The Praise Cure: How to Access Healing Power

I have administered a good many cures, seen a good many administered, and heard about a good many more.

I remember a friend of mine telling me of one she took. But whatever the results might have been, they were certainly not lasting, as she repeated it every year; and she complained, moreover, that it was very unpleasant.

“It was horribly expensive as well,” she continued, “but as I had plenty of money in those days, that didn’t matter so much; but the unpleasantness of it, I shall never forget.”

“What was there so unpleasant about it?” I inquired.

“Well,  to begin with I had to go to Austria for it, for only there is a certain kind of mineral water to be found, which my doctor says my constitution needs. It is horribly nasty, tastes like sulphur matches and rotten eggs would taste, to judge by the smell. When I got there, I was put in a little attic room and had to be thankful to   get it, the place was so crowded. It was a room such that I should  not dare ask anyone in America to sleep in, not even a tramp. Then we were wakened in the morning at five o’clock by a sort of clapper that made a very loud and grating noise. At the very first stroke we had to leap up.”

“Why such haste?”

“Because if we didn’t get up immediately, we should be late and that meant no breakfast. That was part of the cure!”

“Oh, I understand. I suppose, then, you hastily took your bath and ran down to a well-prepared meal.”

“That’s all you know about it. There was no bathroom; and already blue with cold, I had to wash in a hand basin in ice water. Honestly, I have sometimes found a thin film of ice on the water  in the jug. Then I had to dress as quickly as I could in  all  my  outdoor things, including heavy walking boots, and put on a warm wrap. I then dashed downstairs to join the procession on the way   to breakfast.”

“Why, where was the breakfast?”

“Oh, miles and miles away. That was part of the cure. The road was very rough; I think that was part of the cure, too, to shake up your liver.”

“Well, I suppose you arrived at last and went into a building where they had a huge open fireplace with great logs burning in it and sat down in front of its grateful warmth to a substantial German breakfast, all steaming hot.”

“That shows all you know about it. No, when we reached our destination, we were at a sort of fountain surrounded by a platform, which was always slippery and damp, where we formed in line and at last reached the man who dispensed the water. When you gave your name, he turned to a file he had to see how many glasses you had to drink and handed them to you, one by one, watching to see that you consumed the last drop of each. Then, and not till then, he handed you a ticket that entitled you to breakfast; and you made a mad rush with the rest of the patients to a sort of garden, only it had no flowers in it, only some discouraged shrubs. Here there were some small tables (for we always took our meals in the open air if possible, that being part of the cure), on which were rolls of some kind of black bread; but I tell you it tasted good, and the  only  trouble was the rolls were so small.”

“But you could eat plenty of them, I suppose,” I interjected.

“Maybe you’re a doctor, but it’s plain to me that you know nothing about cures,” my friend said almost contemptuously. “No, we were allowed only two rolls at the most; some patients got only one all the time they were there. Once in a great while, some of us got an egg each or a very thin slice of cold meat with our roll, but that was only by the doctor’s special order.  Then we had a cup of  very weak coffee made with milk. It was hot and was the only warm thing we encountered from the time we got up until dinnertime. They usually had some very thin soup for dinner and two kinds of vegetables—very small helpings—and some days a tiny, tiny bit of meat or fish. No dessert, excepting on gala days, an apple. Supper wasn’t worth mentioning, and often I was deprived of it altogether. This ordeal was considered a great cure, and you had to apply months beforehand to be sure of getting in; and counting your traveling expenses, doctors’ bills and board, it came to be very high.”

That’s one kind of a cure, and there have been and are many others; as the grape cure, where patients are allowed to eat all the ripe grapes they can get but nothing else of any kind; the barefoot cure, where they go barefoot; the hot mud cure—no, they  didn’t have to eat it, only wallow in it. And I am far from saying that nothing is accomplished by these and other kindred methods, but I do say that the cure of which I am going to speak is the only sure cure. It is the most expensive one ever known, but the price was paid by another; for “it was purchased, not with corruptible things, as silver and gold…but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.” (1 Peter 1:19.) And the poorest may enjoy its fullest benefits.

I call it the praise cure because it is most readily applied by simply singing yourself into it: Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name (Ps. 100:4). You know you can sing yourself and shout yourself into and through things that you can’t get into or through in any other way.

There was an old Presbyterian elder who was terribly opposed to anybody making a noise over his religion. He thought religion should be like the newest style of typewriters, absolutely noiseless and with a guarantee to that effect. He had one daughter,  however,   a most saintly girl who had so much glory in her soul that she occasionally boiled over. He labored with her to no effect; for it seemed as though she could not help it, though she hated to grieve her old father. At last one day the old man came to the end of his well-spent life; and as he felt himself entering the valley of the shadow of death, he had a glimpse of the glory that is to be revealed. And to the amazement of all his family, he gave one shout of great joy and cried for his shouting girl, “Come along, daughter, and help me shout my way through clear home to glory.” And that is exactly what she did, though the tears were streaming down her face all the while.

And we can stand on God’s Word for salvation and healing after we have met God’s conditions and grounded every weapon of rebellion.

We can praise our way through to perfect manifested victory. This I call the praise cure, and it never fails when the praise is the outflow of a heart resting on God’s unchanging Word.

There was a missionary to China staying at Mrs. Carrie Judd Montgomery’s Beulah Heights in Oakland, California. She had the most wonderful healing of smallpox while on the field by the application of the praise cure.

She fearlessly nursed a sister missionary who had the disease though she had not been vaccinated, standing on God’s promise that no plague should come nigh her dwelling. Then a very bad case of confluent smallpox—that was what it looked like to the doctors— came out on her, and she did not know what to do; so she asked the Lord, and He told her to sing and praise Him for His faithfulness to His Word. They isolated her and told her to lie quiet; but she said if she didn’t praise God, the very stones would cry out. So she sang and sang and praised and praised. The doctor said he feared for her life, that the case was serious and awful complications threatened. But she praised and praised and sang and sang.

He said she was evidently delirious but that he had so little help that he couldn’t restrain her—and she sang and sang and praised and praised. They told her that if by any chance she recovered, she would be disfigured for life—and she sang and praised louder than ever. They asked, “Why do you praise so much?” She answered, “Because I have so many pox on me. God shows me I must praise Him for each one separately.” And she kept right at it.

The Lord had shown her a vision of two baskets, one containing her praising—half full—and the other, in which was her testing— full.

He told her that the praise basket must be filled so that it would out balance the other,  so she kept at it. Her songs and shouts were  so Spirit-filled that they were contagious, and the Christian nurses couldn’t resist joining in; so they kept the place ringing. At last the Lord showed her that the praise basket was full and overflowing. She saw it sink and the testing basket rise in the air; and in a moment, as it seemed, the eruption and all attendant symptoms vanished, leaving no trace in the way of so much as a single scar.

Perhaps that may seem almost too much to believe to some, but  I can furnish from my own personal experience a case where the smallpox eruption disappeared instantaneously in answer to believing prayer and the application of the praise cure.

One evening we were about to open the meeting at a mission where I was then working when a man rushed into the hall and asked to have a few moments of private conversation with me. After I led him to the prayer room, he said, “Dr.  Yeomans,  my wife has  just broken out all over with smallpox!”

“How do you know that it is smallpox?” I inquired.

“Why, we had a doctor who said so and told us not to stir from the house as he was going down to get the health doctor and have the place quarantined without a moment’s delay. But as soon as he had left the house, my wife said, ‘Run down to the mission. Ask Dr. Yeomans to pray, and I am sure God will clear this plague off my skin and out of my blood.’

So right on the spot we applied the praise cure, and the brother ran home to find his wife without a single trace of the disease. A  little later the doctor returned with the health doctor and was unmercifully teased by the latter for reporting a case of smallpox when there wasn’t a pock in sight, nor any symptom of disease.

“Where is your smallpox?” the health officer inquired. “Well, where is it? It was here when I left.”

“Well, where is it now?” inquired the health doctor; and with some jokes as to the probable character of the beverages, which his colleague had been indulging in, he left the place without any  further comment.

Yes, the praise cure works every time. It is not unpleasant; rather it is delightful; the cost of it has been met for us by another,  and it is available this moment to each of us.

Are you ready to begin it? The last clause of 1 Peter 1:8 tells us exactly how to begin: “Believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.

Just believe what God says that Jesus has done for you, body, soul, and spirit—think about it, talk about it, sing about it, shout about it, and the praise cure has begun. You are not to take it once a year but all the time. I will bless the Lord at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth (Ps. 34:1). The Psalms—the book  of praise inspired by the Holy Spirit, which has been used by the people of God in all ages and which Jesus Himself used—are full of this praise cure. Just observe the first five verses of Psalm 103: Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

I personally knew a man who was dying of acute tuberculosis of the lungs who praised himself into perfect, rugged health that lasted a lifetime. His remarkable recovery and good health was the result of following the words of this Psalm. Begin now. You can’t afford to postpone it by so much as a moment. Tread the young lions under your feet by the praise of faith. It has never failed and never will.

Sometimes people say, “That’s true and I feel better already. But when Jesus spoke the word when He was here in person, the symptoms always disappeared instantly; and mine haven’t disappeared or have only partly disappeared; so I can’t be healed.”

The scriptural answer to this difficulty is  that  the  symptoms did not always disappear immediately, even when Jesus was here   in person.

The nobleman’s son, referred to in John 4:49-53, “began to amend,” or get better, improve, convalesce, at the seventh hour  when the fever left him.

The healing of the blind man at Bethsaida, related in Mark 8:22-25, is not only markedly gradual but in three distinct, separate stages.

First, Jesus took him by the hand and led him out of Bethsaida, which city He had abandoned to judgment. (Mark 8:23; Matt. 11:21-24.) Second, Jesus began the healing with an anointing of spittle,  after which He asked the man if he saw aught (anything). And the man replied that he saw men as trees walking; or in other words, that he had a degree of distorted vision.

If the man who now possessed enough sight to enable him to blunder around had departed and told people that Jesus had healed him but that he could only see to get around and had no use of his eyes for work that required clear vision, I believe he would have done just what many thousands of people who come for prayer for healing are doing today. Those to whom he told his story would have said, “Well, that’s the kind of work Jesus of Nazareth does, is it? It’s a wonder He wouldn’t have made a good job of it while He was at it.” But that wouldn’t have been Jesus’ fault, would it? And it isn’t His fault if you have not perfect soundness. If you are in the second stage, press through to the third one. For in it the man received perfect sight and saw every man clearly. Notice that Jesus made him look up (v. 25), and that one look of faith to the Lamb of God brought perfect restoration of his sight. Let us look into His face and praise Him for the fullness of the redemption He has purchased for us, for it is a wonderful cure—the praise cure—and the only unfailing one that has ever been discovered or ever will be discovered.