God Does Not Want You Sick

Here is a truth that keeps proving itself in my life: wrong beliefs lead to wrong living, and right believing leads to right living. Whenever something is persisting in your life that runs contrary to God's word, it helps to go looking for the root, because the root very often lies in a belief that is quietly out of step with who God really is. Even in the garden, the enemy could only get Eve to take a second look at that tree because, underneath, a doubt about the goodness of God had already taken hold.

The Christian author Francis Frangipane put it memorably: any place in a person's life where there is no hope, no joyful expectation of a good outcome based on God's word, is a place where a stronghold of the enemy can settle in. I want to gently challenge one such belief today, a belief that I think has quietly dimmed our expectation of God's healing.

Any place in a person's life where there is no hope, no joyful expectation of a good outcome based on God's word, in that place a stronghold of the enemy will exist.

Francis Frangipane

Where Most of Us Live

When it comes to healing, people tend to fall into three groups. Some do not believe God heals at all today. I doubt many of us are there. Others believe God heals and have seen it again and again, and this message is not really for them, because they already know. But most of us live in a third place. We believe God still heals, yet we do not often see it. We pray, and too frequently nothing seems to change, and slowly a kind of resignation sets in.

There are many reasons healing can seem delayed, and I do not pretend to understand them all. But I want to name one belief that I think matters more than we realize, a belief about the very heart of God toward the sick.

The Heart of God Toward Sickness

Let me say it as plainly and as tenderly as I can. God's heart is not for your sickness; it is for your wholeness. Sickness is not a gift He hands out to make you a better person. It is not the tool He reaches for to shape your character. The consistent testimony of Scripture is that God's desire is to make you well.

The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

John 10:10

Think of it this way. If you were in heaven right now, would God want you sick there? Of course not. There is no sickness in His presence. That tells us something about His heart even here and now. Someone may say, well, perhaps God allows it. Yes, in a sense He allows many things, in the same way He allows people to sin, without any of it being His desire. His permitting something is not the same as His wanting it. So we can hold two things together with humility: God does permit that we live in a world where sickness is real, and yet sickness was never His good intention for us. First John tells us it is the works of the devil that Jesus came to undo.

What about Job, someone will ask, or the loved one whose illness drew a whole family back to God? These are honest questions, and I hold them gently. Job is a shadow; Jesus is the clear picture, and if our reading of any older story ends up contradicting the Jesus who healed all who came to Him, we have probably misread it. And yes, God can bring real good even out of an affliction, drawing a family close through a crisis. But He wanted that family close all along; it is the brokenness of our world, not the will of God, that so often makes it take a hardship to get us there.

Healing and Forgiveness Flow From the Same Cross

Here is what settled my own heart. Matthew takes great care to describe healing after healing, and then tells us why Jesus did it.

Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.

Matthew 8:17

In other words, Jesus paid for it. The same cross that purchased your forgiveness also purchased your healing. We never doubt that God wants to save people from sin. We would never tell someone that God is using their sin to build character, or that maybe it is not His will to forgive them yet. Yet somehow we say exactly those things about sickness. Scripture keeps binding the two together, forgiveness and healing, as in Psalm 103, who forgives all your iniquities and heals all your diseases. The reason there will be no sickness in heaven is the very same reason there will be no sin there: because of what the Lamb has done. And if the provision of the cross is available to us now, then we can begin, even here, to live in the good of it. We may never reach perfect wholeness this side of eternity, but oh, we can come closer than resignation has taught us to expect.

Keep Praying, and Do Not Blame God

So what do we do when we pray and healing does not come? First, let us not quietly blame God, as though His willingness were the thing in doubt. When a gift is sent but not yet received, we do not fault the Giver; we prayerfully look at what may be hindering us on the receiving end, with honesty rather than shame.

Scripture is full of encouragement here. Daniel prayed, and the answer was released the very first day, yet it took twenty-one days to arrive. That delay was not from God's side. Jesus once prayed for a blind man who at first saw only dimly, and then prayed again until he saw clearly. On another occasion the disciples, who had healed many, could not help a certain boy, and the lesson was not that it was suddenly the wrong time, but that they had met something they had not yet matured enough to overcome. The point is simple: we keep praying. We do not give up because we have not yet seen the result.

I am not ashamed to admit that I will lose some battles along the way. But I have read the last chapter, and I know which side wins the war. My longing is simply to win as many battles for Jesus as I can, and to help others do the same. So rather than treating sickness as something to make our peace with, let us treat it the way we treat sin: not something to tolerate, but something to bring boldly to God, contending in faith for the wholeness Jesus has already paid for.

This matters more than we often admit, because a quiet resignation can dress itself up as spiritual maturity. We can call our lowered expectations patience, and our lost hope acceptance, when in fact they are simply unbelief that has grown comfortable. The apostle James did not tell the sick person to settle in and wait it out. He told the church to pray, and he expected the prayer of faith to make a difference. That is not a promise we can control, and it is not a guarantee we hold over God. It is an invitation to keep coming, to keep asking, to keep bringing our bodies and our loved ones to a Father whose heart is unmistakably good. Persistence in prayer is not us trying to twist a reluctant God's arm; it is us maturing into people who can receive what He has always longed to give.

Have Hope Again

If you are reading this and there is something you have simply learned to live with, some place where hope has quietly drained away and you no longer expect anything good, then this is my prayer for you. May hope come alive again. Jesus has already paid for your healing at the cross, and His heart toward you is kinder than your discouragement has led you to believe. I will not put a guarantee on God's timing or His methods, for those remain in His wise and loving hands. But I will say this with confidence: God is good, He is for you, and it is worth lifting your eyes to Him again with expectation. There is no sickness in heaven. So bring your body, and your hope, to the One who bore your sicknesses, and ask Him, with faith, for wholeness today.