The last few weeks have been exciting and very stimulating. I had the opportunity to attend a Power and Love conference here in Lexington. The team of four American guys had just come from doing this same school in Brazil. While I did not know much about the conference or what to expect, I had heard one of the speakers at a church in Nicholasville a few months ago. Prior to that, I had seen Todd White interviewed on a ministry TV show and then on YouTube. Up until six or seven years ago, Todd had been a drug dealer and a pretty bad guy. But, now this dreadlock wearing dude goes around telling anyone who will listen about the power and love of Jesus. One YouTube video shows him walking up to some young women at an outdoor bar and while he ends up praying for all of the girls, one girl’s leg grows out an inch or two to match the other so that her back pain would disappear. Pretty wild stuff when you combine the power and love of Jesus!
Back to the conference, there were about 125+ people there and I talked to folks who had come from as far away as North Dakota, Texas and Buffalo, NY. My original expectation was to learn more about healing ministry, new techniques, etc. I was wrong. While I did see dozens of people healed from everything from deafness to rheumatoid arthritis, about 95% of the time was spent on our daily walk with Christ. Pretty heady stuff, huh?! Things like: Understanding the Father’s love. Our identity in Christ. It’s not about what you do, but who you are. God is good. You owe the world a God encounter, not a sermon. I cannot be rejected because of I am loved by Him. We need to move from evangelism manipulation to lifestyle regeneration. You can only be humble when you know who you really are.
The techniques to facilitate healing were even more advanced. Simple prayers like, “Pain, be gone.” “Inflammation leave, now.” “Body, be whole.” No wonder some people use children to help pray for the sick. They don’t complicate things and are not too concerned about performance.
Last week, Missy and I went down to Christian Healing Ministries in Jacksonville, Florida for another level of prayer ministry training. Here is the list of lectures:
• Love is a Gift
• Intimacy and Identity
• Understanding the Emotions
• Blessings and Curses
• Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion
• The Purpose of Fear
• Understanding the Grieving Process
• Hearing God
• Healing of Addictions
• The Ministry of God's Holy Angels
• Spiritual Warfare
The curriculum and lectures were great but some of the best times were during the practicum exercises. We, as prayer ministers and students (about 75 of us), got to help out by bringing healing prayer to each other. Things ranging from removing the scars of incest to bringing healing to the grief/mourning process, as well as most every problem in between. Pastors and prayer ministers suffer from many of the same problems that everyone else does. Sin is sin, no matter whose family it is in and the brokenness that is the end result. It was a long and busy week but very rich. It is hard to describe how peaceful and loving the environment is at these training events at CHM. Sure, we got to go to FL and dodge the storms that everyone was having at home in KY, but it was much, much more than all of that.
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