The question, plainly
Visiting the sick and praying for them is one of the most Christian things anyone can do. This page is not about the visit. It is about what is said afterwards. If the sick person gets better, the recovery is put down to the visit, or to the preacher’s prayer. If the sick person dies, the preacher says God revealed to him that it was their time. So whatever happens, the preacher is proved right, and proved necessary.
What this page tests
The visit is Christian. The “heads I win, tails you lose” explanation is not. The Bible tells us to visit and pray, but it gives the credit for healing to God, it tells us to test anyone who claims God told them something, and it never lets a minister explain God’s hidden reasons after the fact.
There is an opposite mistake too: thinking that prayer and visiting make no difference. The Bible rejects that as well. Christ says, “I was sick, and ye visited me” (Matthew 25:36), and James says that prayer “availeth much” (James 5:16). The question is not whether to pray. It is who gets the credit, and who claims to know what.
Try it: every square wins
In any illness, two things can vary: whether the preacher was called, and whether the person recovered. That gives four cases. Click each square to see the kind of thing that gets said. The examples are made up by this page, not quoted from anyone. Then switch to the other way of speaking and click again.
Notice the bottom-right square. If a visit could save, then not calling the preacher could kill. The explanation that flatters the visitor in three squares leaves the family carrying the blame in the fourth.
What the apostles did with the credit
When a lame man was healed at the temple and a crowd rushed at Peter and John, Peter’s first words were: “Why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk?” (Acts 3:12). He gave the credit to Jesus, twice in one sentence.
At Lystra, when a crowd tried to worship Paul and Barnabas after a healing, the two men tore their clothes and ran into the crowd shouting, “We also are men of like passions with you” (Acts 14:14–15).
The one man in Acts who happily accepted a reputation as “the great power of God” was Simon the sorcerer, and Peter rebuked him severely (Acts 8:9–24).
James tells the sick to call “the elders of the church,” plural, and says “the Lord shall raise him up.” Then he tells everyone to “pray one for another.” Prayer is everyone’s job, and healing is the Lord’s work.
When the sick were not healed
The New Testament does not explain every illness. It records sick people who were prayed for and not healed, and it leaves them unexplained.
Paul asked God three times to take away his “thorn in the flesh.” The answer was no: “My grace is sufficient for thee” (2 Corinthians 12:7–9). Paul left his friend Trophimus behind “at Miletum sick” (2 Timothy 4:20), with no explanation. He told Timothy to take a little wine for his frequent illnesses (1 Timothy 5:23).
And when his helper Epaphroditus nearly died and then recovered, Paul did not say, “my prayer saved him.” He said, “God had mercy on him” (Philippians 2:27).
Long before, King David fasted and prayed for a week for his dying son. He explained why: “Who can tell whether GOD will be gracious to me, that the child may live?” The child died, and David got up and worshipped (2 Samuel 12:16–23). He prayed with all his heart and admitted he did not know.
“Who can tell.” The heads-I-win explanation can never say them, because it always has an answer.
“God showed me it was their time”
That sentence is a claim that God privately told the speaker something no one else knows. The Bible says such claims must be tested, not simply accepted: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21); “believe not every spirit, but try the spirits” (1 John 4:1). It also says that God keeps some things to himself: “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God” (Deuteronomy 29:29).
But a revelation that only appears after someone has died, and always matches what happened, cannot be tested by anyone. When real prophets in the Bible spoke about someone’s illness, like Isaiah to King Hezekiah, they spoke beforehand, in public, in words that could be checked (Isaiah 38).
And notice a switch. When the sick person recovers, the explanation is that a person’s prayer changed things. When they die, the explanation is that God had fixed it all along. The historic church held both truths at the same time, in every case: God really uses our prayers, and God is free to act without them. That rules out “my visit saved him” and “God showed me why he died” alike. As Paul put it: “whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:8).
A test that can never be failed
The Bible tests a word spoken in God’s name by whether it could turn out wrong: “if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken” (Deuteronomy 18:22). “Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29).
If every outcome proves the preacher right, then no outcome can ever show he was wrong, and nobody can ever correct him. That is not a sign of great spiritual power. It is a sign of a claim that cannot be checked.
“I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth” (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). In the Bible, the minister is useful and never indispensable.
In the year 601, Pope Gregory the Great heard that God was working miracles through Augustine, the missionary bishop in England. He did not write to congratulate him. He wrote to warn him to “rejoice with fear, and fear with joy,” in case his mind became “puffed up with self-esteem.”
Try it: comfort, claim or blame?
Six things people say at a bedside or a funeral. Is each a comfort, a claim about the speaker’s power or secret knowledge, or blame placed on the family?
Jesus refused to read illness backwards to find someone to blame: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents” (John 9:3). The New Testament asks us instead to “bear ye one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2) and to “weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15).
What the church has always said instead
The historic church wrote down its prayers for the sick, so that the words would not depend on any one minister. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer prays for the sick person like this:
That, if it shall be thy good pleasure to restore him to his former health, he may lead the residue of his life in thy fear, and to thy glory: or else, give him grace so to take thy visitation, that, after this painful life ended, he may dwell with thee in life everlasting.
The Visitation of the Sick, Book of Common Prayer (1662)
Both endings are prayed for in one breath, and both are left with God. The Catholic Catechism says the same about its sacrament for the sick: it brings healing of the body “if such is God’s will.” Neither mentions the minister as the cause of anything.
If they recover: thank God, thank the doctors, nurses and everyone who cared for them, and say “we prayed, and God was gracious,” not “my prayer saved him.”
If they die: grieve, offer the Christian hope, say “we prayed, and we entrusted her to God,” admit you don’t know why, and tell the family plainly that they did not cause this.
Try it: what is actually proven?
Four claims. Rate each, then see what the evidence supports.
The point, one more time
Visit the sick, and pray for them with all your heart. Christ counts it as done to him.
Give the credit to God. The apostles refused it for themselves, and Paul said of a recovered friend, “God had mercy on him.”
Don’t claim to know God’s secrets, and don’t let anyone blame a grieving family. “Whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:8).