Have you ever pursued healing, spending lots of time and money, but it never worked out for you? Healing is a vast topic, encompassing the full range of the physical, social and spiritual dimensions of the human experience. Every culture has its own traditions of healing, with its own beliefs, approaches, and worldview. Some practices work, and some do not, or they work for some people, but not others. Why is that? And how can you find the healing method that works for you among the thousands out there? To answer those questions, let’s take a step back and present a model that can represent every healing method of the world, and then explain how they work, theologically.

Every healing method can be broken up into four types of tools:

Not every healing method has or needs all four types of tools, but we think this framework is general enough to model them all, even if some of the tools are optional. For example, let’s take the case of your father suffering from a heart attack. If he can make it to the hospital, then his life can be saved; otherwise, you need to perform CPR until the ambulance arrives (Stabilizer). Once he makes it to the hospital, the doctor uses scissors to remove his shirt so that she can access his chest (Unblocker). Then she performs an angiogram to diagnose which artery is completely blocked (Diagnostic), and then heart surgery to clear the blockage (Healing).

Psychological and spiritual healing can be modeled in the same way. Say your mother is paranoid of giving her testimony at her baptism. You play worship music to calm her down (Stabilizer), and then lead her through prayers asking God, “Why am I so afraid of giving my testimony?” (Diagnostic). She doesn’t know why, so you lead her through a prayer of renouncing her vow to not remember (Unblocker), and she recalls a story where her classmates ridiculed her when she gave a speech. She vowed to block the whole incident from her memory and never speak in public again. You get her to renounce that vow and forgive her classmates (Healing), and then she is no longer afraid of public speaking and is willing to go through with her baptism.

Spiritual vs. Physical Healing Methods

Spiritual healing methods can heal psychological and physical issues, but not vice-versa. The Bible says that all human problems are directly or indirectly caused by sin, because before the Fall, there was no evil, sin, nor death (Gen 1:31

³¹And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

; Rom 5:12),

¹²Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned

either spiritual, psychological, or physical. Spiritual healing methods work more deeply and comprehensively than physical and psychological ones because they diagnose the ultimate root of an issue, sin (Diagnostic), and then remove that sin through the blood of Jesus Christ. Jesus not only heals you of your sin, but also of the effects of that sin on your spirit, soul, and body (1 Pet 2:24)

²⁴He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.

(Healing). Satan and his demons oppose the diagnosis and healing of sin, and therefore spiritual warfare is needed to remove blockages set up in the past (Unblocker) and stabilize you undergoing spiritual attacks in the present (Stabilizer).

Physical healing methods cannot deal with sin, but they are effective for healing the physical effects of sin. For example, even if surgery were to heal your father’s heart attack, it would not heal the gluttony or the generational sinful pattern that caused it. It’s still necessary for your father to go through heart surgery to save his life, but if he does not deal with the root sin of gluttony, then he is likely to end up with another heart attack as surgery cannot heal the resulting effects of his gluttony on his spirit and soul. Surgery can heal only his body, and only partially. God can completely heal your father, including his heart and his addiction to junk food, but he would have undergo a spiritual healing method rather than just a physical or psychological one for comprehensive healing.

How Healing Methods Break the Cycle of Sin

Sin is powerful because it leads to a vicious cycle:

Say your older brother dropped a spider on you when you were young and it traumatized you. That injury in the past causes a panic attack in the present, which tempts you to lash out against your wife in anger. Your sin and her sinful reaction to it then invites an attack against you, resulting in an injury to your relationship with your wife. That injury causes a future attack against you, which starts the cycle all over again. One sin can set you on the path of total bondage through a vicious cycle, and you and your wife may not even realize that the initial cause of your divorce was a prank your brother played on you decades ago. This vicious cycle of sin results in death (Rom 6:23).

²³For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Healing methods break this cycle of sin by healing past injuries while keeping you stable under present attacks.

Diagnostic Tools find sin issues of the past and Healing Tools remove them and their effects. Unblocker Tools overcome demonic and self-imposed blockages that keep those strongholds in place. Healing those past injuries removes the legal grounds Satan has to attack you; however, he won’t give you up without a fight. He will attack you through existing grounds in you and in others to injure you and keep you in bondage.

Diagnostic Tools determine which type of attack you are suffering in the present so you can use the right Stabilizer Tool to give you enough space for the healing tools to work. Once every sin has been found and removed from inside of you, and you are discipled to resist every attack from outside of you, then you are fully consecrated and are no longer a slave to sin.

Types of Attacks and Injuries

There are four types of attacks and injuries: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

A coronavirus infection may or may not be sinful in and of itself, but how you got it and your subsequent reaction to it might be sinful. Say you react in fear and that triggers a memory of when your mother died of COVID-19. That painful memory reinforced an identity-based lie that you are the weak one of the family, which is reinforced by the mass media you consume. Both sources of lies are a type of programming, and may or may not be conscious or voluntary. Demons, either inside or outside of you, then have the spiritual grounds to harass you and tempt you to install curses on yourself and others. The result is that sin and its effects reside throughout your body, heart, mind, and spirit; you are totally enslaved to sin (John 8:34).

³⁴Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.

Why Healing Methods Don’t Work

Now that we have modeled healing methods in terms of their component tools and explained how they work theologically, we are now in a position to explain why some healing methods work and others do not, and how to find the healing method that works for you. The failure of a particular healing method comes down to the lack or inappropriate use of one of its component tools.

Problems with Diagnostic Tools

For example, if your underlying issue is spiritual, then physical healing methods that are missing spiritual diagnostic tools will not be able to find, let alone heal your issue. Similarly, spiritual healing methods that insist that all issues are caused by demons will fail to diagnose issues that are caused by physical problems, such as a bacterial infection. The extreme worldviews are unhelpful here: both the materialists who deny spiritual causes of illness and the spiritualists who lack or refuse access to modern medicine will not be able to diagnose injuries that lie outside their worldview. It is the nature of sin to corrupt everything it touches (Gen 6:12),

¹²And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.

so you need different diagnostic tools that can find problems wherever they may be, whether in the body, heart, mind, or spirit.

Problems with Healing Tools

The second reason why a healing method can fail is that it lacks the right healing tool. A healing tool may be appropriate and effective for a particular problem or person, but not for others; or, the healer might not have the skill or experience to use it correctly. That is why anecdotal evidence and testimonials are of limited use in deciding whether a healing tool will work for you; you have to try it out, and reserve judgment that if did not work for you, it will not work for others, and vice versa.

For example, confession for a Catholic unburdens the soul, but a Protestant might prefer an accountability group to confess their sins. That’s not to say that confession is always better than an accountability group, or that your good or bad experience with a particular accountability group model means that everyone will have that same experience. Instead, we can accept without judgment that the general principle of “confess your sins to one another so that you may be healed” (Jas 5:16)

¹⁶Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

can take the shape of different healing tools that work for some, but not others. That’s OK, as long as you find the healing tool that works for you, and be open to trying other healing tools if the one in your tradition does not work for you.

Problems with Stabilizer Tools

Not all healing methods have or need stabilizer tools, and will work fine as long as you are stable. But if you are too fearful to go through the process, then the healing method will not even get the chance to work. That is why a healing method might work one day for you, but the next day it does not. The method did not change, but your circumstances changed to destabilize you from one day to another so that it no longer works. The solution is to not change the healing method, but to apply a stabilizer tool first and then proceed with the healing method.

Another problem with stabilizer tools is their overuse in treating symptoms rather than root causes. Drugs do not treat sin, so they cannot heal you of past injuries to the heart or the spirit. Neither can Bible studies, fasting, or any other religious duty heal you of a past injury; they can stabilize you from a spiritual attack and help you avoid sinning in response to it, but they cannot heal you of past sins—only the blood of Jesus can. That’s why religious duties do not free you from sin and addiction; they are stabilizer tools to resist present attacks, but they do not heal past injuries that are causing those attacks. Replacing healing tools with stabilizers will doom a healing method to failure because it never heals the root issue.

Problems with Unblocker Tools

That leads us to the final reason why healing methods fail, and it’s due to their lack of having the right unblocker tool. This problem is more common in spiritual healing methods than physical ones because demons are spiritual beings who actively resist and block spiritual healing. For example, some blockages are rooted in a vow, so if you do not renounce that vow, then the blockage remains. Some demons specialize in blocking your spiritual vision, so if you only have visual unblocker tools in your toolbox, you may not be able to spiritually see enough to use them. Similarly, aural unblocker tools are of limited use if your spiritual hearing is blocked. That’s why it’s important to have a diversity of unblocker tools in your toolbox so that at least one of them will work and you can overcome all the blockages.

Conclusion

Healing methods fail when they lack the required tools to heal a particular problem. No healing method has every tool to heal every problem, so we at healingmodels.org do not recommend a dogmatic approach to adopting a particular healing method, but rather a toolbox approach that fits the right tool to the right problem. You may be trained and comfortable with a particular tradition or approach to healing, and if it works for you, keep it. But, if the problem cannot be solved by your current toolbox, then we suggest that you add tools to your healing method to expand the range of injuries that you can heal.

To add the missing tools to your healing toolbox, you need to:

1. Know such tools exist and be able to afford the training to learn them.
2. Resolve the objections to using those tools that you inherited from your theological and professional orientation.

Our mission at healingmodels.org is to provide, “Healing for everyone”. That means we:

1. Provide a free encyclopedia of healing methods and tools that are inspired from every Christian tradition.
2. Theologically respond to objections to using those tools when they are unfamiliar to your inherited tradition.

We are Spirit-led in our practice and biblical in our theology. We aim to popularize healing methods and tools from every Christian tradition, from the conservative to the charismatic, and from the biblical to the integrative. Not every healing method or tool works for everybody, but at healingmodels.org, we hope that you’ll find the healing model that works for you.

Further Reading

The best way to see this overview in action is to read one of our healing methods. The Story Method is a cognitive healing method that is compatible with every Christian tradition and denomination. It uses only that which is common to us all: the gospel. The Whiteboard Method is a Spirit-led, visual healing method that is simple, fast, and effective.

If you are interested in reading more of the theology offered on this site, Who Is Involved in Healing theologically reflects on the different roles in the healing process, while Should Healing Be Free explains the different business models for healing, and why we chose to use a free model for this site. How Can I See God explains how sin separates you from being able to experience God, and How Do I Stop Sinning gives the theology of addiction and how to break free of it through the gospel.