A Healing Ministry Without Making Your Church Sick

  

Cor 12: 7-8 “Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me”. 

The affliction that Paul had was not something trivial; not just an inconvenience. It tormented him to the extent where he thought that Satan had inflicted it upon him. It was something so painful or embarrassing that he pleaded with the Lord to remove it. Three times he pleaded but there was no healing. God used this affliction for Paul’s greater good in order to keep Paul from becoming conceited and to keep him from depending upon himself. Instead, Paul depended on God and not on his personal visions, revelations, spirituality or apostleship. God strengthened him.

For the title of this post, I have used the title of a book by Peter Wagner, “How To Have A Healing Ministry Without Making Your Church Sick”.  We need to correctly pitch what the Bible has to say about healing in order not to hurt other people, especially those suffering from intractable illnesses. Some Christians have the unrealistic expectations that God always cures and God always does miracles. However, the reality is that very often, as in the case of Paul’s experience, God will choose not to heal.

What do we do with Christians who accuse others to be without faith or to harbour unconfessed sins when, despite persistent prayer, there is no healing?

My father-in-law served God as a Pastor, always tending to his churches and congregation throughout a 40 year ministry. He died of prostate cancer which had spread to the spine. When he was first diagnosed, many Christians, including the family, exercised faith and prayed for a cure.

When it became obvious that no miraculous cure would happen, some people refused to give up the praying for a cure. These same people later suggested that the reason God did not heal my father-in-law was because there were unconfessed sins in the old man’s past.

After he died, my mother-in-law, exhausted and grieving, also succumbed to cancer. These Christians then proclaimed the family to have a generational curse. Yet, both my parents-in-law had fruitful Christian ministries for many years; well into their mid-seventies. How insensitive can “holier than thou” Christians be! They explain away their inability to be the instruments of healing by imposing guilt upon the sick.

Where medicine cannot provide a cure, sick people die. For this reason, as a profession of my Christian faith and ministry, I serve as a volunteer and now the Chair on the Governing Council of the Dover Park Hospice (DPH) in Singapore. We tend to the dying, managing pain and other concerns, giving respite care as needed.

I admire the doctors, nurses and staff of DPH as they dutifully and lovingly look after their patients with much care and sensitivity. I tell them that in instances where a cure is not possible, we can help heal the sick. Our desire is to tend to the sick so that in dying, they can be at peace with family and friends, at peace with themselves and at peace with God. This is when the miracles happen, if only we can recognize them. At the DPH, we have a saying, ‘Where we cannot add days to life we shall add life to days’.

Lionel