Relentless: A 5-Day Guide To Discovering God's Faithfulness Exemplo

From the time I was a child growing up in the Westbury Methodist Church, I was always taught that “God is a good God” but that He also acts in mysterious ways. When a young child would die, our pastor would often say that “it was God’s plan to take this child” and “God could have healed her if He wanted, but we have to accept God’s will.” We would hear that oft-used phrase “God won’t give you anything you cannot handle” (that’s not in the Bible, by the way), and naturally figure that whatever hardship we were facing was there for a reason. It was somehow a test that God had put before us.

I was also taught that the only way to get God to do something for you was by bombarding Him with prayer. I had done that a lot, in fact, throughout my life. There were the desperate nights in my attic bedroom as a boy, begging Him to intercede on behalf of my sisters as my dad directed his ire at them. There were the long nights pleading from my pup tent after I had been thrown out of school. That’s certainly how I approached my cancer, even as a sixty-three-year-old man, beseeching God from my hospital bed for deliverance from this deadly disease that I was sure He’d allowed happening to teach me perseverance.

Not knowing what God had on His mind, and recalling plenty of reasons why He had cause to teach me a lesson, manifested terror in me. I found this spiritual healing lottery to be chilling. But . . . I was becoming convinced that prayer is not trying to twist God’s arm to make Him do something. It is becoming settled in my heart that God wants me healthy and well. He wants me to prosper in all things, and that it has always been this way. That’s why Jesus went to the cross. He took our sins. He took our sicknesses.