Our Guest Art Thomas
ART: Welcome everybody! It’s great to have you with us here. And my name is Art Thomas. I’m going to be talking to you tonight about healing. Now what I’ve learned is that when I’m in Africa I really only have to give a three minute teaching on healing, in fact less than that. Really all I teach is Jesus wants to heal. He wants to use you to do it so here’s how you do it. Lay hands on someone. Say “be healed in Jesus name” and then have them test it out. If it works praise Jesus. If it doesn’t do it again. Keep going until you see either they’re done and they don’t want you to anymore or you see it’s healed. Or you find that you’re in yourself you’re striving and so you just have to kind of recognize all right I don’t have the faith for it today. And I just do that. I confess to person I’m sorry.
If Jesus was standing here you would be healed right now instead you got me. And I’m not perfectly like Him but I’m growing and I want to be. All right? And I tell people keep seeking healing. Now that is so much more encouraging to a person than when we say there’s probably something wrong with you. Probably hidden sin in your life. Maybe you didn’t have enough faith. Cause now that’s funny to us because we’ve all heard it. But I can’t tell you how many meetings I go to where someone comes up to me in tears saying 20 years ago someone told me I had hidden sin and that’s why I’m not healed yet and I’ve been seeking God for 20 years and He won’t tell me what that sin is. And I’m like I know why. And they go why? I say because it’s not there. You know? That’s not what Jesus did.
When the epileptic boy wasn’t healed He didn’t pin it on the little boy. He didn’t pin it on the boy’s dad even. So biblically like family members are even like set aside because Jesus knows the emotional strain on us as family members because we love so much and we care so much. But when it comes to learning faith I always encourage people don’t learn faith in the context of your family because it’s really hard to disengage from the heavy emotion attached to it. Usually we’re like well I’ve prayed for this person 300 times and it’s just not going to happen. You know? So what I do when I teach in Africa, real short teaching and then we see people healed left and right. But when I do this in America sometimes that little statement right there everybody’s like whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up! I’ve got some questions. Which is great. You should question things.
In fact the reason I have a whole bunch of answers for you is because I questioned everything. I was the guy that took a whole three whole months of arguing against the possibility that God always wants to heal and I brought every one of those questions to the scripture. I brought all of them to the Holy Spirit. I said Lord this doesn’t make sense. This doesn’t make sense. I was asking questions about Paul’s thorn in the flesh. Questions about Timothy leaving Trophimus sick in Miletus. You know telling Timothy to drink a little wine because of his frequent illnesses. You know the city of unbelief, Nazareth, where you know Jesus could only work a few miracles. I brought all those questions to the Lord and guess what? He answered all of them. And He answered them so satisfactorily, like I’m a very logical thinker. I like to process through things. If it doesn’t make sense I’m not sold.
