Kindle Notes & Highlights
As I write, there’s a stirring in the Church to return to its original design and purpose in the world. God’s plan and strategy is to bring his Church back in line with its original calling of fulfilling the great commission, but with an understanding of our royal priesthood.
It enables churches in an area to come together and work together, using a method of prayer and an approach that everyone can agree on.
It’s unpressurised and peaceful. It’s an oasis of healing where people are offered the opportunity to drink from the fountain of life.
This gentle, non-confrontational ministry works within a loving and compassionate environment, full of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
As people are drawn to the chairs and take a seat, we gather around each one in groups of two to four to kneel and pray our best prayer. God has given us something that’s fresh, simple and within the reach of every believer. No one ever prays alone, but always together in a group.
It is a beautifully simple way to regularly reach out to the lost and hurting on the streets of our community.
We space six wooden chairs out in a line, three on either side of the banner with 5-6ft of space between each chair to allow a team of two to four people to pray around each chair without interfering with the team praying for the person in the adjacent chair.
Two to four of our team will go over to those taking a seat, the men to pray with men and the women to pray with women. We introduce ourselves in a friendly way and ask the person for their name, which we use throughout the time of prayer. As we ask what they want prayer for, we are listening to them with one ear but also listening to God with the other, to see what he might be saying about the person. We’re not looking for a long medical history, because we’re not doctors, we just want to know what it is they want Jesus to do for them.
We then ask permission to lay our hands on them. We gently lay our hands as close as possible to the affected area, being careful only to do so if it’s appropriate and they feel comfortable.
Our motivation for going out onto the streets is the compelling love of Christ.
We begin to pray by inviting the Holy Spirit to come and reveal his presence to the person and for God to touch them with his peace and love. When we sense that the person is connecting with God, we use authoritative prayer and words of command to release healing. For example, if a person has cancer, we speak to the cancer and command it to dissolve, to disappear and go. Whatever condition a person may have we take authority over it and command the sickness, pain, disease or infirmity to go from their body.
We have also learnt to pray from a place of rest.
Ministering on the streets demands so much that we will very soon burn out if we give out of our own strength.
And out of the vast resources of God, instead of panic comes peace; instead of fear there is faith; instead of being stressed we are stretched, and as we are stretched we can grow.
We should be showering people with love and compassion by the bucket load, and although we believe God can heal every sickness, disease and deformity, we’ll never make a judgment on what we think God is or isn’t doing in someone’s life when we pray, because we aren’t always able to see the healing process at work in a person’s life. We can pray with confidence, knowing that Jesus heals through us, but we have to trust him and rest in him, knowing that the results of our prayers are up to him.
Everyone we pray for is given an A5 envelope containing a letter explaining who we are, why we’ve done what we’ve done, and some guidance on how they can pursue God further. We also include a “Why Jesus?” booklet and an invitation to our church. We are careful to ensure that all our literature is well presented and of a high quality.
When we pray for people on the streets we never make a promise or a guarantee that they’ll be healed, but we do promise to pray our best prayer for them, and we leave the results up to God.
We teach simply that healing can come in three ways: either instantly, gradually, or, when there’s no immediate sign of healing, that healing can come as they go.
We won’t tell anyone that God has healed a person unless they themselves confirm it to be the case or their doctor confirms it later on.
by far the commonest way healing comes is gradually.
Some have the wrong expectation that if God’s going to heal at all, he’ll do it instantly, but healing doesn’t always come immediately.
I believe the moment you open your mouth to exercise Christ’s authority and command the body to be healed, or whatever it is that needs to be done, then those microscopic particles, atoms and molecules, accelerated by faith, excitedly begin to move in obedience to the word that’s spoken until health is formed.
“In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.”
To wait in faith means to wait patiently and with a sense of expectancy.
A lot of Christians in particular, tend to look at what God’s not doing, rather than what he is doing.
Faith works in both directions. It works in the right way when we believe the right things, but it will also work in reverse, when we believe the lies that the enemy has sown.
If it’s a condition that comes back, then what the person actually needs is not healing but deliverance from a spirit of affliction, since a demon cannot be healed, it has to be cast out.
Sometimes though, if something comes back, it may be because the person is socially abusing their body to bring back a condition that God had actually healed them from.
When people experience healing we always encourage them to go back to their doctor for confirmation.
Luke 17:11-19. The Bible tells us that “as they went, they were cleansed.”
We want to leave people in a place of faith, reassuring them that even if they’re not healed it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love them or that there’s anything wrong with their faith. It’s perfectly possible that they may experience God’s healing later on.
I used to believe that you had to progress in healing, starting to pray for something “easy”, like a headache for instance, and moving up the scale of difficulty to something “more difficult” like a tumour on the brain.
From a worldly perspective we might think a headache is easier to heal than a tumour on the brain. The degrees of difficulty go up in our mind and we’ve created a healing scale.
We have a tendency to focus on the sickness and make an automatic assessment about the level of difficulty. On a scale of being “easy to heal” to “difficult, if not impossible” we’d rather pray for people on the easy end of our scale and try to avoid the “difficult, if not impossible” ones.
We don’t have all the answers and we don’t guarantee healing, although we know and believe that God has the power to heal.
Whether they are healed or not, showing God’s love is what makes the difference. No one who hasn’t been healed has come back angry.
Yet there is this dilemma in that our experience shows that not everyone is healed. This is the “now” and “not yet” of the kingdom of God.
Some have gone overboard with the faith teaching, but there’s no escaping the fact that Jesus talked about the need for faith.
As I’ve studied the Scriptures and read in Luke 5:17b that, “the power of the Lord was present for him to heal the sick,” I’ve come to the conclusion that there has to be an environment where his presence and his power are there, and where people have faith and are believing in him. The HOTS model has developed into becoming just such an environment.
His presence breaks out when we recognise who we are and what it is we carry.
Our preparation is our relationship with God, our intimacy with him, and drawing from that deep well to create an oasis so that thirsty people passing by will be drawn. If there is a spiritual hunger in people and a thirst, and if there is living water where you are, they will be drawn to you.
There are bound to be quiet times and busy times, but you can be assured that God is always doing something.
The aspects of HOTS that cannot be gleaned from following the manual are best experienced directly from those who carry the presence of God and his authority and are able to impart it to others.
Jesus modelled a creative, fluid lifestyle of healing based on his close relationship with the Father, and his absolute authority over every demon, sickness and disease.
Healing was never meant to be confined to a building, one model, or ministered through just a few. It was meant to happen naturally anywhere, everywhere and at any time, through every believer to everyone!
The mind of Christ, the heart of the Father, and the life of the Spirit in a believer changes the status quo.
Jesus has given us the keys of the kingdom which represent his authority. Whenever we exercise that authority on earth, all of Heaven backs it up. But we have to be childlike in our faith to see the Kingdom of God and we have to believe what Jesus says, because some of the things Jesus says sound so crazy that only a child could possibly believe it.
We need to be ready to pray with anyone, at any time and in any place, whether it’s convenient or inconvenient. People often ask me how they can pray with greater authority. The answer is not to pray for more authority, but to ask the Holy Spirit to give you more revelation of the authority you have already been delegated.
two particular ways we minister healing to people: by the laying on of hands and by the word of command. The
So when I see someone do something abusive in ministry, I know that’s not of God. Even if they say God told them to do it and that person’s healed, and they might think the end justifies the means, my response is that God will heal because he gives us authority to heal the sick, but what he doesn’t do, is tell us how to use it.
