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There are so many different types of situations that can come up as you minister healing prayer. I have seen different ministers use different techniques that have been highly effective for certain situations. In this lesson, I want to concentrate on some of these specific prayer tools or strategies. These are meant to be simply that.. tools that you can pull out and use when God brings them to mind or puts it on your heart to use that particular tool. We must never put our faith in the tool, but in God who heals. We must never fall back on a routine or ritual for a given type of situation. Rather, we must look the the Lord to guide us into His will on how to pray for each specific situation. You should never depend on a given technique for a given situation.. but have many "tools" in you tool belt and ask God to show you which one to take out and use for this specific ministry case.
There will be times when you have prayed and God has done something, but the healing is only partial. If there is some evidence that the Lord is still on the person (heat, coolness, tingling, shaking, crying, the person reporting some type of physical sensation), then you may want to continue praying. However, you may run out of things to pray, and are not sure what else God wants you to say. In this case, it can be highly effective to simply leave your hand on the part of the body you are praying for and begin to bless what what the Holy Spirit is doing, invite Him to brood over the person with healing and to continue to work until He finishes what He doing. You don't have to say a lot, it is OK to have long periods of silence as you continue to rest your hand on the person. Just occasionally say things like, "Lord we bless what you are doing" and "Come Holy Spirit". Sometimes the Lord will be working through you to touch the person. If you are patient and wait until He is done, you may see Him do quite a bit more than you expected.
Sometimes the person you are praying for is nervous and distracted. You might want to help them to get their focus on the Lord by worshiping together with them for a few minutes. You can lay your hand on their shoulder (or on the effected body part if appropriate) and begin to worship, saying things like "Lord, we worship you. You are so awesome and so powerful, so good and so loving." Or you might help engage the person's faith in God's desire to heal them personally by saying things like, "Thank you Lord, that you love Sue and you desire to heal her. Lord, thank you that Jesus already bore this infirmity on Calvary so that Sue won't have to. That you that you desire to make Sue well and that you have the power to make that desire a reality."
What you are doing here is getting the nervous or distracted person to engage their focus and worship on God, building their faith and helping that person enter into a place that makes it easier for them to receive from God.
The bible tells us that Jesus was moved with compassion (or love) and He healed the sick. Matthew 14:14 says, "When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick." And in Mark 1:41, Jesus was moved with compassion for the man with leprosy and healed him. Sometimes we need to remind the person of God's great compassion or love, and of how God often heals the sick in response to that compassion.
So sometimes we need to ask the Lord to come and brood over the person with His love in some tangible way. As they being to sense is presense and His love begins to saturate them, their faith is engaged and they can receive their healing.
Sometimes when a person has recurring back, hip or knee pain, it is because their hips are not at the correct angle and this puts a strain on the skeletal system. In this case, the person does not need a physical healing so much as they need an alignment.. to get things in their right place so that there will not be pressure or strain in the wrong places, causing the pain.
I first saw this demonstrated by someone who was conducting a healing meeting in San Jose. He prayed for this one lady who had a bunch of different problems. God was clearly at work and healed just about all of them. But she still had some back pain. So he asked one of the ministry team ladies to place her hands on the lady's hips and command the pelvis to tilt to the correct angle, the angle God had created it to be in. I had never seen that before and it caught my interest. The next day was a Sunday morning and I was teaching an adult Sunday school class. One of my students came to me after class with much hip and knee pain.. she could not lift her leg high enough to get in her car unless she physically lifted it with her arms.
I prayed for her. As I was finishing the prayer, the Lord recalled to my mind how this man had instructed the ministry team lady to pray for the woman's hips. I figured that if that memory was coming to me duing ministry, it must be the Lord, so I put my hands on her hips and commanded her pelvis to rotate to the correct angle. That portion of prayer did not take more than a few seconds. But just then she reported that the pain had left. I asked her to raise her knee and she was able to raise it higher than I could raise mine. Only an hour before she had been unable to raise it to get out of her car. But when the hip was commanded to rotate to the correct position, the pain left and she was able to function properly.
This is another thing for lower back pain. Sometimes one leg is a bit shorter than the other.. anywhere from 1/4 inch to a full inch. If the legs are not the same length, this can put a strain on the lower back. Sometimes after you see God heal a person's lower back pain, you might feel prompted to see if their legs are the same length. To do this, have them sit in a straight backed chair and press their hips firmly against the back of the chair. Have them extend their legs straight ahead of them, parallel to the floor. You might want to let them rest their ankles lightly on your hands for support, or they will quickly get fatigued holding their legs up. (If the person does not have thin soled flat shoes on, then have them remove their shoes.) Look at their heals, and see if they are the same length. If they are not, have them lower their legs, snuggle further back in the chair and make sure they are sitting straight and upright. Raise their legs again an see if the heels are still at different lengths. If so, then in Jesus name, command the shorter leg to grow. Do not pull on it or tug on it in any manner, the power of God will cause that leg to grow until it is the right length. This is probably the easiest physical healing that there is to do. I have never see someone minister this way and the leg did not grow out.
I first saw this demonstrated at one of Peter Wagner's classes in seminary. Peter was praying for someone with back pain and he invited us to gather close and watch. Then he commanded the leg to lengthen and it did, right before our very eyes. So we began to measure each other's legs and experiment on each other. At that time, I had intermittent lower back pain and my legs measured out to be slightly different lengths. So a fellow student commanded my leg to grow. It felt like she was pulling on it tremendously hard. I even asked her to please stop pulling it. But those who were around us watching said that my legs were resting on her hands and she was not pulling. When the pulling sensation went away, my legs were the same length.
This sounds basic, but literally you tell the sickness or problem to leave in Jesus name, and it obeys you. It is a very short prayer and it is very simple to do. This type of prayer used to confuse me until I began learning to train dogs. When you work with dogs, you give them a command and then you give them a physical feedback to obey the command. After a while, they learn to do the command without any physical help. If you are a dog trainer or someone who takes their dog to obedience class you learn to give the command with confidence and to always be consistent to give the dog the physical feedback if it does not obey you. It does not take long for the person giving the command to expect the dog to obey every time, and it usually does. What happened is that the trainer learned how to exercise their authority over their dog in a quiet and gentle way.
Jesus has given us authority over sickness. We can command it to leave, similar to how we command a demon to "get out" and it must obey. However, this does not seem to work well for people until they get a realization of the authority that Jesus has given them. Once they know they have the authority, it frequently (but not always) works. A simple command like "flu, in Jesus' name and through His authority, I command you to leave immediately and not come back" can have immediate and dramatic results. The reason it works is because Jesus broke the power of sickness on Calvary. We are healed by His stripes (1 Peter 1:24). He has given us His authority over sickness.
Jesus has made it quite clear that we are not to curse each other (e.g., other people). However, this restriction does not appear to apply to inanimate objects. For instance, Jesus cursed the fig tree in Mark 11:21, and it whitered and died.
I have seen people curse cancer, commanding it to shrivel up and drop off. And it did as commanded. I heard a lady share her testimony when I was in Toronto. She intestinal cancer. The person praying for her cursed the cancer and commanded it to shrivel up and fall off. The next day, when she went to the bathroom, she felt something unusual pass through her intestines. She examined the contents of the toilet bowl and saw these gray round looking fatty balls, that were kind of shriveled. She believed it was the cancer lumps, so she went back to the doctors for more tests and did not show any trace of cancer.
There have been multiple times when someone needed healing but God told me not to pray for a healing. Instead He told me to bless the defective body part. And each time He has told me to do this, the person was healed. For instance there was a lady with terrible pain and swelling in both feet. I blessed her feet with health, with the ability to clear the excess fluids and to function properly. It was a fairly short prayer. As I finished praying, the very visible swelling in the feet and ankles began to go down. About 10 minutes later there was no sigh of swelling. She had been wearing shoes that were too big because of the swelling. The shoes would not stay on her feet once the swelling went down.. and she had to walk home barefoot.. but the pain was gone and she never had another problem with her feet in the three years I remained in contact with her after that.
I am just going to mention this briefly here because we covered it in some detail in lesson 6. There are times when the physical condition is caused by a demon. To get rid of the physical condition, you have to get rid of the demon that is causing it. Jesus and His disciples prayed that way frequently.
There will be times when God will have you command a demon to leave instead of praying for physical healing.