Every session in this movement has been about reclaiming ground the enemy has occupied — in your thinking, your agreements, your bloodline, your soul. This session turns to the last and most visible frontier: your body.
“But he lifted up our illnesses, he carried our pain… He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds, crushed because of our sins; he endured punishment that made us well; because of his wounds we have been healed.”
Does God still heal today — and if so, why doesn’t He always?
This is a question every believer eventually asks, usually at the hardest possible moment: beside a hospital bed, in a waiting room, at a funeral that faith didn’t prevent. This session won’t pretend the question is simple. It will make the strongest honest case Scripture actually makes for divine health and healing, and it will refuse to turn the hard cases into anyone’s fault.
Consider This
Think of someone you’ve prayed for who wasn’t healed — yourself, maybe. What did you conclude about why? Was that conclusion something Scripture actually says, or something you assumed?
Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, give me a settled confidence in what You have actually promised, without pretending I understand everything about why healing comes when it comes and tarries when it tarries. Heal what You choose to heal today, and give me grace to trust You either way. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Start where Genesis starts. “God saw everything that he had made — and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31) — no sickness, no disease, no decay in that original design. Every illness that has ever touched a human body entered through the same door sin and death entered through; it was never part of the blueprint. That doesn’t mean every case of sickness has a traceable spiritual cause — it means sickness itself, as a category, is foreign to what God originally made, not a feature He built in.
Word Study
σῴζω sōzō G4982
“made well” · Luke 8:48
Range. Sōzō is one of the most common verbs in the New Testament — well over a hundred occurrences — and English struggles to translate it with one word, because it doesn’t distinguish the way English does between spiritual, physical, and psychological restoration. Thayer’s range runs from rescuing someone from danger, to healing or restoring health, to preserving life, to the specifically theological sense of salvation from sin’s penalty.
The sense here. The same Greek word underlies “your faith has made you well” (Luke 8:48, physical), “the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick” (James 5:15, physical again), and “you have been saved through faith” (Ephesians 2:8, spiritual). NET’s translators have to pick an English word each time; the Greek text uses one word for all of it.
Why it carries the argument. This is the linguistic root behind the claim that Kingdom health touches the whole person. Whatever the New Testament means by salvation, it’s naming a single Greek concept that includes bodily healing as one of its ordinary senses — not a separate, lesser category tacked onto “real” salvation, but genuinely part of the same word’s range.
Source. Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, s.v. σῴζω.
Illustration
A woman had suffered constant bleeding for twelve years, had spent everything she had on physicians, and “could not be healed by anyone” (Luke 8:43). She didn’t approach Jesus directly or ask permission — she pressed through a crowd and touched the edge of His cloak, and “at once the bleeding stopped” (Luke 8:44). When Jesus found her, trembling, He didn’t rebuke her for the presumption. He said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well (σέσωκέν). Go in peace” (Luke 8:48). Twelve years of failed remedies didn’t disqualify her. A single, desperate reach toward Jesus was enough.
The Old Testament makes the identical claim in its own vocabulary, centuries earlier.
“If you will diligently obey the Lord your God… then all the diseases that I brought on the Egyptians I will not bring on you, for I, the Lord, am your healer (רֹפְאֶךָ).”
Word Study
רָפָא rapha H7495
“healer” · Exodus 15:26
Range. BDB’s picture for rapha is concrete and almost domestic: to mend, to stitch back together, to bring wholeness where damage or disorder has intruded. The word appears roughly sixty-seven times across the Old Testament, spanning literal physical healing, the healing of water (2 Kings 2:21–22), and the restoration of a broken relationship with God (2 Chronicles 7:14).
The sense here. Exodus 15:26 doesn’t say God performs healing occasionally. It says, in a sentence structured as self-identification rather than mere promise, “I, the Lord, am your healer” — Yahweh Rapheka, a covenant name, the same grammatical form as “I am the Lord who sanctifies you” (Leviticus 20:8) or “the Lord is my banner” (Exodus 17:15). Healing isn’t presented as an occasional action God performs. It’s presented as an identity God claims.
Why it carries the argument. A God whose self-given name includes “healer” hasn’t grown distant from that name in the New Testament. The consistency between rapha here and sōzō eight hundred years later isn’t coincidence — it’s the same God, the same character, described in two languages across two testaments.
Source. BDB, s.v. רָפָא.
Pause & Reflect
Does thinking of “healer” as God’s actual name — not just something He occasionally does — change how you’d pray the next time you or someone you love is sick?
One honest boundary belongs here before this session goes any further: divine health is not the same promise as immortality. “We will all experience death as a result of the Fall” is simply true, and no amount of faith changes that this side of the resurrection. Scripture never promises escape from aging or from eventual death; it promises something narrower and still remarkable — that sickness and disease are not the normal, expected companions of a life of faith the way they’re often assumed to be, and that healing, when it comes, is a genuine down payment on a body that will one day be fully free of both. Holding these together honestly — real aging is not a faith failure, and neither is real sickness — matters enormously for anyone walking this season of life with the years actually adding up.
If health is God’s design and healing is God’s character, the next question is practical: what did Jesus and His followers actually do about sickness, and what does that mean for you?
The pattern in the Gospels is remarkably consistent. Jesus “healed all who were sick” wherever crowds brought them (Matthew 8:16), and the invitations attached to His healing ministry are consistently universal — “as many,” “all,” “everyone” (Matthew 12:15, 14:36, Luke 6:19). Matthew explicitly ties this healing ministry to Isaiah’s prophecy: “In this way what was spoken by Isaiah the prophet was fulfilled: ‘He took our weaknesses and carried our diseases’” (Matthew 8:17, quoting Isaiah 53:4). Whatever else Isaiah 53 accomplishes — and this curriculum has already treated its atonement for sin as settled ground — Matthew himself reads it as reaching further than sin alone.
“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we may cease from sinning and live for righteousness. By his wounds you were healed (ἰάθητε).”
Word Study
ἰάομαι iaomai G2390
“healed” · 1 Peter 2:24
Range. Iaomai is the New Testament’s standard word for medical-style healing — curing, restoring, making whole — used both literally (physical cures throughout the Gospels) and, less often, figuratively of moral or spiritual restoration.
The sense here. Peter writes: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree… By his wounds you were healed [iathēte]” (1 Peter 2:24). Read in context, the healing Peter names sits inside a passage about sin, righteousness, and returning to “the shepherd and guardian of your souls” (v. 25) — the same word Isaiah used for a suffering servant whose wounds heal others is used again here, deliberately, in a passage primarily about sin.
Why it carries the argument. This is the actual textual basis for what theologians call “healing in the atonement” — the claim that Christ’s suffering secured physical healing the same way it secured forgiveness. That claim is real and textually grounded, not invented. What it doesn’t settle, on its own, is the harder question this session’s What About takes up directly: if healing was purchased at the cross the same way forgiveness was, why does forgiveness land completely and immediately while healing so often doesn’t?
Source. Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, s.v. ἰάομαι.
Healing was never a solo specialty either. Jesus sent His disciples out with a two-part commission, not a two-part option: “preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick” (Luke 9:2) — the announcement and the healing traveled together, the second acting as visible evidence of the first. “Heal the sick there, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you’” (Luke 10:9). Healing, in the Gospels, is never presented as an isolated favor for the sufferer alone; it’s presented as a sign that the Kingdom itself has arrived in that place — which is exactly why its partial, “already but not yet” arrival matters so much for understanding why it doesn’t arrive everywhere the same way.
James gives the New Testament’s one direct instruction for what to do about it: “Is anyone among you ill? He should summon the elders of the church, and they should pray for him and anoint him with oil in the Lord’s name. And the prayer of faith will save [sōzō] the one who is sick and the Lord will raise him up” (James 5:14–15). Notice what this verse does and doesn’t say. It doesn’t say healing is automatic, mechanical, or guaranteed on demand. It says: bring your sickness into the community rather than carrying it alone, ask specifically and in faith, and trust the outcome to the Lord who raises up. James adds one more layer worth naming: “confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed” (James 5:16) — not because sin causes every sickness, this session has already refused that equation, but because honest community, not private performance, is where James locates the ordinary practice of healing prayer.
Illustration
Job lost his health, his wealth, and his children in a single catastrophic season, and Scripture is explicit about the source: Satan, not God, struck him with disease (Job 2:7), even though God permitted it within limits He set (Job 1:12, 2:6). When Job’s three friends arrived, their theology was simple and, on the surface, reasonable. Eliphaz states it as settled fact within the first few chapters: “Call to mind now: who, being innocent, ever perished? And where were upright people ever destroyed?” (Job 4:7). The logic runs in one direction only — suffering this severe must mean hidden sin, and repentance would bring relief — and the friends repeat variations of it across dozens of chapters, with real conviction and real Scripture-adjacent reasoning. And at the end of the book, God rebukes them by name: “My anger is stirred up against you and your two friends, because you have not spoken about me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7). The friends weren’t wrong that God cares about sin. They were wrong to assume Job’s suffering proved he had some. God’s own verdict, stated plainly, is that the blame-the-sufferer theology was the actual error in the story — not Job’s continued insistence on his innocence.
Pause & Reflect
Job’s friends built an entire theology around “your suffering must mean something you did wrong.” Where have you seen — or held — a version of that same assumption, even a quieter one?
This is the honest question underneath everything this session has said so far, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a dodge in either direction.
Scripture’s own witness includes cases that resist a simple formula. Paul — an apostle whose ministry included healings so tangible that people carried handkerchiefs he’d touched to the sick (Acts 19:11–12) — still told Timothy plainly to treat his own recurring stomach trouble with wine rather than a command of faith: “Stop drinking just water, but use a little wine for your digestion and your frequent illnesses” (1 Timothy 5:23). Paul’s own coworker Epaphroditus, serving right alongside him, “became so ill that he nearly died,” and Paul describes God’s mercy in his eventual recovery with real, relieved gratitude rather than treating the illness as something faith should simply have prevented (Philippians 2:26–27). And near the end of his life, writing to Timothy without a hint of embarrassment or unbelief, Paul reports simply: “Trophimus I left ill in Miletus” (2 Timothy 4:20) — not healed, not explained, just left. If any human being in Scripture had standing to command healing by unwavering faith, it was Paul. Sickness still touched his own body, his closest coworkers, and the people he cared about — and he didn’t always resolve it by command.
The honest resolution runs through the same “already, but not yet” shape this curriculum has traced since Session 2’s opening definition of Kingdom Life. The Kingdom has genuinely broken in — Jesus healed, the apostles healed, and the New Testament’s own testimony is that healing continues wherever the Spirit chooses to move. And the Kingdom has not yet fully arrived. “We ourselves also, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we eagerly await… the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23). Firstfruits are real fruit, genuinely tasted now — not the full harvest. Healing today is real, available, and worth praying for with genuine expectancy. Full, final, guaranteed freedom from every disease belongs to the resurrection body, not fully to this one.
That means the honest posture toward healing prayer holds two things at once without collapsing either one: pray with real, unhedged expectancy — not the faith-destroying reflex of tacking “if it be your will” onto every request as a hedge against disappointment — and hold the outcome open-handed, the way Paul held Trophimus’s illness: reported plainly, without explanation or self-blame, rather than forced into a tidy resolution. Those aren’t in tension. They’re the same posture the woman with the twelve-year hemorrhage held when she pressed through a crowd she had no guaranteed right to interrupt.
This isn’t a retreat from the authority Session 13 already established. You genuinely carry real, Christ-given authority to pray boldly for healing, the same authority that covers agreements, strongholds, and demonic oppression elsewhere in this movement. What changes here is the target. Authority over a lie you agreed with, or ground the enemy occupied through your own sin, is authority over something entirely within the enemy’s jurisdiction to begin with — Session 21 already covered exactly how that works. A body living inside a not-yet-fully-redeemed creation, “groaning” alongside all creation for a redemption still being awaited (Romans 8:22–23), is a more complex kind of ground. Authority is still real. It simply operates inside a Kingdom that is genuinely inaugurated and not yet finished — the same tension this whole session has been naming honestly rather than resolving away.
You now have what this session set out to give: a settled confidence that God’s character includes healing (rapha), that Kingdom wholeness reaches the whole person (sōzō), that Christ’s suffering genuinely secured healing as well as forgiveness (iaomai) — and an honest refusal to turn unhealed suffering into anyone’s fault, Job’s friends’ way.
The Preparation movement closes here. You’ve been equipped, session by session, to walk in freedom — from false thinking, false agreements, false bondage, and now false blame about your own body. This session’s Experience returns to the oldest, simplest practice the church has for receiving what Christ purchased: the table He set Himself.
This is a guided practice of taking communion — bread and a cup, whatever you have available — slowly and attentively, specifically remembering both what Christ’s body secured.
Read this aloud before you begin:
“For every time you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes… A person should examine himself first, and in this way let him eat the bread and drink of the cup.”
Paul’s warning in the verses right after this — that careless, inattentive participation in communion had left the Corinthian church “weak and sick,” some even dead (1 Corinthians 11:30) — is one of the most sobering claims in the New Testament, and worth taking seriously without over-reading it into a formula. Paul’s own remedy wasn’t fear; it was attentiveness: “examine himself first.”
Take the bread in your hand. Before eating it, say aloud:
“Lord Jesus, this bread is Your body, broken for me. I receive what it represents — forgiveness fully secured, and healing genuinely purchased for whatever in me still needs it, today or in the resurrection to come.”
Eat. Then take the cup, and before drinking, say aloud:
“This cup is the new covenant in Your blood. I proclaim Your death until You return, and I receive the wholeness — body, soul, and spirit — that Your death secured. Where You choose to heal today, I receive it gladly. Where healing tarries, I trust the grace that has already proven sufficient. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
Drink. Sit for a moment in silence before returning to ordinary life.
Big Ideas
Kingdom Principle
Healing is God’s character and Christ’s purchase, offered freely and prayed for expectantly — never a scoreboard for measuring anyone’s faith.
Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, thank You that healing is who You are, not merely something You occasionally decide to do. Give me expectant faith to pray boldly the next time sickness touches my life or someone I love, and give me the same steady trust Paul showed when Trophimus stayed sick and the answer wasn’t the one he’d have wanted. Free me from ever assuming suffering is proof of anyone’s failure. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Go Deeper
Accessible
Jack Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit (1993). A former cessationist seminary professor’s own account of re-examining Scripture on healing and the gifts — referenced directly in this session’s 2018 source material.
Substantial
The book of Job, read in full rather than only its opening and closing chapters. The friends’ speeches (chapters 4–37) are worth reading before God’s rebuke in chapter 42 lands with its full weight.
Academic
A comparative reading of Isaiah 53, Matthew 8:16–17, and 1 Peter 2:24 alongside a systematic theology’s treatment of “healing in the atonement” (e.g., Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, already recommended in Session 16’s Go Deeper). Grudem represents a measured, mainstream-evangelical case that healing is provided for in the atonement without being unconditionally guaranteed in this life — a useful counterweight to both extremes.
Day 1 Read Genesis 1:31 and Isaiah 53:4–5 together. Sickness was never part of the original design. Does that change how you think about praying for it to be undone?
Day 2 Read Exodus 15:26 aloud, slowly. “I, the Lord, am your healer.” Sit with that as God’s self-description, not just a promise.
Day 3 Read Luke 8:43–48. Twelve years of failed remedies didn’t disqualify this woman. What’s a “twelve years” situation in your own life you’ve stopped bringing to Jesus?
Day 4 Read Job 42:1–8. Where have you assumed — about yourself or someone else — that suffering must mean hidden failure? Name it honestly.
Day 5 Read 1 Timothy 5:23 and 2 Timothy 4:20 together. Paul gave Timothy a practical remedy, not a command of faith; Trophimus stayed sick, unexplained. What does it change to know even Paul’s own story includes ordinary, unresolved illness?
Day 6 Revisit this session’s Experience. Did taking communion with this specific attentiveness feel different than usual? What made the difference?
Pray specifically this week for one physical need — your own or someone else’s — with the same unhedged expectancy the woman in Luke 8 showed, and hold the outcome the way Paul held Trophimus’s illness — plainly, without forcing an explanation.
If something in this session stuck with you, confused you, or hit harder than you expected, I’d genuinely like to hear it — email me.
Leading This Session
Arc and timing (90 minutes). This session covers dense theological ground across two full sections before reaching the What About — protect real time for that section rather than treating it as a quick coda. If you’re short on time, the Go Deeper Academic tier’s Grudem comparison can be assigned as personal follow-up rather than covered live.
Where the room stalls. This is likely the most personally raw session in the entire curriculum for many groups — nearly everyone has either prayed for healing that didn’t come, or watched someone they love do the same. Expect real grief to surface, sometimes unexpectedly, during the Job illustration or the What About. Do not rush past it. If someone shares a painful, unresolved healing story, resist the urge to explain it theologically in the moment; let the room’s compassion do more work than an answer would. Watch also for the opposite reaction — someone who has been taught a harder-edged “enough faith always heals” theology and may initially experience this session’s caution as a step backward rather than a correction.
The ministry moment. The Communion Experience works well as a genuine group practice, unlike several of this movement’s more private Experiences — consider closing your session together at the table rather than sending people home to do it alone, if your group setting allows for it. If someone is currently facing serious illness, invite the group to lay hands and pray specifically for them after communion, following James 5:14’s pattern, but keep expectancy and open-handed trust equally present in how you lead that prayer.
Discussion questions, if you need more than the Pause & Reflect prompts:
What to cut if you’re behind. The Six-Day Practice’s Day 2 (Exodus 15:26 meditation) can be assigned without discussion — it’s a short, self-contained reflection. Do not cut the What About or Not Saying; skipping either leaves this session’s healing claims sounding more absolute and less honest than intended.
Kingdom Essentials · Session 22 · Argument Map
Kingdom Health
“Does God still heal today — and if so, why doesn’t He always?”
Sickness was never part of the original blueprint — God’s own self-given name includes “healer” (rapha), and Kingdom wholeness (sōzō) reaches body, soul, and spirit as one seamless concept.
Christ’s suffering genuinely secured healing (iaomai) the same textual way it secured forgiveness — a real, grounded claim, though one this session refuses to force into more certainty than the text itself supports.
Bring your sickness into the community, ask specifically in faith, and trust the outcome — and never build the blame-the-sufferer theology God rebuked Job’s friends for by name.
Even Paul’s own story includes ordinary, unresolved illness in the people he loved. Healing today is real firstfruits, genuinely tasted now — not yet the full harvest of a fully redeemed body.
God rebuked Job’s friends by name for turning unhealed suffering into anyone’s fault. Whatever healing does or doesn’t come, the verdict over you was never theirs to render.
So Now
Sickness entered through the fall; it was never God’s original blueprint for a human body, and it isn’t the norm you’re asked to make peace with.
“I, the Lord, am your healer” is a self-given name, not a promise God occasionally decides to keep.
Healing available today is real firstfruits, genuinely tasted — not the full harvest a still-groaning creation is still waiting for.
God rebuked Job’s friends by name for assuming suffering proved hidden sin. Unhealed prayer is never proof of anyone’s failure.
Kingdom Principle
Healing is God’s character and Christ’s purchase, offered freely and prayed for expectantly — never a scoreboard for measuring anyone’s faith.
Next · Session 23, The Trinity. The Preparation movement is complete — you’ve been equipped in mind, will, and now body. Session 23 opens The Prize: the movement given to knowing God Himself, beginning with who He actually is.