Bible Verses About Healing: 13 Verses for When You’re Sick or Hurting

Bible verses to pray when you’re sick

Every verse in this guide is quoted from the World English Bible, with a line about where it comes from. They are prayers, not medical advice, and they belong alongside the care of your doctor.

• Jeremiah 17:14. “Heal me, O LORD, and I will be healed. Save me, and I will be saved; for you are my praise.” A short prayer from a prophet under pressure, and easy to remember on a bad day.
• Psalm 6:2. “Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am faint. LORD, heal me, for my bones are troubled.” David prays with his whole body in view. The next verse says his soul is hurting too.
• Psalm 41:3. “The LORD will sustain him on his sickbed, and restore him from his bed of illness.” David wrote this psalm while he was sick and his enemies were asking when he would die (Psalm 41:5). It pictures God at the bedside.
• Psalm 103:2–3. “Praise the LORD, my soul, and don’t forget all his benefits, who forgives all your sins, who heals all your diseases”. David names God as the source of all healing. It doesn’t mean every illness ends now.
• Psalm 30:2. “LORD my God, I cried to you, and you have healed me.” For the day you get good news. David thanks God after coming close to death.

Bible verses for when someone you love is sick

• James 5:14. “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the assembly, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord”. James tells sick people to ask for help, and he makes prayer a shared job.
• Philippians 2:27. “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.” Paul on his friend Epaphroditus. Even an apostle was afraid of losing someone he loved.
• Isaiah 38:5. “I have heard your prayer. I have seen your tears.” God’s reply to King Hezekiah, who was dying. The promise of more years was for Hezekiah, but these first words tell you what God is like.

Bible verses about healing for a broken heart

Not every wound shows up on a scan. These are for grief, shame and hurt that has gone on for years.

• Psalm 147:3. “He heals the broken in heart, and binds up their wounds.” A song about God gathering his scattered people (Psalm 147:2). The picture is someone dressing a wound, slowly and carefully.
• Psalm 34:18. “The LORD is near to those who have a broken heart, and saves those who have a crushed spirit.” David promises God’s nearness, and you don’t need to be better first.

Bible verses for when healing is slow

• Psalm 38:9. “Lord, all my desire is before you. My groaning is not hidden from you.” David, in a psalm about being ill and left alone by his friends. When you’re too tired to pray, God has already heard you groan.
• 2 Corinthians 4:16. “Therefore we don’t faint, but though our outward person is decaying, yet our inward person is renewed day by day.” Paul doesn’t deny what time and hardship do to a body.
• Isaiah 25:8. “He has swallowed up death forever! The Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces.” Isaiah’s picture of the end, and the hope behind every other verse here.

What does the Bible say about healing?

The Bible calls God a healer. He tells Israel, “I am the LORD who heals you” (Exodus 15:26), and the Gospels show Jesus healing the sick wherever he goes. So it is right to ask, and to keep asking.

The Bible also shows faithful people who stayed sick. Paul begged God three times to remove his “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7–8), whatever it was, and it stayed. He wrote, “I left Trophimus at Miletus sick.” (2 Timothy 4:20), and he told Timothy to look after his stomach and “your frequent infirmities” (1 Timothy 5:23). None of these men lacked faith.

So the Bible holds two things together. God can heal, and he doesn’t always heal now. No one can tell you why in your case. The full answer waits for what Paul calls “the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23).

Prayer and medical care go together

Asking God for healing and seeing a doctor are not competing choices. When King Hezekiah was dying, he prayed and God answered, and the prophet Isaiah still said, “Take a cake of figs.” (2 Kings 20:7). They put it on the boil, an ordinary remedy of the time, and he recovered. Paul’s friend Luke was “the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14), and no one told him to find other work.

So keep your appointments, take the treatment your doctor prescribes, and pray. Don’t stop or change a treatment because of something you read here or heard at church. If you’re worried about a symptom, call your doctor, and in an emergency, get help right away.

How to pray for healing

1. Ask plainly. Name the illness or the hurt, and say what you want. Jeremiah 17:14 is only a few words long.
2. Tell God what’s hard: the pain, the waiting, the fear of the next result.
3. Thank him for small mercies: a kind nurse, a better night, a friend who drove you.
4. Ask again. Paul asked three times, and the psalms ask far more often than that.

Our prayers for healing include ones for yourself, for someone you love and for before surgery.

If worry is the hardest part of the wait, our list of Bible verses for anxiety may help, and our guide to God’s love for you is there for the days the silence feels personal.

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