When God Says No or Not Yet

One question has become important to Christians in the last few years. If a person is ill, is it God's will to heal them there and then? Preachers like Andrew Womack and Apostle Guillermo Maldonado have encouraged us to believe that it is. We should not believe that, somehow, God can use this illness to do good or to bring glory to God. Jesus didn't go around making people sick. There are some practical problems with this approach. Kathryn Kuhlman said that many people who came to her meetings were disappointed that they were not healed and were very distressed when people told them that they didn't have enough faith. I think they had faith, or they wouldn't have been disappointed. If I've got a disability and I go to a big healing meeting, just to see if anything happens, I haven't got a tremendous amount of faith but I wouldn't feel disappointed. A church elder once told the story of a woman who had a little girl who was terminally ill. She took her to all sorts of healing meetings. Eventually the little girl died and the mother was so upset that she died herself a few years later. That woman had faith, so much faith she couldn't cope unless God answered her prayers with the desired miracle. Many disasters in my life have worked for my good, including my long term struggles with anxiety and depression and also my long term unemployment. In the Bible, the bad things that happen in our lives are always part of a greater plan. Romans 8:28. Why shouldn't illness be the same?
I found God as a suicidal depressed teenager. I have often wondered why God didn't remove my depression and my nightmares there and then, never to return. Life would have been so much easier if he had. If he had, I would be a trained nurse, as I gave up nurse training because of my depression. That would be a different life. I would have dedicated my life to nursing and it would have been impossible to have taken an active part in church life. I wouldn't belong to the kind of church I belong to now. A job like that requires dedication. When you're throwing the dinner into the microwave oven at the end of a 13 hour shift, you don't have the energy to get into the car and pick up the sandwiches for the Jesus Centre or to write an essay like this one. In 1992 I had a bad episode of depression during some important exams at university. This inspired me to launch The Christian Relaxation Tape which I advertised in a Christian magazine. It wasn't particularly successful, although I had a few interesting letters from people with depression, and I decided to concentrate on a few other ministry titles. This met with only partial success until an African pastor heard one of my tapes when visiting a pastor in another part of Nigeria. Pastor Amos Adamu Jesse wrote to me and told me that he was the leader of 79 African churches and suffered from a considerable shortage of Bibles and Christian books. I provided him with tapes and CDs of my own sermons and free downloads from the internet for 5 years. I encouraged people in his churches to think that they could produce their own Christian publications and all they needed was a Bible, a pen, a notebook and a cassette recorder. After 5 years the letters stopped coming. I hope this was because people had learnt to produce their own programmes. I hope they still do. Cassette recorders are still sold by companies like Amazon and are very useful in parts of the world where batteries might be easier to find than a mobile phone signal. If I hadn't had a bad episode of depression during some important exams, the idea for a tape ministry might never have happened. If I hadn't been unemployed for several years after I left university, I might never have had time to run a ministry. People don't realise how much time and effort is needed, not just to type the words and read them on to the tape but all the books you read, all the research, all those ideas have to come from somewhere. Speaking as someone who does novels and devotional books, writing a novel is easy. You just have to make it up. Devotional books require hours and hours of listening to other people's work and making up your own mind about what you believe about it and how people should respond to the latest ideas. It is not always God's will to provide an unemployed person with a financial miracle or a sick person with healing there and then. For me personally, these things were meant to happen but they would happen later.
We laugh at Christians who think that they can be an effective witness to their nurses and doctors because they are ill. We do so wrongly. Dr. Ainslie Meares said in one of his books, 'How foolish we were to forget God. This could give peace even in the hour of death.' Dr. Claire Weekes, the Australian psychiatrist, mentions that many of her patients find peace in religion. Sick people are an effective witness. One member of our church was in a psychiatric ward. I prayed that God would provide her with another Christian on the ward that she could talk to. I later discovered that another member of our church had been admitted to the ward at the same time. In 1987 I spent several weeks in hospital with depression myself and became a close friend of another patient who was very close to finding Jesus.When Andrew Booth died of leukaemia, I had more faith than anyone that he would be healed. I was surprised when one of the women from the church phoned me in the afternoon and told me he had died. We had all known he was critically ill but that lunchtime I had prayed and believed God for a miracle. On the way home from the prayer meeting, I was met by an unpleasant group of local teenagers who wanted me to give them a reading from my Bible. I said I didn't have a Bible. They didn't believe me. I said that the reason I didn't have the Bible was that we were having a prayer meeting for Andrew Booth. One of the teenagers said, 'I knew him.' Illness is used by God in the same way as any other problem. Opportunities may arise from it. When David Watson died of cancer in 1982, he was looking forward to Heaven. 'At the beginning of my illness, I was prepared to go to Heaven and willing to stay on Earth. Now I'm willing to go to Heaven and prepared to stay on Earth.' Enoch was taken to be with God because he was a godly man and wanted to be with him. So was David Watson. So was Andrew Booth. One of the tombstones in the Jesus Fellowship cemetery recalls a young man who 'loved Jesus so much he wanted to dance with him.'
King Hezekiah is a person who possibly had a problem with expecting a miracle at the wrong time. He was ill. Isaiah came to visit him to tell him to sort all of his affairs out because he would die. Hezekiah came before God with tears and persuaded God to add 15 years to his life. Isaiah returned with some figs to put on Hezekiah's sores and Hezekiah asked for his shadow to go back 10 steps as a sign. (Isaiah38,39. 2Kings20.) Who could blame him? Hezekiah was 39 years old. (2Kings18:2.) Even by the standards of the time, he was only middle aged. He also seems to have become very selfish. When Isaiah tells him that his son will be taken off to captivity, Hezekiah says, 'The word of the Lord you have spoken is good,' because it wouldn't be Hezekiah. There will be peace in Hezekiah's lifetime. That's all that matters. God told Isaiah that Hezekiah would die. God wanted it that way. God didn't want Hezekiah's son Manasseh to become king. Hezekiah died and Manasseh became king when he was 12 years old. He was the most evil and idolatorous king ever. Impossible if Hezekiah had died 15 years earlier, as per God's original plan.
There have been changes in the way Christians understand healing and those changes are very welcome. If you are going to pray, 'Lord, heal this person if that is thy will,' you may as well not bother praying a mousey little prayer like that. You rebuke the illness. You tell it to go. You can set people free from anything in Jesus' name, illness, poverty, childhood memories, not only demons. Jesus commanded the wind and the waves. You can command anything in his name. I am convinced that it is God's will to heal more often than we thought in the 1980s. When I was a young Christian we thought it was extremely rare, extremely exceptional for God to want to heal someone. It may, in fact, be the exception if God doesn't want to heal. But don't be too disappointed if it doesn't happen straight away or if a person with terminal cancer ends up in Heaven.