Welcome To The Hills Medical Group

PRAYER AND HEALING
A speech by Ted L Edwards Jr. MD
Delivered at
FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH
NOVEMBER 6, 2002

Lord, we would like to ask for the presence of the Holy Spirit to fill and illuminate this room and our bodies with God’s love and light, Amen.

When I was a young physician, an approximately 56-year-old female came to me with esophageal cancer. Obviously, the diagnosis had to be made and I was able to make that diagnosis. I sat down with her to deal with what we could do about that. She asked me to pray with her, and I did so. I was not really sure what to pray for, other than just to pray for healing and to be thankful and grateful that the Lord would listen to that prayer. After several weeks, she began to notice that she began to feel better. She had refused all chemotherapy and radiation, and certainly refused surgery. She had gone home and called me to say that she was feeling a little better. I immediately assumed that it was the prayer and agreed to see her in a month or two to see how she was doing. She came back in about three months and I redid the upper GI series, which showed a totally normal esophagus with no evidence of any esophageal cancer. She and I celebrated the fact that she had been healed by prayer. She went away with a planned return for annual physical examination. Six months later, however, she called and said that she needed to come in. At this time, I realized she was totally obstructed in the esophagus and there was really nothing that could go through. The x-ray showed that. I visited with her at the time and asked her what had happened in that six-month period that caused the cancer to come back. She said, and I quote, "There were just some things I couldn't forgive." At the time, I realized she could not forgive, and perhaps that was the reason for her ultimate demise from cancer of the esophagus.

In the early 70s I was elected Chief of Staff of Holy Cross Hospital, which was a two-year term. Six months into my term, I was elected to fill an unexpired term as Chairman of the Board of Deacons at First Baptist Church vacated by a deacon who had died of a heart attack. Later, they gave me a full one-year term. I was never really sure whether it was because of my outstanding job, or because they were still waiting for me to do something. Had I not had a very active prayer life and willingness for God to lead in my life, that would have been a tough two years. Actually, it was exhilarating. Mistakes? Yes, I made them, when I was determined. Successes? Yes, when God led me and I was willing to be led. The second year brought one of my crowning achievements, which was the addition of women deacons for First Baptist Church. A few years later I had a patient with Crohn's disease. She was approximately 25 years old, a very pleasant, lovely young woman, who had this terrible intestinal inflammation. We had done surgery and she should have done well, but obviously was not. She began to spike fevers and began to not do well. We had drains in the pelvis where we had taken out part of the intestinal tract, but nothing was doing well. She was spiking up to 104º fever a day, she was dwindling and losing strength. I was becoming very concerned. I spent time each day praying for her and asking God what to do, because I had reached my limit. The surgeon and I did not have MRI or CT scan at that time. She was getting weaker every day. Finally, he and I decided that if she was not better by Friday morning, he would operate that Friday afternoon. This was on Tuesday or Wednesday. Thursday she was no better, and actually the spiking fever caused me to be even more concerned about her well being. Friday morning on rounds I walked in, and she was standing by the side of the bed complaining. She was complaining that when she stood up this morning, all of this pus and blood poured out of her bandages, and suddenly her fever was gone. She was chipper, she was bright and she was really, truly complaining. This amazed me, because I was sitting there celebrating the fact that she had drained an abscess which apparently had come from behind her stomach, down the side of the back of her abdomen to the pelvis, where there were two drains that we had left in to take the mess out. God had literally caused that drainage to occur, when it seemed impossible physiologically. I saw it as God's healing, an answer to prayer. The surgeon saw it as follows, "Obviously, she has a real doctor."

In the late 1970s I was invited to a weekend at Oral Roberts University. I don't understand why I got the invitation in the first place, but I knew that I had to go there. There we heard talks on healing and prayer, speaking in tongues by the Chairman of the School of Theology, and witnessed the healing service. It was clear to me that I had been content to accept a few drops from the healing faucet, while Oral Roberts was opening the fire hydrant of healing. It was like drinking out of a fire hydrant. It just got all over me. Now, I was exposed to the power of healing, but it was not "respectable" in the conventional church, so I began to study holistic health, prayer and healing, alternative medicine, quantum physics, nonlocal healing, psychic healing, etc. Shortly thereafter, I admitted a member of our church staff to the hospital with severe chest pain. She was having what was clear to me to be a thing called pleurodynia, which is an inflammation of the surface of the lung. Interestingly enough, it's called Devil's Grip, and if you've ever had it you understand where it got the name. It is extremely painful to breathe, and is very uncomfortable. She has had the pain for a couple of days when she came to see me. I put her in St. David's Hospital, and after the studies revealed there was nothing more to be done than to just treat the pain, I sat down with her on a Saturday morning and said, "There is really nothing for me to do here except to deal with the pain. I've got the pain medication. I would like to know if you would be willing for me to pray with you, and if that is acceptable." She agreed that this was okay. So I prayed with her for relief of her pain. It was a short prayer. I've never been much into long-winded prayers, so it was a short prayer for the relief of her pain and discomfort. After it was over, I asked her if she felt any different, and she said no. I said, well fine, and went on my way. That afternoon I got a page on my pager, some 3-4 hours later, the nurses calling to say that Mrs. McCullough wanted to go home. I said, "I thought she was still in pain", and they said "No, her pain has left. She knows it's not going to come back and she wants to go home." I agreed, and saw her at church the next morning. When I came up to her at church the next morning, I said, "What happened"? Her reply was, "Even though I was a member of the church staff and I knew philosophically that I should accept prayer for healing and believe it could occur, I really didn't believe in it. After I had sat there for an hour or two, still in pain, I finally decided that if God wanted to heal me and relieve my pain, I would let him, and it was okay. At that instant, my pain went away and I have not had it since."

We now come up to the present time and the events of the last year at First Baptist Church have certainly opened our eyes to the power of the Good News, the power of prayer, and what we can do about healing. Why did we ignore prayer for healing for long? Let's look at the history. When Jesus came, the worldview was a view espoused by Plato, which stated that Man had contact with both a physical and spiritual reality, and there was interaction between the two. Physical man could relate to, was influenced by, and affected by, the spiritual world which included both the good and evil of the spiritual world. The Hebrew attitude was that sickness and illness were sent by God as punishment for sin. God could also heal, but rarely wanted to. In fact, He seemed to be an exacting, vengeful God if you crossed him. There were the illustrations of the friends of Job who came to Job and said you've got to repent, and if you don't repent you can't be relieved of your pain. Job said, "I have nothing to repent for." They finally said, "Curse God, and die." He said, "No, I'm not going to do that, either." Finally, God rescued him from the ravages of Satan. Remember, all along Satan was the cause of the problem. Moses questioned God at one point in time, and God then said he would never see the Promised Land, and he didn't. When Jesus came, He said evil really was of the Evil One, or Satan, and he spent time healing. In fact, that was why people came to hear him, to be healed, and they stayed for the preaching and teaching. He spoke about healing by faith. Remember the Centurion who came him and said, "My servant is ill. Will you heal him?" Jesus said, "Yes, I will come to him." He said, "No, you don't need to come to him. I order men around all day long. If you'll just give the Word, he'll be healed." Jesus said, "I have never seen such faith in all of Israel." Then, there was the woman with the bleeding, who touched His garment. Jesus said, "Who touched me? I felt the power go out of me." She admitted to it, and He said, "Your faith has made you well. You are healed." He touched the eyes of the blind and told them to wash their eyes elsewhere. He touched the hands of the crippled, the lame and the infirm, and asked them to do something to prove that they were healed. The leper came to him and said, "Lord, you can heal me if you want to." Jesus' response was, "Of course I want to." Jesus taught his disciples to heal, and sent them out to do so. When they came back, they did so well that he later taught 72 of his closest followers, and sent them out in pairs to preach, teach and heal. They, too, came back with stories of mighty successes. In Matthew:17, a man came out of the crowd and said, "Master, have mercy on my son. He goes out of his mind and suffers terribly, falling into seizures, frequently pitched into the fire and at other times into the river. I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn't do anything for him." Jesus said, "What a generation. No sense of God. No focus to your lives. How many times do I have to go over these things? How much longer do I have to put up with this? Bring the boy here." He ordered the afflicting demon out, and it was gone. From that moment, the boy was well. The disciples asked, "Why couldn't we throw it out?" Jesus answered, "Because you are not taking God seriously. The simple truth is that if you had a mere kernel of faith, a poppy seed, say, you could tell the mountain to move, and it would move. There is nothing you would not be able to tackle." This attitude of Jesus, and later the early church, was that his followers were to call on God's power to cure sickness. In fact, they were guilty of shoddy work if they failed to cure the sick and drive out demons. In Father Francis McNutt's book, Healing, he notes the following: "Christianity is more than doctrine. It is power. It is the power to transform our lives, to destroy the evil that prevents us from loving God and our neighbor. Jesus came to bring us to a new life, a share of God's own life. We have always believed these things, but where is the reality of it? Where is the power that truly changes lives? What we have done all too frequently is to take the good news and make it good advice. In short, we are tempted to teach law rather than grace, (and I add, healing). In the Great Commission, Jesus instructed in Matthew: 28 the following: "God authorized and commanded me to commission you. Go out and train everyone you meet far and near in this way of life, marking them by baptizing in the three-fold name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Instruct them in the practice of all that I have commanded you. I will be with you as you do this day by day, right up until the end of the Age." In Mark: 16, he says, "These are some of the signs that will accompany believers. They will cast out demons in my name. They will speak new tongues. They will take snakes in their hands. They will drink poison and not be hurt. They will lay hands on the sick and make them well." After Jesus' death and resurrection, the Church was persecuted first by the Jews, and then by the Romans. Stories about Paul tell of his healing, being bitten by snakes and not being ill, of his speaking in tongues. Primarily, it is a prayer language, and also occasionally apparently with interpretation by others. Peter cast his shadow on a crippled man, and he was healed. They took the Great Commission seriously. Everywhere believers were obedient to Jesus' command to preach, to teach, and to heal. After the apostles died, the Church was even more persecuted. Finding out that one was a Christian meant imprisonment and/or torture and death. Danger of infiltration into the Christian church resulted in the need for about a two-year apprenticeship of someone in order to become a Christian. Pagans came for healing but they also stayed for preaching and teaching. Writings talk about healing, signs, wonders and miracles as if they were commonplace. In James chapter 5, James gives the directions for anointing with oil and prayer for healing. Obviously, healing happened, and with regularity. It didn't stop when Jesus died. Then came the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century. Now, we finally get Christianity out of the catacombs and into respectability. In fact, it was not only respectable to be a Christian; it was favorable socially to be a Christian. Guess what happened? The power of the Church began to go away. It began to go away because of lack of commitment of the believers. It began to go away because the Church made a giant power grab to control everything. Soon, the Pope decreed that only priests could pray for healing, and then later they could only pray for extreme unction, which means Last Rites. Francis McNutt tells the story that as a young priest, a friend of his had a brother who was extremely ill and he wanted Francis to come pray for him. He was quickly uninvited by the rest of the family because they felt if a priest came to pray for him, the brother would assume that he was getting ready to die, and go on and give up. Therefore, the last thing they wanted to have was a priest in the room praying for healing.

When I was in Boston, I was a resident and had two interns working for me who both grew up in Boston. One day we had a patient come to the hospital who was extremely ill. We had worked on him all day long, trying to get him stabilized and get him in position to see what we could do to help him a lot. He made the statement to one of my interns, "Doc, whatever you do, don't send me to the Ghost." My intern understood it, but I didn't. Later, after we walked out of the room, I turned to the intern and asked, "What did he mean by that statement?" His comment was, "There is a hospital here in Boston called The Holy Ghost Hospital for the Incurably Ill." I stood there for a moment, thinking what a travesty that someone would be driven up to the door and rolled in on a stretcher, looking up at The Holy Ghost Hospital for the Incurably Ill when that is exactly the opposite of what the Holy Ghost is about.

B y the fourth and fifth centuries, the worldview now changed from that of Plato to that of Aristotle. Aristotle's belief was that this is a physical world with closed, materialistic and naturalistic viewpoints. Illness really was the result of our folly or just a random event, like being hit by a falling star. There was no real interaction between the physical, spiritual, or the supernatural, world. The tendency to pray was to pray out of obedience but with no expectation that anything would result, and also primarily pray to prepare yourself for Heaven, not really looking at a moment in which interaction with Jesus and God could result in a healing here on earth. Further, it was assumed that prayer for healing was only active in the first century. Of course, they forgot what happened in the second, third and fourth centuries. Prayer was limited to the time of Jesus and the Apostles, that the miracles of Jesus were done to prove his teachings. How many times have I heard that over the last 20 years? What about the next two centuries before healing went away by power of the Church? In fact, in the fourth century the world 'heal' in James 5:14 was changed to 'save' by Saint Jerome. The previous translation was, the prayer of faith will heal the sick man and raise him up again”. Now it was changed by Saint Jerome to “the prayer of faith will save the soul of the sick man, and raise him up again”. The Dark Ages of the Christian church began. Pope Gregory, Saint Thomas Equinus, Luther, Bart, Tillich et.al, avoided healing and wrote little on healing in their works in spite of the fact that approximately one-half of the New Testament deals with the supernatural, and one-fifth of the New Testament deals with healing. Then came the Pentecostals in the 1800s. This group brought back prayer, healing and tongue speaking. Read Second Corinthians 12 and 14 to see how Paul describes speaking in tongues to the unbeliever or believer who hasn't received that gift. Charges of showmanship, crazy people, all of these things happened and Paul wanted to avoid that in his writings. The Pentecostals stayed in the narrow and rigid frame of their thinking through the 1800s and the early 1900s, but healings were happening with them. However, in the early 1900s they expelled two of their prominent ministers who believed that God could also use doctors and other healthcare professionals for healing in addition to prayer – a syndrome described in the book, Your God is Too Small by J.D. Phillips. The revivals of the first half of the 1900s featured healings at services by Katherine Kuhlman and Oral Roberts, but many of us were leery of the Elmer Gantry-type tent revival and apparent healings. Oral Roberts left that to build a university and, in effect, became respectable. However, the worship services and the healings continue to happen there to this very day.

In the early 1900s, Einstein developed a theory of quantum physics. Most of us were never taught it because it is not easy to understand. Many of the research studies on prayer have been on nonlocal events, that is, distant healing. There are three characteristics of nonlocal events, and the words used are 'unmediated', which means that the events do not depend on transmission; 'unmitigated', which means no loss of strength in transmission; and 'immediate', which means changes occur simultaneously. Quantum physics as a nonlocal event essentially said that if two particles are together and for some reason they are separated, they may be separated thousands of miles apart, but if something changes one, the other instantly changes. It doesn't depend on some transmission. There is no loss of strength regardless of how far it is, and it changes simultaneously. During the Cold War, we actually had people who were sitting in California under contract with the U.S. government and the CIA to spy on the Russians and their buildings in the middle of Russia where they were building missiles. This was called 'distant viewing'. The way they tested this was to pick a coordinate that they knew that there was something there that the Russians had, and they would give the coordinate to the person in a room and have them draw what they saw across their mind as what was happening. The first time they did this, the person drew several buildings, and then drew a crane and a rail that this crane was moving up and down on. The U2 had flown over that area about three months before. They got the U2 photographs and there was no crane. The examining person from the CIAA said, "Well, it's pretty good except that he missed this part about the crane." They flew another U2 over and, sure enough, this picture showed that the crane was there now. They then had the person actually visualize the contents of the rooms inside these buildings. These people had never been to Russia, knew nothing about it, did not know what they were doing. All they knew was that they were given coordinates and asked to write down and draw pictures of what they saw.

Today, the medical view is that of Aristotle. The patient is not responsible for illness, it really has no redeeming effect. Illness is random. All is diagnosed and treated in a materialistic framework. Interestingly enough, in a nationwide survey 43% of doctors pray for their patients. However, criticism of physicians praying in many instances is open and occasionally rampant. One doctor was accused of praying for his patients and the hospital was going to kick him off of the staff, until they changed their minds. They realized that he admitted more patients to the hospital than any other doctor in the community. Another prominent person replied, "I would consider a malpractice suit if I found out my doctor was praying for me." On the other hand, Paul Tournier, M.D., the prominent Swiss psychiatrist, when asked to talk about Jesus and casting out demons, commented, "That's a lot better than we're doing in psychiatry today." This Aristotle worldview denies the existence of an evil supernatural force. This isn't a fact, it's really an attitude. It's a worldview. It does not necessarily have anything to do with reality. I think the Plato worldview is the far superior worldview because it does deal with the supernatural. Research has been done on nonlocal healing, particularly focusing on the 'Thy will be done' part. What they have learned is that if you pray the prayer of 'Thy will be done', God takes care of the organism. So, it's not a cop-out prayer. The organism is really brought to its fullness and highest level of health or whatever is best for the organism. In a study in Haiti, there was a group doing work in Haiti and they were having problems because people were dying and not able to be fed. They began to pray that the goats would produce more milk, and that is exactly what happened. The goats began to produce more and more milk – with the goats still healthy, but the people being better able to be fed. Then the problem was that there was no way to refrigerate the milk, so they prayed to get some sort of refrigeration. What happened was the milk didn't spoil as quickly. The milk went several days longer before spoiling, and by that time was able to be consumed, and little or none of it was lost. In the United States they tried to repeat the same study. They prayed for the cows that were bred to produce milk to produce more milk, and actually produced less milk because that was better for the cow. They prayed to have longer shelf life of the milk but that didn't happen, either. We already have refrigerators. We didn't need longer shelf life. It just proves once again that God knows what we need more than we do, and will provide, but not necessarily what we are wishing. In Iowa there is a young Methodist preacher, Reverend Goodfellow, who started out working on his thesis for his doctorate, studying social consciousness of prayer in the Church. He later discovered that prayer affected germination rate of seeds and crop production rate. Farmers in his congregation actually isolated in segments of their farms that were prayed for with the idea of getting a significant increase in the production of that acreage. Then there were areas that were not prayed for. What happened was, the prayed for area showed marked increase in production of corn and grains. Later, he convinced the parishioners of several of the churches to pray for the farmers, their families and crops. Each prayor had about ten names. There were significant increases in the harvest, a sharp reduction in farm injuries (anyone who has been around a farm knows how terrible and awful farm injuries can be), and there was an effect on the prayor, as well, of being more loving and more compassionate.

Several other events have occurred that are worth commenting on. One is the Princeton study which was done about quantum physics. It was a study on human-machine interaction. The initial project was to determine how machines would react to an individual, if they reacted at all. A way of determining that was to program the machine to run so many Xs and so many Os, and at the end of a 10,000 item run, basically they should have the same number of Xs and the same number of Os. What happened was the computer did exactly what the mind of the person wanted. So, if I'm sitting in front of my computer and decide that I want more Xs and Os, basically the computer – even though programmed to have equal numbers – came out with more Xs than Os. I won't go into the study a whole lot, except to add the next point, which I thought was one of the most important, is that when they got somebody who was emotionally attached to the human and sat them in front of the computer and they agreed on what they wanted to have happen, the results were eight times more powerful. So, there is a reason for prayer groups.

Olga Worrell was a Methodist who was a psychic healer who was extensively studied by many physicians. Interestingly, in one study she was asked to kill off bacteria. She refused to do that, so they asked her to actually protect bacteria from the effects of antibiotics, and she was able by the power of her concentration to do so. She also held a healing service in a Methodist church in Baltimore on a weekly basis. I was fortunate enough to meet her at one point, she literally taught me how to lay on hands for healing.

There was a study at Duke University Medical School a few years ago in which they took people from all different denominations and religious backgrounds – Buddhist, Hindu, Islam, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic – all sorts of different groups around the world and used them in a prayer study to evaluate patients in coronary care units. What they found was that those who were prayed for had a much faster rate of recovery, had much fewer complications and got out of the hospital much quicker.

So, what do we know now? Prayer works. We have scientific validation and we know that is what Jesus wanted us to know. We know that hope heals, and for those people who stand by and say prayer is giving false hope, that is an erroneous statement because hopelessness is what kills. Hope always heals. The work of Bernie Siegel a few years ago said the people who are most successful in dealing with disease are those who absolutely refuse to give it space in their lives. What do we do to pray? My studies have led me to believe that the first thing we do is to forgive those who trespass against us. We need to forgive our trespassers. We need to forgive those who we have judgments and feelings about. We need to fill our hearts with love for on the one we are praying for. We have to have faith that God will act – maybe not in the way we think, that we would like to have him act, but definitely God will act in whatever is best for that person. Many times I like to pray for specific results, but I finish with this inclusive statement, that "Lord, if you've got a better idea, let's go with your idea." As far as the person to be healed, that person needs to choose to accept the love that is offered, and hopefully has faith, too, that God will act. Many times Jesus asked that the one being healed needs to demonstrate that healing by walking, moving crippled hands, and otherwise resuming life activities.

There are a number of kinds of healings, but there are three that I think are critical ones. One is physical healing, which is the easiest to pray for and many times the easiest to have happen. Another is inner healing, which takes longer and is usually dealing with emotional wounds and injuries over a many year period of their lives. The last is demon possession, which seems from my readings to be best done by a team of persons experienced in healing. Let's focus on the physical. Ruth Carter Stapleton and Agnes Sanford both used a technique in which they used an imaging process to ask the prayee, the one being prayed for, to visualize Jesus' presence. Then she asked Jesus to go to the sick part of that person and heal it, then filling the air and whole body with Jesus' light and Jesus' love. There was a request that the pain be removed, the illness resolved, and the patient restored to health. For distant healing, such as praying for somebody a long way away, Agnes Sanford had had little success until she started visualizing the person she was praying for in excellent health, not sick as they currently were. Many times, I think that the more prayors, the better. You can literally feel the presence of the Holy Spirit. Then there is the issue of laying on of hands. This must be acceptable to the prayee. I was instructed by Olga Worrell, the Methodist psychic healer, to put one hand on the back and one on the abdomen near the solar plexus. Maybe doctors can get away with that, I'm not sure that everybody else can. Agnes Sanford stands behind the person and puts her hands on their head. Touch is what is important, but is not absolutely necessary. It is useful if you can touch somebody's hand or touch some part of their body so that they know you are in contact with them. Anointing with oil is another important factor. In the fifth century, oil was blessed by the Bishop. Pope Innocent I wrote a treatise that oil should be blessed by the Bishop and taken home to be used for praying for illness. Interestingly enough, in the early Church and even as late as that, all illness was prayed for – sore throats, headaches – all ailments and problems were prayed for. Obviously, many of those were healed. Larry Dossey, in one of his books, Prayer is Good Medicine, makes the point that the people with the shortest life expectancy in the Middle Ages were the kings and rulers because they had the most access to doctors. He thinks that was probably a detriment to their health.

Let's go over the prayer itself. The Lord's Prayer that we sometimes glibly say really has the pattern for us. My prayers start with praise and follow with thanksgiving for the blessings, for this person, for the love in this place, the presence of the Holy Spirit, and for God's desire that this person be healed. The petition may come out with the philosophy of 'Thy will be done', which means we are requesting the best possible outcome for this person, leaving it up to God to decide what is best. It may be a specific petition asking to heal the cancer, the sore throat, the headache or the chest discomfort – to marshal all the forces for healing and speed the processes. Then, there is the thankfulness at the end, thankful that the healing has started, God is moving in their life. They don't have to limit the prayer to the heart surgery and cancer, they can pray for sore throats and minor ailments, lacerations and back pains. Pray for all ailments. We need the practice!

So, what are the results? In the large healing meetings, people that have done exit interviews on people leaving there, have noted that approximately 75% have some effect. Of that 75%, about 25% have some significant healing there, although symptoms may recur and may require more prayer to eventually deal with the problem. The other 50% for the total of 75% have symptom improvement – less pain, they are able to walk better, feel better, function better, all of those things. Then, there are 25% who really don't know that much of anything at all happened. For the individual, they can have instant healing or they can actually start the rapid healing process. Many times, in my experience, it starts the healing process, this is going to require more prayer and more dedication on the part of the prayors. My experience is that most people I pray for experience a deep inner peace regardless of what happens next.

Praying for healing is not complicated; it’s done by amateurs. Remember the Titanic was built by professionals, the Ark by amateurs.

I guess my challenge to me and to First Baptist Church is that of a pastor in a Baptist church in Jerusalem who stated that “faith equals risk”. Carlyle Marney used to say that 'faith' was a verb – to faith means to risk; risk ridicule, possibility of failure, and risk of immature egos in our congregation. There are going to be people who are going to sense the power of God and think it is their power. It has been said that “pride ceases 15 minutes after we're dead”. This is one of the issues we will have to face. Are we going to let that stop us? Are we going to let the risk of failure, the risk of being criticized, the risk of having to deal and care for some immature egos stop us from tapping into this great power that God has for us? I sometimes equate this to the fact that God does have the fire hydrant of healing on the corner of 9th and Trinity. Are we willing to limit ourselves to the faucet on the corner and get a few drops out of the faucet occasionally, or rather pull the plug out of the fire hydrant and let that healing flow into this community and into the community around us? Our next responsibility is to be obedient to Jesus' command: to preach, to teach, and to heal the sick. To be obedient and faithful in prayer and all things. Second Timothy 1:7 says, "For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but the spirit of power, of love, and of self-discipline." Francis McNutt in his book, Healing, said, "The healing ministry is perhaps the most dramatic and one of the most beautiful demonstrations of God's love for us. There is no need to overstate the case or lead the scientific community to disparage it. If we think we have all the answers, we are shut off from God's light. Healing is a mystery of God's love. You should be open to be used for healing, but for not being used. You are in the presence of the mysterious presence of God. Wait upon God's wisdom in all simplicity, like a child."

My question to you tonight is, are you ready to faith? Do you have infirmities you wish to have resolved? Do you feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in this room, and if so, may we pray?