SID: Simply, when you pray for someone and they’re not healed, and it does happen, you must get very discouraged.
ART: It would be easy to. In fact, that’s something I talk about a lot in my ministry, is how we deal with the process of as we’re growing into the faith we need to do miracles like Jesus. And it’s a struggle sometimes. But what I do is I say, alright, if I were to successfully see a healing here, I don’t walk around hogging the Glory from that. That belongs to Jesus, so I give that to him. So it would be wrong for me as well to hold the burden of it, especially since Scripture commands me, “Cast your burdens on Jesus who cares for you.” So my job is to not hog the Glory or the burden. All of it belongs to Jesus. And so sometimes people aren’t healed, but that’s not my emotional weight to carry. I do, however, take responsibility and go to Jesus and say, why couldn’t I do what you could have done if you were standing right here. And to be honest, about a quarter of the time I get an answer. The rest of the time, I’m left wondering. But that quarter of the time I’ve put it into practice and I see results the next time.
SID: You know what? That sounds like the way we’re supposed to pray. What if you pray for someone and they die?
ART: It’s heartbreaking.
SID: It’s worse than that.
ART: First thing you do, you shoot for resurrection. I mean, Jesus commanded, raise the dead, right, Matthew 10:8. But if they stay dead, you know, you still process through it, but you let it fuel you for the future. It makes you say, “I want this to work, Jesus. Life is precious. You consider these people precious and it always worked for you, and I want to be as much like you as possible.”
SID: What if, and I know one case like this, you were in Uganda and there was a woman with an eye problem, and you’re praying for, and nothing happens. So you pray for her again and something happens. People get up and walk out. Tell me about that.
ART: Yeah. I had just taught this congregation how to minister healing, and I said, “I want to demonstrate for you. So how many of you here have eye problems?” And I think three or four raised their hands. I just picked this woman at random from the front. I said, “What’s your problem?” She says, “I can see far, but I can’t read.” So I opened up the Bible and I said, “Alright, look at it. Can you read that?” She said, “No.” Set the Bible down, hands on her eyes, “Eyes open in Jesus’ name.” Opened up the Bible. “Any change?” She said, “No.” I did the same thing, I don’t have to change my words. I’m not looking for the right magic words to convince God, you know, and I did it over and over, and 15 minutes goes by, and one woman gets up and walks out of the church, and I’m like—
SID: I’m glad it’s only one.
ART: I figured, I’ve got to do something now. So I turned to the congregation, I said, “Did Jesus pay for this woman to see?” And they sheepishly started to nod their heads. I said, “Did he pay a very high price for this woman to see?” And they smiled. I said, “Does it matter if I look like a fool in front of all of you while I contend for Jesus to receive what he paid for?” And without an answer, I went right back, “Eyes open in Jesus’ name.” Any change? No. And that on for five more minutes until—
SID: Why do you keep doing it? I mean, most people when they pray, I watch them on TV, “Be healed in the name of Jesus,” and before you can even find out if they’re healed, then the next person will be healed. You don’t seem to work that way.
ART: No. I want to see something verifiable. So you know, what I do is, I am doing for now, and I tell people, you know, in practice, sometimes we see miracles happen the next day or a week later, or even a month later, in practice. But as a target, I want to be like Jesus, and he healed every single person the same day that he ministered to them and almost all of them, it was immediate.
SID: Well what happened to the woman?
ART: Well she started to see the large print. And I turned to the congregation and I said, “Alright, you can see this is starting to work, but I’m going to go back to her and keep ministering until we have a hundred percent. But now that you see how this works, if you need healing, come up to the front.” Ten people lined up. I said to the rest of the congregation, “You know how to do this. You’re the prayer team. Come on up. They gathered around and started ministering to these people. I went back to that woman, “Eyes open in Jesus’ name.” Opened up the Bible and she smiled and started reading all of it out loud. And then she goes to sit down and I said, “Where are you going?” She sat down. I said, “No, no, no. You come pray for somebody.” She smiled. She found the one man no one was praying for yet and he was an old man who was completely blind, and he was the first one healed out of that line of people. All ten of them were healed. I only prayed for one.
SID: What do you believe as far as, does God really want everyone healed. Is it because we don’t have enough faith that we’re not healed?
ART: Well Hebrews 1:3 says that, “Jesus the son is the radiance of God’s Glory and the exact representation of his being.” And Jesus went around, there are nine different scriptures throughout the Gospels and The Book of Acts that say Jesus healed all. There’s no question about it. There was a never a person who came to him and he said, “I’m sorry, my Father is building character in you” or no, or not yet. You know, all these things that we’ve come up with in our American ideology, right, of, you know, why people aren’t healed to make ourselves more comfortable. It always works for Jesus. The only time someone tried to minister healing in Jesus’ name and it didn’t work was when the disciples tried to cast out a spirit from an epileptic boy and then Jesus was still able to do. And they did what I do. They asked Jesus, why couldn’t we do it. So I believe Jesus always wants it because he always did it. But second of all, it’s what he paid for. Isaiah 53 talks about the atonement, “He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for inequities. The punishment for our peace was upon him. By his stripes we are healed.” So Jesus paid for it. He wouldn’t pay for something he didn’t want. And for that matter, I tell people, you can answer most of your own questions about God’s will to heal by just replacing the word “heal” with “forgiveness.” Would a sinner ever ask for forgiveness and he says no or not yet? Or would he ever say, I’m sorry, I’m building character in you with this sin and once I’ve got that worked out then I’ll forgive you. It would never happen. So why do we believe that about healing when he paid with the exact same blood for that.
SID: Okay. I have to ask you this. You prayed for me and I am not healed. Is it my lack of faith?
ART: No. I never, ever put it on the person.
SID: Whose lack of faith?
ART: I put it on me. You know, I have faith in my wife. I trust her implicitly. But if she says, hey, jump off the roof, I’ll catch you, I don’t trust that because I know my wife’s limitations. But the beauty is God has no limitations. The only limitations he has are between our own ears. We think that he can’t do what’s in front of us. And so as a minister, I take the responsibility, I go to the Lord with it, I process it with him. But again, I don’t carry the burden. I know my salvation is secure. That’s taken care of. But this is faith for this specific instance. Something was amiss. And many times, he wakes me up to what it was and corrects me as a son and then we see results in the future.
SID: Okay. When we come back, I would like Art to pray for you. Would you like that?