God’s healing love delights to take action now to fix what is wrong in our lives.
I know someone with a serious medical problem who desperately wants to be healed. She is trying everything the medical profession can offer. Unfortunately, she believes that prayer may offer emotional support but no real help for her physical condition. Prayer is sweet but not powerful and effective (James 5:16).
Do you believe that God loves you in a way that includes not only sympathy and good intentions but also compassionate action, even supernatural action when necessary? Do you believe God loves you in a way that can change your situation and meet your need now?
God’s healing love here and now
This was the question when Jesus spoke with a grieving woman whose brother had died days before. He was already buried in a tomb. Yet when Jesus met her, he spoke an astonishing promise: “Your brother will rise again” (John 11:23).
The woman, named Martha, responded cautiously: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24).
She believed that God could fix the problem in the future when God restores all things and inaugurates the eternal kingdom. But she was not at that point able to believe that Jesus meant to say in that moment he was able and willing to raise the already decomposing body of her brother Lazarus from the dead.
Yet that was precisely what Jesus intended. For he then said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26)
Jesus said, “I am the resurrection” not “I will someday be the resurrection” (though that is also of course true). He wanted Mary to know that his love included the current and immediate fixing of problems. His love is a healing love now, a saving love now, a delivering love now, a restoring love now. Jesus’ love is the answer for our needs here and now.
It is one thing to believe he is able to heal us. It is another to believe he is willing to heal us. It is another still to believe he can heal us now.
Jesus continually expressed God’s healing love
Jesus made that clear years earlier at the beginning of his public ministry. He went to the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth on the Sabbath, and when it was time to read Scripture, “the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:17–19)
Emotional support is good; healing is better. Jesus healed people everywhere he went, the blind, the lame, the deaf, the crippled, the dead. He delivered people from demons. His mission was search and rescue.
“When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick.” (Matthew 14:14)
“Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, ‘I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And I am unwilling to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way.’” (Mat 15:32) And Jesus proceeded to perform the miracle of feeding thousands of people from seven loaves of bread and a few fish.
On another occasion, meeting two blind men, “Jesus in pity touched their eyes, and immediately they recovered their sight and followed him” (Mat 20:34).
And so it is now. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8).
Our way and God’s way
Our way: We may believe in a small God who loves us but can’t or won’t do anything in the here and now to change our needy situations.
God’s way: He has the love of a big God who is able and willing to rescue us in our lifetime from whatever is broken in us. The timing is his, and the answer may require our patience, but he invites us to pray and believe for immediate answers.