Steve Maltz on the part faith plays in supernatural healing.

Steve Maltz

Sometimes we hear wonderful stories of miraculous healings: of limbs growing, tumours shrinking and of sight being given to the blind. Mostly these happen overseas, in developing countries, places without a National Health Service or a welfare state.

At one of our conferences a few years back, one speaker was a lady who had led missions abroad and seen such healing miracles. In fact she declared that in these situations, healings were 100% guaranteed.

So how excited were we when, in a conference centre on the Welsh border, and in front of around 100 people, she asked people to come forwards for healing. 100% healing? Not in our case. We in fact had closer to 0% healing.

Why should that be? Was God simply not interested in us?

The fault wasn't hers entirely. Her mistake was in thinking that there was an all-encompassing formula for such things; a technique that is guaranteed to work under a variety of different situations.

The key word here is faith.

Those in the third world, without easy access to medical help, had such a need for healing because it was their only hope for healing. They had the faith for it, because God had made them utterly reliant on Him.

Not so much us in that conference centre. We treated the sessions almost like a side-show; an 'entertainment'. We had a 'sort of' faith for healing, but clearly it wasn't strong enough.

Our Western lifestyle and comforts tend to get in the way of raw, dependent faith in the Almighty God to work miracles.

How strong is our faith? When we ask God for a miracle, are we really asking Him with every essence of our being?

Upper Room experience

We have recently started monthly meetings in central London. We call them moedim meetings, 'appointed times with the Lord'. We meet in an 'upper room' for around three hours, one Friday every month.

So what? You may ask. And how have we managed to convince around a dozen others to join us, some of them travelling from many miles away? To make things more intriguing, those of us that lead the meetings have absolutely no plans, schedule, or order of service. We have no idea what these three hours have for us. Despite this people come, or should I say because of this they come?

The answer is in the simple remark made by Jesus, "where two or three gather in my name, there I will be also." We are there to gather in His name, nothing else, nothing added. We have faith that He will be true to His promise and that He will not only be there, but that He would speak to us, guide us, instruct us.

Well, He hasn't let us down yet.

We have two or three 'leaders' at that meeting. What tends to happen is that we bounce off each other as the evening progresses. There are times of praise and worship, sometimes unaccompanied, testimonies, prayer, fellowship, crafts, and even confession. These are exciting times for all of us and we get many testimonies of breakthroughs and answered prayer.

This is faith at its rawest. It's a declaration that we are willing to be foolish for His sake; to meet without plan or agenda. I suspect that this is how the very earliest church did it.

Let's put behind the busyness of life and just tell Jesus we would like to meet Him - on His own terms.