Ask anyone who has had a disease or crippling physical problem and they all will say they would loved to be healed and would do almost anything to get healed. Yet there are millions who have never received what they longed for or prayed for. People in many different age groups from young and old will tell you the doctors and medicine don’t seem to be able help them even with all our advanced discoveries. Some sicknesses and problems in life we don’t seem to recover from, so people have to live with chronic illness for the rest of their natural lives. I know this isn’t a popular thing to say but many people, Christian or not, will not receive their healing. In many Christian circles, especially if you believe prayer makes a difference, this seems contrary to what they have been taught in scripture.

As we grow in our trust of God in our daily walk there are some  things he may choose to hide from us. The reasons for such actions I’m sure are many, yet to understand the basic reasons would be helpful to us so that we can know if God is withholding truth because we are not prepared for it, like the early disciples who walked with Jesus in ministry.

The Church has been wrestling with the concept of grace for ages. In fact, ever since the reformation of the 1500s when Luther, Calvin and Zwingli helped usher in the start the reformation from the corruption of the Catholic church, theologians and pastors have wrestled with the simply awkward definition of Grace as “Unmerited Favor.” To be honest, many doctrines the church has embraced and taught today came out of an over-correction of errors that the Catholic church was steeped in. When there is an over-correction of concepts often the new “Version” is flawed as well. The word and concept of “Grace vs Works” is one of them.

We live in a strange time in history because we live with so many images of people who are “Inauthentic” and just pretending to be genuine.  For example, news commentators and politicians continually craft an image or narrative instead of being authentic about who and what they believe about God and life in general. It seems that modern culture has increasingly traded good character for a good image.  The really sad thing is that can be expected from the world but many pastors have gotten in lock step with the world when it comes to working on their image more than their character.

I think many Christian’s struggle when reading the Old Testament because so much of it is about fighting God and the consequences of such behavior. Adam and Eve fought God and his will and chose to do life on their terms, or at least they thought that’s what they were doing, rebelling against a loving provider. Moses fought God about his will and his calling and Israel was constantly either fighting God, their own countrymen or their neighbors.  I think all this fighting in mankind’s history in the Old Testament persuaded many believers today to only read the New Testament, because Jesus seems to be all about peace and love, or at least it seems that way.