Christ our Healer

I believed God could heal long before I expected him to do anything immediate and personal when I prayed. That distance between what I believed and what I expected became important during my time at Nyack College and Alliance Theological Seminary.

I now speak of Christ our Healer with a conviction that reaches beyond an idea I can explain. It is part of how I have experienced Jesus. I also know that people pray sincerely and remain ill. Both realities belong in an honest conversation about healing.

Begin with Jesus’ compassion

The Gospels describe Jesus teaching, healing sick people, and freeing people from spiritual oppression. He responds to suffering with compassion. In Matthew 14:14, he sees a crowd, has compassion on them, and heals their sick.

Divine healing means healing understood to come through God’s action. Christians who use the term often have a particular answer to prayer in mind. The claim is that God remains able to act in people’s bodies and lives.

I believe Jesus’ healing ministry helps us understand his care for the whole person. His miracles are also signs of the kingdom of God: God’s rule bringing restoration into a world marked by suffering and evil.

Jesus’ humanity matters here. He lived a human life of prayer and dependence on the Holy Spirit. Christian faith also confesses him as fully divine. His dependence on the Spirit does not mean that he stopped being God. The Alliance’s Statement of Faith affirms both his true divinity and his true humanity.

How healing relates to the cross

Atonement concerns how Jesus’ death deals with sin and restores our relationship with God. The Alliance teaches that Christ’s saving work makes provision for the healing of the whole person. I share that conviction.

Several passages help frame the discussion. Matthew 8:14–17 connects Jesus’ healings with Isaiah 53:4, which speaks of bearing infirmities and diseases. First Peter 2:24 uses the language of wounds and healing from Isaiah 53:5 while describing release from sin and a return to the shepherd of our souls.

These passages connect physical suffering, sin, and restoration within Christ’s work. They also require care. A connection between healing and redemption does not by itself settle when every aspect of that restoration will be experienced.

Christians sometimes call this the already and not yet. God’s kingdom is already present in Jesus’ work, but the world has not yet reached the promised fullness of restoration. Christians still become ill, grieve, and die while awaiting resurrection.

I believe we can ask for healing now and trust Christ with what remains unresolved. My confidence in his compassion does not give me a timetable for another person’s recovery.

Prayer is a relationship, not a formula

The Gospel stories do not give us one technique. Jesus lays hands on people in Luke 4:40, speaks to a man who cannot walk in John 5:8, and responds to a woman’s trust in Luke 8:43–48. The variety keeps my attention on Jesus rather than a procedure.

I want to pray with faith. By faith, I mean trust in God’s character and ability, not the achievement of an intense enough feeling. I can bring a specific request without claiming authority over its outcome.

Persistence also matters. Jesus’ story of the widow seeking justice in Luke 18:1–8 encourages people to keep praying. It is not a promise that repeating a prayer will eventually force the answer we want.

The Gospels include accounts of deliverance, freedom from evil spiritual oppression. Christians differ about how to understand and practice this ministry today. Such accounts do not justify treating every illness, disability, or psychological struggle as the work of a demon. They do not allow us to blame the person who is suffering.

Why James speaks of elders and oil

James 5:13–18 invites a sick person to call the elders of the church to pray and anoint them with oil in the Lord’s name. Elders are people entrusted with spiritual leadership and care in a Christian community. Anointing means applying oil as part of prayer.

Several things matter to me in that invitation.

• The person does not have to face illness alone. Prayer brings the concern into a community that should respond with care.
• The elders depend on God. Their position does not give them a private supply of healing power.
• The oil points beyond itself. In this practice, I understand it as a sign of entrusting a person to God’s care and acknowledging the Holy Spirit’s work.
• The whole person matters. James speaks of prayer, forgiveness, and restoration together.

James’ reference to forgiveness should not become an accusation that a sick person must have done something wrong. In John 9:1–3, Jesus rejects the assumption that a man’s blindness must be traced to his own sin or his parents’ sin.

I understand prayer and anointing as acts of trust and obedience. The person praying cannot manipulate God, and the person receiving prayer should not be made responsible for producing a miracle.

What I have witnessed in prayer

In a prayer group I served with, a man came seeking help with deep emotional pain. As we prayed, I sensed particular concerns that he later said were relevant to his life. I understood the prayer that followed as part of Christ’s work of inner healing and freedom.

In another extended prayer session, a woman who had arrived deeply distressed left with visible joy and relief. Her journey was continuing, but I believed something significant had happened. We understood aspects of that prayer through the language of deliverance.

These encounters helped shape my conviction that Jesus cares about the wounds people carry within them. They are personal accounts of prayer and my interpretation of what happened. A change in someone’s expression or feelings cannot, by itself, establish a medical diagnosis or its resolution.

The day my eyesight changed

My own experience began in an ordinary place: the shower. I was frustrated by my thinning hair and asked God why he did not heal my baldness and my poor eyesight. To my surprise, I sensed a response that I understood as God saying he would.

Before going to Ron Walborn’s Divine Healing class that day, I left my eyeglasses behind. I was hoping for an opportunity to receive prayer. When the class seemed to be ending without one, I wondered whether I had imagined the whole thing.

Then Ron paused during the closing prayer. He said he sensed there was more to pray about and prayed for freedom from patterns passed down through families, and for the Holy Spirit’s filling and healing.

When I opened my eyes, everything looked strikingly clear, as though the room had switched to high definition. I understood what happened as Jesus answering my prayer for my eyesight. It changed the distance I had kept between believing God could act and expecting him to meet me personally.

The prayer’s language about family patterns is part of that story. It does not demonstrate that an inherited spiritual cause lay behind my eyesight, or establish a connection between someone’s illness and their family’s wrongdoing.

Nor would I ask someone to copy my decision about my glasses. Prayer can accompany appropriate medical and mental health care. Decisions about treatment belong in conversation with qualified professionals, and a personal testimony is not a reason to stop treatment.

When healing does not come as we hoped

I believe Jesus heals today. I also believe faithfulness includes caring for people whose illness continues. They need compassion, practical help, companionship, and room to speak honestly about disappointment.

Unanswered questions do not give me permission to accuse someone of inadequate faith. I can keep praying for restoration while acknowledging that I do not know why one person improves and another does not.

The Christian hope of resurrection reaches beyond death. I want to speak of that hope clearly, without confusing death with a physical recovery that did not occur. Grief remains real, and a promise about the future should not silence it.

Where Christians read differently

Some Christians emphasize healing as a present benefit of Christ’s saving work. Others see miracles as signs of the restoration that will be complete only in resurrection, without a promise of physical healing for every believer now. Christians also differ about whether particular miraculous gifts continue as they did in the earliest churches.

Compare the biblical arguments about healing, and explore the views about spiritual gifts. My own response is to keep praying with expectation, care for the person before me, and trust the compassion of Christ our Healer.