Leanne Payne: Restoring the Christian soul through healing prayer

Kingsway 1991 AJM April 01

Excellent book on seeking and ministering wholeness through Christ.

Part One: the virtue of self-acceptance

1. Self-hatred: the traitor within – when temptation comes

No one with a ministry worth having escapes testing.

Stresses creativity, seeing people grow in their ability to collaborate with God, and become the maker he has enabled them to be.

Way of escape from temptation is to practise the presence of God. Centre self in God, know yourself to be in Christ and he in you, and then the demonic force and spiritual warfare ceases. Failure to deal with inner insecurities and self-hatred, and thus failure to gain a secure identity in Christ, is the most common underlying weakness in falls.

Prayer of thanksgiving for use in renunciation of self-hatred

Holy Father, I thank you that I am reconciled to you through the death of your Son, and that through faith in him as my saviour from sin, my heart is not only washed clean from my own sin, but it can be delivered from its grievous reactions to the sins and shortcomings of others around and against it. Because of your Son, Father, I can look straight up to you and dare to let all these feelings surface, and I do so now, knowing tha Christ is ready to take them and give me in exchange his life and your perspective on myself and others. Accept my thanksgiving, O God our Father. I thank you for Christ who has redeemed me from sin and death and who is even now pouring his eternal life into me.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Father, in whom I am to abide, to fully live, move, and have my being (my true and new self), I direct my thanksgiving to you. I bow before you as Lord of my life, and I thank you, precious holy one, crucified for me, that your blood justifies me, that in oneness with you, your goodness is mine.

Holy Spirit, you who so constantly and faithfully mediates to us the love of both Father and Son, I thank you now for the grace to receive all that is mine as a child of God. Empower me now as I renounce the sin of self-hatred and as I move toward the goal of wholly accepting my true identity as a child of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Then they just pray, Lord in your name and in the grace you shower on me, I renounce the sin of self-hatred.

2. First great barrier to wholeness in Christ: failure to accept oneself

Line between bondage and freedom, with law and voices of world flesh and devil on one side, walk in the Spirit and listening to God on the other.

Problem patterns which indicate need for healing: (Michael Scanlon)

judgmental spirit, harsh on self and demanding of others

perfectionist attitude

pattern of fearing future events

sense of aloneness/abandonment at times of decision

preoccupation with own guilt and compulsion to compete for position/success

Inability to accept self underlies all these. Such people need to exhange old patterns of relating to life for new ones; to do that they must learn to listen to God and to their own hearts.

Pain is usually a signal.

3. Struggling through to self-acceptance

It is important for those in the healing ministry to see troubled people as God sees them (the real people behind the phenomenal ones) and not as they see themselves.

Nonacceptance ranges from rejection of some physical aspect of our being to a wholesale rejection of self. Modern words include low self-esteem, lack of affirmation, unmet emotional needs.

If we do not humbly accept ourselves, we cannot love and accept others. Cannot love out of duty. CSLewis: you don’t teach a seed how to die into treehood by throwing it into the fire: and it has to become a good seed before it’s worth burying.

Seamands, Healing of memories.

Self-acceptance was once taught as Christian virtue, because no one is born with the capacity to accept himself. Should come just after puberty. Previous steps have to have been successfully taken. Impce of knowing identity apart from role; if not, you don’t know yourself as an authentic person. Persona – per sonare, speaking through the holes in the mask on the roman stage. People often have only a professional persona.

Need love and affirmation of a father; and sense of wellbeing which comes from love of a mother.

4. Affirmation: what it is and how it is received

From the love and affirmation of those around us as we are growing up. If those who cared for us approved of us, then, being privileged to see ourselves through their eyes, we feel it is good and right to be ourselves. And yet, even this is not fully adequate to get the job done. We live in a fallen world, and cannot love as we would, even those dearest to us; and if we could, they would make us their god. We need to turn to God.

Ask yourself, what person in my life made me feel good about myself; and write out what they did.

Need to acknowledge selves as truly fallen, confess pride that refuses to acknowledge we have lost the divine splendour, receive healing word from God , come out of fearful, dependent relationships and into right relationship with him and others. Is 55 – come to me all you who are thirsty.

Freedom set out in Romans and Galatians. Truth proclaimed in the power of the Spirit is what changes people.

Shame produces blame; answer is forgiveness.

5. Listening prayer – the way of grace and the walk in the Spirit

Listening prayer is ont only the vital step we take towards self-acceptance, but the same step that begins the walk in the Spirit for us all.

No one can die to your old diseased attitudes for you, or produce the magic prayer; the miracle lies in conversation with the creator. Get them to start a new prayer journal, one which reflects not the agony of the unhealed soul but brings the most diseased thoughts and patterns before God, look at them objectively, and receive what God is speaking into the situation. This is a good precursor to listening prayer.

A Christian is not a person so brave or thick-skinned that he can face the truth about himself unafraid; rather he is a sinner who can face his sin because he has confidence that God has forgiven and accepted him in spite of it. (CSLewis)

Prayer journal – write down the negative thoughts, identify source in world/flesh/devil; then the scriptural truths.

Part II: The Forgiveness of sin

Forgiveness is exclusive to Christianity – an exotic from heaven.

1. Healing of memories – the forgiveness of sin

These are two different terms for the same thing. Wounds so deep that only the mediation of someone else to whom we can bare our grief will heal us. We are confessing sin, our own or those of others; because woundedness and sin break relationships, and forgiveness is about healing relationships.

CSLewis: ‘I now feel that one must never say one believes or understands anything; any morning a doctrine I thought I already possessed may blossom into this new reality’ 69.

Prayer for healing of memories is healing of soul. Not spirit, which is healed from the moment of new birth. Healing of soul is releasing someone from psychological sickness and emotional pain due to hurts and deprivations of the past. It may hurt horrendously, because repressed pain will surface, and they need to understand this is the wounded part of the soul which is being healed.

In praying for healing of memories, we not only confess our sin, but forgive those people and circs which have wounded us. We often need to stop denying that we have been sinned against. Painful memories can go back beyond conscious memory.

Power of memory to make the past real to us is extraordinary. Prayer for healing of memories is the way we overcome our limitations as creatures of time.

7. Second great barrier to wholeness in Christ – failure to forgive others

Forgiving petty offences; can easily come to despise those who offend us in this way – means regarding them as inferior to selves; which is pride.

People often don’t realise they suffer from unforgiveness. Need: to confess it as a sin against you, name it specifically for the sin that it is, then before God extend forgiveness to the offender. People often don’t know what normal is; have been taught to deny their feelings as children. But if asked to state the sin and extend forgiveness, anger surfaces; gets them to raise hands to the cross and see the anger and unforgiveness come out and flow into Jesus. Then ask him to fill the spaces.

Another way is to get them to picture the person standing next to Jesus; it is hard to look at Jesus when one’s heart is filled with hate.

Families – Neh.1.6 I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father’s house, have committed against you.

Tell them:

we do not forgive evil (per se)

we do not forgive Satan

we do not forgive demons and evil principalities

but we do forgive persons in the clutches of that evil

As Christians we find both the grace and the option of mourning before God our sins, sorrows, grievous losses and injustices; and from there we can recognize the human condition, that we too are sinners and capable of wounding others.

Listening to our dreams – her own exp of discovering fear of exposure and feelings of inadequacy was blocking her from writing.

They do workshops for healing of memories; but mostly we deal with people one at a time.

Lots on bonding between infants and parents, and lack of understanding of what needs to happen.

8. Prolonged healing of memories – abandonment issues and the repression of painful emotions

Healing often has to involve intense grieving, esp in cases of felt abandonment. Need to minister to the child. Amazing the way God uses apparently small and insignifcant gestures to bring about massive healing into a lifetime of deprivation. Helpers can become the parents at crucial points in the person’s recovery. Depression and severe anxiety are symptoms. Medication can be useful to calm them down enough to enable them to face the inner deprivation and loss and deal with it. Inestimable value of healing of memories as person relives in the presence of someone they trust the trauma of absolute aloneness they faced early on. Transference may occur, with rejection being perceived from the helper whilst the failed relationship with the parent is being relived; need to deflect these feelings up to God. Importance of appropriate touch – amazing what God can do with one godly, well-timed, prayerful embrace. Like loaves and fishes.

Fantasy bonds – sometimes a child will have bonded to something in absence of bond to mother; darkness, the bed, desire to be of opp sex

9. Third great barrier to wholeness in Christ – failure to receive forgiveness

The law is a fence to make us good. In Christ, the fence has been removed.

Perfectionists – often victims of early training in which love and affirmation was withheld from them apart from good performance.

Every Christian needs to know about the bad guy within. Human heart as a reservoir of unconscious disordered motivation and response, of which unrenewed persons are unaware if left to themselves; heart is deceitful above all things, Jer 17.

She always instructs people to receive forgiveness after confession of sin.

Guilt – false or real. eg person whose mother died in childbirth and feels it’s their fault. Real sin is programmed into the memory, and we can usually get to it quickly as we pray.

Receiving forgiveness – helps to get them to focus on a crucifix. Important to pronounce forgiveness in a way they can receive it. In ministering forgiveness she anoints them with oil, making sign of cross, and then proclaims it; ‘receive God’s forgiveness; receive it into the very depths of your being’. If they struggle, prays that they will open up as a lovely bud or flower to receive the forgiveness Christ is sending.

10. Conclusion to healing of memories

Binding and loosing – refers to sin, NOT evil spirits; them we command to leave.

The interview. Invocation of presence of Christ. Using gifts of Spirit. Don’t need to go through entire life history. Agnes Sanford just asks were they happy as a child; then if so, when did they start to be unhappy. Beware modern disease of introspection; beware helping them with the old self – misplaced sympathy isn’t the love which heals. ‘The mark of a great Chrsitian helper or leader is that he is able by the power and assistance of the HS to inspire those he helps to be all God called them to be’. 156.

Look for problems being transferred from one relationship to another.

Remember to follow through on confession of sin and proclamation of God’s forgiveness once the healing is complete. As things needing confession are uncovered, we

direct their eyes to the Lord and they confess to him

we proclaim forgiveness of those sins

we discern false guilt that results from judgments and suggestions of men, and true guilt that results from awareness of having betrayed an authentic divine standard

we bind the sins of others that have wounded the one for whom we are praying, leading them to forgive

we discern and send away any oppressive/possessing evil spirits

we pray for God to pour in all the love that has been missing andfill spaces where sin/rejection/demonic presence has been

Part III: Spiritual warfare and the gift of battle

11. The use of holy water and other symbols and agencies

Blessing of water – suitable prayers.

Use of crucifix

12. The gift of battle

Power to enter into conflict and the stamina not to grow weary. Isaiah 11.2.

Can’t be exercised apart from mature prayer partners.

How to pray in situations of battle:

pray that the eyes of all who surround these persons be opened to see the situation as it really is

pray that their associates will be given ways to speak truth and light into the situation

pray that any demonic power within these persons/situtations manifest itself

ask that what can be salvaged in this situation and in the lives of yr enemies be saved, humbled, blessed by the Spirit of God.

13. Cosmic dimensions of spiritual warfare in Christian organisations

14. Wrong ways to do battle

essentially these are ones which give the demonic elements a high profile or which personify sin. Concentrate on God and the person, not on the demonic.

15. Restoring the Christian hope of heaven and the grace to persevere