When the Healing Doesn't Come

“I’m sorry that my prayers didn’t help”
“Do you think God could have healed your sister?”
“So many people were praying why wasn’t she healed, why didn’t the cancer go away, why didn’t the baby live?”

For 24 hours hundreds and hundreds of people fervently prayed for my sister. From watching a whole entire waiting room filled with friends and family pray, to watching her basketball teammates circle around her bed sending up bold, faith-filled prayers,”, to me holding her hand through the night praying the same words over and over again, all the way to a sweet 3 year old praying for Aunt Liz to “feel better”; I saw the whole spectrum. You hear of all of these crazy miracles and the way God saved someone’s life or miraculously healed someone—yet for us our story ended with a gravesite and funeral. Sometimes it feels that if maybe we had just prayed more fervently or had more faith than she wouldn’t have died. I know there are so many stories out there where the ending isn’t a miraculous healing where instead there is still the constant daily pain and sickness, the permanent disability or the aching heart from a loved one who didn’t make it.

So the question that I have been wrestling with lately is what do you do when you don’t get the physical healing that you pray for?
If you look at the gospel you see over and over again Jesus healing people of their physical diseases, so we can’t help but wonder if he will do the same for us too. & when he doesn’t it leaves us wondering if God is either unable or unwilling to heal our loved ones.

In the gospel of Mark there is the story of Jesus healing the lepers and the man knelt before Jesus and said:  “If you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean”
Jesus replied
“I am willing, be healed.” Mark 1:40-41

Jesus said to the lepers “I am willing”, but in my own life it felt like he was saying to me “I am not willing” and it hurt, it felt like Jesus was refusing me my miracle of healing the loved ones in my life. I felt like it was a party that I wasn’t invited to, an exclusive privilege that wasn’t extended to me. It left me feeling hurt and upset with God.

When we look throughout the gospels the miracles that Jesus performed display his love and compassion for hurting people BUT the greater purpose of each miracle is to draw people into a greater spiritual reality a greater understanding of him that will give us the life we’re so desperate for.

Jesus really does want us to live, and he came and healed people while he was on earth in order to show us that there was a deeper sickness than cancer, brain injuries, miscarriages, autoimmune disorders and strokes and that deeper sickness is sin and it is a poison that penetrates and destroys everything.

But we have hope for what is to come, hope that as Rev 22:1-3 says, death and disease will be killed for good and sorrow and pain will be no more.

But for now we live in the in-between where suffering is an ongoing reality as we await the healing to come with the new heaven and the new earth.

Jesus’s miracles in the gospels and those that we still see today give us a foretaste of what is coming- the day is coming when the healing ministry of Jesus will come to full fruition,
But “when we insist that God’s promises of complete healing be applied to our lives now as well as in the fullness that is to come, we’re mistakenly expecting in this age what God has reserved for the next. God’s primary purpose in the here and now is not to rid us of sickness and pain, but to purify us and empower us to hope in his promises trusting that one day they will become a reality that we will know fully and enjoy forever (Nancy Guthrie).”

Jesus came to get to the root of our problem—the cause of all suffering and sorrow: sin. Jesus promises to heal us of the most destructive, deadly disease in our lives, the disease of sin.

So when I go back to the question I was asked of  “Why didn’t God heal your sister?” I know that Jesus did not withhold his healing touch from her, instead he healed her in the greatest way possible and has taken her to himself and will at the resurrection give her a glorious new body.

This freedom from sin is the miraculous healing that is beyond our understanding and the too-good-to-be-true promise of the gospel.

So don’t insist that God heal you or your loved one here and now. Don’t reduce the nature of his healing power and intentions. Jesus did not die on the cross to give you a certain number of days of health on this earth, but to fit you for eternity in a new heaven and a new earth.

“We believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will gives us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us.”

-Romans 8:23

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