A Gift for Today...continued

The Gifts of the Holy Spirit - Gifts of Healing

The Greek word for healing is 'lama' and is used only 3 times, all in I Corinthians 12, and signifies the means of healing. Therefore, gifts of healing could rightly be defined as: "Holy Spirit-given and empowered gifts that are the means of healing".

Whilst this could include the use of medicines etc. it more properly refers to a supernatural power over disease or a manifestation of Divine life and/or health.

This could refer to a wholeness of health including physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual.

W.R. Jones in the book Pentecostal Doctrine in the chapter headed 'The nine Gifts of the Holy Spirit' (11) states:

"''To another the gifts of healing" (1 Corinthians 12: 9), so this is the only gift mentioned in the plural. Might it be that some have a gift for the healing of a particular complaint or is it rather that each healing is a separate gift in itself given by the same Holy Spirit?

W .G. Hathaway wrote: "Gifts of Healing may refer, not so much to the power of healing granted to a person to exercise when and where he chooses, but to distribution of healing as the Lord sees fit". He then goes on to quote Hebrews 2:4: "God also bearing them witness with signs and wonders and with divers miracles, and with gifts of the Holy Ghost according to His will".

Whatever our interpretation might be we maintain the position that the gifts of healing are in every respect supernatural. In the early moments of the Church's history, they were wrought by the power of Christ through the Spirit, by believers who seem to have had little knowledge of diseases and little understanding of the symptoms of sickness. Whenever we see the gifts of healing in operation, they remind us that the Lord has compassion on the sick."

Previous Next