I read this statement on someone's blog this morning:
And we believe with everything in us that she WILL be healed. Because we
know that God has the opportunity to show His power and love in that
healing.
And to NOT answer would be to have the chance to have people lose
faith in the
power of prayer.
The context is that their newborn baby is seriously ill. Anyway, what do you think of a statement like that?
4 comments:
That's a tough one. I believe that you need to believe with that absolute faith sometimes. You cannot admit any chance that God will not heal or you would feel your faith is faltering.
I don't believe that in a statement like that a person is denying the sovereignty of God, though, or the fact that He can choose not to heal, and even to deal with people's loss of faith in the power of prayer, if needed. We just can't presume to know what is best or what God's will will end up to be. But I think that in the midst of it, sometimes we simply must be sure or we would crumble. Then, in the times when He doesn't heal, we lean on Him for the strength to get through, and, hopefully, feel our faith strengthened by the way He brings us through such situations. It isn't that we don't see His power, it is just that we see it in a different way than we would have wished.
Chris
What about the statement, "And to NOT answer would be to have the chance to have people lose faith in the power of prayer." ?
She's saying this knowing that thousands of people read her blog. Thousands of people will see God's hand at work when/if their baby is healed.
But what if only a handful of people followed her story? What if only 5 people knew what was happening? Would she believe that God would be less likely to heal her daughter? What if only her family knew?
Does being more popular make it more likely that God will work in the way you ask?
I'm just following the argument to it's conclusion in my own situation. We prayed for healing for my mom. I believed with absolute certaintly that God COULD heal her. I didn't know if he WOULD.
But the idea that the odds of God healing my mom would have been higher if she had been more popular or if I had been more popular because more people were paying attention to her story. . . Well, I can't even being to wrap my brain around that.
I don't believe that to be true. God heals people with only a small "following." I'm sure you can think of cases. And he doesn't heal people who have tons of people praying - like our old pastor, for instance, who has not been healed from his brain injuries, despite years of believing prayers from hundreds of people throughout our denomination.
I guess I didn't catch the fact that she has a "following" because I didn't know who she was. But there have been others in the very public eye who have had bad things happen to them, so she can't possibly believe that God will heal simply because a lot of people follow their life and are (or are not) praying for them.
I know it is easy for me to say, "Don't doubt God's ways," when I'm not dealing as personally as you are with His ways being so different than we wished. But we both know that God is working things out for His glory, even when we don't feel it.
Chris
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