Thoughts From Teresa

You know, as intercessors, we should make prayer a part of our day-to-day lifestyle. We expect God to hear and answer our prayers, or we would not bother praying, right? But God doesn't only want us to have this type of prayer life in our prayer-closet or at prayer meetings or ministry times at church. God expects us to live a lifestyle of prayer as we go about our daily routine. We must not segment our prayer life from the rest of our life -- even when we are around others. This means when we run into someone how needs a touch from God, we should pray with them (being led by God's Spirit, of course). And we should expect to see quick answers to our prayers because that is what He wants to do.

This applies to all areas of needs, including physical healing. As we go about our day-to-day tasks, we will run across people (both saved and unsaved) who need a physical healing type of touch from God. It might be a little thing (maybe a cold or ear infection) or it could be a big thing like a serious or life-threatening disease. We need to be open to God's leading and prepared to pray for the people that God has us encounter during our day. We should expect to see God touch them and heal them in response to our prayer, because He will.

Let me give you some examples from this past week to illustrate my point. I am writing this on a Saturday morning. Last Sunday at church, I decided to munch on a package of sugar-free M&Ms while the pastor was preaching. The bag they come in is a thick cellophane, and it makes a lot of noise when you try to open it. I did not want to make a bunch of distracting noise during the sermon and I was sitting near the back of the sanctuary, so I slipped out of my seat and went into the foyer to open the package. I would have only missed a few seconds of the service to open the bag, except that I saw a friend's husband sitting in the foyer.

It was not normal for him to miss service, so I went over to him to inquire if every thing was ok. He said it was not, that his knee was really hurting him and that was why he'd left the service. (He had been in an accident a while ago that had given him a quite serious knee injury and he had several surgeries. It just did not seem to be healing right and he frequently had painful complications from it.)

I asked him if he would like me to pray for him and he said yes. I sat down next to him and laid my hand lightly on his knee and began to rebuke the pain. I also asked the Lord to restore the knee to it's original condition before the accident and released blessings on him. I could not tell if anything was happening, because I could not feel heat or any of the other manifestations I usually feel when I pray for the sick. He moved his leg a lot as I prayed for him, bending and unbending it.

I was touching him very lightly, so I did not think I could be causing him any extra pain by laying hands on it. But I decided to keep he prayer short just in case. When I finished praying I asked him how it was. He said that the pain was completely gone and he had a big smile on his face. I asked him if there was any trace of it left because I would be happy to pray some more. He said "No, it is completely numb."

I gave him a hug and went back to my seat to catch the rest of the sermon. Now here is the odd thing. My hand was perfectly cool when I prayed for him. But as I got back to my seat, it got really hot, like it often does when there is a strong healing anointing is flowing through it. I am not sure why it happened that way. I asked God about it but He choose not to comment on it.

At the end of service, the pastor did something he doesn't usually do. He gave three words of knowledge for physical healing and invited those with the conditions to come up front for prayer. One of those words was pain in the right knee -- the condition I'd prayed for in the foyer. People came forward for the other two words, but the guy I prayed for did not come up for prayer because he did not have the knee pain any more! God had already healed him.

On Monday, I talked to a friend of mine who lives out of state. Her husband had just been discharged from the military, a medical discharge, because he had come down with MS while serving in the war zone. It took the military close to a year to complete the paperwork and release him, and his MS continued to get worse and worse over the course of that year. The first Friday he home after he was discharged from the military, he went to his church's weekly 24-hour prayer and worship service. The Lord released some healing prophetic words over him through the pastors and church prophets. Then everyone at the service gathered around him to pray for him. The power of God fell on him and he ended up on the ground. When he got up, the numbness that had been in the lower half of his body was completely gone and he could think clearly again, his mind was no longer "foggy." He was healed of MS!

His wife related this story to me on the phone on Monday. Then she said something really strange. She said, "You know, several people where were there on Friday night when this happened asked us about it on Sunday. And when I told them that he was still fine, they acted surprised. Several made comments that he probably wasn't really healed and that we should not get our hopes up, etc." She was astonished at the lack of faith that the people in her church had for this healing. The same people who God had used to bring the healing did not believe God had really healed him. That struck her as odd.

The sad fact is that this is typical of many of us. We are predisposed to disbelieve in miraculous healing even when we are willing to pray for the sick. It's time to confess our unbelief and repent of it. We need to rebuke doubt and disbelief and get rid of them, because God is a healing God. He is planning to do more and more heating through the prayers of His people. It is time to get on board with God and His agenda.

The following day, Tuesday, I was at my gym and working out with my personal trainer. He is unsaved (a pre-Christian, as my pastor likes to say), but he is pretty open to the things of God. I have been witnessing to him on/off for a few months now. One of the things that really catches his interest is stories about physical healing. He knows that I pray for the sick and that God heals them, and that interests him a lot. (I think that in general, the world is more interested in demonstrations of God's power/reality than in a bunch of intellectual arguments about Him.)

On Tuesday, at the end of my workout session, he told me that he had a problem that had gone on for three weeks where his head and ears were very congested and he had really annoying and persistent ear pain because of it. He asked me to pray for him. So we went into one of the offices (they have glass walls so there is not any true privacy. They are usually used by the sales team, and people don't pay a lot of attention to what is going on in them.) I explained that I had to touch him to pray for him and asked if that was ok. He said sure. I laid my hands on his ears, rebuked the pain and congestion in Jesus' name, commanded any spirit of infirmity to leave and blessed his ears and ear cannels with health in Jesus name. I also asked the Lord to demonstrate that He is real by healing him. The whole prayer could not have taken more than two minutes.

Again, I did not feel any physical manifestations of healing -- my hands did not get hot or tingle. I asked my trainer if he noticed any difference, explaining that sometimes healings are instant and other times they take a few hours. He said the congestion had cleared up as I prayed, but it comes and goes through out the day, so he wasn't sure if that meant anything or not. I told him to let me know how it was when we had our workout session the following week.

As it tuned out, I saw him again on Thursday when I went in for a Basel Metabolism Rate test (BMR). You breathe into this machine for a while and it lets you know how many calories your body burns at rest. When I saw him Thursday for this test, he told me that the prayer worked. He said that he was surprised -- he let me pray because he thought maybe something might happen, but he did not really expect anything to happen. But it did happen, he had not had any ear pain since I prayed! He was pretty excited about it, but not quite ready to receive the Lord yet.

He also told me that a bunch of people at the gym had noticed me praying for him and had asked him what was going on. He told them that I prayed for sick people and most of the time my God healed them. They thought that was neat. He said, "You're famous." I replied, "Well, tell them that I am happy to pray for any of them any time they need it. They should feel free to just grab me and I will pray for them." (I hope people at the gym really do begin to ask for prayer, because I believe God really will heal them!)

My trainer did request more healing prayer. It seems that he has bad hearing loss in one ear and he wanted to know if God could fix that. So we went back into the office and I prayed for him again. I must have gone brain-dead, because I forgot to test his hearing after the prayer and see if there was improvement. I suspect there was, because God is a healing God, but for some reason I forgot to check for it. So now I have to wait until Tuesday when see him again to find out what happened.

I wanted to share what a week of a prayer-life style looks like. This week God did a lot of healing stuff, but prayer-lifestyle is not just limited to physical healing. God hears and answers our prayers in all areas of our lives. Let me close with one more example from this week which has nothing to do with physical healing.

I was a bit late in doing the ministry bookkeeping, and a couple of months of donations piled up. So I worked on them on Wednesday. When I did them, I noticed that I had misplaced an honorarium check for $300 from a healing service I spoke at on June 16. I looked all over for the church. I checked my bible, where I had put the check when they handed it to me. I checked every room in the house and I also ripped my car apart looking for it. It was no where to be found. So I prayed and asked the Lord to please somehow get that check to me. I spent so much time on Wednesday looking for that check that I did not make it to the bank before they closed.

Thursday morning before I had to leave for my BMR test, I went back to the table where my bookkeeping and deposit stuff was. There was a little white envelope laying on top of all of my paperwork. It had not been there before and my husband did not put it there. I opened the envelope, wondering what was inside of it, and it contained the missing check I'd been looking for! There is not a natural explanation of how that envelope came to be lying on top of my pile of paperwork. My guess is that an angel put it there in response to my prayer. No matter how God got it there, He did answer my prayer and He returned the missing check. (By the way, I deposited everything in the bank on Thursday before I had a chance to misplace anything again.)

God is a God who hears and answers our prayers -- our personal prayers for our own needs and our ministry prayers for the needs of others. That is why it is so important that we do not segment our prayer life from the other areas of our life. We should develop a lifestyle of prayer, a lifestyle of seeing God's presence and power move regularly in our lives as we go about our daily business.