Even as Thy Soul Prospers

This week members of our congregation met for our monthly prayer meeting. We opened as we often do, a short devotional to encourage our prayer life and then any particular requests we have for prayer. I was struck that most of the prayer requests given had to do with health. Even in our small congregation there’s a lot of aches and pains, sickness and cancer, aging bodies — concerns about hearts, lungs, joints, and minds.



This isn’t unusual. Health concerns usually dominate most church prayer lists. It’s always a continual reminder that the outward man is wasting away, and what is perishable must be sown in order to be raised, in Christ, imperishable. Thankfully, God is Creator of body and soul; and Christ is redeemer of both as well. The Heidelberg Catechism rightly asks of the Christian “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” In part, the answer is: “That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.”

In our prayers for those with health struggles we shouldn’t tire in petitioning God for his particular mercies. Praying that he would sustain them, guard them against discouragement, and if it’s his will that he would bring healing and recovery. But as we were praying the other night I was reminded of another petition we should be taught to pray.

Writing to Gaius, the Apostle John began his letter saying: “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers” (3 Jn. 2). Read quickly, it might sound like a simple greeting-card blessing. Read carefully, the Apostle is doing something precise, and far more pastorally useful. The phrase “just as” isn’t joining two unrelated wishes — equal measures of bodily and spiritual well-being as separate and distinct. Rather, he’s praying that Gaius’s body would catch up to where his soul already is.

What did that mean for Gaius? He was a man who, by John’s own testimony, was spiritually thriving. In the verse that follows he’s commended for walking in the truth which is the greatest of all joys. But his body, by the plain sense of the prayer, apparently wasn’t thriving as his soul was. The Apostle doesn’t treat the difference between body and soul as scandalous, or as evidence that Gaius was being disciplined for sin. Instead, he treats it like an ordinary reality of a faithful life under the cross of bodily weakness, and responds to it with prayer for bodily mercy.

There’s a pattern in that for our own prayers. Sickness and weakness is common especially for aging saints. Our priority in prayer should be that their souls would prosper even in the season of suffering — that inwardly they would be renewed day by day (2 Cor. 4:16). Without that, the health and vitality of the body will mean very little as the soul always has the priority. And then with boldness we should let our petitions on their behalf ascend to the Throne of Grace: “I pray you would be in body what you, by God’s grace, are in soul.”