Last year, there was an idea to hold a healing conference at Community Covenant where pastors, lay-leaders, and church members from all over the state could gather together to learn about the healing ministry of Jesus and then take that back to their churches all over the state.
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.
I’m reading a book right now called Healing by Francis MacNutt, and while reading it, MacNutt made a great statement that I wanted to share here.
Knowing that the synoptic gospels usually speak about Jesus’ healings as “acts of power” rather than as miracles helps us understand the basic theme of Acts, which is to show that the early church, the early Christians, had the same power to preach, to heal, and to cast out demons that Jesus had. The church is the continuation of Jesus’ saving power in history. The Jerusalem church (Peter) and the gentile churches (Paul) all carry on the same preaching and healing as Jesus himself did, because Jesus is the one who is still doing it. Only now he is multiplied in his apostles-and in us-who can be his witnesses to the end of the world.
Just as Jesus combined both preaching and healing in his presentation of the goespel, the early apostles carried on that tradition with no diminution of power. When these early Christians were persecuted, listen to how they prayed for help:
And now, Lord, take note of their threats and help your servants to proclaim your message with all boldness, by stretching out your hand to heal and to work miracles and marvels through the name of your holy servant Jesus (Acts 4:29-30)
Notice that they did not pray to preach and to heal, but to preach by healing. They preached the message of salvation by actually continuing the works of Jesus. A doctrine of God’s salvation without that salvation actually taking place, or a doctrine about healing without God’s power to make healing actually take place, is empty rhetoric. Perhaps this is why so much of today’s preaching impresses people as abstract and irrelevant.
Jesus and the early church didn’t put a separation between preaching and healing. Healing was preaching, and preaching was healing. Healing was so much a part of what Jesus did. Both physical and spiritual, men and women, young and old. Somewhere along the path in Church history though, the common occurrence of healing almost died out completely. But people need the same kind of healing today that was occurring in the gospels, and here’s the good news…
Jesus is still in the healing business!
That’s great news because I know that I’m still a jacked-up mess and the Holy Spirit is currently working in my heart to bring about healing from some woundedness I’ve endured. And when the power of the Holy Spirit comes into contact with our woundedness and brokenness, the result is restoration. Healing is making a come back in the Church and we are beginning to get a better awareness of the power of God and who He is.
I can’t believe that this series has stretched out to a month long. Here’s the final excerpt I’m going to be sharing from this paper. You can find all of the posts related to this series here. And now, the final excerpt.
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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.
Aren’t you proud of me? It’s Friday and here’s the post I promised. Same as usual, this is part IV of my paper on inner healing. For parts I-III click here. This part continues where part III left off.
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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.
So, I’m a bad blog owner and didn’t deliver to put this post up on Friday like I said I would. To compensate for this, I would like to extend the offer of a free hug from me to you next time I see you if you so chose to accept this offer.
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.
Here’s part two my the weekly series I’m doing containing excerpts of the paper I wrote on inner healing. Last week looked at our need for healing and how it goes back to the beginning with Adam and Eve. This week, we look at Jesus’ ministry and how healing played a large role in what he did during his time on Earth.
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“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.
Several months ago, on the old, old, blog, I did a brief post talking about my fondness over the song Healer, written by Mike Guglielmucci and how I believed that that was a song that God really had his hand on and that was really becoming an anthem for the Church.
The story behind the song is that Mike was diagnosed with cancer and wrote that song, in pretty much one session, about how he believes God is his healer and his faith in God in such a hard time. The song was recorded on a Planetshakers album and Guglielmucci even led the song himself on the live Hillsong album, This is Our God, where he had an oxygen tube in his nose and the tank onstage with him during the song.
Since that time, however, there has been a development that has been brought into the light. Apparently, Guglielmucci wasn’t and has never been sick with cancer and actually came up with the cancer story to cover up a pornography addiction that he was battling. Now, I loved this song. I fell in love with the lyrics, the melody, and the story right away when I first learned about this song. I thought that this was an incredibly powerful song, with amazing lyrics, written by a broken man, that really captured what worship is. But with the news of Guglielmucci making up the cancer, and he was trying to cover up a pornography addiction, I think that… this is an incredibly powerful song, with amazing lyrics, written by a broken man, that really captures what worship is.
But not everyone shares this same opinion now that the real story has been revealed. I’ve read blogs, seen videos and read newspaper articles that talk about how they’re outraged and that the song loses all credibility and how it should never be used again and how it should be stricken from the record books and how if they’re ever in a worship service where that song is played they won’t be able to worship because all they’ll be thinking about is the lie that that song was promoted on.
I believe though, that if you’re unable to focus on God during worship because you’re so wrapped up with this story, then that’s your problem. Healer is a great song – it was written by a sinful and broken man. Name one song or hymn that we sing that was written by a sinless and perfect person?
Maybe I feel the way I do about this story because I can understand some of what Guglielmucci has gone through with his pornography addiction, as I’ve shared before about my struggles with porn. Maybe I feel this way because I’m naive. But just because the song wasn’t written based on the story we thought it was doesn’t mean that it isn’t accurate. God can heal cancer. God can heal pornography addictions. Nothing is impossible.
And if you feel like you have been hurt by Guglielmucci’s actions, forgive him. I know God already has; and if the Creator of the universe can forgive something, who are we to hold onto it?
Dustin
p.s. Here’s the video of him doing the song for the Hillsong recording.
This semester I wrote a research paper in inner healing and deliverance. While I was writing this, I had several people ask if they could read it once it’s finished and I thought that this would be a good place to post some excerpts from the paper and see what you think about it. (Am I trying to get more blog traffic? Maybe, but this is how I’m gonna do it.) This paper was written based on what I’ve read, what I know, and what I’ve seen and experienced in my own life.
This first excerpt talks about our need for healing and how that goes back to the beginning; it goes all the way back to Genesis.
If one is to look at the subject of inner healing, one must first go back to the very beginning and observe a key matter: what is the need for it? In the Christian faith, Jesus Christ is the only Son of God and He was sent to save and restore the world. Francis MacNutt (2006), a Catholic Priest and pioneer in the revival of inner healing ministries who has written several books on the subject of inner healing, asserts in his book The Healing Reawakening: Reclaiming our Lost Inheritance that, “We will remain forever in the dark if we do not understand why God sent His son to be Savior of the world. Why did Jesus come among us in the flesh? He came because we had lost our inheritance and he intended to restore it” (p.27). This is a key statement in looking at inner healing because if someone doesn’t know that inner healing is needed, how then will healing take place?
The need for healing starts in the very beginning. Going to the Bible, it is easy for a person to see that humankind had committed a great travesty and was in need of reconciliation both to God and to them. According to the Bible, in the story of Adam and Eve, God created them in His image to live, work, and take care of the Garden of Eden. They could eat from any tree in the Garden, but they were forbidden to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This didn’t last long though as both Adam and Eve both ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They committed the first sin, and the consequences were severe both for them and for everyone who was to come after them. In Genesis 3, it says:
To the woman he said,
“I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:16-19, New International Version)
The incident of Adam and Eve’s sin was a tragic time because humankind had officially committed what is known as “the fall” and the result was that we could no longer be in the direct presence of God, as well what God laid out in the passage. In this sin that Adam and Eve committed, we had lost what God had originally intended for humans and thus we had lost what God had intended to give to everyone. Francis MacNutt (2006) goes on to state in The Healing Reawakening that our inheritance was lost when, “the human race sinned and fell from fellowship with its Creator” (p. 28). For Christians, this may have the darkest time in history, for it was the day that humans fell from a real relationship with God.
It was not going to stay like that forever though, the Bible tells us that God had a plan to reconcile the world to him and erase the work that sin had done in the world. The plan was for God to send his son, Jesus Christ, to bear the burden and pay the price of sin for the entire world. When Jesus came in human form, he spent three years of his time on earth ministering and teaching those around him. And in his teaching and ministering, healing was a large part of what he did. In fact, Jesus’ ministry could be summed up with three points or three main goals. He proclaimed that the Kingdom of God was near, he fought to take back what had been claimed by the kingdom of Satan, and he came to heal the sick; He came to heal them physically, spiritually, and emotionally. In another one of his books, Healing, Francis MacNutt (2006) says that, “The time of the Messiah [Jesus] would be a time of healing, of liberation, and of salvation” (p.41). In other words, the time of Jesus would consist of people being healed, people being set free, and people being saved.
I think I’ll make this a weekly series and post some more excerpts over the next few weeks. Hopefully this will stir up some really good discussion about God-stuff.
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