The Nature of Healing and Faith Healing

Have you ever cut your finger? Just a cut, not too deep… What happened? Did you sit contemplating the cut for hours on end, convincing it to heal? Did you pray to God that it would heal? Did you go to a doctor to heal it? Did you heal it?

Or did it just heal? Our bodies KNOW how to heal, that is part of our natural makeup. We’d be in trouble if we had to somehow know how to make a cut knit itself; we’d all be walking around with gaping wounds! We trust that our skin knows how to knit, that the flesh below will come together, and that in a couple of days the cut will be forgotten.

We heal naturally. God made us this way. Our cells know what to do. Our natural state is Health and when we have Faith that we can heal, we do. Most of us believe that a cut finger will just heal. Few of us have that same faith that our body will heal itself of a dis-ease. It is that doubt that is the problem, not the disease. It is faith that is the answer.

In The Science of Mind, Ernest Holmes says “History has recorded many instances of healing through faith… The principle governing faith is, that when the one praying becomes convinced, his prayer will automatically be answered. Jesus announced the law of mind saying: ‘It is done unto you as you believe.’”

Jesus was a master healer. How did he do it? The descriptions in the Gospels differ slightly. Sometimes he laid hands on the sufferer. Sometimes he just spoke (“Rise and walk!”), sometimes he didn’t seem to do anything at all, as in the case of the woman who was healed by touching his garment: he wasn’t even aware of her until she was healed. In all these instances, although they seem different, the unifying circumstance is Faith. Jesus had Faith. Jesus KNEW God was in him and could reveal wholeness through him. Jesus didn’t have any doubt about it. In the case of the woman, it was HER faith that healed her. She believed that Jesus had the power to heal - that it permeated his very clothes. She didn’t believe SHE could heal herself, but she just KNEW Jesus could. And so she was healed; through her own faith.

How about the story of the Centurion’s servant? We never even meet the sick man. Everything is arranged between the Centurion and Jesus. “Speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.” Jesus is amazed by the Centurion’s faith and responds “Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee.” As Ernest Holmes remarks in The Science of Mind, “How simple the words, yet how fraught with meaning! What majesty and what might! From whence came the power of this spoken word? Is it not necessary to suppose that the word of man, when spoken in compliance with the law of Truth, is also all-powerful? We cannot believe that Jesus had an occult power not possessed by other men…[or that] he was especially endowed with power from on high... There is but one logical explanation of the power of Jesus: He believed what he taught, and so completely lived his teachings, that he was able to demonstrate them.”

The challenge is, that when we are in the middle of something that appears to be an illness we don’t think our body can heal, how can we call on faith? Unlike the woman touching Jesus’ garment, we may not believe that anyone has the power to heal us. Sounds pretty bad.

This is the time when we can rely on someone else’s faith! The beauty of metaphysics and of what we see in the descriptions of Jesus, is that we don’t have to do it, we can have someone ELSE believe FOR us. We can take our health challenge to a Practitioner. Religious Science and Christian Science Practitioners are trained in Believing the Truth. Prayer or Spiritual Mind Treatment is the means through which the Practitioner convinces him or her self that the Truth Is Health right Now. When one person believes, the Law of Mind does the work, and our body is able to do what comes naturally: heal itself back to wholeness. Faith in healing, heals. It doesn't have to be YOUR faith. One Faith (yours, Jesus', the woman's, the Centurion's or a Practitioner's) is all it takes to reveal the Truth of Wholeness.