“Are you hurting? Pray. Do you feel great? Sing. Are you sick? Call the church leaders together to pray and anoint you with oil in the name of the Master. Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet. And if you’ve sinned, you’ll be forgiven – healed inside and out. Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.” (James 5:13-16, The Message)

Wholeness, health, peace, or shalom, is a characteristic of the kingdom of God. But so is suffering. God’s design for us is to live fully into the promises of the kingdom of God but on this earth there is sin and suffering. The salvation brought by Jesus, is the inauguration, the initiation, of deliverance from sin and suffering, which will be completed, fulfilled, consummated, in the resurrection. On this earth, in this life, we struggle with our infirmities, our thorns in the flesh, from which we cannot escape; but we are promised that God’s grace will be sufficient for us, that his power will be made perfect in our weakness. Our prayers are answered: we overcome and are victorious through being given grace to endure.

            “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work, so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking in anything.” (James 1:2-4)

We become whole through the suffering we endure in God’s strength. Prayer is the means God has given us to persevere, to mature, to become whole, to be healed. Prayer is motivated by faith that God hears us and uses our requests to fulfill his purpose in and through us. When we are hurting we are to pray. When we are rejoicing we are to praise. When we are sick we are to enlist the prayers of church leaders. The prayers of others are effective because God has structured the universe to respond to every action.

Professor Edward Lorenz, who died on April 16, 2008, was a mathematician and meteorologist who was one of the early exponents of chaos theory and in particular of the ‘butterfly effect’: the notion that a tiny event, such as the movement of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil, can have enormous effects, such as a tornado in Texas.

God has ordained that, what seems to be irrelevant actions, such as the prayers of church leaders and anointing with oil in the name of the Lord, may be used to bring shalom, wholeness, healing, peace, to a troubled and sick soul. The anointing with oil is the outward and visible sign of the inward anointing of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer.

We are talking about healing in its widest application. Sickness may be physical: caused by disease or accidents; emotional: caused by temperament, abuse or traumas; relational: caused by conflict and rejection; and spiritual: caused by our own personal sin. God works through the medical profession, through psychologists and counselors, to effect his healing. Prayer should surround and support the ministry of healing of the scientific medical community. There should be no conflict between science and Christianity on the subject of healing.

But scientific methods do not exhaust the possibility of healing. The church has a role to play in healing the sick. Jesus told his disciples to preach the Gospel, announce the coming of the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick. The Gospel of the forgiveness of sins is available to those who will repent and believe. Healing involves forgiveness. Only God can forgive. Jesus accompanied healing with declarations of forgiveness.

Francis MacNutt has this to say about the relationship between the medical community and the church.

Ordinarily God works through doctors, psychiatrists, counselors and nurses to facilitate nature’s healing process. This may seem so obvious as to go without saying, except that there are some evangelists who set up an artificial opposition between prayer and medicine – as if God’s way of healing is through prayer, while the medical profession is a secular means of healing, somehow unworthy of Christians who have real faith. Consequently, they encourage people to pray and not to see their doctor. But God works through the doctor to heal as well as through the prayer for healing – the doctor, counselor and the nurse are all ministers of healing. All these different professions, with their different competencies, go to make up God’s healing team. Any time we disparage any person who helps bring about the healing of the whole person we are destroying the kind of cooperative healing ministry that the Christian community might have and are setting up false divisions between divine and human healing methods.

As evidence of their harmful division we have already seen too many: faith healers who tell the sick they don’t need to see a doctor, doctors who disparage the ministry of healing as a nonscientific appeal to the credulous; evangelists who disparage church sacraments as dead rites, ministers of the sacraments who have little concept of how much of God’s healing power can flow through the Anointing of Sick.” (Francis MacNutt, Healing p.148)

Richard Foster tells the story of his first experience with healing prayer. It involved a man who had led a mission of thirty-three men in World War II. They found themselves pinned down by enemy gunfire. He prayed all night for deliverance, but instead all but six men were killed. This experience left him a confirmed atheist. But since that day he had not been able to sleep. Foster asked if he could pray for the man, who agreed. The prayer was for emotional healing and included, as an afterthought, the ability to sleep through the night. The man returned a week later with this report: ‘Every night I have slept soundly, and each morning I have awakened with a hymn on my mind. And I am happy…happy for the first time in twenty-eight years.’ This experience convinced Foster that the healing ministry of Jesus is intended for the whole person – physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.” (R. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, p.205 quoted by David Nystrom)

What is the greatest hindrance to healing, to wholeness, to shalom? It is the sin of independence – the unwillingness to admit that we need the prayers of others. We have no problem with praying for ourselves, but we are reluctant to ask others to pray for us. This reluctance comes from our desire to avoid being seen as deficient in any way, and our egotistical need to feel that we are self-sufficient, that God and us can handle anything by ourselves. The truth of the matter is that all of us are deficient – we are all sinners in need of forgiveness – and we are not self-sufficient – we need the community of believers – the church. That is why God has provided for us the opportunity to be prayed for, to receive the laying on of hands and anointing with oil, so that we might experience the healing we need, and which God wants us to have, whatever it is. That is why I have provided opportunities for healing prayer during or after worship services in my churches.

Sometimes we are reluctant to pray for healing because we don’t want to be disappointed. Jesus chided his hometown neighbors for their lack of faith (Mark 6:6). We lack faith when we do not pray for God’s will for our lives and the lives of our loved ones. St. Paul prayed for the removal of the thorn in his flesh, a messenger of Satan that tormented him (2 Corinthians 12:8), but his healing came when he heard God say: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  From that moment he found Christ’s power rest on him in his weaknesses. His healing came when he experienced God’s grace: “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” God will answer our prayers, perhaps not in ways we think best, but in ways that, in the perspective of eternity, are the only ways that were possible. Our task now is to seek first God’s will, God’s healing, God’s wholeness, God’s salvation.