When We Question If Faith Is Enough

Part 1 of 6 · When Healing Doesn’t Come

I picked up our five-year-old son and gently placed him in the casket. After a thirteen-month battle with a tumor on his brainstem, our family faced the unimaginable. The questions my wife and I faced were overwhelming. “His name is Josiah, which means ‘Whom Jehovah Has Healed.’ But God didn’t. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. We prayed. Everyone we know prayed. Even strangers prayed. We fought. We believed. What now?”

That was back in 2005. As an associate pastor in a well-known Pentecostal denomination, we found ourselves completely unprepared for the dark waters of deep grief that engulfed us. Although our tradition doesn’t explicitly teach, as some Pentecostal and Charismatic circles do,¹ that healing is always guaranteed with sufficient faith, there remained this quiet sense that something hadn’t quite worked. It wasn’t that we believed we had failed, but that “it” had failed. All our prayers and faith seemed just shy of what was needed, missing their mark. We were left with a lingering “if only.” The haunting question no one would talk about, much less quite answer.

The next several posts will sit with the question of faith and healing. I want to be upfront: I don’t approach this topic with clinical detachment. This one is personal for me. However, I refuse to let that personal connection settle the question prematurely, in either direction. I am not here to argue that healing has ceased; it absolutely has not. I’ve seen it. At the same time, I don’t believe healing is owed simply because “enough faith” has been built. Instead, I’m interested in what the Gospels actually say and how they challenge the notion many of us have inherited, whether explicitly or implicitly.

The question I have carried since Josiah’s loss, and the one this series aims to explore seriously, is whether the Gospels genuinely teach what we’ve often heard or implied: that faith’s presence or absence, measured by a kind of inner emotional intensity, determines whether God heals.

About this series

Over the next six weeks, I want to walk this question with you, one post at a time. This idea comes from a paper I wrote in graduate school. I spent more time than necessary on the research and writing because it was personal. Some assignments are for the grade, while others are for yourself, hoping that someday they’ll help others too. That’s how I see this. This isn’t a formal research project but more like a series of essays. It’s not aimed at professors but at the people I meet daily, who carry this question without a safe place to set it down.

The series follows the structure of the question.

In Post 2, we will sit inside the two scenes in which Jesus is said to marvel: once at the faith of a Roman centurion and once at the disbelief of his hometown. At first glance, these scenes seem to highlight a clear symmetry between faith and miracle. However, on closer inspection, that symmetry does not hold.

In Post 3, we’ll explore what healing truly means in the Gospel context. Modern Western thought often sees healing primarily as eliminating symptoms. However, the Scriptures portray it as a broader, more far-reaching concept, connected to restoring shalom, reconciling communities, and the arrival of God’s kingdom into a broken world.

In Post 4, we’ll examine three Greek verbs used for healing in the Gospels: therapeuō, iaomai, and sōzō. Don’t worry, it won’t be too technical. We’ll discover that the concepts we often treat as separate, being saved and being healed, are often rendered with the same English word in our translations of the Gospels.

In Post 5, we will focus on faith itself. Many of us have inherited the assumption that bigger problems require bigger faith. That cancer costs more faith than a head cold. A marriage in crisis demands more belief than a small worry. Jesus tells a different story, and Post 5 is where we look at it.

In Post 6, I’ll turn pastoral. We’ll look at the language we’ve inherited and the songs we sing, considering their implications and how they affect those who hear them, even as they remain unhealed. We’ll conclude by asking how a church that takes the Gospels seriously can pray for the sick with boldness and conviction, without adding to their burden.

A word about what I am not arguing

Let me be clear from the start, because nothing that follows will make sense if misunderstood. I am not saying faith doesn’t matter. It’s absolutely essential. Faith is the central attitude toward Jesus in the New Testament, and the New Testament openly encourages, nurtures, and urges growth in faith. What I am after is something more specific. The words we’ve received about faith, whether in conversations, prayers, or songs, carry a burden that faith was never meant to hold. That burden is the expectation of a certain outcome. When that outcome doesn’t arrive, the unspoken message is that faith has failed. I want to explore this idea, especially where the Gospels themselves challenge it, in hopes that we might free people to keep believing without carrying what was never theirs to bear.

A word for the one in the middle of it

If you’re reading this in the middle of unanswered prayers, a sick child, a failing body, slipping parents, or a marriage carried alone, I want to honestly say what this series can and can’t do. It cannot explain why your prayer hasn’t yet been answered. I don’t have access to that. However, I do hope to offer what my wife and I didn’t have. When we lost Josiah, people loved us, but no one knew how to sit with the questions we carried. Years removed from that season, I hope to affirm, with both the experience of having walked it and the authority of the Gospels, that your questions are not signs of weak faith. The Gospel invites and even encourages you to ask them.

And that permission is not a small thing. For many people I have sat with, it is the first kind word they have been given in a very long time.

See you next week.

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1. Documented within Pentecostal scholarship itself. See Jennifer Anne Cox, "A Re-Examination of Faith and Healing in the Gospels: Toward a Pentecostal Theology of Healing and Disability," Cyberjournal for Pentecostal-Charismatic Research 24 (June 2017), http://www.pctii.org/cyberj/cyberj24/cox.html.