When was the last time you prayed for a miracle?
Do you ever find yourself struggling to pray boldly in your prayers? I do.
Recently, the New Life elders had the blessing of praying for a man with multiple sclerosis. I found myself battling over how assertive my prayers for healing ought to be. Should I be praying more for physical healing, or more for strength and faith as he battles the autoimmune disease?
We hold both of these impulses in prayer. To only pray for the miraculous and neglect the formative aspects of suffering is to fall into the lie of the prosperity gospel, that difficult things are in conflict with God’s true desires for you: health and wealth. But to neglect to pray for the miraculous is to fall into the lie of stoicism: that God is far off and that our only recourse is to endure the challenges of this world fatalistically.
I tend to fall prey to the trap of stoicism. An appropriate desire to allow God to form us through the challenges of life (which he certainly does), can shut us off from the heart of God. While God does use trial and hardship for our good, let us not forget that God’s ultimate desire for us is prosperity.
As Christians, we recognize we will only experience the fullness of God’s prosperity in the new heavens and the new earth. But, if we are to believe Jesus, that kingdom has broken into our world and continues to break in this very moment. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mk 1:15), Jesus said. He reiterates, “The kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Lk. 17:21).
We can become so calloused to the fallen world in which we live that we begin to think of sickness, suffering, death, and pain as normal and not aberrations of God’s design.
The German theologian Jurgen Moltmann once said, “Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly ‘natural’ things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded” (Jurgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ). Jesus’ miracles do not defy God’s natural laws, but instead reveal how God intended the world to be. Jesus’ miracles restored, they didn’t intrude, and they are the first fruits of God’s promise to repair the world.
One of the most startling questions Jesus ever asks is to an invalid. John tells the story:
2 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic[a] called Bethesda,[b] which has five roofed colonnades. 3 In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed.[c] 5 One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” 7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” 8 Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” 9 And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. (Jn 5:2-8)
“Do you want to be healed?” Do you want to be healed of addiction? Of the rupture in that relationship? Of shame? Or the spirit of fear? Do I want to be healed? Or am I more comfortable living with my limp, with my pain, with my shame? They provide a shield that keeps me from having to step forward in genuine faith, in true courage.
Pastor Ray Ortlund once challenged, “Do you want Jesus to be the chaplain of your status quo?” Not many of us would say yes. And yet, what do my prayers reveal? Do I want the fullness of Jesus’ healing? Or do I just want him to be there with a cool rag and a kind word as I nurse my wounds?
It might be that Jesus is asking you to pray in faith today for healing. He is no mere chaplain, after all, he is the King of Kings.
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