Why do some prayers for healing fail?

Question 60110.

Prayers for healing are among the most heartfelt any of us ever pray, and one of the hardest things in pastoral ministry is standing beside someone whose prayer has not been answered. I have done it many times, and I have never got used to it.

So this article on prayers for healing is not an exercise in tidying up a theological loose end. It is an attempt to say something true, and something that will bear weight, about why the God who heals does not always heal.

God Is Able, and That Is Not the Question

Let us clear the ground. Scripture presents God as entirely able to heal, and I believe He still does. Jesus healed constantly during His ministry, the apostles healed, and James 5:14-15 instructs the sick to call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil.

I am a continuationist. I do not believe the gifts ceased with the apostles, and I have seen things I cannot explain by medicine. So when prayers for healing go unanswered in a congregation I lead, I cannot reach for the explanation that God does not do this any more, because I do not believe it.

That makes the question sharper rather than easier. If God can, and sometimes does, why then does He so often not? I would rather sit with that difficulty honestly than escape it by shrinking my doctrine of God.

What the Prosperity Answer Gets Wrong

The reply most commonly offered in certain circles is that unanswered prayers for healing indicate a failure of faith in the person praying or the person suffering. I want to say as clearly as I can that this is false, and that it is cruel.

It is false because Scripture contradicts it repeatedly. Paul, who had healed others, asked three times for his own thorn in the flesh to be removed and was refused. He left Trophimus ill at Miletus. Timothy had a recurring stomach complaint and received dietary advice rather than a rebuke. Epaphroditus was ill to the point of death.

It is cruel because of what it does to the sufferer. A person already carrying illness is handed responsibility for God’s silence, and told that their child died or their body failed because they did not believe correctly. I have seen the wreckage of that teaching in real families. See the dangers of the prosperity gospel.

What Scripture Says About Prayers for Healing

There are a few things the Bible does mention in connection with unanswered prayer, and honesty requires listing them even though none of them is the automatic explanation. Persistent unrepented sin can obstruct prayer. Praying with wrong motives is named by James. Broken relationships within a marriage are said to hinder prayers.

But notice how these appear. They are pastoral warnings addressed generally, not diagnostic tools for use on a sick person. Nowhere in Scripture does anyone stand beside a suffering believer and identify which of these applies. The book of Job is a sustained rebuke of exactly that instinct.

So if you are ill and someone has been running down a checklist of possible faults in you, I would gently suggest that they have stopped being a comforter and started being one of Job’s friends. God’s verdict on those men at the end of the book is worth reading.

The Reason Scripture Actually Gives

When the New Testament does explain an unanswered request for healing, the reason given is not sin or unbelief. It is purpose. Paul was told that God’s grace was sufficient for him, and that His power is made perfect in weakness.

That is a startling answer and we tend to hurry past it. God says, in effect, that Paul with the thorn is more useful and more Christlike than Paul without it. The apostle then draws the conclusion himself: he will boast all the more gladly of his weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon him.

There is a hard truth in that for how we pray. We ask for the removal of the difficulty, and God is frequently more interested in what the difficulty is producing. That does not make illness good. It means God is not wasting it.

Healing Delayed and Healing Complete

There is also a matter of timing that changes the shape of the question. Every person Jesus healed eventually died. Lazarus was raised and later buried again. Physical healing in this life is always temporary, a postponement rather than a solution.

The healing Christians are actually promised is the resurrection of the body, and it is total and permanent. Seen from that angle, no prayers for healing offered by a believer are finally refused. Some are answered now, in this body, and the rest are answered at the resurrection.

That is not a consolation prize and I would not offer it as one at a bedside. It is, though, the reason a Christian can face a terminal diagnosis without believing that God has abandoned the request. See what will our resurrection bodies be like.

The Mystery We Are Left With

After everything I have said about prayers for healing, a great deal remains unexplained, and I would distrust anyone who claimed otherwise. Why this person and not that one? Why the recovery nobody expected in one bed and the deterioration in the next?

Scripture gives no formula, and the pattern of healings in the Gospels resists systematising. Jesus healed one man at the pool of Bethesda and walked past a crowd of others. He healed a crippled woman on the Sabbath and did not empty the region of illness.

I have made my peace with not knowing, and I would encourage you to do the same. The alternative is to invent a rule, and every rule I have seen invented has ended up wounding somebody who was already suffering.

How to Keep Praying Anyway

None of this is a reason to stop asking. Jesus told a parable specifically to teach that we ought always to pray and not lose heart, and James’s instruction to call the elders has never been withdrawn.

Pray boldly and specifically for healing. Anoint with oil if that is your practice. And add what Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, not as a hedge against disappointment but as an act of trust: nevertheless, not my will but yours be done. That phrase is not defeatism. It is the prayer of a Son who knew His Father.

Then keep praying when the answer is slow. Some of the most sustained prayers for healing I know of have run for decades, and the people praying them are not naive. They simply know who they are asking. See prayer for healing and why gifts of healing are rarely seen today.

Healing and the Means God Uses

One question that comes up quickly is whether praying for healing sits comfortably alongside going to the doctor, and I want to answer it plainly. It does.

Luke, who wrote a Gospel and Acts, is called the beloved physician by Paul. Paul told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach, which is straightforward medical advice. Isaiah applied a poultice of figs to Hezekiah’s boil in the same chapter in which God promised to add fifteen years to his life.

So the biblical pattern is not a choice between medicine and prayer. Both are means, and both are under God. When prayers for healing are answered through a surgeon’s hands, that is not a lesser answer, and treating it as one has caused real harm in families who refused treatment on principle. See 1 Timothy 5:23.

What James 5 Actually Instructs

Since James 5:14-16 is the standard text for prayers for healing, it is worth reading carefully rather than as a slogan.

The sick person calls the elders; the initiative sits with the sufferer, not with a visiting healer. The elders pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins he will be forgiven.

Two things follow. The context is the local church and its ordinary leadership rather than a platform ministry, which is a considerable corrective to how healing is often practised. And the conditional if he has committed sins shows that James did not assume sin was the cause; he allowed for it without presuming it.

So, now what?

If your own prayers for healing have gone unanswered, hear this plainly. It is not because you failed. God has not lost interest, and your request has not been mislaid. Paul asked three times and got a no with a reason attached, and it was the making of him.

And if you are praying for somebody else, resist the urge to explain. Bring meals, drive to appointments, sit in silence, keep asking God without embarrassment. The most useful thing you can be to a suffering friend is present and unshockable. Who is on your heart at the moment, and when did you last actually pray for them by name?

But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

2 Corinthians 12:9 (ESV)