Preparing to Minister Healing
What is the best way to get ready to preach healing, especially in a public gathering? Well, there really ISN’T any one best way to do it. I don’t have a quick little formula or a simple secret to offer, just some observations that I hope will help you.
God may have you prepare differently for different meetings! For me, I know that sometimes I’m going to be teaching (or at least I think I am!), and so my main preparation consists of studying the Word and seeking God as to what in particular to teach. There are only so many topics in the Bible, although there are a lot of them, so I may end up preaching on a subject that I’ve covered before somewhere else. The Lord may even have me preach a similar message many times in a row in different places. But in no case do I just “take Sermon #52 off the shelf” and preach it – I don’t want to have a dry-as-toast meeting. I always seek the Lord for what specifically I should share from the Word for the group of people that will be before me in the upcoming service. I don’t think I’ve ever preached the same message in the same way twice! That’s because the Lord knows the needs that are present, and you’ll never encounter two different crowds who have exactly the same needs.
I can’t stand the idea of “ripping a sermon off the internet” to make preparation easier. I’m sure it’s easier, but it isn’t more effective, and I have NEVER done it. You need to preach YOUR message that comes from YOUR heart, not someone else’s message from someone else’s heart. You can’t be someone else, so you should not expect to copy anyone else when you preach, no matter how good he is. You are the #1 authority in the world at being you, and you should be you when you preach. Don’t try to be someone else whom you admire.
So even when you’re teaching, you need to find out what the Holy Spirit wants to emphasize in that service. Sometimes it will be combination of things you have preached to different groups in the past.
Also, even in a teaching service, you’ll often minister to the sick after the message, so you should pray about what specific instructions God might have for that time. He might not give you any such instructions up front (He seldom does with me), and then you just have to follow His leading on the fly. On the other hand, He might show you someone with a specific condition who needs to come up and receive through the gifts of healings and the laying on of hands. You don’t have to necessarily spend hours on your face seeking such leadings, but at least “check in with headquarters” so that if the Holy Spirit does have something specific to say, you’re listening and you can act on His instructions.
But then there are times when I know in advance that the service won’t be a teaching service. In such cases, my whole mode of preparation changes, and I do almost all my praying in the Holy Spirit. I pray out mysteries. I still often don’t know anything that will happen until I get there, but at least I will have prayed out any situations before anything happens.
If you flow in the prophet’s office, you may find that most of your preparation time is spent praying in the Spirit. Still, any prophet needs to be a teacher of the Word, as you can’t just get up and prophesy all night every service. So you still need to pray out messages and stay grounded in the Word so that you don’t come up with some outrageous prophecy that you realize later couldn’t have really been from the Lord. Also, faith comes by hearing the Word (Romans 10:17), not by hearing prophecies, so you have to make sure that you are putting out the Word so that people can latch onto it.
Should you have dedicated intercessors with you who will pray throughout the service? I hope this doesn’t shock you too badly, but Jesus didn’t need any “intercession teams” and neither did the apostles. Yes, I’ve heard about Father Nash who went to places just to pray before Charles Finney got there. But I DO NOT see any command in Scripture to have “intercessors” who “back you up” when you preach. Nor do I see “advance teams” of intercessors going somewhere to “prepare the ground” before Jesus or the apostles taught there.
We DO have people who pray for our ministry and we certainly appreciate them! Jesus even asked for prayer in the garden, and Paul asked people to pray for him on many occasions (among them Ephesians 6:18-19, Philippians 1:19, Colossians 4:3, 1 Thessalonians 5:25 and 2 Thessalonians 3:1-2). I’m not greater than they are, so I want people to pray for me. But it’s possible to get carried away and think that if you don’t have someone interceding, Jesus won’t heal the sick the way He wants to. We do not see that taught anywhere in Scripture. (There are even some “intercessors” who will take the credit for anything that happens in your meeting because they think that they “prayed it out,” but I consider that obnoxious. Let’s just give Jesus the credit and do the works that He said that we could do in His name.)
When Jesus said that we would do the works that He did and greater (John 14:12), lay hands on the sick (Mark 16:18), have other signs follow us (Mark 16:17-18), and so on, He never said that it was contingent upon having “intercessors” pray everything through. By the way, there is no ministry office of intercessor, lest people who pray get carried away with their own importance. We should ALL pray. The first person who should pray for your ministry is YOU. If you “farm out” praying for your ministry to “intercessors,” you are missing God in a horrible way. You will probably end up falling, and you wouldn’t be the first one to do so for that reason. Do not fob your prayer life onto anyone else! If you think that you can just listen to secular music all day and show up and improvise or just preach a “canned” message, you will probably fall the way one such acquaintance did – it’s only a matter of time. The people used mightily in the Bible had to pray, and so do you.
On the other hand, I used to unwittingly let the devil kick me around in my thought life because he would always tell me that I hadn’t prayed or prepared “enough” for a service. In his book, no amount of prayer or preparation is ever enough! You can be duped, as I used to be, into thinking that success in the service requires you to get everything just right and be mega-“prayed up” and be at the pinnacle of your Christian walk. The devil WISHES that this were true! But he knows – and so should you – that the Holy Spirit in you is greater than any tough situation, and that He can and does use imperfect, ordinary people like YOU in imperfect situations!
You can prepare for a service and have unexpected car trouble on the way over or hit an unexpected traffic jam. Or once you get there, there can be weird sound system issues like a 60-cycle A/C “hum” that just doesn’t seem to want to go away no matter what you plug in where, and you don’t want to endanger people and equipment by “lifting the grounds” to get rid of the hum. Or you find out after much effort that a microphone cable is busted and needs to be replaced. None of these things will stop the Holy Spirit from moving! They might annoy or even frazzle you somewhat, but they will not frazzle the Holy Spirit.
If at all possible, you want to be at a service plenty early and do a sound check – especially if you’re the person who has to set up the sound system! You don’t want to be working out sound problems such as excessive feedback due to misplacement of microphones and/or monitors five minutes before you’re supposed to get up there and flow in the Holy Spirit.
But despite your most careful and diligent preparation, something can happen right before a service that throws off your routine. Maybe someone you know calls with a sudden emergency and wants prayer. Maybe some flaky person is causing trouble and needs to be dealt with. In other words, you are faced with an unpredictable-in-advance, less-than-perfect situation. Does that mean that the flow of the Holy Spirit will be hindered? It will only be hindered if you let these things “get to you” so that you get into the flesh and stop allowing yourself to be led by the Holy Spirit. We can see in the Bible that the Holy Spirit is perfectly able to flow in tough circumstances! Don’t you suppose it was a little tough for Jesus and Paul when they preached in places where some people wanted them dead? Do you suppose it was easy for them when unbelieving Jewish religious leaders were doing their best to spew their unbelief all over the place to undermine their ministry? I don’t see where Jesus, Paul or the others EVER had it “easy!” And they did everything without sound systems or worship teams who traveled with them! Thank God, the Holy Spirit is greater than all adverse circumstances!
The Bible tells us to be instant in season and out of season (2 Timothy 4:2: “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine”). So the Bible predicts that there will be “out of season” times when everything doesn’t seem to line up right, and it’s still the time to be quick to preach the Word!
What about binding the devil? Should you “bind the devil” so that he can’t mess with your service? This might shock you too, but I don’t see where the disciples were ever taught, “Bind the devil and THEN heal the sick.” Actually, when you heal the sick, that IS binding the devil – you’re binding his works and thus stopping him from working! The devil manifested himself through demons when Jesus ministered on many occasions. Is this because Jesus was unaware that you could “bind the devil” to stop him or his demons from manifesting in a service? I don’t think so! I don’t see any “bind the devil from the service” verse in the New Testament, despite the fact that this is a very common prayer you hear before services. I can testify that the sick can be healed quite nicely without such a prayer. In fact, maybe they can be healed more easily, because a different mindset is involved on the preacher’s part – “The devil’s on the loose! I’d better bind him or in his great might, he’ll ruin the service,” vs. “The devil is already defeated anyway, so I don’t have to pray to defeat him. Jesus and I are just going to go destroy his works and there isn’t anything the devil can do to stop us!”
If you really could “bind all evil spirits from manifesting” before a service, you would do demonized people a great disservice! The man in Mark 1:23-26 would never have been set free! The demon became fair game to be cast out when it manifested in the synagogue in front of Jesus. If it had not been allowed to manifest, the person who came in with the demon would have left with the demon. I cast a demon out of someone who interrupted one of my services and he was permanently set free from a major sin in his life. If we had prayed some prayer that stopped demons from manifesting, he would not have been set free.
If demons want access to your service, they need to find people willing to listen to them and do their bidding. Otherwise, they can’t do anything in the service.
If you feel heaviness, God gives you a way to do deal with that.
Isaiah 61:3:
To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified.
Praising God is a great way to blow “heaviness” away. Even though you might be convinced that the whole room has a dark cloud over it, it may be just be one of Satan’s agents trying to work on you personally to discourage you.
If a demon manifests openly, we can stop it and cast it out. But what about demons that just influence people’s thinking? Can we just “bind” them at will, regardless of whether a person even wants help? If so, we have a greater revelation than Jesus had, because right in His very presence, Satan influenced Peter’s thinking to try to get Peter to try to talk Jesus out of going to the cross! If there was a “we bind you Satan” prayer, surely Jesus would have known about it and demonstrated it so that Satan could not influence anyone in His presence! Then He could have repeated that prayer to stop Satan from entering Judas in His presence after the Passover meal.
That is where the weapons of our warfare come in. We speak the WORD, and the WORD will destroy strongholds in people’s minds. It is light that dispels darkness, not saying “we come against any darkness here in Jesus’ name.”
As mentioned elsewhere in this book, we most certainly do not have to bind “ruling spirits”, “principalities,” “powers,” and so on over geographic areas before we preach – no one ever did that in the Bible. They are powerless to stop you, so they will have to just stay where they are and sulk while you advance the kingdom of God.
Can we “bind every human spirit” in a service (as some Pentecostals have prayed)? No, you do not have one whit of authority over any other person’s spirit, so you are completely wasting your time and demonstrating ignorance through such a prayer. Your prayers can never override anyone else’s free will. If someone gets mad and storms out, God won’t stop him. (I can vouch for that many times over!)
I believe that God gave us the ability to fantasize for reasons other than sinning by thinking lustfully about someone of the opposite sex. I enjoy fantasizing about raising up seriously sick people. I’ve seen it in real life, but I like to build into my thinking the idea that nothing is too hard of a case for God. I think that it is useful to picture yourself laying hands on the blind and having them see, laying hands on the deaf and having them hear, and so on! I saw myself (on the inside) laying hands on deaf people and having them hear before I started seeing it on the outside. Not all “imaginations” need to be cast down – some should be encouraged! God does not require you to crucify your imagination when you get saved!
At this point, some anti-healing people will probably cite me for practicing “New Age visualization techniques” or some such thing. In fact, fear of such may be why most Christians DON’T picture themselves healing the sick or even getting healed themselves. They’re afraid that any use of their imagination is ungodly. Perhaps up until now a lot of their use of their imagination HAS been ungodly. But that is by choice. GOD does not make anyone use his imagination to fantasize about having a beautiful woman’s spouse die and his own spouse die so that he can end up with the beautiful woman. GOD gave you an imagination – it isn’t the devil’s invention. It is up to YOU whether you use it for godly thoughts or devilish thoughts.
I would dare to say that EVERYONE reading this book uses his imagination constantly – for good or for bad! Either you see yourself healed and able to function normally, or you see yourself suffering and popping pills while “grinding out” the disease until its natural end. You see yourself as a success going somewhere to happen or as a failure going somewhere to happen. You see yourself happily married, or you see yourself unhappily married, or happily or unhappily single. You have pictures in your mind of what your future holds – but if they don’t line up with the Word, you need to renew your mind with the Word so that those pictures match what God says.
I am not the first to suggest using your imagination with the Word. It is what God told Joshua to do – he was supposed to meditate on the Word day and night (Joshua 1:7-8). The righteous person in Psalm 1:1-3 is supposed to do the same. So constantly thinking on the Word is a Bible concept, not a New Age concept. There is little question that the woman with the issue of blood “saw” something on the inside as she kept saying, “If I can only touch His clothes, I’ll be healed!” (Mark 5:25-34). (The Greek word translated said in the King James Version is the “imperfect” verb form, which means that she kept saying something rather than only saying it once.)
Do we have to FAST before we minister? Jesus said that in the days when He was gone, His disciples would fast, so fasting should be part of our lives, absent a medical reason that wouldn’t allow it for now. I personally have never gone on a total fast (water only) for more than 4 days. I’ve met at least 3 people at this writing who’ve gone 40 days, but I have no plans to do that. ONE of them has had quite a bit of success at this writing, but another one almost lost his mind, his ministry and his life. Personally, I often fast a meal before ministering to help me stay “sharp,” but that’s my personal preference, not something that I preach as doctrine, because there is no Scripture commanding it. You have to find what works for you – everyone’s different. Fasting and prayer will help eliminate the Flesh Freakout Factor, which is a good thing.
Can we mingle with people before we minister? I don’t see why not, as long as they’re not trying to hit you for pastoral advice that they should not be coming to you for anyway if you’re a visiting speaker, or trying to pile on prayer requests or tell you their horrid life stories. Some ministers like to be kept separate from people, and there are people I’d like to be separate from as well, but this again is a preference matter. Back when I thought I had to be “hyper-spiritual” before a service, I would not want to be around people, lest my anointing “leak,” but I’ve outgrown that! I had to realize that it is JESUS, through His NAME, that is the source of people’s healing – not my superlative preparation! If it were due to some special preparation formula, I could start taking credit for things, at least in my thought life. I try to be all prepared long before I show up somewhere so that I’m not in last-minute “cram before the exam” mode. I don’t want to flip through my Bible during worship, thus setting an example for everyone else that they can “tune out” during worship too and just flip through their own Bibles. (I always hated it when guest speakers did that!)
I am also convinced that one of the most spiritual things you can do before and during a series of services is to get plenty of rest. I try to do that. Things come up, but not everything is an emergency that just can’t wait. You can flow better in the Holy Spirit when you’re not feeling drained physically.
One final thought about preparation. We are all different, so God relates to different people in different ways. Someone might have God-given dreams, another visions, another divine visitations, and another none of the above! Joseph (Mary’s husband) seemed to hear from God in dreams, but He spoke to others in other ways. God knows how to relate to YOU in a way that YOU can “get.” Don’t think that you have to pray and prepare the same way that someone else does just because that other person is getting good results. You can “be you” around God. Let Him speak to you as He wishes.
If you’re looking for a preparation formula, here’s my advice – there isn’t any preparation formula! There is a PERSON, the Lord Jesus Christ! He heals people through His Body. Formulas do not heal people. Your results will be based on the life in the Vine flowing through you, the branch. Without Him you can do nothing (John 15:5). So commune with Him and enjoy the preparation process. Rest in the knowledge that He will work with you and back you with signs following when you preach His Word, even if the conditions are not completely perfect!