God's plan of redemption - explained
Study 9. HealingTrue praise and worship in a meeting is not a matter of the worship leader choosing his or her favourite choruses, it is as important as the preaching of the word that you are directed by God throughout. This means spending time in His presence long before the meeting to get the theme that the praise and worship should take.
Once you have done that you will then need to do what everyone else should be doing and that is fasting and praying for the presence of God to be in the meeting in a powerful and tangible way. There is such a thing as a sacrifice of praise because in reality there may be some who are going through a rough time, especially the sick.
What has all this got to do with healing? The fact is that when praise and worship is from the heart and led by God with the worship leader listening out for any instruction from God (as indeed should always happen) many people get touched, healed and delivered through the power of God even though nobody has prayed for them.
If you are to see these things happening amongst you then not only will you need to pray and fast days in advance but you will need to have prayer going on against the forces of darkness continuously before hand, while the meeting is going on and for a time afterwards also.
At an outreach meeting some time ago a group of prayers stopped praying when the leader of the meeting announced that the meeting had concluded, after many had come forward to receive prayer. At that point the hall started to empty as people made their way home.
However on this occasion, especially as it was an altar call for people to receive Jesus as their Lord and saviour the group decided to find out what would happen if they continued to pray after the meeting had been declared over. What happened on other occasions was that the people simply went home at that point.
What happened on this occasion was that the longer they continued to pray the longer the people kept coming forward to receive The Lord Jesus as their personal saviour or to receive healing from something that they had been suffering from for a long time. Many wonderful testimonies of both healing and salvation came out of that meeting.
There are several types of illness that can come about; we will need the gifts of discernment and knowledge to know what the person asking for prayer needs at that time. Many times in churches around the world people will receive a touch from God and then after a few weeks will have to come up for more prayer because they are suffering as much as before, why is this?
If you pull up a weed from your garden but do not pull it up by its roots, you will find that after a while that weed grows back again, whereas if you pull it up by its roots it does not grow again. It is the same with praying for people to receive healing, we need to deal with the root cause of their sickness not the symptoms of it.
A person can get sick through abuse of alcohol or tobacco, also a person can get sick when they catch one of the many viruses that are continually going around in the air. They can get sick through taking on too much work or doing things that they are either not strong enough or should not have to be doing.
Many people today are suffering mental and physical health breakdowns because of the pressures that are put upon them in family life, working life and other ways also. Anyone these days can suffer in this way, Christian or not. However, the root cause of such illnesses might not be so obvious unless someone goes into their family background.
Exodus chapter 20 verse 5 and several other places in the Old Testament read as follows: ""You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me"
Why would God punish future generations for the sins their fathers have committed? The true answer is that He will not, what is meant here is to draw the attention of the people to the fact, not understood in the same way in those days, that some of the things that their fathers get up to can affect their children and grandchildren many years after.
For instance, if someone in the family suffered from mental illness there is an increased risk of the present or future generation suffering in the same way, this applies also to alcoholics, womanisers and those who do even worse things by indulging in occult activities.
The spiritual consequences of these and other sins can go on through three or four generations. When we pray for a person to receive healing we need to know if the illness has come upon the person as a result of their own sin, the sin of their ancestors or in a perfectly normal way in a fallen world.
This is where we need a word of knowledge, so that we know what we ought to be praying. We should never pray for someone to be healed if we have not been directed to do so by God. Anything else would not be acting out of faith but out of presumption and would actually be a sin.
In John chapter 5 Jesus is at the pool of Bethesda where many sick people await the stirring of the pool so that they can get into it and be healed. It tells the story of a man who had been ill for more than 30 years being healed by Jesus but nobody else was, He just simply disappeared into the crowd after that.
Verses 1 to 9 of this chapter read as follows: "After this there was a feast of the Jews; and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. There is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, lame, and withered waiting for the moving of the water.
An angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water, whoever entered the pool first after the troubling of the water was made whole of whatever disease he had. A certain man was there, who had an infirmity for thirty and eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had been a long time in that condition, he said unto him, do you want to be made whole?
The impotent man answered him, sir I have nobody, to put me into the pool when the water is troubled: but while I am on my way another person gets there before me. Jesus said unto him, rise, take up your bed, and walk. Immediately the man was made whole, took up his bed and walked: and on the same day was the Sabbath."
Every time somebody came up to Jesus and asked to be healed Jesus would immediately ask Father what He should do. As Jesus did this, so do we need to. Once He had heard Father's instruction He obeyed it, not out of presumption but out of obedience.
Unless we get to the root of the sickness no matter how many times we pray or whoever prays for that person the illness will after a little while come right back again, but if we listen for a word of knowledge from God as to what the root cause is and how we should pray then the number of people who get healed would multiply exceedingly.
Jesus healed three blind men in three different ways. One He told to wash in the pool of Siloam, the other touched the man's eyes and asked how much he could see and the third man was told "receive your sight, your faith has made you whole." Since Jesus needed to hear Father's instruction as to how and what He should do, so do we.
The above things are general principles, sometimes in a meeting if healing has been and continues to be prayed for God will sovereignty break out and start healing people from various illnesses (some of which have been described as incurable by doctors) and many miracles will happen without anyone having prayed for these people.
What an honour and privilege it is to be in a meeting like that, if you follow the suggestions mentioned in these studies you will find that you can have these things happening in your meetings also, but if you do not want it enough you will not put in enough effort or prayer time. Are you willing to pay the cost to see people healed and souls won for Jesus?
Continue to the next part of God's plan of redemption - explained... Study 10. Deliverance
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