Moradeke has known pain for as long as she can remember. She was diagnosed with sickle cell anaemia at the age of two, and her childhood was measured out in hospital admissions: the drip in the back of her hand, the smell of the children’s ward, her mother sleeping upright on a plastic chair beside the bed. She grew up anyway. She finished her degree, qualified as a chartered accountant and now works as an auditor for a firm on the Marina. Her colleagues know her as the woman who never misses a deadline and always has a flask of water on her desk.
Two years ago she went to a large healing service on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway. She went with real expectation, and I honour her for that. When the minister called for those with blood disorders, she went forward. He laid his hand on her head and declared her healed, and she wept with gratitude. Then, as she turned to go back to her seat, one of the ushers leaned in and said quietly, “Sister, if you have faith, you will not need those tablets again.”
Moradeke went home and looked at her folic acid and her painkillers for a long time. In the end she kept taking them, but she began to take them in secret, almost ashamed, as though every tablet were a small confession of unbelief.
Five weeks later a crisis came, the worst she had had in years. Her joints felt as though they were being crushed in a vice. Her brother drove her through the night to a hospital in Surulere, and she spent nine days on a ward with intravenous fluids and strong pain relief. On the fourth day a woman from her church came to visit. She brought a bottle of Lucozade and a question. “Sister Moradeke, what happened? Did you allow doubt to come in? Is there something you have not confessed?”
When I sat with Moradeke a week after she was discharged, the pain in her joints had eased. The pain of that question had not. “Pastor,” she said, “I need to know. Is it me? Does God love me less because I am still sick? Or is my faith just not good enough?”
Many believers carry an illness that has not gone away: diabetes, hypertension, lupus, kidney disease, cancer that returns, pain that has no clear name. Many of them are carrying a second load on top of the first: a verdict they have passed on themselves, or that someone else has passed on them, because they are still sick. This teaching is for them, and for the churches that love them.
Two questions in a hospital bed
Moradeke’s two questions are the ones that persistent illness tends to raise. The first is about God: does He love me less? The second is about herself: is my faith deficient? Both questions are understandable. Both, when they are answered wrongly, do great harm.
The first wrong answer turns a medical condition into a statement about God’s heart. Under this way of thinking, health is evidence of favour and sickness is evidence of rejection. When you are well, you feel close to God. When the crisis comes, you feel that He has turned His face away. Your sense of His love rises and falls with your blood count.
The second wrong answer turns a medical condition into a measure of spiritual performance. Under this way of thinking, healing is a reward that faith earns, and continued sickness is proof that the faith was not strong enough, not pure enough, or not spoken correctly. If you are still sick, the problem must be you.
These two answers feed each other. If God’s love depends on my faith, and my faith is measured by my health, then every hospital admission becomes a trial in which I am both the defendant and the evidence.
Let me say clearly what this teaching will not say. It will not say that God has stopped healing, or that prayer for the sick is a formality. Jesus healed the sick, and God heals the sick today, sometimes suddenly and often through a process. We should pray expectantly. But the Scriptures that teach us to pray for healing also refuse to make illness a verdict on God’s love or on the sufferer’s faith, and it is those Scriptures we need to hear.
The disciples’ question and the Lord’s refusal
There is a moment in John’s Gospel when the disciples ask the very question that Moradeke’s visitor asked. They are walking with Jesus in Jerusalem, and they pass a man who has been blind since birth, probably sitting by the road and begging:
And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
The disciples were not being cruel. They were being theological. They had inherited a view, common in their day, that every affliction could be traced to a particular sin. Since this man had been born blind, they reasoned, either he had somehow sinned before birth or his parents had sinned and he was paying for it. Their only question was which.
The same reasoning drove Job’s friends, who spent thirty chapters insisting that his suffering must have a moral explanation. At the end God told Eliphaz, “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7). The friends who defended a neat theology of suffering were rebuked. The sufferer who protested was vindicated.
Jesus answers His disciples with a flat refusal: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents.” He will not take part in the search for someone to blame. And then He turns their attention elsewhere: “but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” The disciples were looking backwards for a cause. Jesus looked forward to what God was about to do. Within minutes He had spat on the ground, made clay, anointed the man’s eyes and sent him to wash in the pool of Siloam. The man came back seeing.
We should not turn Jesus’ answer into a rigid rule, as if every illness were sent so that God could perform. Sickness belongs to a fallen world, and Jesus could even describe it as a bondage of the enemy, speaking of a woman “whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen years” (Luke 13:16). Notice that He did not blame her for being bound. He loosed her. Illness is an enemy to be resisted, prayed against and treated. It is not a reliable sign of the sufferer’s spiritual condition.
PunchlineSo when someone asks you, “Who sinned?”, you are allowed to give Jesus’ answer. And when you ask it of yourself at two in the morning, you are allowed to give it too.
God heals, and the New Testament is honest
James gives the church its most direct instruction about sickness. “Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord” (James 5:14). This is a ministry of the local church, carried out by its recognised leaders, in the name of Jesus. And it comes with a promise: “the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up” (James 5:15).
We should take that promise seriously and act on it. Many believers have been raised up exactly as James describes. If you are sick, call for the elders. If you are an elder, go, and pray with expectation.
Now notice two details in James that are often overlooked. First, the phrase about sin is conditional: “and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.” If. James does not assume that the sick person has sinned. He allows that sin may be present, in which case forgiveness is part of the healing. He gives no licence to interrogate the sick. Second, the confession James describes is mutual: “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16). One another. The healthy confess to the sick and the sick to the healthy. Nobody sits in judgement. Everybody stands in need.
The New Testament is also honest that faithful believers were sometimes sick and remained sick for a time. Paul left his friend Trophimus “at Miletum sick” (2 Timothy 4:20). He told Timothy to “use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities” (1 Timothy 5:23), which is ordinary medical advice for a recurring complaint. And he wrote warmly to the Philippians about Epaphroditus:
Yet I supposed it necessary to send to you Epaphroditus, my brother, and companion in labour, and fellowsoldier, but your messenger, and he that ministered to my wants. For he longed after you all, and was full of heaviness, because that ye had heard that he had been sick. For indeed he was sick nigh unto death: but God had mercy on him; and not on him only, but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow.
Look at how Paul describes this man. Brother. Companion in labour. Fellowsoldier. There is not a hint that his illness diminished his standing. Paul is open about how serious it was, “sick nigh unto death,” and about how it affected him personally: had Epaphroditus died, Paul would have had “sorrow upon sorrow.” And when recovery came, Paul called it mercy. That is a healthy way to speak. God’s mercy was praised when healing came, and nobody was blamed while it was delayed.
The apostle through whom God worked “special miracles” in Ephesus (Acts 19:11) also travelled with Luke, “the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14). Paul saw no conflict between miracle and medicine, and neither should we. Keep taking the medication your doctor has prescribed. If you believe God has healed you, let your doctor confirm it with proper tests before any treatment is changed. That is wisdom, and it is honouring to God.
Paul’s thorn and the sufficiency of grace
The most discussed passage on unanswered prayer for relief is Paul’s account of his thorn in the flesh. He writes that “there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure” (2 Corinthians 12:7). Then he tells us what he did: “For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me” (2 Corinthians 12:8).
What was the thorn? Sincere believers have held different views for centuries. Some understand it as persecution, pointing to the phrase “messenger of Satan” and to the long list of beatings and dangers Paul has just described in chapter 11. Others understand it as a physical affliction, perhaps a problem with his eyes. They point to something Paul told the Galatians:
Ye know how through infirmity of the flesh I preached the gospel unto you at the first. And my temptation which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus. Where is then the blessedness ye spake of? for I bear you record, that, if it had been possible, ye would have plucked out your own eyes, and have given them to me.
Paul says he first preached to them “through infirmity of the flesh,” and that they would have given him their own eyes if it had been possible. That is at least suggestive. I hold the question loosely, because Scripture does not settle it, and I would gently caution anyone who builds a whole doctrine of sickness on our uncertainty about Paul’s thorn. Whatever it was, three things are clear.
First, Paul prayed for its removal, and he prayed more than once. He did not treat the thorn as something to be accepted without asking. Persistent prayer for relief is apostolic.
Second, the answer he received was a promise: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The Lord did not tell him he lacked faith. He gave him grace for the present and a different way of seeing his weakness.
Third, Paul’s response was to locate Christ’s power in the very place he felt weakest: “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” And then the great paradox: “for when I am weak, then am I strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).
The Galatians passage gives us one more gift. Paul says that when he came to them sick, “my temptation which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor rejected; but received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus.” His illness was a trial to them as well, an embarrassment perhaps, a weakness in a preacher. They could have despised it. They chose to receive him. That is the community every sick believer deserves.
Nothing on the list can separate
If Moradeke’s first question was whether God loves her less, Paul answers it in the closing verses of Romans 8, and he answers it with the most sweeping language in the whole letter:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Read the list slowly. Tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. Paul is writing about believers who suffer, and he quotes a psalm to show that suffering has always been part of the story of God’s people: “For thy sake we are killed all the day long.” Then he widens the list until nothing is left outside it. Death and life. Angels and powers. Things present and things to come. Height and depth. “Any other creature.” A sickle cell crisis is a thing present. A diagnosis that may shape the years ahead is a thing to come. Neither of them is able to separate a believer from the love of God.
Notice where that love is located: “the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” It is not located in your symptoms, your test results or your recovery rate. It was settled at the cross, where God “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” (Romans 8:32). God does not need to prove His love to you by removing your illness this week. He proved it on Calvary, once and for all.
And notice the phrase “more than conquerors.” Paul does not say that we conquer by escaping these things. He says “in all these things we are more than conquerors.” The victory happens within the trouble, through Him that loved us. A believer lying on a hospital bed, still trusting, still loved, still held, is not a defeated Christian. She is in the very place Paul is describing.
Just before this passage Paul speaks of believers groaning, “even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23). The full redemption of the body is still future. We receive foretastes now, sometimes dramatic, and we wait for the rest. In that waiting, “the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought” (Romans 8:26). When you are too weak or too confused to pray well, the Spirit Himself prays within you. Weakness in prayer does not cut you off from God. It is the very place where the Spirit’s help is promised.
NuggetYour sickness is not a verdict on God’s love. That love is located in Christ Jesus, and nothing on Paul’s list, including the illness you carry, is able to separate you from it.
Faith that keeps asking
If persistent illness is not a verdict, what does faith look like while it continues? Many believers have been taught that real faith says nothing about the symptoms, and that to admit pain or to keep asking is a kind of unbelief. The Bible gives us a fuller picture.
In the middle of the book of Lamentations, written in the ruins of Jerusalem, the prophet pauses to say something about the heart of God:
For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.
“He doth not afflict willingly.” The Hebrew phrase means, literally, not from His heart. Whatever God permits in a fallen world, suffering is not what He delights in. That changes how we pray. You are not trying to persuade a reluctant God to care about you. You are bringing your pain to a God whose compassion is “according to the multitude of his mercies,” and who “will not cast off for ever.”
Faith in this setting can sound like lament: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD?” (Psalm 13:1). That psalm ends in trust, but it begins with an honest question. Faith can sound like persistence: Paul asked three times, and Jesus told a parable about a widow who kept coming back to a judge “to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint” (Luke 18:1). And faith can sound like rest: Lord, I do not understand why this has not lifted, but I trust You.
What faith does not have to sound like is denial. You do not have to tell your doctor you feel fine when you do not, or apologise for your medication. Naming a symptom does not give it power. It simply tells the truth, and God is not threatened by the truth.
You are also free to keep praying for healing while making wise plans for living with your condition. Moradeke can ask God boldly to heal her and also drink her water, keep warm in the harmattan, take her folic acid and tell her line manager what to do if a crisis comes at work. That is how a believer lives faithfully in a body still waiting for its full redemption.
Carried by four
The church has a crucial part to play when illness persists, and Mark gives us a picture of what that can look like:
And again he entered into Capernaum after some days; and it was noised that he was in the house. And straightway many were gathered together, insomuch that there was no room to receive them , no, not so much as about the door: and he preached the word unto them. And they come unto him, bringing one sick of the palsy, which was borne of four. And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.
The paralysed man could not get to Jesus on his own. Four friends carried him. When the crowd blocked the door, they did not give up. They climbed onto the roof, broke it open and lowered their friend on his mat into the room where Jesus was teaching. And Mark records a remarkable sentence: “When Jesus saw their faith.”
Their faith. Mark does not tell us anything about the paralysed man’s faith. We do not know whether he was full of hope or exhausted by years of disappointment. What we know is that his friends believed enough to carry him, and Jesus honoured what He saw in them.
That is good news for anyone whose faith feels tired. There are seasons in a long illness when you cannot pray as you once did. The pain is too much, the medication makes you drowsy, the disappointment has worn you down. In those seasons you are allowed to be carried. Let others believe for you. Let the elders pray. Let your friends hold the corners of the mat.
It is also a calling for the rest of us. Here is what it can look like for a church to carry a sick member well:
- Keep praying, and keep showing up. Long illness tests a church’s patience more than a short crisis does. The visitors come in the first week and fade by the third month.
- Ask how she is, and then listen to the actual answer. Do not correct her report of her pain with a confession you think she ought to make.
- Never ask what she did to cause it. Never suggest that her faith is the problem. Never tell anyone to stop treatment.
- Meet practical needs: transport to clinic appointments, a meal on a bad week, help with hospital bills, a visit to sit with her mother so the family can rest.
- Include her. Find ways for her gifts to be used on the days she is able.
PunchlineFour men on a rooftop did more for their friend than a hundred sermons about faith could have done. Let the church be the four.
Living faithfully in the meantime
What should you do, then, if your illness has persisted and you have started to condemn yourself for it?
Begin by setting down the verdict. Say it aloud if it helps: My illness is not proof that God loves me less. My illness is not proof that my faith has failed. Then put the truth in its place: Nothing shall be able to separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus my Lord.
If there is a sin you know about, deal with it simply. Confess it to God, make it right where you can, and receive His forgiveness, which is full and immediate in Christ (1 John 1:9). But do not go hunting through your past for a hidden cause. You will always find something, because every believer has things to confess, and you will leave the search more condemned than when you began. The Holy Spirit convicts clearly and specifically. Vague, endless accusation does not come from Him.
Keep your treatment and your appointments. Medicine is part of God’s common grace, and using it is stewardship of the body He has given you.
Refuse to let the illness become your identity. You are a child of God who has sickle cell, or diabetes, or arthritis. Your name in heaven is not a diagnosis.
And keep your hope fixed on the day when the redemption of the body will be complete. John saw it: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” (Revelation 21:4). Every healing we receive now is a sign of that day. Every day of waiting is shorter than the eternity that follows.
Moradeke and I read John 9 together, and when we reached Jesus’ answer, “Neither hath this man sinned,” she asked me to read it again, and then a third time.
She went back to her haematologist and told him, a little embarrassed, that she had been taking her medication in secret. He was kind about it. He reviewed her treatment and made some changes. She also asked the elders of her church to pray for her, as James instructs. They came to her flat in Yaba on a Thursday evening, anointed her with oil and prayed. One of them, an older man who had buried his own wife after a long illness, said something she has kept. “Sister, we will pray for you as many times as you ask us. And we will still be here if you have to ask again.”
She has not had a major crisis since then, though she still has the condition, still carries her flask of water, and still sees her doctor every three months. She thanks God for every good month and asks Him boldly for complete healing. But she told me the deepest change happened before any of that.
“I stopped putting myself on trial,” she said. “When the pain comes now, I tell God about it. I do not try to work out what I did wrong. I just say, Father, it hurts, and I am still Yours. And I take my tablets in the open.”
If your illness has persisted, set down the second burden. The disciples’ question has been answered, and your condition is already on Paul’s list of things that cannot separate you from God’s love. Keep praying. Keep your treatment. Let others carry the mat when you are tired. You are still His.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Have you been interpreting your illness, or someone else’s, as a verdict on God’s love or on personal faith? Where did that way of thinking come from?
- How does Jesus’ refusal in John 9 to name a culprit change the way you think about persistent sickness?
- What does Paul’s experience with the thorn, and the Galatians’ response to his infirmity, teach you about grace and community?
- Which item on Paul’s list in Romans 8:35-39 speaks most directly to your situation today?
- If you are well, whose mat could you help to carry this month, and what would that involve in practical terms?
This Week
Read Romans 8:35-39 aloud once each day this week, and add the name of your condition, or a loved one’s, to Paul’s list: “nor sickle cell, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.” If you are sick and have not yet asked the elders of your church to pray, ask them this week. Take your prescribed medication openly and thank God for it as part of His care. If you are well, choose one person with a long-term illness and offer one specific, practical help, such as a lift to clinic, a meal or an hour of company, without asking them to explain their condition.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that Your love for me is located in Christ Jesus, and that nothing in my body or my circumstances can separate me from it. I bring You my illness honestly. You know how long it has been and how much it hurts. I ask You to heal me, and I ask You for grace while I wait. I lay down the verdict I have been carrying against myself. Thank You that Jesus refused to blame the sick, and that You do not afflict willingly. When I am too weak to pray, let Your Spirit pray within me, and let my brothers and sisters carry me. Give wisdom to those who treat me, and help me to honour the body You have given me. Keep my eyes on the day when every tear will be wiped away. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.