What Place Should Healing Have In the Life of a Modern Christian?

What Place Should Healing Have

In the Life of a Modern Christian?

            I was preparing lunch in my kitchen, when I heard this awful, awful sound from the basement.  I ran downstairs as fast as I could to find my son laying on a bench with a 250# barbell laying across his neck.  He was not moving and turning blue. 

            I grabbed the bar and lifted it off him and put it on the floor.  I don’t actually remember doing that, but I do remember reaching for the bar.  He then went into convulsions.  Immediately, without even thinking, I put one hand on his chest and the other on his neck and said: “Be healed in Jesus’ Name.  Be healed in Jesus’ Name.”  After about six times, he said: “I’m okay.  I’m okay.”  He sat up and said: “What happened?  I don’t remember anything.” 

            I sat down on the bench, trying to calm down.  He got up and started to take the weights off the bar to put the bar back on the rack.  He asked me if I thought he should finish his workout.  I suggested that maybe he shouldn’t do any more bench presses in case he hurt a muscle.  But he did anyway.  He never went to the doctor or had any after effects.

            We know that God can heal.  God can do anything.  By definition, that is what God can do.  But we have lost the sense in the Church today of what exactly He will do. 

            We have this 1,000 page book that tells us about God, but instead of seeing a pattern or a picture of God’s character, we see isolated events in distinct periods of time and unique circumstances to a different people.  So when we see ourselves in similar situations, we have no idea of how God will respond. 

            In fact, we have even lost the expectation that He will respond.  God is just as likely or more so to leave us in our troubles for some good that will be explained later, probably in heaven.  In the old days, prayer was the way to move God’s hand in our lives.  Now we view it as a form of psychotherapy in which the process of talking over our problems with God releases our pent-up tension and we find peace in thinking that whatever happens is good, no matter how it may look to us.

            One of the big problems facing any person who reads the Bible a lot is how to explain the apparent differences between life in Bible days and today.  Obviously we have about 2,000 years of history condensed into one book, so that we see the high points rather than the uneventful succession of ordinary days in the lives of ordinary people.  Still, we see a picture of a God who is active in the lives of His people in ways we just don’t see today.  And you don’t get the impression that these were meant to be rare and unusual interventions on His part.  People were chastised when they didn’t expect them.

            Healing is a subject that I have studied and thought about and prayed about for most of my adult life.  I haven’t been too forward in offering to pray for other people who obviously needed it, but I have seen God heal me hundreds of times over the years, whether it was a runny nose or mixed cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

            I have always thought it was more important to learn how to believe God for healing in your own life, at least first.  If you depend on someone else to solve all your problems, what are you going to do when they are not around?

            So the big question is how to take a book that was written 2,000 years ago about events that happened in a land far, far away and to distinct people in distinct historical contexts.  It’s a little like reading somebody else’s mail and putting our name in the heading.  But this is the Bible, so we know it is important for us.  We’re just not sure on the details.

            When it comes to healing, the fact is that Jesus healed people as much as He taught them.  We say that this is some sign for us to prove He was the Messiah, but you have to ask the question why healing is the sign.  Isn’t walking on water good enough?  Or just the resurrection from the dead?  After all, Jesus did say that if people won’t believe Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe if someone were to rise from the dead? 

            So Jesus didn’t seem to be trying to prove anything to people.  If a person’s heart is to seek God, they will know what is true.  They wouldn’t need flashy miracles to open their eyes to see who He was. 

            But Jesus came to show us the Father.  The one who has seen Him has seen the Father.  This would suggest that Jesus acted out of who He was rather than doing something out of character just to prove a point. 

            The fact is the only Jesus we know is the Jesus of the Bible.  If He were to physically appear in our church on Sunday, you know He would end up healing every person who was there.  If the Jesus of today is not like the Jesus of the Bible, then what else has changed, and how are we to know what it is?  We would need a Newer Testament that would tell us how things are today.

            The New Testament has been divided up between Jews, Jews in the tribulation period, Jews in the millennium, Jews in the dispersion, a transitional period, carnal Christians, Judaizing believers, and a group called Gentiles.  There are a few short books that we can read today with profit, safe books.  We certainly don’t want anything controversial in our churches.

            But we have a problem.  At some time in our lives, we will be faced with the question of God healing today.  The truth is we all know people who have died at ages far younger than they should have, people who we and others have prayed for fervently, but nothing changed.  And we are left trying to explain why. 

And, of course, there are only two options.  Either it was God’s decision not to intervene or “the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”  Our theologians have come to our rescue, and they have left the entire outcome to God’s inscrutable, infallible will. 

I would like to suggest that we have more responsibility for the outcomes of our lives than we often like to think.  Magazine articles aren’t often the place to tackle the really big questions, but they can start the discussion.  There are five examples from Scripture that I believe can start that discussion.

                           God delivered His chosen people out of the land of Egypt.  But that was only have of what He had in mind.  He had a new land that He wanted to give to them, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land where they would experience everything in abundance.  They arrived at this land and discovered that this land was already occupied and that they would have to take the land by force.  Only three of the leaders of the people, Joshua, Caleb, and Moses, believed that they could do this.  The rest of the people were afraid and wouldn’t take that next step.  If we, our church, our leaders, our friends, were there with them at that time, do we think we would have done better than they did?  God was not pleased, but He did not remove the problem for them.

                          Similarly, when Goliath challenged the army of Israel, not one soldier had the confidence to face him.  After 40 days of this, David happened to arrive at their camp, faced Goliath, and killed him.  Again, putting ourselves back into that time, would we have lined up to confront Goliath?  Did God just supernaturally endow David for that task, or was David’s faith and courage something that we are all supposed to have?

                          Paul says that these stories were written as examples for us.  We don’t have to kill Philistines and Canaanites today, but the parallels are obvious.  Today we would conclude that it wasn’t God’s will for us to kill Goliath.  God was chastising us, and we need to learn to live with him.  God would give us the grace to bear it.

                          There was a woman who spent all she had on doctors over the course of 12 years and only got worse.  She heard about Jesus and said to herself that if she only touched the hem of His garment, she would be made well.  She did, and she was.  Jesus didn’t even know who touched Him.  He told her it was her faith that made her well.  The fact that He didn’t know who touched Him shows that the image of God sitting on his throne sorting out reasons why He should or should not grant a request for healing, at least in this case, doesn’t adequately describe the relationship between faith and answered prayer. 

                          We often act as if the amount of our faith is a virtue whereupon God rewards us for our achievement.  We feel that we have to ask God for everything, and He may or may not grant it, and we have no idea beforehand which it will be.  This story suggests another image, that of the child who feels free to open the refrigerator at his parent’s house and help himself when he is hungry.

                          Theologians have again tried to help us here by often referring to faith as a gift from God.  This alleviates any guilt that we may feel for our lack thereof, but it doesn’t explain why Jesus was so upset when people didn’t have enough, or any, whether it be walking on water, being fearful in a storm, not being able to cast out a demon, or worrying about food and drink.

                          If faith is a gift from God, then we have as much responsibility for it being present in our lives as the fruit of the Spirit.  We cannot excuse the lack of love, joy, and peace in our lives with the defense that God has chosen not to give it to us.

                          This brings us to the last example, which really is two in one. 

Sorry, I never finished this.

Theologians -  faith is a gift.  As if no responsibility for having it.  Then why was Jesus so often angry when the disciples didn’t have it.   Why was God angry when they didn’t enter the Promised Land?

If the fruit of the Spirit is the fruit of the Spirit, is it our responsibility to have them present in our lives?  Is it our “fault” if we don’t?