This study sorts out what Christians mean when they say God heals. Many believers hold that he still does, and Scripture gives no reason to stop asking. Christians do differ on how gifts of healing work today, and no view of those gifts promises a particular outcome to a particular person. Much of the confusion comes from treating healing as one thing. The episode behind this guide, Lisa Fields’s conversation with Judith MacNutt, president and co-founder of Christian Healing Ministries, works with four kinds of healing, a firm place for medicine, and a sober account of evil. The goal here is practical. By the end you should be able to take one real need, your own or someone else’s, and say which kinds of healing it involves, which means God might use, and which explanations you should refuse.
You can work through it alone in about an hour, or with a group over one long session or two shorter ones. Each section explains one distinction, points to Scripture, and gives you a short task before the next idea arrives. Read the passages yourself before reading the explanation. The discussion questions near the end work better after the tasks are done.
Start with your own definition
Before going further, write one sentence that finishes this line: When I pray for someone to be healed, I am asking God to… Keep the sentence. You will come back to it.
Most people write something about a body. MacNutt names that habit directly: “Most people just think of healing as being physical.” She is not dismissing the body. Of physical healing she says, “Of course, that’s important if you’re hurting and sick or especially terminally.” Her point is that the body is one part of what needs healing, and often not the only part.
Four kinds of healing
MacNutt describes four kinds. Each answers a different question about what is wrong.
Physical healing
This is healing of the body: an illness, an injury, pain. MacNutt keeps it plain: “Some people just need good old physical healing.” Her example is someone hurt in a car wreck. Nothing deeper has to be found. The body is hurt, and that is the request.
Spiritual healing
This concerns a person’s standing with God. MacNutt describes it this way: “But then there’s spiritual healing, which is what you’re talking about, the love and the grace of God, and forgiveness.” Scripture states the promise underneath it: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). What is healed here is guilt and separation, not tissue.
Inner healing
This is healing of the emotions and memory, especially wounds from trauma or a lack of love. The psalmist uses healing language for exactly this: “He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3). That is poetry, and its wound and bandage are images. The claim behind the images is still real: God attends to inner injury.
MacNutt is careful about what inner healing does and does not mean. “It’s not like Jesus erases the memory. He kind of reframes it.” The event remains true. What she hopes will change is the grip the memory has when it returns. She also marks a limit of her own profession. As a therapist, she says, “I can’t reach back in someone’s childhood” and change it, while Christ, in her view, can meet a person inside that memory.
Deliverance from evil
The fourth kind is freedom from the active influence of evil. MacNutt lists it last in her sequence: “then there’s deliverance from evil.” She treats it as part of the same work, not as a separate and frightening specialty: “But it’s just another form of healing.”
Then she adds the point that ties the four together: “So all four of those, a lot of people that have been really traumatized need all four kinds.” A single need may have more than one layer. Abuse in childhood can show up as physical symptoms, as false guilt, as a memory that still controls a person, and sometimes as a spiritual foothold.
Task: Look at your opening sentence. Which of the four kinds did it include? Rewrite it so it includes every kind that honestly applies to the need you had in mind. Leave out any that do not.
Where medicine fits
The next prerequisite is the place of ordinary means. A common mistake is to treat prayer and medicine as rivals, so that taking a pill counts as trusting God less. The conversation refuses that mistake. Lisa Fields says, “And so I know we’re not discounting there’s sometimes chemical imbalance and people need medication.” MacNutt agrees immediately.
Scripture assumes the same thing. When Jesus defends eating with sinners, he says, “They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick” (Luke 5:31). The saying is about his mission, not about medicine. Yet it takes for granted that a sick person goes to a physician, and Jesus uses that ordinary fact without any hint of disapproval.
Jude 3 Project holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, that God works through trained counselors and clinicians, and that caring for your mind is part of stewarding the life God gave you. It also refuses to spiritualize what is medical or to medicalize what is spiritual. Qualified care and prayerful support belong together.
So the useful question is not prayer or medicine? It is what does this need call for? A broken leg needs a cast and may also need prayer. A buried memory may need a counselor and prayer. A person can ask God for healing and keep every appointment in the same week.
Sin or wound?
Forgiveness runs through MacNutt’s whole account, and here one distinction keeps people from serious harm. “Because many people think they’ve sinned, and they haven’t.” She describes a man who, at six years old, shouted something cruel at his parents as they drove away on a trip. They died in an accident on that trip, and he carried the belief, into adulthood, that he had caused it. He did not need to repent of a curse. He needed to be freed from a guilt that was never his.
Her test is a simple question: “was it a real sin, or was it just a wound?” She ties the answer to Jesus’ words about the Holy Spirit: “And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8). The KJV’s word reprove is rendered convict in many other translations. MacNutt contrasts the Spirit’s conviction with the enemy’s condemnation. Conviction is specific and leads to repentance. Condemnation is vague and leads nowhere.
Real wrongs done to you raise a different question: forgiving the person who did them. MacNutt is honest about how this feels: “You never feel like forgiving anyone.” She treats forgiveness as grace asked for, pointing to Jesus on the cross: “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). She also sets a firm boundary: “I don’t mean you go back to a perpetrator, if it’s a dangerous situation.” Forgiving someone is not the same as returning to them.
Task: Draw a line down a page. On the left, list things you have repented of more than once. On the right, write next to each: sin, wound, or not sure. You do not have to show anyone this page.
Evil is real, and it is not behind everything
The last distinction is the one people get wrong in both directions. Some act as if evil is not real. Others see a demon behind every bad week. Jude 3 Project affirms that the spiritual world is real and that Christ has authority over it, and it urges discernment so that genuine medical and psychological needs are not mislabeled as demonic.
MacNutt explains how a foothold forms through a sequence anyone can follow. First comes temptation. Then, “if we give in to temptation and we continue in that behavior, it becomes habit.” Then: “And then over time, if we stay in that habit, it becomes a stronghold, and that’s where the enemy can come in.” She connects this to Paul: “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: Neither give place to the devil” (Ephesians 4:26-27). Paul treats anger itself as something a person can have without sin. The danger is anger left to settle.
She names the occult as a major open door, including practices people treat as games, such as tarot cards and horoscopes. Her description of the way out is concrete: to “acknowledge that we have sinned against God by seeking knowledge other than from Him,” then repent and renounce it. Jude 3 Project teaches that practices meant to access spiritual power or guidance apart from God are not compatible with following Jesus, while the line is the intent, not the object.
Two cautions keep this section honest. First, MacNutt says “some people are sick because of the demonic activity.” The word is some. She does not say most illness is demonic, and you should not go further than she does. Second, she says plainly that she believes a Christian can have a demon, and she notes that the church has debated this for a long time. That is her view. Faithful Christians hold different positions on that question, and on many details of how the demonic works.
The mistake to avoid
Here is the predictable misuse of everything above. A body is not healed, so someone says the healing must have been spiritual or inner instead. Or a prayer goes unanswered, so someone hunts for hidden unforgiveness or a stronghold to blame.
The four kinds of healing are not a way to relabel an unanswered prayer. They are a way to ask for more than one thing. A person can pray for a body that is still sick and also for a memory that still controls them. If the body did not change, nobody should say it secretly did. Scripture does not hide sickness that stayed: Paul asked three times for his affliction to be removed, and it was not (2 Corinthians 12:8-9).
A practice: map one need
Choose one real need, with permission if it belongs to someone else. Work through these steps on paper.
- Describe the need in two plain sentences, without guessing at causes.
- For each of the four kinds, write whether it seems to apply, and why. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer.
- List the ordinary means already in place or still needed: doctor, counselor, medication, rest, a trusted friend.
- Write any explanation you have heard, or told yourself, that puts the blame on the sufferer. Ask whether it is a real sin or a wound.
- Write a prayer request that covers every layer you marked, and that asks God to work through the means you listed.
Then take MacNutt’s training order seriously before you pray with anyone: “We teach our prayer ministers to three things, listen, love, and pray.” Listening comes first. Lisa Fields points to how plain the starting point is: “And so it’s so basic, but we forget to do it.” Ask one safe person to pray with you, using the request you wrote.
Discussion questions
- Compare your opening sentence with your rewritten one. What changed, and what made you change it?
- Matthew 10:8 reads, “Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye have received, freely give.” Jesus spoke these words when sending out the twelve. MacNutt reads them as a pattern for the church today, and other Christians read them more narrowly. What in the surrounding chapter supports each reading?
- Why might someone feel that taking medication is a lack of faith? What would you say to a friend who felt that way?
- MacNutt distinguishes conviction from condemnation. How could a person tell which one they are experiencing?
- James 5:16 says, “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.” What makes a group safe enough for that kind of confession, and what makes it unsafe?
- Where have you seen people underestimate evil, and where have you seen them blame it for things that needed a doctor or a counselor?
For the person leading
This subject reaches into illness, trauma and sometimes abuse. Make every disclosure optional, and say so at the start. Do not pray over anyone without asking. Never tell a participant why their prayer has not been answered, and never suggest that anyone stop treatment. If someone shares that they are thinking about ending their life, encourage them to call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and stay with them until they have support. If someone describes abuse in their home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. Forgiveness never requires a person to stay in danger.
One thing to carry
Lisa Fields describes a prayer she was given while working through her own forgiveness of someone: “Let love swallow the hurt.” It does not deny the hurt. It names something larger that can hold it. This week, pick the one layer of your mapped need that you have never prayed about by name, and bring it to God plainly, alongside every ordinary means of help he has already put within reach.