Your Personal Journey Into Miracle Faith

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They have read all the books. Anyone who has been to any kind of Bible School has looked at the lives of those that God has used in revival. They've all done that. I've done that too. But I had a deep hunger in my heart for the gift and ministry of healing to operate in my life. After studying the scriptures, I said, "There is nowhere in the Scriptures that says it's not for me. Healing is for today; I see it in the Bible. Jesus is the same today, yesterday, and forever, so healing must continue today. Still, I had some questions to resolve: Is this for me or is it only for the ones that God has used in healing.

But I needed to find out whether this healing gift was for me or just for Benny Hinn and Reinhard Bonnke. I wondered, "Do I have to be called, or can God use me? Then I saw in Scripture that "the prayer of faith will save the sick. So I asked myself, "Why would God want me to desire something He didn't want me to have? During those days, the Lord answered three main questions for me. First, I wanted to know whether it is God's heart to heal-I became convinced in my heart that is His heart.

My second question was: The third question God answered is this: That's when miracles started for me. After my questions were answered, then it was on to step 2—I realized that if I believed it, I needed to preach it and that the Holy Ghost would confirm the Word with signs and wonders. I knew He would work with me. You know--Mark the Lord working to confirm the Word. The Lord had shown me that, "if I want healing, I need to preach healing. If I want prosperity, I need to preach prosperity. If I want deliverance I need to preach deliverance.

If I want fruit in the family, I need to preach family. I preached everything that the classic healing evangelists did; I preached everything on healing and then I prayed for the sick in faith. I believed that God would confirm the Word if I laid my hands on the sick believing that God would do what He said He would do.

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Very simply—I followed the faith model. I talk more about this in the chapter on the Four Levels of Healing, but that is basically how it all started for me. What really stirred that passion was the fact that I wanted the deaf to hear because my mother was deaf. God actually used that situation in my life to fuel the fire in me. When I learnt that healing was a part of the Christian faith I asked, "God, are you going to heal my Mom? This was even before I started pursuing healing in my own life and ministry.

When my Mom wasn't healed, a holy zeal and determination rose up within me: My number one passion in the healing ministry was that the deaf would hear. So in my healing meetings I would always go for healing of the deaf—that would sometimes be one of the first alter calls that I would give. In those days, I remember inviting all the deaf up for prayer and none would hear, or perhaps one would partially hear.

But that was how I began to increase in my healing gift. I teach more on this in the chapter about the deaf and dumb spirit. Describe how you got into the healing ministry and how you developed your gifts and your anointing.

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All the different healing ministers kind of helped mentor me in my early days of healing ministry. I would look at the strengths of healing ministers like T. Osbourne and notice that their strong points were in the Word, faith and authority. Then I would look at ministers like Kathryn Kuhlman and Benny Hinn and the healings that came through the worship, the atmosphere the anointing and the Presence.

Then you have guys like Kenneth Hagin and Oral Roberts—although anointed healing ministers, their strength and ministry of healing came through the presentation of faith and the belief that "faith comes by hearing. I know that today God has placed on our ministry an apostolic anointing in which my two strongest suits are the call of prophet and the call of evangelist.

I've had to learn how to operate in the office of the prophet and the office of the evangelist and then learn how to mix those two gifts together in the healing ministry. So I would combine all those elements: Examining the strengths and weaknesses of different healing ministries allowed me to learn from each one. William Branham would hardly even preach, at times, in the beginning of his ministry. He would just do the word of knowledge and healing stuff.

Obviously, there are also good things about Christianity.

The Miracle Prayer - My Catholic Life!

Is there a danger of the pendulum swinging too far? Well, I am an atheist. I make it clear in the show that this is not in any way against the Church or religion, or even the idea of healing. The reality is that a lot of churches nowadays do rely on sensationalism and personal experience. I remember standing there when we were all being told to speak in tongues. Not to belittle much richer religious experience, but that is sadly quite typical.

Yes, but only in a very personal sense.

I had, what seemed to me, a strange reaction from my fellow Christians in the CU of absolute horror. I would do a hypnosis show and have Christians at the back talking in tongues and trying to exorcise me. I thought it was just based in fear and ignorance, but that planted a seed of alienation. At the same time I had a good friend who was and still is a psychic healer.

I could look at that and see how she was maintaining a circular belief: I think there are many ways of sustaining a Christian or any other religious belief without this, but for me I thought the difference is that there has to be an objective, historical, factual event rooting it, like the resurrection, that separates it from just being a subjective circular belief. I wanted to undo those glib answers. I knew I could go to church every Sunday and be given a lot of emotive truisms. Do you feel that if your church had had a more intellectually robust engagement with these issues you might have been able to stay in the Christian faith?

Equally, they probably kept me going for longer too. I personally believe that there are strong arguments for the historical reliability of the Gospels, specifically around the death and resurrection of Jesus. What was the process that led you to take that view?

October 2018

These are sacred stories that are there to show a divine person. How seriously would you be expected to take it? It seems an odd thing to make up.

For me, a much more likely scenario is that of a spiritual resurrection. Within the Jewish context that Christianity came from, there was a belief in physical resurrection at the end of time. From everything I can see, Paul seems to understand it very much as a physical resurrection. He only seems to talk about visions, and things that he describes seem to be very understandable as spiritual. But that was my journey through it. That was the one thing I was looking for because it was the one thing, for me, that separated it from somebody saying they were psychic for all their own reasons.

It is a background interest.

The Miracle Prayer

Benefit of the Doubt: Why Trust The Bible? The Resurrection of Jesus: The website includes articles, videos and DVD resources. Did coming to terms with your sexuality play a role in you rejecting Christianity? On the other hand, I think it brings pain and damage with it. There was never any real evidence that it worked.

If anything it kind of attracted me more to the Church because it was trying to give a helpful answer, albeit a very misguided one. So I never saw a conflict with that. At the start of Miracle , you say: Finding personal meaning is huge in life. We are story-forming creatures and we desperately need to find that. But God is with them, and He'll either miraculously heal them, or He'll miraculously use them in a way that allows them to flourish and reflect the Father's heart right in the midst of their vulnerability. Life on earth is short. God's promises are true. And if you follow Jesus through the Gospels, you'll find a Savior who cares deeply about the human condition.

That fact—our Savior's heart for the human condition—is what brings us the assurance that God wants us to thrive, and He's with us every step of the way. You and I need to make some adjustments amidst the craziness of this world and the toxicity of our times. God offers us wisdom from above, wisdom that's unique to us and to our situation. But in order for us to know the fullness and the restoration that are possible for us as heirs of God, we have some things to learn.

We cannot and must not keep grinding our gears through life while ignoring the physical and emotional toll that our hardships have had on us. I can't prove this, but I believe there's a trapdoor in our hearts that drops things into our souls. Our soul is the place where our emotions brew and our hurts collide, and the turmoil of it all can put the squeeze on our hopes, our dreams and our perspective.

Jesus wants peace to rule and reign in our hearts so that we can prosper in our soul. He wants us to flourish in every way possible. We're going to ask God for a fresh vision of what flourishing can look like for us, and then we're going to position ourselves on the path of healing—whatever it takes. Some of this will be hard.

But you're no stranger to hard. You've done it before. We can do hard if it leads us to a better life, right? We're going to roll up our sleeves, take inventory of our habits, give our soul some room to breathe and maybe change a few of our ways so we can enjoy better health. And then we're going to go before the Most High God, who loves us with a passion we cannot fathom, and we're going to ask Him for a miracle, because He's the same God yesterday, today, and forever.

He loves us, and He still performs miracles today. Excerpted from Fully Alive: Larson is a national speaker, radio host and author of 15 books. Visit the Charisma Store to view all our specials. Help Charisma stay strong for years to come as we report on life in the Spirit. Click here to keep us strong! Please consider the following statements pertaining to comments posted by you and other visitors to our website:. Please follow these guidelines before commenting on our website: Please be considerate and respectful of your fellow posters.

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