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If a Christian prays for someone to be healed, and the person isn’t healed, whose faith is it that’s lacking?
D. A. Carson wrote about two Jewish men talking on the night of the first Passover. This is a paraphrase: One man said, “I know that you are trusting completely in what Moses said, that God commanded us to put the blood of a lamb on our doorposts so the destroying angel would pass over our households tonight and spare our first-born sons, but you have several sons. I have only one. I’m afraid.” The other man replied, “God will do as He has said. Do not worry.” Carson asked, “Which father’s son lived that night?” Carson answered, “Both. It was not the quality of their faith that saved them. It was the quality of the sacrifice.”
In a related way, believers often wonder if it’s the poor quality of their faith when people aren’t healed when they pray. True, sometimes, people are healed. Most of the time, however, they are not. This mystifying quandary has led to some strange considerations and supposed solutions. Let’s review a few.
In this series of articles, we have been looking at this question: How does a Christian pray for the Church, when the Bible is clear that it will become apostate before Jesus returns?
In this series of articles, we are looking at the issue of how to pray for a Church that will, according to Scripture, fall into apostasy. How is a Christian to pray? In order to help us, we have been studying Daniel’s prayer for his people, who had fallen away from God, in Daniel 9.
In the last post, I brought up the problem I experience about praying for the Church during the Last Days. How does one pray for a Church that will, that must, go into apostasy or rebellion—because that is what will happen before Jesus returns (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4).
When one intercedes for a Church destined for apostasy, a tendency may arise in us to pray in terms of “us” and “them”—the apostate folks and those who are not. The pray-er, of course, does not consider himself an apostate. However, this presents a problem. Who are these apostates, after all? What criteria must they meet?