I’ve had people say to me, “Brother Hagin, when you laid hands on me, I felt the power go through me just like electricity. It went all over me. For days I was perfectly all right, but now every symptom has come back on me, and I’m worse than I ever was. Can you help me?
“Thank God, I can. Thank God, I can,” I tell them. “You see, you were healed on somebody else’s faith or by a manifestation of the Spirit of God. You didn’t have any foundation of the Word of God in you to help you keep your healing.
“You were like the man who built his house on the sand; the storm came and destroyed it. The symptoms came; the devil bluffed you with symptoms; you accepted them, and he put the sickness back on you.”
I tell people, “The thing you must do is get to know the Lord through His Word.” As Smith Wigglesworth said, “I can’t understand God by feelings; I can’t understand Jesus Christ by feelings. I understand God by what the Word says about Him. He is everything the Word says He is. Get to know the Lord through the Word.”
When you know that by His stripes you WERE healed, when you know that surely He has borne our diseases and carried our pains, when you know “Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses,” when you know that in your spirit as well as you know in your head that 2 + 2 = 4, then the devil will have no power over you.
When you know the power and authority of the Name of Jesus and that you have a right, a biblical right, a scriptural right, to that Name, then the devil will have no power over you, and when symptoms come, you’ll not be filled with fear. You’ll simply laugh at the devil and say, “Satan, did you know you’re whipped? Now you leave my body!” And he’ll leave.
In August 1970, my wife and I went to Syracuse, New York, to preach a Full Gospel Business Men’s Convention and to stay on for several weeks to speak for their chapters in Upper New York State.
I remember three Methodist ladies who came up to us after one of the morning services. They said, “We’re new in this.”
One of the ladies told me how her doctors had sent her to a hospital in New York City because they couldn’t determine what was wrong with her.
After five weeks, specialists told her they had found out what was wrong, but it was incurable. She gave us the name of the disease; I had never heard of it.
“In all the history of medical science, we know of only seven or eight people in the world who have ever had this,” the doctors said. “There is no cure for it. We don’t know exactly how long you will live; it’s according to how the disease progresses, but we do know that you’ll be dead within 10 years.”
That’s not much for a 36-year-old mother to look forward to.
She went on, “Somebody told me about wonderful healing meetings in Pittsburgh, so I went.”
In the first service she attended, the Spirit of God operated in the evangelist. She pointed in this woman’s direction and said, “There is a lady over here who has a very rare disease. In fact, medical science has said that only seven or eight people have ever had this.”
“I was instantly healed,” this woman related. “I went back to the specialists; they ran every test they could, and they couldn’t find it. They said, “We don’t understand it, but it’s gone.” And for months I never felt better.
“But now,” she told my wife and me, “every symptom has come back on me. I haven’t told my husband yet, but I’m worse than I ever was. I’ve been back to the meetings, but I haven’t received anything. Can you help me?”
“Yes, I can,” I said. “You see, you were healed by a special manifestation initiated by the Spirit of God in the life of this evangelist, and thank God for it, but then, after you got back home on your own, Satan took advantage of what you didn’t know and began to put symptoms back on you. And instead of resisting them, you accepted them.”
“What can I do?” she asked.
I said, “Just get in these Bible teaching services like we’ve been teaching here this week.”
So she and her two friends began to follow us from city to city as we spoke for the various Full Gospel Business Men’s chapters.
When we were getting ready to leave the area, she said, “Brother Hagin, I’m completely healed. Every symptom has disappeared. This time I got it on my own faith, and I know how to keep it. And I’ll tell you something else: I know how to go out and get others healed, too.”
What happened to this Methodist woman happens to many. It’s easy to get healed in a mass meeting where there is a mass faith and everybody’s believing. Others get healed through a special manifestation of the Holy Spirit through gifts of the Spirit, gifts of healings, etc.
But when these people get back home on their own, they’re really on their own! They’re not surrounded by faith any longer. Many times they’re surrounded by doubt and unbelief.
Then the minute the first symptoms show up, they say, “I thought the Lord healed me. I guess He didn’t.” And when they say that, they open the door to the devil. Instead of rising up and meeting the devil with the Word of God and commanding his power to be broken, they yield. Why? Because they have no foundation of God’s Word in their lives. They are depending on others to carry them on their prayers and faith.
That might work temporarily, but a permanent healing will be based on their own faith. No one can maintain a healing that has come as a result of another’s faith, gifts of the Spirit, and so on, unless his faith is developed through the Word of God to the point where he can maintain his own rights.
We must learn to say, “Devil, you can’t put that back on me! The Lord has healed me. I won’t accept it back.” We must learn to stand in faith, to “keep the switch of faith turned on.”
We know God uses people who are especially equipped and gifted by the Spirit, and we thank God for them. The healing gifts bring people in, but just like new converts need to get established in the Word if they’re going to go on, people who get healed need to get established in the Word if they’re going to stay healed.
Years ago, when I was pastoring a Full Gospel church in the Blacklands of North Central Texas, I was walking uptown to get my mail at the post office box, and I saw one of my members, Brother, let’s call him Brother W, staking his cow out in a vacant lot full of knee-deep green grass; this was 1939; he could do that then. We didn’t have all the city ordinances we have now, especially in small towns.
As I walked up to him, he started to get up, and suddenly he grabbed his back, moaning, “Ohhhh….” I saw that he couldn’t stand up straight, so I got hold of him and started to help him. “Oh, no, no, no! Don’t touch me, Brother Hagin! Don’t touch me! My goodness, that makes it worse,” he said.
It took him five or ten minutes to finally stand upright. He said, “That old rheumatism has come back on me.”
He was a man about 63 years old; he had been backsliding for 25 years; then I’d held a meeting in that church eight months before, and he had gotten back to God. I had laid hands on him then, and he’d been healed.
I said, “What happened, Brother W?”
“Well,” he said, “day before yesterday, I was milking the cow, and the pain hit me right here in this hand, and it went up my arm and into my back. Ever since then, when I bend down, I can’t get up. My back won’t work right, and my arm won’t work right. I’m just in pain and misery.”
I said, “Brother W, you know I prayed for you last January, and you were healed.”
“Well, yeah,” he said.
I said, “Well, how come it came back?” “I don’t know,” he said.
I said, “I guarantee you that when that pain struck you in the hand and went up your arm, you said to yourself, or maybe right out loud, I thought the Lord healed me. I guess He didn’t.”
He looked at me and said, “You must be a fortune-teller or a mind reader. That’s exactly what I said!”
I said, “I’m not telling your fortune or reading your mind. I knew you had to open the door for the devil to come back in, or he couldn’t have gotten back in.”
He said, “That’s exactly what I said.”
I explained, “When you said that, you just opened the door and said, “Come back in, Mr. Devil, and put it on me, and he obliged you.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but I’ll tell you what I believe: I believe if God ever does anything, it’s done. If God ever heals anybody, they’re healed forever.”
I said, “You mean if a fellow ever gets healed, then he’s always healed?” “Yeah.”
I said, “Well, isn’t that something? Jesus didn’t know that. He didn’t know you couldn’t lose your healing or the blessings of God. When He appeared in a vision to John on the Isle of Patmos and gave him a message for one of the churches in Asia Minor, He told them to “hold fast” to what they had. Why hold fast to it if you can’t lose it? There’s an enemy arrayed against you who’s going to do his best to rob you if he can. That’s why!”
I said, “Now I’m going to ask you a question: When I laid hands on you and prayed for you last January, how long had you had this condition?”
He said, “I was in pain, and I took pain medicine every day for 25 years.”
I said, “Then I laid hands on your head in the Name of Jesus; every pain disappeared, and for nine months you haven’t had one pain, one symptom, and you haven’t taken anything for pain?”
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“Not a thing,” he said.
“And you said, I thought the Lord healed me.” Why, Brother W, I said, “a 12-year-old child with half sense would know he had been healed.”
He said, “Maybe I’m wrong?”
I said, “I know you’re wrong.”
I stood there in that vacant lot and taught him for over an hour, and he got it. He told me afterwards, “I may be a little dense, but once I get it, I’ve got it!” This time he got his healing and kept it.
Credit: Rev Tokunbo Adejuwon
