This article is a sidebar to “Doctors Who Pray”
My pagan friend, hospitalized, prayed for healing and is now well again. My Christian friend, hospitalized, prayed for healing, but it never came. What sense can I make of that? Statistics suggest that any form of prayer by anybody, Christian or not, helps patients recover. Does that make any sort of sense? Let us see.
Just as an awareness of the divine is natural to human beings through general revelation, so also is the instinct for petitionary prayer in time of need. Everywhere in every era when crises come, children and adults of any faith or no faith find their minds forming the cry, “Please let this (specified) happen, and not that (specified again).” The dictum that there are no atheists in the trenches bears witness to this. The naturalness of prayer under pressure is a fact of life.
So it is no wonder when patients who have asked whatever God they pray to to watch over and heal them, and who are trusting God to do it, relax inwardly in a way that, being natural, is actually therapeutic. And since the true God is in truth very kind and generous, it is no wonder if those who thus reach out in his direction, ungodly though their beliefs and lives may be in all sorts of ways, find that as they pray their health improves. Nor will it be wrong to read any statistics that substantiate this as witness to God’s everyday mercies.
Christian prayer, however, has a more solid base. Christians know the God of creation and providence as their covenant Lord, the God of saving grace, and they pray accordingly. Christian prayer is Trinitarian, addressing the Father through the Son and the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit. Christians base their approach to the divine throne on their acceptance through the Son’s atoning death and their adoption as the Father’s children and heirs. They claim the Father’s promise to hear and answer their prayers, but their bottom line is always “thy will (not mine) be done,” and they know that if through ignorance and lack of wisdom they ask for something that is not really good for them, God in love will answer by giving them something that is really better. So, for example, when Paul prayed to be rid of his thorn in the flesh, God answered by strengthening him to carry on while the thorn remained.
Petitions for healing, or anything else, therefore, are not magic spells, nor do they have their effect by putting God under pressure and twisting his arm, whatever health-and-wealth, bring-down-revival, win-the-world teachers may say to the contrary. Non-Christians’ prayers for healing may surprise us by leading to healing; Christians’ prayers for healing may surprise us by not being answered that way. There are always surprises with God. But for God’s children, “Ask, and you will receive” is always true, and what they receive when they ask is always God’s best for them long-term, even when it is a short-term disappointment. Some things in life are certain, and that is one of them.
