She pointed to 1 Peter chapter 5, where God tells us to cast all our anxiety on Him, because He cares for us.
“Joni,” she said, “God doesn’t want to hurt you. He wants to help you. That’s in His nature. He’d go to any lengths to release you from severe pain and a difficult disability.”
When Karen shared that with me, the first thing that came to mind was the way God cared for Timothy in the Bible. The text says that this young man had to deal with frequent illness, and there is no record that he found healing. Instead, the apostle advised him to use a little medicinal wine to settle his stomach.5 God also cared for James, but James was run through with Herod’s sword because of his testimony.6 God cared for John, but allowed him to be exiled and left isolated on a lonely island.7 He cared for Stephen, from the first stones that struck the young man’s earnest, unmarred face to the last one that sent him out of his broken body.8 He cared for Paul’s companion Trophimus, whom the apostle had to leave behind sick in Ephesus—though he was desperately needed for ministry.9
While I’m not saying God enjoys watching us struggle, His Word clearly indicates He allows wounds to prick and pierce us. But that doesn’t mean He has stopped caring. God expresses His care in different ways. As many have said so eloquently, sometimes He delivers us from the storm, and at other times He delivers us through the storm.
And even if the storm happens to take our earthly life, He delivers us safely into the best and most joyous place we could ever wish for in our most agonizingly beautiful dreams. Just look at what happened to Paul near the end of his life. While sitting in a dank prison, he writes confidently to his friend Timothy (in the last letter he would ever write), “The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom” (2 Tim. 4:18). A short time later, a Roman soldier lifted his sword and, with a swift stroke, killed the old apostle. That was one evil attack from which God obviously did not rescue Paul. Instead, that Roman’s sword became the blessed key which opened the latch on the pearly gates to welcome Paul into heaven! Just another example that healing and escape from suffering isn’t always God’s priority for us.
On other occasions when Paul sat in a prison cell, he no doubt cast all his anxiety on God and had confidence that God cared about his situation. In fact, the Lord Himself appeared to Paul and said, “Take courage! As you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so you must also testify in Rome.”10
The Lord came to Paul. Spoke to Paul. Encouraged Paul. Isn’t that proof that He cared? And yet after that encouraging visit by the Lord Himself, Paul remained in custody at least two more years. Did God stop caring for Paul during those twenty-four long months in confinement? Of course not. And God proves it by giving Paul the kind of peace that allowed him to write from his prison cell, “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation.”11
Could God have caused Paul’s chains to drop off and open the prison doors to allow him walk free? Who could doubt it? He did it for Paul and Silas in Philippi—with a great earthquake! He did it (twice) for the apostle Peter. But was it any less of a miracle to meet with Paul in that dungeon and give Him a supernatural contentment in that place? Was that a somehow lesser thing?
You may not be in prison (although you might), but you may be lying in a hospital bed, or a bed at home, struggling for weeks with being sick. Or you may still be laid up from your knee surgery or hip surgery. You might be struggling in your marriage with unhealthy and unhappy circumstances that have gone on for years.
Well, today grab hold of the truth of 1 Peter 5, and cast all your anxieties on the Lord. He may not miraculously touch your knee or hip, throw open the doors of the prison, instantly erase your migraine, raise you up tonight from your sick bed, lift you out of your wheelchair, or immediately change your spouse’s heart. But He will give you contentment, deep and profound, in any and every situation.
Someone might ask, “Have you always had such contentment, Joni?” And I would have to answer no. I well remember the first Christmas I got out of the hospital, my first visit home since the accident. Depressed and frightened, I remember going to church with my family on Christmas Eve. One particular carol stands out in my mind. I remember singing, with tears falling from my eyes:
Hail the heav’n-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
risen with healing in His wings.
When we got to that third verse of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” I thought, I’m sure this Christmas season I’ll get up out of my wheelchair—risen with healing in His wings!
Little did I know (and I don’t know if I would have understood even if you had explained it to me) that in due time, God would heal me—but on a level I would have never dreamed. Just two years later, on another Christmas, I found the very peace and contentment that had eluded me. I also found joy, simply because I had embraced His will for my life.
And what is His will?
That you and I be in the best position, the best place, the timeliest circumstance in which God can be glorified the most.
For me, that place just happens to be a wheelchair.
That happens to be my place of healing.
Don’t Miss the Miracles All Around You
Many Christians don’t see God in their trials. If no dramatic miracles seem to be happening—if the floods aren’t receding or the cancer isn’t in remission—they think God must not be at work. That’s because they think of miracles as the sort Hollywood’s special-effects wizards manufactured in the movie The Ten Commandments. “Those ten plagues on Egypt … now that was God up to something!”
Well, yes. Thunder and hail, rivers of blood, armies of locusts, and frogs in Pharaoh’s bed (to Yul Brynner’s great discomfort) made for a great film back in the fifties. Ah, but if we could only watch the real movie of how God runs the world from behind the scenes!
Oh, the infinite complexity of it all! Talk about God doing miracles! Just think of the miraculous way He wrenches good out of evil, like blood from a turnip—the way God operates behind the scenes, always exploiting Satan’s worst escapades. And think of the miraculous, divine balancing act of weather systems that assure the arrival of summer. Think of the way God even infiltrated grace and salvation behind the barbwire of Soviet death camps. And look at the miraculous way God rallies the exact number of white blood cells, calling each one into action to defeat your illness.
I tell you, if we could only watch the way God works behind the scenes, we would have a greatly expanded view of the miraculous. The superbly conceived, delicately balanced, invisible workings of our great God—this is the real drama.
Meanwhile, He just wants us to trust Him.
As Jesus told skeptical Thomas in John 20:29 right after the resurrection: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
So why do we still doubt? We know God is always shifting and pulling and pushing and making things happen behind the scenes. Why do we agonize? Why can’t we trust Him? Why can’t we rest in His “good, acceptable, and perfect will” for our lives? Each of us must experience a thousand miracles in our lives every day! Maybe it’s because in our heads, we can’t find mental wrapping paper wide enough to neatly package such truths. It takes faith to realize that our almighty God is moving miraculously in our lives every day.
Friend, our inability to comprehend something doesn’t make it untrue or any less miraculous. Count His miracles today. Count the many narrow misses. Count the smiles and words of encouragement and expressions of gratitude sent your way today. Count the safety and well-being of your children and grandchildren. Count the miracle of being able to worship God freely in a country like this. Count the miracles of grace, of which 1 Peter 1:12 tells us that “even angels long to look into these things.” And th
ank Him. Honestly, it’ll be healing to your bones.
In John 14:12 Jesus said, “Anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.”
I’ve found that an interesting thing takes place when you “fix your faith on Jesus.” You begin praying and asking for the sorts of things that He wants accomplished rather than zeroing in exclusively on your own private prayer list. You pray for the success of the gospel, even for mountains to be moved that His word might go forth. You pray for despair and discouragement to be alleviated in ten thousand obscure places around the world. You pray for souls to be settled and for God’s people to experience peace that is profound. You pray for lives to have intensity and depth; you pray for joy and peace in the church without a lot of parade and noise.
Those are among the greater miracles in which I move every day, and I would not trade them for the lesser miracle of being healed from quadriplegia.
Henry Frost concurred with this point of view. In his study of people in his own sphere who had prayed for healing but not received it, he noted that “special spiritual blessings were given to the persons who were permitted to be sick, and that most of the persons, if not all of them, were finally constrained to testify that they believed that the sickness had proved to be even better than health could have been.”12
The veteran missionary and friend of Hudson Taylor added this notation:
If I may be permitted to refer to my own experience in this connection, I would witness to the fact that the deepest, the most precious, and the most abiding spiritual lessons which God has been pleased to teach me were learned in consequence of enduring my various experiences of sickness. This last is particularly true in respect to the prayer-life, the praise-life, the life of dependence upon God, and the life which chooses to live not for the seen, but for the unseen, not for the temporal, but for the eternal.…
I feel it would have been nothing short of a calamity to have missed the physical suffering through which I have passed.…
I am positive that I have sometimes met with God’s refusal to heal when I have been most in fellowship with Him.13
And so it has been in my life.
A no answer has purged sin from my life, strengthened my commitment to Him, forced me to depend on grace, bound me with other believers, produced discernment, fostered sensitivity, disciplined my mind, taught me to spend my time wisely … and widened my world beyond what I would have ever dreamed had I never had that accident in 1967.
My affliction has stretched my hope, made me know Christ better, helped me long for truth, led me to repentance of sin, goaded me to give thanks in times of sorrow, increased my faith, and strengthened my character. Being in this wheelchair has meant knowing Him better, feeling His pleasure every day.
If that doesn’t qualify as a miracle in your book, then—may I say it in all kindness?—I prefer my book to yours.
Three
Healer … and Lord
Christ did die to destroy sickness, and He will yet do it. But He does not say that He will, in a perfect sense, do it now.
—Henry Frost
There are times when I have watched a healing service on TV as I’m being exercised, dressed, and lifted into my wheelchair.
It’s a little bit of a surreal experience.
There I am, lying in bed, disabled and unable to care for myself, listening to the fiery message and watching people hobble on stage with crutches … and then walk off without them.
“Jesus doesn’t want you sick and disabled,” the speaker will often thunder. “He wants to do for you what He’s done for those you’ve seen today. You, too, can experience His healing power. Rest your faith on His promises!”
As I watch, I often think about other sick and disabled people all over the country who are viewing the same broadcast. What are they thinking? Are they asking themselves the same questions I asked years ago? Questions like, “Does God still heal people miraculously today? If so, does He want to heal all or just some? And what am I to think if my prayers for healing go unanswered, unlike the prayers of those I see on TV?”
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, one of the milestones for me in answering questions like that was running across a book by a man named Henry Frost, a Canadian missionary statesman of an earlier generation. His book Miraculous Healing was first published in 1931. A contemporary of the great missionary pioneer Hudson Taylor, Frost served as the first home director of the China Inland Mission (now Overseas Missionary Fellowship) for North America.
Miraculous Healing isn’t a new book by any means. Nor does it read like this morning’s newspaper. In fact, the language sounds rather stilted and out of date to our modern ears. But I doubt whether you’ll ever find a more sensible and balanced treatment on the subject of divine healing. What first drew me to the book was the obvious fact that Henry Frost didn’t seem to have any theological ax to grind. Rather than approaching the subject as a combatant for any particular point of view and armed with well-selected prooftexts, Frost maintained a gentle spirit and an open, inquiring heart.
Writing as an eyewitness, he examined situations where God does heal and then asked, “Now, what did all these people have, or do, in common? What keys can we find if we wish to be healed as well?” His conclusions aren’t only helpful and interesting, but are firmly rooted in the pages of the Bible. This double-edged sword of Scripture and personal experience cuts through thickets of error and misconceptions to present one of the clearest discussions about miraculous healing I’ve ever heard.
You may have the opportunity to read the whole book for yourself—and I hope you do. But for those who might have difficulty with the outdated and sometimes technical language, allow me to give you some of its flavor in the next few pages—along with my own thoughts and experiences on several of his key points.1
1. Jesus is just as concerned about our health and healing today as He was when He walked this earth.
When it comes to seeking the Lord for physical healing—or endurance to bear up under suffering He has permitted to enter our lives—I can’t help but think about the words Peter addressed to Jesus at a crucial point in our Lord’s ministry. “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life. We believe them, and we know you are the Holy One of God.”2
We come to Jesus in our times of stress and heartache and pain and bewilderment. Where else would we turn? Where else could we go? If we belong to the Son of God, then our lives are all about Jesus. Yes, we look for help from earthly physicians, hospitals, medicines, physical therapists, and counselors. That’s a given. But we ultimately look to Jesus. He is our Great Physician and the source of all healing and help.
If not Him, who else?
One translation of Hebrews 4:16 says, “So let us come boldly to the very throne of God and stay there to receive his mercy and to find grace to help us in our times of need.”3
I like that phrasing, that we would go to the throne of God and stay there to receive the mercy and grace we seek. There is no better place to be in the entire universe.
Henry Frost writes:
Christ in heaven has all power upon earth, and His present interest in the members of His body is as close and compassionate as it was when He was on earth amongst men.… If Jesus were on earth and I needed Him for healing, I should go to Him for this even as others went to Him; as He is not on earth, I cannot go to Him in person; nevertheless, I may reach Him by faith where He is in heaven, and since He is not changed in character, I may expect Him to heal where there is need, even as He used to heal.4
“… It is my present, deep conviction that Christ does strengthen and heal, and that He is more often ready to do the one and the other for those who put their trust in Him than most Christians realize.”5
Looking back on Jesus’ earthly mini
stry, what do you think was on the Lord’s heart when He healed those who were paralyzed? When He opened the eyes of the blind? What was the Lord feeling when He counseled the father of the little boy who was gripped by seizures?
There are those who point to such miracles as signs of Christ’s lordship saying, “Jesus healed those people as evidence of His authority as the Son of God. By such power, He was proving He was Messiah.”
They are right. But it’s not as though Jesus only approached blind people and healed them to prove a point about Himself. No, God did not use helpless people to advance His own agenda. He did not enlist hurting men and women as “props” or audiovisual aids to teach an important lesson about Himself. Neither did He approach blind, deaf, or paralyzed people in an emotional vacuum.
How do I know? Scripture tells us. He was moved with compassion when He saw the hurting masses. Oh, I’m so glad for that! I could never imagine Jesus healing someone as if He were a mystic guru who stood there aloof and unemotional, “in touch with the universe,” above and beyond humans. No, no. I can’t imagine Him acting untouchable, saying, “Yes, I can heal you. Here, beg at My feet and let Me show you what it means to be the Messiah.”
I’ve never pictured Jesus that way. When I read the many accounts of the Lord healing the sick and opening the eyes of the blind, He is pictured as being filled with compassion. That’s why I’m convinced He didn’t heal people only to prove a point about His being Messiah; He didn’t look at men and women as guinea pigs for testing truth. He cared for them as His own. He considered them dear to His heart. He desired to work His will in their lives, not just for His benefit and others, but for the person He was healing. When He touched them with His love, He really meant it.
How much so? Early on in the book of Revelation, the Lord says, “I know your affliction.” Elsewhere He says, “I have seen your affliction.” And not just seeing or knowing; He is moved by your tears. Remember, He places your tears in His bottle (Ps. 56:8 KJV). Now there’s a reason God’s Word describes it that way—because in a bottle, our tears won’t evaporate. They won’t disappear. God’s compassion is so great that He remembers your afflictions for all time.
A Place of Healing Page 5