Suffering well: Faith tested by pastor’s cancer
DALLAS — Matt Chandler doesn’t feel anything when the radiation penetrates his brain. It could start to burn later in treatment. But it hasn’t been bad, this time lying on the slab. Not yet, anyway.
Chandler’s lanky 6-foot-5-inch frame rests on a table at Baylor University Medical Center. He wears the same kind of jeans he wears preaching to 6,000 people at The Village Church in suburban Flower Mound, where the 35-year-old pastor is a rising star of evangelical Christianity.
Another cancer patient Chandler has gotten to know spends his time in radiation imagining that he’s playing a round of golf at his favorite course. Chandler on this first Monday in January is reflecting on Colossians 1:15-23, about the pre-eminence of Christ and making peace through the blood of His cross.
Chandler is trying to suffer well. He would never ask for such a trial, but in some ways he welcomes this cancer. He says he feels grateful that God has counted him worthy to endure it. He has always preached that God will bring both joy and suffering but is only recently learning to experience the latter.
Since all this began on Thanksgiving morning, Chandler says he has asked “why me?” just once, in a moment of weakness.
He is praying that God will heal him. He wants to grow old, to walk his two daughters down the aisle and see his son become a better athlete than he ever was.
Whatever happens, he says, is God’s will, and God has his reasons. For Chandler, that does not mean waiting for his fate. It means fighting for his life.
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February 17, 2010 at 05:52:18 AM
It is always sad to hear of suffering, but to pray that God will heal you is not scriptural, we know that the Word says that Jesus came to do the will of the Father healing all that sick and oppressed of the devil, but if you check the scriptures you will find that every reference to healing in the NT is in the past tense, 1 Peter 2-24. by His stripes we were healed. All of Gods provisions are gifts that we have to receive such as salvation-the Holy Spirit- healing etc, so we could be asking amiss as James 4-3 says, or it could be our tongue, death and life are in the power of the tongue, speaking against what God said. Prov.18-21. or it could be Babylonian pratices in the church that came from the whore of Babylon, God said to come out of her my people that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of of her plagues. Rev 18-4, notice even partaking of paganism you are stil his people,
Hosea 4-6 says , my people perish for lack of knowledge, The only thing that God can honor is his Word {Jn 1-1} JN 15-7. We’ll be praying for this brother.
February 17, 2010 at 11:30:54 AM
James 5:14-16
14 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. 15 And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. 16 Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.