About seven years ago I had a personal trainer who told me one day that his wife had been treated for abdominal cysts that had been serious enough to warrant surgical intervention, apparently more than once. He also told me that she would be going for testing the next day because the doctors were virtually certain that she had another one. I told him that I would pray for her. He was not a believer, and did not seem particularly open to praying with me, so I prayed for her alone later. One of the things I prayed was that when they did the testing they would find no cyst at all, as a testimony to the power of God.

The next time I was at his house for our regular training session I asked him how things had gone and he rather matter-of-factly informed me that when they went in they found nothing. I was pretty amazed because, in the two decades or so I had been a believer by that time; I had never seen a prayer for healing answered so clearly and, in my mind, so miraculously.

It had never happened before, and it hasn’t happened since.

As I sat down to write a blog on the topic of healing in response to this series we have been in, I wrote out some notes beforehand to help me frame my thoughts on the subject. I was surprised when I finished those notes because I did not expect that they would contain quite so many questions. This was a bit surprising to me because I thought I had a pretty well developed “theology of healing” that I had come to through the years.

If I had to sum my up my long-time stance on the subject it was basically this: God can, and does, heal supernaturally today, but He usually doesn’t. He usually works through doctors. Beyond that He will also often allow sickness of mind, body, or soul to continue unhealed for deeper reasons than we know, no matter how much we pray.

(To that I might also have added that one of the reasons we do not experience the kind of regular, dramatic healings we see in the New Testament in this part of the world is because we have been captured by the rationalistic, medical model of healing engendered by living in the Western world in the 21^st Century and, as a result, effective faith in divine healing has suffered for it. More on this later)

Truthfully, though, I’m not sure I can say that I still hold to all of what I just shared, and that is largely because of the series on which we have embarked at True Life. The messages preached by Pastor Chris and Rigo have seen to that. I now find myself having a hunger to pray in greater faith for healing of every kind, and by “healing” I do mean the dramatic and immediate kind which we very often see in both the Old and New Testaments.

I’m not exactly sure why this is. Our pastors’ effective preaching is certainly the primary catalyst, but it is not the only one. I think they simply brought out a deeper desire in me, and that is to see God work in the 21^st century the way he obviously did in the 1^st. I guess I’m tired of reading the Bible and finding myself either consciously or unconsciously having to decide which of God’s promises are more for then than they are for today. I’m tired of living out a Christianity that does not reflect an embrace of the full counsel of Scripture and all it implies we should be seeing happen in the here and now, and I suspect I’m not the only one at True Life who feels this way.

It is not that I think that we have been given the power to heal at will and have neglected it. Apart from the mystery of how our faith plays into it healing is not of us, it is of God. I believe in divine sovereignty and so I believe that our Lord has never healed “on cue”, whether it was 2000 years ago or today. As an example I happen to be one of those people who believe that the Apostle Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was a physical illness, specifically a problem with his eyes. I do believe that there are times when the Lord does not choose to heal us of something because He knows that only the affliction in question will grow us in the Christlike character he desires for all His children. (My own life has reflected this in the form of a debilitating clinical depression and anxiety that dogged me for close to half of my adult life.)

All that said I still believe that there is something wrong in the believing Church in the Western world today when it comes to our approach to divine healing. One of the reasons is because I’ve read or heard enough reports coming in from the overseas mission field in recent years. As Pastor Chris pointed out in one of his messages in this series; where the Gospel is advancing in the midst of great opposition and persecution in other parts of the world we are seeing real miraculous healings occur, even mass healings.

If it can happen in Africa or Asia I do not see why it cannot happen here as well.

So why isn’t it happening? That is the question that I think has led to some of the concerns raised by sincere believers in our congregation since this series began, and it is a completely legitimate question to ask. It is a question I have asked, and more than once.

As I wrote earlier my very recent thinking on this subject for the purpose of writing this article surprised me in being rife with questions related to that primary one, and in the crucible of asking those questions that thinking continues to “evolve” (ugh, how I hate to use that term!) What I am finding, however, is that for all the conundrums the paradoxes of Scripture raise in my mind and heart, and for all the lack of consistent miraculous healing I have personally seen or in which I have taken part, this series has inspired a hunger in me. It is a hunger to pray for and trust in the belief that we are going to see non-medically induced healings begin to happen at True Life in a way I have not seen in other places in my 27 years as a Christian. I cannot completely explain why this is. I will say that it is something that transcends every question that remains in my mind on this subject, every doubt, every tendency towards cynicism.

As my wife will tell you I have a tendency to “overthink” things, but I do not want to overthink this hunger, or the prospect of it being fulfilled. I just want to trust in what our God can and will do, and move forward in that trust with an expectation that True Life will see great things in the weeks and months to come….by the grace, mercy and, most of all, by the acknowledged power of Christ in our midst.