When God Says Yes

Today's Scripture

After five days of hard truth about unanswered prayer, today we read the other half of the Bible's witness.

James 5:14-15 — "Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up."

Mark 5:34 — "And he said to her, 'Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.'"

Psalm 103:2-3 — "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases."

The Big Idea

God really does heal, and the Bible really does tell us to ask. But every healing in Scripture is a gift, never a paycheck. Today is about learning to ask boldly without demanding — because the difference between asking and demanding is the difference between prayer and the prosperity gospel.

Reflection

The Bible expects us to ask

There is a quiet thing that happens to people in long-term pain. They stop asking. Not all at once — prayer by prayer, year by year. Asking starts to feel naive, like a kid who keeps writing letters that never get answered. Many chronically ill Christians still believe in God. They have just quietly retired the prayer for healing.

Today's passages will not let us do that. Psalm 103:2-3 calls God the one "who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases." Notice the company healing keeps. It sits right next to forgiveness, in the same sentence, on the list of God's benefits. Healing is not an embarrassing leftover from Bible times. It is part of who God says he is.

And Jesus tells us, flatly, to keep asking. Matthew 7:7-8 — "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you." Three commands, all in the present tense: keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. Then he explains why we can. Luke 11:11-13 — "What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent?... If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

God is not a vending machine that ate your money and now you kick it on the way past. He is a father at the table. You can ask a father for anything.

John Calvin — who, remember, lived most of his adult life in chronic illness — put asking at the very center of the Christian life:

"Prayer is the chief exercise of faith, and that by which we daily receive God's benefits." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Read that slowly. Faith is not the mature alternative to asking. Asking is what faith does for a living. The Christian who has stopped asking has not become more spiritual. They have just gone quiet in the middle of a conversation their Father never ended. Martin Luther said it in four words: "Pray, and let God worry." The asking is your job. The outcome is his.

Call the elders

James 5 is the New Testament's actual instruction for sick believers, and it is startlingly practical. The sick person calls the elders — the recognized leaders of a local church. The elders come, pray over them, and anoint them with oil. Anointing just means putting a little oil on someone's head or hands as a physical, touchable sign that prayer is happening. "And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up" (James 5:15).

Notice what James does not say. He does not say, "Have enough faith and you will be healed." He does not say, "If you are still sick, look for the hidden sin that is blocking your miracle." He says: ask, and ask together. The agency is communal. The sick believer reaches out; the church reaches back.

Most of us have never done this. We will ask a prayer team on a Sunday, post an update in the group chat, mention it vaguely at small group — anything except the simple, slightly awkward thing the New Testament actually says to do. We have left a biblical practice sitting on the table and then concluded the Bible has nothing for the sick.

George Müller ran orphanages in Bristol that cared for thousands of children, funded — famously — by prayer alone. He had standing to say this:

"The great fault of the children of God is, they do not continue in prayer; they do not go on praying; they do not persevere." — George Müller, An Hour with George Müller

And Spurgeon, with his usual picture-language, described what persevering prayer looks like:

"Prayer pulls the rope below and the great bell rings above in the ears of God. Some scarcely stir the bell, for they pray so languidly; others give but an occasional pluck at the rope; but he who wins with heaven is the man who grasps the rope boldly and pulls continuously, with all his might." — Charles Spurgeon

Grasp the rope. Call the elders. Ask out loud, with oil, with witnesses. Today's reading is permission — more than permission, instruction — to ask again.

A gift, never wages

Now look closely at who actually gets healed in the Bible, because this is where the prosperity gospel quietly falls apart.

Mark 5:25-34 gives us a woman who has bled for twelve years. She has "suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse." She has no credentials, no platform, no track record of victorious faith — only desperation. "If I touch even his garments, I will be made well" (Mark 5:28). She touches. She is healed. And Jesus turns and calls her "Daughter" — the only person in all the Gospels he addresses with that word.

In Acts 3:1-10, Peter meets a man lame from birth begging at the temple gate. The man is not even asking for healing; he wants money. "I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!" (Acts 3:6). The man did not earn it. He did not expect it. He goes into the temple "walking and leaping and praising God."

There is a third person hidden in Mark 5 worth noticing: Jairus, the synagogue ruler whose dying daughter started the whole scene. The woman's interruption costs him everything — while Jesus stands talking with her, messengers arrive to say the girl has died. Jairus has every reason to be furious at the delay. Jesus turns to him and says five words: "Do not fear, only believe" (Mark 5:36). Then he walks to the house, takes the dead girl by the hand, and raises her. Both sufferers got their healing that day — but neither one on the schedule they would have written. The woman waited twelve years. Jairus's answer arrived after the funeral had already started. When the yes comes, it often comes by a longer road and a stranger route than we would ever have planned.

Run the math on these stories. Nobody qualified. Nobody claimed anything. Nobody's faith was impressive — the woman was superstitious about cloth, and the lame man was looking the other way. Healing came because Jesus chose to give it. That is what the old word grace means: a gift with no invoice attached. Every healing in Scripture is grace. None of them are wages. The prosperity gospel turns healing into a paycheck God owes the sufficiently faithful — which means it has stopped talking about the God of the Bible.

Asking the way Jesus asked

Here is the tension we cannot edit out: the same New Testament holds both answers. In Philippians 2:25-27, Paul's co-worker Epaphroditus "was ill, near to death. But God had mercy on him." Healed — and Paul calls it mercy, not mechanism. Yet this is the same Paul who pleaded three times for his thorn and was told no. Same apostle. Same Spirit. Same God. Different answers. Paul refuses to make either one the rule.

So how do we pray inside that tension? Tim Keller compressed the answer into one sentence:

"God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked for if we knew everything he knows." — Tim Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

That sentence only comforts you if God is good — which is why the Bible keeps pointing us to the night Jesus prayed for healing-of-a-kind and heard no. Mark 14:36 — "Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will." Look at the order. First the bold ask: remove this cup. No hedging, no pre-spiritualized resignation. Then, and only then, the surrender: not what I will. Jesus did not skip the asking to get to the trusting. He held both, sweating blood.

And here is the gospel underneath all of it: the reason your prayers get through at all is that his didn't. The cup did not pass. He drank it — the cross, the forsakenness, the whole weight of it — so that when you come to the Father asking for mercy, the answer to the deepest question (does he love me?) is already settled, whatever the answer to today's question turns out to be. Augustine's famous prayer fits a praying patient perfectly: "Give what you command, and command what you will." God himself supplies what he asks of us — including the faith to keep asking.

So ask. Ask plainly, ask boldly, ask again after years of not asking. Expect that God may heal, because he does. And do not threaten him with your faith if he does not, because his love was proven somewhere better than your test results.

Going Deeper

If you have never been prayed over for your illness — by elders, a small group, a trusted pastor or friend — take one step toward it today. Send the email. Make the call. Say the awkward sentence: "Would you pray over me, the way James 5 describes?" Oil is not magic and the words are not a formula; they are the church doing what it was told to do. If a yes comes, you will receive it as a gift. If a no comes, you will know you asked like a child of the Father, not a customer of a machine.