Healing Prayer Is God’s Idea by Joseph Seger

Join David Chotka on October 2nd for a live book study on our WE 419 app.

“For the first time in my life, I had joined with Jesus’s compassion for someone who was sick and felt the power of God flow into another to make him well.” In their book Healing Prayer: God’s Idea for Restoring Body, Mind, and Spirit, David Chotka and Maxie Dunnam remind us that healing miracles still happen today. Healing miracles in the Bible captivate us and bring us to worship our good God. We read in these pages how those who seek God’s healing presence become part of God’s healing in others. It is such a beautiful way to think and communicate about God’s agency through us to others – a beautiful plan God has for us. Healing prayer is God’s idea. Have you ever considered it? God made us to bear his image in part so that we might heal others. The truth becomes clearer with every page turned in this book.

The book pours forth story after story of God’s miraculous outpouring amidst our continued awe.  The authors effortlessly weave their each unique vantage point into a shared thesis of how the Holy Spirit works through disciples of Jesus in healing prayer.

They acknowledge the seeming scarcity of healings throughout the church, but they continue to challenge the church to lean into the promises made in scripture.  Sometimes even calling out our gaps in discipleship, “That’s where many Christians are stuck today.  The gospel stops at the decision to receive the grace of forgiveness and doesn’t move us toward a divine infilling. As a result, pews are full of people who believe in Jesus and affirm some kind of formal faith, yet those people remain empty and unfulfilled. They lack divine power while seeking (like John Wesley before his transformative Aldersgate experience) to obey God “under their own steam.”(p.37)  The authors are quick to acknowledge cultural differences, but still desire all who follow Jesus to know the joy and power of a Spirit-filled life.

They remain hopeful in their Wesleyan roots that God’s grace can do more than we can possibly imagine, “Jesus came to infill and saturate every pore of our beings with his spirit! Christ came to empower us with the very nature, character, and power of God. (p 40)” Wesley saw this lived out in his ministry.  His journals record many people receiving miraculous healings through prayer. The authors complement the biblical and historical healings with their own experiences from around the world.

As their dive into this practice uncovers more and more, they are quick to acknowledge that God’s grace is not confined to healing prayer alone. “Medicine, miracle, and mystery – their threads of grace intertwine until time ends, and God reveals how those pieces, woven together, comingle to coalesce into a melded tapestry of beauty.” Even harder is the acknowledgement that not all have been or will be healed. Yet even here God is found to be at work in the waiting for the day when “death is swallowed by triumphant life.’

Perhaps their simplest statement is also one of their most profound – “God initiates. We respond.”  Healing prayer cannot just be done. There is no incantation or holy person. There are only faithful people who seek a holy and loving God through fervent prayer. God has always and will always be the worker.

David and Maxie go on with this divine centrality, focusing on the character of God and work of Christ as they are revealed in scripture – “Based on this, we pray with Christ, through Christ, and in Christ. Because prayer is God’s idea, we begin with these attitudes as rock-solid footing, even before we start. We start praying by embracing these postures: Having bold confidence in going to God, trusting God’s faithfulness, with childlike simplicity, confidently, remembering it is the Spirit who intercedes, knowing Jesus esteems the desires of your heart.” Anchoring our prayers in what God has already shared about Himself guides us to be present to the pain of the person before us rather than the anxiety of our own agenda.

Ultimately, we find that healing prayer is itself a tool of discipleship, “Healing prayer is designed to bring people toward the love of God rather than distract them from it! (p 155)”  This book runs the gamut of scriptural exploration, seasoned wisdom from practice, powerful stories and practical observations, and will be a blessing for the church.

The best recommendation I can give for this book comes from the fruit. Our church has been blessed by a growing prayer ministry. We have begun holding a periodic time of healing and anointing prayer. Upon reading this book, I shared the wisdom and insight from David and Maxie with our team. They were so grateful. The next time we offered the ministry, we felt the Holy Spirit move in new ways and heard from several who came forward for the first time in their lives in response to the Holy Spirit’s movement. Praise God for his initiative. May we all be humble in our response.

World Methodist Evangelism will be hosting a book study on Healing Prayer on our online platform WE 419 (download on the App Store or get it on Google Play and get connected). This will be a live event with the author on October 2nd. You can purchase the book here.