Requesting God to Do Something

I have a friend who has struggled for months or even years to slowly walk from his kitchen back to his bedroom with a walker, maybe 40 feet, which may take him 20 to 30 minutes to make the journey. Currently he can no longer make that entire journey. There are millions of people in the Word of Faith and/or Prosperity movements (for example Kenneth Copeland or Joyce Meyers) who would probably say, “If he and/or his friends had enough faith he would be healed”. But the truth is, all we need to do is look around the world at the millions of people in similar or worse situations who also are not healed. God can heal people but He does not do so many times or most of the time. So the truth is that it is a total mystery as to who or when people are healed.

I have another friend who nearly died not long ago and he still struggles to maintain a certain level of activity do to heart conditions. He struggles with not being able to go back to his normal abilities but he also has said that his relationship with God has increased and therefore he probably would not change things as a result. But still, that’s his situation and that doesn’t necessarily make other people in similar situations feel any better.

So what do we do or say?

I think that anyone who claims to know what God is doing or will do in these situations is pompously incorrect!
Yes, we can ask God to do anything we want but we must realize that God is not obligated to do what we want; if He does then we can be thankful, if He doesn’t we can proceed on.
The Faith/Prosperity people’s tendency is to pompously claim that God is obligated to come through with fulfilling their requests as though He promised them all of these things.

Instead, I would say that we need to humbly request and hope that God will do what we request, realizing that he owes us nothing and that we owe him more than we could ever hope to repay!