The prayer of faith. Or, y’know, not.

There’s a blog I used to follow. He’s a pastor who likes to talk about politics. Over time he’s allowed his politics to corrupt his interpretation of Christianity… although it might be more accurate to say his interpretations were always compromised, and he’s just publicly admitting it. Anyway, once I realized what he was doing, I stopped reading.

One of the articles which made me say, “Whoa, waitaminnit,” was on how he stopped believing in prayer. That is, he doesn’t believe it cures the sick. He tried to cure the sick; as a pastor he’s in thousands of situations where somebody asked Pastor to pray for the sick and dying. He’s led prayer vigils and prayer chains, and begged God time and again to cure people or let ’em live. But he didn’t get the results he asked for. Either God didn’t cure them (or didn’t cure them enough), or didn’t let them live.

So he’s concluded prayer must not work that way. It’s not, he says, about making our petitions known to God, hoping God might intervene in human history and do us a miracle. It’s only about being God-mindful, and letting that mindset transform us and our attitudes.

He’s not the first Christian to claim this. I grew up in cessationist churches, and heard it all the time from Christians who likewise don’t believe God does miracles anymore, so there’s no point in asking for one. To cessationists, the best God will do for you is grant you wise doctors, or keep other things from interfering with the body’s natural healing processes. But praying for miracles is just the act of desperate people who can’t accept reality. You just gotta accept the fact God’s allowing this to happen, and slog it out. Hey, suffering builds character.

I might be inclined to believe this too… but then again I read the bible. Specifically James.

James 5.13-18 NIV

13Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. 14Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. 15And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. 16Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

17Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. 18Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops.

Sure sounds like James bar Joseph, brother of Christ Jesus, believed prayers can cure the sick.

Based on what? Duh; based on personal experience—read Acts. In James’s day, Christians prayed for one another and for strangers, and got straight-up cured. Cured like when Jesus cured the sick, ’cause it’s the very same Holy Spirit who empowers the curing. James recommended elders of the church, the mature believers among them. When newbies make these prayers, sometimes they lack the maturity and faith for effective prayer. They’ll learn; give ’em time.

Cured like people got cured back in bible times. For James, “bible times” was Old Testament times—when Elijah performed miracles, which is why he pointed to Elijah in verses 17-18. Well, the same Holy Spirit who empowered Elijah, empowered Christians of his day, and empowers Christians of our day. God never turned off the miracles. They still happen.

I’ve had this same personal experience. I’ve seen sick people get cured, right in front of me. Prayed for them, and the Holy Spirit cured them. They prayed for me, and the Holy Spirit cured me. No I didn’t psyche myself into thinking the Spirit cured me; I was honestly skeptical he’d do anything, and he graciously cured me anyway. Wasn’t my faith that cured me; it was the person praying for me. That’s all the Spirit wants to see.

So why do I have experiences which jibe with the bible, and this blogger doesn’t?

First of all, let’s be gracious.

To be honest, my knee-jerk reaction is to rant about why I think God’s not answering this blogger’s prayers the way he wants. It’d be arrogant and ungenerous of me. Part of the knee-jerk reaction (which is the main reason why we Christians need to learn gentleness, and control our knee-jerk reactions) is the presumption he’s the problem. He’s defective; he lacks righteousness; he lacks obedience; he lacks faith; he’s in some way offended God in a way that got God to turn away from him.

Notice these ungenerous reactions are all based on karmic thinking. Not on how God actually works or thinks. God’s all about grace. Karma’s all about trying to earn or deserve God’s attention and blessings, and if prayer actually worked that way, nobody’d get anything from God, because we’re all fallen way short of his glory. God wouldn’t even answer prayers for salvation.

But prayer isn’t a rewards system. It’s a loving Father who wants to give his kids stuff… if we’d only ask.

And yeah, part of the knee-jerk reaction is to presume the blogger didn’t ask correctly. I don’t know him personally; I only read his blog. So I haven’t a clue how he used to ask God for what he wants. What I do know is God is generous. We might ask him for stuff in the most pathetic, worst way, much like the wayward son in the Prodigal Son Story. Lk 15.20-24 But God’ll do us one better. If we think we’ve gotta follow some prayer formula in order to get God to say yes, that’s not Christianity; that’s how magic is meant to work. We’re not unlocking some sort of key to God (or to the universe); we’re asking our heavenly Dad for help, and Dad doesn’t care if we fumble our words or we’re covered in mud.

So let’s get away from these ridiculous ideas that first we gotta achieve some level of divine power and favor, or gotta get the words right, or get our attitudes right, or any other such thing. Jesus teaches us God wants to give us stuff—

Matthew 7.7-11 NIV

7“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

8“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

—and either we believe Jesus or we don’t.

The faith factor.

But here’s where the discussion now turns to faith, and I don’t wanna make the other knee-jerk response of saying, “Well, the reason you don’t get what you want is because you lack faith.” Yes, Jesus said as much too—

Matthew 21.21-22 NIV

21Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. 22If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

—but I don’t know how much faith this blogger had when he previously prayed for the sick. I only know he doesn’t have any faith now.

It’s entirely possible he did have faith back then… although I don’t precisely know how he defines “faith,” so maybe he didn’t.

• Maybe he knew for certain God would cure the sick. Except that’s not actually faith. Faith isn’t knowing such things for certain. If we were certain, we wouldn’t have to practice any faith!—we’d know our prayers would cure people. We’d actually be horrified if they didn’t work—’cause we knew they’d cure people. If they didn’t, it’d mean something went terribly wrong!
• Maybe he believed really hard God would cure the sick. Except that’s not faith either. Blind optimism isn’t “the solid basis of hope,” He 11.1 because there’s nothing solid about it at all. Prayer isn’t wishing stuff into being, and we’re not gonna move God’s hand by tensing our abdominal muscles as if to squeeze out a hard little turd of “faith.”

What he did do, is pray for the sick like his congregation expected him to. And he didn’t get results. And he grew to expect not getting results. He got used to the idea of a God who’s not interactive… yet even so, going through all the motions of prayer requests, as if God might, just this one time, do something. But suspecting, maybe even “knowing,” God probably wouldn’t.

Y’might call that faith, but I call it dead faith.

Again, I don’t know the blogger. I have no idea if this describes what was going on in his head. I have seen this behavior in other Christians… and myself, when I was a kid. It felt like “faith” to me, because at least I was going through the motions, and wouldn’t unbelief mean I wouldn’t even bother to go through the motions? But unbelief takes a lot of different forms, and religious-looking hypocrisy is actually more common than apathy. And we’re more likely to psyche ourselves into calling it faith, than recognizing it for what it isn’t, and recognizing the absence of our own faith.

When you ditch the hypocrisy, and proclaim, “That’s it; I’m not gonna say these empty prayers anymore; I’m just gonna confess I don’t believe God cures the sick, and all my prayers from now on are gonna express this,” you haven’t lost faith, ’cause you never legitimately had it. You unbelief simply swapped forms from a dishonest form, to an honest form. Your unbelieving prayers are now gonna be honest unbelieving prayers. Still powerless and unidirectional, but at least they won’t be phony… and they won’t con believing Christians into thinking you’re one of the people they really oughta call upon for prayer.

Elijah-like faith.

When Elijah turned off the rain, did he know for certain it’d stop raining? No. From what we know of ancient Hebrew history, Elijah never performed such a miracle before; nobody performed such a miracle before. He had no track record to point to. This was a new thing, and either the LORD would back him up on this… or not.

Now the scriptures don’t tell us whether the LORD ordered Elijah to pray off the rain, or Elijah did it on his own initiative and the LORD just went along with him. Either way, Elijah didn’t know for certain whether his declaration would work. That’s where faith comes in: You know God can, so you act, and see whether God will.

Wasn’t wishful thinking either. If the LORD didn’t go along with Elijah’s declaration, there’d still be rain, Elijah would be dismissed as some hairy lunatic, and the nation’s Baalism would continue unchecked. Wishing Baalism away, praying super hard for Baalism to go away, wasn’t gonna happen. Something drastic had to take place, so Elijah steeled himself, stood before the king, and said the rain stops till he said otherwise. 1Ki 17.1 And like James said, it didn’t rain for 42 months.

When we pray for the sick to be cured, we need to take Elijah’s tack. Not wish and hope and contort ourselves so that something might happen. Nor take the opposite extreme of blind certainty, declare the person well even though they’re clearly not well, and try to tug crutches out from under them, yank them out of bed, pull them out of the caskets, or some of the other crazy stunts we’ve seen faith-healers try. We’re asking God to cure people, and we oughta do that humbly, not arrogantly.

Praying for the sick can’t be passively saying some words, then telling the sick person, “Hope you get better,” or “Hope that makes you feel better.” Forget the platitudes. Get a group of mature Christians, get some olive oil—yes, canola is fine too—and tell God you want this person to get better.

But praying for the sick, like every prayer, requires a conversation between us and God, ’cause we wanna know what he’s up to. If he’s not gonna cure them—’cause sometimes he’s not!—maybe tell us why, or let us in on what he’s thinking or planning. Maybe we’re to encourage the search for a medical solution, so more than just one person can be treated or cured at a time. Maybe we’re to make them comfortable, and serve them better than we have been. Or maybe it’s legitimately their time to die, and we need to be okay with that, and so do they.

God knows best, so ask him what he knows! Don’t just passively say, “Well I’m gonna guess he doesn’t work like that.” Jesus tells us he does so work like that. Don’t go rejecting what Jesus taught us, yet claim you still follow him. Actually follow him.