Our trust in God's character--His goodness and kindness as well as His power to actually help us--is a type of faith, but it is not the kind of faith required by the "prayer of faith" mentioned in James 5:15. I have often prayed for someone who was sick, but although I approached God confident of both His ability to help and His faithfulness to do what was right and good, the person was not healed (as the verse indicated would happen). Now, I can either look for ways to explain away the verse--as many do by saying that death is God's perfect healing or by saying that God must have had some other plan--or I can look for ways to better understand what the prayer of faith is. I choose the latter.
Faith requires a word from the Lord: So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10:17). Only when God has spoken can we be sure of what His will is. Once He has revealed His intention, we can pray with complete assurance. A man once shared with me a testimony of God's healing his son. The son was in the hospital, deteriorating by the hour. The father, a faithful follower of Jesus, was praying fervently and unceasingly. He believed in the Lord's power to heal and in His goodness to hear prayer, but still the son grew worse. The father said that he had to go to his house for something, and as he was driving, he was suddenly struck with the realization that his son was healed. His heart leaped for joy and gratitude to God. The moment was so strong that he turned the car around and headed back to the hospital. He met the son's doctor in the corridor. The doctor had just left the son's bedside. He looked the father in the eye and said, "He's made a turn for the better. He's going to be all right." The son went through long days of recuperation, but the father never had any doubt that his son would be completely restored, And he was.
That moment when the father experienced the realization that his son was healed was God's revelation, His word to him about the situation. When God speaks, things become real (we see this in the opening words of Genesis). When His Spirit testifies to our spirit, His will becomes real to us. A spiritual reality is created within us. Thus the Bible's definition of faith is, in the words of Hebrews 11:1, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. When God speaks, faith is created in us and what is true in the spiritual realm becomes real to us, often before it becomes real in the material realm.
Note that this word from the Lord is not the logos but the rhema. It is not the written word of God to everyone, it is a revealed word of God to a specific individual regarding a specific situation. I have shared a salvation experience comparable to that of many others. I was raised in the church and understood the plan of salvation--my sinfulness, my inability to save myself, Christ's death on my behalf as my only hope, my need to repent and believe--long before I was truly saved. One day, all those things that I understood intellectually hit me with a reality and forcefulness that made it seem like I had never truly understood those teachings before. They became real in me, a part of me. When God's Spirit witnessed to my spirit and made salvation real to me, I was able to have saving faith. I had believed in my head what God's word, the Bible, taught, but only when His Spirit-spoken word made real in me what Jesus had done for me was I able to exercise genuine faith.
To pray the prayer of faith, we must first "get a word from the Lord." The story goes that a man made a sudden trip to Alaska and when the weather turned really cold, he realized he had forgotten to bring an adequate coat. He calls home and his wife agrees to send the coat by next-day delivery. Later he meets up with his boss who offers to buy him a coat. His reply? "I've already got one." Now technically, he does not yet have it in his possession. But he knows that it is on the way so that he does not have to procure one by some other means. When we have His word, we know that we have it. That's why 1 John 5:15 says, If we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him. The way we know that He has heard us is because He has responded by speaking to us.
Let us pray with the confidence that comes from knowing the character of God and the written word of God. But let's keep praying until He responds and tells us what He intends to do. Then we can pray the prayer of faith.
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