In a post a few weeks ago, I talked about being a part of what God is doing instead of trying to fit God into what we’re doing. This post falls in line with that, but it takes it to a deeper level and gets a little more specific. I thought it would be good to share some of the ways that our crew here in Eagle River have found work well in planning and preparing worship events and worship sets in general.

***disclaimer*** This is NOT a “5 surefire steps to a blah blah blah…” This isn’t meant to be a cookie-cutter strategy, these are just a few things that we have found work well for us.

Dump the baggage. We want to be in line with God’s plans for the event, and want to remove any distraction or aspect that could distract us from focusing in fully on Christ. So, before we even start brainstorming an order, flow, or other creative elements, pray. Set aside any junk or baggage, confess anything that needs confessing. Basically, get rid of any junk.

Ask and then listen. God knows best, I think we can all agree on that. In prayer, ask God what He wants to do, ask God what He wants us to know. And then, once you ask, listen to how God responds. It’s nice to have something to write with so you can jot down things as they come. It’s also nice to pray as a group, that way you can discern as a group what you feel God is saying to and showing you.

Take it from there. God is creative. We are made in His image. We are designed to be creative. So let’s take what we’ve gotten in prayer and start to build on that. Here is where a lot of songs, scriptures, flow, and an order of events usually come in.

Check back often. Go back often, in prayer, and ask God if you’re on the right track. If something feels off, ask what it is and then work to correct it and continue on.

We’ve found that in doing these things consistently makes things go a lot smoother overall. When we as a group seek God’s will and guidance and discern together where God is leading something, there is less room for egos, there are less disagreements, and there’s less tension between those involved in planning.

Again, this is not a step by step guide to great worship or event planning. It’s just a few things that we’ve found that work and I thought it might be helpful to others.

Make God the center of what you do, and no matter what, the end result will be good.

d

She was the one that I’d wanted for all times
And each night I’d spend prayin’ that God would make her mine
And if he’d only grant me this wish I wished back then
I’d never ask for anything again

I’m sure just about everyone can recall a moment when they essentially prayed, “If I get X (person/job/gift/whatever), I’ll never ask for anything again.” I can remember one very specific moment when I was fifteen when I came to God with a request like this. Now, when I think about requests like this that I’ve made and others have made, I think of how it must sadden God when we say this.

To say that if we get something, we will never bother God for anything again, I think we totally miss it. We totally miss who God is. God loves us so incredibly much and wants us to come to Him for everything.

Paul said to pray continually, and part of praying continually is asking God to do stuff. We ask God to heal, to protect, to provide.

I feel like, so far, this post isn’t written very well and I’m not sure how to rectify that, but I want to emphasize that we as Christians are called to pray continually, and pray with power and with authority. (That was a very long, maybe run on, sentence).

I am actually going to take my own advice and spend some time in prayer with our Father as soon as this post is finished.

Go. Pray. Now.

d

Tonight, that idea, that dream, is going to become a reality as the three day Healing Prayer Training Seminar at Community Covenant kicks off tonight. Over the next three days, eyes will be opened, chains will be broken, walls will come crashing down, the boxes we’ve put God in will be busted open, hearts will be mended, and people will be healed.

I’ve been excited for this weekend for the last several months and I can’t believe that it’s finally/already here. A lot of good stuff is going to happen over the next three days.

God will be God and it will be good
d

I spent an hour or so last night writing down lyrics, humming melodies, and coming up with chord progressions to some songs that I’m trying to write, I actually made a lot of progress on a new one and am going to put more focus on finishing it. But after I finished writing for the night, as I was getting ready to go to bed, I felt really refreshed and had a peaceful feeling about me. I wrote a post a few months ago about rest and refreshment. And I think that the great feeling after songwriting last night is a way of God telling me that this is a good thing for me to do to rest, relax, and spend time with God.

The timing of this realization is not a coincidence as the subject of rest and the discipline of taking a Sabbath was brought up during a prayer session Tuesday night. And so here, I post publicly my intention to use songwriting as a way to rest, relax, recharge, and spend time with God. I don’t believe that this is all that I personally need to do to be more faithful and intentional about a time of rest, but I believe that this is definitely a part of it.

So I want to issue a challenge to you, the reader. What’s something that you can do to be more intentional about resting and spending time with God on a consistent basis? Read your Bible more? Spend a certain amount of time every day/week in prayer? Do an activity that you enjoy that calms your spirit? And would you be able to commit to doing that and telling a couple people about it to hold you accountable to it? I encourage you to seek out a way to go about doing this and see how the time you spend with God in a more intimate way affects the rest of your day/week.

Mine involves songwriting. What does yours involve?

Dustin

A very popular and effective way to go about the process of inner healing is through what’s known as prayer ministry. In a nutshell, prayer ministry is a group of people working in cooperation with the Holy Spirit to bring about inner healing in a person’s life. And there are some very key parts to the process of inner healing through prayer ministry.

“Affected people usually know not only that something is wrong, but that their problem might be caused by evil spirits” (MacNutt, 1995, p. 76). A person knows his or her own body and thoughts best, and usually he or she can tell when something just doesn’t feel right. As a person who is in the group performing prayer ministry, there are a few key areas to observe when diagnosing whether or not a person is being oppressed by an evil spirit: spirit, mind, will, emotions, and body (Log et al., 1999). Although one must always use caution when attempting to discern if the problem a person is experiencing is caused by demonic oppression or something else. Long et al. (1999) warn to, “Never presume too quickly, on the basis of observed symptoms or behaviors, that afflicting spirits are the cause of a presenting problem. Be careful to hold in mind the whole spectrum of potential causes of suffering, being open to be guided in other directions [by the Holy Spirit] (p.244). What this means is that it is never wise to immediately jump to the conclusion of saying that a person is being afflicted by an evil spirit and that you should examine other possible areas before diagnosing the cause of the problem. Francis MacNutt (1995) also gives the same warning that the problem might be caused by something else and that he’s been in situations where people have faked signs of demonic oppression just so they would receive attention. Just because a person is reporting signs or symptoms that are similar to spiritual oppression, one must always be careful and never rush to that conclusion.

Once it’s been determined that there is a problem or an oppression by evil spirits that needs to be dealt with, the ones doing the prayer ministry should try to go back and see where it might have started. It is a good thing to look back and try to find the source of the oppression, or an incident or ecperience that would allow evil spirits to come in and gain some influence and control. Examples of this would be but not limited to sexual sin, drunkenness, drug use, occult activites, or contact with persons or places with demonic power (Long et al., 1999). The purpose of doing this is to remove the reason the demon has to be there. And once the demon has no reason to inhabit the person anymore, it is much easier to, with the authority and backing of the Holy Spirit, tell it to come out.

Sometimes an evil spirit will come into a person because of a weakness or wounding that they are carrying around with them, not necessarily sin. If that is the case, “it is important that, following upon the healing and deliverance, we ask that Jesus’ life come into that person’s life to fill up whatever was missing” (MacNutt, 1995, p.192). This is imperative because like the picture Jesus paints of demons in Luke 11, the demon will go out and try to find others it can bring back to re-inhabit the person. But if Jesus’ life is in the spot where the demon once resided, it won’t be able to move back in.

According to Francis MacNutt, When doing prayer ministry, it is important to note that while deliverance always requires inner healing along with it, inner healing does not also require a deliverance session (1995). There are times where all that needs to be healed is a wound or burden someone is carrying around with them that isn’t necessarily sin, but it is something that prevents them from living the life that God intended them to live.
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There you have it, five excerpts addressing the wonderful subject of inner healing. There is so much that can be said about this topic that it’s almost impossible to cover everything, but I hope that this was informative and educational and raised some questions about God and how He still works. Again, if anyone has questions, don’t hesitate to ask me either through leaving a comment or by tracking me down on Facebook. Thanks for being a part of this series and reading the stuff that came out of my head.

It’s been fun to share these ideas.

Dustin

Unfortunately for The Church, the common practice of healing would not last long. In some areas in the middle ages, it was even believed that God not only wasn’t healing people, but that He was directly afflicting people because of the common belief that all people were evil. Gabriele de Mussis, a lawyer in northern Italy wrote in 1348 that, “After the mortals had thus been warned, the quivering spear of the Almighty, in the form of the plague [bubonic plague or black death], was sent down to infect the whole human race, aiming its cruel darts everywhere” (Aberth 2005, p.99). Those words show how, even though this man was a Christian, he believed that God was actually the one punishing the human race through the terrible disease that swept across medieval Europe. Another popular belief among Christians since the time of the early church is that illness and sickness of all sorts, spiritual, mental, and physical, are all crosses to bear from God and that it was actually God’s will for them to be afflicted like that. MacNutt (2006) says, “If we believe that, then to ask for healing is to oppose God’s will and to refuse the cross he offers. In such a view it may be permissible to ask for relief, but it is far better for the sick people to accept and bear their suffering” (p. 33). In other words, if it was believed that the afflictions someone was suffering from was from God, they should, instead of seeking relief, bear with it and continue on. This was a popular belief among Christians even thought it goes against when Jesus himself said “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). However, this worldview of believing that God is the one who afflicts people with terrible illnesses, like the plague, took hold in this time and has carried all the way into the modern day church.

Today, we are able to identify terrible happenings like wars, oppression, and genocide; all of which are effects from the Fall (MacNutt, 2006). It’s not uncommon in today’s society to watch television and see a story about something horrible that’s happening to someone or a group of people in your own neighborhood, city, state, or nation. There is a general consensus among people of all beliefs that the world is messed up and in need of some serious work to restore it to the way it should be. However, the idea of healing isn’t a very well received topic, even in the church where is should be a central value. The idea of a demonic oppression or infestation is not an acceptable concept in many mainline Christian churches (MacNutt, 1995). In some places, even suggesting or bringing up the topic of inner healing and deliverance, or casting out demons, could have negative consequences for the one who brings it up. However, despite the common views against inner healing, there is a revival and a movement going on in the area of healing ministry. “The climate is changing. People are hungering and thirsting to know God in a direct, experiential way. And the sick need healing, just as much as they did in Christ’s day” (MacNutt, 2006, p.18). And healing goes beyond illness and oppression from spirits; if healing the way it has been described were to flood over the earth, wars could end, hatred and prejudice would be a thing of the past, and injustice would just be a word, not something that is actively happening in the world. Francis MacNutt even wrote in his own book, Healing, that his own experiences convinced him that these divine and inner healings happen regularly.
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I think that next week will be the last part of this series and will wrap it all up with talk about prayer ministry and what that looks like. Thanks for reading, and please share and comment if you agree/disagree or if you think I’m just totally whacked out.

Thanks for reading and joining in on this series of looking at the often forgotten aspect and desire of God.

Dustin

Now to the good stuff…

This is part three of the paper I wrote this fall about inner healing. You can read part I here and part II here. Now for part III: healing in the early church.

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After Jesus was taken up into heaven and his disciples remained on earth, the Holy Spirit came upon them in power in an event known as the Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4). From there the disciples were filled with the power from God to continue the work Jesus had started. The apostle Peter healed a crippled beggar and witnesses were amazed by what they saw (Acts 3:1-10). As more and more people began to accept and believe what Christ had said, people were being brought out into the street in the hope that Peter’s shadow would fall upon some of them as he walked by and they would be healed (Acts 5:12).

After Paul, the writer of most of the New Testament, accepted Christ, he began doing the same works that the other apostles had been doing.

Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. This girl followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so troubled that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!” At that moment the spirit left her (Acts 16:16-18)

The apostles and those the apostles ministered to were seeing first hand the miraculous works that those who believe and follow the words and teachings of Jesus are capable of. In fact, healing was such a big part of the early church that in the book of James, it was written that healing is something that we are supposed to do. It says, “Is anyone of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord” (James 5:14). This passage makes it seem that healing should be a very common part of what the Church is all about because everyone could use healing to some extent or another from evil oppressions and influences.

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This is the shortest excerpt of the series and we’ll hit the home stretch next week with part IV. Again, check back next Friday (I’ll actually put it up on Friday this time) for part IV of this series where we’ll look at the fall off and resurgence of healing in the Church.

Dustin

For me personally, I had a prayer ministry session with two amazing women and in that time God really gave some clarity to a situation that I was literally heartbroken over. It was actually kind of funny, (not funny-haha, but funny-interesting), because as I was getting ready for the prayer session, I had imagined how it would go and what God would say. But, like always, God had something else in mind which was a ton better than what I was thinking would happen. By the end of the session I felt much better about what God was doing and wanting me to do.

That was the biggest moment of the retreat for me, but there were several other people who had incredible moments of vulnerability with themselves, with God, and with the others there. There were testimonies of people realizing that they were believing a lie that they were a failure and unloved. There were testimonies of people beginning a relationship with Christ after knowing about Him. All in all it was an amazing three days of bonding and developing our relationships with our Saviour.

God never fails to amaze me at times like this.

Dustin

“A significant portion of His [Jesus’] ministry was that of setting people free from the bondage to evil spirits” (Long, Shay, White, & Willcox, 1999, p.228). In the Christian faith, evil spirits are fallen angels that instead of aligning themselves with and serving under God, they align and serve under Satan and continuously wage war on the kingdom of God and those who follow Him. When Jesus was on earth, he decided, out of his love and compassion for humanity, that it was time for these spirits that had been oppressing and afflicting people to be cast out and sent away. To do this, one must first understand a little bit about what an evil spirit, or demon, is and does. Since evil spirits are bodiless beings, they desperately want to attach themselves to something with a body that they can then influence and gain some level of control over. Jesus describes a journey of an evil spirit by saying:

When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, “I will return to the house I left.” When it arrives, it finds the house swept and clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go and live there. And the final condition of the man is worse than the first (Luke 11:24-26).

That story Jesus tells paints a clear picture of how desperate evil spirits are to have a place to inhabit and they tremble at the thought of being homeless (Long et al. 1999). The idea of evil spirits desiring a resting is well demonstrated in the gospel of Mark where Jesus is casting out an evil spirit. It says:
Then Jesus asked him [the evil spirit], “What is your name?”
“My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area (Mark 5:9-10).
The words spoken by the spirit show their fear of being without a place to inhabit.

Because Jesus was compassionate towards people and wanted to see them set free, he was willing to travel around to heal and free those who were afflicted. He would do this even when some of the religious leaders of the day protested. The gospel of Matthew states, “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick” (Matthew 14:14). What it doesn’t say is that Jesus felt obligated to heal them; it says that he had compassion on them. Jesus possessed the heart of God the Father and wanted desperately to see people, his people, set free from what was holding them down. The compassion, love, and mercy Jesus showed towards those he was around was so great that he healed people much to the chagrin of the religious leaders. On the Sabbath, when Jesus was teaching in a synagogue, he healed a crippled woman (Luke 13:10-13) and because he had healed her on the Sabbath and the religious leaders considered that to be work, which wasn’t allowed, they criticized him. But Jesus quickly rebuked them. “His willingness to violate the tradition of his religious authorities shows the strength of his compassion for the sick…” (MacNutt, 2006, p.73). Jesus’ healing ministry can be summed up with just a few words. He healed because he loved, and this was an important part of Jesus’ mission on earth.

During Jesus’ time on earth he also bestowed upon his followers the power to heal and drive out demons. “He called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out evil spirits and to heal every disease and sickness (Matthew 10:1). Jesus never intended to be the only one to go about healing the sick. His plan all along was to disciple and to teach his followers so they could be a part of the work that he was doing. But authority over demons doesn’t just mean praying a simple prayer and the demon will leave. To cast out a demon one must be using the power and authority of God to fully do what Jesus was intending them to do. MacNutt (2006) says, “We notice at once this is not merely a technique He taught his followers about how to pray for the sick: God’s power has to back up the prayer or it will not work (p. 70). In other words, a prayer is just words if the power of God isn’t behind it. And when performing a healing or deliverance, the power of God must be present with what is being prayed for any real healing to take place.

The way believers were to have the power of God to back them up in their prayers was for Jesus to send the Holy Spirit to be forever present and among those who believe and follow Jesus. “In Jesus’ famous Last Discourse (see John 13-17), we find that His main promise was to send the Holy Spirit to His disciples – and to us (MacNutt, 2006, p.73). This was the promise that Jesus gave to his disciples as he left them and was taken up into heaven. It was a promise that they would be able to continue with the work he started and fulfill the commission he had given them to go to the ends of the earth proclaiming the good news and healing the sick.

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You can read part on of this series by clicking here.

Check back next Friday for part three.

Dustin

I spent most of the hour of worship wrestling with God and trying to haggle and bargain my way out of dealing with some stuff in that time, but I knew that I was supposed to receive prayer. So the music stopped and we regrouped and began to pray for each other. I knew I was the first one who needed prayer, so I reluctantly said that I was the one who was supposed to be prayed for. I didn’t want to say why I was the one who needed prayer so I said for them to ask God what they’re supposed to pray about and maybe I’d avoid having to deal with this stuff. But in prayer one of the people received something from God that couldn’t be ignored and I knew that this had to be dealt with.

The time that followed was full of healing for my spirit and I’m thankful that God chose to deal with it last night, despite me not wanting to. God blows my mind in so many ways in times like this. No matter how much we try to do things on our own, we desperately need God’s guidance to really do what needs to be done both in our lives and in others. And when God offers his guidance, we need to be obedient and willing to accept it. Last night would have been nothing if those praying for me wouldn’t have shared what God was telling and showing them. God continually blows my mind and I wouldn’t trade what happened last night for anything else.

Even though I originally didn’t want to deal with it!

Dustin