Can one be healed if one is unrepentant? I think that if faith is required, then likely not, because the unrepentant heart is not one that has much faith, in my humble opinion, but I don’t know.

But to not be healed is no evidence of sin. Sometimes the Lord blesses us with trials of illness that we don’t understand, and He doesn’t always take them away because we receive a blessing.

My husband received a blessing for what we think must have been a brown recluse spider bite about three months ago. He is still suffering from it. Now, does that mean the blessing had no effect? Nope. Many people would have died, or lost a leg if they had suffered what he did. But I believe that the blessing allowed him to heal, and to not lose his leg or die, or even be hospitalized like another guy in a nearby community was.

It makes me think of one of the New Testament stories where someone asks the Savior why someone was blind, was it his sin or the sins of his parents (you know the story). The trials that we go through we don’t always understand (I daresay we rarely understand them at first!), but we must submit meekly to them in order to learn what He would have us learn. (This is hard for me!)

And to receive a blessing is not some kind of panacea that will take away all of those trials. Sometimes, often, it will help us to understand why we are going through this trial.
Anyway, good questions, made me think, thanks!
Peggy Cahill | Email | Homepage | 12.01.04 – 8:45 pm | #

I like your comments, Peggy. They make sense to me and also “feel” right.

I don’t know that those who give blessings have any right or authority to forgive sins themselves, but perhaps (according to James 5:15) by nature of the sick person’s faith combined with the blessing, the Lord will then use His authority to forgive the sins.

I strongly agree with Peggy that “to not be healed is no evidence of sin.” We can look at Pres. Faust with his Parkinson’s, or Elder Maxwell with his cancer, and see that such men of faith still deal with mortal illness.

I wonder, though, in answer to some of Don’s many questions, if the sickness and the healing refer to spiritual matters perhaps more so than physical matters…

This is a topic for much more space than a little blog comment, but being made “whole” is not the same thing as being physically healed. Look at the story of the 10 lepers — all were healed of their leprosy, but only the one who returned to thank Jesus was pronounced whole. Of course it takes faith to be physically healed, but maybe it takes more faith to be spiritually healed (cleansed, made new, reborn). Elder Oaks once stated, after sharing numerous stories of miraculous physical healings, that the greatest miracle is the changed soul through repentance and the Atonement.

As Peggy mentioned, sometimes the Lord won’t take away our trial of illness. But He can still heal us inside as we learn to deal with the illness — we can be made whole spiritually because of our faith, while on the outside still appear to be sick to others.

I know this doesn’t answer all of Don’s questions, but to me it helps answer many of them.
Amy | Email | Homepage | 12.03.04 – 1:49 am | #

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