A Letter to Nikki

Dear Nikki,

As I write, a host of memories sweep over me. I think back to your growing-up years at Berachah. Your father and mother were faithful to bring you and Shay Sunday after Sunday, month after month, year after year. I remember you quietly sitting there with those big brown eyes listening to Bible exposition (Were you really listening?). But now as I fast forward my thoughts, that picture your mother sent on the internet is fresh in my mind’s eye. It’s the one of you and Railin with the bandanas on your head. What makes that picture all the more poignant is the story it represents. Since you were first diagnosed with breast cancer wave upon wave of emotional issues have washed over you and all of us who love you. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments have now become unwanted but necessary guests. Nausea, loss of hair, and weakness have become new milestones in your life. We have heard these stories from other women and wondered how we would feel if this happened to someone we knew well. Now we know. Your battle with cancer has drawn so many of us into your suffering. God’s people have come alongside you in prayer, gifts, and help with your daily routine. Your family is bearing your burdens in extraordinary ways. As we have prayed together, the preciousness of trust in God has become even more meaningful and real.

But what is faith? How does it express itself when God’s providence frowns? Is faith merely some abstract feeling that everything is going to work out for the better? If we exercise enough faith, can we see our ailments vanish? As I recall, you were told by someone that very thing. This theologically flawed understanding of faith is offered as hope in our times of sickness and need. We are told to claim our healing. The words of Jesus (“Whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it shall be granted him” Mk. 11:23) are used as heavy weapons against our supposed lack of faith.

It would be helpful if we pondered the words of our Lord in their context. The disciples of Jesus needed to understand the vital place of confidence in God, if they were to bring the greatest glory to Him. The withered fig tree provided the opportunity to teach an indispensable lesson in how to move the mountains of the seemingly impossible. Prayer is very powerful in its effect. Jesus was using the figure of a mountain to refer to mountainous difficulties (like fighting cancer). Biblical faith does not have to overcome a reluctant God but rather expresses confidence in God’s power and goodness. God wants to display His perfections by our calling on Him for the help we need. He is the “rooter-up of mountains of great difficulties.” Faith that honors God is the assurance and conviction that what God has said is true and that it is to be acted upon. This is a far cry from that cruel idea that by our faith we can create reality (“Faith in God can make my cancer go away”). This is nothing more than a mental game of having faith in faith or faith in oneself. The kind of faith Jesus was talking about is rock solid confidence in God and in His Word.

Nikki, when you pray about your cancer, ask that God’s will be done, as any of us should when we encounter obstacles in life (“That, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us” 1 Jn. 5:14). God could, of course, eliminate every cancer cell in your body. But He may choose not to do this. Many years ago I heard a wise pastor speak about our struggles “when God doesn’t come through.” He drew his thoughts from Hebrews 11 by highlighting four characteristics of faith. Sometimes faith changes our circumstances (Note the list of things in Hebrews 11 that God did as a result of faith). Sometimes faith does not change our circumstances (some “were tortured”). We should never judge God by circumstances. We have to hold firmly to the fact that God loves us even when the pain does not go away. Faith is not merely receiving from God the things we want. It is the ability to receive what God gives us. We must not build our theology from our emotions, but from the teaching of God’s Word. Bible faith always leads to ultimate victory. The victory is finding delight in God as He works out His plan in our lives for the achievement of His glory.

I certainly don’t want this to sound like a cold lecture. But, in the words of the psalmist, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And besides Thee, I desire nothing on earth” (Psa. 73:25). As the long shadows of cancer hold sway over your life, continue in your hunger for God. He wants to take you places in your trust in Him where you have not been before. Thank you for the encouragement you have been in these last several months. Your presence among your brothers and sisters in Christ in our worship services says volumes. You are telling us what you think is most important. We rejoice at what God is doing in your life and Kyle’s. As Railin is in the infancy of her journey in life, may God use you as an example of unshakeable, joyful confidence in God.

Your pastor and friend,
Howard
Berachah Bible Church