Healing in Christ II

Okay, now we can go. Alright. Technology drives me crazy. Well, thank you for coming back.

That I needed healing. And I think this is the first time I ever remember in my life that anybody sitting down with me and saying, let's pray for you.

And when I realized, it was getting to what we call generational healing. And so, Bishop Dave and Mary Ellen were a big help. And then, he anointed me with oil.

And I praised God. I was able then, later in the week, to have an appointment with them. And I got some things settled. I'm okay now. And I'm just really praising God.

I feel a freedom that I've never felt in my whole life. And I have to thank the Lord for it. He's so good. Praise God. Thank you. Another testimony.

I'm not good at speaking. A big crowd like this. Last Sunday, it was a blessing Sunday for me. I asked Bishop and Sister to pray for me after the prayers, after the session.

I had a severe pain. They said arthritis or whatever, but it was not a continuous pain. In a sudden way, it will come and then it goes off. But it was really severe.

I couldn't do anything this side or that side. So, after Bishop and Mrs. prayed, prayed oil and everything, I went home. I was okay.

But the next day, again, Monday, go to work. And again, the pain slowly came back. I went for a hospital visit and I saw Kathy in a different angle and then Susan Anton suffering and all this.

I said, Lord, all these people are going so much of pain. This is nothing for me. And why is it this fellow is coming and Satan is coming and disturbing me and it was healed and again, he's trying to disturb me and I said, no, in the name of Jesus, you have to get behind Satan and I again applied the prayer oil that I have at home Monday night and I said, Lord, this hand should be healed by morning to do what you want me to do.

That's what I prayed. And it's the morning until now, I have no pain. Great. So, Hepsi, do this. All right. Okay. That's great.

Are there any other testimonies anybody would like to share? I like to say that I was overwhelmed with everything that was going on.

So, but today, God strengthened me through the words saying, they prayed for me last weekend and then I prayed for me. And the sovereign Lord is my strength.

With that word, God strengthened me. Amen. The self-pity is gone. Yay! That's self-pity. Self-pity can be a monster, can't it?

It wants to grab us. Tonight, we're going to give a little introductory talk and then we're going to talk about how Jesus did it. How he went about healing people.

We're going to talk specifics about what he did. and then we're going to talk about some myths regarding Christian healing. We're going to talk about generational healing and if we still have any time, we're going to talk about post-traumatic stress disorder which just doesn't happen only if you go bang bang on a battlefield.

And then we'll have time for individual prayer following. We should be done by about midnight so there's no problem. Actually, we're going to try to finish around 8.15 and then go into prayer so that people who need to get home by dark can do that.

Okay. So, let's begin. I want to ask you a question. If there's enough healing in God's plan for everyone, why don't we see healing everywhere all the time?

Don't answer the question because we're going to talk about that. Let's, let's investigate that. First, we're going to talk about some basics of the Christian salvation.

And first, some God's love for us. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. John 3.16 says, For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that all who believe in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

that's a wonderful plan, isn't it? Why, why does the plan not pan out? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but one has to do with our own sin nature and our, our natural self-centeredness.

our sin and our self-centeredness rob us of living fully into that plan. What does Romans 3.23, which is a memorization verse, for all have fallen short of the glory of God.

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And then what happens as a result of that? This is the ouchy, ouchy verse. Romans 6.23, somebody started to say that.

The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. That's another memorization verse. because given our natural inclination, it's not only physical death, but spiritual death.

That's not popular to talk about in our culture today, but it's just straight scripture. It's straight Christian theology. It's been taught for 1965 years.

And then we went into the rebellious 60s. Some of you remember that. And us theologians, you don't remember that, no. And theologians began to teach about the ultimate goodness of humankind.

And one concept got lost. We had God's plan, God's redemption, forgot about the fall. That's been part of our undoing. But God loving us makes a way for us to get back into his plan and be restored to wholeness.

Romans 5, 8 says, but God shows us his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Jesus died on the cross in order to pay for our sins and self-centeredness to bring us back to God.

So the gift of salvation and wholeness is really ours. It's a gift. What do you do with a gift? You receive it.

The old illustration of getting a beautiful wrapped Christmas gift and saying thank you very much and putting it on the shelf, that's not God's plan. God's plan is salvation for all of us.

You know what? I suspect all of you have received Jesus Christ into your life. But we need to live on that next verse. Romans 10, 9 and 10.

But if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. That's not just a Baptist word.

That's a Christian word. You will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified and with your mouth that you confess and are saved.

I'm going to just have a prayer right now. Because if you've never received Jesus or acknowledged that you received Jesus, believe in his heart, it's time.

The healing comes when we confess Jesus. So let me pray for us and pray with me in silence. Lord God, you've been doing this for a lot of years and you know a lot more about it than we do.

But we do know that as we repent of a sinful lifestyle, of a self-centeredness, of everything's about me, you joyfully receive us back into your plan.

Your plan is wholeness for us, Lord. And so right now we acknowledge, we confess with our lips that you are Lord Jesus. Jesus, we believe in our hearts that the Father raised you from the dead.

We acknowledge that you have given us salvation. In our hearts, we believe we're justified. With our mouths, we confess and are saved.

Welcome into our hearts, Lord Jesus. Amen. If that's the first time you've said that prayer, please see us after and we'll just put a stamp of yay on you.

Because that's salvation. That's where it goes. Okay, Mary Ellen. The good news is that through Jesus, heaven awaits us when we die. But even as we live on earth, God wants to save us.

The same word, salvation, in Greek, sozo, means healing. God is active on the earth. He's active in our lives.

He wants to heal believers in Jesus. If this is true, which, by the way, it is, the healing ministry should be a prime ministry of the church, shouldn't it?

But things get in the way. We go off on tangents. We fear that we might pray for healing and nothing will happen. Or, we become timid when addressing God.

Or, we get involved in church wars over sex and doctrine. The energy for healing gets drained away in our anger. Even in charismatic parishes, where the Holy Spirit is alive and well and recognized, Holy Spirit energy gets drained off.

God sanctifies when we surrender entirely to His Holy Spirit. Often, in Spirit-filled parishes, we tend to replace the Holy Spirit with our own spirit without even realizing it.

We get so consumed with the gifts of the Spirit that we neglect the fruit of the Spirit. Those go together. That's happened to me before. Spending so much study time and speaking on healing at one point enticed me into a spirit of arrogance toward those who could not accept that ministry made me oblivious to the passionate love of the people Jesus loves.

Saying, God, work with me and help me to do a good job tonight replaced, Lord, just make some people better tonight. You get the difference? I found at one point that I was just running on empty.

I just knew that I could make it through the next talk, but watching the spiritual fuel gauge was consuming me. At last, I had to realize that I am as broken as the next person.

I am in abject need of God's faithful love. And at that point, I fell into the arms of Jesus. Healing came into my soul, into my ego.

Remember the movie Star Wars? God, in a sense, said to me, the force, Dave, use the force. So you can see that the institutional church itself needs healing.

It needs to return to its scriptural base, rather than wandering into a cultural base. We need to humble ourselves as church leaders and as church members, and pour out our pride so that there is room for healing and renewal.

1 Peter 5, 6, and 7 says, Humble yourselves therefore under God's mighty hand that he may lift you up in due time, casting all your anxiety on him because he cares about you.

If we are to impact our world with the love of God, we need to be an institutional church which is healed so that we can be known as a healing church.

So the church's ministry of healing is for you and it's for me and it's today. The Pentecost that took place 2,000 years ago, it's happening today.

The Pentecost is now. It's all over the world. Even in this room, the Holy Spirit still falls. God offers us a passion for spiritual renewal and healing today.

How much passion do you have for Jesus? I have to admit that my fire sometimes flickers. I try to do it on my own and so I get sick and tired and then I'm tired of being sick.

I forget to hold on to Jesus. The late J. Vernon McGee, radio preacher, once said that somebody yelled to him that Jesus was just a crutch.

McGee responded, you're wrong. Jesus is not just a crutch. He's the whole hospital. That's passion. Why do you think Jesus spent so much time healing people and teaching his disciples to heal and so little time leading church growth seminars?

Because healing was his passion. Jesus didn't spend much time demonstrating with placards or promoting other politically correct notions as the solution to the world's problems.

He just healed people by his touch, by his words, by his death and resurrection, by sending the Holy Spirit to make us all Pentecostals.

Jesus expects us to be healed and to heal in accordance with Acts 1 5, which says, For John baptized you with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.

So let's climb aboard the Holy Spirit train. The fire is being rekindled. The coal is being applied to the engine. all over America, all over the world, especially in Africa.

The Holy Spirit train is moving. As the evil one desperately tries to capture the heart of Christianity, so is God on the move to save his people.

This is not a good time to dither. This is not a good time to sit on the fence and not commit to anything. In this day you will be shot off the fence by one side or the other.

God wants his people found, he wants them saved, and he wants them healed. In the Anglican movement, in the United States and Canada, he's working.

It's interesting, the Anglican church has become a church filled with the Holy Spirit. it's amazing that he does that with stodgy old Anglicans.

It's amazing. He wants us to be consumed with the fire of the Holy Spirit. So we need to allow that Holy Spirit to inebriate us, to renew our faith commitment, to invite the Holy Spirit to fill us, to ask for healing of our minds, of our souls, of our bodies, to become wounded, healers, which is what we're to be.

You know, a few years ago, God gave me a vision, and it was a vision of a dotted line. It was just a dotted line going down, and I was watching this dotted line being made, and then suddenly, the dotted line became a solid line, and God said to me, you need to make a choice.

Which side are you going to be on? You can no longer cross lines. You need to be for me, or you need to be against me.

It's your choice. Of course, I chose to be for him. Praise the Lord. Lord. Okay, thank you, Mary Ellen.

We're going to shift now that we've given you the pep talk. All right, so we're supposed to be healing. How do we do that specifically? So we're going to talk about how Jesus did it.

That's a good place to start. And I have some handouts. We're going to go over these fairly quickly, but your homework assignment is to take them home and pray through them and look up the passages in the Bible.

We need to be on board to how Jesus did it. We need to be on board to how the apostles did it after he was ascended and the Holy Spirit came down.

So this could be interesting for us. We're going to do Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. When we do Mark, Luke, and John, we're going to only do those healings that were specific to those gospels.

And then we'll look at what the apostles did in the book of Acts. Okay, so we start right out with the gospel of Matthew and the first healing in Matthew is chapter 8, verse 3.

Jesus cleansed a leper. How did he do it? He spoke to the man. He touched him. Yuck. A man with leprosy.

He touched him. He spoke to him. You weren't supposed to speak to a leper. He touched him. You were not supposed to go near a leper. and he said, be clean.

The prelude to that was the leper approached him and said, if you will, you can heal me. And Jesus looked at him, spoke to him, touched him and said, I will be clean.

Chapter 8, verse 13 is the centurion's son. And this was a long-distance healing. He did not go, he was not anywhere near this young man, but the young man was healed.

And he said, go, and the centurion, the centurion had come to Jesus and said, my son is very ill, and I know that you can heal him.

and so he said, Jesus said to the centurion, go, let it be done as you have believed.

So believing on the part of the person healed has something to do with this. We'll find the contradiction to that later, but that's part of it. Okay. 8-15, Peter's mother-in-law.

Did you know Peter was married? Yes. Yeah, okay. So Peter's mother-in-law, they went home for fried chicken dinner after church, and she had the fever, right?

Jesus was hungry. Not really. So Jesus touched her hand, he touched her, and the fever left. Okay, it was a touch. Chapter 8, verse 32, the demonic oppression.

He just commanded, go. Nothing fancy, just a very, very simple word, go. And did he go?

Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Okay. All right, 9-2. This is a whole string of healings in one section. Matthew put this together. He didn't make it up. He recorded it, and he put them all in one plop.

Okay. The paralytic, 9-2. This was the man that they brought him, they had to put him down through the roof.

Okay. So the first thing Jesus did was, your sins are forgiven. And then later, he didn't touch him. He just said, rise, pick up your bed, and walk.

Forgiveness of sins has something to do with the healing process. Chapter 9, verse 20, the woman with the issue of blood, she just touched his garment.

garment. And the interesting thing was that even in this whole crowd of people, they were totally crowded in, and they were walking along the street, and this woman comes up and says, if I can touch his garment, I will be healed.

So she touches his garment, and then Jesus says, who touched me? And his disciples look at him and say, everyone's touching you.

There's a million people around you. What do you mean who touched you? And he says, somebody touched me. I felt power go out. And then he says to her, and she comes back, she comes up to him and said, sir, I touched you.

And he said, take heart, daughter, your faith has made you well. Sometimes when you pray for people, you can feel the power of the Holy Spirit working through.

She took the initiative, didn't she? She believed with faith that something wonderful is going to happen, and the issue of blood, which had been years, stopped.

25, the dead girl, do you think she had faith? She was dead. She was dead. Jesus took her hand, and she rose.

Touch, arise. Okay. 929, two blind men. He touched their eyes, saying, according to your faith, be it done to you.

Here's that faith thing again. It's an ingredient in healing. All right? And then, chapter 2. It's an ingredient, but it's not required.

And we're going to get to that, too. But it's pretty important. 12, 13. The man with the withered hand, it was on the Sabbath. You're supposed to do no work on the Sabbath.

You know, we talked about work this morning in the sermon. Work is worship. It's our work. Jesus said to the man, stretch out your hand.

The man stretched out his hand, and it was healed. By the way, editorial note, this morning we had some friends from Virginia worship with us. They were visiting us.

They were so impressed with you guys. They said, that's a mature group of Christians. And I said, are you talking about their age? They were really impressed with you all.

Thank you for being so kind to them. Matthew 17, 18. The boy with the demon. Jesus simply rebuked the demon, and it came out.

So, commanded demons to come out, rebuked the demon. All right, and then chapter 20, 34. The blind men in Jericho.

It's interesting. He asked, what do you want? You think a blind person coming up for prayer would kind of know what they want? But he wanted, he had to ask the question, what do you want?

And they said, we want to be healed. And so he touched their eyes, and their sight was restored. That's the last healing Jesus did in the gospel of Matthew until he did the real healing.

The real healing is eternal healing for us through the cross and resurrection. Okay. And now we move into Mark. In Mark 1, 25, the demoniac in the synagogue, he rebuked the demon, saying, be silent and come out of him.

Are we getting a pattern here for demons, how he dealt with demons? Chapter 7, verses 32 to 34, the deaf mute. This is interesting.

He's got almost a procedure here. Jesus puts his fingers in his ears, he spits on his tongue, he looks into his eyes, and he says, be opened.

The physical was an important part of that healing. touch, spit, spit. Any of you have a mama that if you got your face dirty and you were heading somewhere, she took her handkerchief and spit on it and wiped your face?

I have PTSD because of that. Okay. The boy, Mark 9, 25, the boy with the unclean spirit.

Here again, he rebukes the unclean spirit. Saying to it, you mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.

Sometimes even physical maladies have a spiritual, negative spiritual basis. Not always. Probably not even most of the time. But sometimes we need to watch for that in our lives.

Okay, so Luke, oh wait, and I missed one. Mark 8, this is an important one. 23-25, another blind man.

Jesus spit in his eyes, he laid hands on him, and he spoke it. He said, how do you see now? What did the man say? It was so neat. Yeah, I see men, but they look like trees.

Jesus said, we need a second touch here. So he did it again. For those of you who believe you just pray once and it ought to be better, no can do. Jesus had to pray twice for somebody.

And that may be what happens in our life. Jesus, another thing was he asked, how's it doing? How did I do on this? Sometimes when we're praying for people, we need to say, how are you feeling?

What's going on? Okay, so then we move to Luke. Healing is unique to Luke. 7, 13, and 14, the widow's dead son.

Jesus comforted the woman, he touched the beer or the casket, and he said, young man, I say to you, arise. Hmm.

Have any of you lost a loved one and just kind of hoped that they would come back? I remember when my father died, I was with my mother at my father's casket in the funeral home that night, and we were talking, he had already been embalmed, and my mother looked at him, and she said, he just moved.

He just moved his hand. Well, she thought he had. What was her great desire? He'd rise right up out of that casket and be the way he had been. All of us would like to have that.

Well, sometimes we're really glad they're lying there, but most of the time, we would like to see people arise from the dead. God's timing and care is really important in those times.

In this particular case, Jesus said to quote Monty Python, he's not dead yet. He's not dead yet. God's dead yet.

Wow, this one? Yeah. Okay. Chapter 13, 12 and 13, the disabled woman. He told her she was free, laid hands on her, and she was made straight.

What did he tell her? She was free. Healing a lot of times is getting free, isn't it? If you've ever had a lingering situation, when you got healed, you were freed.

Jesus did that over and over again. Let's go on to John. Healing's unique to John. The Bethesda pool, chapter 5, 8.

It could be that Jesus was on his day off, because it doesn't say he's got his guys with him. He just kind of comes into town. He may have been going to go to the mall, whatever.

He walks in, and he gets to the pool. I'm taking great license with this. We don't know any of that. We know that he was in time everybody beats me to blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

And then finally Jesus looks at him and says, get up. Get up. Take your bed and walk. Sometimes Jesus can be kind of tough with us.

Get us off the dime. Get us moving. God And there's the man born blind in chapter 9, verse 6.

Jesus spat on the ground, made mud, anointed his eyes with the mud, and said, go wash at Siloam. So he told him to do something on his own, and then he would be healed.

Sometimes he does that with us. And then finally in John chapter 11, 43, Lazarus raised. How much faith did Lazarus have?

He was dead. He was dead. And Jesus simply called Lazarus, come forth. Sometimes he just sort of comes out of nowhere and bops us into healing.

That's a wonderful gift. Now, you saw some patterns for Jesus. He touched often. Physical touch is important in healing.

He didn't always use touch. Did he touch people that needed demons released? It doesn't record, he does. What he did was took command of the demons.

He knew the demons were not supposed to be in the people. And so he commanded them, go. Sometimes we don't get possessed. We've got Jesus in our hearts.

Sometimes we get oppressed by demons. They tell us lies. And sometimes we even believe the lies. We can rebuke those demons.

In Jesus' name. We can tell them to get the heck out of my life. in Jesus' name. And take command. So were these all the healings that were done?

Did any healings take place after Jesus was ascended? Oh, while Mary Ellen has the word on that. In Acts, there are a lot of different incidences where the apostles were involved in the healing ministry and did a lot of, and were used by the Holy Spirit to do quite a few healings.

And the first one is Acts 3 verse 4, the lame beggar. And this is the, John said, silver and gold have I none, but what I have I give to you.

In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk. And then he took him by the hand and raised him up. He went walking and leaping and praising God.

Walking and leaping and praising. Okay, so we know that song. All right. Okay, touched. Use touch. And whose name did he pray in? The name of Jesus.

Okay. Chapter 917, Ananias to Paul. Remember, Paul was on the way to persecute Christians, Damascus, and he, a great, something happens.

And he falls down, there's a great light, he goes blind, and Jesus talks with him. Now, if you're on this side of history, if you're on Paul's side of history, you think, I'm going to be blind for life.

They led him into Damascus, he was a wreck, and not only did he come in as a wreck, he stayed a wreck for several days. Meanwhile, this layman, just a guy who was a Christian, a believer in Jesus, the Holy Spirit visits him and says, I got a special mission for you, Ananias.

And it's about, what was his Hebrew name? Paul's Hebrew name? Saul. You're going to go anoint Saul. What do you think Ananias thought?

This guy wants to lop off my head. You want me to go pray for him? But, okay, so he had enough courage, and the Holy Spirit came into him, so he went to Paul, he laid his hands on Paul, and he said, Brother Saul, Brother Saul, that's powerful.

This was not his brother at all. This was the enemy. Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus has sent me that you may be restored your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Once again, he laid hands on him, and he spoke in Jesus' name. All right? The next one is chapter 9, verse 34, bedridden Ananias.

And this was Peter who spoke, Jesus Christ heals you, arise and make your bed. And then same chapter, verse 40, Dorcas, whose other name was Tabitha, another dead person.

Peter, knelt down and prayed and turning toward her said, Tabitha, arise. It wasn't only Jesus who brought people back to life.

Okay? And the boy who fell out of the window in chapter 20, verse 10, Paul bent over him and took him in his arms and said, don't be alarmed, his life is in him.

Why did the boy fall out of the window? Fell asleep in the middle of a boring sermon. So that's why I'm glad we are on the bottom floor here.

The worst you're going to do is fall over. You're not going to fall out the window. Okay. And then lastly, yeah, is that yours or is that mine?

I just didn't boy. Okay, 28, eight. Remember when Paul got shipwrecked and they went ashore and they were saved and the local residents saved them and the snake attached.

Remember to Paul and the locals said, he's going to die. Let's watch him. And he shook the snake off and continued on. Then they figured, well, there's something special about this guy.

Well, the leader of that island, of Malta, invited Paul to come over for tea and in the process mentioned that his father was sick with dysentery.

And Paul prayed, laid his hands on him, and healed him. You see the pattern? It wasn't just the miracle worker Jesus who did healings.

His followers did healings in his name. They used his methods. And down to us today, we are to use the methods of Jesus.

To my knowledge, Jesus never used Reiki. Anybody know what Reiki is? Jesus never used to do it. It's all the stuff from the universe comes down and on my touch, I roll my hands around you and the universe kind of does its thing on you.

Jesus didn't use that. Some people use that. We try to do what Jesus did, which is why we went through this whole thing. In a couple of weeks, we're going to have a commissioning service for those who want to be commissioned as Christian healing instruments.

And so, I want you to not use other stuff. I want you to use Christian methods for healing and what Jesus has taught us. Which brings us to the next outline, the next handout.

Excuse me. You're in action again. You got you, buddy. Okay. Hopefully, there will be enough copies for everybody here.

We made 25 copies. It may be a couple of you that you could share because I think there are more than 25 people here today. We're going to do the Christmas tree of myths.

It's not Christmas yet. Halloween. Oh, that's true. We've got to get Halloween first. But you know, I'm thinking Christmas, it's the same weather, right?

Either that or somebody lied to us. Yeah, Raymond told us it's like this all year round. Okay, so myths regarding Christian physical healing.

healing. The first myth is the 21st century word for everything. It's all about me. Well, healing is about you, but it's about much more than that.

Healing is about the glory of God. It's God still working in his creation. Our God is not an old man who wound up the earth's clock and put it on the desk and let it run down.

But that's called deism. A lot of people still believe in a deistic God. When God does healing, he's not sitting up in a rocking chair someplace watching the world wind down.

He's active. So although it is about you, it's really about God in action. another myth is it's God's will.

And the only reason I say that's a myth is because sometimes people use it as a cop-out. They don't see any reason to pray for people for healing because they feel like the people who are ill are ill because it's God's will.

and God's will is for all of us to be healthy. God's will is for all of us to spend eternity with him and to be in joyful communion with him.

And what we are to do as healers is to help bring about that possibility in everyone that we meet and in everyone that we pray for a joyful communion with God.

Sometimes it is God's will that we go to heaven sooner than we thought we'd like to. But we're to pray for healing for everybody all the time seeking his will for the person.

Third, some people would say well it's okay for the spiritual part of me to be prayed for but not the physical. That's why we have medicine. No.

God wants to do healing in our minds, in our hearts, in our bodies, in our relationships, in our spirits. He's a full meal deal kind of God.

one prayer is enough, no more. This is a real, a real myth. I believe that everyone who has a need for healing should go back over and over and over again for prayer.

When you're given a medication by a doctor, he tells you to take the medication every single day.

He doesn't tell you to take it until you feel better and then stop taking it. He tells you to take it every single day. And I just believe that God wants us to ask for healing over and over again.

Ask for prayer over and over again. we're always, in some way or another, we are always in need of some kind of healing in our lives.

Just from the human condition. Another myth, Christian healing ministry ended 2,000 years ago. We talked about this a little bit last week.

There's a group within the Christian faith who believes that God may heal, but it's not our business. So we don't do the gift of healing. We don't do the gift of tongues.

We don't do the gift of word of knowledge, word of wisdom, interpretation, healing. Those were all ended with the last apostle. There's not one stitch of evidence of that in the Bible.

It was a kind of a heresy that got into Christianity. And a lot of Christianity is very suspicious of healing prayer today. That's a myth. you must have enough faith to be healed.

Well, you saw in several of the passages right here that several of the people in these passages didn't have any faith.

They were dead. They couldn't have any faith. But they were healed. They rose from the dead. and so that is definitely a myth.

And it's a cop out. And it's a cop out for people who are in the healing ministry who don't see any results. They don't want to think about the fact that, you know, things like that just happen.

And it's not there. It's not because of anything that they've done or haven't done. They want to make excuses for themselves. Sometimes I don't have enough faith, but you do.

And you can pray for me. I don't know if you've been really ill, but at some point in that illness, you just don't even pray anymore. It takes your brothers and sisters to pray for you.

They've got the faith. Ultimately, Jesus has the faith. Okay, so, if you're healed, you will always be cured.

That's a myth. What I mean by that is a person had cancer and he had given up.

And people prayed for him regularly and he was healed. The cancer didn't go away. But he was healed before the Lord.

His whole attitude, his whole complexion changed. He went to sleep and died peacefully. He was healed.

The cure didn't happen. Now, I would like the cure to happen. You know, I put my $1.50 in the machine. I expect to get a Coke. Right? You're saying, what does that have to do with anything?

Well, I want people to be cured as well as healed. And most of the time they are, but sometimes we're not going to get cured this side of the grave.

The healing, though, can come. And so that's a beautiful thing to hold on to. Expect a cure, but know the healing.

Another thing we need to remember is that God's ultimate healing is for us to spend eternal life with Him. And when we ultimately spend eternal life with Him, we are no longer on this earth.

And that is the greatest healing we can have, is to spend the rest of our lives with Him in His presence.

which is eternity. Which is eternity. I don't understand eternity, but I think it goes on for quite a while. Christian healing does not believe in the medical arts.

Now, I was taught that in my church. The church I grew up in, Christian science church, taught, teaches that you cannot rely on any medical science.

you have to rely totally on God. That is a myth. God and medical arts go hand in hand.

And you can have one with the other. You can have both and be in the healing process. God gave us brains.

He gave us intelligence. He gave us the ability to look for cures. And he gave us the ability to do research, medical research.

And he wants us to use that. so it's not true that you cannot rely on the medical arts.

You need to rely on both for healing to take place. Did you ever renounce Christian science? Oh, okay, great. All right. So, I know you had.

That was a trick question. That was a prompt. Okay. All right. And then next to the last. I've heard people say, look, I may be angry, but that doesn't mean I can't get physical healing.

I want to get fixed up, but I'm never going to forgive my mother. That's painful. That's a myth. Forgiveness, being able to forgive, being able to accept forgiveness, that's part of the healing.

Now, all physical illness does not come from anger or unforgiveness, but those two exacerbate our bodies, our problems.

And so, one of the things we all need to do, and all of us have, if I took a poll, all of us have somebody whose guts we are not deeply in love with.

all of us have somebody who did us in badly. And a lot of us have said, I'll never forgive him. We're making kind of an inner vow, which, that's very dangerous.

Jesus forgave you. You know, he really should have said, I'll never forgive you. You turned against my father. And you say, well, that's easy. He was God in the flesh.

Of course he was able to forgive. Well, he expects us to do the same thing. It's often a wonderful gift when we can finally take the hatchet, bury it in the backyard, and then forget where we buried it so we don't dig it up again.

And then healing often comes as a result of that. Keeping your body healthy has nothing to do with Christian healing. that is a myth as well.

Ouch, I don't like that. I don't either. Oh, okay. But it's true. Yeah, so all right, we're all going to run around the building five times now to get our exercise in.

But it is true that we assist God in the healing process through proper diet and exercise. I took a New Year's resolution this last year which has worked really well for me.

I'm going to exercise less and eat more. And it worked. But it may not be so good for my healing. So we need to be in tune with our bodies and treating them well.

So the bottom line and what's holding up the Christmas tree and makes it sparkle rather than be heretical is that God loves us. God loves you. Amen?

Amen? Okay. We're going to talk about generational healing. So we're going to save PTSD for next week.

We're going to save post traumatic stress for next week. I just don't feel stressful enough to give it tonight. I'll give it to you next week.

This is generational healing we're going to talk about now. Marilyn, can you give us a little briefing on what this generational healing thing is? Well, it's mainly praying through the family tree and praying for things that have gone on in your family and a lot of it is stuff that you have absolutely no control over because a lot of it was done before you were even born.

But it sets up tendencies in the family. one of the illustrations that Judith McNutt gives in one of her talks in the schools of healing prayer is of a description of a little boy who was outside playing and his mother was watching him.

He was about five years old and his mother was watching him play outside and every once in a while he would go like this. And she didn't know why.

She did not understand why this child was doing that. But every once in a while he would just take his hand up like a gun and go like this at his head.

And they found out through some research into their family tree and talking to family members that one of their grandparents had shot himself.

And it was this child had absolutely no idea that this was in the generational family tree.

Another thing that is intergenerational is addiction, drug addiction, alcohol addiction. Another thing that can be very generational is cancer, different types of cancer.

In my family, I had two uncles, an aunt, and my mother who died of colon cancer. And they were all in several different generations.

And what the McNuts do is they give you what they call a genogram. And it looks like a family tree.

And you just fill in your names in this family tree. And you fill out everything that you know about as much as you know, possibly know, about your family, and you put it in this family tree.

And then they do a generational healing Eucharist. And they take up these genograms, and they put them in a pail, and they take it outside, and they burn them in the pail.

And they pray over them, and then they burn them. But there's a lot to be said for healing the family tree.

You know, it's kind of like what it says in the Bible, the sins of the father can be set on children for several generations.

Four generations. Yeah, four generations. And that's where they have, and some people have witchcraft in their backgrounds. You know, and they, it just needs to be gone.

It just needs to be out of their lives. And this is one way of doing it, is to go through this generational healing process. Yeah, see, I don't, I know nothing about my family.

family. My father was an immigrant. My mother, my mother's parents came from the same little village right near Vienna, Austria. They were all peasants.

I have, I think if I went back in my family tree, I would not find a president of a nation for a lot of good farmers. And so I'm not aware of any kind of generational stuff.

I have noted that alcohol seems to be some kind of an ingredient in my family. And I don't know where that started. I know farmers drank a lot of beer back in those days, but I don't know about addictions or anything like that.

But I still need to pray through the family tree. Because Satan can bring things down to us that we never thought would come upon us.

We know that a lot of our behaviors are based on things that we just react to. We don't know where they come from. Behaviorists would say, well, we come out of the womb with some kind of a personality and then it gets destroyed by how we are raised.

Well, I think some of that comes while we're in the womb. Passes through how we behave and how we react.

We just need to pray it out. So we're going to give you a chance to do that tonight. The prayer for healing the family tree is something that I would like you to say with us tonight.

And then if you could just take that home and kind of think through your ancestral line and just pray along through that. Some of you, you know, she's got relatives that were on the Mayflower.

Okay? When she had those relatives coming across on the Mayflower, my family was hoeing and plowing and planting potatoes.

That's why I'm built the way I am. See, that's a generational thing. I'm short, strong legs, low to the ground. I can pick potatoes. Okay? That's just part of my heritage. I don't think I've ever picked a potato, but I could do it, I think, in a pretty good manner.

And so, we don't, you know, so she's got, she can think back of a lot of relatives down through the years. I can't, but I just give them over to the Lord. So, let's pray this prayer together.

Heavenly Father, I come before you as your child in need of your help. I have physical health needs as well as emotional, spiritual, and interpersonal needs.

Many of my problems have been caused by my own failures, neglect, and sinfulness, for which I humbly beg your forgiveness. But I also ask you to negate the sins of my ancestors, whose failures have left their effects on me in the form of unwanted tendencies, behavior patterns, and defects in body, mind, and spirit.

Heal me, Lord, of all these disorders. With your help, I sincerely forgive everyone especially living and dead members of my family tree who have directly offended me or my loved ones in any way, or those whose sins have resulted in my present suffering or disorder.

In the name of your divine Son, Jesus, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, I ask you, Father, to deliver me and my entire family tree from the influence of the evil one.

Free all members of my family tree, including those in adoptive relationships and those in extended family relationships from every contaminating form of bondage.

By your loving concern for us, Heavenly Father, and by the shed blood of your precious Son, Jesus, I beg you to extend your blessing to me and all my relatives, heal every negative effect transmitted through all past generations, and prevent such negative effects in future generations of my family tree.

I symbolically place the cross of Jesus over the head of each person in my family and between the generations. I ask you to let the cleansing blood of Jesus purify the bloodlines in my family lineage.

Let your protective angels encamp around us to protect us from the evil one as you heal, guide, and encourage each of us in our needs.

Let your healing power be released at this very moment. In our family tree, Lord, replace all bondage with a holy bonding and family love, and let there be an ever deeper bonding with you, Lord, by the Holy Spirit to your Son, Jesus.

Let the relationship of the Holy Trinity pervade our family with its tender, warm, loving presence, so that our family may recognize and manifest that love in all our relationships.

All our unknown needs we include with this petition that we pray in Jesus' precious name. Amen. So please make that prayer yours as the days go on.

Now, we have concluded our talk for tonight. Push the button, please. Oh, thank you. Push that button.