It made for an amazing story. After a pastor in Australia fould out he had terminal cancer, he went home and wrote a worship song called “Healer” in one take, without even pausing to look up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzhS3uc1mUU
I just heard the story behind that song last week. Which made the news I read this week all the more shocking:
A high-profile Australian pastor known for the hit song “Healer” has admitted to lying about his two-year struggle with terminal cancer in order to hide a long-term obsession with pornography. Pastor Michael Guglielmucci hid the truth from his wife and family, sending fake emails about his condition from non-existent medical practitioners while his addiction led to physical conditions that mimicked the symptoms of cancer.
“This is who I am … I’m addicted to the stuff, it consumes my mind,” Guglielmucci said in a TV interview. “I’m sick and this is why I had to come up some sort of explanation of what was happening in my body.”
Non-charismatic Christians get a little queasy with the idea that spiritual sin might lead to physical disease. It sounds a little too close to the health-and-wealth preachers who say you’re only sick because you don’t have enough faith. But it’s clear to me that the two are somehow linked. Listen to what James says:
Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. (James 5:14-16)
There are some who say James is just talking about being healed from the sickness of sin. That’s obviously part of it, but not all of it. He’s instructing elders to administer oil to the sick person, which was well-known to have medicinal qualities (in Luke 10, the Good Samaritan used oil and wine when he tended to the wounds of the beaten man). If James were writing his letter today, I think he would say, “Let the elders pray over him, giving him Erithromicin and Tylenol in the name of the Lord.”
To be clear, it’s not the medicine that James is emphasizing. It’s the “prayer of faith” and the confession of sin that can bring both spiritual and physical healing.
Especially when that illness is given deliberately by God to open a person’s eyes to the sin they’ve allowed in their lives. That’s what God did to Paul in 2 Corinthians 12 when he gave him a “weakness” (the same Greek word James used to describe sickness) in his flesh to warn him against pride, and that’s what he might have done to Michael Guglielmucci to point out idolatry and lust.
Along with Pastor Guglielmucci, we all need to pray for our sin to be healed:
You hold my every moment
You calm my raging seas
You walk with me through fire
And heal all my disease