Your purpose is wholeness
Not our health
You seek our growth
Not our comfort
Your are Lord
Then our healer
We will seek you,
Resting in grace
In our groaning flesh,
We will seek your face
Heal us Lord,
This we pray

I have heard it taught several times over the years that God always wants to heal. This sentiment, while at first sounding good does not stand up well to an honest reading of the Bible. Jacob had his hip permanently damaged when he wrestled with God, Job experienced extreme suffering with God’s permission. Jesus waited and allowed Lazarus to die. On the road to Damascus, Jesus struck Saul blind. When Saul became Paul, Jesus refused to heal Paul’s thorn in the flesh.

It is true that healing is a major ministry of Jesus, The Apostles, and the Church. The Bible and history both are full of accounts of God’s miraculous healing. However, when we say that God always wants to heal, we are distorting The Gospel. God’s goal is not to remove all suffering from our lives. He is saving us. God’s is after our wholeness. He is restoring us to true humanity made in His image. He always wants us to be growing into His image. He always wants the Spirit to be bearing fruit in our lives. He desires love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control to be visible and evident no mater what our circumstances may look like.

 When training a dog for service work the dog must be introduced to hundreds of circumstances and environments. In every new environment the expectations for the dogs behavior remain consistent, but the added distraction create new challenges. When a dog is fully trained and mature, it reliably does his masters will no mater the circumstance.

God is training us. He is teaching us to abide in Christ whatever our circumstances and environment may look like. When we suffer, God is with us, training us, making us whole, in times of plenty and great joy, Got is with us, training us, making us whole. In no way does this downplay the suffering, but it quite possibly shifts our perspective on how we are to walk through times of trial. In those times we are often growing most tangibly into the image of Christ.