Acts 14:9.

Faith in God is fed from that which reveals God.

The Apostle Paul was preaching in the city of Lystra in central Anatolia (modern Turkey).
In that curious crowd was a man crippled from birth who had never walked.
Then Paul noticed something in the listening cripple's attitude.

Bible tells us that it was faith, fed/stimulated by Paul's preaching, faith enough to be supernaturally healed. So, why was he not then automatically healed if, as the Bible says, he had enough faith to be healed?

is more than a state of mind. Faith is more than a spiritual condition. Faith has the potential to become, metaphorically speaking, a 'channel' for the infinite power of God to flow to the point of need.

For this reason Paul –

Was this interruption of Paul's sermon really necessary for the listener to be healed if he already had enough faith?

Decorum is never the issue. The welfare or benefit of people always is, and Paul knew what is generally not known today.

Faith often requires a release!

demonstrated this repeatedly in many different ways, as the Bible records for our sake so that not the method but the principle may be understood. Jesus healed by touching a leper (Matt.8:3); by telling a mother (Matthew 15:28); by muddying blind eyes and sending to wash (Jn.9:7). The method changed according to the circumstance but the principle remained the same.

The faith of the recipient needed a 'trigger' for it to become a 'channel' through which God's waiting mercy impacted the need!

This does not mean that God needs a trigger from us for Him to do something.

it is a natural part of the damaged psychology of the human condition that, even when there is sufficient faith in God to receive His works, human faith is still in bondage to its circumstance of feelings and past perception. The 'trigger' of faith is simply a stimulus for the person in need to respond according to that faith, by which unconscious unbelief is overcome within the person concerned.

at the Pool of Bethesda, where a superstition prevailed about a moment when the water stirred, commanded a cripple to do the impossible, but only after He had focused the man's mind by asking the question (John 5:6).

with John at the Temple gate spoke similarly to a cripple but also helped stimulate the man's response by taking his hand to lift him onto his crippled feet (Acts 3:7).

The method of the release of faith ought never to be standardized for it is directly relevant only to the unique individual in need.

have seen the Bible's instruction through James (James 5:14) to anoint the sick as a set methodology for healing to be practiced in the churches but this misses the point which James makes in its context. The sick Christian is instructed to call for the spiritual leaders of the congregation of God's people (the elders) and their response to that call it to acknowledge the spiritual identity of the sick person (as belonging to Christ's people) by anointing with oil as a symbolic confession of this truth. The addition of "confession" of faults (Ja.5:15-16) is to clear away the spiritual hindrance which may be the cause of the illness as Paul had warned the believers could result from wrong relationships (disunity) among them (1 Corinthians 11:30).

have seen the Christian practice of laying on hands as the appointed means for 'imparting' God's blessings such as healing, but God's Spirit is not like an electric-current that needs a conduit to reach a recipient. He is the personal presence of the Infinite who needs nothing! The laying-on-hands is simply the personal identification of the intercessor in empathy with the recipient which may in itself serve as a trigger to the waiting faith within the recipient. When Christ felt the surge of the Spirit of God through His body as the haemorrhaging woman was healed by her touching the hem of his cloak, it was an awareness of the Spirit's response to her faith, not a method for distributing healing (Matthew 9:21).

be bold with the compassion of Christ –

to meet people at the point of their need – and not where or how we think they ought to be –

for God cares!