A Beginner's Guide To Healing

Review

We have spent the last several lessons examining various bible models of praying for the sick. We covered 21 of them, including:

1. Straight intercession (2 Chron 30:17-20)
2. Petition prayer for another - asking God to heal them (Gen 20:14-18)
3. Petition prayer for yourself - asking God to heal you (2 Kings 20:1-7)
4. Standing in agreement with a relative's prayer of faith (Matt 15:28)
5. Standing in agreement with another's proclamation of faith (Matt 8:8, 13)
6. Being a point of contact for another's faith (Matthew 9:21-22)
7. Encouraging and building another's faith (Luke 8:49-55 [especially 50])
8. Proclaiming God's truth and good news (Matthew 9:35)
9. Proclaiming the healing of Jesus over a person (Acts 9:34)
10. Petition prayer and laying on of hands (Acts 28:8)
11. Through physical contact, usually the laying on of hands (Matt 14:35-36, Mark 5:22-23, Luke 4:40)
12. Anointing with oil (Mark 6:7-13)
13. Healing through deliverance (Matthew 17:15,18, Acts 8:7)
14. Commanding the person to be healed (Luke 18:41-43)
15. Command body parts to work properly (Mark 7:32-35)
16. Commanding the person to do the impossible (Matt 12:9-13)
17. Forcing the person to do the impossible (Acts 3:2-8)
18. Persistent prayer (including asking for feedback) (Mark 8:22-25)
19. Moving under God's healing anointing when it is present (Luke 5:17)
20. Carrying God's sovereign healing power/anointing (Luke 6:19)
21. Being explicitly sent by God, and obeying (Luke 9:2,6)

What I would like to do now is to share a few practical prayer models that incorporate these bible principles. One of the most popular is the Vineyard 5-step model, originally developed by John Wimber.

In any of these models, the most important thing to remember is to minister in love. Be gentle and unjudgemental as you interact with the person. If you get any words of knowledge, deliver them in a tentative way ("I'm getting the impression that..." or "does ___ mean anything to you") instead of "thus sayeth the Lord." Give the person the space to reject the word if they are not comfortable with it. (You might be right on and the person just is not willing to face that issue or admit that problem yet. Or maybe you have simply made a mistake. Either way, just let a word go if the person is unreceptive to it. Trust the Holy Spirit to deal with that person in His own time and in a way where they are wiling to accept His ministry.)

If you minister in genuine love, the person will usually feel ministered to, even if you make mistakes or miss important issues. If you are 100% correct with words of knowledge and prophesies, but deliver them in an unloving manner, the person will usually feel abused and dissatisfied with the ministry time. So, if you do nothing but minister God's love to the person in a gentle and unassuming fashion, the person will go away feeling ministered to. And they will be more open to the Holy Spirit (and less guarded), so the Lord can continue ministering to them after the prayer time is over.

The 5-Step Prayer Model

This healing prayer model is a 5 step process --

1. Interview the person to find out what they want prayer for and any relevant data (listen to them with one ear and listen to God with the other)

2. Form a tentative diagnosis of what to pray for. If the person has stomach pain but also has frequent nightmares and is holding a severe grudge against her sister and is enveloped in bitterness, you have to decide what you're addressing in prayer. In this example, just praying for stomach pain probably will not do the trick -- even if God heals it, it will probably come back soon if the other issues (especially unforgiveness and bitterness) are not dealt with.

   Trust the Holy Spirit to reveal to you what the key issue He wishes to address for this person is. It might be a straight physical healing, it might be some type of inner healing, it might be to deal with (and release) bitterness or unforgiveness, it might be to repent of sin in their life, it might be deliverance from a demon, etc.

3. Choose a prayer strategy. Once you've determined what God wants you to pray for, you need to find out how He wants you to pray.

   Let's assume you are prying for the person with stomach problems and bitterness against her sister, and you've decided to address the bitterness and unforgiveness. There are different ways you can pray. You could ask God to bring His healing for those past hurts that made the person bitter?. Or you could ask for a divine empowerment for that person to let go of the bitterness. Or you could help them to confess their sin of unforgiveness to the Lord and ask for His forgiveness and then help the person to release forgiveness to their "offender". Or you could rebuke a demon and break it's power off of the person so that they will not be under an oppression that makes it more difficult to forgive. So you need to find out which prayer strategy God wants you to use in this case.

   There are usually many valid ways to pray for a given thing. The secret is to find out which way God is doing for this person at this instant... they you do it with Him. If you are unsure of which strategy God wants you to use, ask Him.

4. Once you've finished chosing the strategy and the person is done answering your last question (plus any necessary follow-on dialog) then it's time to go ahead and pray. Pray according to the strategy that you've prayerfully selected. It is OK to cycle through these steps multiple times. You might pray a while and then ask the person what is happening with them (more interview or feedback). In fact, you are strongly encouraged to get feedback from the person (see lesson 8). Based on what they say, you may choose to keep pressing in, address another issue in prayer, or you may realize that God has already done the healing. During this whole process, we ask God to lead us, to reveal words of knowledge and any truths that He wants to reveal. We trust Him to do so.

5. Post prayer counseling and follow-up. After you've finished praying, you don't just walk off and leave the person standing. You "debrief" with them. If, for example, you've prayed for physical healing and it did not happen instantaneously, you might mention that sometimes God starts the healing as a process and it takes a little time to complete. Sometimes God wants us to soak in prayer on several occasions. Sometimes when we pray for healing, nothing appears to happen, but that does not mean that there is anything wrong with the faith of the person who is being prayed for, etc.
   If the person received a healing, you might warn them of how the enemy sometimes tries to bring the symptoms back and talk them out of their healing. Teach tell about standing in faith, etc.

   In short, post prayer counseling is dialoging with the person about what we've just done in prayer and any follow-up that they may need to do.

It should be noted that when praying for physical healing, we never suggest the person discontinue their medication until it is obvious that they've been healed. We recommend they go back to their doctor for verification and let the doctor be the one to take them off of the medication. It is important to differentiate between faith and wishful thinking. And it is dishonest to pretend that a healing has occurred if one has not actually taken place. Remember, the responsibility to heal/minister belongs to the Lord, not to us. Our job is simply to pray and ask God to come with His power/grace. It is up to God, not us, to decide whether or not to answer that specific request.

When we use this healing model to people, we generally tell them that we're going to be asking them some questions so that we can get an idea of how best to pray and also asking God to come and lead this prayer time. We explain that we may drop in and out of discussion/feedback during the prayer time and that is OK. We remind them that all we can do as pray-ers is to invite God to come, but all the power and all the ministry come from God, not us.

Words Of Knowledge

Another ministry model is to call out words of knowledge and ask the people who have the conditions listed in the words to come forward for prayer. This can take a few different formats.. you may seek the Lord for words of knowledge in advance of the meeting, or you may simply be given the words during the meeting. When the people come forward for prayer, there are two different prayer strategies. One is to have a ministry team who simply go around praying for people, asking them what word they are responding to and praying accordingly. Another strategy is to have the person who got the word of knowledge be the one to pray for the person who is responding to the word.

The more specific a word of knowledge is, the more effective it is. If you receive a word of knowledge from God, try to press in for more details. If He tells you that someone has a sore wrist, ask Him which one.. is it the right wrist or the left wrist. Ask Him for details about the condition, such as this started 3 weeks ago or that it is a sharp seering pain instead of a constant dull ache. Ask God if it is a constant problem or an intermittent one. The more information you can get from God, the greater the ability you will have to activate the faith of the person who God desires to heal. You can also ask God for details about the person with the condition, such their sex, their approximate age (e.g, in their twenties) or even there first name.

A general word of knowledge can be effective, such as someone with a sore hand. But a specific word will serve to build the person's faith when they hear it called out and also serve to build your faith when you give a lot of detail and then someone responds. For instance, if you say, "This word is for Bob, who is somewhere in his mid twenties. You hurt your left hand at work a few weeks ago and it seems to be getting worse instead of better. There is a searing pain just below where the thumb connects to the wrist and it really acts up every time you move your thumb." I promise you this.. if someone named Bob comes up with that condition, you are going to have faith that God will heal them because He gave you so many specific details.

The problem about word of knowledge is that the more specific it is, the scarier it is to give it because there is a greater risk that you could have heard wrong. If you say "headache" in a group of 30, someone is bound to respond whether you heard from the Lord or not, because it is common for someone in a group that size to have a headache. But if you have a lot of specifics, you eliminate probability and begin moving more on the guidance and anointing of God. This builds your faith as well as the faith of the person you are praying for.

Let me just say a quick thing about how you might receive a word. Let's say it is a word of knowledge for someone with a compressed disk in their lower back. God can communicate this to you in a number of ways. You might suddenly start thinking about someone having back pain. Or you might "hear" the Lord say "compressed disk in the lower back" in your thoughts. Or perhaps you see a picture of someone clearly in pain and holding the lower back. Or you might see a picture from a medical book of the spine and it zooms in on a certain disk and you can see it is damaged. Or perhaps you feel the person's pain briefly in your own body. There are many different ways that God can communicate a word of knowledge to you. Once He has communicated a word of knowledge to you about a physical condition He wants to heal, then you should expect you will get a chance to share that word and pray for the person.