Healing Prayer Is God’s IdeaНамуна

It is common today for congregations to entreat the Lord to bless medically trained specialists, doctors, nurses, and technicians to bring dearly loved sick ones to a place of health. And those prayers are good and valuable; they do not go to waste and should be continued.

Yet regularly in practice, it has become common for congregational prayers to be permeated with a phrase barely found in the New Testament. You may have prayed it too: “If it be Your will…”

I have prayed that phrase when I didn’t know what God’s best was for the one I was praying about. I have also prayed it when I didn’t know whether to ask God for healing, for a person to endure pain in natural healing processes, or for them to pass away because their time had come. It was an honest prayer. It sounds biblical. And I wanted to learn better how to pray. So I went into a study on the will of God, determining that I would sift through the biblical material on how to pray for the will to be done.

I didn’t find one clear example in the New Testament of anyone praying “If it be Your will.” There was not one clear case from Matthew to Revelation.

This phrase is often associated with Jesus’s prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. Yet there, Jesus knew exactly what God’s will was; He bluntly told the disciples that He was going to die an awful death to save us. Moses and Elijah appeared to Him on the Mount of Transfiguration and talked to Him about just how He would die. In fact, when Simon Peter understood what Christ was saying, he began to tell Him off. Jesus rebuked the well-intentioned fellow sternly and vehemently for telling Him that Messiah could not die like that! In fact, this rebuke was as strong as it ever got with Jesus speaking to another.

It is clear from the Gospels that Jesus knew exactly what the will of God for His life (and death) was going to be. When He came to the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was praying with a full and complete knowledge of what the will was going to be—and He foretold it in an exact, clear manner.