Only Through Prayer

And these signs will accompany those who believe:  in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Mark 16:17-18

Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.  The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.  Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain.  Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.
James 5:16-18

            A couple days ago, my team was out doing door to door evangelism, stopping at each house to share the word of God and to pray for the residents.  We came to one house of a man who had a spinal injury and was paralyzed.  Naturally, we prayed for healing.  We finished praying, and as we finished, the man continued to lie in his bed, still paralyzed.  Not exactly the story that grabs people’s attention, right?
            As we went on to the next house, I became frustrated and wondered why the man wasn’t healed.  We all laid hands and faithfully prayed; he should have been healed.  I asked similar questions when I was in Thailand on the World Race and when I was in Uganda, leading a Real Life trip.  Every time we prayed for someone, and they weren’t healed, it just didn’t make any sense. 
            Now, of course, many of you readers are probably now thinking the typical Christian response (or at least the Christian response in the Western world):  “God has a plan; it just wasn’t His will for that person to be healed.  There are probably still lessons he wants to teach that person first.”  Growing up in the church, I’ve heard this response many times. And to be honest, I think it’s just a bullcrap response we give to cover up the fact that we lack true faith in the church.  Don’t get me wrong; I know there are plenty of verses in the Bible about God’s sovereignty, His will, and how He works everything to our good.  But when I look in the Gospels and in the Book of Acts, I find that every time there was a prayer for healing, that person was, well, healed.  I’ve never read the story in Acts where Peter and the other apostles pray for healing, that person isn’t healed, and Peter then stands up and gives a sermon on God’s will.  What happened in the last 2000 years between the day when Peter’s shadow was powerful enough to heal people (Acts 5:15) and the day when it is God’s will for people to remain sick (American Church 2012)? 
            And so, we left the house of the paralyzed man, and I asked God why.  God lead me to Mark 9:14-29.  In this passage, Jesus comes upon a crowd.  He asks what’s going on, and a man comes to Jesus and tells Him that his son is possessed by a demon, and Jesus’ disciples were not able to cast it out.  Jesus rebukes the crowd for being faithless and then proceeds to cast out the demon.  Afterwards, Jesus’ disciples come to Him and ask why they were not able to cast out the demon; Jesus responds, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”  (Mark 9:29)  There have been times in the past when this passage has been given to me as an explanation for why people are not always immediately healed today.  In other words, people have told me that this passage explains that sometimes you just have to pray for a long period of time in order for healing to occur.  But when you look at what happens in this passage, that explanation doesn’t line up.  Mark doesn’t tell us that Jesus prayed for multiple days and then the demon was cast out.  We still see in the story that the demon is nearly immediately cast out.  So what did Jesus mean when he said, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer”? 
            I don’t believe that Jesus meant what we typically think of as prayer.  Usually, in today’s church, prayer is asking God something specific or hearing something specific from Him.  And for many people, prayer has been minimized to something to be done before meals and right before going to sleep.  But I think that Jesus was talking about devotion to God.  We read in the Gospels that Jesus often got alone to spend time with His Father.  We read in Acts that the apostles and the other early believers devoted themselves to prayer.  In other words, they spent enough time with God to be filled up so that they could go out and actually make a difference in the world and maybe actually see His kingdom come. 
            So go spend time with God.  I mean, actually truly spend time with God.  Devote yourself to Him.  And watch God move in amazing ways.

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and heal their land.
2 Chronicles 7:14