Yes. Scripture presents God as one who hears the sick, and many Christians, including Judith MacNutt, who has spent decades praying with people for healing, believe he still heals today. An honest yes has two limits. It makes no promise about how your prayer will end. And it leaves your doctor, your medication and your counselor exactly where they are. If you prayed and nothing changed, you have not proved that God stopped healing. You have reached the part of the Christian faith that has always included waiting, grief and requests that went unanswered.
That is a hard place to stand, and it deserves more than a slogan. Maybe you prayed for a body, a marriage or your own mind. Maybe other people prayed with you and believed hard. Now you have to decide what to do with the silence.
Why Do Some Familiar Answers Make It Worse?
When healing does not come, people reach for explanations. You need more faith. There must be sin in your life. God is teaching you a lesson. Some of these are offered sincerely. Most of them do the same thing: they put the weight of the outcome on the person who is already carrying the illness.
Jesus met that instinct head-on. When his disciples saw a man blind from birth, they assumed someone was to blame: “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus rejected the question’s premise: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:2–3).
This is narrative. It tells us what happened in one encounter, and it does not explain every illness or promise every sick person a miracle. What it does is close the door on a tempting shortcut. Suffering is not automatically a verdict on the one who suffers. If someone has told you that your unchanged diagnosis exposes a defect in your faith, Jesus did not reason that way.
What Does MacNutt Mean by Healing?
MacNutt did not come to this subject from a pulpit. She grew up in eastern Kentucky watching her mother pray with people at the dining room table. As a young psychologist she started praying for her patients in the hospital, which, she says, landed her in trouble. She later co-founded Christian Healing Ministries in Jacksonville, Florida, with her late husband, Francis MacNutt, where people come for prayer and for training.
Her first move is to widen the word. “Most people just think of healing as being physical,” she says. She names four kinds:
- physical healing;
- spiritual healing, through the love, grace and forgiveness of God;
- inner healing of the emotions;
- deliverance from evil.
She does not demote the body. Of physical healing she says, “Of course, that’s important if you’re hurting and sick or especially terminally.”
Here is the objection, and it is a fair one. A list like this can become a way to rename a failed request. Your body was not healed, so someone tells you that you were healed spiritually instead, and the prayer can never be counted as unanswered. If your body did not change, nobody should tell you that it secretly did. That would be dishonesty dressed up as comfort.
The four kinds are useful for a different reason. They widen what you are allowed to bring to God. A person can pray for a body that is still sick and also for a memory that still controls them. One request does not cancel the other.
Her account of inner healing shows how restrained the claim is. Describing prayer for someone carrying a childhood trauma, she says, “It’s not like Jesus erases the memory. He kind of reframes it.” The event stays true. What she hopes will change is the power the memory has when it surfaces. She also marks the edge of her own profession: Christ, she argues, can enter a memory in a way she cannot. “I, as a therapist, can’t.” She is describing two kinds of help that reach different places.
Her method begins with attention. “We teach our prayer ministers to three things, listen, love and pray.” Prayer that starts by hearing a person’s story is a long way from prayer that starts by diagnosing what they did wrong.
She adds something worth hearing if you prayed for your mind and still cannot make yourself well. She argues that trauma and a lack of love in childhood leave people without the inner strength to change by effort alone. “People don’t have the capacity to do what they need to do to get well.” The implication is merciful. Failing to will yourself out of depression is no evidence that you prayed too little.
Does Praying for Healing Mean Trusting the Doctor Less?
No. Even the most hopeful story in this conversation keeps medicine in the picture. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, describes praying for a friend with HIV who reported, the next week, that for the first time his tests were undetectable. She is careful about the context: “And so they do have medicine to, like, get you to undetectable status.” He had been taking medication for years. Whatever you conclude about that story, the prayer did not replace the pills. Fields also says, “And so I know we’re not discounting there’s sometimes chemical imbalance and people need medication.”
The New Testament shows the same ease with ordinary care. Paul calls one of his companions “Luke, the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14). He tells Timothy, “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities” (1 Timothy 5:23). That is advice to one man, not a medical command for every reader. But it shows an apostle recommending a practical remedy with no hint that doing so was a lapse of faith.
If God Still Heals, Why Didn’t He Heal Me?
This is the question underneath all the others, and the honest thing is to say what the conversation covers. It is full of answered prayer. MacNutt says her father was healed of cancer. She tells of a migraine that left as she prayed. The episode does not take up the prayers that went unanswered. That silence is no reason to dismiss the stories. But it means the answer to your question has to come from somewhere else.
Scripture does not hide unhealed sickness among faithful people. Paul, whom Acts describes healing others, writes of his own affliction:
“For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:8–9).
Christians have long debated what Paul’s thorn was, and the text never says. What it does say is that he asked three times and the answer was not removal. In another letter he mentions a coworker almost in passing: “Trophimus have I left at Miletum sick” (2 Timothy 4:20).
These passages describe rather than command. They do not tell you to stop asking. They show that an apostle who prayed for the sick also lived with sickness that stayed. Your unanswered prayer has company inside the Bible itself.
A harder part of MacNutt’s teaching needs care. She connects some illness to unforgiveness, and she says some people are sick because of demonic activity. Fields qualifies the first point: not every physical illness is the result of unprocessed trauma. What MacNutt offers for these claims is decades of pastoral practice and testimony, including her own. Testimony can tell us what people experienced and what they believe happened. It cannot show, as a controlled study might, how often illness has these causes, and it cannot show that your illness does.
The key word in her teaching is some. If you read your own diagnosis as proof of hidden bitterness or a spiritual stronghold, you have gone further than MacNutt does. The Jude 3 Project affirms that the spiritual world is real and that Christ has authority over it, and it urges discernment so that genuine medical and psychological needs are not mislabeled as demonic.
MacNutt herself offers a check against self-blame. “Because many people think they’ve sinned, and they haven’t.” Before you search yourself for the sin that must have blocked your healing, she would have you ask a different question: “So I think it’s really important for people to know, number one, was it a real sin, or was it just a wound?” She draws on Jesus’s words that the Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin (John 16:8), and she distinguishes that conviction from the condemnation that comes from the enemy. Conviction names something specific and leads somewhere. Endless, vague accusation goes nowhere.
Forgiveness does run through her account of healing, and she is realistic about it. “You never feel like forgiving anyone.” She treats forgiveness as grace you ask Christ for. She is also clear about its limits: “I don’t mean you go back to a perpetrator, you know, if it’s a dangerous situation.” Forgiveness never requires returning to someone who harms you.
What Can You Do With a Prayer That Is Still Unanswered?
You can keep praying it, honestly. The psalms give words for exactly this: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). That is poetry, a prayer of complaint, and it sits in the Bible as worship. The psalm does turn toward trust by its end, but only after it has said the hard thing out loud. You are allowed to do the same.
You can stop praying alone. Fields points to James:
“Is any sick among you? 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 shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:14–16).
Christians read the promise in that passage in different ways, especially the words “save” and “raise him up.” The same chapter also tells believers to be patient until the Lord comes (James 5:7). James holds fervent prayer and long waiting in one letter, side by side.
MacNutt’s own counsel is plain. “But I just encourage people all the time, just start praying.” She also describes a nightly habit. Before sleep she thanks God for the day, brings him what hurt or disappointed her, and says, “I choose to forgive before I go to sleep.” You could take that shape and make room in it for the disappointment you feel toward God. Tell him what you asked for. Tell him what happened instead. That counts as prayer.
Keep your appointments and your treatment, and ask the people praying with you to support that care. Reaching for help fits with trusting God. It is often how people stay alive long enough to keep praying.
Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US): call or text 988
National Domestic Violence Hotline (if the marriage you have been praying over includes abuse): 1-800-799-7233
Where Does Hope Rest When the Outcome Is Unknown?
MacNutt ends where she says everything begins. “All love starts with him, and you have to know you’re loved,” she says. She asks people to pray what she calls the Romans 5:5 prayer. The verse reads:
“And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Romans 5:5).
The setting of that verse matters. Paul gets there by way of suffering. Two verses earlier he says tribulation works patience, patience works experience, and experience works hope (Romans 5:3–4). The hope that does not leave a person ashamed belongs to people still in the middle of trouble. Paul describes it growing there.
The Christian hope has always looked past this life for the final answer:
“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
That is apocalyptic writing, full of images, but its promise is concrete. Every healing in this life, the dramatic ones and the slow ones, is partial. The whole is still coming.
That leaves you free to keep asking for healing without staking God’s love on the answer. Romans 5 places that love in the heart of the one who suffers, given by the Spirit, before any outcome arrives. Whatever your next test result says, it cannot revoke what has already been poured in.