Dr Paul Allen

Tim Shorely I have stage four, poor-prognosis cancer, and I believe in healing, either bestowed directly by the Lord or through the intercession of others. I’m convinced there are moments when God transcends and circumvents the normal to heal instantaneously and supernaturally (1 Cor. 12:7–9). I sincerely believe he can and often does this without any means other than his love-released power—to make the body whole, the spirit glad, and the tongue exult. My faith doesn’t embrace fraudulent faith healers, name-it-and-claim-it charlatans, prosperity peddlers, or positive-thinking gurus. I believe God can and often does grant actual, supernatural healings of the body, spirit, and mind, by which the truly sick are made truly whole through the authority of Christ’s name, often catalyzed by the believing prayers of God’s people. But I still have cancer. Despite thousands of prayers, many of which have been bathed in ample faith and anointing oil, I still have cancer, and my clock’s ticking. T...

I need to join you in the fight against the fears of ageing by faith in future grace. I have nine fears we will walk through together, and I’ll give you biblical antidotes for those fears. These antidotes will work through faith; without faith, they won’t work. But by faith, they will work, and fear will be overcome, and we will go to be with Jesus in due time without walking in fear during our last season. That’s my hope.] Living by Faith in Future Grace Let me give you a word about future grace. I picture the Christian life as a stream of divine grace flowing to me from the future. I’m walking into it. It flows over the waterfall of the present into a reservoir. The reservoir is getting bigger and bigger, which means our thankfulness as we look back should be getting bigger and bigger, right? As grace comes to us, it flows over the waterfall of the present, accumulating in a reservoir that will get bigger forever and ever. We’ll never stop getting grace from God because, for eternity...

Some sorrows run so deep and last so long that those who bear them may despair of ever finding solace, at least in this life. No matter how large a frame they put around their pain, the darkness seems to bleed all the way to the edges. Perhaps you are among those saints whose lot seems to lie in the land of sorrow. You have not taken the bitter counsel of Job’s wife — “Curse God and die” (Job 2:9) — and by God’s grace, you will not. Yours is not a fair-weather faith. You know that God has treated you with everlasting kindness in Christ. You cannot curse him. But still, with Job, you stare at the fallen house of your life, where so many dear desires lie dead. And even with faith larger than a mustard seed, the brokenness seems unfixable in this world. The wound is incurable. The grief is inconsolable. The darkness defies the largest frames we could build. This is why, when God speaks to such saints in Romans 8, he does not bid them to merely look harder here below, squinting for a silve...

There are two ways in which my fellow Italians are trying to handle the fears that the COVID-19 emergency is spreading around us. The secular way is to use the phrase Tutto andrà bene, meaning “all will go well.” It is obsessively written in blog posts, pictures, and messages that people exchange with frenzy. It is used as a secular mantra in an attempt to exorcise the worries of the pandemic. The hope that all will go well is grounded in the promises of medicine to cure the sick and in science to quickly find a vaccine. Of course, we are extremely grateful for the help of doctors and nurses, for whom we pray. Yet, we know that not all of the sick will survive even with the help of modern medicine. Ultimately, sooner or later, we will all die. Yes, we are also hopeful in the new discoveries of scientists, and we support medical research, but we know that COVID-19 is just one of the threats to our lives. For all its wonderful achievements, even science will capitulate to the inexorabili...

John Donne, one of the greatest lyric poets in the English language, fell sick, possibly from a typhus epidemic.  In the course of his illness, which could have been fatal, and after his recovery, Donne wrote a series of meditations on the experience entitled Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Besides being a dazzling masterpiece of English prose, the Devotions are a classic example of Christian meditation.  Their reflections on sickness, facing death, and trusting in God through afflictions are startlingly relevant for today’s coronavirus epidemic. The devotions follow the entire course of the illness, with a meditation on every stage:  the first faint symptoms; starting to feel really bad; going to bed; calling the physician; the physician is worried; they try various medicines; the patient keeps getting worse; the patient (Donne) realizes that he is probably going to die; he starts feeling better; he can get out of bed; he worries about a relapse, etc. In all, there ar...

Darrell Carman was a member of my church who died of cancer six months ago. His wife, Ann, had died six months earlier with COVID (I wrote about her in another article, “Real Churches Commune with Dead Saints.”) As I thought about Darrell during the days after he died, and of what he must’ve been experiencing in heaven, I began thinking about what it means to “beat cancer.” We’ve all seen T-shirts and bumper stickers that say, “I beat cancer.” And of course, by beat, they mean survived. That’s how you “beat” it. To live is victory; to die is loss. (To be clear, I rejoice for anyone who survives cancer.) But by that definition, Darrell didn’t beat cancer—cancer beat him. At one level that’s obviously true, but it’s not the whole truth. Because as followers of Jesus, we walk by faith, not by sight. That doesn’t mean we close our eyes to the painful realities in front of us, but it does mean we open our eyes to the bigger picture God paints for us in his Word. That’s what it means to walk...

Perhaps one of the most painful and unhelpful things we can say to someone who is sick is to suggest that their sickness is directly caused by their sin. The whole of the book of Job is designed to show how unhelpful that approach is. In the end, God rebukes Job’s friends for saying just this (see Job 42).  The simple fact is, at some point in their life, sickness comes to every single person in this world, no matter whether they are a scandalous sinner or not. Jesus was asked about the role of sin in causing sickness and he again strongly stated that, at least in the case of this blind man, a specific sin had not led to his sickness: As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  Jesus answered,  “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but  that the works of God might be displayed in him. In a similar vein, Jesus was also asked ab...

Many contemporary Christians feel disconnected from the vibrant, Spirit-filled ministries of the prophets and apostles described in the Bible . In the Old Testament , God seemingly took the people of Israel through miraculous event after miraculous event. In the New Testament , those who watched the ministry of Jesus were seized with amazement at the miracles he performed ( Luke 5:25 ), and the apostles in the early church regularly performed signs and wonders among the people ( Acts 5:12 ).  Yet today, such miraculous events seem rare and, when we do hear reports of miracles, many Christians are skeptical. At the very least, we feel there's  something  different about the way God worked in the Old and New Testament periods and the way he works today. This raises a valid question: Why don’t we experience today the miracles we read about in the New Testament? To answer that question, we need to understand not only how God works through  providence and c...