that He desires and needs to
take full possession of our lives in order to work His purposes out both in and
through us. Learning to relate to Him as
a Person who abides with and within us, helps us to release our need for
physical healing to Him within us and to trust Him to do the work of healing.
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