The Healing Ministry of Jesus

In early 1982, the phone in my London flat rang with a call from Tony Fitzgerald. At the time, Tony was one of the national directors of Youth With a Mission. He was inviting me to join him and a mutual friend, Don Northrup from Maranatha Ministries in the US, to pray for the teenage son of Roger and Faith Forster, the leaders of the Ichthus Fellowship in Forest Hill, London. Their son had been diagnosed with leukemia and was in the hospital undergoing treatment. Because of a previous commitment, I wasn’t able to go, but Tony and Don did pray with the Forsters over their son.

Several months later, Roger and Faith Forster discovered that from the moment of that prayer, leukemia simply disappeared from their son. Doctors told them that they had reservations about saying anything about the remission at the time because of concerns it might recur just as suddenly as it had vanished. It never did. Their son was inexplicably and instantaneously — in other words, miraculously — healed of a dread disease. That healing had a huge ripple effect in London and around England, unleashing a great wave of renewed evangelistic activity and church planting that spurred the Icthus movement into a remarkable force for Kingdom advance in the UK.

In 2003, while I was serving a church in Kentucky, I was called by two distraught young parents about their little two-year-old girl. She’d been diagnosed with a deadly and rare form of cancer. There was much prayer for her and she received constant treatment at the very fine Children’s Hospital in St. Louis. A few months later, I stood at that little girl’s graveside as we grieved her death and the deep suffering she endured in the course of the illness that killed her. That death killed the marriage of her parents too, and, at least for a season, snuffed out the faith they had in God’s love. It's been said that small coffins weigh the most and that is true. Over four decades of ministry, I’ve served at far too many small coffin funerals and I still weep when I think about the suffering so many have endured in the loss of their little one.

Two weeks ago, a very good friend was skiing when he suffered a heart attack. The quick action taken by family members and EMTs who used a defibrillator to jump-start his heart, followed by the attentive care of a surgeon at a nearby hospital, led to his survival from what would have surely killed him not so many years ago. Advances in medical knowledge and technology, not to mention the great skill demonstrated by medical personnel, have contributed to the preservation of life, the healing of the broken, and the cure of the sick in ways that were scarcely imaginable to previous generations. We believe these are great graces bestowed upon us by God’s kind providence, mercies for all, whether among the faithful or not.

In summary, many I know have suffered in many ways without ever knowing a day in which the course of that pain was reversed. Some have suffered deeply and died. Others have been healed, whether by a miraculous divine intervention or by a recovery received through the brilliant and attentive care of doctors and nurses who deploy the great advances of medical research to bring healing and health to as many as possible.

Jesus heals today and he does so both miraculously and medically, and a Biblical understanding of healing has to take that into account.

Jesus does not heal all today, whether by miraculous intervention or medically, and a Biblical understanding of suffering has to take that into account.

Both of these truths highlight our deep need to reflect on God’s purpose in healing and suffering. We need the wisdom to understand why some prayers for relief are powerfully answered while others appear unanswered, and how we can minister effectively to those who endure pain and suffering.

This means we have to have a thorough theology of suffering to match our theology of healing and deliverance; the simple reality is that more often than not suffering and healing walk hand in hand. Most importantly, we have to note the primary purpose of Jesus’ own healing ministry, one which was and is so very powerful and diverse.

Why was healing so tethered to Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom? Why was healing such an important feature of his ministry anyway? In other words, apart from the simple fact of relieving human pain, why did Jesus heal people and why should we expect him to continue to do so now?

The answer begins with God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ and leads directly to developing a thick theology of sin. If we don’t know the depths of our sin and its impact on us and the world, and if we have not seen that God is known as a Healer, then we will never grasp a Gospel vision of the catastrophic illness that’s befallen us and the provision God has made for our healing.

The Lord our Physician (Yahweh Rapha, Exodus 15:16) enters our broken and sick, groaning and grieving world and identifies himself as the one who has come to heal the sick. Jesus said, ​ “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:31-32). The Great Physician has come to heal a disease deeper and more deadly than any cancer, and this is at the heart of the signs and wonders of his healing ministry in the Gospels.

What we have to recall as we watch Jesus’ healing ministry in the Gospels, the outpouring of signs and wonders that accompanied him, is that there is always a sign in the wonder, a message in the miracle, a word of authority liberating the sick so that we know more deeply our need for him and understand more clearly the reach of his mercy.

Next: Signs and Wonders in Matthew 9