There may be times when people who pray for their world feel the patient not only is unresponsive but virtually rejects the treatment being given, the spiritual enlightenment offered. Can a patient—whether an individual or the world itself—be helped if he appears to oppose the work done on his behalf?
I've often marveled at the courage Christ Jesus displayed in confronting the Gadarene.See Mark, chap. 5. The account of this healing conveys a variety of lessons that have blessed many Bible readers through the centuries. To look at it one way, couldn't this powerful episode almost be a microcosm of the experience of today's Christian practitioner who reaches out with healing prayer to a world in turmoil? Here was a patient it seemed no one could help. "Night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones." How hopeless, from a human view, the potential for healing may have appeared. His name was Legion—there were so very many difficulties.
As he raced toward the Master he "cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not." Indeed, the ordinary person might be tempted to fear such a patient. But Jesus was no ordinary person. Christ-empowered, he subdued the aggressiveness, the agitation and confusion. And he yearned for all of us to learn that no practitioner of Christian healing is ordinary.
