[Below is an extract from a book on which I am working, entitled “Signs, Wonders and Divine Revelation: The Gifts of the Spirit and Today’s Churches”.  It so far has 140 pages and 52,000 words. It is actually building on a smaller piece which I wrote in 1993. In 30 years, I have only seen the outrageous phenomena of false healing ministries worsen. So many so-called ‘Christians’ seem to have no idea what a real miracle, healing or deliverance is. Thus, the extracted little section below presents a challenge to all those who claim to have such a ‘ministry’ today].

A Challenge to All Those Who Claim to Have a ‘Healing Ministry’

Let it first be noted here how vastly different are the immediate, instantaneous, organic healings of Jesus Christ and His Apostles when compared with the psychosomatic, shamanistic, suggestion-based, small-scale ‘healings’ being practised by so many in the Charismatic-Pentecostal churches today. I am so fed up of seeing the trickery and scam of so-called healing ministries today. God still works miracles. He still heals. He still delivers people, spiritually and wholly. But no one today can go round claiming that they have a ‘miracle ministry’ or a ‘healing ministry’, or a ‘deliverance ministry’. When one understands the unique nature of Apostleship in the New Testament and grasps how suggestion and mesmerism work on primed, gullible people, one will see through all the impostors who set themselves up with such ‘ministries’.

I here put out a challenge to all those who lay claim to a personal ongoing ‘healing ministry’ today:  Don’t just ‘tarry’ in your tent meeting waiting for all those desperate people to line up in front of you (while, of course, you ignore the very difficult cases in wheelchairs). Instead, go out into the casualty departments of your local hospitals on a Saturday night and bring instantaneous organic healing to the battered victims of the brawls and accidents that present themselves there for treatment. Watch those knife-wounds disappear on the spot. See those bent and broken bones straighten before your eyes. Observe that smashed-in skull become a whole one, without a scratch. Then nip up to the surgical wards and lay your hands on the amputees, everything-ectomies and hopeless cases, so that their truncated limbs and diseased entrails will be restored to them. When those places have been emptied, find your local ‘Institute for the Blind’ and bring some colour into their lifelong darkened lives for the first time with your ‘remarkable healing powers’. Then buzz over to the offices of ‘Scope’ (formerly ‘National Spastics Society’) and get them to take you out to their many training centres, where you can restore those withered limbs on the spot. When all the callipers have been thrown on the scrapheap, if you still want to show you have a ‘proven ministry’ (as you claim), find some local authority Special Schools and make that Down’s Syndrome melt away from those pleading little faces. That twisted and hunched little kid with cerebral palsy in the wheelchair who you just walked past in the street; why don’t you turn around and wave your ‘gifted hands’ over her so that she walks away and puts a huge smile on the faces of her parents’, who have struggled with her for so many years? With all the filthy earnings you have accrued over the years through your phony ‘ministry’, put on your Gucci suit and fly your private jet over to some middle-east country and enter a leper colony and make it redundant through your ‘amazing powers’ (as your kitsch and lying brochure says). And if you still have any energy left, take a stretch-limo across to the local mortuary and bring some of its frigid occupants out with you for a breath of fresh air and a good meal. One final gesture for you then is to get your ass over to Benny Hinn’s place and put him in a straitjacket and see if he can miracle-work his way out of it.

If you lay claim to a ‘healing ministry’, I challenge you to do all these things today. Why wait? Imagine what an effect it would have. For those are the kinds of healings which Jesus Christ and the Apostles carried out in the course of their ministry (e.g. Gospel of Luke, chapter 22, verses 50-51; Gospel of Mark, chapter 1, verses 40-42; chapter 3, verses 1-5; Gospel of Luke, chapter 8, verses 43-44; Gospel of John, chapter 9, verses 1-11; chapter 11, verses 43-44). Not only did they have a 100% success-rate, but nothing was too difficult for them to tackle. If you believe you should be healing ‘just like Jesus’ (as you claim), then anything less than the same success-rate and instantaneity of His healing is a complete sham. You people have not the faintest idea what a real miracle is, or what real healing and deliverance actually are. By all means, call yourself a ‘faith healer’ or even a Shaman, as that would be more honest. But do not make the false claim that you are doing the works of Jesus. If you want to ‘claim your healing’, then claim those which are the same as those that have been recorded in the New Testament. For they are the healings which have been given to us as a sign to point the way to Jesus, the Forgiver of sin, which is the true miracle, healing, and deliverance.

When the famous Council of Nicaea was held in AD 325, it was attended by some three-hundred bishops from around the empire. Accounts of this gathering state that a great many of the delegates were crippled and came limping in on crutches, having suffered physical abuses in the persecutions. But there was no healing service. Just a quiet faith in Jesus Christ and an acceptance of their sufferings for the Lord. They knew the great secret that the true healing is that of the soul. They knew that “our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (Second Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 4, verse 17).

It is a sobering thought that there will be many professing Christians on the day of judgement who will ‘knock on the door of heaven’ and say to Jesus: ‘Lord, Lord, have we not… done many wonders in Your name?’  But He will declare to them plainly, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness’ (Gospel of Matthew, chapter 7, verses 21-23).

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© 2021, Alan Morrison / The Diakrisis Project. All Rights Reserved. 
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]