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CHRISTIAN HEALING - AN OVERVIEW
prepared by the Rev. Marsh Hudson-Knapp
1. Who needs Healing?
Is there anyone who doesn’t need some kind of healing? Raise your hands!
2. Did healing happen in the Bible?
Many experiences in the Hebrew Bible.
Gospels are FULL of healing - the holey Bible of Morton Kelsey!
3. Does God want us healed?
Jesus never refused to heal someone declaring, "Gee, God wants YOU sick!"
God wants us all well! God loves us!
4. Does God heal today?
How many of you pray for other people to get healthy?
Do you believe that God does something?
5. Is it God or doctors and medicine that heal?
Yes!
6. Does healing work?
NOT ALWAYS according to our plan or desire. Paul lived with his thorn in the flesh. My mother lived her life with Multiple Sclerosis and with healing prayers but was not physically cured. At the same time, that prayer gave her and us the strength to live with hope, love, and joy. When she went to heaven her complete healing did come!
SOMETIMES healing is a single event, but more often it involves a process like taking a regimen of medicine, fully completed in eternity.
Healing does happen ALWAYS, when you pray for healing with love.
Love flows into the person or group and their lives are richer, more whole, because of that powerful love!
7. HOW do we pray?
Silently or in English or tongues
or singing - or in the Spirit
Touching, esp. in area where healing needed
In images (Images guide the body in its growth.)
As one or with a team drawing upon different gifts
Once or soaking (with a range of approaches over time)
With anointing oil or with communion
In person or from a distance
In masculine and feminine ways
8. What types of healing do we experience:
Four MAJOR types:
Forgiveness: Jesus empowers us to give and receive it
Physical Healing - God made our bodies and is constantly at work within us.
Healing Emotions- Jesus is not limited in time and so can reach back to transform hurtful memories at any time in our lives!
Deliverance: Jesus is setting us free from evil and from elements of life that have gotten out of proportion
Other types:
Healing for addictions/idolatry/sin: drug, alcohol, work, sexual, shopping, money, anger, eating disorders, co-dependence... all that separates us from experiencing the fullness of life and God!
Healing relationships: with God and our God-image
with other people: marriage, family, friends, work...
with institutions - e.g. churches
with nations
Generational Healing of relationships/family tree: claiming blessings and healing wounds in a family or in a place
Healing for Grief (miscarriage, abortion, still birth, unresolved death, uncommitted soul)
Healing Wounded Sexuality
Integration of whole self - especially important in midlife when God weaves in aspects of ourse4lves that we have discarded or ignored in the past.
Healing for our Fear of Death
Questions to consider:
Have you ever been ill?
Did you ever get better?
Did God have a part in your healing?
If so how?
If not, how can you tell?
Did people serve as a channel for healing to you?
How?
What type(s) of healing do you need - want at this time in your life?
Are there people around you who would pray
to help you on that path to health and wholeness?
What questions do you have about Christian healing?
What convictions do you have about Christian healing?
Find your own path!
