Faith, Health, Wealth, and Other Wonderful Things
Jim slouched on his hospital bed as the doctor informed him there was nothing more she could do to help him. After she left the room, he stared at the ceiling and cried out to the Great Physician, the heavenly Father who “heals all your diseases” (Psalm 103:3). Not willing to accept defeat, Jim stood up and shuffled over to the bathroom. He looked deep into the mirror and confidently confessed the healing power of the Holy Spirit over his life. And he claimed the truth of Scripture. He recited texts like Proverbs 12:21: “No harm overtakes the righteous.” And he quoted Isaiah 53:5: “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.”
Jim said he could not see his healing with his physical eyes, but that he looked for it with his spiritual eyes. He claimed his healing. And, eventually . . . he received it! As wonderful as it is that Jim was healed, before we cheer too loudly for this story, we should pause and consider what it means to have faith in God and how God responds to our faith.
The idea that we can claim a spiritual reality in spite of our physical reality comes out of what many refer to as the prosperity gospel, the health-and-wealth gospel, word-faith theology, or simply, the faith movement. The prosperity gospel comes in different shapes and sizes, but at the heart of it is the teaching that God desires all Christians to prosper in every aspect of their lives. While this includes things like having healthy relationships, those who teach some version of prosperity theology usually emphasize financial and physical health. One wonders if the health and wealth gospel blesses the American dream as if it came from God. On the financial side of things, the emphasis on prosperity can be problematic—at its best it rightly encourages us to trust in God as our provider, whereas at its worst the prosperity gospel blesses selfish greed (1 Timothy 6:9)—but in this chapter I focus particularly on the issue of healing.
Who Teaches This?
It is not always easy to know if you are listening to a pastor who teaches the prosperity gospel or not. First of all, those who preach health and wealth generally hold to the same orthodox theology as the whole of the evangelical church—in other words, they have a lot of biblical things to say, including emphasizing that Jesus is Savior. Second, since people usually speak of “prosperity gospel” with scorn, when asked outright, many pastors will deny they believe in the prosperity gospel, even when they preach prosperity from the pulpit. One such pastor from Florida said, “I’m not one of those who would be called a prosperity preacher . . . I believe in prosperity. I believe in the blessing of God. But typically, a prosperity preacher [makes it] their life’s message. I don’t feel like it’s my life message, but it’s part of the Message, the Word of God.”1
Even when people are hesitant to identify themselves with the prosperity gospel, you can often recognize prosperity teachers by their words. Typically, you will notice an emphasis on health or wealth. For example, one prominent author claimed, “When you are walking in the Word of God, you will prosper and be in health.”2 Another famous preacher emphasized, “You are destined to reign in life. You are called by the Lord to be a success, to enjoy wealth, to enjoy health, and to enjoy a life of victory. It is not the Lord’s desire that you live a life of defeat, poverty, and failure. He has called you to be the head and not the tail.”3
Not everyone who teaches the prosperity gospel will be quite so explicit and easy to recognize, however, in part because different preachers will emphasize prosperity in varying degrees, and they may emphasize only one of the central themes: either health or wealth. Nevertheless, you can listen for key phrases to help you recognize if you might be in the presence of a prosperity teacher. People who follow this teaching sometimes speak of releasing their faith, speaking their faith, and believing God for things. As an expression of these ideas, they might also speak of declaring or confessing certain things over their lives. For example, if you are asked to “declare that this will be your year of . . . (fill in the blank),” there is a good chance you are in the presence of someone who either teaches or has been strongly influenced by those who hold to the prosperity gospel.
Historians often point to Kenneth Hagin Sr. (1917– 2003) as the father of the faith movement, although the teachings clearly go back to men like E. W. Kenyon (1867–1948), A. A. Allen (1911–1970), and Oral Roberts (1918–2009). You can find some prosperity preachers, often only tolerated, within denominations, usually Pentecostal or Charismatic, but most are found in independent churches or in loose networks of churches that share the prosperity message as an important theme. Although they all present the properity gospel in their own way and include their own distinct emphases, famous pastors and speakers who are often identified as prosperity teachers include Kenneth Copeland, Fred Price, Benny Hinn, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, Guillermo Maldonado, Paula White, T. D. Jakes, Charles Capps, John Hagee, Rod Parsley, Paul Morton, Eddie Long, Jesse Duplantis, Jerry Savelle, Miles Munroe, Morris Cerullo, Jim Bakker, Joyce Meyer, and Joseph Prince. Other well-known personalities could also be named, not to mention those in smaller churches without fame.4
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
I have mentioned names so that you can be aware of some places where prosperity teachings are found, but not to discredit everything that takes place in the ministries these teachers lead. To the contrary, I’m sure all the people listed above have been used by God in various ways, from seeing people healed to helping people come to faith in Christ. And at least some aspects of their preaching and teaching are worth commending. Kenneth Hagin, for example, rightly encourages readers to “meditate on the Word. Dig deeply into it. Feed upon it.”5 And those who promote the prosperity gospel do well to actually expect that God is going to work in their lives, whereas many Christians today really don’t expect much from God. As Gordon Fee, a critic of the health and wealth gospel, observed, “Most Christians’ expectation level, when it comes to the miraculous, is somewhere between zero and minus five.”6
Yet overall, the health and wealth gospel is problematic and even dangerous. Prosperity preachers generally take Scripture out of context when attempting to build a biblical case for the health and wealth gospel. I point readers to Gordon Fee’s book, The Disease of the Health and Wealth Gospels, for a helpful analysis. With healing in particular, those who proclaim the health and wealth gospel are correct to emphasize that Jesus healed many people and that God still heals people today. It becomes problematic, however, when teachers claim that (1) there is some sort of an automatic connection between our level of faith and receiving healing from God, and (2) one way to exercise your faith is by claiming your healing through positive confession.
Faith and Healing
A friend of mine lost her husband to cancer when they were still young in their marriage. Some people accused them of lacking faith when he wasn’t getting better. Aside from their poor understanding of Scripture, this wasn’t a loving response to a suffering couple.
And yet, faith is instrumental in healing. There were a few times that Jesus said to someone, “Your faith has healed you” (Mark 10:52). So, sometimes it is the faith of the sick person that is instrumental in healing. Sometimes, however, it is the faith of the person praying that seems to matter more. James 5:15 highlights how “the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well.” If the people who were discouraging my friends had followed their own logic that a certain amount of faith was necessary for a person to be healed, then, to be fair, they also should have been apologizing that they didn’t have enough faith when they were praying for my friend’s husband and that it was, perhaps, their own fault that he wasn’t being healed. Of course, people who think that a certain amount of faith is necessary for healing are usually quicker to point their fingers at others than to point back at themselves.
The fact of the matter is that no person’s faith—neither the faith of the sick person nor the faith of the person praying—guarantees healing in this life. Even those who do experience healing will eventually no longer be healed, at which point they will die. Those with faith will—praise the Lord—all experience ultimate healing, or “the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23), in the future at the resurrection. But in this life, healing is never a guarantee. The Bible instructs us to pray for healing and, because God is compassionate and all-powerful, we can expect God will heal some people. Nevertheless, regardless of how holy a person is, how hard a person prays, or how much faith one may have, miracles do not always come. Realizing this would save many people a lot of grief.
Surely the apostle Paul was a man of great faith. Paul not only did miracles, but the Bible says that “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul” (Acts 19:11). And yet, Paul himself was not always healed. Paul reminded the Galatians that “it was because of an illness that I first preached the gospel to you” (Galatians 4:13). And he also had sick friends for whom he had no doubt prayed. To Timothy, he wrote that he left “Trophimus sick in Miletus” (2 Timothy 4:20), and in Philippians we learn that Paul’s friend Epaphroditus was so sick that he “almost died” (2:27). Paul nowhere suggested that these people were sick because he or they were lacking faith. And he didn’t tell Timothy that Timothy needed to exercise more faith because of his “frequent illness” (1 Timothy 5:23). Instead, he suggested a medicinal remedy. Suffering through sickness is not a sure sign of a lack of faith. Indeed, as Larry Hart rightly observed, “It takes greater faith to continue trusting, thanking, praising, and serving the Lord when the healing doesn’t come as we desire.”7
Faith and Prosperity
If you stop and think about faith more widely, you will realize that faith does not guarantee a life of prosperity, for faith does not guarantee a good life in general. You can probably think of someone from your church who is a great example of faith, yet who has had to endure significant experiences of suffering. Aside from Jesus, who was murdered despite his close relationship with the Father, the book of Hebrews contains a faith “hall of fame” celebrating the lives of many faith-filled people who endured much hardship. Hebrews 11 presents people like Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as people who “were still living by faith when they died,” and yet, we are reminded that “they did not receive the things promised” (v. 13). The writer added stories of people like Joseph, Moses, and Rahab. Some of these heroes were people “who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames, and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. Women received back their dead, raised to life again” (vv. 33–35). Yes! The life of faith!
We can be tempted to stop reading the chapter there, but Hebrews 11 continues, “There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated” (vv. 35–37). These outcomes don’t sound desirable. This is certainly not a life of prosperity. And, yet, these hardships happened to people of great faith, and the book of Hebrews says, “the world was not worthy of them” (v. 38). And so we see that sometimes, people of faith can experience great blessing, but at other times, they may experience suffering. Thankfully, regardless of what comes our way, we can be assured that nothing can separate us from the love of God, not even death (Romans 8:37–39).
What Is Faith?
Some people think there is some sort of automatic connection between faith and healing because they don’t really understand what faith is. They seem to think faith is something we stir up in ourselves, like stirring up excitement. It is as if we can close our eyes tightly, clench our fists, and yell “Argh!” and our faith will get stronger.
If you are like many Christians, you have probably already thought of Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” How helpful do you think this verse would be to explain what faith is to the average person who didn’t grow up in church? If I say, “An apple is red,” or, “An apple is round,” or, “An apple is something that can fill you up,” that isn’t a definition of an apple as such. And while Hebrews 11:1 does describe faith when it says “faith is,” it doesn’t offer a definition of faith.
So what is Hebrews 11:1 saying? When the author tells us that faith is “assurance about what we do not see,” the author does not mean, as someone might wrongly suppose, that faith is being certain of the existence of an invisible God. And having “confidence in what we hope for” does not mean that faith equals being sure that God is going to give you everything you ask for in prayer. Rather, later in the same chapter the author clarifies that the people in the faith hall of fame “were still living by faith when they died” because, although “they did not receive the things promised” in their lifetime (Hebrews 11:13), due to their faith they had confidence in and were hoping “for a better country—a heavenly one” (v. 16). So we might paraphrase Hebrews 11:1 as teaching that faith in God gives us certainty regarding what we hope for in the future, after death, because God has made promises to us. And the author of Hebrews illustrates this by teaching us about the heroes of faith who had deep trust, or reliance, on God, regardless of their sometimes horrific circumstances, and even though they hadn’t yet received what God had promised.
Faith, then, is trust in God or believing in God. In fact, there is only one Greek word (pistis) used in the New Testament for “faith,” “trust,” or “belief.” We aren’t called to just “believe that” God exists, but rather to “believe in” God and to “believe in” Jesus (Acts 16:31). As an analogy, picture a modern-day action movie. Someone is perilously hanging from the edge of a cliff. The hero reaches out his muscular arm to pull the frightened person to safety. The hero says, “Take my hand.” The other person replies, “I can’t. I’m scared!” The hero says, “Do you believe in me?” The person hanging from the ledge says, “Yes.” The hero responds, “Then take my hand.” We understand that if the individual in danger actually has faith in the hero, they will commit themselves to the hero by taking the hero’s hand. Then, of course, the hero pulls the person to safety—tragedy averted! Whew! Having faith in God is kind of like that.
Faith means believing in God by committing our whole self to God and God’s ways. Faith is not, as some prosperity teachers suggest, “a spiritual force, a spiritual energy, a spiritual power.” Faith does not, then, make “the laws of the spirit world function.”8 Rather, having faith simply means that you believe and trust in the Lord. It means you believe that God is able. You have faith that God cares for you. You trust God for your salvation. This is what faith is.
Faith ≠ Positive Confession
This means faith is not equal to positive confession. Some prosperity gospel teachers have claimed that you need to exercise your faith by confessing what you desire—only then will God give you what you wish for. This implies that our confession must always be positive. That is, they claim, “We as believers, as Christians, should never talk defeat. We should never talk failure. If you talk about your trials, your difficulties, your lack of faith, your lack of money—faith will shrivel and dry up.”9 The idea is that we should not engage in negative confession because we will end up inviting bad events into our lives. Such negative confession is, they wrongly suppose, the opposite of faith, whereas positive confession is how we express our faith. Therefore, some claim that “if you confess sickness, it will develop sickness within your system. If you talk about your doubts and fears, they will become stronger. If you confess the lack of finances, it will stop the money from coming in.”10 This is dangerous teaching. First, the concept of exercising your faith is not found in the Bible. More important, though, the Bible never teaches us to deny our present circumstances by pretending that negative things aren’t happening in our lives.
Stop and think for a moment about the logic of positive confession teaching. It makes little sense. Positive confession leaves little to no room for lamenting, and there is a whole book in the Bible called Lamentations. One would feel trapped in a world of depression, sickness, and fear, because to talk about such experiences would open the door to those things. You could never really admit you are sick. You would be able to call someone to pray for you, but you couldn’t tell them why to pray for you, because if you admitted that you were sick, that would be a negative confession, which would welcome sickness into your life. Yet Scripture never instructs us to deny our symptoms.
Many sincere Christians have wasted their time trying to “exercise their faith”—and this is not faith—by trying to convince themselves through positive confession that God has already healed them, even though they are still suffering from sickness. We don’t manipulate God with our confession. Instead, we must humbly come to God, and like the man who had leprosy, kneel and acknowledge, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean” (Matthew 8:2).
Faith ≠ Expectations
To further explain the meaning of faith, faith does not equal expectations. I have heard too many preachers claim that God won’t work in your life if you don’t expect God to. Following this line of thinking, some claim, if you don’t expect God to heal you, it won’t happen. We need to be clear though. Our faith is in God, not in what God may or may not do, and not in whether or not God is going to heal someone. Our faith is in God—period. We believe in God—period. We trust in God—period—even when healing doesn’t come. On the one hand, if I expect nothing from God, then I probably don’t have faith in God. Given that God cares for us, I expect that God will provide for me and heal some people. Faith, however, comes first, then expectations. These are not the same thing. God asks us to have faith, not necessarily to expect. The result is that we can have great faith and trust in God, even when we have little to no expectations of God producing certain results. Again, faith doesn’t equal expectations. It is too much to claim that expectancy “sets the stage for a miracle. . . . It influences Heaven. It starts things to happen.”11 On the other hand, we can affirm that our faith in God may set the stage for a miracle.
A few verses in the Bible might appear, on the face of it, to contradict what I’m saying. I think especially of Mark 11:23–24 and James 1:6–7. The passage from James reads, “But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea. . . . That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.” From these verses, it might seem that faith is the same as expectation. Furthermore, at first glance this passage almost makes it sound like if you have the right kind of faith, you will always get what you pray for.
When we continue to read through James, however, we learn that sometimes people do not receive what they pray for because they “ask with wrong motives” and are primarily concerned with their own “pleasures” (James 4:3). Plus, if we remember that faith means trusting in God and being committed to God, it is clear that when James said we “must believe” (1:6), he wasn’t indicating that we must have expectant certainty. Rather, he meant that we must give our full loyalty to God. And when James said we must “not doubt,” he wasn’t saying we can’t have any mental doubts that God might not do what we are asking for. Instead, he meant that our faith and commitment to God must not waver . . . “like a wave” (v. 6). In other words, the book of James calls us to have faith, which is total allegiance to God and trust in God, because God “gives [wisdom] generously” (1:5).12
The meaning of Mark 11:23–24 is similar to the meaning of the previous passage from James. In these verses, Jesus declared, “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” This passage is not a universal and unconditional promise that we will always get what we pray for if we expect we will get it. Even proponents of prosperity teaching, such as Fred Price, recognize that when Jesus speaks of “whatever you ask for in prayer” (Mark 11:24), it doesn’t mean that a woman can pray and “believe God for” or “claim” the husband of her choice, or that a man can realistically expect to “believe that I can eat as much of this cherry pie as I want and it is not going to make me fat” (these comical examples are real life stories Fred Price has encountered).13
Even faith, when rightly understood (as trust and commitment), doesn’t guarantee the outcome we desire. We know this because Jesus added another aspect of effective prayer in the following verse: forgiveness (v. 25). In light of this, and the rest of the Bible’s teaching on prayer, it is clear that in Mark 11:23–24, Jesus’ primary concern is that he wants to encourage his disciples to “have faith in God” when they pray (v. 22). This passage, then, is not a guarantee that all mountains will be moved when we pray with expectation, but an appeal that we must have faith in God if we are going to see any mountains moved.14 Similarly, when Jesus stated, “Ask and it will be given to you . . . For everyone who asks receives” (Matthew 7:7–8), he was not making a guarantee that God will give us everything we ask for; rather, these words are simply meant to encourage us to ask God for whatever we need, given that God will “give good gifts to those who ask him” (v. 11).
Faith Beyond Our Expectations
No story better illustrates the difference between faith and expectations than the resurrection of Lazarus in the gospel of John, chapter 11. As the story begins, Martha’s brother Lazarus was sick. Martha sent for Jesus to come and heal Lazarus and because of her faith in Jesus, Martha expected Jesus was going to heal her brother (John 11:21). But, this isn’t what happened. Instead, Jesus waited a few days and purposely didn’t show up in Bethany, where Martha was, until Lazarus was already dead. If faith is the same thing as expectation, Martha’s faith would have been shattered since her expectation didn’t come to pass. Yet, in spite of this tragedy, Martha still maintained her faith in Jesus. When Jesus arrived, she told him, “I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask” (v. 22). Then out of her lips came the fullest confession of faith in the whole of the Gospel of John: “Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world” (v. 27). Notice that these words didn’t come from someone who had just witnessed a miracle, but from someone who was grieving the loss of her brother.
So Martha still had faith in Jesus, even though she wasn’t expecting Jesus to raise her brother from the dead. And God worked in a way that was different from and beyond what she was expecting. Jesus told her that her brother would rise again, and Martha agreed that Lazarus would “rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (v. 24)—as in, “when everyone else rises.” Jesus then told people to move the stone that was covering the entrance to the tomb where Lazarus was buried, but Martha objected: “By this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days” (v. 39). Again, she was not expecting Jesus to raise her brother from the dead. But that is precisely what Jesus did. Thank God that God is not limited by our expectations! While it is good and right for us to expect things from God, our faith is not in what we expect God to do. Our faith always has to be in God.
Faith is not a technique we use to manipulate God to heal us or give us anything else in life. When people think there is some sort of a faith recipe for healing—whether it’s having enough faith, exercising their faith through positive confession, or expecting things from God—they have taken their eyes off of God and put them on themselves. They have put faith in faith, rather than putting their faith in God, and turned God into a cosmic bellhop who is required to do whatever we ask if only we will use the right faith technique. Again, faith is simply our belief in and trust in God.
How Much Faith?
Even after we recognize the true meaning of faith, the question might linger: How much faith is required before God will heal someone? People can have different levels of faith. Remember that faith also means “trust,” and some people do trust God more than others. And so, “the apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’” (Luke 17:5). It is wrong, however, to think God only responds to people who have lots of faith or, perhaps, people who have victorious faith, whatever that means. It would seem strange to think that anyone with faith can be saved by Jesus Christ, but that for someone to receive an answer to prayer—for example, for healing—they need to have a whole lot of faith. Is God gracious only in salvation? No, God is always gracious. And God heals people out of compassion and grace, not because people deserve healing due to their levels of faith.
The Bible only records two instances when Jesus commended people for their “great faith.” In one story, a Roman centurion asked Jesus to heal his paralyzed servant, who was “suffering terribly” (Matthew 8:6). Jesus asked if he should go to heal him, but the Roman replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it” (vv. 8–9). Jesus was amazed at the centurion’s response and praised his great faith.
The other instance involves a Canaanite woman who approached Jesus on behalf of her daughter, who was “demon-possessed and suffering terribly” (Matthew 15:22). Jesus probed the woman’s faith, testing her to see if she (and those around her) recognized the universal love of God, and the woman did not relent in her request. As a result, Jesus assured her, “you have great faith” (v. 28). In both of these stories, Jesus did not say that he decided to heal the person because of the amount of faith they had. Rather, he simply observed their great faith. Why did he do this? Biblical scholars agree that the reason Jesus highlighted the faith of these two people is that Jesus was commending these non-Jewish people—a Roman centurion and a Canaanite woman—in order to encourage his Jewish audience to have the same faith in him that these Gentiles had, and to challenge the common Jewish belief that God’s grace did not extend to the Gentiles. That’s why Jesus said to the Roman centurion, “I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith” (Matthew 8:10).15
Little Faith
As with great faith, Jesus did not speak often of a person having “little faith,” and when he did, it was never in connection to healing. Once, Jesus said that those who don’t trust God to provide for their basic needs have little faith, given that “God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire” (Matthew 6:30). On another occasion, Jesus observed the disciples’ little faith when they were afraid their boat was going to sink during a “furious storm” (Matthew 8:24–26). And many sermons have been preached on the story of Peter walking on water. He began to sink, and Jesus then remarked on his “little faith” (Matthew 14:31). Finally, Jesus mentioned the little faith of the disciples when they were concerned about their lack of bread, even though Jesus had already miraculously provided bread on more than one occasion (Matthew 16:8–10).
Sometimes I can identify with the people in these stories and their “little faith.” But these stories about little faith aren’t discouraging. On the contrary, we see through the people in the stories that Jesus worked miracles despite their little faith. Just as God is not limited by our expectations, God is not limited by our level of faith. And so, Jesus saved the disciples and calmed the stormy sea, even though they had little faith. And Peter may have begun to sink, but he still walked on water. I seem to remember Jesus saying something about having “faith as small as a mustard seed” (Matthew 17:20).
When Jesus spoke of faith and healing, he rarely mentioned how much faith people had. Instead, Jesus just spoke generally about “your faith” (Mark 10:52). At the same time, it does seem that unbelief can hinder miracles. When Jesus was teaching in the synagogue in his hometown, many people “took offense at him,” and the Bible tells us that, as a result, Jesus “did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith [or, more accurately in some Bible translations, their unbelief]” (Matthew 13:57–58). The people in Jesus’ hometown didn’t believe in him because they didn’t understand who he was. Nevertheless, Jesus still “laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them” (Mark 6:5 ESV). And I am reminded once again that God is not limited by the amount of faith I have, or by the faith of anyone else for that matter.
The teaching that we need lots of faith to be healed has ironically led to fewer healings because it can make people too scared to pray for healing since they fear they don’t have great faith. Rather than giving up on prayer, whenever you feel like your faith is small, you can cry out to God, “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24 ESV).
Healing or No Healing
You may be left wondering, what then shall I do? Or, how should I pray for healing? If you think you must use a specific technique or formula when praying for healing, you may have a hangover from prosperity teaching. We cannot manipulate God into being gracious toward us—grace is a gift, and that means we don’t create it and we don’t earn it. We should pray for healing, and we should do so with faith in God. After all, God “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20). And so we should pray. But we should also remember that there is no right way to pray. History shows us that God has responded to all kinds of different people with different ways of praying for healing. Some praying for others to be healed touched them, at times anointing them with oil. Others merely spoke. Some prayed loudly, while others were quiet and calm. Some prayed for an extended period of time, while others saw healing instantly. Some received a revelation from God about a coming healing, and others just prayed with hope. Some were in a church service, some were not. And some had peculiar teaching, while others didn’t.16
So what about Jim who looked into his mirror, confessed his healing, and was healed and released from the hospital? In light of all I find in the Bible, I am convinced that God did heal Jim. But I am also convinced that it was not because of how Jim acted. It was not because of Jim at all. Instead, God, in grace, responded to Jim’s faith. The story might not have ended as it did, though. Many people with great faith, even those who have “claimed their healing,” have continued to suffer through their pain. And many have died in the midst of having great faith.
Sometimes we are too prone to look for God only in the victory of Christ’s resurrection, and by analogy in the victory of our present healings. We need to remember, however, that God was also present in the suffering of the cross of Christ, and by analogy in our present sufferings. In the midst of suffering, we can affirm with Paul that God’s “grace is sufficient” (2 Corinthians 12:9). And just as we pray (and should pray) for God to heal people through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can also pray for God’s grace to endure suffering. Blessed be the name of the Lord!
Father, forgive us if we have ever made anyone feel guilty about not having enough faith. And help us forgive others who may have caused us to feel this way. At the same time, increase our faith. Help us trust in you and to pray for healing for ourselves or for others. Help us “understand the incredible greatness of God’s power for us who believe” (Ephesians 1:19–20). Give us the compassion of Christ. And for those who are not healed, provide the strength to endure as we await the redemption of our bodies at the resurrection.
Questions for Reflection or Discussion
1. What does it mean to have faith?
2. Can you identify any ways your understanding of healing might have been shaped by prosperity teaching?
3. Have you ever heard someone tell another person they don’t have enough faith for God to do something in their life?
4. Why do you suppose God sometimes responds to a person’s faith by granting their prayer request, whereas other times God doesn’t give that same person what they desire?
5. How likely are you to pray for someone to be healed?