Straight to the Heart

“If you give children child-sized answers to their spiritual questions, then when they grow out of your answers they will also grow out of their faith.” That’s the advice that apologist Michael Ramsden gave me when I chatted with him last year. It has prompted a six-week sermon series this summer at Queens Road Church in which we are trying to answer children’s questions with adult-sized answers they can understand. We’ve chosen the twelve best questions which  the children have submitted and are tackling them two at a time each summer Sunday.

This morning I preached on the question “Why Doesn’t God Always Heal People When We Pray?” It is, after all, a very good question. I have seen some amazing healings over the past few years (no one has been more amazed than me!), yet at the same time my own father has been seriously ill for seventeen years. I’ve prayed for him, a lot, yet nothing has happened. So here’s how I tried to answer the question this morning:-

1. It is a good question to ask!

The book of Job is a 42-chapter epic story about a godly believer who was sick. In the New Testament, we find that Paul was laid up with a serious eye infection in Galatia (Galatians 4:13). He also failed to see his friends Trophimus and Epaphroditus healed in response to his prayers (Philippians 2:25-27 & 2 Timothy 4:20). The disciples found similar frustration in Matthew 17 when nine of them joined together in united prayer for an epileptic boy to be delivered, yet found that his sickness refused to go away. If you are asking this question, then you are thinking the same way as the men and women of the Bible. God wants to answer you, just as he did them.

2. Giving up is very easy, but it is also very wrong

Disappointment can easily breed a ‘theology of sickness’. We tell ourselves that “God wants me to be sick so that I can bring glory to him in how I bear it.” Whilst it is certainly true that we can glorify God in our sickness (as Job did), let’s consider the following:-

a) Deep down, we don’t really believe this. For all we tell ourselves that this might be true on Sunday, we don’t let it stop us from going to the doctor’s on Monday.

b) Not once did Jesus or the apostles refuse to pray for anyone to be healed on the grounds that they needed to glorify God through sickness. On the contrary, the gospel-writers tell us consistently that many people glorified God by being healed!

c) Even though Paul and Epaphroditus were not healed immediately, they were healed in time. Presumably this happened because they persisted in prayer. Similarly, Job was healed miraculously as soon as his friends stopped waffling about their ‘theology of sickness’ and were quiet long enough for him to pray! Delayed healing is frustrating, but it doesn’t change God’s promises

3. God wants to heal, even when it doesn’t look like he does

Jesus refers literally in John 11:4 to a “sickness unto death”. To state the obvious, we will all eventually die of something! In 2 Kings 13, we find Elisha suffering from “the sickness from which he died”, yet we are also told that once his diseased bones were buried they still carried enough of his past anointing to raise a dead man to life. There does come a time when God will only heal us through our resurrection bodies, but our problem is assuming too quickly that it is now.

When the nine apostles failed to heal the epileptic boy in Matthew 17, they had a pretty good case for assuming that it wasn’t God’s will to heal him. Nine of the twelve disciples. That’s a pretty good ministry team. And yet Jesus came along and healed the boy at once. God had wanted to heal him all along, but several factors had prevented him from doing as he wanted. Back in Matthew 8:1-4, he confronted the leprous theology of “If you are willing…” with the promise “I am willing”, and in chapter 17 he tells us what is stopping him.

4. Faith is key

Note that Jesus does NOT reprimand the sick boy for his lack of faith. That’s what Jim Carrey’s character in the film Bruce Almighty refers to as “a sideplate of guilt” to go alongside “a main course of suffering”. No, Jesus addresses lack of faith on the part of the believers who prayed for healing.

Nor is he saying that they needed to have faith to pray for the sick. They had been praying for the boy - quite a lot, actually. The issue was that their prayers contained not even a mustard seed of faith that their words would win the day. They had failed to grasp the authority of Jesus over the Devil, and were doubting instead of dismissing the sickness. Matthew - himself one of those nine unsuccessful apostles - tells us in Matthew 8:17 the grounds for true effectual faith.

5. Prayer and Fasting are key

It’s fair to assume that the nine apostles prayed for the boy to be healed. What else were they doing in their highly charged ministry time? Nor can Jesus have meant that they should have fasted whilst ministering. He must be telling them in verse 21 that how we walk with God in the run-up to prayer for healing is of vital consequence as to whether or not we succeed. Jesus spent long hours in prayer and fasting before his Father, connecting with him deeply and receiving his Holy Spirit. As a result, he could pray in John 11:41 before raising Lazarus that “Father, I thank you that you HAVE HEARD me.” Jesus lived in intimate fellowship with the Father and the Spirit, so when he came into contact with sickness he was already poised to minister unimpeded and effectively. Do we do the same?

6. We are on a journey

Jesus appears to have healed everyone who came to him. So did the apostles in Jerusalem in Acts 5:16. I, on the other hand, see only a minority of people healed, but at least I can say it is more now than it was three years ago. Jesus had perfect faith and perfect communion with his Father. The apostles followed hard after his example at the start of Acts. This should lead us to assume that the more we follow Jesus’ example ourselves, the more we will see what the apostles saw. Yes, God doesn’t always heal, but he has also told us why not. He urges us to learn the lessons of Matthew 17. If those apostles could become the miracle-workers of Acts 5, then there is also hope for you and for me. Let’s pray, fast, and study Scripture verses which grow our faith. The more we do that, the less we will need to ask this question.

I made these points this morning - aided by drama and chocolate, and followed by a time of prayer for healing - in the kind of language that children can understand. We are teaching our children to ask tough questions and to think for a moment about what God might reply. Next week, I’ll be answering one of the toughest questions which the children have posed: Where do babies and young children who die spend eternity?