My experience as a young believer in college fellowship leadership is not the only part of my story that causes me to balk at outcome-based faith. The death of my first wife, Sharon, also plays a large role. Three years into our marriage, Sharon was diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease. We were told that this was a good type of cancer because it usually responded well to treatment. But after going through a round of chemotherapy, Sharon’s first checkup scan indicated that the cancer had already returned. This was bad news and significantly reduced her chances of survival. The following year was filled with biopsies, medical consults, chemo treatments, surgeries, and a bone marrow transplant. But after all that, the cancer was still detected. We had exhausted medical treatment and Sharon had one more year with palliative care before her death in June of 1997. After 7 years of marriage, I was a widower with a daughter (6) and son (4).

During our battle with cancer, we were connected to various Christian circles in which people’s first response to our situation was an expression of outcome-based faith. “I am believing God for your healing.” “God wants to heal you, keep believing Him for your healing.” Of course that was the outcome that everyone desired. And with a young mother of two small children, surely that was God’s desire as well.

When the first scan after chemo showed cancer, I thought that God was going to heal Sharon, but I did not adopt an outcome-based faith for that. I certainly believed that God could heal her, and even believed that was our more likely outcome, despite the prognosis. But I also knew that faithful Christians suffered all kinds of tragedies and that Sharon’s death was a real possibility.

In all of the medical treatments and procedures, thoroughly prayed over by many, I cannot recall that any of them yielded an encouraging outcome. There were a few times when we thought the results were positive, but those turned out to be in error and the cancer had not responded well to treatment after all.

When medical treatment was exhausted, I still believed that God could heal Sharon, but I now thought that she was much more likely to die and that we needed to prepare for that outcome. We knew that there were people who saw this as a lack of faith. What we needed to do was to practice outcome-based faith and believe God for healing despite how things looked. “Don’t plan for Sharon to die, plan for her to be healed.” As we wrestled over this, we came up with a practical perspective. If God chose to heal Sharon, that would be wonderful and really not something that we needed to plan for. We would handle that just fine without any necessary preparation. But if Sharon died, that was going to be very challenging, so it made more sense to prepare for that outcome.

But there was still the question, “Should we have practiced a more outcome-based faith for Sharon’s healing”? The answer would be “yes” only if it would have changed the outcome…. because an outcome-based faith for healing would have been terrible for experiencing Sharon’s death. The ordeal of treatment without positive results would have been a time of waiting for God “to show up” and deliver on His promised healing. And we needed God to be present in the ordeal. And with Sharon’s death, I not only would be grieving her loss, I would be in a crisis of faith when I needed God the most.

I think that “Name it Claim It” theology is a heresy that can only be believed by people who are in deep denial about the life that we live on this side of eternity. Since I do not believe that Sharon would have been healed if we had practiced more faith, I am confident that this was not a time when an outcome-based faith would have been a good thing. It would have been devastating.

But I did still have a nagging concern that the whole experience had left me unbalanced when it came to faith. Isn’t there a place for faith in outcomes, in God “showing up” in ways that I did not experience in our pursuit of healing for Sharon’s cancer? Had my ability to expect God to move like that in my life been diminished, even damaged? It was this concern that led to the next chapter in this story of why I balk at outcome-based faith. I will continue next week.