At Grace Church recently, the topic of the day has been ‘healing’. Nick Sharp has been preaching a longer series on the power and manifestation of the Holy Spirit (archived here) and has more recently narrowed his focus done for a mini-series on praying for healing (listed near the top of the page, here).
That’s the background for what I want to briefly talk about. Many of his messages have touched on a particular aspect of healing that struck me: the place of compassion.
Now I’m making a few assumptions here: a) that God can heal people today in through both supernatural and medical means, b) that God does heal people today, c) that God wants to heal people and that d) God often heals people. I’m not going to examine these, but some of those messages at the Grace Church website would be good places to start.
I’ve often heard people speak on the importance of faith in healing, and they’re right, the Bible clearly places an emphasis on faith. I think that can be overstated - but it can’t be denied.
Far less often (i.e., not really ever), have I heard people speak on the importance of compassion for healing. Essentially I have two very simple statements to make and comment on:
Firstly, God experiences compassion for the hurting.
Yahweh is a personal God. He loves people. He loves people even while they hate him. He has voluntarily invested his very happiness in the happiness of his people. God’s happiness and future glorification is bound up in the redemption of his people and the ‘glorification’ of them and creation. In other words; God has chosen to love us and to save us. This choice means he has tied his happiness up with ours. This means two things: 1) Our future redemption and resurrection is assured; 2) God now involuntarily feels compassion towards us. I don’t mean that he’s forced to, I mean that by the nature of his choice he will do nothing else. We can know for sure that he will.
If you read the gospels you meet a Jesus who is unlike the Jesus you think you know. That’s always going to be the case. Most recently I have been struck by Jesus’ compassion for the broken.
He cares.
Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man.
Mark 1:41
(Yeah that’s the NIV. I don’t think that the ESV’s ‘pity’ adequately sums up Jesus’ emotion. He isn’t sad that someone’s hurt, like me looking at a poorly kitty. He’s the incarnate Lord of the universe - he is involved.)
The Jesus that walks off the pages of the gospels is a Jesus who hates it when people are ill. A Jesus who has promised that one day all will be made well in the eventual resurrection of the dead and redemption of the earth. After all, there will only be one wounded man in heaven - and there is no way it is going to be me.
Secondly, we need to feel compassion when we pray for people to be healed.
Praying for the sick isn’t an exercise in hyping yourself up into ‘faith’ or in saying the right magical words. Our faith comes from our knowledge of who our God is (and is augmented by testimony of his works), and our God is a compassionate God.
I feel convicted that I have prayed for the sick looking for a ’sign’. I feel convicted that I have prayed for the sick because I want the testimony to tell people. I feel convicted that I have prayed for the sick in order to build the church, or see the kingdom ‘breaking in’, or to see people saved. Some of these are good reasons, but without one little thing they are frankly a mockery of the entire purpose of healing.
If I pray like that I can turn the person into an object, a statistic. If you are praying for someone to be healed then you are praying for someone to be healed. They are a person.
Your motivation should be that they are sick and need to get well. Sounds obvious, comes like a revelatory express-train to the temple. As Christians, we have to care more.
And, because stories are fun, after we were talking about this at my midweek group last Thursday, we prayed for my friend Ali’s trapped nerve in his shoulder - which got miraculously better. Praise Jesus!
As a final note, let’s remember something about our God: It’s his name.
I am Yahweh-your-healer.
Exodus 15:26