When Healing Doesn’t Eventuate

The expectation that God will answer our cries for help is everywhere in Scripture. Passages like Psalm 3:4 and Psalm 116:1-2 convey that when we call out to God, he will hear and will answer by removing our difficulties. For example, wracked with fatigue and pain, King David calls out to God: Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am faint; heal me LORD for my bones are in agony. Then he confidently says, The LORD has heard my cry for mercy; the LORD accepts my prayer (Psalm 6:2, 9). As we have seen, healing is in the heart of God, and he cares about our sicknesses, stresses, and suffering and delights in hearing our earnest prayers.

Then we come to Paul’s line in our passage of study: Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me (2 Corinthians 12:8). Paul implored God to remove the painful thorn, but it wouldn’t move. This echoes King David’s heart cry in Psalm 22:1 "My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest".

Are Paul’s three prayer vigils an example of unanswered prayer? His pleading was unanswered in the way he desired, otherwise, he wouldn’t have kept on begging the Lord to take it away. He didn’t passively lay his request before God, he pleaded with God to get rid of it. He didn’t lack faith. He came boldly to the throne of grace for the third time.

On the third time, God answered, “Yes.” Still not in the way Paul wanted, but if you get the opportunity to interview him in glory, my guess is that he will say, “God gave me something better—his abundant grace.”

I find the response of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to King Nebuchadnezzar when told that if they didn’t bow down to the image he had erected, they were to be thrown into a furnace, very reassuring. They said: If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us, and he will deliver us from your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, your Majesty that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.

Bold faith. Humble faith. Realistic faith.

There’s still a sense of mystery, why some prayers are answered straight away, and some seem to be unanswered. We need to live with the mystery. “To live with the mystery is to embrace the questions themselves as stones that pave—not obstruct—the path toward deeper intimacy with God.”[1]

That deeper intimacy with God is what Paul experienced, even though his thorn wouldn’t budge.

• How have you dealt with unanswered prayers for healing in the past?
• What are some ways you might minister to people who long to be healed but nothing seems to be happening?

Excerpts from The Point of Your Thorns: Finding Purpose in Your Pain

by Rowland Forman