Monday, January 26, 2009

I got this question recently and decided to post my response. "I would treasure your thoughts on this question; I know you must have thought about it—if God is the source of all of our healing, why do we go to doctors for things like chemo treatments? I have a hard time reconciling this. My mom died from her first and only chemo treatment. Any thoughts?"

My response:
Well, Luke is called the beloved Physician (Col 4:14) and we never see that he was led to abandon his vocation to follow Christ. We also see that when He led captivity captive, He gave gifts to men (Eph 4:8). I believe that physicians are supposed to be those with gifts of healing, who prophetically discern the area that needs to be focused upon and would partner with God to see the miracle take place.

When dad had this last TIA on Friday, we went into the hospital and they just looked at him. They drew some blood, got out the stethoscope, had him stick out his tongue... He got no treatment that he couldn't have gotten two generations ago. I was frustrated by the fact that there was literally nothing they felt empowered to do. So I'm praying for a resurrection of the mantle of Luke. That God would raise up doctors who recognize that their giftings and passion to see the broken become whole don't exist apart from the Holy Spirit of God. That with confidence in that calling and their relationship with God, they would move without fear of litigation to seek out new treatments and techniques to walk in that place of co-laboring with God and in the process, receive revelation about the workings of the (human) body and apply it to the Body (of Christ) and we would benefit through their ministry, Spirit, Soul, and Body. Spirit filled doctors are meant to release the Shalom of heaven through healing as an act of worship to a Holy God.

That's what I think anyway.