Food for Healing Prayer
For the sick and the injured
by
Mike Endicott
The phone rings. It's a friend's wife.
"Pete is in a lot of pain after his operation. Would you pray for him please?"
"Yes," you tell her, "Of course I will!"
And so you do. By the time it gets around to about two weeks later, one of a number of things could have happened. Pete could be really on the mend, in which case we stop praying because of other prayer priorities. On the other hand he may be in just the same condition. What now? Do we stop? Do we go on? There are those among us who argue for persistent prayer, that we should be praying at all times for the saints. There are also those of us who want to say that one prayer is sufficient anyway; that continuing with it displays a lack of faith. We may have to be a bit careful of that one though - it may be our own lack of faith that's driving our argument to stop praying!
The trouble is that, if we then find out a few weeks later that Pete is just not coming right after all that time, we then get an attack of the guilts because we were not faithful in prayer.
So we turn to the Scriptures and try to find some prescriptive way, some mechanistic method, of moving things on, or for clearing our conscience about the matter.
Strangely enough, it may never have been meant to be this way. The real question is this - what have we lost? The early church, as we can read in Acts, seems to have found the whole business of healing the sick and the injured a great deal more simple than we find it today. Healing grace, whatever we might rightly claim about God never changing, seems to have flowed to greater numbers of people with greater ease than ever it seems today, with our hours of faithful intercession and the holes in our trouser knees.
Now it would be wrong at this point to sound dismissive about all those wonderful people who dedicate large chunks of their lives to praying for others. The driving force for this in their hearts, not necessarily the method but certainly the motive, is only to be imitated, to be sought after eagerly. Of course these dear ones are called to pray, not necessarily to heal, so we have no statistics to show the effectiveness of their time - only God knows. But sitting in our own closet and praying diligently for someone who is sick may be the only way left to us these days. We simply know no other way.
And yet Jesus says something quite shocking - that you can point out his disciples - they're the ones who lay their hands on the sick and they get well! Now here's a clue for us to start with - don't you think there is a strong implication of 'doing' something here? Come to think of it, every occasion in the New Testament after the Ascension where the sick get healed is always when the disciples have 'done' something! I rack my poor brains to find any practical scriptural example from the NT where people are actually healed through the faithful prayers of some Christian sat in a closet. That's quite challenging, when you think about it!
Ha, you say, but Jesus can heal at a distance! OK, I will accept that fact as demonstrated by Our Lord himself but I would ask you this - how often did he do it that way as against the numbers of sick he healed by direct ministry? The answer is 'Not a Lot!' and we know we should build our own theology out of the majority of Bible examples, not the minority in our understanding of these things.
So, if we're not careful, we start getting prescriptive again. We grab hold of the words 'lay their hands' and bring into being a whole sacramental methodology called 'The Laying on of Hands'.
Perhaps, because we have read the letter of James, we say that such prayer should be done only by or with us Elders or other church leaders, completely forgetting that ecclesiastic hierarchies, ranks and titles came into being well after the Scripture was written!
Surprise, surprise, it doesn't really help very much in any practical sense but we get on and justify it all by claiming that God always does something although we may never know what it is. Of course that approach, we pray and God does whatever he wants to even if we never find out what it is, may justify to us what we are doing here but it doesn't help the Petes of this world very much and it doesn't necessarily give much glory to Jesus. If it did, then thousands would be flocking to the churches like we do to the local GP. Have you ever been in a general surgery on a Monday morning before the GP's appointment system kicks in? That's food for thought!
But the basic implication of Scripture remains - the kingdom dynamic here is that we get together as a body and minister to each other in trust that something, not anything but the particular thing we need, is actually going to happen. . When two or three…..
I only wish the church could go back and start again with this one! The European Christian church's level of expectancy in Jesus is so low these days it has generally gone negative. We honestly think the only thing we can do for people like Pete is ask. We have gone into denial that we actually have any responsibility at all to 'do' anything else for him, in a spiritual sense that is.
Wouldn't it be lovely if Pete's wife invited us round to her house to pray over her husband in trust rather than just phoning around all and sundry in the hope of working up as much prayer support as possible? Wouldn't it be even more exciting if Pete got better as a result of the visit?
Now, let's be even more practical about this - when we get to Pete's, how can we possibly be any more effective than we were before? Otherwise we may wonder if the effort is worth it? In other words, how can we imitate Jesus when we get there, because he wouldn't have had a problem?
The answer is much more simple than we might think - it's in the Gospels. Whenever Jesus sends disciples out without him, to homes just like Pete's place, he says they should do two things - preach the good news of the kingdom and heal the sick. This is advice worth following as Jesus is unlikely to be leading us up the garden path on this one. Would he say "Do this…" if it didn't work?
But now here's another difficulty looming up straight away - just what is the good news and how do I tell it when I get to Pete's? We may just have touched ground here with another lost skill of the church today - do we know what the good news of the kingdom really is and can we speak it out in a way that people get better when we do it?
That's how it used to work. After all, if we get that bit right, signs and wonders should follow as the Holy Spirit confirms what we are talking about!
Well, you can't restore an art lost for generations in one article but we can make a start. Here's a suggestion, but it will only work for those with hearts open to Scripture and compassion for the sick.
Firstly, get hold of the 'Your kingdom Come' booklet obtainable from this website. It will tell you what to say. If that wets your appetite, and you would like to find out more, much more, then take a look at the kingdom healing programme from the Order of Jacob's Well and that will begin to turn this whole thing right around for you!
Jesus says, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is near!" By the way, 'repent' in this context is nothing to do with sin but a great deal to do with turning around because we are looking in the wrong direction!
Let's take Jesus' advice and see what happens?
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