“Don’t continue drinking only water, but use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.”
Paul interrupts his instructions to Timothy on appointing elders in the church to give him a little advice for his health. He tells him to drink a little wine because of his stomach and his “frequent illnesses.” It’s such a small verse, and it can easily get lost among the other important teachings on how to choose and discipline elders. But I want to stop on this one verse today because of a false teaching that is spreading in the church today.
First, I will describe the movement, then I will explain the false teaching. One of the fastest growing branches of Christianity Today is the New Apostolic Reformation movement. This hyper-charismatic branch of Christianity embraces Word of Faith teachings. It has a global reach of tens of millions of believers. One of its main beliefs is that Jesus purchased our physical healing at the cross, differing from that of historic Christianity.
Let’s look at this belief a little closer. The Word of Faith (WOF) and New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) leaders use these verses to show that it is always Jesus’ will to heal us physically. In John 10:10, Jesus says, “A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance.” In Matthew 7: 7, He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.” He says in Mark 11:24, “Therefore I tell you, everything you pray and ask for—believe that you have received it and it will be yours.” One of the most famous verses they use is Isaiah 53:5. “But he was pierced because of our rebellion, crushed because of our iniquities; punishment for our peace was on him,and we are healed by his wounds.” Peter quotes this verse in 1 Peter 2:24. Historically, Christians believed that these verses teach that we have been delivered from our sins, not that we have been promised physical healing. The other verses that they quote have been pulled out of the context of Jesus’ larger teachings.
This is a teaching that comes from New Thought, which took off around the turn of the 19th century. New Thought ideas have infiltrated Christianity over the last one hundred years to the point that some believers cannot distinguish between the truth of Christianity and the lie of New Thought. Melissa Dougherty has written a book titled Happy Lies- How a Movement You (Probably) Never Heard of Shaped our Self-Obsessed World. She does an excellent job explaining the history of this.
The first time that I was made aware of this teaching was when my brother handed me a book by Kenneth Hagin called Healing Belongs to Us. Now I have to say, just the title alone made me cringe. This was long before I was studying the Bible as closely as I am today, but even then, I knew that healing didn’t “belong” to us, it was solely up to God whether He was willing to heal us or not. It has been a long time since I looked at the book, so I asked ChatGPT for a summary. This is one of the few ways I use AI. I never use it to write my blog, or even to edit it! Here are some highlights. Jesus bore not only our sin but sickness and pain. Therefore, healing is already provided-not merely something God might decide to give later. The believer must “possess” the healing. Faith in God’s Word is central. He teaches that healing is something that the Christian possesses as part of Christ’s redemptive work.
Kenneth Hagin is considered to be the father (or grandfather) of the WOF movement. He founded Rhema Bible Training College in 1974 which has trained thousands of WOF ministers around the world. But who influenced Kenneth Hagin? Hagin was heavily influenced by E.W. Kenyon (1867-1948), a Baptist pastor who was heavily influenced by his time at Emerson College. The curriculum was largely dominated by Transcendentalism and New Thought. Kenyon taught that with the right kind of faith, we could overcome sickness and poverty, and that sickness was a spiritual condition. Dougherty writes in Happy Lies, “… where did he get these teachings from? From two sources. The first was a divine healing movement in the late nineteenth century called the ‘faith cure’ movement. This taught that God guaranteed healing to all believers as part of the atonement. Illnesses disappeared when someone truly believed and lived as if God had already healed them. Kenyon adopted much of these teachings, believing sickness is a spiritual rather than physical problem. He supported the New Thought belief that the proper response to illness is to ignore symptoms of sickness and refuse to acknowledge or affirm it verbally.”
As you can see, these ideas are not biblical. Kenyon did not read this in the Bible. He got them from New Thought, which is gnostic in nature. And Kenneth Hagin pulled much of his work from E.W. Kenyon. In an article for the Gospel Coalition, Robert Jackson writes this about Hagin. “An American, Daniel McConnell, has conducted a piece of research which is extremely illuminating in establishing the origins of prosperity theology… McConnell sums up ‘Whereas Hagin appears to have copied only occasionally from sources other than Kenyon, he has plagiarized Kenyon both repeatedly and extensively. Actually, it would not be overstated to say that the very doctrines that have made Kenneth Hagin and the Faith movement such a distinctive and powerful force within the independent charismatic movement are all plagiarized from E.W. Kenyon.’”
Today, the NAR has grown from this early teaching. The current “apostles” (I use the quotes because I do not believe that the office of apostle has been restored), consider Kenneth Hagin to be the foundation on which they are building. They believe the same thing that he taught about healing. Some of the NAR churches have healing rooms where a person can go and receive prayer. They conduct healing services where people come to be healed. Physical healing is an expectation in NAR churches.
So what is the problem with this teaching? First, it isn’t biblical. If it is always Jesus’ desire to heal, why was Timothy suffering frequent illnesses? Paul asked Jesus to heal him three times in 2nd Corinthians 12:8, but we read in verse 9, “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.’” At the end of Paul’s second letter to Timothy, he tells him that he left Trophimus sick in Miletus. If the WOF/NAR teaching is correct, wouldn’t Paul have healed him? One last point on this. NAR teachers say that Jesus healed everyone while He was on earth. But did He? In Mark 1:34, it says Jesus healed many (not all), and then in verses 37-38, we read that He left, knowing everyone was looking for Him. “…and when they found Him they said, ‘Everyone is looking for you.’ And he said to them, ‘Let’s go on to the neighboring villages so that I may preach there too. This is why I have come.’” He was there to tell the good news of why He came, not to perform miracles.
A lot of harm comes from this teaching. The implication is that if you have not been healed, it is your fault because you do not have enough faith. And if our healing is bought by Christ’s work on the cross along with our salvation, are we truly saved if we aren’t healed? The answer is, of course we are! There is so much unnecessary guilt being carried by too many people in the hyper-charismatic movement. People have left the faith entirely because of not being healed when they thought it was promised. But it is a wrong application of these verses.
If we were to take these verses to their logical conclusion, no one would die, or there would be no one dying of sickness or cancer in these churches. But we know this is not happening. Bethel Church in Redding’s School of Supernatural Ministry has trained “Dead Raising Teams. These volunteers travel with first responders to pray for deceased people in an attempt to bring them back to life. There is no evidence to support any of their claims that they have brought anyone back to life. In an article for the Gospel Coalition titled Can We Raise the Dead Like Jesus Did?, Stephen Tan describes why this is so harmful. It is a long quote, but he explains it very well.
“Picture a funeral service for a loved one. Friends and family are gathered to grieve the loss of a loved one. Instead of providing words of comfort though, the minister turns the funeral into a ‘resurrection service,’ commanding the deceased to wake up and walk out of the casket. I know of Bethel-inspired ministers doing this from America all the way to Malaysia… Bethel followers sometimes declare that healing has already happened, which is both presumptuous and deceptive. And when the dead person isn’t raised as promised, Bethel lacks A biblical theology of suffering to help the grieving family understand why the miracle didn’t occur. At best they’ll say they don’t know; At worst that is due to lack of faith, unconfessed sin, or generational sin… How many people become disillusioned with God when they don’t get their promised miracle?”
The Bible teaches something different. Paul teaches that, “In fact, we are confident, and we would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). He writes in Philippians 1 that to live is Christ and to die is gain. He is torn, because he knows there is still fruitful work for him, but he writes, “I long to depart and be with Christ—which is far better…” (1:23). One of my favorite passages is 2 Corinthians 4:16-18. “Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” When I do leave this earth for the absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory, I sincerely hope that there is not a team trying to bring me back to this world of suffering.
Grace be with you!
