Sermon Illustrations

Dave Fredrick's -- From the Vineyard - 30-Second Healing Prayer Exercise

Welcome!

We are going to begin by taking a little time to pray for physical healing. If you are here for the first time, I promise you, it looks nothing like TV! No one is going to yell at you, push you, or anything else like that. And you are free to just watch, or join in, whichever you prefer. We are only going to take a couple minutes to do this, and then we will move on to our teaching. We believe that Jesus is still doing the same things now that he did in the Bible, and we want to stretch ourselves a little in order to go after it.

Let me tell you how we are going to do this. In a couple minutes, I am going to ask anyone who has a physical problem to stand up, and then we are going to pray and ask God to heal you right now.

When we pray, we are going to do it in a very particular way. If you are used to doing it differently, I would ask that you humor me and let that go. If you aren't clear why feel free to grab me after the service. You will only have about 30 seconds to pray. If you are praying for someone, when I say "go" you just go over to them, ask them their name, and where it hurts. Please don't get a medical history or more details--you don't have time for that. Then you are going to pray, and I want you to pray in a specific way.

When you pray, if the person is comfortable with it, you can put your hand on the area that hurts, and then simply ask God, in Jesus' name, to heal and restore it. That's it. Or you can speak to the condition in Jesus' name, and command the pain to leave. Nothing else!

Please do not give advice or counsel, pray for the doctors to have skill, give prophetic words, rebuke the devil, tell God how worthy they are (both the person and God know that's not true), or pray for anything else! That is not what we are doing right now. Just pray they will be healed.

Also, do not pray "if it's your will." No child at Christmas ever went up to their dad and said, "Dad, could I have a bike if it's your will?" So we are going to pray like we are kids at Christmas, and just ask our heavenly dad for a gift. OK?

Once you finish (and I'll be timing you and I'll tell you when you are done), ask them how it feels. There are only three possible results:

One: They are completely healed;

Two: They aren't healed at all--nothing has changed, or

Three: They are somewhere in between the two--there is some improvement, but there is also still some pain. There are no other options!

If it's #1, you are done. If it's #2 or #3, pray once more. You can pray the exact same way--it isn't really about how good or creative a pray-er you are, so it's ok to use the exact same words again if you want. If you are getting prayer, you might want to test it out--move in some way, or see if you can do something you couldn't do before.

When you finish, ask them again, and then take a seat. After we are all done, I'll do a little survey and we'll all find out what happened. Just so you know, we've done this several times and we have always seen some people healed; we have also never seen everyone healed. But we believe if we don't go for it, nothing will happen, and we are committed to trying to learn and grow.

So--if everyone who is sick or has a physical problem could stand up, we will get started. (Pause). Now for the rest of you, if you are comfortable, please gather around each of these people and pray the way we just talked about. Like I said earlier, if this is new to you, feel free to just watch--we won't take long.

(Once the pray-ers start moving, I ask the people wanting to receive prayer to raise their hands until someone gets to them, because once people start moving around it is hard to tell who is who).

After everyone returns to their seat, I ask "Of those who got prayed for, who is either completely healed or noticeably better, even if it isn't 100%?" I often go through and ask them what their condition was, and how they are now (depending on the number of people we are talking about) but I don't take full testimonies--there isn't time for it. Sometimes if someone is real excited they can't help it and go on and on, but that is usually worth it.

I end with an encouragement for those who weren't healed at all, or weren't fully healed, to get more prayer after the service from our trained prayer team, noting that often the longer we pray, the more we see happen. Then we go on.

With practice, you can get it down to 5-6 minutes

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