By Sunil Mahajan –
What heals a person, is it their faith or the faith of the person healing? This was the discussion or a debate on one of the WhatsApp groups. The Bible tells us that all the gifts given to us are to build the body of Christ. So there is no self-glorification or self-gratification in what the Lord gives to us so freely to use it for the edification of His people.
I was invited by a friend to attend a healing service for my frozen shoulder and there I was standing in the line to be prayed for the healing that I needed. As my turn was approaching I had this small ounce of doubt in my mind of the healing that I wanted to receive. As that this man of God layed his hands on me for the healing, he asked me to believe and receive it. After the session my friend enquired about my healing and I couldn’t give a confident reply as I didn’t feel anything.
I remember seeing many videos of healing sessions that this man of God had done and here I was asking myself what went wrong. Was it my faith or the faith of the person praying for me or rather the faith of the one laying hands on me?
We constantly face the challenge of God’s uncompromising demands for faith. It’s easy to talk about having faith, but ask the one who has been praying for a breakthrough from an addiction or sickness, debt or relationship issues.
I know when people who I reach out to with issues and they just don’t want to listen to anything except a solution to the problem as they have gone to people for prayer and tried everything and still they are stuck with same issues.
Many people, when they realize they must live by faith, make the mistake of confusing faith with EMOTION. Other people think they are exercising faith by looking for a sign. Other people try to “work up faith,” which, to them, means an emotional feeling. They become so sentimental about it that they are convinced God will answer because of their human sanctimonious inner-conviction and when unanswered, there lies the chasm.
So how, then, do we acquire faith? Is it something unpredictable and unexplainable, over which we have no control? Or does the same Bible which presents God’s demands for faith also show us the way to acquire it? One of the most important discoveries I ever made in the Christian life concerns faith. Like most of the lessons that have proved of permanent value to me, I learned it the hard way by personal experience.
Out of a period of struggle and suffering, I eventually emerged with this one pearl of great price: I had learned how faith comes. It starts as a small dew drop in the shell of an oyster and slowly builds in form and strength patiently till it becomes what is beautiful for all to behold. Faith is not a blind leap in a dark room hoping there’s an unseen floor.
As someone once said Faith is the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary. Faith is an attitude of trust in the presence of God, which is simple enough to say, yet to live by faith means to surrender your entire life over to God, abandoning your own desires and becoming a servant under the realization that everything you have (including your very existence) is a grace, a gift. Amazing things happen when we make this transformation; indeed, that which begins with a mustard seed of faith can grow, by the grace of God, to bless the whole world.
Sunil Mahajan is the founder and director of Pathfinder, a catholic ministry that is involved in working with various institutions in South India. Pathfinder acts as a catalyst to bring about transformation in families, teachers and students. He can be reached at: [email protected]