Healing "Preliminaries"

Our goal is to understand how to pray for the sick and see God heal them. Some of us have already gotten started in this, and others of us would like to get started. This teaching series is going to be a "starter" in praying for the sick. Before we can get started, we have to deal with a few things that can hold us back and prevent us from being effective. Let's talk about those things so that we will have a better understanding of healing and praying for the sick.

The Three I's

When you pray for the sick, there are some things that are necessary to "getting the job done" and they start with the letter "I". Let me describe them for you and then we will develop one of those "I's" in great depth.

INTEGRITY

Things have to be done with integrity. That means what you are on the outside is what you are on the inside. If we don't know where to start, that is always a good place to start. Cooperate with God as He changes our character, so that we are through and through genuine, we are righteous, we are the way God expects us to be. We are to be the way we are when we come to church or relate to other believers, but yet, it comes through and through with integrity. Integrity also gives us credibility. Integrity also keeps us in there for the long term. So integrity is very important. When we do ministry, we must do it with integrity.

INTENTION

The second "I" is intention. This means we do things on purpose. Let me share an example from my own church. Ten or eleven years ago, we abandoned nearly every program that we had in our church because we were doing things we did not know why we were doing those things. We abandoned almost everything, keeping only a few things. Little by little, we began to add in new things as God would give us direction. This means that all of the ministries we have going on today were done on purpose.

For instance, we have two services. It is not because of the size of the congregation -- most days we could fit everyone from both services in the building at the same time. That would be easier on me because I would only have to preach once on Sundays instead of twice. But we intentionally choose to have two services. Why? We did it because we wanted to minister to another group, not because we were just running out of room.

The first service has the more traditional worship -- it consists of three hymns. We do this because here are people in our congregation who are not comfortable with contemporary worship music and a worship band. The worship that ushers them into God's presence is the worship they grew up with and it is the worship style they are comfortable with -- the hymns. So we purposely choose to have two services in order to minister to this group as well as to the majority of our congregation.

It was done with intention. We do things with purpose and we do things with intention. Intention is to know what we are doing and why we are doing it, and to have confidence that God wants us to be doing it.

INITIATIVE

The third "I" is initiative. That is what we are going to focus on -- initiative. Initiative is getting started. It is beginning a task or taking the first step. All of the beginning steps in the Bible are given in such a way that you are not going to fulfill them if you don't have initiative. It tells us to pray, seek, ask do. There are many things we are told to do, and we will never accomplish those things if we don't have initiative. William Carey said, "attempt great things for God and expect great things from God." If we are going to be people who are going to get some things from the Lord and begin to walk in those things, it has to start somewhere and a lot of it has to start with us.

The Season Of God's Visitation

As we get started, it is important to understand the times we are in -- I believe God desires to bring a visitation of His presence to His people. Now some can say, "That sounds really nice, but what in the world are you talking about when you say, 'a visitation of His presence?'" To be honest with you, I can't really say what that is going to look like in this day, at this hour, in this place. I don't know. I can tell you what it looked like in the past.

There were certain periods of time in history where God simply invaded in a special way with His glory and His presence. It would take and capture a whole city or a whole region, or perhaps just one church. And the glory of the Lord would descend and we would experience the presence of the Lord. In other words, you would experience a little bit of heaven on this earth and it is the greatest experience. There is nothing that compares to it. When people experience a measure of the presence of the Lord, there is nothing in this life that even comes close to it.

There are periods of time when God would do that and it is characterized by great deep repentance of sin, conviction of sin, and also great, great waves of refreshing from the Lord, renewal, joy, and of all the things that come from the Lord. So I can look in history and see the times when God would come and move in an awesome way. So when I say visitation, that is some of the things I am referring to. But I don't know what it would look like in this day, in this century, in this place, in this culture, in this area. I don't know. All I know is that when it comes, we will know it.

We have to understand the season that we are in. We must be like the "sons of Issachaar" from 1 Chron. 12:32, "who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do." When you know the times, when you know the seasons, then you know what to do. God has a time frame to be fulfilled in order to carry out His purposes. He has a time table to accomplish His will. It is like a moving train, and God is saying, "Will you get on the train? Will you get in on My agenda?"

We don't have all the time in the world to accomplish the will of God. We don't have time to sit back and wait for something to happen. We need to be discerners of the timing of the Lord. Like the sons of Issachaar, we need to discern what to do in the times and the seasons that we are in. I believe we are in a season of grace where God is pouring out His grace of preparation before the visitation. This means that you will be able to get in on it at the beginning instead of at the end. You will be able to maximize your participation in the outpouring of God in His time of visitation.

We need to leave behind the things that hold us back in order to move ahead with God. What are the things you need to drop? What are the things you need to cut loose of in order to follow the Lord, in order to move on with God? What are some of the areas of business that you need to give concern to?