My friend Carol was diagnosed suddenly with a brain tumor. Carol was a vibrant, godly, loving woman. She was a fellow Elder and I came to trust her as a co-worker and as a mentor and guide.

Carol knew Jesus intimately and was a courageous follower of His and a servant of all those God called her to love and lift up. She had a special place in her heart for the struggling in our world and served quietly to relieve their pain. She was a spiritual hero for so many and loved by everyone she came in contact with.

She had a dizzy spell one day and went to the emergency room reluctantly.  She wasn’t one to complain or scurry to the doctor at every little ache and pain. By the time the tests were done, everything had changed. She had an advanced cancerous tumor on the base of her brain stem that could not be operated on and on which treatment would have little effect. She asked me and all of our Elders to pray for complete healing and we did – diligently. We anointed her with oil and prayed.

She sought second and third opinions, not out of any panic but out of due diligence. Carol’s attitude was one of contentment. She didn’t want to leave her husband, friends, kids, grandkids, and ministry but she knew that ultimately she would be in the presence of Jesus. Going wasn’t her concern, but leaving was her heartache. All these opinions only yielded an experimental treatment. The side effects were severe. Eventually, it was obvious that they were not going to bring Carol quality of life and she decided to stop them. Carol joyfully submitted to God’s will and way and graciously was gathered to her reward and Jesus’ side. She was healed for time and eternity. She wasn’t physically healed so that she could stay here.

Lisa, another friend of mine, was diagnosed with cancer shortly after she followed God’s lead to leave her job in the marketplace and accept a pay cut to serve on a church staff. She was excited to follow God’s will and serve Him with the best hours of her day and then she was inflicted with cancer. It didn’t make sense. We prayed for her healing. It wasn’t immediate, but she was declared cancer free six years after they found the first cells.

Why was Lisa healed and Carol not? Were they both healed? Was Carol not as important to God? Was Lisa more important? Why? Did Lisa have more to do here and Carol was done? 

Through their experiences, many other people were healed and Carol and Lisa both were each an equal vessel of eternal life and grace. Both of their experiences pointed to God’s grace and mercy and the aftermath of each of their experiences testifies to hope. Carol taught us all how to die. She truly trusted God and Jesus and the Spirit led her through the literal “shadow of death.” She had a growing peace that one could not deny. Those who visited her saw Jesus and knew He was true and real. Lisa has been used to serve dozens of cancer patients as a survivor and to counsel them to faithfulness as she has testified to God’s power and grace. In her recovery, she has pointed to God as her source of strength and hope. Lisa has brought healing to the living and Carol brought healing to the dying.

I believe they were both healed and all those who chose to see the eternal aspect of their experiences were healed also. Neither of them wanted God to just do it all nor did they blame God for any perceived failure in their process. Neither of them “sat” and waited for God to do something while they languished in grief. They both followed the Spirit and taught others how. Neither of them quit when it was hard and they allowed God to heal their perception of Him and His actions in their lives and other’s lives. Carol and Lisa submitted to God and followed Jesus as they were guided by the Spirit to understand that the cancer was not about either of them but it was about God and the community of believers surrounding them. Healing? Yes – they and all around them were healed.

We all seem to look for the easy way in or out. This is especially true when there is something in our lives that is not “whole.” Healing means to “make whole or well – to cure.” The implication is that there is something broken or that we are sick.

Our first task is to determine if we are, in fact, ill or if our lives contain something broken. Our inherent laziness often causes us to call for healing when, in fact, we are in a season when life is hard or our own errors have place us in an uncomfortable place. At times, instead of healing, we need to ask God for wisdom. The task before us is to determine the change of behavior or tactic needed to progress through this normal stage of life. Change is very hard but it does not require healing.  It requires obedience and submission to God’s leadership. Change requires obedience to God’s loving guidelines so that He can bring victory and contentment in the next season. Not healing – just following Jesus.

We often call for healing because we want to be able to blame someone else if we are unable to experience change. Legitimately, if a person has experienced failure and rejection over and over in life, the ability to assertively seek change is extremely hard. The person may feel as though one more failure will be fatal – literally or figuratively. We don’t need healing – at least not concerning the issue that is looming – we need courage and faith. We do need our perception of God healed. He has promised to never leave us or forsake us when we follow His guidelines to wellness and hope.

When we are seeking someone to blame if things don’t change, we are assuming they can’t change and we are preparing a scapegoat. If where you are right now is not where God wants you to be, the journey away from there is in God’s control and following Him will bring success. It may not be as fast as I want nor get me to where I think I should be but He will guide. You don’t need a scapegoat for when it fails – you have a Father who will bring success.

Admit it, we often just don’t want to put forth the effort. We know we are ill. We know our marriage is on the rocks. We know our behavior is destructive. We know this is not the way to contentment and a life of dynamic obedience. We call out for God to heal – to bring change. We call out as we sit back. We cry out as we recline. ‘Change me God – I’ll sit right here until you do.’ We don’t like where we are but it doesn’t take much energy to stay here so we decide that not expending energy on a solution is more important than the things in life that feel broken. We just sit.

There are many of us who have tried and tried and tried and all we have experienced is what we perceive to be failure and we are tired. We started by trying what we thought to be right with our own energy. We leaned on our own understanding of issues and spent whatever emotional and physical energy we had to solve the “problem.” We might have even moved to calling out to God for more energy to go about our own solution until it seemed God stopped providing. Then, weary and broken, we asked for His knowledge of the eternal solution and when we heard it, we got back up but found we just couldn’t move that way – we were exhausted. We called out for healing.

If that is the case, ask for God to heal the right thing. You and I need healing of our own minds, hearts, and bodies – the stress has taken its toll – not the situation, relationship, ailment, or system. We need healing so that we can continue to be an agent of healing as God’s ambassadors. We have the privilege of being part of the process and part of the solution. That is where a ton of joy comes from in our lives.

The healing God wants to bring might very well be a wholeness of our hearts and minds so that we might see eternally as He does. The cure is often to bring our hearts to the place of contentment and calm – a peace that goes way beyond our ability to understand or know. God often heals our humanness and replaces it with a super-natural awareness of the most important aspect of life and death – the eternal.

God’s intent in healing is the spiritual awakening of the human community. Following Jesus is never about the individual but about the communal. All I have, am, own, know, behold, and experience is for the growth, advancement, redemption, and healing of all of humanity starting with those closest to me and moving outward from there. In asking for healing, I am asking for the healing of mankind.

In the New Testament, illness and hardship was seen in the misguided Jewish community as a sign of sin in a person’s or family’s life. Health and wealth were signs of God’s blessing. After 400 hundred years of God’s silence, He refused to speak to the Israelites because they had refused to listen – the Jewish leaders had taken the written law of the Old Testament and added paragraphs of oral law. Living a rigid life of the law brought “blessing” and they measured that materially and physically. When Jesus healed, He was, in the eyes of the Jewish Leaders, forgiving sins. Only God, the God of Abraham, forgave sins and He did that through the priests and by using the oral sacrificial system that turned a profit for the leaders.  Jesus was not only healing the lame and sick, He was trying to heal the hearts of the teachers.

The Greeks and the Romans in the known world at Jesus’ time also saw hardship and isolation as a punishment from their gods for the violation of rules. When one made the gods angry, a price was paid. Others did not stand in the way of the gods lest the wrath be visited on them also. If a person was hungry, that was a result of their sin. If a person was a slave, don’t free them. It was his or her lot in life. If a person was lame, blind, or injured, stay clear or the gods will see you as defying them and you too will suffer. When Jesus heals in the Gospels and the Apostles do so in the Acts of the Apostles, they are disarming the myth of the Greek and Roman gods and revealing them as nonexistent.

The Greek god of healing, Asclepius, could heal many things, but not blindness. He could help many people but not pregnant women and elderly people. The gods had spoken when a person was blind. If the person became blind during their lifetime, it was the result of angering the gods. If they were born blind it was because of their family’s disobedience. The best Asclepius could do was to restore some sight but the people the healed person saw would just look like trees. Their sight, at best, would be shadows.

If a woman was pregnant, it was in the god’s hands as to whether the sins of the father and mother would result in a still birth, a handicapped child, or the death of the mother. If you were elderly, the gods would deal with you as they saw fit according to your life achievements.

In the Gospels, Jesus heals a blind man. He touches his eyes once and the man can suddenly see people walking around but they are blurry and they appear like trees. Jesus touches the man again and His sight is clear and crisp. This healing was not for the blind man. It was for the Greeks in the crowd and all those tempted to follow the Greek Pantheon. Jesus pointed to God as the one and only healer.

The early church took in the pregnant and the elderly because they knew their value as God’s creation and they also knew that God was powerful enough to protect them. In following Jesus’ example, the early church didn’t shy away from those who were ill and alone because they knew from Jesus’ teaching that sin was not the cause of someone’s illness and that all things were possible with their powerful God. The elderly were wise and discerning and the pregnant carried a life given by their God and the child was a soul to be claimed and redeemed by Jesus. As the Greek gods were portrayed to be bullies, the early church knew the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit to be compassionate and caring. In this case, a culture was healed.

Healing in 2010 and beyond has the same purpose – to point to God through Jesus as a caring, compassionate God who redeems entire people groups and brings hope and peace to wherever they reside.  Sickness is not the result of sin. Healing has eternal consequences. There is nothing God can’t do. God is always focused on the condition of the soul first and the body next. He calls on followers of Jesus to take in those the culture rejects because they don’t measure up to the standards or they are feared to bring retribution on those that come to close to them. Healing of the people comes when all that is feared is proven to be powerless. That proof comes not as an argument or a debate but simply through what is perceived as followers of Jesus “ignoring” that which is thought to be able to affect the future. It is not about what we don’t believe, follow, or put our hope in. It is all about what we live out as our hope and faith.

Does God heal today? Yes. I’ve witnessed it. I’ve seen miraculous removal of cancer. I’ve watched tumors disappear. I’ve seen marriages reunite after affairs. Adult kids who have gone prodigal have returned home as they were before the poor choices began. Premature babies determined to have a struggling future have grown up to be dynamic leaders, scholars, and artists. Addicts have gotten sober. God heals.

What about the times He doesn’t? I really think He always does, but just not the way we want or see to be best. Our mistake is to think that healing, or any act of God, is for the individual. Nothing in Christendom is for the individual. It is all for the community of followers of Jesus and those not yet following Jesus in our towns and around the world. He might not heal the body, but He heals those the ill person touches. He might not heal right now, but He uses the gift of medicine to heal gradually and the experience heals one’s resolve and faith. He might not heal the marriage, but He heals the angry spouse’s attitude so that he or she sees there wasn’t a problem with the marriage, just one person’s attitude. He might not heal the child born with a handicap, but He will heal the community that has the privilege to surround the child and family in order to learn to be a caring community of Spirit-led servants. He might not heal the fatal injury or illness, but He has healed the soul and the greatest cure is brought; not temporal life here, but eternal life in Glory. That is the ultimate healing and the community is drawn heavenward as parts of us go with each one that ascends to God’s arms before us.

In the Gospel of John, the 5th chapter, Jesus approaches Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate. That was the Gate where all the sheep and lambs to be sacrificed in the Temple for the forgiveness of sins entered. He approaches that Gate as the Lamb of God who will take away all the sins – past, present, and future – of the world. As He is approaching, He walks by the Pool of Bethesda that has five covered porches where the crippled and blind gather for healing. The myth was that an angel would come and stir up the water. The first one in the water would be healed. Bethesda means ‘mercy’ or ‘healing and flowing water’. The people would wait for the water to flow so that healing could be realized. After the time of Jesus, this pool became an Asclepion – the place of worship for the false Greek god of healing, Asclepius.

Jesus comes to that pool and sees a man that had been lying there for 38 years. He was lame. He was on a mat. This account is about Jesus primarily and secondarily, about the healing of the man. Can you imagine the smell? This man made his way around on his hands and he is outside the Sheep Gate. He would have been helped to this place every morning unless the family had forgotten to come and get him the night before. That would mean he would spend the night there and beg for food and water. He would have been covered with his own feces and urine and the dung of the sheep. His hands would have been calloused and dirty. His beard would have been matted with grime and his hair and face filthy from years of living at knee level. Of all the people Jesus could have healed, He went to this man.

Why? There would be no disputing that when this guy walked, that it was purely an act of God. The Jewish Leaders would not be able to claim fraud. They had seen him there for 38 years. This man was totally undeserving. He was seen as spiritually unclean on so many levels. He was constantly in the dirt. He was often neglected by his family who had “obviously sinned” in the Jewish mind. He had human feces on him and animal manure. His mat and clothes were dirty and unfit for the temple. He could not sacrifice – he was lower than the sheep he would have needed for his sins to be forgiven. Jesus chooses the least of the least –not to give the man healing, but to point to His Heavenly Father who heals and forgives who He wants, when He wants. Jesus chose this man to heal the minds and hearts of the people watching. The lame man was an instrument of God’s grace. The healing was for the community.

Should I pray for healing? Yes. Should I expect healing? Yes. How do I position myself to be healed? Position yourself to be God’s instrument of grace and hope and submit to the manner in which He chooses to heal you. Know you are not beyond healing. If God can send Jesus to the man at that pool, He can and will send Jesus to you. Ask God to glorify Himself and to heal the community as He works His power in and through you. Submit to His will and trust Him. Pray with faith – don’t debate whether or not God is capable and wise and all-knowing. See all of yourself and the situation. Be open to observing and knowing that God is healing in ways you didn’t expect or even want. Enjoy His activity wherever He chooses to assert it. Be part of the process; be an agent of healing for yourself and others. Remember, Godliness – holiness, joy, peace, selflessness, humility, contentment, which is a resting attitude in God’s will and ways that reserves our energy, is a great thing.

When we rest in the Lord, He renews our strength. That, in itself, is a miracle. The word rest is a picture of a horse not pulling against the reins as the master leads it. A horse that is untrusting or rebellious will pull and jerk, wasting energy on fighting against the one who will lead it, whether it is liked or not. We are invited to follow willingly and trustingly and to have the energy we would have spent jerking around poured back into us. We will be renewed for the new leg of the journey. As you pray for healing, rest in the Lord as you wait. New strength for the journey and new power for the fight is given.

Are you in the position of the man by the pool? Take heart, Jesus is reaching to you. He sees you, loves you, cares for you, knows you, died for you, and lives for you. Are you in the position of Jesus? Are you being given the chance, through your suffering, to reach to those who feel hopeless and hurting so that through your experience and willingness to endure, they might see hope and find life? Is your life about their healing? Count it a calling and a blessing that you can change a life by the way you live – or possibly die.

All of this takes place every day within the sight of the Gate through which Jesus walked to be the sacrifice for all of humanity so that we can and will be adopted into God’s eternal family. He chose and chooses to walk through the gate we used to have to go through in order to allow us to have a personal relationship with the Creator and Sustainer of the universe. We journey day by day in real life, facing real hurt, weary from the battles, selfish because of the conflict right next to the place where Jesus came to take the place of all that hurts, aches, roars, and undermines.

Look! There is your Savior walking to the cross and coming from the tomb to so that you and I have eternal healing – hope, peace, love, and joy – that can’t be taken away by anything this side or the other side of Heaven. You can exercise faith in that truth. In that, you will find healing – mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical wholeness for you and all those around you.