When God Says Yes

Today's Reading

Read James 5:13-16 carefully. James is plain about the practice. The sick are to call for the elders. The elders are to pray and anoint with oil. "And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up." Notice that James takes for granted that this prayer will sometimes be answered.

Read Acts 3:1-10 — Peter and John at the Beautiful Gate. A man lame from birth is healed in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. He goes into the temple "walking and leaping and praising God."

Read Mark 5:21-43 — two healings interwoven. Jairus's twelve-year-old daughter, who has just died. The woman with the twelve-year hemorrhage who reaches out and touches the hem of Jesus' garment. Both are healed.

Read Philippians 2:25-30 — Epaphroditus, a fellow worker of Paul's, is "ill, near to death." God has mercy on him. He recovers. Paul names this as God's mercy, not as something automatic.

Reflection

We have spent the last few days on the no. Today we spend it on the yes — because the yes is also part of the Bible, and we cannot tell the truth about Christian suffering if we drop one half of the picture.

Jesus healed people. Constantly. The Gospels are crowded with healings, so many that John says the world could not contain the books that would be written if every miracle were recorded. The lame walked, the blind saw, lepers were cleansed, the deaf heard, even the dead were raised. This was not incidental. It was central to his ministry. The kingdom of God breaking in looked, in part, like bodies being repaired.

The apostles continued the pattern. Peter heals the lame man at the Beautiful Gate; Paul heals on Malta and elsewhere; the early church, in Acts, is full of healings. James, writing his short pastoral letter to dispersed Jewish Christians, gives churches a procedure: call the elders, anoint with oil, pray. Not as an emergency measure for exceptional saints. As ordinary practice for ordinary sick believers.

Two thousand years of church history continue the story, though more unevenly. Healings are recorded in the lives of the desert fathers, in medieval saints, in Reformation pastors who anointed and prayed, in the Wesleys and Whitefields, in modern missionary biographies, in ordinary churches in ordinary towns where ordinary people sometimes get unexpectedly better. Every honest pastor knows of cases where people prayed and a tumor disappeared, a chronic illness lifted, a marriage was reconstituted from what looked like wreckage. We do not have to pretend these are not real.

So the question for the suffering Christian is not "does God still heal?" The biblical and historical answer is yes. The question is: what do I do with the fact that he does, and that he sometimes does not?

James 5 is the right place to start because it is the practical instruction the New Testament gives. The structure is striking. James does not say "have great faith and you will be healed." He does not say "if you have hidden sin, your healing will be blocked" — though he does say that confession of sin should accompany prayer for healing, because the two are often related. He says: call the elders. The agency is communal. The sick believer reaches out to the church. The church reaches back. Together they pray.

This practice has been almost entirely lost in modern evangelical churches. Many Christians have never been anointed with oil and prayed over by elders. Some have never even known it was an option. The result is that we have left a New Testament practice on the table while pretending the New Testament does not promise anything about healing. That is bad on both ends. We do not pray as the Bible tells us to, and then we conclude that the Bible does not have anything to say.

What would it look like to recover the practice? It would mean asking. It would mean a group of trusted believers gathering, with oil if you have it, and praying — not magically, not formulaically, but plainly, asking God in the name of Jesus to heal. It would mean confessing sins to one another (James says this in the same paragraph) so that the prayer happens in the context of a real community, not a transaction. It would mean expecting God to act, while leaving the form and timing of his action to him.

J. I. Packer, in his book on prayer, makes a related point. Petitionary prayer — asking God for things, including specific healing for specific bodies — is not a lower form of spirituality. It is the New Testament's primary form. Jesus tells us to ask, seek, knock. The Lord's Prayer is largely petitions. Paul asks for things constantly in his letters. To stop asking, in the name of being too mature for petition, is to leave behind the actual practice of biblical prayer. Many Christians in chronic suffering have, over years of unanswered prayer, slowly stopped asking. Today is permission to ask again.

But — and this is the crucial word — to ask is not to demand. The yes is real. It is also a gift. Every miracle in the New Testament is, in the technical sense, grace: an unearned, freely given act of God. None of them are owed. The lame man at the Beautiful Gate did not have superior faith. He did not even know who Jesus was when Peter spoke. The woman with the hemorrhage had spent twelve years with doctors and was at the end of her resources. Jairus's daughter was already dead when Jesus arrived. None of them claimed their healing on the basis of accomplished spirituality. They received it because Jesus chose to give it.

Mark 5 is worth lingering on. The structure is deliberate. We meet Jairus, a synagogue ruler, whose daughter is dying. He approaches Jesus with appropriate humility and asks. On the way, the crowd presses in, and a woman who has bled for twelve years touches Jesus' cloak in desperation. She is healed. Jesus stops. He calls her out. He calls her daughter — the only person in the Gospels he addresses with that word. Meanwhile Jairus's actual daughter dies. The delay caused by the woman is the death of the girl. Jairus has every reason to be furious. Jesus says, "Do not fear, only believe." He goes to the house, takes the girl by the hand, and raises her.

What this passage shows, almost too clearly to miss, is that healing is on Jesus' timetable, in Jesus' way, for purposes Jesus understands and we usually do not. The woman could have given up after the eleventh year. Jairus could have given up when his daughter died. Both of them got their healing — but neither on a schedule they would have chosen. The yes, when it comes, often comes through a longer wait and a stranger route than we would have written.

Paul's letter to the Philippians has a small but important moment. Epaphroditus, his fellow worker, has been "ill, near to death." Paul says, "But God had mercy on him, and not only on him but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow." Two things to notice. First: God had mercy. The healing is named as mercy, not as a mechanism. Second: the same Paul who writes this is the Paul who pleaded three times for his thorn and was told no. The same apostle, the same Spirit, the same God — different answers. Paul does not pit the two against each other. He calls Epaphroditus's healing mercy and his own thorn grace. He refuses to make either the rule.

How then do we pray, today, in chronic pain?

We pray plainly. We tell God what we want. We ask for healing, by name, with no apologies for asking. We call the elders if we can. We let the body of Christ pray over our bodies. We confess what needs confessing, knowing that not all sickness is connected to sin and refusing the cruel suggestion that ours must be. We expect that God may heal. We do not threaten him with our faith if he does not. We hold the asking and the surrender together, the way Jesus did in Gethsemane: "let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will."

The yes is real. So is the no. Tomorrow we walk into the no more carefully. Today we pray with full expectation that God still heals. He does. Sometimes the one he heals will be you.

Going Deeper

If you have not been prayed over for your illness — by elders, a small group, a trusted friend or pastor — consider asking. Email a pastor. Tell a friend. Set a time. Anointing with oil is biblical and not a strange practice; it is a physical sign of the prayer being made. If a yes comes, you will receive it as a gift. If a no comes, you will know you have asked. Either way you will have done what James 5 actually tells the church to do.