In a third world country, a young woman who had seen great success in her own little village churches ventured out to preach in a remote village known for its witch doctors and danger. No one expected her to come back alive. She later reported that no one in the village came to her church meetings until one night a woman came with her dead baby. The baby had been deceased for three days and none of the witch doctors had been able to revive it. The woman wanted to know if this woman’s God could bring her baby back. The young woman prayed over the baby and the baby began to breathe again. The next night more people than her tent could hold came to the church meeting.

Miracles. We’ve heard about them, we know someone who has experienced one…maybe we ourselves have even experienced one. Physical healing stands as the most common miracle we look for. We know God made provision for the healing of our bodies according to what Isaiah 53:4-5 tells us, “Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.” We lean on these verses with our full weight and reports on physical healings keep us coming back for more.

We CRAVE happy endings. Like Oprah on her show, “You get a miracle, and you get a miracle, and you get a miracle, and you get a miracle!” But we also know the miracle – the healing – doesn’t happen for everyone. My own parents passed away within two and a half years of each other: my dad a couple of days after a heart surgery that went well in 2020 and my mom after a five year battle with her reoccurrence of cancer in 2023. 

Unfortunately, physical healing is not something we can understand this side of Heaven. Deuteronomy 29:29 tells us that there are, “secret things [that] belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” God has reasons and timing for everything and we won’t always understand it. And he has made it that way when it comes to healing.

Has anyone else experienced this? Finding yourself in this place of knowing you can’t understand and yet begging God for understanding.

We know we are more than physical beings, but we focus so much on physical healing that we forget we are triune beings and all parts of us need care and healing. The Bible reminds us of this in 1 Thessalonians 5:23: “May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.“

Did you catch that? Sanctified through and through. To sanctify means set apart for special purpose or use. Sanctification is the process we go through that sets us apart. It is a life long process of working out our faith with fear and trembling and allowing God to change us to be more like Him. We are to be sanctified completely – not just in our body, but also in spirit and soul.

To clarify, when I speak to the spirit, I am talking about our empowered drive and our unity or communion with God. When I speak of the soul, I am talking about our mind, will, and emotions.

Sometimes physical ailments can be just that, physical ailments. We go to the doctor, they find the issue, and we receive treatments. Sometimes physical ailments take time to heal or they are illnesses that need to be managed, but we know what they are and act accordingly.

But sometimes physical ailments – chronic pain, stomach aches, back aches, etc. – can be the result of spiritual or soulish ailments. And it’s the healing of the spirit or soul that will bring relief to the physical body.

I have a friend who was sick to the point of throwing up every morning. His doctors could not find anything wrong with him. There was nothing that would cause vomiting every day. But when he began seeing a counselor for his anxiety, the vomiting stopped. The physical vomiting was not a symptom of a physical problem. It was a symptom of a soul problem.

A number of experiences and feelings in our lives present spirit and soul issues: insecurity, anxiety, depression, apathy, addiction – of any kind alcohol, drugs, gambling, shopping.

Some symptoms unfortunately seem too normal to us to be anything, but they’re signs of needed inner healing: people pleasing, constantly feeling let down, easily and consistently disappointed, feeling left out, consistent conflict in your relationships, switching jobs often, just to name a few. Also, many of the things we discuss as sins are issues of the spirit and soul: pride, being critical or judgmental, greed, lust, control, comfort, anger…and so on.

In the past, I would get angry over any and every little thing. If someone didn’t put my favorite pen back in the kitchen drawer after using it, I’d go into a yelling fit. If I felt wronged in the slightest, I would rant and rave, even if only in my head. Once I could see how horrible this anger was, I stood at the altar for a couple of years at least, asking God why I was always angry and to take it away, but nothing changed. The reason? Anger wasn’t my problem, it was a symptom of my problem.

When I started through a process of soul healing – which is about mind and emotions – with a few people, the anger began to disappear. Because I addressed the problems causing it, the anger slowly, but naturally, let go.

We often experience these feelings and write them off as our norm…or we read over some of these in scripture without stopping to think any deeper about them. I don’t think we understand that there are practical ways to work through these issues.

I posit that God is AS concerned – if not MORE SO – with the healing of our soul and spirit than our bodies because the healing of the spirit and soul builds our character and cements our communion with Him.

I know it may be hard to hear that our physical healing may not be the top concern on God’s list. Physical healing is often a top concern to us because we live with the sight and feel of our bodies before us at all times.

I may not look old, but I’ve hit the point where things don’t work like they used to. I’m not falling apart, but I am definitely annoyed. I’ve also walked alongside my husband Brandon in his numerous and varying illnesses – from two different cancers to kidney stones to gallbladder removal.

As a matter of fact, mid-July Brandon pulled a calf muscle while playing four square volleyball in the pool. I sent a picture of him in a wheelchair at the ER to my coworkers because we have this ongoing inside joke that Brandon will meet the Gleghorn family’s annual health insurance deductible within one to two months of it starting over…which is July 1st every year. Right on cue – only took him 14 days this year! When one coworker asked what happened, I told her, “He’s old and he won’t admit it.” We had a good laugh.

And please, I am not saying God doesn’t value physical healing or that he doesn’t use it in people’s lives…don’t misunderstand or misquote me on this. God does value our human bodies and He does use physical healing, as with the case of the dead baby. But to what purpose? He intended the baby’s physical healing to bring an entire village to church to hear the Gospel and accept Him…to save their souls. It wasn’t so much about the baby as it was about the eternity of an entire village of people.

What I am saying is that we need to shift our perspective on healing to see different ways in which God wants to work. Shifting perspectives – typically from the norm – is a life skill. Life succeeds based on one’s ability to shift perspectives.

Dr. Bruce Marino, a professor at the University of Valley Forge, says it this way: “The Christian life is not about not sinning or having all good things happen to you but about learning to see with new eyes.”

Where do you need to shift perspective? What do you need to see with new eyes?

Just so you know, I’m not forming my thoughts on God’s high value for spiritual and soulish healing in a vacuum. Let me back up my inference on why I think God so values spirit and soul healing and why we need to shift our perspective.

First, Matthew 10:28 says, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” In this verse the disciples are being told that the importance of the work they do may get them into trouble, but they should not fear those who can ONLY kill the body because ultimately it is the destruction of their souls they should fear.

I can’t help but think if Jesus told them to not fear the destruction of their bodies, but to watch out for their souls in this context, that the same depiction between the body and the soul would apply elsewhere too, such as with the topic of healing.

Second, when we think of the body, we think of life. Living, breathing beings. In her Bible study “Finding I Am,” author Lysa TerKeurst states that there are two Greek words used for life in the New Testament. One is bios – it means “breath in your lungs or physical life.” It appears 10 times. The other is zoe (zo-ay), which means “possessed with vitality, looking to the fullness of life.” It is used 135 times.

So, of the two words for life that are used, the one that speaks to that which makes life full – the soul and spirit – is used twelve and a half times more than the one that speaks to the physical body and physical life. That’s 1,250 percent more that the Bible speaks to the fullness of the spiritual and soulish life than that of physical life.

(Listen, if that math is wrong, don’t come at me. I know better than to math. I asked my math teacher friend to figure that out for me. If I had done it, I would’ve just told you that 135 is much bigger than 10.)

Any way we state it, that’s a pretty big emphasis on the life of the spirit and soul over that of the body. Why? The state of our spirit and soul is what determines our closeness to Him and what makes us more like him. Our being with Him and like Him is His ultimate goal.

On this topic of life, TerKeurst says, “The enemy of our soul strategizes day and night to get us to settle for bios [the physical] life so we will never taste the hell-shattering fullness of zoe [the spiritual life].” Only focusing on physical healing will hinder and maybe even halt God’s ultimate goal for our lives.

Think back to all of the times you have prayed for healing – for yourself or someone else. How many times was it physical healing? How many times was it for the spirit and soul?

Praying for both is good and both are needed, but have you really considered your need of healing for your spirit and soul?

What are you letting the enemy get away with if you aren’t?

What is the state of your love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Because that’s what’s at stake here.

In 2018, there was a situation that affected me, but I had no control over it. And it was like the straw that broke the camel’s back – I sank. And I grabbed at anyone and anything I could to hold myself up, but none of it worked and for the first time I saw my crutch as a crutch.

What is your crutch? We all have them – the people or things we go to when our spirit and soul are suffering. What is your crutch?

Up to this point, my life had been lived as a person always seeking to be wanted, known, understood, and loved. I viewed the world through my own emptiness and need and in my desperation was a toxic person in some ways. Until a series of people showed up in my life over the span of five years and began teaching me things about perspectives and mindsets.

Through this group of people, God fostered the healing of my spirit and soul. It was like using binoculars. When you can’t see something – usually because it’s too far away – you grab a pair of binoculars. When you first put the binoculars up to your eyes, your vision is blurry. There’s a wheel in the middle that you need to turn slowly until your view comes into focus. Turn that wheel too far in one direction or the other and your vision is blurry again. But when turned slowly and in just the right amounts…everything comes into focus! You can see you so clearly, it’s like standing face to face with someone!

Likewise, each of the people and resources God led into my life turned the wheel slowly, and day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year, EVERYTHING about the way I thought and viewed the world my entire life shifted and shifted and shifted…and with each shift, actual hope came into focus. And once hope came into focus, it began consistently standing in front of me – face to face.

Real hope – hope in focus – produces more hope. Because what you focus on is what you will find. Where is your focus? What you focus on is what you will find.

What’s it like to stand face to face with hope? It’s like the day you are living in is the best day of your life and your tomorrow can look exactly the same to everyone else and yet, it will be even better than yesterday to you. So, even as those shifts have become full fledged healing, hope has not only remained, but has also grown…and the result is that I live knowing that as good as today is, the best is yet to come.

God has revealed these layers of spirit and soul healing to me – to us – and so, as Deuteronomy 29:29 says, it belongs to us and the generations to come forever. We can follow after it, claim it, and live in it. Think of how many stories you’ve heard where someone battles a physical ailment and they don’t find healing easily, right away, or at all, but they speak to what God has shown them in the battle. How he has revealed himself, how he has grown their faith, how he has healed their hearts or minds.

This is because sometimes we are not delivered of our ailment, but delivered through it.

God can use physical burdens to heal the spiritual because it’s often in the desperation of our physical pain that we draw close to Him and as we begin to seek His face and not just his hand…when we seek Him for who he is and not just what he can do…He will work on things we didn’t know needed work. And when he works, our perspective will shift, and what He has for us will come into focus.

In her memoir Packing Light, Allison Fallon perfectly paraphrases author and speaker Marianne Williamson’s take on this: “miracles are sometimes a shift in circumstances, but much more often they are a shift in perspective.“

I think this applies to healing as well. We need to shift our perspective on the healing God wants to do in us and allow him to shift other pieces of us in the process.

So if you need physical healing, yes, please pray for it. But also ask God what He has for you in this place. What does he want to show you, how does he want to change you through your ordeal?

The healing of our hearts and minds and the unity of our will with God’s will enable us to work effectively in the lane he has placed us and move His kingdom forward here on earth.

Because that’s what all of this is about – moving God’s kingdom forward. God cares about ALL aspects of our lives and He has a plan that He asks us to trust and participate in, but the main purpose of that plan is to move His kingdom forward…physical frailty can move the kingdom forward, but ailing spirits and souls cannot.

There’s something about a mind at peace that is irreplaceable. This past June I faced the hardest possibility yet. In May, a precautionary MRI screening for a family history of breast cancer turned up a mass on the right side and they scheduled me for further testing. At the end of June I had an appointment for an MRI with biopsy at the Cleveland Clinic.

I wrote this piece on healing while waiting for that test and the results. Fortunately, the biopsy came back good news, benign. But, God knows I didn’t miss that, even though there wasn’t cancer, there was evidence of a healing that He did.

I spent that month of waiting processing that I might have cancer…what would life look like and how would I respond? Would I be able to stand on the faith I claimed to live?

For me to have the peace and presence of mind to make it through that whole month knowing this test was coming and that the results could start me down the path I watched take my mom…that is evidence of healing. Healing that I can take into the world and share.

*This post was originally a sermon given at Bridge of Hope Church. Click here to watch, starting at minute 36:36.