Sometimes, the pain in this world can be overwhelming.  Just the painful people with broken bodies that I work with each week are enough to want to fix the world, but that is just a fraction of the suffering present in this world.  When faced with such pain, whether physical or emotional, it can be difficult to know how to move forward, especially when it seems like nothing will fix it.  My wife gets frustrated with me at times because I’m always trying to fix problems, especially when she hurts.  Women usually are assumed to be caregivers (and usually they do an amazing job at it), but while being problem-fixers is hard-wired into males I think this is part of how we express our care and compassion, in our infinite hunt for the cure for the pain of the world.

Certainly, it isn’t an all-encompassing search, but I believe that men deeply care about stopping the pain and suffering in this world.  And nowhere do we see this demonstrated better than in the life of Jesus.  This guy was amazing, and his love constantly amazes me.  Just reading about how he dealt with people in the Bible, he was so incredibly kind and filled with compassion.  This dude took sacrificial love to another level, and that even before giving his life on the cross.  In Matthew 14, the Bible says that Jesus received word that his cousin, John the Baptist, had been beheaded by Herod.  It says, “When Jesus heard it, He departed from there by boat to a deserted place by Himself. But when the multitudes heard it, they followed Him on foot from the cities.  And when Jesus went out He saw a great multitude; and He was moved with compassion for them, and healed their sick (Matthew 14:13-14).

Jesus was leaving to spend some time by himself to grieve his cousin’s death.  In verse 15 it says his disciples were there, so either they followed along with the crowds, or Jesus brought them with him.  Either way, no matter how much his heart hurt, he saw the suffering of the people, set aside his own pain, and ministered to them, healing all of the sick who were present out of his great love.  Jesus knew that we humans need a solution for our suffering, so he stretched out his hand to heal time and time again.

I think we all wish sometimes that Jesus was not just “alive in us”, but that he would physically appear and do the things He did in the Bible.  Why?  Because many of us or our family members are sick or in pain or otherwise in need.  Sometimes it feels like the supernatural is highly impractical.  Many believers who actively minister in divine healing have difficulty getting our own spouses healed of their problems, and sometimes it can feel like divine healing only works on total strangers.  Except when they are lying in a hospital bed near-dead or permanently disabled.  Even in many church meetings, someone’s back pain will go away, the headaches and joint pain may leave, but the cripples come and go just as crippled as they were before.

The hard part, for me, is both the lack of healing as well as the fact that when all of this happens, or rather when healing fails to happen, I am still convinced that Jesus is the cure for the pain of the world.  Why is that hard?  Because I don’t understand why it doesn’t work.  The only reason infirmity and disease even have the capacity to exist in this world is because of sin.  Jesus conclusively and successfully paid the price for all sin for all time and eternity, so there shouldn’t be any difficulty getting people healed.  And while I can list nearly a dozen things** that can influence why and when people don’t get healed, the reality is that Jesus is our trump card, and none of that should matter.  So what do we do to fix this?

Personally, I talk to God about it every time something fails, if only to let Him know that it disappoints me, and to ask Him to transform me to become the solution to the problem.  I do believe in using however many steps it takes to get the job done, whether inner healing methods or daily faith-affirmations or whatever else, but I also believe there is a higher reality we need to access.  I believe that when Jesus told us in John 14 that we would do greater works than He did because He was going to be with the Father, that He meant it.

It is incredibly discouraging to pray for people and not see them healed.  It is downright heartbreaking to have someone reach out to you to help raise their loved one from the dead only to bury them within the week.  It pains me to know that so much suffering still remains in this world in spite of our efforts to remove it.  I believe that in spite of the many failures we still see in healing and the many people in the Body of Christ who are still sick and dying, and even those who don’t get raised from the dead when we pray, that Christ is still on the throne and that His promises to us are still good.  I believe that as we continue to pursue Him, and love Him, and continue to reach out our hands to cure the world one person at a time, that God will meet us.  Maybe we don’t see it every time, but Paul explained that it makes a mockery of God to think that we can sow and not reap (Galatians 6:7).  If we pray in faith and continue to believe, we will reap a harvest one way or another.

In this hour in history, God is bringing us fresh revelation and fresh outpourings of His spirit to take us to a higher level.  He is preparing the Body of Christ to step into an entirely new realm of His spirit and power.  We must continue to press forward, continue to believe, and when circumstances fail us, keep believing anyway.  After all, what other solution is there?  It is my prayer, both for myself and for you, that God would strengthen us with power in our innermost being by His Spirit so that we, the Body of Christ, might manifest the life, light, and love of Jesus Christ in healings, signs, wonders, and miracles to become the cure for the pain of the world.

**their faith, your faith, the atmosphere, angelic assistance, demonic resistance, emotional wounds, unbelief, fragments and alters, generational issues, curses, witchcraft