Science of Healing
At one time I visited at the John Hopkins institution, and submitted myself for this series of experiments. It was not sufficient to know that God did things, I had to know HOW God accomplished these things. But I prayed in my heart, “Lord God, if you will only let the Spirit of God come like the lightnings of God upon my soul for two seconds, I know something is going to happen that these men never saw before.”
I want to explain the assimilating power of your nature, your capacity to assimilate God and take the life of God into your being, and keep it in your being. I am not talking to you about what I believe. I am talking about what I know.
By John G. Lake
Chicago, 1920
“In Him was life, and life was the light of men.” (John 1:4)
There is a difference between Christianity and philosophy. (I presume some folks are inquiring why it is that there is always that keynote in my addresses.)
God gave me the privilege of living in the heart of philosophic South Africa, where we have one million five hundred thousand, who are ministered to by Buddhist, and Brahman priests. Every imaginable cult has its representatives there. I was amazed to discover that the whites were gradually assimilating the philosophy of the East, just as we Westerners are assimilating the philosophy of the East, and have been doing so for a long time.
When you take the philosophies, Christian Science, New Thought, and Unity today and examine them, you discover they are the same old philosophies of India, Egypt and China from time immemorial.
The difference between philosophy and religion, particularly the religion of Jesus Christ, is in the words I have quoted from the Scriptures, “In Him was Life, and the life was the light of men.” Philosophy is light. It is the best light the individual possessed who framed the philosophy. But it is not a LIFE GIVER.
But from the soul of Jesus there breathed holy, living life of God, that comes into the nature of man, quickens him by its power, and by the grace of God he has the life of Jesus in him, eternal life. Many of the ancient philosophies have a marvelous light. One of the Indian philosophies, Bhagavad, was written five hundred years before Isaiah. In it they predicted the coming of a Son of God, a Redeemer, who was to come and redeem mankind.
Buddha presented his philosophy five hundred years before Jesus. Pythagoras wrote four thousand years before Jesus Christ. In each one of them you will find many of the teachings of Jesus. The teachings of Jesus were not unique in that they were all new. They were new because they contained something that none of the rest possessed. It was the divine content in the word of Jesus Christ that gave His teachings their distinguishing feature from the other philosophies. That content (element) is the LIFE of God. “In Him was LIFE, and the LIFE was the light of men.”
Beloved, the real Christian, and the real Christian Church, undertakes to bring to mankind the life of the Lord Jesus, knowing that when the LIFE of Jesus comes, the light of civilization and Christianity will follow, but the LIFE is the first thing.
As men traveled from God, and as the world traveled from God, men naturally fell into their own consciousness and soul states, and proceeded in the common way of the world to endeavor to bless the world through LIGHT. But LIGHT never saved a world. Light will never save the world. There must be a divine content from on high that comes to the soul to enrich it and to empower it, to illuminate it, and to glorify it, and more–to deify it! For God’s purpose through Jesus Christ is to deify the natures of men, and thus forever make them like unto, not only in their outward appearance and habits of life, but in nature and substance and content, in spirit and soul and body, LIKE THE SON OF GOD.
Jesus never intended Christians to be an imitation. They were to be bone of His bone, and blood of His blood, and flesh of His flesh, and soul of His soul, and spirit of His Spirit. In this He becomes the Son of God and a Redeemer forever.
In my youth I took a course in medicine. I never practiced medicine, for I abandoned the whole subject a few months before the time of my graduation, when it came to the place where diagnosis became the general subject for examination. It was then that I discovered that the whole subject of diagnosis was very largely a matter of guesswork, and it so remains.
Consequently, throughout my life, there has remained in me somewhat of the spirit of investigation. It has never been easy to accept things readily, until my soul stepped out inch by inch and proved them for myself.
When I approached the matter of baptism, I did so with great care, but I approached it as a hungry soul; my heart was hungry for God, and one day the Spirit of the Lord came upon me. God flooded my life and baptized me in His Holy Spirit. Then, began in my heart, a new and powerful working of God, which has gone on for fifteen years, until Christ has become to my soul a divine reality.
Having had former acknowledgment as a medical student, it is still my privilege to attend a medical clinic, which I frequently do. I submitted myself at one time to a series of experiments. It was not sufficient to know that God did things, I had to know HOW God accomplished these things.
So, when I returned from Africa, at one time I visited at the John Hopkins institution, and submitted myself for this series of experiments.
First, they attached to my head an instrument to record the vibrations of the brain. This instrument had an indicator that would mark according to the vibrations of the mind. I began by repeating soothing things, like the Twenty-third Psalm; then I repeated the Thirty-seventh Psalm and then the thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, the ninety-first Psalm; and Paul’s address before Agrippa. Then, I went into secular literature, and I repeated the Charge of the Light Brigade, Poe’s Raven, with a prayer in my heart that somehow God would connect my soul in the Holy Ghost. My difficulty was that while this was going on I could not keep the Spirit from coming upon me, and when I got through with Poe’s Raven, they said, “You are a phenomenon. You have a wider mental range than any human being we have ever seen.” But it was this that the Spirit of God kept coming upon me in degree, so I could feel the moving of the Spirit within me.
But I prayed in my heart, “Lord God, if you will only let the Spirit of God come like the lightnings of God upon my soul for two seconds, I know something is going to happen that these men never saw before.”
So I closed the last lines. All at once the Spirit of God struck me in a burst of praise and tongues, and the old indicator on the instrument went to the end of the rod and I haven’t the least idea how much further it would have gone if there had been an indicator to record it. The instructors said, “We have never seen anything like it!” I replied, “Brethren, it is the Holy Ghost!”
Now in order to get the force of what I want to tell you in this next experiment is something of the processes of digestion. I want to explain the assimilating power of your nature, your capacity to assimilate God and take the life of God into your being, and keep it in your being. I am not talking to you about what I believe. I am talking about what I know.
For twenty-five years God has kept me so that sickness, nor the devil, were able to touch me, from the day that I saw in the ninety-first Psalm a man’s privilege of entering into God, not only for healing, but HEALTH, and having God and the life of God in every fiber of his being.
Scientists tell us that in a single inch of a man’s skin there are one million five hundred thousand (1,500,000) cells. They have almost doubled that statement now. But be that as it may, I want you to see that the whole structure of man’s life is one wonderful cellular structure. Your body, your brain, your bone is just one great cellular structure.
In the process of digestion it is something like this. The food we eat is reduced to vegetable lymph before it is absorbed by the body. But no scientist in the world has ever been able to satisfactorily explain what it is that changes the lymph and makes it life. Something happens when it is in the body that changes it to life.
I want to tell you what grew up in my soul, and how I proved the fact. I could feel sometimes in the attitude of prayer, just as you have felt hundreds of times, the impulse of the Spirit moving down through your brain and your person to the end of your fingers just little impulses of God’s presence in your life. And I have said, “If there was an instrument powerful enough I believe men could see the action of the brain cells, and see what took place.”
Here is the secret of digestion. When from the spirit of man, and through the spirit of man there is being imparted to every cell of your body waves of light, waves of life. It is the movement of your spirit. Spirit impulses pass from the cortex cells of the brain to the very end of your fingers and toes, to every cell of your body. And when they touch that vegetable lymph it is transformed into life. That is common transmutation.
In the material world you can dissolve zinc and attach a wire, and transmit it to the other end of the wire. They dissolve that zinc, and the battery at the one end, and transmit the zinc to the other end of the wire, where it is deposited. How is it done? There is a process of transmutation. That is what it is called. There is change from one form to another.
My brother, you listen to me, if that is not true in the spiritual world, there is no such thing as divine LIFE. There is no such thing as salvation through the Son of God. For that which is soulish must be transformed by the Spirit of God in us until it becomes spiritual, until it is of God. Jesus sat with His disciples and ate with them, both bread and fish. He went to the mount and ascended before them to Glory. What happened to the fish and bread that He ate? I tell you there is a transmutation. That which is natural becomes spiritual. That which was natural is changed by the power of God into the life of God, into the nature of God, into the substance of God, into the glory of God.
So when I returned to this country this time, I submitted myself for this experiment.
They attached to my head a powerful instrument that could take some kind of picture one after another, in order to see, if possible, what the action of the brain cells would be.
Then I repeated things that were soothing and calculated to reduce the action of the cortex cells to their lowest possible action. Then I went on into the scriptures to the better and richer things, until I came to the first of John, and as I began to recite that, and the fires of God began to burn in my heart, presently once again the Spirit of God came upon me, and the man who was at my back touched me. It was a signal to keep that poise until one after another could look through the instrument. And finally when I let go, and the Spirit subsided, they said, “Why man, we cannot understand this thing, but the cortex cells extended so that we can hardly imagine it possible to a human brain.”
Oh, I’ll tell you, when you pray, something is happening in you. It is not a myth. It is the action of God. It is scientific that the almighty God comes into the soul, takes possession of the brain, lives in the cortex cells, and when you will or wish, either consciously or unconsciously, the fire of God, the power of God, that life of God, that nature of God, throbs through your nerves, down through your person into every cell of your being, into every million five-hundred thousand cells in every square inch of your skin, and they are alive with God.
Men have treated the Gospel of Jesus Christ as though it were a sentiment and foolishness. Men who posed as being wise, have scorned the simple things that were taking place every day. But I want to tell you that no dear old mother ever knelt before the Throne of God, and raised her heart to heaven without demonstrating the finest process of the wireless of God that ever was produced.
In these days they are now able to transmit by wireless from six to seven thousand miles — and even 12,000 miles recently (1920). Once again they have been able to demonstrate that in one-tenth of a second they can transmit the first section of thought twelve thousand miles. Think of it! There is practically no such thing as time.
Beloved, the very instant your soul moves with your heart cries, that yearning of your soul, it registers in the soul of Jesus Christ, and the answer comes back.
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I said to them, Gentlemen, I want you to see one more thing. You go down in your hospital and bring a man who has inflammation in the bone. So they brought up a man with inflammation in the bone. I said, “You take your instrument, and attach it to that fellow’s leg, but you leave enough space to get my hand on his leg you can have it attached on both sides.” So when the thing was all ready, I put my hand on that man’s shin, and I prayed just like Mother Etter prays. No strange prayer, but the cry of my heart to God. I said, “God, kill this devilish business by the power of God, let it live in him, let it move in him.” Then I said, “Gentlemen, what is taking place?” They replied, “Every cell responds.” All there is to it is that the life of God comes back into the part that is afflicted, and right away the blood flows in, and the work is done.
My soul has grown tired long ago of men treating the whole subject of Christianity as though it were child’s play. We have our physical sciences, we have our psychological sciences, the action of the mind, taught in the great schools of the land, but there is something greater. One of these days there is going to be a new chair. It will be the chair of pneumatology–the science of spirit, by which men will undertake to discover the laws of God. And by the grace of God, men shall know that God is alive, and the living Spirit of God is no dream.
In my healing rooms at Spokane, there came one day a dear woman whose name is Lamphear. She is the wife of a merchant in the city. She had fallen down a stairs, causing prolapses of the bowels and stomach. She had been an invalid for eleven years. On top of that she had become tubercular. On top of that the poor thing developed inflammatory rheumatism, until she was terribly deformed. She was going to die. The doctors said there was nothing they could do for her. They advised that she be taken to Hot Lake, Oregon, and perhaps that would do her some good. So they put her in hot baths there and she suffered just as much as ever. So they thought they would try superheated baths. They put her in water hotter than any human being had ever been in before. The result was that instead of having any healing effect, the left leg developed an abnormal growth, and it became three inches shorter than the other leg. It is a simple condition of sarcoma. The foot became an inch longer. She came away from the institution worse than when she went. She got as far as Portland. Her parents were living in The Dalles. She wanted to see her parents before she died. Her husband carried her in his arms onto the ship. As he did so, a Pentecostal missionary stepped up and said, “Dear woman, we understand now why God told us to take this boat. The Lord told us last night to take the eight o’clock boat for The Dalles.” He had called up on the telephone and found the fare was $1.80, and as that was all the money they had, they went without their breakfast so as to be able to take the boat.
As she lay crying with her suffering, they said, “When we get to The Dalles, we will pray for you.” (They were timid folks.) Eventually they reached The Dalles and went to a hotel. The two knelt to pray for her. She says as they prayed and put their hands on her knees, their hands became illuminated until they looked like the hands of Jesus, their faces looked like the face of Jesus, and she was afraid. But something happened. The pain went out of her.
Strangely, she retained the tuberculosis and the struggle for breath. The leg remained the same length. When she examined herself, she was surprised that it was not shorter. She said, “Pray again that the Lord may make it the same length as the other”, but the poor missionary was staggered. He said, “Dear Sister, the pain is gone. You be satisfied and give praise to God.”
So she went on three and a half years coughing her lungs out and with her leg longer than the other. One day she came to the healing rooms and was ministered to by Mr. Westwood, and she felt relieved. She said, “Mr. Westwood, I saw breath clear down into my stomach.” He said, “I’ll pray for that.” “But,” she said, “the man told me I should be satisfied that the pain was gone.” Mr. Westwood said, “He had not grown up in God yet.” Mr. Westwood put his hands on that lump and prayed, and God Almighty dissolved that lump of bone, and that leg shortened at the rate of one inch a day, and she wears shoes like anyone else.
There is a difference between healing and miracles. Healing is the restoration of diseased tissue, but miracle is a creative action of the Spirit of God in a man’s life. And the salvation of a soul is a divine miracle of God. Every time Christ speaks the word of LIFE to a man’s heart there is a divine creative miracle of God in him, and he is a new man in Christ Jesus.
One day I sat in Los Angeles talking to old father Seymour. I told him of an incident in the life of Elias Letwaba, one of our native preachers, who lived in the native country. I came to his home, and his wife said, “He is not home. A little baby is hurt, and he is over praying for it.” So we went over and got down on our knees and crawled into the native hut. I saw he was kneeling in a corner by the dying child. I said, “Letwaba, it is me. What is the matter with the child?” He told me that it had hurt its neck. I examined it and saw that the baby’s neck is broken, and I said to Letwaba, “Why, Letwaba, the baby’s neck is broken.” I did not have faith for a broken neck, but poor old Letwaba did not know the difference, and I saw he did not understand; but he discerned the spirit of doubt in my soul. I said to myself, “I am not going to interfere with his faith. He will just feel the doubt and all the old traditional things I ever learned, so I will go out” and I did. I went out and sat in another hut and kept on praying. I went to bed at one o’clock, and at three o’clock Letwaba came in. I said, “Well, Letwaba how about the baby?” He looked at me lovingly and sweetly and said, “Why brother, the baby is all well.” I said, “The baby is well! Take me to the baby at once.” I went to the baby and took the little black thing on my arm, and I came out and prayed, “Lord, take every cursed thing out of my soul that keeps me from believing the Lord Jesus Christ.”
In my meeting in Spokane is a dear man who told us he was dying of Pellagra. He came from Dallas, Texas, to Sister Etter’s meetings. Apparently, he died on the train and they laid his body at the station house and covered him with some gunny sacks, but discovered in the morning he was still alive. So they carried him to Mother Etter’s meetings and she came down off the platform and prayed for him. That man is living, and has been preaching the gospel for seven years at Spokane.
Why, there is more science in the Son of God in five minutes than the ignorant old world ever knew. “In HIM was LIFE, and the LIFE was the light of men.” The LIFE of God is that which the mind of men, and the keenest of them, never knew, and never discovered. “The world through wisdom knew not God.” They could not discern His death nor understand the marvels of His life, until the Lord Jesus came and lived and died and entered into Hades and destroyed the powers of darkness and liberated the souls of men; liberated them from the chains of darkness and came forth into the world to speak God’s word and reveal God’s power and show God’s nature. And by the grace of God, we have been privileged to enter into the nature of Jesus, and the fires of God burn in his soul like they burned in the soul of Jesus.
The scientific world has been startled by one of the English scientists who has come forward with a formula for transmuting the grosser metals into gold. It did not work. Years ago this knowledge was known to the world, but somehow it disappeared from the world. Recently men again have attempted to change lead, silver and iron, transmuting them into gold.
Beloved, that is the thing that Jesus Christ has been doing all the time. It is as old as Christianity, and as old as the Son of God. He has been coming to the hearts of men, taking the old base conditions of the nature, and in the mighty action of the Holy Ghost, they have been changed into pure gold of God. If there never was another blessing that came to the world through Pentecost but this one, all the price that men could pay would be as nothing for it. For I want to tell you there has been more real divine researching by the Holy Ghost into the nature of God and the nature of men in these last 15 years than there ever was in the whole world. When anyone comes to me with the statement
that there is nothing in the Holy Ghost but a psychological manifestation, I say, “Brother, sister, come with me and see the gems of God and the beautiful gold that has come out of the dross and the dirty lives, and then you will know.”
In my assembly at Spokane is a dear little woman who was totally blind for nine years. She had little teaching along the line of faith in God. She sat one day with her group of six children to discover that the dirty brute of a husband had abandoned her. A debased human being is capable of things that no beast will do, for a beast will care for its own. You can imagine what that little heart was like. She was broken and bruised and bleeding. She gathered her children around her and began to pray. They were sitting on their front porch. Presently the little one got up and said, “Oh, Mama, there is a man coming up the path, and he looks like Jesus. Oh, Mama, there is blood on His hands and blood on His feet!” And the children were frightened and ran around the corner of the house. After a while the biggest one looked around the corner and said, “Why, Mama, He is laying His hands on your eyes!” And just then her blind eyes opened.
And Beloved, if we could have seen the reason, we would have seen that there were some Christians at Zion Gate or some other place who were praying the power of God on a hungry world, and Jesus Christ in His search, rushed into her life and sent her forth to praise God and teach the Gospel of Jesus.
I would not have missed my life in Africa for anything. It put me up against some of the real problems. I sat upon the Mount of Sources one night, and I counted eleven hundred native villages within the range of my eyes. I could see the color of the grass on the mountains sixty miles away. I could see the mountains one hundred and fifty miles away. Then I began to figure, and I said, “Within the range of my eyes there lives at least ten million native people. They’ve never heard the name of Jesus. In the whole land there are at least one hundred million people, perhaps two hundred million. They
are being born every day at a tremendous rate. Do you know there are more heathen born every day than are Christianized in fifty years? When are we going to catch up by our present method of building schools and teaching them to read? Never! I tell you it will never come that way. It has got to come from heaven by the power of God, by an outpouring of the Holy Ghost.”
That is the reason that in my heart I rejoice in the blessed promise. “In the last days,” saith God, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” (Acts 2:17). And every last one of the two hundred million poor black people is going to hear and know of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And beloved, I would rather have a place in the kingdom of God to pray that thing into existence, and to pray the power of God upon them, than anything else in the world.
…
I began to pray. I said, “Has God no interest in these people, and if He has an interest, why is not something done for them? What is the matter with God?” My heart was breaking under the burden of it. I said, “God, there is an explanation somewhere. What is it, Lord? Tell me about this thing.”
After a while the Spirit said, “The Church which is His Body,” [Ephesians 1:22-23] and I knew that was God’s answer. I said, “Yes, the church should have sent missionaries
and built schools and done this and that. “The Church, which is His body.” And I sat and listened to that voice repeat that sentence for a half hour. I said, “My God, my soul
begins to see. The Church is the generating power of God in the world; the Church has been negligent in one thing. She has not prayed the power of God out of heaven.”
Then I saw that which has become a conviction in my soul from that day. There never was a soul born to God in the whole earth at any time until some soul in the world got hold of the living Spirit of God and generated that Spirit in saving grace and creative virtue, until it took possession of a soul, no difference if it was a million miles away.
When I try to induce men to forget their little squabbles and little differences and go praying it is because my soul feels the burden of it. Mother Etter has been like a marshal for fifty years. The sick have been healed, people have been converted and blessed. But beloved, when I heard of Brother Brooks shutting himself up night and day to pray the power of God on a world, I said, “That is where she gets her fire; and from where it comes to my soul; that is from where it comes to every other soul.”
Look how beautifully this hall is lighted. Do you know the world lived in darkness for five thousand years and they had no way of lighting a place except by torches? But there was just as much electricity five thousand years ago as there is today. Somebody found how to handle it, discovered the laws that govern it. To this day there is not a man who can tell us what electricity is, or what its substance is. We know we can control it this way and guide it that way, and make it do this and that, but what it is, nobody can tell us. But down somewhere on the river there is a thing that is called a dynamo, and its draws the electricity out of the air, and transmits it over the wires, and these days they are even sending it wireless.
Do you know what prayer is? It is not begging God for this and that. The first thing we have to do is to get you beggars to quit begging until a little faith moves in your souls. PRAYER is God’s divine dynamo. The spirit of man is God’s divine dynamo. When you go to pray, that spirit of yours gets into motion…not ten thousand revolutions or one hundred thousand. The voltage of heaven comes to your heart, and it flows from your hands, it burns into the souls of men, and God Almighty moves on their behalf.
Over in Indiana some years ago was a farmer who used to be a friend of Brother Fockler and myself. His son had been in South America, had a dreadful case of typhoid fever, had no proper nursing and the result was a great fever sore developed until it was seven inches in diameter. The whole abdomen became grown up with proud flesh, one layer on top of another layer, until there were five layers. The nurse would lift up those layers and wash then with an antiseptic to keep the maggots out of it. When he exposed the body for me to pray for him, I had never seen anything like that before. I was shocked. As I went to pray for him, I spread my fingers out over that sore. I prayed, “God, in the name of Jesus Christ, blast this curse of hell and burn it up by the power of God.” Then I took the train and came back. The next day I received a telegram saying, “Lake, the most unusual thing has happened. An hour after you left the whole print of your hand was burned into that thing a quarter of an inch deep, and it is there yet.”
You talk about the voltage of heaven and the power of God. Why, there is lightning in the soul of Jesus. The lightnings of Jesus heal men by its touch, sin dissolves, and disease flees when the power of God approaches.
And yet, we are quibbling and wondering if Jesus Christ is big enough for our need. Let’s take the bars down. Let God come into your life. And in the name of Jesus your heart will not be satisfied with an empty Pentecost, but the light of God and the lightnings of Jesus will flood your life. Amen!
SCIENCE OF HEALING by John G. Lake in PDF format is available at www.breakthroughministriesonline.org/resources/messages/lake/science.pdf
Tags: Bible truths, Holy Spirit, Physical Healing, Science and Faith, sons of God
July 31st, 2010 at 2:50 pm
It was nice to find your page. Most things that are common knowledge are the things that need official studies the most.