WHEN GOD DOES NOT HEAL

James 5 Living Ready: Faith that Works to the Finish

WHEN GOD DOES NOT HEAL

Intro: Last week, we looked at reasons God heals. Jesus welcomes people who ask. He is moved with compassion. He heals to make Himself known. And He responds to faith. And James says: “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him... And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up.” We believe that. We will keep praying for sick people. But there's an obvious question we have to answer: What about the person who was prayed for...and wasn't healed? What do you do when you asked...believed...prayed...and nothing changed? Here's the tension: The kingdom of God has come—but it has not fully come yet. Jesus is the Healer. And people still get sick. We see real healings and remarkable breakthroughs. We also see hospitals, hospice care, and funerals. So what do we do when God doesn't heal?

WHAT IF THE PROBLEM ISN'T GOD?

When healing doesn't happen, people quietly ask: What went wrong with God?

If He is powerful, why am I still sick? If He is good, why did my child suffer? If Jesus heals, why didn't He heal me?

But before we accuse God of being broken, the Bible asks us to remember where we live. We live in a broken world. Go back to Genesis 3.

Gen 3:6-7 “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food... she took of its fruit and ate... Then the eyes of both of them were opened.”

One act of human rebellion fractured everything. It robbed us of the life of God.

Brokenness spread through the entire human experience. Shame entered. Fear entered. Pain entered. Death entered.

Gen 3:17-19 “Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it... In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground.”

Our bodies break. Our minds struggle. Cells malfunction. People die.

Something happened to the world.

Cornelius Plantinga called sin: “The vandalism of shalom.”

God created a world of wholeness and peace. Sin vandalized it. So when your body doesn't work the way God originally designed a human body to work...Don't mistake a broken world for a broken God.

The world is broken. God is not. Romans 8 says:

Rom 8:22-23 “For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also... groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.”

Even believers groan. Our bodies have not yet experienced complete redemption. But the cross guarantees complete restoration for every believer. One day every disease will be gone. Every weakness removed. Every body restored. Every tear wiped away.

The question is not whether every believer will be completely healed. The question is when. Today or That Day?

Some receive healing in this age. Every believer receives complete healing in the age to come.

But Scripture does not promise complete physical healing for every believer right now.

Even in Jesus' ministry, healing wasn't mechanical.

At the Pool of Bethesda there was a multitude of sick people. Jesus healed one man. Why that man? The text doesn't tell us.

Sometimes the Bible is comfortable leaving questions unanswered. We should be too.

So when healing doesn't happen...don't conclude that something has gone wrong with God. The world is broken. God is not.

WHAT IF GOD IS DOING MORE THAN YOU CAN SEE?

We tend to measure God's activity by the one thing we're watching.

“My pain is still here.” “The tumor is still there.” “The test results haven't changed.” Therefore...God isn't doing anything.

But what if God is doing more than you can see?

Mark 2 tells us about a paralyzed man. Four friends carried him to Jesus, climbed onto the roof, tore it open, and lowered their friend into the house. Everybody could see the problem. The man couldn't walk.

And Jesus said: Mark 2:5 “Son, your sins are forgiven you.”

Can you imagine the four friends on the roof? “That's wonderful, Jesus. But we carried him four blocks.”

Everyone was looking at his legs. Jesus was looking at the whole man.

Eventually Jesus said: Mark 2:11-12 “I say to you, arise, take up your bed, and go to your house.” Immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went out in the presence of them all.

Before Jesus dealt with the problem everyone could see...He solved the deeper problem within.

Now hear me carefully. This does not mean every sickness is caused by personal sin. Jesus specifically rejected that idea.

John 9:3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him.”

Don't turn hurting people into spiritual suspects.

“You must not have enough faith.” “Something must be wrong spiritually.” “If you were really trusting God...”

Sam Storms calls that kind of automatic blame “irresponsible and insensitive.”

We don't diagnose hurting people from a distance. We walk with them.

But here's the point: Sometimes we pray about one thing while God is working on five things.

We see the body. God sees the heart. We see the diagnosis. God sees the memories. God sees the whole person.

And sometimes healing itself unfolds progressively. In Mark 8, Jesus ministered to a blind man.

Mark 8:24-25 “And he looked up and said, ‘I see men like trees, walking.’ Then He put His hands on his eyes again... and he saw everyone clearly.”

Jesus ministered to him. The man saw partially. Jesus ministered to him again. Then he saw clearly.

And if Jesus wasn't embarrassed to minister to somebody twice...maybe we shouldn't be reluctant to pray twice.

Sometimes God heals instantly. Sometimes healing unfolds in layers. Because God isn't removing symptoms. He's restoring people.

The absence of visible change does not mean the absence of divine activity.

WHAT IF HEALING WAS NEVER OURS TO CONTROL?

Healing cannot be reduced to a formula. If we pray the right words...with enough intensity...using the right method...then healing must happen.

But the New Testament doesn't present healing that way. Even the apostles could not heal whenever they wished. Jesus said:

John 15:5 “Without Me you can do nothing.”

Think about Paul.

Acts 19:11–12 “Now God worked unusual miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons were brought from his body to the sick, and the diseases left them and the evil spirits went out of them.”

Extraordinary miracles. And yet Paul later said: 2 Tim 4:20 “Trophimus I have left in Miletus sick.”

Timothy had “frequent infirmities.” Epaphroditus became sick “almost unto death.”

The contrast is striking. Extraordinary miracles happened through Paul, yet Trophimus remained sick, Timothy experienced recurring illness, and Epaphroditus nearly died.

Even in the strongest miracle ministries of the New Testament...healing was never automatic. Why? Because healing power never belonged to Paul. It belonged to God. And it still does.

illus: Sometimes God gives a unique confidence in prayer. Jack Deere tells about a woman who called him crying because doctors believed her unborn baby had only one kidney. While she was talking, Jack suddenly said: “God will heal your baby.” After he hung up, he thought: “Lord, I hope that was You and not me.” Later, the baby was examined again and was found completely healed. Jack's point was that kind of confidence is a gift from God. He couldn't manufacture it.

Sam Storms suggests this may help us understand “the prayer of faith” in James 5—a Spirit-given confidence in a particular moment.

That means there's a difference between expectant prayer and presumptuous prayer.

Expectant prayer says, “God, You can.” Presumptuous prayer says, “God, You must.”

One is faith. The other is control masquerading as faith.

John Wimber – “Faith is spelled R-I-S-K.”

What if nothing happens? What if we're disappointed? We pray anyway. Our responsibility is to pray. God decides whether to heal.

CAN YOU TRUST GOD WHEN YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND HIM?

Paul knew what it was to pray and not receive what he asked for.

2 Cor 12:8 “Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me.”

Paul pleaded. Three times. And God said no. But God didn't say nothing.

2 Cor 12:9 “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.”

Paul asked God to remove the weakness. God gave Paul grace in the weakness.

That wasn't the answer Paul requested. But it was still the answer of a good God.

Joni Eareckson Tada – “Sometimes God permits what He hates to accomplish what He loves.”

That doesn't make suffering good. Cancer isn't good. Pain isn't good. Death isn't good. The Bible calls death “the last enemy.”

But suffering is not meaningless in the hands of God.

Sometimes God says: “Not yet.” Sometimes He's doing something we cannot see. Sometimes He simply says: “No.”

And sometimes the most faithful answer is: “We don't know.”

Why was one person healed and another wasn't? I don't know. And I'm not going to insult hurting people by inventing an answer God hasn't given.

Christians don't have to pretend to know what God hasn't told us. But listen:

Mystery is not the same thing as absence.

The absence of healing is not the absence of God.

Sometimes the miracle isn't that the thorn disappeared. Sometimes the miracle is that His grace was sufficient.

Sometimes the miracle is that after everything you've been through...you still love Jesus.

So when I cannot explain His hand...I trust His heart.

When healing doesn't come...I still pray. I still ask. I still come to God.

My confidence is in the goodness of God.

So the question is: Can you trust God when you don't understand Him?

Conclusion: Maybe disappointment has silenced you. Maybe somewhere along the way you decided: “I prayed before. I got my hopes up before. I can't go through that again.” So you stopped asking. Maybe it's simply opening your heart again. “Jesus, I don't understand. I don't know why. But I still trust You.”

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Listen, God hasn't stopped doing what he's always done. We believe this. We'll keep praying for sick people. But there's an obvious question we have to answer. What about the person who was prayed for and was not healed?
What do you do when you asked? What do you do when you believed? What do you do when you prayed and nothing changed? Here's the tension that I want us to feel today. The kingdom of God has already come, but it has not fully come yet.
Bible scholars call it already, but not yet. Jesus is the healer. Yes, but people still get sick. We see real healings in our church and remarkable breakthroughs. But you know what else we see in our church?
Hospitals and hospice care and funerals. So what do we do when God doesn't heal? That's the question I'm going to answer. I'm going to answer it. With four questions today.
Are you ready? All right. Let's ask the Lord to help us. Father in heaven, would you encourage a church that is bubbling over with faith, but also is experiencing your nose and your not yet and your weights and those that have been praying for healing and for a change that haven't gotten it? Lord, I pray that today this truth in the scripture will encourage them as well.
In Jesus name, everybody said number one, what if the problem isn't God?
When God doesn't heal, what if the problem isn't God?
When healing doesn't happen, people quietly think and ask, what went wrong with God? I mean, if he's powerful, why am I still sick? If he's good, why did my child suffer? If Jesus heals, why didn't he heal me? Those are real questions asked by real people in this room.
But before we accuse God of being broken, the Bible asks us to remember where we live. We live in a broken world. Let's go all the way Back to Genesis 3, verses 6 and 7. The fall of man in the garden. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.
She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. And then the eyes of both of them were opened. One act of human rebellion fractured everything. You know what it did? It robbed us of the life of God.
So brokenness spread through the entire human experience. And that means that shame entered at that moment. Also, fear and pain and death entered into the human experience. And the Lord says, here's the aftermath. Genesis 3, 17, 19.
Cursed is the ground. For your sake in toil you shall eat of it. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. Friends, because of the fall, our bodies break, our minds struggle, our cells malfunction, and people die. Something happened to the world.
Cornelius Plantinga called sin the vandalism of shalom. Shalom is the Hebrew word for peace. God created a world whole and good and peaceful, and sin vandalized it. So when your body doesn't work the way God originally designed a human body to work. Listen to me.
Don't mistake a broken world for a broken God.
The world is broken. God is not. Consider Romans, chapter 8, verses 22 and 23. Paul writes, for we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together. Until now.
Not only that, but we also groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. So the Bible Teaches us that even God's children groan and long for something better than this. Our bodies have not yet experienced complete redemption, have they? Have you been looking in the mirror? Over time.
It's the second law of thermodynamics. Things are winding down. They're not getting better. Amen. Right.
The cross guarantees complete restoration for every Christian. Doesn't that comfort you? One day, every disease will be gone, every weakness will be removed. One day everybody will be restored and every tear wiped away. Don't you long for that day?
The question is not whether every believer will eventually be completely healed. The question is when? Will it be today or will it be that day? If, and we pray in faith that it's today, and we look in faith for that day. Some receive healing in this age.
I've given you like, 12 stories of healings in our church in the last two weeks from this pulpit. We have evidence for this. Every believer, though, receives complete healing in the age to come. But scripture does not promise complete physical healing for every Christian right now. It doesn't promise that.
It holds it out as the possibility of the love and grace of God, but it doesn't promise it. Listen, even in Jesus ministry now, can we agree that he was really good at healing you? Not sure. Can we agree that Jesus is really good at healing? Yes.
At the pool of Bethesda. John, chapter five, I think it is. It's the only hospital we read about in the Gospels. It's an infirmary. It's where they took sick people to the pool.
And the legend was an angel would come down and stir the waters. And first one in gets the healing. Second and all the last ones in, they're the rotten eggs. Right? Remember this?
So at the pool of Bethesda, the only place where Jesus visited an infirmary, he healed exactly one person. Why is that? The text doesn't say. Sometimes the Bible is comfortable with leaving questions unanswered. And, friends, we should be comfortable with that too.
So when healing doesn't happen, don't conclude that something has gone wrong with God. The world is broken. God is not. That's question number one. Question number two.
When God doesn't heal, what if God's doing more than you can see?
This is true for all of us. We tend to measure God's activity by the one thing that we're watching in our own lives.
My pain is still here. The tumor's still on the X ray. The test results haven't changed. Therefore, God must not be doing anything. Friends, that is not the biblical conclusion to draw.
What If God is doing more than you can see, you know, Mark Chapter two. We've mentioned this a couple of times already tells us about a paralyzed man. And he had four faithful friends, and they carried him to Jesus and they climbed up on the roof and they toted his whole body upon the roof and tore the roof open and lowered their friend into the house. And everybody could see the problem in that hushed moment. This man's legs do not work.
They need to be reanimated. They need to be healed by God. Jesus is here. He's been healing. This thing is set up perfectly.
It's like put up on a tee for Jesus just to swing and knock it over the fence. And there's a hush over the crowd. They can't wait. The next words are going to be something like, get up and walk and run around and dance, right? No.
Jesus says in Mark 2:5, Son, your sins are forgiven. Do you remember this story?
Can you imagine the four friends on the roof? Did he say his sins are forgiven? I think somebody shouted down, Jesus, that's great. But we carried this guy like six blocks.
Come on with it. Everyone was looking at his legs. Jesus was looking at the whole man.
Eventually, Jesus does say in Mark 2:11 and 12 to the man, I say to you, arise. Take up your bed and go to your house. And immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went out in the presence of them all. That's a healing miracle, is it not, friends? Before Jesus dealt with a problem that everybody could see, he solved a deeper problem within.
I told you earlier, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, it's better to go to heaven with your legs cut off. It's better to go to heaven with your hands cut off. It's better to go to heaven with your eyes plucked out than to go into the judgment of hell with your whole body intact. So this man's worst need, most important need, was that he have his heart made right with God. So Jesus did it first.
Now hear me carefully. This does not mean every sickness is caused by personal sin. It is imperative that I say that to you again. Jesus himself specifically rejected that idea. John, chapter nine.
The man born blind. The disciples asked Jesus, who sinned, this blind man or his parents, that he's in the condition that he's in. And the Lord Jesus says in John 9:3, neither this man nor his parents sinned, causing his blindness, but that the works of God should be revealed in him. What if the weakness that you're experiencing, you're really just on the verge of Seeing the glory of God with it.
Friends, let me tell you what we learned from that. It's not going to be on the screen, but write this down. Don't turn hurting people into spiritual suspects. Don't turn hurting people into spiritual suspects. Oh, everything's going wrong with your body.
What did you do?
You must not have enough faith. Something must be wrong with you spiritually. You know, if you were really trusting God, it wouldn't happen to you. Friends, our friend Sam Storm calls that kind of automatic blame irresponsible and insensitive. It may be worse than those two things.
Listen, we don't diagnose the hurting people from a distance. If you really want to know what's going on in their heart and life, you get up close and you walk with them. But here's the point I'm making. Sometimes we pray about one thing. While God's working on five things.
Man looks at the outward appearance. God looks at the heart.
We see the diagnosis. God sees all the memories and all the things that have happened in that person's life. He sees the whole man, the whole woman. And here's another thing we learn in the Gospels. Sometimes divine healing unfolds progressively.
In Mark chapter 8, Jesus ministered to another blind man. Now if you have a Bible, turn to Mark chapter eight because this is a late edition and it won't be on the screen. Just one verse. The next two I will have on the screen. Mark chapter eight and I'm going to read verse 23.
There's no more beautiful sound to a preacher than the pages of the Bibles turning in the room.
If you got it, say I got it. Mark 8. 23. So he took the blind man by the hand. Teenagers, watch this.
Your Bible is awesome. And he led him out of the town. And when he had spit on his eyes. Amen.
When he had spit on his eyes and put his hands on him, he asked him if he saw anything.
Can you imagine if we did a seminar how to heal people the way Jesus did? And we just listed all of the gross things he did. You know, he spits in their eyes, he puts his fingers in their ears. He makes mud with his spit and puts it on. You know what I'm talking about in the Bible.
So Jesus spits on the guy's eyes and he goes, hey, how's your viewfinder? Can you see anything? Now we read verse 24 and the man looked up and he said, I see men like trees walking. You know what that means? It was blurry.
He said, I see stick Figures and they're stick figures and they're moving. Does that make sense? It's like, look, I see something. It's not real clear, but there's something there that wasn't there before. And now you read verse 25.
Then he put his hands on his eyes and the next word in my Bible is again.
And he made him look up and he was restored and he saw everyone clearly.
Why did it take Jesus two realms to heal these guys eyes?
There was nothing wrong with Jesus healing ability. He was making a point earlier in Mark chapter 8. The disciples were blind to what he was teaching. So he illustrates it with healing a blind man progressively and saying to them, this is how you are beginning to see truth. Blurry at first clear.
Later Jesus ministered to him and the man saw partially. Jesus ministered to him again and he saw clearly. Listen to me. If Jesus wasn't embarrassed to minister to somebody twice, maybe we shouldn't be reluctant to ask for prayer twice.
Because sometimes God heals instantly, sometimes his healing unfolds in layers. And here's the reason. God isn't removing your symptoms, he's restoring you. I want the whole thing, don't you? So the absence of visible change doesn't mean the absence of divine activity.
Just because you can't see it doesn't mean he's not doing anything.
What if God's doing more than you can see? Question number three. What if healing was never ours to control?
I want to tell you divine healing cannot be reduced to a formula. There are magic words that we've unlocked that if we use them and if we pray them right and if we use enough intensity and if we have the right method, then healing must happen in the New Testament. It doesn't present healing that way. Can we agree that Jesus apostles did some cool stuff?
I think it was Peter's shadow healed somebody. I'm going to show you some stuff with the apostle Paul.
Jesus said without me you can do nothing. Even his apostles could not heal whenever they wished. No one healed on demand. Maybe other than Jesus. I want you to think about Paul.
Acts, chapter 19, verses 11 and 12. The apostle Paul. Now God worked unusual miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons were brought from his body to the sick and the diseases left them and the evil spirits went out them. Don't you know? The apostle Paul thought, man, what if I had a thousand aprons and a thousand handkerchiefs?
And just tell people, if you'll just invest in my ministry, I'll mail you one and It'll heal you.
That would be blasphemous, would it not? That would be a misuse of the grace of God. And so if you've ever fallen for that, because the preacher on TV said some things you could understand, let me tell you, they are doing injury to the gospel. We reject prosperity theology here. We reject name it and claim it word of faith error.
Here, I'm getting ready to show you this. The apostle Paul's handkerchiefs and aprons. God used to heal some people. Can we agree those would be extraordinary miracles? And yet the apostle Paul said later in second Timothy, chapter four, verse 20, his good friend Trophimus.
If you're looking for a name for your next baby boy, Trophimus, I have left in Miletus sick.
What, Paul, you couldn't heal your buddy. Your aprons and your handkerchiefs could heal people you never met. But the dude that labored in the Lord with you, you left him sick. In one of his letters, he notes that Timothy had frequent infirmities. Timothy was his protege whom he trained how to be a minister.
You couldn't help Timothy's frequent infirmities. And then his buddy, here's another boy name. If you're looking for one. Epaphroditus. Everybody say Epaphroditus.
Everybody love this guy's name. O Epaph. Epaphroditus became sick almost unto death.
Isn't the contrast striking? Aprons and handkerchiefs. Best friends over here. Extraordinary miracles happened through Paul and yet Trophimus remains sick. Timothy experienced recurring illness and Epaphroditus nearly died.
You see, even in the strongest miracle ministries of the New Testament, healing was never automatic. Why is that? Because the healing power never belonged to the apostles. It belonged to God and it still does. Our.
Our friend Jack Dear tells this story. Sometimes God gives a unique confidence in prayer when you're praying for somebody and just kind of comes over you. And Jack Dear tells about a woman who called him crying on the phone because the doctors believed that her unborn baby in the womb only had one kidney. While she was still talking, Jack blurted out, God will heal your baby. Well, after he hung up, he said, here's what I thought.
Lord, I hope that was you and not me. Later, they examined the baby again through ultrasound and whatnot, and the baby was found to be completely healed. And there were two kidneys there. Here was Jack's point. That kind of confidence that came over him is a gift from God.
It's unusual. Nobody can manufacture it and be right. And Sam Storms suggests that this may help us understand what James meant when he called it the prayer of faith. In James 5. The prayer of faith is something like a spirit given confidence in a particular moment, a spirit given confidence in a particular moment.
You know what that means? That means there's a difference between expectant prayer over here and presumptuous prayer over here. Expectant prayer says God, you can. Presumptuous prayer says God, you must. One is faith.
The other is control masquerading as faith.
So we pray expectant prayers here, and we say, God, you can, but we don't think that you must.
John Wimber, when he was teaching on faith, used to say, faith is spelled R I S K. So we take risks in believing. When we pray for people at our church, we want to exercise faith. We want to get out there and say, God, we're on the edge here. And if you don't intervene, then it'll be clear that it wasn't you. But we're not going to be afraid to take a risk.
But what if nothing happens? Well, what if we're disappointed? We pray anyway. Our responsibility is to pray. God decides whether or not to heal.
Do you get that? All right. What if healing was never ours to control? Lastly today, number four. Can you trust God when you don't understand him?
That same apostle, Paul, the apron handkerchief guy, knew what it was to pray and be close to God and not receive what he prayed for. He called it his thorn in the flesh. Do you remember this? Second Corinthians, chapter 12, verse 8. Concerning this thing, this thorn in my flesh, I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me.
Paul pleaded three different times. And God said no. And even though God said no, he didn't say nothing. Second Corinthians 12, 9. The next verse.
Here's what God said. My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Whatever Paul's thorn of the flesh was, it was a weakness in his life. And the Lord says, I'm going to give you grace in your weakness so that others will see how good I am and so that you can learn to trust me. Paul asked God to remove the weakness.
God gave Paul grace in the weakness. Was that the answer Paul requested? No. But it was still the answer of a good God.
Joni Eareckson Tada A lovely Christian sister, quadriplegic since her teenage years. Amazing writer. How many of you know who Johnny is? Okay. Johnny said sometimes God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves.
She says that from a wheelchair not being able to do the things that we get to do every day. And that doesn't make suffering good. Cancer isn't good, pain not good, heart trouble not good. And death isn't good. You know, the Bible calls death the last enemy.
But suffering is never meaningless in the hands of God. Sometimes God says, when we pray, not yet, Sometimes he's doing something that we can't see. And sometimes he simply says no. And so that means as Christian leaders, sometimes the most faithful answer is, we don't know. Why was one person healed and the other not?
I don't know. And I'm not going to insult hurting people by inventing an answer that God hasn't given.
In other words, Christians don't have to pretend to know what God has not told us.
But listen, mystery is not the same thing as absence. The absence of healing is not the absence of God. It's just mysterious. So sometimes the miracle isn't that the thorn disappeared. Sometimes the miracle is that his grace was sufficient.
Sometimes the miracle is that after everything you've been through, you still love Jesus somehow. So when I cannot trace his hand, Charles Spurgeon said, I trust his heart. When healing doesn't come, I still pray. When healing doesn't come, I still ask and I still come to God. My confidence is in the goodness of God.
What about you? In conclusion today, maybe disappointment has silenced some of you. Maybe somewhere along the way you drew this conclusion, you decided. I prayed before. I got my hopes up.
Before. I can't go through that again if that's you and you stopped asking. Maybe the way you apply this message today is simply opening your heart again. You just. You pray something like this.
Jesus, I don't understand. I don't know why, but I still trust you. It's about for prayer today, Lord, I want to pray for those whose healings have not come.
And I want to pray that you would remove the discouragement that the enemy has targeted them with.
And I want to pray that you'll give them hope again. And I pray that you'll say yes soon. And if you don't say yes, God, I pray that you'll just shower them with your favor and grace, because it's enough. This is our prayer. In Jesus name, Amen.
Will you stand together with me? Prayer Ministry Team Will you come to the front when we adjourn our services, our prayer ministry starts. And if you're here today and need prayer, come forward to a prayer line and receive prayer. If you don't know what to pray for, you're kind of in the best spot to let the Holy Spirit lead them. And just say to the prayer team, hey, I know I need prayer.
I don't know exactly for what for. Would you just ask the Lord and would you just pray for me? Whatever he puts on your heart and watch what he does when that happens. Hey, are you glad that you came today? I'm glad that you came today.
So to the mission field we go. Father, look on us with favor. Walk with us this week. Let us know that you're real because you've given us eternal life. In Jesus name, amen.

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