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Our last lesson looked at petition prayer (just asking God to come heal). We discovered that this is not usually the best prayer strategy to use when we pray for someone who is sick. Petition is not all that effective in physical healing, e.g., most people don't seem to get healed when all we do is invite God to come heal the person. This is because Jesus gave us His authority to heal the sick and He expects us to use that authority when we pray for sick people.
How do we exercise that authority? There are many different prayer styles that allow us to take authority over sickness and disease and spirits of infirmity. I would like to look at four of them:
(We will cover the first authority prayer style, commanding healing, in this lesson and look at the other three in subsequent lessons.)
COMMANDING HEALING IN JESUS' NAME
When Jesus prayed for the sick, He prayed like the one commanding a blind man to "Receive your sight" (Luke 18:42), or commanding a deaf man's ears to "be opened" (Mark 7:34). When Peter prayed for the crippled man at the temple gate, he prayed, "In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk" (Acts 3:6).
These prayers are examples of using authority to heal the sick.
Taking authority to heal means that we command healing in Jesus' name. You may command a disease to leave the person, or you may command the pain to leave. Or you may command the body part to function properly. Or you may command mutated cancerous cells to die and pass out of the body without causing any harm. In other words, you exercise the authority of Christ in conjunction with praying in God's will, and the sickness and disease and defective body parts have to obey.
Let me share an example of authority prayer from when I ministered in Nigeria in March of 2004. A man came to me for prayer who had been injured in a terrible fire. The soft tissue in his leg had been burned away and did not grow back properly. His muscles and tendons did not work right. When he sat down, he could not lift his right foot off the floor by straightening his knee and raising the foot. He had to grab the leg with both of his hands to lift his foot. Also, he was not able to stand up from a sitting position unless he used his arms to push off of the chair. He had these problems because his leg muscles and tendons had been severely injured in the fire and had not grown back properly.
When I prayed for him, I used Jesus' authority to command the muscles and tendons and ligaments to regenerate fully. I also commanded strength and elasticity to return. I commanded all these things in Jesus' name, and it took about 2 or 3 minutes to do that. Then I asked the man to raise his leg and he did so easily. (You should have seen the look of surprise and pleasure on his face when that happened!) Then I had him stand up and sit down several times. He was able to do so each time without using his arms to push off of the chair. He was very excited about that and he also reported that the pain was gone.
Why did that healing take place? Did I have some special anointing? Has God granted me a special authority? No, I have no healing authority in and of myself. I simply used the authority that Jesus has given to each of us. The muscles and tendons and ligaments in this man's leg had to obey Jesus, just like the storm had to obey Jesus in Luke 8:22-25. This healing had nothing to do with my personal authority; it was based on the authority that Jesus won over sickness and death when He died for our sins and rose again. And I had a right to exercise that authority because Jesus gave it to all of His followers, so that we might be His witnesses. You have a right to exercise the same authority that I did. You can do this too. Jesus promised it to you in John 14:12-14.
Now here is one "trick" about using Christ's authority. There is some measure of faith involved here. In other words, you have to believe and know that Jesus' authority is real, and that you really have permission to use it. Most of us don't truly believe that until we begin to experience it in some measure. We know in our heads that God doesn't lie and that we can take Him at His word. But we need to have experiences that line up with our head knowledge before we really "know" that Jesus intends us to move in His authority with Him. And most of us build our faith through experience.
It may sound like a "Catch-22," but it is not. You may think, "If faith is required to use Christ's authority to heal the sick, then I can't pray until I get faith. But I can't get faith unless I pray, so there is no hope."
I have really good news for you. You don't have to have great faith to begin to heal the sick. You just need a willingness to "try it" and the common sense to start with the simplest and "smaller" type of infirmities. I am not sure why, but most of us feel that it is "easier" to heal something simple like a headache or cold or flu than something "major" like blindness or deafness. The reality is that it is just as easy for God to heal a cripple as it is to heal a headache. But one feels harder to us than the other. So we should start by praying for the things that are easier for us to believe.
Now here is the neat part: as we step out in proportion to our measure of faith and use the authority Jesus has given us, God meets us. He heals the sick and we see that Jesus' authority really works for us when we use it the way He wants us to use it. We begin to experience God healing those small things and that gives us confidence that it might actually work if we exercise His authority over something a little bigger. So we try it. At first it works some of the time and it doesn't work some of the time, but we have greater confidence to try it because of the "successf experiences" we had with the "little stuff." Over time, we begin to experience more and more healings, and our confidence begins to grow and we are ready to move to the next level of "difficulty."
Again, from God's perspective, one illness is not harder for Him to heal than another, but we are driven from the perspective of our faith. God wants us to grow in faith as we experience His faithfulness to heal. Most of us have to start with relatively simple things because that is all our faith can handle. And after we see that the authority works, it builds our faith enough to step up to the next level.
When I first started authority prayer, I started with the "little stuff." I would command headaches and backaches to leave and command bodies to be healed from common maladies like colds and the flu. I would pray and the person would report that they felt better. At first I did not believe them, I thought they were just saying that to make me feel good. But after a while, I began to realize that most of the time when I used Christ's authority to command headaches and flues and colds to leave, they really did leave. I became confident that if I prayed for these types of problems, the person would usually be healed. Why? Because Jesus' power is real -- it really works.
That gave me the confidence to start out on the next level, which was things like arthritis and high blood pressure and digestive system disorders, etc. At first I did not have a lot of confidence in my authority to pray for these things because I did not have a lot of experience seeing God heal them. But over time, I gained experience and confidence in that area as well. I learned that the prayer has nothing to do with me, but that Jesus' authority is real and that He has given me permission to exercise that authority because I am called by His name.
There are some areas where I am still learning my authority. For instance, I have prayed for blind and deaf and crippled people and seen God heal them. But I have not prayed for enough of them that I have a confidence that God will usually heal these people when I pray. I know He might heal them, but I am not "sure" He will. As a result, I see some (but not most) of the blind and deaf and crippled people I pray for healed. But the more I pray, the more I see this type of healing.
I am currently building confidence in Jesus' authority to heal those things that seem "big" to me. I build the confidence by praying for people and seeing Jesus heal some of them. The more times I experience Jesus healing someone who is blind or deaf or crippled or who has cancer, the more my confidence and faith grow. Because of those experiences, my faith is growing. One day (soon) I expect to have as much confidence in Jesus' authority to heal cancer as I do in His authority to heal headaches. In my mind, I know His authority extends equally well to both areas, but I am still building the experiential faith that gives me the confidence to exercise His authority in that area.
This same principle will work for you. As you begin to pray for little things, you begin to see God heal and then your faith grows until you are ready to pray for the "next level" of sickness and infirmity. It is true that we need to have faith to exercise the authority that Jesus gave us. But that does not mean that we should not pray for the sick because we don't have enough faith to exercise Christ's authority in healing. What it means is just the opposite. We need to start praying in Jesus' authority for the little things so that we can begin to have experiences of God healing, and that will cause our faith to grow.