Foreword to The Importance of Healing

Foreword

Healing is a difficult subject to talk about. 

Many of us have known people close to us who have been seriously sick or who  have died.  It may even be we ourselves who are sick.  We or they have done everything that we or they knew what to do and yet the sickness remained.  We always want to be compassionate with those who suffer, and we don’t want to be like Job’s friends who turned out to be “miserable comforters.”  It is often easy to talk and offer solutions when we are the ones who are healthy. 

            Yet we must not lose sight of the fact that our goal is to help each other. 

We may say that it is not God’s will to heal us, yet we continue our medications and religiously follow our doctor’s instructions.  Whatever it is that God wants, we still want to be well. 

            Yet there are others I have known who have chosen to remain sick.  They believe this suffering either shows God their devotion to Him or in some way it makes them feel more worthy of God’s favor.

            If you have tried to be healed supernaturally and nothing seemed to happen, we do not want to add to your burden by adding guilt or blame.  To say that there is more that we can do is to offer hope, not condemnation.  To say that it is entirely in the hands of God and there is nothing more for you to do does not really offer hope, especially when it is believed that God may very well want you to die in your disease.

            It is our belief, on the contrary, that God does want people to be well, that sickness is not what He wants, and that, frankly, the choice is ours.  Yes, there is more to life that we will ever understand while we live, but health and healing should be the norm rather than the exception.

            The fact is that serious illness will face all of us at some point in our lives, whether in our own bodies or in someone we love.  Now is the time to prepare for that and to understand God’s purposes and His provisions.  If you knew that some time in your life, you would have to face an adversary in physical combat to the death, would you not now prepare for that time?  Would you not train and do what you could to be ready?  When you hear the doctor pronounce the grim news of his diagnosis is not the time to learn about healing.  Now is the time.

            And, of course, the benefits are far more than just feeling better.  You will see that God’s love really does make a difference in your life now, that God is more than just a sympathetic bystander but indeed the deliverer of His people.

            In this book I have tried to reach as broad of an audience as possible.  That means that I have tried to assume little or no prior Biblical knowledge in the main text.  I have also tried to keep the main text free from theological jargon.  I believe it is also necessary to write to the professors and teachers and pastors who teach our future pastors and who feed their flocks every week.  If they are not convinced that this is relevant and important and, most importantly, true, then my book will simply become another fad that will pass when the new latest fad appears. 

            With this in mind, I have included the original Greek and Hebrew texts of many of the Scripture verses I have quoted.  The translations are my own, and I have tried to stay as literal as possible, though at times the English may be a bit clumsy.  To save time, I would print out an English translation of the text and then change what I needed to make it more literal.  I know many recent popular books have used whatever modern translation sounds the best for what the author is trying to say.  I think this can give the impression we are trying too hard to convince someone of the truth of our message. 

I think too that we as a Church have gotten away from a serious engagement with the text of Scripture.   We judge the validity of a translation by its readability rather than by its accuracy.  The more “modern” the translation, the more the translator has had to interpret the text for us to make it more understandable.  There are also too many passages of Scripture that we just don’t talk about anymore.  So they are here, and the original texts are included, so that we might listen anew to the Word of the Lord.

            

Introduction to The Importance of Healing

Introduction

            If Jesus were physically present in your church on Sunday, and He were to say to you, “I can stay after the service for an hour or so.  What can I do for you while I am here,” what would you tell Him?  What do you think your church would ask of Him? 

            Why do I think that people will line up and down the aisles and ask Him to heal them?  I could be wrong.  I am not saying that physical healing is the most important thing that we need.  But I will say that at many times in our lives it will be the most important thing in the world to us. 

            We can always use more love or more patience or more kindness.  We could always be smarter, wiser, and more knowledgeable.  But health is something that we either have or we don’t.  At least that’s how most of us view it.  We either hurt or we don’t.  We are either sick or we are well.

            And when we are sick, or when we hurt, it has a way of getting our attention more than the fact that we find ourselves being angry over things that shouldn’t bother us or the fact that we can’t stand our neighbors.

            I would agree that it is far more important that we become loving people than that we are healthy people.  It is far more important that our minds are free of dirt than our bodies are free of germs. 

            Yet we need to talk about it.  The fact is it is hard to be kind to people when we don’t feel good.  It is hard to be patient when we hurt.  It is hard to be joyful when we can’t even think straight.  It is hard to worship God when all we want to do is watch television to get our minds off our pain.

Healing is a difficult subject.   I wouldn’t presume to say that I have all the answers.  But to say that we don’t have all the answers does not mean that we don’t have any.  To say that some things about God’s will are  unknown does not mean that everything about God’s will is unknown.  To say that because somebody we know was not healed does not mean that you shouldn’t expect to be.  And to say that we can’t tell God what to do does not mean that we are not supposed to keep asking, seeking, knocking for something that we should expect Him to do.

            Healing is a painful subject.  Many of us have lived with people who have suffered and died, good people who have prayed; and nothing seemed to happen.  We have been sick ourselves, but maybe the sickness just has to run its course like with everyone else, or you find that no matter what you do, everything stays the same.  Year after year after year, and you just give up.  You know this just ain’t going away.  You just have to live with it.

            But do you find that your spiritual life just isn’t what you think it should be?  Sure, you can worship God, even get tears in your eyes as you worship in church.  But this is because you know that God is worthy, God is God, and we are just mortal humans who deserve nothing from God, but all we have from Him is due to His grace.  And even without health, we know He is worthy of our praise and thanksgiving for, oh, so much.

            Yet.  Yet there remain questions, not necessarily even specific ones, but lingering feelings of disappointment.  Yes, in some bigger scheme of things, this is all supposed to work together for some greater good, but you just can’t help but wonder how your experience has made you or is making you a better person.  Or you watched as someone suffered and died, and you wondered why God seemed to stand there doing nothing and it just didn’t seem a very loving thing to do. 

            If you (God) can do something but won’t, what does that tell me about Your love?  And if you want to do something but can’t, for whatever reason, what does that do for me when I have another problem, like losing my job?

            Every time we experience or see someone suffering whom we know and care about, and we don’t see God working to alleviate it, little by little it can diminish our enthusiasm for God.  We may still use the word ‘love’ for God, but our joy in God will become more qualified, more bounded rather than boundless.  Instead of wanting to dance before the Lord, we may still raise a hand, or two, but something will be missing.  And we may or may not know just what it is.  The song may say “Shout for joy,” but you won’t..

Healing is a heated subject.  And there are three particular questions that stand out.  To talk about healing seems to presume that we know what God’s will is in the matter.  And the fact is most of us are very reluctant to presume what His will is in the matter.  One reason, of course, is that, if it is His will to heal, why didn’t He do it already?  What on earth is He waiting for?  Then, too, why did we get sick in the first place?  If He allowed it to happen, it must have been His will, right?  Then why would He then turn around and undo what He seemed to have wanted in the first place?

We will look at these questions in more detail later, but the fact remains that the Church today is quite divided on what God’s will is in the matter.  We can see a parent with three young children come down with a life-threatening illness, and yet still admit that for some reason we don’t understand, it very well may be God’s will for that person to die and leave these children fatherless or motherless.

We know that God is infinite and we are finite, and we know that there will always be things about God and life that we will never understand this side of heaven, but then in real life the result is that we see no pattern or apparent purpose in God’s actions or His will.  One day (usually quite rarely) He does a great healing in someone’s life, but more often we are left to the doctors to do whatever it is they can do.  If the doctor’s treatment works, we thank God for the results.  If things don’t go so well, that must have been what God wanted as well. 

Now it is true that we will never understand all that God does in the world.  There will be reasons for Him to do or not do things that we may never find out about.  Yet the Bible makes it clear that we can know God[1] or at least it is common in churches to hear talk about knowing God or having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. 

But what does it mean to know God, to know anybody?  Now we often use the expression to refer to someone that we have met, that we have been introduced to.  We hear a name, and we blurt out: “Oh, I know him, or her.”  But all we mean is that, if we were to see them in an airport, they might smile at us and even pass the time of day while we are waiting. 

We use the expression at times when we know a lot about a person, facts, details, a bit of their history.  But if someone were to presume they knew us on the basis of these facts about us, we would insist that they don’t really know us.  And we would be right.  Until you understand why I do what I do, and what I think about, and what is important to me, and what I am trying to do with my life, and what I love and what I hate, you don’t really know me.  If you knew me, you could probably predict what I would do in a certain situation, what kind of dessert I would like, what kind of clothes I would buy, what kind of car. 

True, we will never fully understand God, but He did give us a 1,000+ page book that is supposed to reveal Himself to us, a record of His dealings with humans over the course of 4,000 years.  Now, if God doesn’t change, which is something that most Bible students would agree upon, then you would think that some patterns would develop, that there would be some consistency in how God responds to human sickness.  Does He have anything to say about it?  I think the answer is: Quite a bit, actually!

The fact is the Bible talks a lot about sick people.  There are many, many instances where sick people come to Jesus or His disciples (or apostles) for help.  And the response is very consistent. 

Another question that troubles people is that they feel like expecting God to do certain things is like we are bossing Him around, like we are expecting Him to do what we say rather than we seeking to do what He wants.  I agree that it would be a very foolish thing for a person to live a life without God, to form one’s values apart from God, to make one’s decisions without consulting God.  I agree that you would not want anything that God does not want for you nor should you seek anything that God would not bless.  The Bible is clear that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge”[2] and “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”[3]  It is only a life that is formed around the knowledge of God that can be said to be living wisely. 

So this means, first of all, that if you try to figure out life without including God, all your conclusions will be wrong, like doing math problems without knowing the value of the variables, without even knowing there are variables.   But we have already tried to show that there is consistency in what God wants in the world. 

The second question asks how much we can expect God to work to bring about these things.  We know that God wants us to provide for our families, but He expects us to work to do that, right?  So if God wants us well, He expects us to take care of ourselves and to get the best medical treatment possible, right?

            According to the latest statistics, 40,000,000 Americans today are without medical insurance.  I am sure that in many countries in the world, there isn’t even that option.  So, are we saying that, when it comes to a person’s health, medical treatment is our first option?  I am not sure this is the approach the Bible supports.

            There is the familiar story of a woman who came to Jesus for a condition that she had for 12 years.[4]  It says that she spent all she had on physicians and only got worse.  That possibility is very real today as well.  She came to Jesus and received healing.  He then told her that her faith had made her well.[5]  Must we be like her and spend all we have on medicine and doctors before God heals us? 

            There is another story where Paul the Apostle and Luke, a physician, land on the island of Malta.[6]  I suppose Luke could have started a clinic; but, instead, all the people came to Paul for healing.  The impression given in the text is that everyone who came to Paul for healing was healed.  How interesting that there was no one there whom God thought it best that they remain in their sickly condition!

            If we are to exhaust all human efforts before God steps in to help us, then I think we are establishing a dangerous precedent.  How can we ever say that we have done all that we can?  How often have we looked back on some misfortune or some failure and not thought that we could have done better?  Isn’t God to be our first resort rather than the last?  Isn’t this where the Israelites often made their big mistakes?[7]  In trying to do all that they could to protect themselves from their enemies, it was so hard for them, as well as it would be for us, not to join forces with the ungodly, either because they are the experts in a matter, or because you both have a common enemy.  I think God’s response is that He doesn’t want and doesn’t need their help. 

            Am I saying that we shouldn’t go to doctors?  Not at all!  But I am saying that we need to know where our real help is, and that what He does is not limited to what the doctors do, say, or know. 

            But our second question asks if believing in healing presumes too much, that it expects God to work when and in ways that He might not want, and we are trying to force God to do what we want. 

            The disciples came to Jesus once and asked Him to teach them how to pray.[8]  He describes prayer as going to a friend in the middle of the night, waking him up, and not leaving until you get what it was you came there for.  It can be foolish asking, or demanding, that God do something for us, when we don’t have any idea what we are doing.  But when we know what God wants, sometimes we will have to stand our ground until we get it.  I think this is one reason why the Old Testament has so many stories about wars and fighting.  Even in the New Testament, there is talk about a war.[9]

            What all this means is that there are spiritual forces in this world that oppose God and His people, that what we see on the surface is not always what God wants for His people or for the world, and that the only way to bring about God’s purposes is to stand strong and wage spiritual warfare. 

            The third question that troubles people about healing has to do with the fact that we all know of someone, maybe it’s us, who prayed and prayed for healing and it didn’t come.  They did all the right things and yet they died.  Wasn’t Paul not healed of something?   This is a difficult question, and I need to be careful not to be insensitive.  But I do think we need to make clear what the issues here really are. 

            Let me detour for a minute here first.  There is a story in the Bible about David and Goliath.[10]  The story is a familiar one,  so familiar that I think we often don’t even think twice about it anymore.  But there were two opposing armies in a standoff.  The champion of one was a giant named Goliath, who challenged the other army to send their champion to fight him one on one.  But no one was willing to face him.  They were afraid.  But one young lad, who wasn’t even a soldier volunteered and even killed Goliath.  What was the difference?

            David had learned how to win by having to face a lion and a bear earlier in his life while tending sheep.  He was able to learn from past, smaller victories how to win bigger ones.  Most people don’t give a thought to healing until they are face to face with a serious, life-threatening illness.  When that happens, it is hard not to be afraid and often hard to even think clearly about what God’s will might be. 

            I don’t know about anyone else but myself.  I first learned about healing when I was healthy, long before I was diagnosed with cancer.  I saw how this worked with headaches and earaches and all those mysterious pains that suddenly hit you and you don’t know where they came from. 

            Now I used to have to go to the doctors frequently for all kinds of infections and pains.  And then I didn’t.  And then when I got cancer, my first response was not to take the treatment but to give God a chance to work.  If I just took the chemo right away, how would I know what God did or the doctors?

            But back to the third question:  if a person is not seeing healing, there are only two basic options.   Either this is God’s doing, meaning it’s entirely His decision not to heal you, or somehow, somewhere, the reason lies within us.  We have all been in circumstances where if we had been smarter, stronger, faster, better educated, whatever, we would have achieved something, gained something, or in some way attained different results in something in our lives.

            Do we blame God because we didn’t make the dean’s list, or because we lost the championship tennis match?  Even the disciples were unable to help a man with a demon possessed son, because of their lack of faith.[11]

So when healing doesn’t come, either it was God’s decision, or something on our end made the difference.  So the tendency is to say that God had a greater good in mind. That can be hard to explain to the small children who are left behind. 

We don’t want to say that somehow it was our fault.  That sounds so cruel or guilt-producing.  So it’s better to say that it was God’s fault?  But fault isn’t even the right word here.  It’s not blame, but responsibility. 

Ask the question: is everything in life God’s will?  If it is, why do people pray for things?  We should all only be giving thanks for everything that is.  So if prayer changes things, so that means there are probably an awful lot of things that need changing in the world.   And who among us will say that we pray as much as we should, or that we even pray in the manner that we should.  Even the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. 

So if there are things in life that need to be changed, and our prayers are one of the main instruments for doing that, and no one of us would claim to pray as much as we should or could, and, since, like the disciples, we too need to be taught how to pray, and who would say we have learned enough, then surely somewhere there must be things that are not good that could have/ should have been changed but were not because of human failure. 

But surely not our prayer for healing, or that of our Aunt Harriett!  Consider that man with the demon possessed son that we mentioned earlier.[12]  This son had had the problem since his youth.  We don’t know how long this was, but Jesus asked the father how long it had been, so his son was not very young.  The man asked Jesus if He could help, because the disciples could not.  And Jesus’ response is: “(As for ) that if you can, all things are possible to the one who believes.”[13] 

So here is this distraught man with a son possessed by a spirit which has been trying to kill him for years.  Has this father prayed for his son prior to this?  I am sure he has.  But so far nothing has happened.  Then he asks Jesus for help, and Jesus essentially tells him: “Sir,  if you could have believed it, your son could have been healed years ago.”  Unlike us, Jesus was not hesitant to chide His listeners for lack of faith.[14]  This seems to me the thing that upset Jesus the most with His disciples and the thing that took them the longest to learn. 

When I was a kid, there were bigger, stronger, or older kids who often picked on me.  They could push me around and hurt me if and when they wanted to.  God allowed them to, so should I blame God for this?  What if, when I was younger, my father told me:  “Now, son, when you go off to school, you will most likely meet other kids who are bigger, stronger, or older than you who will want to steal from you, pick on you, and generally make your life miserable.  So, I want to prepare you for that time.  I am going to train you to become stronger physically and to be able to defend yourself against any and all bullies.” 

I believe it is the same with physical illness and a myriad of other problems that we will face in our lives.  Jesus talked about moving mountains and doing things that are impossible, and we look at that as hyperbole.  We don’t take it seriously, and what church teaches its people on how to grow their faith to do these very things?

You can’t read the Bible for very long without seeing that it shows a reality of God both in His presence and in the demonstration of His power which is greatly lacking in our churches and lives today.  Theologians, Bible teachers, and pastors have tried to provide explanations why this is so.  The most common view taught today is that God doesn’t intend for it to be that way.  I think any position that removes all responsibility from us and places it entirely on God should be examined very carefully before we hold on to that very tightly.  It is our view in this book that, at least as it applies to healing, there is very much more that we can do to see God’s power work in our lives.  And it is important that we do just that.

           

           

           

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[1] John 17:1-3     These things Jesus spoke and, having lifted His eyes to heaven, He said, "Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son that the Son may  glorify You, just as You have given Him authority over all flesh, in order that all which You have given to Him, He may give to them eternal life.  And this is the eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and the One you have sent, Jesus Christ.

[2] Proverbs 1:7

[3] Proverbs 9:10

[4] Mark 5:25-34

[5] Mark 5:34 o( de\ eiåpen au)tv=, Quga/thr, h( pi¿stij sou se/swke/n se:  “ But He said to her, Daughter, your faith has saved you.”  The perfect tense emphasizes her present condition as that of being saved, and the word ‘save’ sw/zw (sode’ –zoh) can be used of any kind of deliverance from something, including sickness.

[6] Acts 28:1-10  The island is Meli/th (me-lee’-tay), translated as Malta.

[7] I Kings 3:1, II Chronicles 25:5-10,  Isaiah 30:1,2

[8] Luke 11:1-13

[9] Ephesians 6:10-17

[10] I Samuel 17

[11] Matthew 17:14-20

[12] Ibid., Mark 9:14-28, Luke 9:37-43

[13] Mark 9:23

[14] Matthew 6:30, 8:26, 14:31, 16:8, 17:20

1. A Story of a Healing

1.         A Story of a Healing

My doctor called me at work on a Friday  [September, 1996].  When the doctor himself calls you and tells you to come to his office the next day first thing in the morning, which was a Saturday, and to bring your wife, you know this is serious.  He told me I had cancer.  When we were driving home afterwards, my wife was surprised that I had no emotions about the whole thing.  I felt like all my emotions had been sucked out of me long before this. 

God’s work in my life didn’t just deal with the cancer, and it didn’t just start when the diagnosis was made.  The cancer was the bottom of a long spiraling descent.  My life was falling apart.  I was falling apart.  My life wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.  I know some people say that I went through a midlife crisis.  I wouldn’t call it that.  A midlife crisis, at least as I understand it, is where a person wakes up to the realization that his or her life is going in the wrong direction, that they need to find out who they really are or what it is they need to do with their lives. 

I knew all that for years.  I knew what I wanted to do with my life for years, since I was a teenager.  And as I grew older, it was like I was watching that dream go further and further away and I couldn’t stop it.  There was no sudden revelation.  I had been watching it happen for years.

I don’t know how much anybody else was really aware of what was going on if anything.  I was always a quiet person and usually quite expressionless.  Nobody would ever accuse me of being a happy person, though I would never really say that I was sad.  That would be admitting that my Christian life was not working out right.  But the fact is, for my whole life, I would have to say that my natural disposition bordered on sadness or depression.   

What my family was seeing and what I did not want my kids to see was that I was very tired when I came home from work, and I spent a lot of time watching videos.  I have thousands of books at home and I was too tired to look at them.  I had little interest or energy for things around the house either.

I think it is important to understand just where I was at psychologically and emotionally at this point.  I am going to lay it on a little thick, but it is all true and it will make what happened later much more meaningful.

I knew where I wanted to be.  I knew it my whole adult life.  But I spent 25 years not doing what I felt I should be doing, going further and further from what I had wanted almost my whole life and watching it happen.

1.         So I was miserable, though I would never really admit that.  That would be admitting defeat or failure.  I knew all about counting one’s blessings, but the fact was my whole life seemed to be wrong. 

2.         I was getting older and I hated the way my life was turning out.  How could it possibly be further from what I had wanted for my life, from what I felt I was supposed to do with my life?  I had a career I never wanted and felt was robbing me of what I really wanted to do with my life.  The work wasn’t so bad, but I was giving my best time and energy to something I did not want and had very little left over for the things I really wanted.

 This never affected my work, because I always worked hard and usually enjoyed my work.  I just wanted to be somewhere else.  So while I often enjoyed my work, I hated the fact that I was there and not doing the things that I wanted to do with my life. 

I felt I was living a double life.  I would give my best time and energy to something I didn’t want to do, and then when I would get home, I would try to do what I really thought I should be doing.  I didn’t spend the time with my wife and kids and other people like I should or would have liked to.  I was always thinking about how little time and energy I had for what really mattered to me.

3.         I was angry. I felt I had made a wrong turn 30 years ago and couldn’t get back on the right track.  I felt like I had wasted the last 25 years of my life.  People my age had already spent 25 years or more doing the things they wanted and now were at the peak of their careers. 

4.         I felt trapped.  I made a wrong turn, though I didn’t really know how or when, and now I had no way out.  All my efforts to change my life were thwarted.  I had gotten on the wrong boat and was getting further and further from where I wanted to go every day it seemed.

5.         I had a strong sense of disappointment.  I was disappointed in God.  I felt He could have and should have done more for me in my life.  I had always heard about this great love that God has for His people, but what I saw and felt did not move me greatly.  Is love only a feeling or a description of one’s thoughts of another?  Or is it a disposition that moves one to action on behalf of another?  I long thought and felt that God could have and should have done far more for me on the basis of this love that He was supposed to have for me.  So in my head, I would have to say that God loved me and I knew it.  But it is another thing to feel loved by another, and I could not say that I felt loved by God.

I believed in what I considered a promise from God, and it always seemed to be later.  If a human makes a promise to you, generally you would expect the person to act on it shortly.  With God any time before you die is okay, or even as in Abraham’s case, hundreds of years later.

Proverbs 13:12 says that “Hope deferred (brings) sickness of heart, and a tree of life desire coming (has come).”  I felt like the promises that I believed God had given me in my life kept getting pushed back.  I often described it as coming to the end of my rope, and then, after hanging for a while, finding that the rope suddenly got longer.  But I was always having that sense that the end of the rope was near.

I saw a God who would let His people flounder around for years trying to find the right thing to do with God just sitting there waiting until they got it right.  There was a famous amusement park in Chicago, where I grew up, called Riverview.  It had an attraction that I loved to go in: Aladdin's Castle.  There was a room which was a labyrinth, where every wall looked like a door and you had to push on every one to find out which was really a door and which was a wall.  I felt that the Christian life was a lot like that.  At least my life did.  I would ask God for direction and usually get nothing.  Then I would get something which seemed like a direction, and it would turn out to be what seemed a dead end. 

I was familiar with examples in the Bible of people to whom God had made promises and who went through experiences where it seemed like those promises would never, couldn’t, come to pass.  I felt the same way, yet even knowing this pattern, that God will often do that, it still did not take away the pain that there would be no way out apart from a miracle.  While I believed in miracles, after years of waiting, it was hard to really think you would get what you had been looking for.

6.         I hurt inside, from things people had done to me.  I had forgiven them, but like you can forgive the person who ran over you with their car, you might still have a broken hip and be in pain.  The mere sight of a church building often caused me to hurt inside.  It stood for a whole way of life that I wanted more than anything but couldn’t have.

7.         I felt frustrated, like an athlete who used to start on another team but now was sitting on the sidelines for no reason that he could think of.  I had to watch but couldn't participate.  Why?  Who knows?

8.         I had a deep sense of loss.  I had skills that weren’t being used and which I felt were deteriorating.  Like a musician who couldn’t practice and whose chances of making the symphony were becoming more remote because he couldn’t compete with those who spent their lives in music.

9.         I felt like I was a failure, not in every particular thing, but overall.  Though I knew what my strengths were, I was all too aware of where I was weak and where I had really blown it.  There were times, sometimes in the middle of the night, when I would go through my whole life and see how I had failed in some major way in every area.

10.       I felt like I was dying inside, like the life was being sucked right out of me.  Literally?  We’ll see.

11.       I had a number of problems which will go unnamed.  But let me say that they were big ones, and ones that I felt completely powerless to change.  It would have to take a miracle, and after so many years, that seemed quite unlikely.

 Some time in 1995 or 1996, I was riding home from work on my bike, and I felt God say to me, “I want you to get to know Me.” 

My first reaction was, “What?  What have I been doing for the last 35 years?”

1.         When I was about 14, I was going to confirmation class because my parents wanted me to.  I had to memorize the Apostle’s creed – I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Savior - and I realized that I did believe in God and all these other things about Him and His Son.  Right then my whole life changed.  I knew immediately as a consequence of believing in God that He was the most important thing in life, and my highest priority was to get to know Him and to serve Him.

2.         When I was a senior in high school, I dropped my advanced math and science courses, because I was no longer interested in things like that.  I wanted to study the Bible. 

3.         After high school, instead of going to the university to train for a high paying secular job, I went to a Bible school, because I wanted to learn the Bible and go into full-time Christian work. 

4.         After Bible school, I didn’t go on to further schooling at that time, because I believed that what I really needed, I couldn’t get in school: I needed to get to know God and people.  I would get a secular job to learn what life was like on the other side of the pulpit

5.         I studied Greek and Hebrew on my breaks at work, so I could study the Bible in the original languages.  I would spend all my extra money on books to learn all I could about anything pertaining to God and church.

6.         I later quit a good paying job so I could work in a new church that I started, where I would have no sure income. 

7.         When I later got my master’s degree, I didn’t get it in computer science or business, so I could make a good living.  I got it in Biblical Studies, because I wanted to know more about God and to be able to teach it to others.

 Now He tells me I needed to get to know Him.  I long had believed that God had promised me some things about my life and that they were due, even long overdue.  I thought I was near to the light at the end of the tunnel.  I then saw that light and it turned out to be the light at the beginning of the next tunnel.

But I saw that all the things I was doing for God had nothing or little to do with knowing God.  It is one thing to know in my head that God loved me but quite another to believe it in m heart.  It is one thing to know that I should trust God for everything, but another thing to actually do it.  One thing to say that I love God and another to really enjoy Him.  One thing to be able to teach a lesson on joy, and another to actually have joy.  Especially when there were so many things in life that I really wanted, things that I felt I needed, things that I had been praying for and was not seeing.

Now He was asking me if I could be happy if I never got those things, if I only had Him.  Could I love God even if He didn’t answer my prayers?  Could I love Him for himself apart from His gifts?  Could I believe that He was doing the right thing even when I didn’t like it?  I knew from the story of Job that I would never know all that was going on and why things may not be going on to my liking.  God wanted me to love Him for Himself, like two people in love where all that mattered was just being together.  But that was not to come soon or easy.  I told God, I would try.

One morning in early June 1996, I woke up and heard the words: “Rejoice always.”  Not audibly but very real.  Four things came to my mind immediately:

1.         I knew that that was in the Bible, and I had known that for at least 30 years.

2.         I knew that in the original Greek that verse said, “Always rejoice.”

3.         I knew that two verses later it said: “In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God for you.”

 4.        I knew that God had spoken. 

I was looking for the direction of God in my life, and I knew He had just given me some very clear instruction.  Now these verses have always been in the Bible, and I should have been practicing them from the beginning, but I wasn’t.  So here I was looking for something to do with my life, and I get this?

Now this was not easy, but I knew I had to do it.  So I started thanking God for my life and how I hated it.  When I got angry about something, I would thank God I was angry.  I thanked God for the job I hated.  I thanked God for the people who hurt me.  Did I feel like it?  Did I enjoy this?  Did I mean it?  I did it because I knew God wanted me to.  No other reason.

Several days later, I was playing ball with my sons and, while picking up a ball and holding the bat in the other hand, the end of the bat pressed into my chest.  It felt really strange.  Usually I just brush pain off.  But this was different.  I stopped playing ball after a few minutes and went to bed early.  In the middle of the night, I woke up and couldn’t move.  Oh, I could move, but I didn’t want to.  It hurt too much.  I slowly got dressed and my wife drove me to the hospital.  They took CT scans and said I had a deep bruise.  They advised me to see a certain doctor for follow-up on Monday.  What, take off work to see a doctor for a deep bruise?  So no, I didn’t go.  I was still at the hospital when I had to call my boss about work that day.  It still hurt me a lot to try to get upright, so I took the day off.  In a few hours, the pain subsided enough to get around, so my wife drove me home.  The next day I was almost 100%, and I never gave it another thought.

About a month later, I woke up while dreaming of teaching a Bible class on James 1:2-4.  “Count it all joy when you fall into various trials,” it says.  My whole life felt like a various trial.  But again, I knew God had spoken and I knew that I had to regard the very things that I hated as reasons to be happy.  It wasn’t easy, but knowing it was the right thing to do, it gradually became easier.  Gradually means about three months, six months, a year.

            Near the end of August 1996, I got a letter from the doctor I was supposed to see asking me why I hadn’t come in to see him.  The letter said that I had enlarged lymph glands.  Well, nobody had told me that.  So what does that mean?  He wanted me to meet him at the hospital the next day before work for some blood tests.  The blood tests would rule out things like HIV and the next step would be to take a biopsy.  When all the blood tests came out negative, I switched to our family internist who then recommended an oncologist.  When the oncologist wanted to do more blood tests, my doctor said, “No.  Just get into the hospital tomorrow and get a biopsy.  It’s been three months already.”

The diagnosis was mixed-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  I don’t know the difference between Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins, but I did learn that mixed cell means large and small cell cancer, the large cell being aggressive, the small cell not.  It was in stage 3, which is 3 out of 4, meaning it was pretty well spread throughout my body.  The next step was to get a bone marrow biopsy. 

I had a problem here, and I don’t mean the cancer.  I already believed in healing.  I had studied it for years and have seen it work many times, though on smaller things.  But I had learned very early that it was important that I had to want to be well.  And now I wasn’t sure.  I didn’t really care whether I lived or not.  Now that scared me.  Now this was several months after I had started to rejoice always, but the pain and the hopelessness were only gradually going away.  We’re talking slow progress here.

I knew I needed help.  I couldn’t get a will to live on my own.  On the way to work a couple days later, God reminded me of the story of Aaron and Hur.  The Israelites had been attacked by the Amalekites.  Moses went up on a hill with his staff, called the rod of God.  When he held it over his head, Israel prevailed.  When he let it down, Amalek prevailed.  When he got too tired, he sat on a large stone and Aaron and Hur held up his arms until the battle was won. 

 I knew I needed two people to pray for me, but I couldn’t just ask someone to pray for me.  I knew if I had asked someone, they would have agreed, but their heart may not have been really into it.  I needed someone who really wanted to.  In the next two days, two friends called me unexpectedly, and I knew they were the right ones.  Within a week or so, that empty sense of not caring had left.

Then in my Bible study, I came across the verse that says: A broken spirit dries the bones.  (Proverbs 17:22: A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.)  I said, “That’s me.”  Remembering how that bat hurt me that first day and that now I was scheduled for a bone marrow biopsy made me think that my bones were already affected.  But how do you fix a broken spirit?  I remembered immediately Ephesians 5:18:  “Be filled in spirit, speaking to yourselves with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father, being subject to one another in the fear of Christ.” 

I know most translations read, “Be filled with the Spirit.”  But I also knew enough Greek to know that this phrase in Greek was different from any other expression in the New Testament for being filled with the Holy Spirit.  I also knew that there were five participles following that sentence describing this filling.  Most teachers I have heard say that these five participles showed the results of being filled.  On the contrary, they were the means to this filling.  I was convinced that the Bible was telling me how to fill my Spirit in contrast to filling it with wine, like in the previous verse. 

These participles were: “speaking to yourselves in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father, being subject to one another in the fear of Christ.”  Those who saw these participles as results of being filled with the Spirit would not see them as something that we are to initiate on our own, but they would wait and hope for God to do this for them.  But I saw that these are things I needed to do to fill my spirit and consequently heal it.  So I began memorizing Bible passages again, Psalms and other scriptures that God brought to mind, and I would sing and make melody to God.  The passage also spoke of giving thanks, so I made sure to continue that as well.

My bone marrow test was postponed for a week or so.  When I finally had the test, it turned out to be negative.  I can’t prove that that extra week made a difference, but I believe it did. 

The doctor again confirmed the original diagnosis and told me that the treatment would be chemotherapy, and that I should start right away.  I told her I did not want chemo.  This was the first time I had actually said this, so my wife was surprised as well as the doctor.  I don’t really know what to say, so she then said we would get another opinion.  We went to Northwestern Memorial Hospital about three weeks later.  They agreed with the original diagnosis and urged me to start chemo right away.  Again I told them I did not want chemo. 

I believed in healing.  For the 10 or 12 years prior to this I had believed God for healing for dozens of smaller things.  If I were to get medical treatment for this because it was bigger, I would have felt like a hypocrite.  I would have denied everything I had come to believe about God.  At this point I had a diagnosis for a problem I didn’t even know I had.  To jump in and get treatment without even giving God a chance to heal, without even checking to see if any difference in my condition had or would occur by the power of God I believed would have been irresponsible for me as a Christian.

Also, ever since my kids were small, I had encouraged them to pray for healing or whatever else they needed.  If I now sought medical treatment, I would be telling them that God doesn’t or can’t do the bigger things.  If I were to start treatment, how could I say that God had answered our prayers?  Any heathen can get chemo.  If I got better, who is to say if I got better from the chemo or from God?  Or both?  Or who is to say that prayer even made a difference at all?  

If I got better having taken the chemotherapy, it would in my mind only confirm the belief that people should look first to science for the answers to life’s biggest problems.  If God only chooses to work through medicine, then what can we pray for?  What if we didn’t have medical insurance?  Would God expect us to spend all we had on treatment before He would help us?  There was a woman in the Bible who spent all she had on doctors but only got worse (Mark 5:25-34).  So I couldn’t accept that the medical route was the one I had to take.

Now there were two issues that were on my mind at this time.  The first was the pressure we were facing from our friends and family.  I knew what I believed, but people were telling my wife that I was crazy not to get chemo.  I had to think of my kids.  My wife was afraid that she couldn’t support the kids by herself.  So I wanted some input from God to confirm my decision.  This was a big decision, and I wanted to be able to show her that God was in this.

Over the course of about a month and a half, I read my Bible trying a little harder to hear if God was going to speak to me through something I read.  I didn’t change my pattern of reading.  I just read what I would have read anyway, though I might have spent more time actually reading than if I wasn’t in a crisis.  I wrote down almost 30 passages of Scripture which to me spoke directly to my situation and which seemed to confirm my decision.  Though I was looking for guidance, I was not looking for passages that I thought would support my views.  

These are the passages that I believe God brought to my mind in this regard:

Exodus 17:8-13           when Moses held up his hands, Israel prevailed

Exodus 23:25              “I will remove sickness from your midst.”

Exodus 34:10,11         “Before all your people I will perform miracles which have not been                                                produced in all the earth . . . and all the people among whom you                                                    live will see the working of the Lord.”

I Samuel 17                 David kills Goliath.  Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should                                        taunt the armies of the living God?

Psalm 34                      He delivered me from all my fears.  He saved him out of all his troubles.                                         He delivers him out of all his afflictions.

Psalm 103:1-5             He heals all your diseases.

Proverbs 3:5-8             “Fear the Lord and turn away from evil, and it will be healing to your body                                                and refreshment to your bones.”

Proverbs 3:11-18         “Long life is in her right hand.”

Proverbs 4:20-23         His words are life to those who find them and health to all their whole                                           body.

Proverbs 9:7-12           “By the fear of the Lord your days will be multiplied and years of life will                                                 be added to you.”

Proverbs 10:2              “Righteousness delivers from death.”

Proverbs 10:17            “He is on the path of life who heeds instruction.”

Proverbs 10:27,28       The fear of the Lord prolongs life.  The hope of the righteous is gladness.

Proverbs 11:4,6,8        Righteousness delivers from death. The righteousness of the upright will                                        deliver him.  The righteous is delivered from trouble.

Proverbs 17:22            “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.”

Ephesians 5:18            “Be filled in spirit,  speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves,  singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord,  giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, being subject to one another in the fear of Christ.”

Proverbs 18:21            “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”

Mark 5:25-34                          “Your faith has saved you.”  This woman had spent all that she had on doctors over the previous 12 years, and the Bible says that they didn’t help her at all, but she only got worse.

Mark 5:35-36              Your daughter has died.  “Fear not, only believe.”

Mark 9:19-23              “All things are possible to the one who believes.”

Mark 11:22-24 Have faith in God.  If you do not doubt in your heart but believe that what                                                you say is coming to pass, it shall be unto you.  Therefore, whatever you                                         pray for and ask, believe that you have received it and it shall be unto you.

John 11:40                   “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you shall see the glory of God?”

Acts 3:6                       “What I have I give to you.  In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise and                                 walk.”

Acts 10:38                   “Jesus went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the                                       devil.”

Acts 28:1-9                             Paul had been bitten by a poisonous scorpion and he just shook it off into the fire.  All the sick people in the whole island then came to him and he healed them.  Luke the physician was with him at the time.

I had made an appointment to see the doctor just to tell her why I did not want to have treatment.  I remember driving downtown and asking God if He had anything more to tell me about this.  Very clearly in my mind, I believe He said, “I have told you everything you need to know.  It’s time for you to stand on what I have told you.”  So I asked the doctor to monitor me.  If I came back in several months and things were worse or the same, then we’ll see.  She and the other doctors agreed to wait.

The second issue that I was concerned about was dealing with the causes of the disease in the first place.  If you come down with some physical condition, what makes you think you can’t come down with it again?  Why did you get it in the first place?

I knew it did not make sense to get healed of something and then not deal with the causes that made you sick.  Now, I can’t prove that my psychological state caused the lymphoma, but I know how I felt, the depth of the pain, the loss of energy, the feeling of having the life sucked out of me, the emptiness, the frustration.

So I asked God: How do I get out of this state? 

The core issue behind all my misery was that I felt my whole life was off track, that I had gotten off the right path somehow and couldn’t get back on.  Where was I going and what should I do with my life?  I was constantly examining my life to figure out what to do.  So how do I get out of this state?  I had to have an answer to this, so when I read the Bible, I kept an eye and ear out for something I needed.  I ran into a number of verses that together spelled out my next step.

Proverbs 16:3              “Roll unto the Lord your works, and your plans (thoughts) will be                                                   established (made firm).”

Proverbs 16:9              “The heart of man plans his way, and the Lord establishes his step.”

Jeremiah 10:23            “I know, O Lord, that not to man is his way and it is not to man who walks                                   to establish his way.”

Psalm 37:5                   “Roll on the Lord your way; trust on Him and He will act.”

Psalm 37:4                   “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

I was seeing that my life is not in my hands.  You are always told that you have to do something.  These verses were saying, “It’s not what you think you have to do.”

Daniel 4                                   The Most High rules over the realm of mankind and bestows it on whom He wishes.

The verse about rolling on the Lord my way reminded me of Psalm 55:22

Psalm 55:22                 Cast on the Lord your burden (Lit. what was given you, Greek: care), and                                      He shall sustain you.  

which in the early Greek translation is almost exactly like I Peter 5:7.

I Peter 5:7                   Be humbled under the mighty hand of God that He may exalt you in due                                       time, all your care having cast on Him, for He cares for you.

The Greek word for care μέριμvα (me´-rim-na) means: care, thought, solicitude [solicitude and solicitous imply profound concern, full of concern or fears; meticulously careful; attentive care and protectiveness].

The word care I had always understood as worry, which has to do with fear, fear of what can go wrong.  So I never thought that applied to me.  But then I saw that cares and concerns are more than that.  My consuming concerns were occupying my mind and continual self-examination and looking for clues and new paths were preoccupying me.

Philippians 4:6 says:  “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.  The Greek text says: “for nothing be anxious (mhde\n merimna=te).”

My back was against the wall.  I had no choice.  I had always known about these verses, but I had not really lived by them.  Now I knew I had to.  I knew I could no longer afford the luxury of worry.  I knew I just had to trust God completely or die.  So now when something came up that needed my concern, I would make my request and then leave it.  I refused to be caught in the trap of careful watching.  I refused to give it any more thought.

And what this does now is free up a lot of brain space.  Being an introvert, our minds are very active.  Now I had all this free time in my head. 

I read two books at this time by John Piper:  Desiring God and Let the Nations be Glad.  They reinforced the idea that God was more concerned about my being able to enjoy Him than about anything that I might do for Him.  Like what He tried to tell at the beginning of all this when I was on the bicycle riding home from work.

            There were two passages in the Bible that showed me God’s concern for things in the bigger picture.

Isaiah 48:9-11    “For the sake of My name I delay My wrath.  And for My praise I restrain it for you, in order not to cut you off.  Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction; For My own sake, for My own sake, I will act; f or how can My name be profaned?  And My glory I will not give to another.”

Ezekiel 36:22-23,32   “Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord GOD: It is not for your sake that I act, O house of Israel, but for My holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came.  And I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among  the nations, which you have profaned among them; and  the nations shall know that I am the LORD, says the Lord  GOD, when through you I display my holiness before their  eyes.

It is not for your sake that I am acting, says the Lord GOD; let it be known to you.  Be ashamed and dismayed for your ways, O house of Israel.”

I could no longer justify the time I was spending thinking about my life, my problems, my future.  If God is to be the center of life, I was paying too much attention on the perimeter.  When God first created people, He put them in a garden.  They didn’t really have a whole lot to do.  It was the love and companionship of humans that He wanted.  He didn’t need our work.

            These are the passages of the Bible that God brought to my mind next:

Genesis 3                     God created us to enjoy His presence.

Psalm 50:23                 “The one who offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving honors Me.”                      

I Samuel 2:30              “Those who honor Me I will honor.”

Acts 16:19-26             At midnight in a dungeon Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises to God                                        before all the prisoners, and God then delivered them.

I Peter 2:5                   You are like living stones being built up into a holy temple to offer                                                  spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God

About two months after I last spoke with that doctor, I called her up and asked for that follow-

up exam.  I figured that by now, if anything was going to change, something would have changed by now.  I believed in healing, but I did know that sometimes changes happen slower than we think they should.  I remember driving downtown for these tests and I asked God for some more input.  I sensed Him saying that there comes a time when you just have to stand on what you know already.  You don’t need any more information.  Stand firm in what you have.

The doctor called me at work a few days later and said that all my tests were within the normal range, so they would not recommend chemotherapy at this time.  They would not say that I was healed.  That is not an expression they like to use.  With lymphoma there was no way they could say with certitude that there were no cancer cells anywhere in my body.  But if I had had these same results when I first went to the hospital that night with the deep bruise, they would not have called me in for tests.  There would have been no reason to think that there was anything wrong.

Lymphoma, they say, can come and go.  My wife asked her if she ever heard of it going away without chemotherapy.  The doctor replied, No, she had not.  My wife asked her how she could explain this, and she said she couldn’t.

Do I go back for checkups?  No, I do not.  Some would say this is foolish.  I know if I did, I still would do what I did the first time.  If the course of the disease was reversed without the treatment, why would it not if it appeared again? 

In the time when this was all going on, there was a time when I could see the lymph glands of my neck swollen.  For a time it hurt when I walked from the glands in my groin.  But those are all distant memories.  Whenever I went to see the doctor during all this, they would always ask if I had night sweats or was losing weight.  I wish I could lose a little weight.  I barely give it a thought any more, except when I meet someone who has cancer. 

I know that few battles in life never need to be fought again.  I still work in a field not of my own choosing.  In fact, few of the outward circumstances have changed at all.  But I have.  I know too that if I let myself, I can fall into the same downward spiral of self-pity and anger.  There is a story in the Bible where Jesus walked on water.  Peter asked if he could too, and Jesus invited him to.  As long as Peter was able to keep his eyes on Jesus, he actually stayed on top.  But as he became more conscious of the storm that was going on around them, he immediately sank.  The choice is mine. 

I asked God why all this happened.  Not the cancer so much.  That was incidental compared to the other things I felt.  I had a day recently where I felt again the loss of the last 25 years, how I wished they would have been different. 

Then I saw it.  If I had had everything the way I thought it should have been, everything that I had wanted in life, I would have been happy from a lot of little things that sort of centered on myself.  I was amazed by how much my whole thought life centered around myself.  One of the things that died in this whole thing was a certain sense of self-consciousness, where now I hardly even give myself a thought anymore frankly.

I would have evaluated my life by the number of people in the church that I pastored, the number of degrees after my name, how many languages I used in my studies, how many books I had written or read.  I would have equated my knowledge of God by how well I knew Hebrew and Greek, and how much time I spent in study.  I would have thought I was a success in life.  I would have had all the outward trappings of being a good Christian leader, but my knowledge of God would have been superficial. 

I would have substituted my successes in life and my satisfaction in my things for my satisfaction in knowing God, my knowledge about God for actually knowing God, and I would have substituted the approval of people for the approval of God.  I would have been proud of all my knowledge, but my joy would not have been in God.  I would have been happy because of things I could lose, things that were not permanent, things that were not God. 

Now these are all non-issues.  I am only one person.  I no longer pray for what I can do for God, but for the glory of God to be made known, no matter how or through whom it is manifested.      I was made aware of how much more concerned I was about what people thought about me than what they thought about God.  I was the center of my universe and not only was I unaware of it, but I didn’t even see what was wrong with it. 

The words of Paul are fitting here: The things that were gain to me, these things I have regarded for the sake of Christ to be loss, rather indeed I regard all things to be loss because of the surpassing greatness of knowing personally Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as refuse or dung, that I may gain Christ . . . that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings. . . .       This one thing I do, forgetting the things that are behind, reaching out to the things in front, I press on toward the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.                                     

Philippians 3:7-14