When my first baby was grievously ill, a well-meaning Christian came to my house to encourage me.   We prayed together that God would heal the child and we asked for God to open the way for us to find the doctors who can best help the child. After we prayed, I told them that I surrendered the matter to the Lord.  I wanted my child to live; I wanted my child to be healthy, I wanted my child to survive.  I also told them that I had told the Lord that as much as possible, I didn’t want the child to have surgery.  But then, if surgery was how God intended to heal the boy, all I asked is that He lead us to the right doctors.  That well- meaning Christian so vehemently objected to what I had just said.  She said to me, “Mali ka diyan.  You must claim God’s healing for your son.”

Again when my husband was sick in 2008, I received the same advice.  My husband and I were both praying for healing but we were praying for healing in accordance with God’s will.  We left to God how to bring about the healing if the healing was his will.  But we also prayed that if healing was not his will, that He prepare our hearts and our minds to accept God’s will and to praise and thank Him for all that He had done for us.  We thanked God for leading us to the physicians he was using to treat my husband’s heart condition.  We thanked God for supplying the financial need.  We thanked God above all for the gift of life and for the many years he had already given.  We asked for more years, not for our sake but for the children’s sake.  But still I was told that I was wrong.  I was told to claim the healing.

In the dictionary, the verb “to claim” means to demand something that is yours by right or by entitlement.  I wonder now, can I “claim” healing?  Can I demand healing from God as though healing were mine by right or by entitlement?

The Pentecostals believe that healing is part and parcel of one’s salvation.  This is what they mean by a full gospel.  Pentecostals believe that once a person repents and believes that Jesus Christ died on the cross, that he was buried and that he rose again, that person will be saved and all his diseases will be healed.  For this particular doctrine, they point to 1 Peter 2:24 as the source of this belief and teaching: “Who on his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree,  that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. “  They also claim the healing of their bodies on the basis of God’s declaration that he is Jehovah Rapha, “the God who healeth all our diseases.”

This is why I am a Baptist and not a Pentecostal.  I do not believe in formulating a doctrine by wrenching out a verse from its immediate context and standing on it.  I believe in taking one verse and understanding it within its immediate context and understanding it within the context of what the entirety of Scriptures say about healing.

When God declared that he is the “God who healeth all our diseases” God was declaring an attribute of his character: that is is a God who has the power to heal diseases.  This is something true about God.  Does God have the power to heal us? Yes, but there is no implied or express promise to heal every disease we have.  God is all powerful and even diseases are subject to him; but God may choose not to heal us because He is working in our lives in a different way.  The prophet Elisha died of a disease.  Apostle Paul lived with a medical condition which he described as a thorn in the flesh. He died without a healing. Lazarus of Bethany died of his disease.  These men were believers and yet they did not receive the healing they desired or needed.  Instead, they were given grace to bear their diseases.

Second, disease is a natural consequence of the presence of sin and corruption in this world, just as death is a natural consequence of the presence of sin.  It is a given.  When you are born in this world, you are born into a world that is suffering from the ill-effects of sin. No one is immune from disease, all will fall sick at one time or another.  God in his graciousness has equipped us with an immune system that helps us battle disease but disease is ever-present.  Believers and unbelievers alike suffer from disease.

Third, when Jesus died on the cross, his shed blood became the atonement or payment for the penalty of our sin.  Sin always has a penalty.  When Jesus Christ died on the cross, he took that penalty and bore it on his own body.  Every person who believes that Jesus Christ’s death is substitutionary and accepts his death as payment for the penalty of his own sin is freed from having to pay the penalty for his own sin.  This, at its most basic is what it means to be saved, it means I don’t have to pay for the penalty of my sin, Jesus Christ already did.  Salvation means I am free from the penalty of my sin.

However, Jesus Christ’s death on the cross has to be a daily reality in our lives:  every day, we have to reckon ourselves as having died to sin.  Just like Christ, we must daily die to our sin.  By reckoning daily that we have died to our sin with Jesus Christ on the cross, our bodies are freed not to serve sin anymore.  This is what sanctification does: it frees us from the power of sin in our daily life.  This means that daily I have a choice; whether to allow my body to be an instrument of serving sin, or claiming the victory of Christ on the cross over the power of sin.

Someday, the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first.  If I am alive at this time, I will be caught up together with then in the air and my mortal body (my body which is prone to disease) will be changed into a glorified body.  A glorified body is one that can live eternally.  The glorified body will match the eternal soul and spirit I have been given.  This is when my body will no longer be subject to the corruption and presence of sin.  Disease will no longer affect the glorified body.

I heard Dr. Adrian Rogers preach that in the Old Testament, God told Adam and Eve that they were free to eat of the fruit of every tree in the garden but the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the Garden, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they cannot eat.  In the day that they eat of it, they will SURELY die.  When Adam and Eve ate of it, did they die?  Yes, they died immediately in their spirit (that part of the human being that can communicate with God); they died progressively in their souls and they died eventually in their bodies.

In the New Testament, salvation reverses the order.  Once a person is saved, he is immediately justified in his spirit, he is progressively sanctified in his soul and one day, he will be glorified in his body.  This is gospel truth.

So where does this leave me?  When I am sick, how can I pray?  Can I pray with the assurance that God will hear my prayer?  Yes.  Can I be sure that God’s answer to my prayer for healing will always be granted?  No.

In the time of Elijah and Elisha, God granted healing to a Shunnamite woman who was childless and she bore a child.  The Shunnamite’s only son died and God healed the boy and brought him back to life.  The Syrian Captain Naaman was leprous and he was healed.  God can heal but he may not always heal.  Jesus Christ himself said so.  He said that of all the people who were sick in Israel in the time of Elijah and Elisha, God chose to heal only these Gentiles.  The choice to heal or not to heal us belongs to God alone.  I have no right to claim it, but I can come boldly unto the throne of grace to find help in time of need.  God’s healing can come with or without human or medical intervention.  God’s healing may come instantaneously or it may come after surgery or medical protocol.  The choice to heal us belongs to God and to God alone.

I think that the best way to pray for healing is still that example of the leper who approached Jesus Christ.  He asked the leper, “What wilt thou?”  And the leper answered, “If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.”  And Jesus Christ answered, “I will, be thou clean.”

In 2010 I was diagnosed with myoma, uterine and ovarian cysts.  I was scheduled for a total hysterectomy.  I prayed for healing and instead of opening the way for my surgery, God brought me to a doctor who is working on my problem through medication.  I haven’t felt this good in years!  I still suffer a little achiness but the debilitating pain no longer accompanies my monthly period.  The other day, I palpated something very hard next to my navel.  It is the myoma.  It’s still there.  I’ve had an ultrasound and the ovarian and uterine cysts are gone, only the myoma remains. I would like nothing more than to be rid of it so that I don’t have to think about it.  Instead, God wants me to live every day depending on his grace to get me by.  Daily He heals me and renews my strength.  He is the God who heals my diseases.

In 2008, my husband was diagnosed with heart disease.  He was not a good candidate for a bypass, not that we can afford a bypass, anyway.  God led us to a Baptist cardiologist who gave my husband an aggressive cocktail of medication to improve the condition of his heart. A year later, he told my husband to get a nuclear scan.  All indications point that he may have received the healing we had been praying for.  When the results of the scan came, we were appalled.  The scan was completely dark, and this meant that his heart muscles received no oxygen when his heart rate is high.  We were stunned and we were wondering. How was he able to regain his strength and feel so good and be able to go back to doing the same things he was doing before the diagnosis and yet his heart was as diseased as ever?  We prayed about it and God led us to another doctor.  This second doctor said that the blockage in his heart may not be from cholesterol or plaque build-up but it may be the residual effects of polio. That changed our perception.  We suddenly became so grateful and thankful.  My husband could have died years ago. Every time his blood pressure spiked, he could have died, but God has been healing him, keeping his heart working all these years. He is 59 and he is still alive because of God’s continual healing.  He is the God who daily heals his diseases.

I do not claim healing.  I have no right or entitlement to be healed.  What I claim is God’s grace, the all-sufficient grace that is available for every day life.  This, I can claim.