Only by prayer and fasting

Afterwards, when Jesus was alone in the house with his disciples, they asked him, "Why couldn't we cast out that evil spirit?" Jesus replied, "This kind can be cast out only by prayer and fasting." Mark 9:28-29 (NLT)

On this Christmas Day, 2007, it is well to remember why God sent his only begotten Son to us in the little town of Bethlehem, in the land of Judea, by way of Mary and Joseph, linear descendants of David, to be born in a lowly manger among the gentle domesticated animals. Many of us brazen children of the modern hedonistic generation have the audacity to demand direct communication with the Lord God himself, heedless of the absurdity of such presumption. Not that God does not want to talk to us one-on-one, face-to-face so to speak, or even spirit to spirit; but that we would not live to tell about it. Imagine speaking to an avalanche exploding in our face, or shouting at the hurricane gusting at our heels, or puffing at the volcano spewing fire and ashes and lava into our sky,... well, you get the picture. We have very little respect for the power and majesty of God, while we marvel and cower at the display of natural forces even at minutely terrestrial magnitudes within our astronomical measures, only to underscore our disbelief of the Almighty. We really don't believe that our God is present and living, all powerful, all knowing; do we now? And who told us that he is a loving God, a judging God, a fearsome God, a jealous God, an angry God, a consuming God, a demanding God, a capricious God?

Jesus came to earth because we needed a mediator between us and the Almighty. For those who understood the unfathomable might of a true living God, to approach God without a mediator is not just suicide -- it is utter futility. No communication would take place and sure destruction would result. Every religion that conceives of an almighty god must provide for a means of mediation between the mortal man/woman and the immortal potentate. So from the beginning of the Biblical faith, there were men and women chosen by God himself to be temporary mediators between him and his chosen children. As the Hebrews conceived it, this process was initiated by God himself, but the response depended largely on the chosen mediator, and the effect depended entirely on the recipient people. Biblically, there were at least five classes of human mediators: Patriarchs, Judges, Prophets, Priests, and Kings. A rich record of how these mediators served as communication links between God and his people down through the ages has been passed down to us in the Old Testament Bible of the Hebrew people.

Jesus came, as the epitome of mediators of the old covenant -- embodiment of the perfect Patriarch, Judge, Prophet, Priest, and King; and, above that, as the mediator of a new covenant -- the first-born Son, the first Apostle, and the King of Kings. Incredibly, but of necessity, Jesus brought the persona of God all the way down to the level of a new-born child easily approachable by even the lowliest, the saddest, and the sickest of all mankind, not to mention all the rich, powerful, and famous. Only because he came in this way on that first Christmas night are we now able to approach God Almighty anywhere, anytime, through our ever-present and permanent mediator -- Jesus the crucified lamb of God. To call on the name of Jesus in our prayers is not merely a sentimental afterthought or an expression of decorum, it is the absolutely only means for us to communicate with the God we know as the Almighty himself.

The early disciples were quick to discover, however, that this process of mediation comes with a high price. As Jesus taught them, self-sacrifice of the highest order is required of a mediator chosen and ordained by God himself. In the long tradition of Old Testament mediators, the New Testament mediators must also yield to the power of the Holy Spirit by a process of self-imposed spiritual discipline and purification. Jesus himself prepared for his ministry with 30 years of study in the teachings and scriptures of his forefathers, while learning a successful trade as a master carpenter and gaining favor in his community and family. He then began his ministry by submitting to baptism by the prophet John the Baptist in the River Jordan, followed by 40 days of prayer and fasting in the wilderness. Thereafter, for the three years of his earthly ministry, he continued his discipline of preparation, prayer and fasting. In this story recorded for us in Mark 9, healing the sick child appeared to require more discipline on the part of the mediator than the disciples had acquired. To be an instrument of healing, to be the messenger of forgiveness, required the faith and commitment of the sacrificial lamb. The servant of God himself needs to be in the right position with his God, so that the sick may exercise his faith in an effective condition.

Healing of the sick, just as redemption of the sinner, requires all three conditions: the living presence of the Almighty God himself, the effectual hand of the mediator, and the overcoming faith of the recipient. Many a brave Protestant soul claim the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and dare to call directly nupon the Almighty in the name of Jesus as the only necessary intercessor, without the aid of another human mediator. More power to them. But I suspect that most of the time the effort is well-meant but naively ineffectual. No wonder so many prayers go unanswered, sins unforgiven, sick unhealed, and gifts unclaimed. Catholic and Orthodox believers have the benefit of the apostolic succession of priests as their official and ordained mediators, so they are more likely to invoke the help of such a human intercessor. Again, more power to them. Their problem is that many of the intercessors are themselves not given to deep faith, fervent prayer, and fasting spirit, and so betray the trust of their petitioners. Again, prayers go unanswered, sin unredeemed, and sickness unhealed.

Two lessons are delivered to us in these simple verses. First lesson is that we the disciples of Jesus must be honest as to our own abilities and limitations; must be willing to see the sicknesses that we cannot heal with our powerful medicines and surgeries and therapies; must be convinced that no other alternative or even hocus-pocus therapeutic strategies exist to deliver the cure; and must be willing to turn to Jesus our Master Healer and ask the humble question: Why could't we cast out that evil spirit? (Mark 9:28 NLT)

Second lesson for us is in the words of Jesus passed down to us for our cogitation. For the petitioner, he said: "What do you mean, 'Do something if I can'? Anything is possible if a person believes." (Mark 9:23 NLT) For the mediator, he said: "This kind can be cast out only by prayer and fasting." (Mark 9:29 NLT) It all depends how much the sick believes in the healing, and how much the mediating disciple is willing to sacrifice himself in his spiritual discipline.

Please join me in this prayer.
If you are sick, then pray this: "I do believe, but help me not to doubt." (Mark 9:4 NLT)
If you are a Christian physician as I am, then pray this: Give me your spirit of sacrifice, you who bore our sorrows and carried our weaknesses on the cross, you who rose from the dead with healing in your wings, you who commanded us to place our hands on the sick and heal them (Isaiah 53:4; Malachi 4:2; Mark 16:18 NLT), give me your spirit of prayer and sacrifice that I may cast out the evil spirits of sin and sickness. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Jesus came to heal the sick

"Healthy people don't need a doctor -- sick people do." Jesus healed great numbers of sick people who had many different kinds of diseases. (Mark 2:17; Mark 1:34 NLT)

There were a great number of sick people around Jesus, and a great deal of healing was taking place wherever he preached. He healed physical ailments, he healed mental illnesses, he healed thought disorders, he healed religious misunderstandings, and he healed spiritual rebellions. No distinctions, no discriminations, no disqualifications in this broadly based healing ministry. The disciples related certain salient features of some particularly memorable healing events for us their posterity in loving instruction, unable to document the many thousands of diseases cast aside by the hands of Jesus in those three short years. The early disciples themselves were marvelling most of the time at the healing power flowing so effortlessly from their own fingertips, leaving little time or energy to understand the mystery of it all.

We might wonder why Jesus the Great Physician did not institute some fundamental healing procedures, or some elementary scientific knowledge, or some basic biophysiological insights to launch the disciples quickly into a more modern healing regiment. Instead, he seemed to have left them with some primitive notions more akin to religious philosophy than scientific knowledge. Indeed, he left all the wonderful scientific discoveries to the toil and labor of generations of thinkers, many of them secular and profane atheists, scarcely any devout believers, in the centuries to come. Christians and their establishments, in fact, began to make enemies of scientific thought, rational discourse, evidence based knowledge, humanistic endeavors, tolerance of diversity, respect for life and pursuit of happiness.

Today, we live in a world filled with ever more sick people, caught between a very dogmatic enterprise of modern medical science on the one hand, and a very prosperous explosion of alternative/folk/naturalistic/popular/spiritual therapeutic experimentations on the other. We all pay our money and take our choices. If we are healed, then our money is well spent. If not, that's just life and fortune for us.

Where is our Lord Jesus today, who offers to heal our sicknesses for free; to forgive our sins for free; to liberate our bondages for free; who offers to decimate our miseries for free; to mend our heartbreaks for free; and to transform our mortality for free?

What do we make of the young man in perfect health dying a sudden death on a roller coaster ride? What do we make of the robust 40-year-old woman who dies of a heart attack after getting a clean bill of health from her week-long excecutive checkup last week? What do we make of a well-adjusted college honor student who mysteriously commits suicide? What about a perfectly wonderful Christian youngster who ends up prostituting for drugs? And then there is the senseless millionaire executive who takes a few drinks and drives into a carful of high school kids making brain-damaged/dismembered/pain-ridden messes of them all.

We preach miracle healing because that is the last resort, the last appeal, the last promise of a loving God who has given his first and only Son a ransom for our sins, a remedy for our infirmities, a mediation for our death. "Yet it was our sicknesses he carried; it was our diseases that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God for his own sins! But he was wounded and crushed for our sins. He was beaten that we might have peace. He was whipped, and we were healed!" (Isaiah 53:4-5 NLT)

Science is not the final answer. Religion does not offered the ultimate path. Medicine of all kinds, from brain-surgery to witch-doctoring, can only temporarily stay the final execution of death. Only Jesus can bring healing of the lasting order, lasting from now to eternity. What we preach is that when Jesus heals the sick, he makes them well for ever. Believe it or not, he has come to heal the sick -- to put right what is wrong, to revive what is decaying, to rejuvenate what has fossilized, and to breathe life into what is dying.

We preach a crucified, resurrected, and everliving Jesus who is here to save us from our sins and heal us of our diseases, that we may become servants of hope, deliverers of immortality, and givers of life extraordinary.

I believe in miracles

One day Jesus called together his twelve apostles and gave them power and authority to cast out demons and to heal all diseases. Luke 9:1 (NLT)

Jesus did not take the apostles through 4 years of medical school and three years of internship and then send them out on the road to heal the sick as physicians. There were physicians in those days of the first century as there are physicians today in the twenty-first century, trained to the best of known science of healing. Instead, Jesus gave his apostles power and authority from the Father God to evict the demons and to heal the diseases in those who received the Good News of the coming of Kingdom of God.

It is amusing that people spend so much time and energy arguing over the existence of God since the dawn of human consciousness. We have been wondering a long time about our self-understood loneliness, pondering our uninvited awareness of our unique existence, lamenting our unquenchable sadness of inevitable mortality. We so much wish that we can believe in God, we so much wish that we can believe in heaven, we so much wish that we can believe in eternity. We question God's existence because we are afraid, though we can scarcely prove that we ourselves exist. Most of us like to take it for granted that we exist just because we do, or we think, or we hurt, or we love, or we die. But we have no proof that any of this is real, any more than we can prove that God exists just because he does, or that he must, or that he might as well, or that he matters not. Maybe it is a flaw of our scientific language that we must believe in God as a real being, as we believe in the number one as a real number, in order that we may be able to compute the rest of our scientific universe.

Let me say then, it really does not matter if you believe in God or not, his existence that is. As you see in Jesus' discourse with his disciples, that question never came up seriously. More important are questions of obedience, of faith, of forgiveness, of hope, of righteousness, of love, of sacrifice. Especially in the presence of Jesus the Master, the Son of Man / Son of God, whose existence no one ever doubted, the question was constantly and persistently asked of the disciples: Do you believe in Jesus who you see, not God who you do not see?

So, I believe in miracles. And I mean real, honest to goodness, old-fashioned miracles, the kind that few modern saints actually believe in any more. People talk about common occurrences as miracles because they evoke a sense of wonder in the beholder, such as a new-born baby, a new sprouting plant, a beautiful sunrise/sunset, a man falling in love with a woman, etc., etc. People talk about modern medical inventions and discoveries as miracles in that we can now do what we were not able to do even a generation ago, such as transplant kidneys and hearts, resuscitate the dead, kill infections, modify psychosis, control pain, cure cancer, reorganize genes, etc., etc. People also like to say that faith in any form, faith in religions, or icons, or signs, or idols, or doctors, or medicines, or incantations, or oneself, etc., etc. all help increase the effectiveness of healing processes. But I am not talking about any of these. These are down-graded uses of the mighty miracle word. Miracle is a power word in the gospels.

I believe in miracle healing. Miracle healing is by definition unbelievable, beyond our common belief, over the top of our common sense, not to be expected by ordinary measures. Miracle healing only happens when all else has failed, when all manner of known therapy has been exhausted, when all hope has been abandoned, when all experts agree that no cure is forthcoming. When a doctor says it would take more than a miracle to heal this disease, when all medical experts agree that no known cure exists for this disease, when all of us including the most optimistic of us are finally convinced that all is lost, then it begins to make sense to talk about miracle healing, the healing of Jesus, the healing of the apostles. Miracle healing is not cheap, it cannot be practiced by every self-proclaimed faith-healer in heat, it does not work in the hands of anyone who decides to take up the task. Miracle healing is practiced by the chosen messengers of Jesus the healer, by those who are willing to bear the cross and pay the supreme price of obedience, by those who look not to themselves but to the master for the power and authority to forgive sins and to heal the sick.

I regret so called faith healers who defy God's good gift of modern medicine and pretend to heal those who are in need of immediate medical attention, or denigrate the benfits we have derived from so many powerful scientific inventions. We cannot go back to the dark ages of ignorance, when the earth was flat, childbirth was a curse, and viruses were evil spirits. However, we have not yet arrived at the age of total enlightenment, when all knowledge has been revealed, all secrets discovered, all limitations transcended, and humans have become immortal eternal celestial beings. There is still a large place for miracle healing, perhaps more than ever before in this day and age when we demand utter perfection and daily miracles from the hands of us physicians -- resulting from the deification of medical art in TV shows like ER and HOUSE, and endless litigation from unsatisfied customers.

This is not any different climate than that which buffeted the apostolic miracle-healers. And they were not even holding medical degrees. We must believe in miracles, you and I who have been given the privilege of healing our generation of diseases. Where our medical knowledge ends is where our faith begins, where our medicines run out is where our faith fills in, where our optimism reaches its limit of reason is where our hope engages its leap of serendipity. Miracle is when our learned hand whithers and our healing hand sprouts faith eternal. Yes, miracles still happen, and only happen when no one else believes anymore but humble you and me, who know our own weakness/limitation/infirmity as the best physicians on earth today.

I challenge my co-workers, physicians and psychologists who obey the Lord, who carry the cross, who sacrifice daily for their patients, to reach out our healing hand just a nanometer more and say ever so nano-quietly to the sick ones we touch -- in the name of Jesus, your sins are forgiven and your sicknesses are healed. And I guarantee you true miracles.

The Suffering Servant

Yet it was our sicknesses he carried; it was our diseases that weighed him down.... He was whipped, and we were healed. Isaiah 53:4-5 (NLT) All the spirits fled when he commanded them to leave; and he healed all the sick. Matthew 8:16-17 (NLT)

For the early disciples, healing of the sick was part and parcel of Jesus' teaching and ministry. Not only was the healing miraculous, it was authoritative. There were many miracle workers and healers in those days, but none had the authority that Jesus commanded. The disciples did not just marvel at the power that cast out demons and healed the sick; they were awestruck by the presence of a man who claimed dominion over heaven and earth. Much of what Jesus taught his disciples they did not understand at the time, but the sweeping sceptre of healing was quite obvious, and the attending talk of forgiveness of sin was nearly blasphemous. Fifty years later, when the first disciples recounted their precious walk with Jesus on earth to the children of faith facing severe persecution, they would remember vividly the commanding voice of the Lord's sacrificial lamb -- the suffering servant prophesied by Isaiah -- taking charge over the sin and sickness of the common people.



Today, nearly 2000 years after Jesus walked with his first disciples on earth, we are so acculturated in our commitment to scientific dogma that we understate the fundamental assumption of the scientific enterprise: science imposes the best available theories to explain the current collection of observed phenomena and known facts; but it cannot explain the unknown, or the unobserved, or the seemingly inexplicable phenomena we encounter in our common experience. It is well for the scientist to assume that future geniuses and divine serendipity will give rise to new theories that will in turn explain things that are un-explained for now; it is just as well for the Christian to assume that miracles continue to happen that defy our limited imagination and finite intellect demanding in us some measure of courageous faith and frivolous importunity.



We Christians who are physicians, after four years of rigorous medical training, would do well to pray fervently each and every time we lay our hands on our patients: pray for the power of the Most High to heal their diseases, and for the authority of the Almighty Judge to forgive their sin. This gift of mediation between the Lord and our patients is easily dispensed from our hands, yet unconscienably withheld for the most part by our spiritual timidity. Have we not dedicated ourselves to do our very best for our patients? Have we not promised ourselves not to withhold any good remedy that might prove effective to our patients? Have we not subscribed to the common practice of recommending a therapy when scientific experiments have demonstrated but a small advantage for its use? Why then are we so reluctant to wield our mighty sword of Christian faith over these human diseases?



For those of us Christians who believe in Jesus and are experienced in all things faithful in many different occasions in our own lives, we need no external proof for the power and effectiveness of our faith in healing. Scientific proof of such faith as ours is a contradiction in terms. Those who experiment in the relation of faith and health are laudable in their effort to demonstrate some mind/body connection in the realm of medical sciences. But we are dealing with our spiritual faith. Our faith does not yield to scientific proof or statistical manipulation. Our faith in Jesus is tautological, self-evident, internally valid. Our faith is in itself the proof and evidence, the self-fulfilling prophesy as it were. It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see. Hebrews 11:1-2 (NLT)



I believe in concentrating on our faith and not on our diseases, embracing the promise of his forgiveness and not the guilt of our sin, looking to him who heals us and not to ourselves who succumbed to sicknesses. I believe in miracles -- not only those brought about by modern science, not only those brought about by human love, not only those brought about by all manners of folk and adjunctive therapies, but more specifically miracles commanded by our Lord Jesus himself through the hands of his servants -- miracles of healing by virtue of the suffering servant who was whipped in order that we may be healed.



Let us pray: Lord Jesus, I believe in your healing ministry. Take my hands and make them instruments of healing, so that I may lay my hands on the sick and heal them of their sicknesses as well as their sin. Amen