Because Timothy Needed More Faith
There is a remarkably simple way to test a theological claim: apply it consistently to Scripture.
Christians are sometimes told that sickness reveals a deficiency of faith. The language varies. One person needs to believe harder. Another needs to stop speaking negatively. Someone else has supposedly allowed fear or doubt to interfere with healing. The assumption beneath all of these explanations is essentially the same: if a Christian possesses sufficient faith, sickness should not remain.
If that principle is true, Timothy presents us with an immediate problem.
Paul writes to him:
“Be no longer a drinker of water only, but use a little wine for your stomach’s sake and your frequent infirmities.”
— 1 Timothy 5:23
Timothy was not suffering from a single unexplained episode. Paul refers to his frequent infirmities. Whatever precisely those ailments involved, they occurred often enough that Paul knew about them and offered practical advice concerning them.
What Paul does not provide is a spiritual diagnosis.
He does not tell Timothy that recurring sickness reveals recurring unbelief. He does not instruct him to increase his faith, rebuke a spirit of infirmity, declare himself healed, or examine his life for some spiritual failure preventing him from receiving what God has promised. Paul addresses Timothy’s physical weakness as a physical problem and recommends an ordinary practical measure.
That becomes significant when we remember who Timothy was.
Paul calls him his “true child in faith” (1 Timothy 1:2). Timothy had accompanied Paul in ministry, represented him before churches, and received considerable responsibility for teaching and preserving sound doctrine. When Paul sent Timothy to the Philippians, he explained that he had “no one else like-minded” who would genuinely care for their welfare, adding that Timothy’s proven character was already known to them because he had served with Paul in the gospel as a child with his father (Philippians 2:20–22).
Nothing in Paul’s description suggests a spiritually deficient young minister whose chronic lack of faith manifested itself through recurring illness. Timothy was a faithful servant of Christ who happened to suffer from frequent physical ailments.
If sickness itself demonstrates inadequate faith, however, we are left with an uncomfortable conclusion: apparently Timothy needed more faith.
Trophimus Was Left Sick
Timothy was not an isolated exception.
Near the conclusion of 2 Timothy, Paul gives a series of personal updates concerning his coworkers. Among them is an extraordinarily ordinary sentence:
“Erastus remained at Corinth, but I left Trophimus at Miletus sick.”
— 2 Timothy 4:20
The simplicity of the statement is important. Trophimus was sick, and Paul left him at Miletus in that condition. No explanation accompanies it.
This is particularly striking because Paul was certainly no stranger to divine healing. Acts describes extraordinary miracles occurring through his ministry. In Ephesus, even handkerchiefs and aprons carried from Paul were associated with the healing of the sick (Acts 19:11–12). The New Testament therefore gives us both realities without apparent embarrassment: God performed extraordinary healings through Paul, and Paul later left one of his coworkers behind because that coworker was sick.
We are not told why Trophimus was not healed. Perhaps that is precisely where we should allow Scripture to establish the limits of our knowledge. Paul does not attribute the illness to unbelief, hidden sin, negative confession, demonic attack, or any other cause. He simply tells Timothy that Trophimus was sick.
The biblical category is considerably less complicated than the theological systems we sometimes construct around it. God heals, and faithful Christians can also be sick. Scripture has room for both truths.
A Man Worthy of Honor
Epaphroditus gives us an even stronger example because his illness was not minor.
The Philippian church had sent Epaphroditus to assist Paul, and during that service he became dangerously ill. Paul writes:
“For indeed he was sick nearly to death, but God had mercy on him; and not on him only, but on me also, that I might not have sorrow on sorrow.”
— Philippians 2:27
Epaphroditus recovered, but Paul’s explanation of that recovery deserves attention. He does not describe healing as the inevitable result of Epaphroditus finally exercising sufficient faith. He says that God had mercy on him.
That language keeps healing where Scripture consistently places it: in the gracious hands of God.
Paul then tells the Philippians how they should receive the man who had nearly died:
“Receive him therefore in the Lord with all joy, and hold such people in honor, because for the work of Christ he came near to death.”
— Philippians 2:29–30
If serious sickness were reliable evidence of deficient faith, this would have been a natural place for Paul to address the problem. Instead, he points to Epaphroditus’s costly service to Christ and tells the church to honor people like him.
His illness did not become a measurement of his faithfulness.
That distinction matters. Scripture can celebrate God’s healing without turning continued sickness into an accusation against the sick. Epaphroditus received mercy and recovered. Before that recovery, however, he was still a faithful servant of Christ who had become so sick that Paul expected he might die.
Paul Knew Bodily Weakness Himself
Paul was not merely observing sickness in other Christians. He knew bodily weakness personally.
He reminds the Galatians:
“You know that because of weakness of the flesh I preached the Good News to you the first time.”
— Galatians 4:13
The precise nature of Paul’s condition is uncertain, and there is little value in pretending that Scripture tells us more than it does. What is clear is that the Galatians had encountered Paul in a condition of bodily weakness and that this weakness formed part of the circumstances surrounding his initial ministry among them. In the following verse, Paul recalls that his condition had been a trial to them, yet they had received him warmly.
This is the same Paul who wrote extensively about faith, prayer, suffering, spiritual gifts, resurrection, and the Christian life. He knew miraculous healing, and he knew physical weakness. Those categories did not contradict one another in his theology.
The contradiction appears only when we impose a rule upon the New Testament that the New Testament itself does not impose: sufficiently faithful Christians should not be sick.
What About the Healings Connected to Faith?
None of this requires us to minimize the importance of faith in the healing accounts of Scripture.
Jesus sometimes explicitly connects healing with faith. He tells the woman who had suffered from bleeding, “Daughter, your faith has made you well” (Mark 5:34). When two blind men come to him for mercy, he asks whether they believe he is able to heal them and then says, “According to your faith be it done to you” (Matthew 9:28–29). James instructs suffering believers to call for the elders of the church and speaks of “the prayer of faith” in connection with the sick (James 5:14–15).
Those texts should be allowed to say exactly what they say. Faith matters. Christians should pray. God heals. Jesus repeatedly responded compassionately to people who trusted him.
The mistake comes when we reverse those statements into a universal proposition they do not establish.
“Your faith has made you well” does not mean that everyone who remains unwell therefore lacks faith.
The distinction is crucial. A passage can tell us that someone received healing through faith without teaching that every instance of continued sickness is caused by insufficient faith. Timothy alone should prevent us from making that inference. If recurring illness necessarily diagnoses deficient faith, then Paul’s practical advice in 1 Timothy 5:23 becomes extraordinarily difficult to explain.
The same is true of Trophimus and Epaphroditus. The New Testament contains genuine miracles of healing alongside faithful Christians who experienced sickness, sometimes severe sickness, without the biblical writers turning their physical condition into an indictment of their spiritual condition.
We should be willing to preserve both categories because Scripture preserves both categories.
Healing Is Mercy, Not a Measurement
Part of the problem comes from subtly changing what biblical faith is.
Faith is trust in God. It is not a spiritual force by which Christians gain sufficient control over physical circumstances. God remains the healer; faith does not become an independent mechanism that obligates him to produce a particular outcome.
Epaphroditus illustrates the distinction beautifully. Paul does not say that Epaphroditus finally reached the necessary level of faith and therefore recovered. He says that God had mercy on him.
That does not make prayer meaningless or faith irrelevant. It places both within their proper relationship to God. Christians pray because they trust him. We ask him to heal because we believe he is able to heal. We can ask boldly and persistently without pretending that our confidence gives us sovereignty over the answer.
This is why a theology that turns healing into a measurement of faith can become so pastorally destructive. Once healing is treated as the expected result of sufficient belief, an unanswered prayer requires an explanation. If the doctrine itself cannot be questioned, responsibility eventually falls upon the suffering person. They must have doubted. They must have spoken negatively. They must not have believed strongly enough. Something in them must have prevented the healing.
The person who was already carrying physical suffering is then required to carry a spiritual accusation as well.
Paul does not place that burden on Timothy.
He gives him advice for his stomach.
When My Sickness Is Different
There is another problem with treating sickness as a reliable spiritual diagnostic: the diagnosis has a curious tendency to change depending upon who is sick.
When another Christian becomes ill, insufficient faith can provide an easy explanation. When the person teaching that doctrine becomes ill, however, other explanations suddenly become available. Perhaps it is spiritual warfare. Perhaps the enemy is attacking because the ministry is effective. Perhaps exhaustion has followed a particularly demanding season of spiritual work.
Some of those categories are perfectly biblical in themselves. Scripture certainly recognizes spiritual warfare, and Scripture contains examples in which physical affliction has a spiritual dimension. The error is not believing that such things are possible. The error is assuming that we can look at an illness and confidently infer its spiritual cause, particularly when our method conveniently assigns an unflattering explanation to someone else and a flattering explanation to ourselves.
The same symptom cannot establish opposite theological conclusions merely because the identity of the sick person has changed.
Scripture does not give us that kind of diagnostic authority.
Timothy’s recurring ailments did not authorize us to conclude that Timothy repeatedly lacked faith. Trophimus being left sick at Miletus does not permit us to reconstruct some hidden spiritual failure in his life. Epaphroditus nearly dying did not reveal that something was wrong with his relationship with God. Paul explicitly presents him as a servant worthy of honor.
There are occasions when Scripture tells us why someone suffered. Where Scripture provides the explanation, we should believe it. Where it does not, humility requires us to resist inventing one.
Faith Is Not an Immune System
Christians still inhabit mortal bodies.
Those bodies become sick. They are injured. They weaken with age. They eventually die. None of this means that God has abandoned his people, that prayer is useless, or that divine healing is impossible. It means that redemption has not yet reached its final consummation.
Paul’s great hope for the body was not that Christians could develop enough faith to prevent physical deterioration indefinitely. His hope was resurrection.
In 1 Corinthians 15, the mortal must put on immortality and the perishable must put on imperishability. In Romans 8, believers who possess the firstfruits of the Spirit still groan inwardly as they await “the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23). The Christian already belongs to Christ, already possesses the Spirit, and already lives by faith, yet still waits for the complete redemption of the body.
That is why bodily weakness cannot function as a simple gauge of spiritual maturity. The most faithful Christian in the world still awaits resurrection.
Until then, Christians pray for one another. We care for the sick. We ask God for healing. We seek ordinary medical care. We give thanks when health is restored, and we remain beside our brothers and sisters when it is not. What we should not do is take suffering that Scripture never identifies as evidence of deficient faith and transform it into an accusation against the person suffering.
Timothy could suffer frequent ailments and remain Paul’s trusted child in the faith. Trophimus could be left sick and remain a fellow worker. Epaphroditus could come near to death and remain a man whom the church was commanded to honor. Paul could experience bodily weakness without treating it as evidence that his faith had failed.
Their illnesses were real.
So was their faith.
If recurring sickness is evidence that a Christian simply needs to believe more, then the question remains unavoidable:
How much more faith did Timothy need?