Should We Pray to Determine the Real Root Cause of an Illness?

There is no record that Jesus and His followers prayed to determine the real root causes of illnesses before they ministered healing to the sick.  The sick were healed regardless of what the root causes were.  So there is certainly no requirement for such prayer to be done before ministering to a sick person.  This fact should give you confidence to go ahead and minister healing without having to get involved in all the messy details of someone’s imperfect life.

Searching for “real root causes” can turn into a witch hunt for sins and do more harm than good.  The Pharisees wanted to know whether a man was born blind because of his own sin or because of his parents’ sins.  They were on a witch hunt for a “real root cause” and Jesus immediately pointed out that both of their “real root cause” theories were false (John 9:1-7).  Sin was not involved at all, other than Adam’s sin that allowed birth defects to be part of mankind’s experience!  We don’t want to turn into modern-day Pharisees who assume that if someone is sick, there is some dark hidden secret cause that needs to be brought to light and dealt with so that the root of the sickness can be destroyed.

Another pitfall of searching for “real root causes” is that it tends to magnify the problem, not the solution.  Jesus has paid for the solution, so that is what you need to emphasize.  Searching for a problem only tends to elevate the problem in the minds of everyone involved.  It is hard to receive or minister healing when the focus is on the problem.  The sick person needs to get his focus on Jesus, who is the Solution to his problem.  We are not detectives who attempt to ferret out people’s problems – we are proclaimers of good news that they can be free from disease regardless of its cause because of what Jesus has done for them!

A cousin of the “real root cause” thing is to trying to identify “where the door was left open to the devil.”  It’s basically the same thing, and the same comments apply.  You don’t need to determine where you left the door open to the devil to be healed.  Coming down with this year’s flu strain probably has nothing to do with failure to stop the devil from getting an opportunity in your life, and you’d search in vain to try to figure something out.

Another problem is that you can just plain get in over your head when it comes to people’s inner messes and provide an opportunity for people to babble on about their lives for as long as you will allow it.  And if you are in someone else’s church ministering to the sick, frankly you have no business getting involved in complex personal issues that should be dealt with by the pastor, not by a visiting evangelist.  (Sometimes people will want to grab your ear because they already talked to the pastor and didn’t like what he had to say.  They hope that you will side with them instead of with the pastor.  You REALLY don’t want to get involved in such stuff, even though such people really DO want to get you involved!  Do yourself a favor and make sure that you never try to provide pastoral counsel to anyone unless you are that person’s pastor!  Let the pastor do his job – and that advice holds true even if you think you could do a better job than the pastor in that particular case.)

The biggest danger that goes with searching for inner, hidden roots of sickness is that in many cases there aren’t any!  Often the person hasn’t done anything special to bring on sickness; he just got a bug when someone else who had it sat next to him on a bus and kept sneezing, or he got bitten by an infected insect, or he has a physical issue beyond his control.  Then when you keep looking for an inner cause, you’ll either invent one (bad) or waste a lot of time while focusing on the problem (also bad).

Having said this, there are cases where prayer for healing is like putting a bucket under a leak rather than fixing the leak.  It stops the immediate problem but it doesn’t solve things long-term.  If a person is having ulcers because he is in strife with his wife all the time, he can get healed of his ulcer, but he’ll end up with more ulcers until he addresses his marriage situation.  If someone gets healed of cancer but continues to use tobacco, he may find himself with cancer again.

Jesus did warn about a real root cause when He told the man at the Pool of Bethesda to go and sin no more lest a worse thing befall him (John 5:14).  So Jesus recognized that a certain root cause could result in more sickness.  But think about this – Jesus healed the man without an assurance that the man’s sin problem was solved.  It was possible that the man COULD HAVE gone and sinned more and gotten even sicker than he was before.  Jesus healed him anyway.  He did not require the man to clean up his life before He ministered healing.  Everyone who has ever been healed has sin in his life; it’s only a matter of degree.  Sin is the reason why Jesus had to shed His blood and die for us!  He is the Remedy for the sin problem.  He opened the door for the sick to be healed when He bore our sicknesses for us that we deserved as punishment for our sins.

Paul advised Timothy to change what he was drinking (1 Timothy 5:23).  In this case, Paul was addressing the root cause of Timothy’s stomach trouble to try to spare him additional trouble.  There is nothing wrong with physical common sense or medical advice to address something that is causing a physical problem.  As with Timothy, it is better to avoid sickness in the first place than to keep having to get healed of the same issue.

There are certainly cases where emotional issues lead to sickness, and if the underlying issues aren’t dealt with, sickness will return – or perhaps never completely leave in the first place.  Jesus is the Healer of our emotions as well as our bodies.  He is able to save us to the uttermost (Hebrews 7:25) in all areas of our lives.  We have seen people gloriously healed after they dealt with certain emotional issues.

So here is my personal take on the matter: If you are ministering to a lot of sick people in a service, don’t take up any time praying to find the “real” reason each one is sick.  Just take authority over the diseases in the name of Jesus.  Someone who can spend more time with them (such as the local pastor) may be able to help them if they continue to struggle with recurrences of the same issue.  The issue might be something in the Mistakes to Avoid section.