I'm going to talk about a book, but before I do, let me tell you more about my interest in this subject of healing. As I mentioned in a
post earlier this year, I have long struggled in my Christian walk with the issue of miracles and healing. I have always believed that God can and does heal, but I struggle because it seems so rare, while the Bible makes it sound like God heals people all the time, almost every time we ask (Mt. 21:22, Mark 11:24, James 5). While logically I know God can do miracles, I am plagued by many doubts. I don't enjoy having doubts; it's really frustrating. Every time I hear a miracle or healing story, my skeptical mind goes through all kinds of rationalizations to explain how the diagnosis must have been wrong in the first place, or maybe the person never was sick at all, etc.
Much of my doubt comes from learning how to be skeptical and doubt everything the Bible says while I was in college. Thankfully I no longer struggle near as badly as I did back then. But I realized recently through some good conversations with people on the farm and through quiet reflection with God, that much of my struggle is very personal and has to do with my relationship with my grandpa, William Stob. All of my grandparents were missionaries in Japan, the Sytsmas and the Stobs, and they were all my heroes. As you can see below, when Grandpa Stob wasn't doing ministry or giving my family a Bible quiz, he made time to play legos with me.
He was a Christian Reformed minister, but also became heavily influenced by Pentecostal Christians. When I was growing up I heard all kinds of miracles stories from this grandpa while he did ministry in Japan and Sri Lanka. I accepted these stories with childlike faith and was convinced that God was doing miracles and healing people and delivering people from demons all the time. Of course, I now realize that this wasn't quite the case. Having just read my grandparents old prayer support letters, I now see that many, if not most, of their prayers for healing were not answered in the ways they wanted. But as a child I still got the impression that they were practically a daily phenomenon for my grandpa. And his wife, my grandma, at one point was remarkably healed by God, the story of which had made a big impression on me. So I grew up with strong faith in God's power to heal people and that God was indeed doing so regularly.
But then when I was in early high school my grandpa got sick with pancreatic cancer. He and my grandma came back to the US and lived in St. Johns right near my family. For one summer, every single day, my whole family went over to their place and prayed for hours each day for his healing. It's hard to imagine how we possibly could have prayed more than we did. We sang, we worshipped, we thanked God, we pleaded with God, but grandpa was in constant terrible pain, getting weaker by the day and he went on hospice care. But still I, and the rest of my family, fully expected that he would be healed and go back to his unfinished ministry that we viewed as so important. One day, we came over and he said he was healed! He was up and around and full of energy. It was an unbelievable change. He wanted to throw out his medications. We had a great long time of prayer together thanking God for his mercy and healing. I remember we even talked about how to give God glory for this healing, whether we should call up the newspapers or not.
But later that day, we were called back to my grandpa's house. He had suddenly fallen over in the hallway, and appeared to be dead. The whole family prayed over his body for 2 hours, prayers and tears mixed together. At this point we still expected God to heal him and even to bring him back from the dead. We knew God could do so. But it didn't happen.
At his funeral, I was sad, but I processed it well. But I now realize that this event scarred me in a way I didn't realize back then. It was not so much that I was angry with God for my grandpa's death. I knew my grandpa was with Jesus and though I missed him, I really did not have bad grief. It was more that my faith in God healing people was shaken. If God would not heal him, this missionary, after so much prayer, then who would God heal? Since that time I have never doubted that God
can heal, but I have struggled with believing that God regularly
desires to do so, or indeed that he actually does so very often.
Because of all of this past history, I have always been incredibly interested in hearing miracles stories and stories of healing. I want to get over my doubts. I want to understand why God doesn't always heal. I want to understand how to pray for healing. I want to see God heal people. Thankfully, in the past seven years I have grown immensely in my understanding of God's sovereignty and providence. I have grown much in my understanding of why God sometimes allows suffering in our lives and how he can comfort us through it. In fact, I am so deeply comforted by these important doctrines, and trust so strongly that God works all things for good in our lives for his purposes and for his good plan for this world, that I am at peace when God doesn't do the miracles I want or heal the people I ask him to heal. But I still don't feel like my heart is right on this issue of healing, and I feel like if I could witness just one amazing healing that was obviously only by God's miraculous unordinary intervention, then everything would be great and this wounded part of my faith would be healed.
Part of the problem is that every time God does heal someone as a result of my prayer, I still manage to find ways to explain it away. For example, while with family for this Christmas, my dad's eye suddenly got really cloudy. We looked up information online about it and got worried and thought about taking him to the emergency room. But we prayed for his healing, and within an hour his eye was back to 100% and the strange cloudiness had gone away. This is probably one of many times God has answered my prayers for healing, and yet I am ashamed to admit, that after he was healed, part of me thanked God for this wonderful healing, and part of me rationalized that it was some random eye event that went away on its own apart from any work of God. Sometimes I just have to cry out to God like the man in Mark 9:24 - “
I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” I wish I was free of stupid doubts.
I have always continued to pray for healing for people. I never gave up on that. But I think I had grown to
expect that God will not answer those prayers. And the book I just read has helped me greatly with this problem. After reading this book, I feel like my faith has been greatly strengthened. I'm now excited to pray for healing for people with eager expectation, rather than as a duty expecting that God will do nothing. The book is "Healing" by Father Francis MacNutt. On the cover of my old copy it says: "
The most comprehensive book ever written on healing through prayer - Forgiveness of sin, inner healing of emotional problems, physical healing, deliverance: exorcism." I had never heard of it, but found it in the farm's library.
The thing I appreciate most about this book was that it was so well balanced. It avoided most of the errors that we tend to associate with some healing ministries, such as rejecting medical science, or saying God will always heal if we have enough faith, and so on. The author was a Roman Catholic priest influenced by charismatic evangelicals. I can't say that there was nothing in the book I found strange, but overall it was really good and level-headed, not to mention grounded in Scripture.
I was going to explain a whole list of things I learned from this book, but this post already got long. So I will just mention a couple things I thought were helpful, and you can read it yourself if you wish :)
I really appreciated how he unpacked the biblical passages about faith, and what kind of faith we need. Our faith is not in ourselves and in how much belief we have, our faith is in God. And our faith in God can be divided into four parts, when thinking about having faith in God to heal us.
1. Faith in God's faithfulness, that he is faithful to his promises.
2. Faith in God's wisdom, that God knows what is best. Sometimes in ignorance I pray for something that is not good. Sometimes the results of my prayer will surprise me. Sometimes it will seem like God is letting us suffer for no reason but somehow it fits into his good plan for our lives.
3. Faith in God's power. God can do anything, even raise someone from the dead.
4. Faith in God's goodness. God actually likes me, he loves me. He desires good for me. We should expect that God wants to heal us, instead of always thinking God wants us to suffer.
Thinking about faith in this way is so concrete and helpful. Some people argue that we need to have faith that God WILL heal us for sure, and if we don't then we won't be healed. But the author of this book nicely points out that this would mean we need to be omniscient knowing exactly what God will do. Instead of trying to get myself to believe I know the future, I can think about having faith in who God is and his loving and powerful nature. Faith in God's goodness was what I most needed to read about in this book. I have believed in God's wisdom and power especially, but I've had trouble thinking God actually
wants to heal me or others. I've trusted so much in his sovereignty which is good, but sort of went around thinking of God as someone who wants all of us suffering all the time. I needed rekindled faith in his goodness, that he delights to see us well and healthy, and will act to make us so, not only in the age to come, but even now in this life.
A second thing I learned from this book was a helpful distinction between demonic oppression and demonic possession. The author argues that demonic possession is extremely rare, and even in some biblical stories demonic oppression is actually what is being talked about. He says that demonic oppression happens all the time and can even happen against Christians. It was a convincing argument. This would explain why we don't see people demon possessed all the time, acting out in ways such as in the movie "The Exorcist", or like the demon possessed man hanging out in the tombs during Jesus time (though of course that still happens sometimes). But just because we don't see possessions all the time, we can't be blind to demonic oppression, and the importance of freeing people, including fellow Christians, from demonic oppression and influence.
Feel free to comment with thoughts, criticisms, encouragements, or questions.
