How To Increase Your Chances of Getting Healed

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Pastor Foley

That’s the title of a video I found as I was committing random acts of Googling related to the subject of healing and comforting.

The speaker in the video, Rev. Steve Cioccolanti, offers several recommendations based on his statistical analysis of incidents of healings in the New Testament. Rev. Cioccolanti notes that 72% of those healed in the New Testament are healed by their own intiative, compared to only 28% of individuals who were sitting around minding their own business at the time Jesus healed them.

On the basis of his statistical analysis, Rev. Cioccolanti recommends:

  • Be the squeaky wheel. Quiet Christians don’t get much.
  • Worship exuberantly and exhibit visible faith (e.g., get your hands up and your mouth open)

Rev. Cioccolanti contrasts this high percentage approach with those who “sit and wait” and believe that if God intends to heal them he will do so sovereignly, regardless of any action or attitude on their part. Says Cioccolanti:

Now if my chances are less than 30% that that’s going to succeed, I don’t like those chances. I’m going to put myself in the other camp, where the chances are very high.

So what’s the problem here? After all, Rev. Cioccolanti has statistics on his side.

Just this:

Rev. Cioccolanti omits Option C, which is a better fit for the data.

If Option A (the 72% option) is being squeaky, and Option B (the 28% option) is being silent, then Option C (the 100% option) is being steadfastly committed to the belief that God is always and actively good.

It would be puzzling if a belief in the unassailable goodness of God drove us to silent suffering in the face of illness (why would we be silent if we knew God was good and has welcomed us to approach him about anything?). It would be equally puzzling if an unshakable belief in God’s goodness prompted us to think that any amount of arm raising or mouth opening could make him any gooder than he already is by nature.

Should we pray for God to heal us when we are sick? Without a doubt.

Should we believe that whether we are healed or not God is actively doing good to us? Absolutely. Nothing–not even the persistence of illness in our bodies–ought to cause us to question the proactive, comprehensive, grace-drenched goodness of God.

While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us…

While our finger shook at him accusingly. While our mouths called down curses on him.

God blesses us at every moment. We open our mouths and raise our hands not to increase our chances of receiving a blessing but rather because we know every blessing is already ours in Christ and always will be.

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Discipline in Prayer

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Pastor Foley

The following is a written preview of our new Q&A style podcast where Pastor Foley takes questions related to the Whole Life Offering discipleship training model. Subscribe now!

Q: So we’re going to work on our prayer life as being a key part of Healing and Comforting as well as the other Works of Mercy; this fits heavily into the Works of Piety, doesn’t it?

A: Yes. Every month there’s a prayer focus to what we do. In Healing and Comforting, it is really key because we know the association between prayer and healing and, as we’ve talked about, we know the connection between confession and healing.

Confession is a form of prayer that God gives us as a means of grace that allows us to experience healing, whether or not we’re ever healed physically. We have some real opportunity to practice our prayer this month. We need to do that by doing things like praying the hours – whether it’s every hour or three times a day or whatever. We don’t do it because we want to fall into legalism. That’s always what Christians worry about: “I don’t want to do anything that looks like discipline because I might fall into legalism.” My response is, “You don’t have to worry about it.”

If people exercised the way they practiced spiritual disciplines they would never lose weight; they would never become healthy. We eat at certain times during the day, but we don’t fall into legalism. Amazingly, we still enjoy the food. So we can distinguish between legalistic aspects of prayer and being disciplined to say, “I’m going to pray at these certain times because it is going to force me to turn my attention to God and outside of my own navel-gazing.” That’s going to be very helpful to be able grow us to fullness in Christ.

Q: You’ve blogged a lot about James 5:13-18 during this series. But I wanted to share verses 19 and 20 because that seems like a piece that brings a lot of this together. It says, “My brothers if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”

So it seems like the things we talked about in terms of prayer and confession are all ways that we would help people keep from wandering from the truth and keep from wandering ourselves. Is that true?

A: This is such a key point. It’s considered accepted  behavior today that people can wander away from God and say, “I did it because he wasn’t there when ______,” as if God has to come and say to us, “I am so sorry.” That posture is so radically unbiblical because it portrays a God who doesn’t care unless we bring something to his attention and really put a lot of effort into getting him involved. You do not see that when you hear Jesus talking about his father. What you hear when Jesus talks about his father, and even when Paul talks about the Lord, is “Look, in the past God overlooked that time of ignorance. But he has appointed a man to judge.”

We don’t shake our fist at God about not being there when __________.

We have to say, “I have wandered away from a good God who created me and had good intentions and purpose for my life and has always supplied for me. I have wantonly disregarded that provision.” Tools like confession are really important because they remind us that God doesn’t come to us and apologize for neglecting us as if he were an erring father. We come to God and we confess our sin and say, “You are a good father. You provided for me. I was the one who disregarded that. I only worshipped you when I got what I wanted and, yet, when I got what I wanted, it didn’t turn out to be what I needed anyway. I’m turning my life over to you.”

That’s what confession, Healing and Comforting, that’s even what illness can do. God uses all of those things as a way of reminding us not that he is around the corner if we need him, but that he is always present and it is us who fail to see his presence and draw upon his provision even in times of illness.

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How to Pray Better

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Pastor Foley

The following is a written preview of our new Q&A style podcast where Pastor Foley takes questions related to the Whole Life Offering discipleship training model. Subscribe now!

Q: One of the key things we learn about in Healing and Comforting is the danger of self-centered prayers. The message we portray when we pray this way is that we believe in a being who, if we’re good enough, is going to grant our wishes. What are the things that we should be praying for and how we can go about learning to pray better (i.e. more Biblical)?

A: We have a tendency when we get sick to become very focused on ourselves. So what does the church across Christian history do to be able to deal with this? It reminds us that no matter what our physical situation is, we can pray for other people and be a meaningful part of the kingdom of God working on Earth. That’s pretty exciting! There’s already a shift there from saying, “My nose feels kind of stuffy today” to saying, “Even though my nose feels stuffy today, I can still impact the work of God.”

Prayer is our permission. We invite and invoke the presence of God to be active in those specific areas of our lives and the lives of other people. Healing prayer, unfortunately, tends to be synonymous with very self-centered prayer: “Lord, I am really sick; therefore, heal me.” Is there anything wrong with that? No. Is it sufficient as a prayer life? No. The more you get sucked into that kind of prayer, the more efficacy is lost. That kind of prayer says that in order to be an effective Christian, I have to be healthy, I can’t be in debt, etc. Wow! That’s symptomatic of the way the church thinks today.

Karl Barth, the great theologian of the last century, said we have a human inclination to constantly look inside ourselves and say, “There’s nothing good in there.” God says, “Yes. Obviously. I know. So stop doing it.” Our focus, instead of looking inside and seeing that there’s nothing good in there, is to do what Jesus did. He said, “I only ever do what I see my father doing.” We should do what he calls Peter to do when summoned to walk across the water: we have an unerring focus on Jesus. If we find ourselves focused on anything else, we return our focus to him. And we need not fear that because we’re focused on Jesus that he won’t notice that we’re sick. Trust me, he’ll notice because he is a good father. If we’re not feeling well, the father knows it. So we say, “Lord, I’m turning myself over to you today, but I’m not going to allow my illness to stand in the way of carrying out my responsibility as a minister of the Gospel. I’ll pray for my own needs, but it will always be part of interceding for the needs of others.”

Q: This is an area that I think a lot of Christians struggle with. If you were to put on a seminar titled, “How to Pray Better” you would sell out! Christians go to church, they pray these self-centered prayers, and they have this feeling or knowledge that they’re not adequate or sufficient. But they don’t know what to do because that’s all they see modeled in the churches they’re in. Previously, you blogged about praying through the hours and praying the Psalms; can you go through that and any other ideas that will help train us to pray better?

A: Your distinction is a good one. We’re not talking about praying “better” as if by praying more eloquently, God hears you more. What we’re saying is that prayer is an integral component to the way that God grows us to fullness in Christ. As a result, we can’t pray to our lowest common denominator which is to be self-focused: only whenever we feel like it, at the times that we don’t have anything better to do, etc. We’re not going to grow that way. So the church has instituted various disciplines like praying through the hours, like prayers we memorize. People say, “Well, if I memorize it, then it’s not authentic,” but that’s absolutely not true. If that were true, we shouldn’t be singing any of the hymns or worship songs in church, we shouldn’t be reciting wedding vows, and we shouldn’t say the pledge of allegiance.

We have a tradition as human beings of knowing that if something is written down you have to make sure you’re not just going through the motions of rote memorization and speaking while your brain goes somewhere else. But the reason why we pray the prayers that the church has entrusted to us over these two thousand years, including the one that Jesus himself entrusted to us, is because we grow  into those prayers. They reshape what we think about when we pray and how we pray.

Submit your questions to Pastor Foley by posting a comment or emailing us at [email protected].

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