Perilous Pastoral Pushback

If you pastor a church, it is virtually certain that at some point, someone you minister healing to will stay sick and then get in your face and demand to know why he isn’t healed.  And someone you minister to will die and the family will demand to know why divine healing “didn’t work” for the deceased person.

This places you in the position of Perilous Pastoral Pushback.  How you respond will determine your future effectiveness in ministering healing.

The ONLY correct option is to side with the Word against any notion that God was unwilling to heal that person or that God had NOT provided healing through Jesus Christ’s completed actions.  Pastors often back down because things can get ugly, especially if the loss of a loved one is involved.  The family can be mad at God, and because they see you as God’s representative, they can transfer that anger to you.

No one seems to want to face the prospect that the person could have been healed and failed to receive it.  Someone may well get in your face and say, “If ANYONE knew how to believe God, it was So-and-So!  You can’t tell me there was anything wrong with his faith!”

You have every right to state – correctly – that you do not know why the person stayed sick or died.  (In rarer cases, you DO know, but you are not at liberty to divulge what you know.)  However, if people try to get you to side in with unbelief, you can state that you DO know that Christ provided healing for everyone, and you don’t know why the person did not receive it.

Quite a few of the healing objections handled in this book are lame attempts by pressured pastors to offer false comfort.  But this false comfort RUINS any chance of others receiving healing through their ministry in the future, which then devolves from teaching faith to spouting unbelief along with so many other pastors who have been down that road.

Blaming God and His will is so much easier.  It takes all the pressure away from both the sick person and the preacher who ministered to the sick person.  If God didn’t want it, no one fell short, no one failed to believe, and no one did anything wrong.  That’s what makes people comfortable, so it’s what they’d like to hear and believe.

But the TRUTH is still that healing WAS available to that person and it WAS God’s will for that person to receive what Jesus paid for him to have, even though the person did not receive it.  You just don’t know why.

On a practical note, saying that the person “did not receive it” will probably be considered less stinging and offensive than saying that the person “failed to receive it.”  Most people don’t like to think of themselves or their relatives as “failures.”

I presented the concept of the new birth to tens of thousands of people on the street in Maine.  Few received it.  Does that mean that the message of the new birth is defective?  Does it mean that it was not God’s will for those people to be saved?  Does it mean that God did not really provide salvation for all when Jesus died for the sins of the world?  No, we know better when it comes to being saved from hell.  It is no different with healing.  Jesus provided it but not everyone receives it.

Now a relative of someone that I evangelized could come to me and demand to know why that person did not get saved.  Was it my fault for presenting the gospel poorly?  If not, it had to be that person’s fault.  WHY did that person fail to receive new life?  I honestly don’t know, and I would have no problem saying, “I don’t’ know.”  But I would NEVER back down from the truth that the person COULD HAVE been saved even if the person died and went to hell without Jesus, and that it would be his lack of receiving that was the issue. There was certainly nothing wrong on the sending end (God’s end), and there’s only one other end that could be the problem – the receiving end.  As to WHY, I may never know, any more than I will ever know WHY some people did not receive healing even though it was offered to them.

GOD is never to blame when someone doesn’t receive the healing that He provided.  He did all that He needed to do.  The problem HAS TO BE on man’s end – either with the person doing the ministry, the person receiving it, or both.

While apologizing for your lack of faith is one way to deflect anger, I don’t recommend that approach for reasons I state in my answer to the question If I Lay Hands on Someone and Nothing Happens, Should I Apologize to That Person for My Lack of Faith?.

You probably realize that this still leaves only the possibility of failure to receive on the sick person’s end of things.  Given that the person could have received based on his own faith even if yours was deficient, the issue MUST come down to the person who did not receive.  And while that’s an uncomfortable position to maintain, it’s infinitely better than the alternative, which is discussed in Descent into Stupidity.