God Heals

All healing is, in some way, divine healing, spiritual healing, perhaps even a 'miracle' healing. We can speak of 'natural' processes for healing, but who created nature? Who set its rules, gave it its direction? God, of course. So when body tissue repairs itself and the immune system works, it is doing what God intended it to do. We can also speak of Me' medical' healing or cure (Gk. therapeuô). But medicine is rooted in the understanding of how nature works. It gives a boost to the systems for healing that we already have within us, clearing away roadblocks to restoring health, and does some things that nature does not have the ability to do on its own. Medicine itself has no ultimate healing power.All medicine can do at its very best is to delay death's inevitable arrival. Even medicine's ability to delay death is a great gift from God. The Holy Spirit is, according to the Nicene Creed, the Giver of life. The Spirit is also the sustainer of life, the breath you keep drawing in as long as you're alive. Just as the Spirit can heal your soul, the Spirit can work within you to heal your body.

The kind of healing that the Bible talks about also takes place today in our day and time. It is real. It's in the toolbox that the Spirit has given Christ's followers. As we do with many of those tools, we try to be in control, to manipulate people using faith healing, or to fake it in order to become famous. That is the human way. The real gift may be hard to find because so many are claiming to do it.

In today's world, many people turn to spiritual healing ministries and faith healers for many of the same reasons they use for turning to alternative medicine, unusual therapies, and New Age spiritual healing:
spiritual hunger;
meaning in life;
direction for life.

It's best to address these needs without letting them overwhelm the healing task at hand. A true congregational healing ministry is not a psychiatrist's couch or a medical practice or a weekend with a guru. It is neither modern therapy nor another way of saying 'salvation', though it is related to both. A congregation's task for health has a different task. It must not try to imitate them.

Faith healing is not there to replace medicine or the body's healing processes. But Western civilization has gotten even most Christians to look to medical science as their only source of healing. When the Bible speaks of healing, it is speaking of God's stepping in to bring about healing by divine power rather than just medicine. The natural processes obey God's command rather than operate as they normally do. What we call 'miracles' are simply the loving response of the One who's already driving those processes. Thus, the Christian's prayer is not just that the ill be comforted, but that they may be made whole inside and out. When that wholeness occurs, whether miraculous or not, we are not to ask what we did right, but to ask what God is up to.
http://www.spirithome.com/healings.html