How Is It That You Have No Faith? | Faith & Healing: Trusting God When We Don't Understand
Faith and Healing: Trusting God When We Don’t Understand
If you have ever prayed for healing, you probably know how quickly the questions can come. What if I do not have enough faith? What if I prayed the wrong way? What if I am missing something? What if God is able to heal, but He is not willing? And what do I do when I have prayed, others have prayed, I have done everything I know to do, and nothing seems to change?
Those questions make healing one of the most difficult places to talk about faith, because this is where theology becomes deeply personal. Throughout our How Is It That You Have No Faith? series, we have been working toward a biblical understanding of faith. Faith is not simply believing that God exists or trying to convince ourselves strongly enough that something will happen. Biblical faith begins with who God has revealed Himself to be. Because He is faithful and trustworthy, we entrust ourselves to Him. That sounds straightforward until sickness enters your life or the life of someone you love.
James 5 gives us a picture of what faith looks like in that moment. Those who are suffering are told to pray, those who are cheerful are told to praise, and those who are sick are told to call for the elders of the church so they can pray and anoint them with oil. James later says, “pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16). What stands out is how communal the passage is. Healing is not presented only as a private matter between one person and God. The sick person calls. Others come. The church prays. There is confession, prayer, anointing, and participation.
For some of us, that alone can be challenging. We have learned how to carry hard things quietly. We do not want to bother anyone or feel like a burden, so we tell ourselves that we will just pray about it on our own. Yet James does not leave the sick person isolated. Sometimes one of the first acts of faith is simply allowing someone else into what you are carrying and saying, “I need you to pray with me.”
At the same time, conversations about healing can create another kind of burden. If you have been around them long enough, you may have heard some version of this: believe more, do not doubt, say the right words, find the right person to pray, or make sure your faith is strong enough. Before long, you can begin examining yourself constantly. Did I believe enough? Did I doubt for a moment? Did I somehow pray incorrectly?
That is where faith can quietly become a formula. Instead of looking at Jesus, you begin looking at yourself, and eventually the object of your faith becomes your own ability to get faith right. But the healing ministry of Jesus does not give us one repeatable technique. Sometimes Jesus touched people. Sometimes He spoke. Sometimes people touched Him. Sometimes healing happened at a distance. Sometimes another person came asking on behalf of the one who was sick. The consistent pattern was not a method. It was Jesus.
Biblical faith is not confidence in your ability to perform faith correctly. It is confidence in the One you are trusting. At the same time, avoiding formulas does not mean becoming passive. Some of us have been disappointed enough that we have moved in the opposite direction and simply said, “If God wants to heal me, He will.” It is true that God alone is the healer, but James 5 is not a passive passage. People call, pray, confess, anoint, and participate.
That participation may look spiritual, practical, or both. You can ask others to pray and still go to the doctor. You can be anointed with oil and take medication. You can ask God to heal while also making wise changes in how you care for your body. Faith can use natural means without making those means the ultimate source. God is the healer, but our response still matters.
That raises a deeper question beneath many of our questions about healing: what do we actually believe God is like? This is why Jesus matters so much in the conversation. In John 14:9, Jesus tells Philip, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” If we want to understand the heart of God, we look at Jesus.
When we do, healing is impossible to ignore. Matthew describes Jesus traveling throughout Galilee “healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease” (Matthew 4:23). Later, Matthew says Jesus “healed all who were sick” who were brought to Him (Matthew 8:16). Luke describes crowds gathering around Jesus because “power went out from Him and healed them all” (Luke 6:19). Again and again, sick people come to Jesus and encounter compassion, authority, and healing.
Then Mark gives us an encounter that makes the question especially personal. A man with leprosy comes to Jesus and says, “If You are willing, You can make me clean” (Mark 1:40). His question is not whether Jesus is able. His question is whether Jesus is willing. Jesus answers him directly: “I am willing; be cleansed” (Mark 1:41).
That story does not answer every question we may have about healing, but it does reveal something significant about God’s character. Jesus reveals compassion, power, and willingness to heal. If Jesus reveals the Father, then we should be careful not to build a picture of God that moves in the opposite direction of what Jesus consistently revealed.
Scripture also keeps us humble, however, because not every healing passage fits into a simple pattern. At the Pool of Bethesda, Jesus entered a place filled with sick people, yet John records Him healing one man. In Nazareth, Mark connects the lack of mighty works with unbelief. James connects healing with prayer and confession. These passages show us that faith, unbelief, confession, and obedience can matter. But they do not give us a formula.
John 9 is especially important here. When the disciples assumed that a man’s blindness must have been caused by either his sin or his parents’ sin, Jesus rejected their assumption. That means we should be careful about turning every sickness or every unanswered prayer into an accusation against ourselves or someone else.
Maybe you have done that. Maybe you have replayed your story and wondered, “What did I do wrong?” Mark 9 gives us a helpful picture. The disciples had tried to help a boy and failed. His father finally comes to Jesus and cries, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). His faith is not perfect. There is belief and weakness mixed together, yet he brings all of it to Jesus.
The disciples’ failure matters too. Their inability to help the boy did not reveal a different Jesus. It did not mean Jesus was unable or unwilling. Jesus still healed him. Sometimes our failures may reveal our need for deeper dependence, but they do not redefine the character of God.
James later points to Elijah as an example of effective prayer. In 1 Kings 18, God had already told Elijah that rain was coming, yet that promise did not make Elijah passive. He prayed and sent his servant to look toward the sea. The servant returned with the report, “There is nothing.” Elijah sent him again, and eventually a small cloud appeared.
The point is not that praying seven times guarantees an answer. The point is that Elijah kept responding to what God had revealed even when he could not yet see evidence of it. His faith did not require him to pretend the sky was already full of clouds. It meant that “nothing” did not become a greater revelation than what God had spoken.
If you have prayed for healing for a long time, you may know exactly what that feels like. You pray, you seek help, you ask others to pray, you follow through, and the report still looks the same. Faith does not require you to pretend the report is different. It means refusing to let what you see become a greater revelation than what God has already shown you about Himself.
That brings us to the hardest part of the conversation: what happens when healing does not come? What if someone you love dies? What if you are still living with the same condition years later? We often rush to fill that space with explanations. Maybe they did not have enough faith. Maybe it was not God’s will. Maybe there is some reason we simply need to accept. But Scripture does not always give us those answers.
Sometimes the most honest thing we can say is, “I prayed for healing, and I did not see it happen.” Faith does not require us to manufacture an explanation God has not given. It allows us to say, “God, I do not understand what happened here, but I still know who You have revealed Yourself to be.”
Even in that unanswered space, faith remains relational. We stay open to the Holy Spirit. We allow Him to search us, correct us, deepen our dependence, call us to repent, lead us to forgive, or tell us to keep praying. We do not do that because we are trying to find someone to blame. We do it because faith stays connected.
In the end, one of the deepest challenges of faith is refusing to let what we do not understand redefine what God has already revealed. We do not have to deny our disappointment or pretend our questions are gone. We can acknowledge both: “God, I know who You have revealed Yourself to be,” and, “God, I do not understand what happened here.”
Biblical faith is not confidence in our ability to believe perfectly or pray perfectly. It is entrusting ourselves to the God who has revealed Himself as faithful. So when healing is needed, we pray. We invite others to pray. We participate. We listen. We stay dependent. And when we encounter something we still cannot explain, we refuse to make our unanswered questions greater than the revelation we have already received in Jesus.
God is willing. God is able. And even in the places we do not understand, we can keep entrusting ourselves to Him.