Thoughts on healing 1.

In the same way that suffering is a mystery, the why's and wherefore's of miraculous healing remain a puzzle. Some claim to know the 'secret' to healing. We are told that God wants everyone to be healed. Some even suggest that sickness is an illusion and that we simply need to 'claim our healing' in order to receive it. Yet the number of people who remain unhealed by even the most confident, inevitably leaves us scratching our heads. As a friend of mine commented when I asked if he wanted me to pray for his sick friend, "They have already had every possible prayer, anointing, exorcism and 'word' spoken over them." Yet they were not healed.

I don't presume to have the answers. Yet I offer the following 'random thoughts' about what I consider key issues. I hope they will send us back to the Bible, some earnest prayer and greater trust in the God, "who heals all my diseases" (Ps.103.3)

Firstly, it seems to me that sickness evokes such strong feelings in us that it can easily push bodily healing to become the single all consuming priority and sole thing we want from God. In that sense 'health' may assume a priority in our thinking greater than it warrants. Rather, we need to keep bodily health in perspective. Contrary to worldly thinking, it's not the most important thing. To say, "So long as you have your health," is not the Christian view of life. As someone once said even about death, "It's not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian." We do not pursue life at all costs. For example, we are prepared to suffer bodily for the sake of the gospel. Sickness is bodily dissolution of another sort and equally, is subsumed under our life in Christ.

We must discover ways to keep our life in Christ and our future in him front and centre whatever we believe about sickness and healing. As Paul says, "If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord (Rom. 14:8.) If in the end we say that Christians suffer sickness and for some reason God may not heal, and that we may die from a disease, it does not mean that everything is lost.

It's important that we clearly set our hearts on Christ in this life and so in this way we may, in some small way prepare ourselves for whatever may come our way. If we begin with a faulty view of this, we may make sickness even harder if we or a loved one become ill. Even the highest expectation of healing must be subsumed under the knowledge that whatever comes our way, we belong to Christ and we are safe in him.