John G. Lake: A Case Study in Divine Health

There are men and women throughout Church history whose lives force us to examine what we believe. John G. Lake is one of those men for me. His ministry raises questions about healing, the indwelling Holy Spirit, the life of God within the believer, and what the finished work of Jesus means for the body.

Lake did not only believe that God could heal someone after sickness came. He became convinced that the life of God within a believer could minister continually to the body. He distinguished divine healing from divine health, and that distinction became an important part of his understanding of salvation and life in the Holy Spirit.¹

I have studied Lake at different points since the years following my own baptism in the Holy Spirit. He was one of the historical healing and revival figures I encountered as I began studying the Kingdom of God, healing, the gifts of the Spirit, and life with the Holy Spirit. His life brought me into a larger question than whether God still heals today: What does the indwelling life of God mean for our mortal bodies?

That question is at the center of this case study. I want to look at how Lake came to believe what he did, how divine health took shape in his life and ministry, and what we can learn from his example as we look to Jesus and Scripture for our understanding of healing.

A Family Marked by Sickness

John Graham Lake was born in Ontario, Canada, on March 18, 1870. Sickness was woven deeply into the story of his family. Lake later described years filled with doctors, hospitals, nurses, funerals, and the prolonged suffering of people he loved. He testified that several of his siblings died and that others in his family suffered from serious illness.²

Healing was not an abstract theological question for Lake. He had watched sickness touch people he loved, and he wanted to know whether the Jesus who healed throughout the Gospels was still healing people.

Lake eventually came into contact with the ministry of John Alexander Dowie, whose life I have examined in another case study. Dowie preached Jesus as the present Healer and built a ministry in which prayer for the sick occupied a central place. Lake became connected with Dowie's Christian Catholic Church and spent time within the Zion movement.³

Lake testified to seeing significant healing within his own family during these years. His brother, sisters, and eventually his wife Jennie became part of the story through which his conviction concerning divine healing developed. When Jennie became gravely ill, Lake described reaching a point where Acts 10:38 came alive to him: "God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power," and Jesus "went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him."

Lake prayed for his wife with the conviction that Jesus was still the Healer, and he testified that she recovered. The experience helped settle something in him. Healing was no longer only something he saw in the ministry of Jesus or heard about through Dowie. He believed he had watched the power of Jesus touch his own family.

Lake's understanding of healing continued to grow from the ministry of Jesus. When he looked at Christ, he saw the Father revealed through a Son anointed by the Holy Spirit. The sick came to Him and were healed. The oppressed were delivered. Bodies that had been broken were restored. Jesus then sent His disciples to minister in His name.

Lake became convinced that the Church should expect the ministry of Jesus to continue through people filled with the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit and the Life of God Within Us

Lake's understanding of healing cannot be separated from his experience of the Holy Spirit. Even after seeing healing and praying for the sick, he described a growing hunger for more of God. Healing had shown him something about the power of Jesus, but he wanted to know God more deeply.

Lake increasingly gave himself to prayer. He later described a period in which prayer began occupying more of his attention even while he continued working and carrying the responsibilities of daily life. Eventually he experienced what he understood to be the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

From that point, Lake's teaching increasingly centered on the life of God dwelling within men and women. The Holy Spirit was not only the One who came upon someone during a moment of ministry. He lived within the believer. Christianity was not simply believing truths about God or waiting to be with Him after death. Through Jesus, men and women had become the dwelling place of God by the Spirit.

This conviction became foundational to Lake's understanding of divine health. If the Holy Spirit actually lives within us, then His presence cannot be confined to what we normally call our spiritual life. Lake began asking what the life of God within a believer meant for the whole person, including the physical body.

That question connects Lake's story with my own.

When I gave my life to Jesus at eleven years old, I knew that Christ lived in me, but I did not understand what it meant to live from His life within me. For years my Christian experience often revolved around trying harder, failing, repenting, and trying harder again. I loved Jesus, but I did not yet understand the Holy Spirit as the One dwelling within me and producing the life of Christ from within.

In 2017 that began to change, and healing was one of the first ways God opened my understanding.

My First Encounter with Healing

In 2017 I was serving in a youth ministry arts gathering when I attended one evening with what felt like a bronchial infection. Laura Ottaviano asked if she could pray for me. I had grown up in an environment where present-day healing, tongues, and the supernatural gifts of the Spirit were not taught as expected parts of Christian life, so I had very little framework for what happened next.

Laura prayed in Jesus' name with authority for the sickness to leave. As she prayed, heat rushed through my chest. The symptoms disappeared completely while the heat continued moving through my chest.

I knew God could heal because I had read the Bible. I believed the miracles recorded in Scripture were true. But now I had encountered His healing power in my own body, and it opened something in me.

In the days that followed, I reread the New Testament letters in roughly three days. Passages I had read before began opening to me in a new way. Several weeks later I experienced the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and soon afterward I began praying in tongues. Romans 8:1-2 became one of the defining passages of that season as I began learning that transformation did not come primarily through trying harder but through the Holy Spirit working within me.

I began consuming Scripture and studying healing, the Kingdom of God, the gifts of the Spirit, revival, and historical figures who lived with an expectation of God's power. John G. Lake was among them.

My experience was not identical to Lake's, but I understand why healing became a doorway into larger questions for him. Once you have experienced the power of God touching the body, you begin reading passages about the indwelling Holy Spirit differently. The question is no longer only whether God can intervene when someone becomes sick. You begin asking what it means that the Spirit of the living God has made His home within us.

That question eventually became central to Lake's understanding of divine health.

Divine Healing and Divine Health

Lake gave one of his clearest explanations in a teaching commonly known as "Triune Salvation." Drawing from 1 Thessalonians 5:23, he taught that God's salvation concerned the whole person. Lake did not believe salvation should be understood only in terms of the spirit while the soul and body remained outside the present work of God. Within that framework he distinguished divine healing from divine health.⁴

Divine healing, in Lake's understanding, was the power of God removing sickness that had entered the body. Divine health described something more continuous. He spoke of living day by day and hour by hour in fellowship with God, receiving His life into the whole person. Lake envisioned something beyond repeatedly becoming sick and then seeking God for healing. He believed the life of God could continually minister to the body.

This is where I want to make my own definition clear.

I do not define divine health simply as never becoming sick. If we reduce divine health to the absence of symptoms, we can easily begin measuring someone's faith or relationship with God by the condition of their body. I do not believe Scripture gives us permission to do that.

I understand divine health as the believer learning to live from the indwelling life of God, trusting His resurrection life to minister strength, healing, preservation, and wholeness to the mortal body while we await the fullness of bodily redemption.

Divine healing concerns God restoring what sickness or injury has affected. Divine health begins with the reality that our bodies belong to God and that the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead now dwells within us. It takes healing out of the category of something we think about only when sickness comes and places the body within our daily life with the Holy Spirit.

Lake carried this conviction deeply. His understanding of divine health flowed from his understanding of the indwelling Spirit. He believed that if God had truly made the believer His dwelling place, then His life could not be treated as though it had nothing to do with the body.

Romans 8 and the Spirit of Life

Romans 8 gives us powerful language for understanding what Lake was teaching while also giving us the biblical framework through which I understand divine health.

Paul writes: "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you." Romans 8:11 ESV.

I love the language Paul uses here because he specifically speaks about our mortal bodies. The Holy Spirit is not presented as concerned only with an inward spiritual part of us while the body remains disconnected from His presence. The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells within us, and Paul connects His indwelling presence with life being given to the mortal body.

Lake took this seriously. He looked at Jesus and saw the Kingdom confronting sickness. He looked at Acts and saw the ministry of Jesus continuing through Spirit-filled believers. He looked at Romans 8 and saw the Spirit of resurrection dwelling within the Christian. His understanding of divine health grew from bringing those realities together.

There is a tension within Romans 8 that also helps us understand where we are now. The same chapter that speaks of the Spirit giving life to our mortal bodies says that we are still waiting for "the redemption of our bodies" in Romans 8:23. The Holy Spirit lives within us now, but the fullness of bodily redemption is still coming.

I do not see that as a reason to expect less from God. I see it as the setting in which we learn to trust Him now. We have not yet entered the fullness of resurrection, but the Spirit of resurrection already lives within us. We are waiting for the day when mortality will finally give way to immortality while already experiencing the life and power of the age to come through the Holy Spirit.

This gives divine health a foundation deeper than trying to guarantee that we will never experience sickness. We can trust the Holy Spirit with our bodies now. We can pray for healing when sickness comes. We can ask Him for strength and preservation. We can care for our bodies as belonging to God. We can grow in our awareness of His presence and expect His life to affect every part of who we are.

Lake's life gives us a historical picture of someone who attempted to live from that conviction with unusual confidence.

South Africa and Living from the Spirit of Life

In 1908 Lake traveled to South Africa with Thomas Hezmalhalch and other missionaries. By this point, two streams had deeply influenced his life. Through Dowie and Zion he had encountered a ministry that expected Jesus to heal the sick, and through his experience of the baptism in the Holy Spirit he had come to believe that the power of God was not only something believers sought from heaven but the activity of the Holy Spirit dwelling within them.

Lake carried those convictions into South Africa. He preached salvation, the baptism in the Holy Spirit, divine healing, and the present ministry of the Spirit. His work contributed to the early development of what became the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa and helped establish divine healing as an important part of its early Pentecostal witness.⁵

Lake's years in South Africa also give us some of the clearest pictures of how his understanding of divine health moved from teaching into the way he approached life. He did not want merely to preach that the Spirit of life lived within believers. He wanted to live conscious of that reality when sickness and death were directly in front of him.

One of the best-known examples comes from his testimony concerning a plague outbreak in South Africa. Lake described helping care for the sick and bury the dead while others feared contracting the disease. He testified that he remained free from the plague and connected his confidence directly with Romans 8:2: "the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death."

Lake believed the Spirit of life within him was greater than the disease confronting him.

In the most frequently repeated part of the testimony, Lake described a microscope demonstration involving material associated with the disease. According to Lake, the living germs could be observed under the microscope, but when the material was placed against his hand, they died.⁶ The account comes to us through Lake's testimony, and I want to present it as he gave it rather than build more onto the story than the source gives us.

What I find valuable in the account is the way Lake understood what was happening. His confidence was rooted in the Holy Spirit within him. Romans 8 was not only theology he preached when conditions were favorable. He believed the Spirit of life was present within his body when death was directly in front of him.

I am not suggesting that believers should intentionally expose themselves to disease or turn Lake's experience into a formula. What I want us to see is the consciousness from which he lived. Lake believed the Holy Spirit within him was more than a doctrine to confess. He expected the Spirit's life to have a present effect in his body.

The Spokane Healing Rooms

After returning to the United States, Lake eventually settled in Spokane, Washington, where his convictions concerning healing took another practical form. He established the Divine Healing Institute and developed what became known as the Spokane Healing Rooms. People came for prayer, workers visited the sick in their homes, teaching was provided, and believers were trained to minister healing.⁷

Lake did not want healing ministry centered entirely on himself. He trained others to pray for the sick and expected believers to grow in their ability to minister in Jesus' name. Healing was not supposed to remain the ministry of a few people whose lives seemed unusually supernatural.

There is something deeply biblical in that conviction. Ephesians 4 describes leaders equipping the saints for the work of ministry. Jesus trained His disciples, sent them out, and gave them authority to minister. The book of Acts then shows the Holy Spirit moving through believers as the gospel advances.

I want to see that same expectation in the Church. I want believers to know that praying for the sick is not reserved for a conference speaker or someone with a healing ministry. We can love the person in front of us, listen to the Holy Spirit, lay hands on the sick, pray in Jesus' name, and expect God to move.

Jesus is the Healer. We are not trying to become impressive people with supernatural abilities. We are learning to minister through the Holy Spirit who lives within us.

Lake's Healing Rooms gave practical expression to that conviction. Instead of allowing testimonies of healing to become stories people admired from a distance, he trained people to participate. His theology moved into practice. If the Holy Spirit lived within believers and Jesus had commissioned His followers to minister, then believers could be equipped to pray for the sick.

Divine Health as a Way of Living

Lake's ministry of healing is impressive, but divine health takes us beyond what happens when we lay hands on someone who is already sick. His teaching asks what our relationship with the Holy Spirit looks like before sickness ever comes.

If I only think about God as Healer when my body begins hurting, healing remains primarily a crisis theology. I become conscious of God's power when I need Him to fix something. Lake's understanding of divine health moved the emphasis toward continual fellowship with God. He believed the believer could live in ongoing communion with the Holy Spirit and receive the life of God into the whole person.

I believe we can carry that conviction without turning divine health into a formula or measuring our relationship with God by whether we ever experience physical weakness.

My body belongs to Jesus now. I do not need to wait until I am sick to entrust it to Him. I can thank Him for my body, care for it, pray concerning it, and trust the Holy Spirit to minister His life within me. When sickness comes, I can pray from the awareness that the Healer is not distant. The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead has already made His home within me.

This changes the starting point of healing prayer. I am not trying to convince a distant God to come close enough to do something. I am trusting the God who has already joined me to Christ and filled me with His Spirit.

Lake lived with a radical confidence in that reality. At times he carried his conclusions further than I would, but I do not want the places where I differ with him to weaken what his life can teach us. He expected the indwelling Holy Spirit to have present consequences. He believed the life of God was stronger than sickness, and he ordered his life and ministry around that conviction.

The question his life places before us is not whether we can reproduce every experience Lake reported. It is whether we are willing to take the indwelling Holy Spirit as seriously as he did.

Where I Differ with Lake

Lake's confidence in divine health eventually led him to conclusions I do not believe we need to adopt in order to live with faith for healing. At points in "Triune Salvation," he connected the complete consecration of the body to God with a refusal to depend upon physicians or medicine. He believed that if the body had been fully entrusted to God, then God alone should be relied upon for its healing.⁸

I believe God is our Healer, and I want my confidence to remain in Him. I also believe I can entrust my body completely to God while receiving appropriate medical care. A physician treating the body does not prevent the Holy Spirit from healing it. Medicine and prayer do not need to become opposing choices in which receiving one means I no longer believe in the other.

There is also a danger in turning divine health into a standard by which we measure another person's faith. Someone can love Jesus, walk closely with the Holy Spirit, pray with faith, and still be waiting for healing. Romans 8 speaks of the Spirit giving life to our mortal bodies while also telling us that we are waiting for the redemption of our bodies. We are living in the reality of the Kingdom now while still waiting for its fullness.

I have had to live with that tension myself.

There have been times when I have prayed and watched God heal. I have experienced His healing power in my own body. There have also been times when I prayed and did not see the healing I desired. My wife and I have walked through years in which we have seen substantial healing while some physical recovery has remained ongoing.

I refuse to allow what I have not yet seen to become the lens through which I interpret Jesus. I keep looking at Him.

When I look at Jesus, I see compassion toward the sick. I see Him touching people others avoided. I see authority over disease. I see people restored. I see the Kingdom of God confronting what had held people in bondage, and I see Jesus commissioning His followers to continue His ministry.

When someone remains sick, I do not need to find a reason in them for why healing has not happened. I can continue loving them, praying with them, believing with them, and caring for them. If healing happens immediately, we rejoice. If we see partial healing, we thank God and continue praying. If we do not yet see change, we do not turn the person's suffering into an accusation.

The same Jesus who gives me confidence to pray also teaches me how to love the person I am praying for.

The Resurrection Life of Jesus in Mortal Bodies

My understanding of divine health ultimately comes back to Romans 8:11. The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives within us, and Paul says that God gives life to our mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in us.

I believe we should expect that life to have present consequences. I believe God heals today. I believe His power can touch diseased tissue, restore damaged bodies, remove pain, strengthen weakness, and do things that no human ability can accomplish. I believe we should pray for the sick with expectation because Jesus is alive and the Holy Spirit is present.

At the same time, Paul calls these bodies mortal. A few verses later he says that we are waiting for their redemption. The fullness of divine health is ultimately found in resurrection, when mortality gives way to immortality and death itself is finally destroyed.

Until then, we live with the Spirit of resurrection already within us.

The fact that we have not yet entered the fullness of resurrection does not mean resurrection life is absent from the present. Jesus has already risen. The Holy Spirit has already been poured out. The Kingdom has already come among us. We taste now what will one day fill everything.

Healing is one of those foretastes. When a body is healed, we are seeing something that belongs to the world God is bringing. Disease does not get the final word. Pain does not get the final word. Death itself does not get the final word. The resurrection of Jesus has already revealed how the story ends.

Divine health therefore lives between what Christ has already accomplished and what we will experience fully when He returns. I can trust the Holy Spirit to minister life to my mortal body now while knowing that my final hope is resurrection. That gives me freedom to believe God for more without pretending I have already received everything.

What We Can Glean from Lake

John G. Lake gives us a historical picture of what can happen when someone becomes convinced that the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead actually lives within the believer. His life was shaped by that conviction. He prayed for the sick, trained others to minister healing, and developed an understanding of divine health that extended beyond receiving a miracle when sickness came.

It is possible to affirm the indwelling Holy Spirit while expecting very little from His presence within us. We can believe that God heals while approaching sickness as though healing is rare and distant. We can read the ministry of Jesus, the book of Acts, and the gifts of healings in 1 Corinthians while unconsciously placing those realities in another time or among another kind of Christian.

Lake did not live that way. He expected the Holy Spirit to move.

His life invites us to examine our own expectation without turning his experience into a formula. When sickness comes, where does our heart go first? Do we remember that our bodies belong to Jesus? Do we pray with confidence in His goodness? Do we expect the Holy Spirit to minister life? Are we willing to lay hands on someone who is hurting and believe God with them?

We can also learn from the way Lake equipped others. Healing ministry does not need to be built around a few people with recognizable ministries. Jesus commissioned His followers, and the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon the Church. We should teach believers how to pray for the sick, how to love people without making promises God has not made to us personally, how to recognize what the Holy Spirit is doing, and how to keep praying when healing is progressive rather than immediate.

The goal is not to create people who are fascinated with miracles but disconnected from Jesus. Healing should reveal Him. When someone who has lived in pain experiences the power of God in their body, they are encountering the compassion of Jesus in a tangible way.

That is part of what happened to me in 2017. The healing itself was wonderful, but it awakened hunger. I wanted to know the God who had just touched me. I went back into Scripture. I began discovering the Holy Spirit in ways I had never known before. Healing became part of a much larger discovery of life with God.

I want the same thing when I pray for someone else. I want them healed, but I also want them to encounter Jesus. I want the person who already knows Him to discover more of His goodness and the person who does not know Him to see that Jesus Christ is alive.

The Greater Pursuit

Divine health can never become greater than God Himself.

If the pursuit becomes primarily about maintaining a body that never experiences sickness, our attention can gradually turn inward. We begin examining our faith, our confession, our diet, our decisions, or whether we somehow opened a door to sickness. What began as confidence in the life of God can become another form of striving.

I do not want to live conscious of myself. I want to live conscious of Him.

The treasure of the Christian life is that God has given us Himself. Through Jesus we have been reconciled to the Father, joined to Christ, and filled with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit who hovered over creation and raised Jesus from the dead has made us His dwelling place.

Divine health belongs inside that reality.

I want to know the Holy Spirit, abide in His Presence, and trust His life within me. I want my body surrendered to Jesus because it belongs to Him. I want to care for it with wisdom, pray when something is wrong, receive prayer from others, and expect God to heal. I want to grow in faith without becoming preoccupied with myself.

When I think back to my first experience of healing in 2017, what changed in me went beyond the disappearance of the bronchial symptoms. I encountered the power of God in my body, and that experience made me hungry to know Him. I went back to Scripture because I wanted to understand the God I had encountered. Several weeks later I experienced the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and my life began changing from within.

Healing was one of the ways God opened my eyes to His present activity, but the greatest discovery was the Holy Spirit Himself.

That is still how I want to approach divine health. I want to see the sick healed because Jesus loves people. I want people who have lived with pain to wake up without it. I want damaged bodies restored and diagnoses changed. I want believers to discover that the Holy Spirit can move through them wherever they are. I want to see far more of the healing power of Jesus than I have seen so far.

But I want all of it to lead us deeper into Him.

John G. Lake spent much of his life exploring what the indwelling life of God could mean for the human body. We do not have to reproduce every conclusion he reached in order to receive the challenge his life gives us. He believed the Holy Spirit was present, he expected His power to be expressed, and he refused to confine the life of God to something inward that had little effect upon the body.

His life leaves us with a question worth carrying before the Lord: How much have we really considered what it means that the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead now lives in us?

I want to spend my life finding out.

Notes

1. John G. Lake, "Triune Salvation," in John G. Lake: His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith (Fort Worth, TX: Kenneth Copeland Publications, 1994). Lake distinguishes divine healing, in which disease already present is removed, from divine health, which he connects with continually receiving the life of God through fellowship with Him.

2. John G. Lake, "How I Came to Devote My Life to the Ministry of Healing," in John G. Lake: His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith. Lake describes the prolonged sickness within his family, the deaths of several siblings, and the experiences of healing that helped form his conviction concerning the healing ministry of Jesus.

3. Gordon Lindsay, John G. Lake: Apostle to Africa (Dallas: Christ for the Nations, 1972). See also Lake's autobiographical accounts concerning his connection with John Alexander Dowie, Zion, and the healings Lake associated with that period of his life.

4. Lake, "Triune Salvation." Lake develops his understanding of salvation in relation to spirit, soul, and body and presents divine health as something more continuous than receiving healing after sickness has already developed.

5. Allan Anderson, Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007); Marius Nel, The Pentecostal Movement: A Short History and an Interpretation for South Africa (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023).

6. John G. Lake, "The Law of Life and the Law of Death," in John G. Lake: His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith. Lake recounts his plague experience and interprets it through Romans 8:2 and the "law of the Spirit of life." The microscope episode is presented in this case study as Lake's testimony rather than expanded beyond the account he gave.

7. John G. Lake, letter of June 16, 1916, concerning his Spokane ministry and healing work. Lake describes regular healing ministry, teaching, workers ministering alongside him, and visitation of the sick in their homes. See also Lindsay, John G. Lake: Apostle to Africa.

8. Lake, "Triune Salvation." Lake's teaching at points connects complete consecration of the body with reliance upon God rather than physicians. The present case study receives Lake's confidence in God as Healer while distinguishing that confidence from a requirement that believers refuse appropriate medical care.

Bibliography

Anderson, Allan. Spreading Fires: The Missionary Nature of Early Pentecostalism. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007.

Lake, John G. John G. Lake: His Life, His Sermons, His Boldness of Faith. Fort Worth, TX: Kenneth Copeland Publications, 1994.

Lindsay, Gordon. John G. Lake: Apostle to Africa. Dallas: Christ for the Nations, 1972.

Nel, Marius. The Pentecostal Movement: A Short History and an Interpretation for South Africa. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023.

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2016.