the truth is.. there’s nothing as precious to me as knowing You. The things of this world grow strangely dim, and I pray they’ll grow increasingly dim as I seek more of You.
I’m a mere jar of clay - fallible, imperfect - but in Your grace, You use me and make me Your servant. Thank You for You, for Your perfect love that comes to me though I’m wholly undeserving of Your love and though You were wholly undeserving of death on a Cross. My life is Yours and I love You.
In anticipation of the Easter service this Sunday where we’ll be praying for healing for the sick, I was reading Jack Deere’s Surprised by the Power of the Holy Spirit. It was good to read from God’s word how He healed and how He continues to heal even in the present day. I think the book was particularly helpful cos it helped to clarify how faith comes into the equation.
I always had this notion that faith when praying for people meant that you had to think of the healing as a certainty in order for it to really happen - and if the person isn’t healed, it’s because we weren’t able to rid ourselves of every sliver of doubt. But the book says that our faith is not in that the person will definitely be healed, but rather, our faith is in God’s ability to heal. Whether He heals or not is a matter of "if He is willing", as well as the degree of our faith in His abilities, whether we are worshipping things other than Him, whether we limit what God can do.
I struggle with the question about why God doesn’t heal sometimes especially when we know that He is a loving Father… but I realise the thing to remember is that God is sovereign, His ways are not our ways. Much like how when I was praying for a job, yes, I can pray specifically for a particular job/outcome, but ultimately my attitude has to be one of surrender to His will, that no matter the outcome I will praise God that He is good. All things work for the good of those who love Him (Romans 8:28) but we aren’t always able to see from the same perspective as Him about what is good for us. Much like how parents would not give their children anything and everything that their children ask for, because there are lessons to be learnt in patience, self-control, trust and these lessons are ultimately for their children’s good, I believe that in the same way, God is able to give us anything and everything that we ask for, but whether these things are what is good for us is another thing altogether. He does not withhold any good thing from us, and we just need to trust that He will give us the best thing for us, regardless of how we define "best".