Help Kids Grow their Faith for Healing the Sick in Jesus’ Name

One of my favorite things in the whole world is teaching kids to operate in the things of the spirit. It’s teaching them how to go deep in God’s word and understand difficult spiritual concepts. If you listen to me for very long you’ll hear a recurring theme of “Kids cannot live by Bible stories alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God!” What does this mean? It means we need to be teaching our kids biblical truths that they can sink their spiritual teeth into and help them walk the Christian lifestyle.

Is Kids Ministry Broken?

In my opinion kids’ ministry, in general, is somewhat broken. We say we believe that kids can do anything through Christ who strengthens them, but then we never tell them what those things are. We’ve become a broken record of the same 52 Bible stories over and over again, and for good measure, we throw in the whole armor of God, the fruits of the Spirit, 7 days of creation, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s prayer. And don’t forget Noah’s ark! Every kid needs to know about Noah’s ark!

Those things are important, but there’s more to the Bible than just that!

It’s not so much about what we teach—it’s about what we don’t teach kids. Kids want to be a part of what God is actively doing in the world today, and to do that, they need to know how spiritual things work

Let’s Talk about Faith

Faith applies to everything in our Christian walk. Faith is the foundation everything else is built upon. You have to have faith to get saved. You have to have faith to get your prayers answered. You have to have faith to get through the tough times! You have to have faith for miracles! And the beautiful thing is our faith can grow so God can use us for greater and greater things in his kingdom!

Kids Sermon on Growing Your Faith

Hi, kids! Do you remember me telling you that God needs us as much as we need him? I mentioned that when I taught you the importance of being baptized in the Holy Spirit. I said that one of the big reasons we needed to be baptized was so we have the supernatural power of God in us and on us to help him establish his kingdom on this earth!

So with that in mind, I want to talk to you today about healing sick people in the name of Jesus. This is something that is very important to God because He hates for people to be sick! Every time Jesus went about healing people in the Bible, whether it was lepers, or blind people, or crippled people, and more he would always add that the kingdom of heaven has just come to you! Jesus taught the disciples to pray, “your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9-10)

That means that God wants to use us—you and me– to bring his kingdom to people on this earth. In his kingdom, there is no sickness or disease, or broken bodies of any kind. So when we allow the power of God to flow through us to heal people, that’s one way we can help him bring His kingdom to this earth.

So, how do we do that?

It’s all about faith.

We need to have faith to heal to the sick. You see, there are two kinds of faith the Bible talks to us about. One kind of faith is called the measure of faith. The other kind of faith is called the gift of faith. We need one or the other of these types of faith to heal sick people.

So I want to talk to you about a measure of faith because the Bible says all of us have a measure of faith.

Do you know what it means to measure something? I’m sure you’ve seen your mom or grandma, or somebody else who loves to bake and cook get out some measuring cups to help them know how much of an ingredient to put into something they want to bake—like putting sugar or flour in a cake, for instance.

Our Faith Can Be Measured

There is something called a tablespoon. Then an 1/8 of a cup, a ¼ cup. A ½ cup, and a whole cup, and a really big measuring thing that could even hold two cups! That would be a lot of sugar or flour.

We can use these measuring cups to help us understand what a measure of faith is. Faith isn’t something we can see with our eyes like sugar. But according to the Bible it can still be measured.

When a Christian is young in the Lord, which means they haven’t been a Christian for very long, or we could say even a child who is young, and they are just learning about what the Bible says about healing and miracles, they probably just start out with a tablespoon of faith. Remember, everybody has faith. But some people just have more than others.

We Need Faith to Pray for the Sick

When it comes to praying for sick people we need faith. But when we only have a little bit of faith like this, we might not always see everybody healed that we pray for. So we need to practice! Yes, I said practice! Because like anything else, you need to practice to get good at it.

Practicing in this way means praying for a lot of sick people using the measure of faith God has given you even if it’s just a little bit.

You might pray for 100 people with your little tablespoon of faith, and none of them get healed! But you don’t give up, then all of a sudden one day, you pray for someone and right before your eyes they get healed! Wow! All of a sudden, your tablespoon of faith grows into a ¼ cup of faith. And it makes you want to go pray for more sick people.

Pray for Lots of Sick People!

And it goes on and on. The more people you pray for, over time the more people you are going to see get healed! And it might take years and years, but soon you little ¼ cup measure of faith grows to a half cup, then a whole cup, and wow you just start seeing more and more people getting healed all the time!

Unfortunately, there are a lot of grown-up Christians who pray for one or two people with their little tablespoon of faith, and they don’t get healed. So they start backing off. They start making excuses like “well, God just doesn’t heal everybody! We don’t know why, but it must just not have been his will to heal that person.” The only problem is, they can’t find any scriptures in the Bible to back that up!

No! The problem is they just never persevered to grow their measure of faith! See kids, a lot of times people with a ¼ cup of faith try to go out and heal someone dying of cancer, or they try to pray that a crooked back straightens up. But they have never developed their faith for those kinds of healings. That’s why you need to pray for lots of people and never give up! Because the more people you pray for, the greater the chances you are going to see miracles!

The Gift of Faith is Different

Now the second kind of faith, called the gift of faith is super special. Any Christian can have it, but only when God chooses to give it to them. And we never know when that might be. The gift of faith is amazing, because God sometimes chooses a person with a little tablespoon of faith, drops this giant gift of faith on them, and all of a sudden, through nothing they did on their own, they have this moment in time where they have amazing faith for something impossible! And they lay hands on someone really, really sick, and they get healed! It was a special gift that God gives for a specific situation.

That’s the difference between a measure of faith, and a gift of faith! We can’t practice to get a gift of faith, but we can practice praying for sick people to grow our measure of faith. How about it? Do you want to grow your measure of faith!

Lay Your Hands on Sick People

When you pray for sick people, the Bible says sometimes we need to lay our hands on them. It might seem kind of an odd thing to do. So, let me explain. When you have the Holy Spirit in you and on you, and you lay your hands on a sick person, the supernatural power of the living God flows out of you and into that sick person! Like this toy power stick. If I just depend on my own strength, and my own abilities when I pray for someone, probably nothing is going to happen. But when I become the connection between God and that person by laying my hands on them in faith, the power flows from me to them. Or from you to them! And there’s a greater chance they are going to be healed! [End of kids’ sermon]

[To parents of kid’s ministers.] The first thing you should be wanting to do right now is grab your kids and go find some sick people to pray for! Remember—this is an important key to teaching children. You want to AWAYS let them get out of their chairs and practice what you taught them in your lesson. Kids don’t want to just sit and listen to you talk! They want to get in on the action and participate with what God is doing in the earth today! That’s how you activate them and make them useful soldiers in the army of God. Take opportunities to invite sick people into your children’s ministry whenever you can and let your kids practice. When it becomes natural at church, they will start doing it at home.