Bible-Based Healing: How to Use Scripture to Build Faith in Troubled Times

The war on sickness may never have been so real for our nation, and our whole world, as it was during the Covid pandemic.

While a real sickness, we soon found that this disease was supercharged by the enemy to be not only a tool of sickness, but also one of fear and division. False narratives spread along with the virus, and our freedoms suffered. The entire situation took a tremendous toll on our faith.

When the enemy wears down our faith, it is vital that we understand how to build it back up. We have police officers and people serving in the military in our church, and they understand that when they use their firearms, they must reload to stay in the fight. You can’t keep fighting if you don’t put more ammunition in; and for the Church, our ammunition is the Word of God.

The trials of life may have depleted our faith, but our Father wants to rebuild our faith for healing. We must be strengthened in our faith if we are to fight the enemy by rebuking sickness and disease as Jesus did, so it’s time to reload the healing promises of God into our hearts and spirits as we declare war on sickness and disease!

God has provided a host of healing promises throughout His Word to help us rebuild our faith. Remember, faith comes from hearing the Word of God (Romans 10:17), so we are going to continue looking at Scripture as we examine some key pathways God has given us, not just for healing but for many of God’s blessings. You see, God’s healing power is out there; we’ve established it’s His will to heal. But are you experiencing it? If not, you can learn the key pathways God gives us for receiving healing.

Faith Comes by The Word

I certainly do not claim to have all the answers, but the Bible spells out clear paths that God has given us for healing and other miracles throughout the Scriptures. Most importantly, I learned long ago that I cannot base my outcome, miracle, or answered prayer on someone else’s experience. We do not know another’s heart, and we do not know someone else’s faith. We definitely cannot judge anyone else, and no one’s faith was ever built up by someone trying to condemn them for their level of faith.

I heard a pastor friend share his story that I found enlightening. A woman in his church, another pastor, was diagnosed with a form of cancer. She was very active in the church, and people prayed for her fervently. They did everything they knew to do, yet she still kept getting worse. Eventually, the pastor sharing the story described a visit with her in the hospital. He prayed in advance, asking God for a word for her, because they had believed, prayed, and fasted for this woman’s healing. The Lord told him to ask her what she wanted her outcome to be. When he went into her room, he asked her that very frankly.

“You know, Pastor,” she said, “I have to be honest. Just between you and me, the moment I was handed this diagnosis, I felt I was going to die.” Ultimately, that is exactly what happened—she passed away. She simply could not be free from the thought that she would die from that disease. No onlooker knew of that, and it summarizes why we cannot look at God’s Word through the lens of another person’s story.

We can sometimes look at circumstances with other people and base our faith for our own experience on what happened to someone else. However, that is not God’s plan for us. You don’t know what is in another person’s heart; and instead of basing our faith on what we can see in the lives of others, we must instead place our trust in the truth of God’s Word.

We walk by faith, not by sight, and there is no substitute for reloading our faith with the truths in the Bible. God may never give us answers about why a specific someone was healed or not, but He has given us His Word to guide us. We base our faith upon the timeless, inerrant truth of the Word of God—not our experiences.

If you spend all your time lamenting, “Why, why, why did this happen?” you will talk yourself straight into unbelief. The Holy Spirit can share with us all the knowledge we need for spiritual growth, but there are some questions He will not answer on this side of eternity. And there are some situations that even if God gave us some direct insight, we might not even be prepared to handle it correctly or emotionally. It might be too much to bear. Let God decide what He wants you to know and trust Him from there.

Job, when questioning God, learned that the clay cannot demand answers from the Potter about why it was made or for what purpose, and God gave Job some pretty blunt answers. It is natural for us to wonder; but if we are hung up on our questions, we are often not going to get the answers we seek. Instead, God has given us other answers—those in His Word—that describe His character and will to heal. These truths do not pass away, and they are not subject to another person’s experiences.

I am so glad that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever and that His compassion does not fail! His Word is immutable, and in it He declares that He is the Lord who heals us! That is the promise on which we stand, no matter what our eyes see.

Learn The Word

The first pathway I want to show you is to have a working knowledge and good command of God’s promises. Whether it’s because of the lack of teaching or incorrect teaching about healing, many Christians do not know God’s healing promises or what the Bible genuinely has to say on the subject. If they do know them, many have forgotten how to apply them.

Hosea 4 spells out the dangers of not knowing God and His Word:

Hear the word of the Lord, You children of Israel, for the Lord brings a charge against the inhabitants of the land: “There is no truth or mercy or knowledge of God in the land. …My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge…” (Hosea 4:1, 6 NKJV).

It’s important to see that God was speaking to the people of Israel, those who should have known Him as His children but did not.

The devil is trying very hard to oppose the knowledge of God, because he knows that if the Church truly understands and applies the Word, we will walk in God’s promises. He knows he doesn’t stand a chance if we do this, so he opposes it at every opportunity!

I value medical science, and God definitely works through doctors and others. However, as an old country preacher said, “God does the healing, and the doctors take the credit!” There is no healing without the Healer, regardless of how it manifests.

If you want to walk in healing, it’s time to turn off the TV and shut down the social media feed. Don’t make the doctors and nutritionists on the screen your source of hope for healing; God is our Source. The devil is the father of lies, and he twists the truth every chance he gets. If you’re not careful, relying on the sources of this world will suck the faith right out of you.

Perhaps never before in history has it been so important to draw our truth from the Bible. Lies and disinformation abound, and the media tries to proclaim darkness as light.

When you focus on something, you become confident in it. All too often, we focus more on the fallible resources of this world than the timeless truths of the Word of God. Go ahead and study nutrition, embrace eating right, and take your vitamins, but don’t look to those things as your source. Don’t get confident with nutritional facts alone; be confident with the facts of the Bible!

Let’s be honest, even with the best natural effort it’s impossible to protect ourselves from every toxin, or every virus and disease without God’s help. We must rely on the power of God in this regard. This is why when speaking of Spirit-filled believers, Jesus says, “If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them” (Mark 16:18 KJV). It wasn’t their medical and nutritional knowledge that saved them from the poisons that one might unknowingly ingest, but rather their trust in the power of God!

Know God’s promises and apply them in fervent prayer. We live in a generation where we want to take a pill to magically fix every condition—but our greatest daily need is spiritual nutrition from the Word!

Let me clarify, it’s not the information about health that is bad, but when we look to it instead of God first, we position ourselves to miss divine healing and replace it with vitamin C and man-made supplements.

Does God work through medicine? Certainly, He does! The prophet Isaiah told Hezekiah to use a medicinal therapy for a boil (Isaiah 38:21), but Hezekiah still had to keep his eyes on God. Jesus also supported the value of doctors by mentioning that the sick, not the healthy, need a doctor (Matthew 9:12). But we also learn that when King Asa put his trust in doctors over the Lord, he died (2 Chronicles 16:12-13).

So there must be a balance, and we must make sure that ultimately our trust is in the Lord, not medicine! To keep that balance, do all the natural things to remain healthy, but at the same time your spirit needs a steady supply of the Word of God regarding health.

If you want to refresh yourself in healing Scriptures, you can’t build yourself up if you don’t know what they are! God wants to restore our faith, build it up and strengthen it, but that means you need to participate. We need God’s Word in us—to get the Word down inside where it takes root and grows into a bountiful harvest. We know seed time and harvest is a principle of the Word, so plant the seed of God’s promises in your spirit—and when you need a harvest of healing you can reap back a hundredfold!