God is a God of miracles or he is no God at all. God is a healer, or his healing Son who said “anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9) has deceived us. Yet if that is so, what do we say to those who have cried out for healing and received none? Does our miracle working God still heal today?

Sceptics tell us that miracles are a proven nonsense. But let us be clear on this. Science works by explaining things that can be examined and proved in experiments. A scientist can't possibly prove that Jesus didn't rise from the dead! (Proving a negative is a very hard to do.)

Nor will examination of the object help. Miracles, in the main, are when God changes something ordinary into something else ordinary. Jesus changed ordinary water into ordinary wine. Illness is ordinary, wellness is ordinary. Analysis of the new wine will not help us. Examination of the healed will not answer the world's questions. God's precise role in transforming one into the other is beyond our grasp.

No one has the Spirit's power “on tap.” Every healing and every miracle is at the Spirit's discretion

As for Christians who don't believe in miracles, it doesn't matter how smart you are, if you think that the miracles in the Bible aren't miracles, that's an idea you bring into the Bible, not one you can get from it. The Bible pretty much expects God to do miracles from beginning to end. As Gordon Fee says: “Only among intellectuals and in a 'scientific age' is it thought to be too hard for God to heal the sick” (The First Epistle to the Corinthians, New International Commentary).

I have a personal stake in this issue. Just over two years ago I was diagnosed with advanced Hodgkin's disease. Many fervent prayers were offered for healing, mine among them. After three courses of chemotherapy the cancer was, somewhat unexpectedly, completely gone (this didn't stop the doctor prescribing three more rounds of chemo). Was this a miracle? Did God answer the prayers prayed for me? I believe he did. A sceptic will believe he didn't. After all, treatments for Hodgkin's are among the most successful for any type of cancer. The problem is that there is no “control Grant” that we can leave untreated except for prayer and find out if it was prayer alone that healed. Miracles are by their very nature “one-offs” and hence are impervious to scientific investigation. I believe God healed me.

And yet … Dad started to feel “funny” one afternoon. He was in his 60s and fit for a man his age. He left work to drive home. After a few minutes his legs stopped working and he clambered out of the vehicle, hoping a friend would see his distress and help him. One did. But Dad has never walked since. Oh, believe me, we prayed, and not just his family. Friends and prayer warriors alike prayed for his healing. He was anointed with oil and prayed for some more. If healing comes about by the fervour and faithfulness of our prayers, Dad would be walking. But he is not. He spent nine months in a spinal unit and is now a paraplegic. What am I to do with my story and Dad's story? Why would God heal me and not him?

God is a God of miracles today. The New Testament tells us that the Kingdom “was inaugurated by Christ in the power of the Spirit, who continues the work of the Kingdom until the consummation” (Fee, New International Commentary). That is, we cannot just say that that was a different time. The Spirit and the Kingdom are present realities. Acts 3 tells us of Peter and John's healing of the lame man in the temple. Years later, in writing to the Corinthians, Paul clearly says that in the Spirit's power and at the Spirit's discretion, some are given “gifts of healings.”

As this is one of the few passages that mention such a charismatic gift, we need to hear Paul. In Corinthians 12:9-10 he literally speaks of “gifts of healings” and “workings of miracles.” This indicates that these gifts are given to certain individuals and also that each healing or miracle is a special gift. The healer or miracle worker will always stand, as theologian Arnold Bittlinger has noted, in “new dependence upon the divine Giver.” And perhaps this is an indication of why God heals some and not others. Healing for all in this life has never been promised, nor is there anyone on earth who can provide it. Healing is at God's discretion not ours.

God writes our prayers into history as we speak them

At a recent conference I spoke with a young person who said he wanted to have Holy Spirit power “on tap” so that he could work some miracles. Paul's language should give my young friend and, indeed, any miracle working televangelist pause. No one has the Spirit's power “on tap.” Every healing and every miracle is the Spirit's doing and at the Spirit's discretion. Yes, some are given “gifts of healings” but nobody has “a gift of healing” given once and for all to use at their pleasure. Each healing is a gift. People who long for, or claim, such power “on tap” are misguided at best and bring their Lord no credit at worst.

Why would I say that? Kim has cerebral palsy and his intellectual development is impaired. He volunteers at our corps and is cared for most lovingly by his brothers and sisters in Christ. A few weeks ago he asked if I could “deliver him.” I asked what he meant. He said he wanted to be delivered from his cerebral palsy. A Pentecostal neighbour had told him that as a minister I would be able to do so, that I would be able to help him get rid of the “evil.” My heart went out to Kim, but not to his neighbour. Such a theology diminishes Kim and misrepresents the Gospel.

We in the Christian West have been seduced by the idea of power. We want to have control over our own fulfilled lives. And of course illness has no place in such an idea. There is no room for cerebral palsy here. We long for God to do “awesome” things for us. The alluring, self-serving prosperity doctrine, which is almost laughable in its disconnection with Jesus and what he said and did, fuels such “it's all about me” theology. And yet if there is no Kim, where is my compassion? Where is the need to which I must respond for Jesus' sake? Tenderness, kindness, weakness, patience and “you” are replaced by awesome, great, power, mighty and “me.” Where is my need of God for anything other than personal empowerment? What can authentic community possibly mean in this ludicrous idea of a potent self-sufficient Christian? We need pain. If for no other reason than “illness may be the only time we have the opportunity to discover that we are part of a story we did not make up” (Stanley Hauerwas, “The Sanctified Body” in Embodied Holiness). Trust me, serious illness forces us to depend on God and others. Have we forgotten God's word for Paul when he wanted healing? “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

I heard a woman speak of her work with severely autistic and disabled children. I was interested to hear her reaction to the manifest pain in these children and their families. Her ultimate response was: “Thank God, my child is whole and healthy.” That's OK. Health is indeed a gift from God. But her conclusion also left me unsatisfied. Surely to say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” is an inadequate response from a child of God. Stanley Hauerwas contends: “Illness is one of the last sources of grace just to the extent that it forces us to need one another, to be communicative bodies.”

At the end of the day we must kneel before God, recognizing that we desperately need him and that we desperately need each other. Illness always reminds us of that fact. Healing is a gift from God. But it just may be that illness is a more important gift from God. After all which is the greater testament to God's power? A miracle? Or genuine community where hope, faith, trust, love, gentleness and compassion are expressed by the unhealed and offered to the unhealed? Where is God best glorified? In miracles of power or in our faithful dying? Stephen's rising, healed, from his stoning would have been a testament to God's might. But Stephen's pain and death honoured God even more (see Acts 7). If ever there was a people who should understand that God is glorified in hope filled suffering and faithful dying it is the followers of Jesus!

How then should we pray? Shamelessly. We should pour out our hearts to him and ask for healing without any cautious codicils of “if it be your will.” God is our loving Father. We do not have to remind God to act according to his will. Jesus parable on prayer in Luke 11 commends the petitioner's “shamelessness” (Walter Bauer, Greek-English Lexicon). We too can ask our Father for what we really want.

Some people say prayer is all about us, we pray to change us (as C. S. Lewis famously says in Shadowlands). This is not so. Prayer is about God. If he is not God we have no reason to pray. If he cannot or will not act on our behalf prayer is merely inner reflection. We pray believing that God will answer our prayers. Sometimes we are hurt by his reply because we truly believe he could do what we ask but he chooses not to. And sometimes our heavenly Father's only explanation is “because I said so.” Perhaps God's reasons are beyond our understanding. Nevertheless, we trust God to be God―there is no other way.

So we pray, believing that our prayers matter to God. The evidence of Scripture is that “God does not act if [we] do not play our part” (Millard Erickson, Christian Theology). Jesus healed when people acted in faith by asking him to do so. But it's not because of how we do it! God is not more likely to say “yes” to our prayers just because we pray a particular way. God answers our prayers because he loves us not because we are a good prayer or have been especially clear in our request or because we believed harder than the prayer next to us.

Our prayers matter to God. He is not a distant clockmaker who wound up the timepiece of history and is now letting it run its course. God is not merely a detached observer who has foreordained our whole life. God sustains and governs all things. He keeps the world going now. Our world is a dynamic work in progress and God writes our prayers into history as we speak them. He is not the remote God who occasionally intervenes with a miracle for the really good prayer. Our Father hears our prayers and weaves his “yes” and “no” into our present and our future, working all things together for our good. It appears that sometimes our good is served by miracles of healing and sometimes it is not.

The author and the authentication of healings are beyond our comprehension. That's OK. If we could fully understand God he wouldn't be God. Sometimes God changes our illness into wellness and sometimes he does not. In either case we pray, trusting that the God of miracles is glorified in both, for that is how we play our part.