Common sense is your natural ability to make good judgments and to behave in a practical and sensible way. It‘s an ordinary sensible understanding of a situation and the use of one’s basic intelligence without which good decisions can’t be made. Compare that to one apostle’s description of faith as “the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is the belief (and trust) in a higher truth than what our senses reveal to us, or what our past experiences infer just isn’t reasonable.
To paraphrase a pastor friend of mine, a person of faith doesn’t deny the reality of the problem – rather he or she acknowledges that we serve a higher Authority Who is well able and willing to help us overcome each and every problem. While that is true, its application to life’s many challenges is not always simple. A number of spiritual and natural factors will impact every decision a brother and sister in the Lord makes and the path(s) they choose to proceed down. The only decision that is the wise decision is the one that aligns with God’s Word and will and which follows the Holy Spirit’s leading.
There is a fine line between trusting in God’s promises and presuming we know the way those promises will be fulfilled by God. The Holy Spirit is the “leveler” between trust and the proper path to fulfillment; whereas presumption tends to block out His “still small voice.”
With respect to God’s promise to His people for good physical health and healing when sickness or disease strikes, the only thing we can say with confidence and certainty is that God is always the healer. However, there are any number of means God may choose to use to heal. He may intervene through a Christian’s laying on of hands or an elder’s anointing with oil and praying. God may intervene via the Church’s exercise of the Spirit’s Gifts of healing, miracles or faith. He may respond to a person’s reliance on and faithful pronouncement of Biblical healing verses. But it seems that most often, whether by design or simply because His follower’s faith may be weak, God uses medical professionals and their learned expertise, technology and medications.
If presumption leads either the seeker or the minister of healing down a wrong path, he may make the challenge greater and could even endanger his own life or the life and health of the very one he (with the best intentions) is seeking to help. For this reason it’s imperative that a Christian minister (which all of us are called to be) must be in tune with the Holy Spirit.
A friend in our Saturday morning men’s prayer group for the past several weeks has been confiding that medical tests revealed blockage in some primary arteries and damage to a heart valve and that his doctor had recommended immediate surgery. Though a couple years earlier my friend came close to dying when he suffered a heart attack, and had a stent inserted as a result, he made a declaration that he was going to forego the surgery for the time-being and “give God a chance to heal him.”
Most of the men in our group encouraged my friend and one-after-the-other gave testimonies of how God had intervened miraculously on their behalf to heal their bodies. I felt a check in my spirit that it was not the wisest thing for my friend to ignore the advice of his doctor. Six years earlier I had faced a similar decision when faced with three blocked arteries. Though I hadn’t even experienced a heart attack, I chose the surgery. God gave me great peace and the surgery went well with little serious discomfort. I wanted to share this with my friend, but I held back, not wanting to be the single voice planting seeds of doubt into his faith decision.
This past weekend he had a second heart attack. As I stood praying over him in the ICU, I couldn’t help but wonder if we had all done him a disservice.
A testimony can be a faith-builder to some – but to the one with weaker faith it may well lead to a bad decision. What active Christian wants to disappoint those who see them as a spiritual giant? We need to cease spiritually ranking the multitude of routes brethren take to healing. Otherwise there is a tendency for some to assume guilt should they seek healing through a “less spiritual” route, like the medical profession.
Only the Holy Spirit knows a person’s heart and their degree of faith and trust in God’s promises. If we “push” a person into a faith stance that they are not spiritually prepared to assume, we are neither being compassionate, nor doing the true work of our Lord.