Praying for one another : Holy Trinity 16.3.03

Acts 3.1-10

Introduction

Good morning. Today we are looking at the subject of how we can minister to one another in prayer. I thought I’d start by telling you about Robert.

Robert is a pastor in a village in one of the poorest parts of Tanzania. I met him at the pastors’ conference we took there last summer. At the end of the conference we said we would like to pray for them. We teamed ourselves up with some of the locals who could translate for us, and Robert came for prayer. Now as you know, sometimes it isn’t at all obvious how to pray for someone, and it can be even harder when you only have a few words of their language. So I’d been a good girl and done my homework. I knew that Robert’s parents separated when he was very young, and that he was brought up by family members. Because of this he and his brother were not able to go to school, which you have to pay for; instead they looked after the animals and tended the crops. Robert is paid between £5 and £7 a month. This isn’t enough to feed his family.

So Robert came forward, and we asked him how we could pray for him. I am always overwhelmed in Africa by the experience of praying for people who give so much and receive so little. How could we pray for him, this isolated pastor struggling to minister against so many odds? Well, said Robert, he’d been having problems with headaches. Ah, I thought to myself, hardly surprising. Now, it’s no use just praying for the headache; we need to find out what’s causing it. So I put on my best listening hat and asked him was this a recent problem, or had he had it for some time? No, he said, he’d had it for some time, and it was getting worse. Ah, I thought again, wondering about his tough childhood, the loss of his parents, the stress of trying to provide for his family. How long have you had it? Since 1984, he said. Hm, I thought. Let’s explore a bit further. I put on my most empathetic expression and asked whether anything particular had triggered it off, so far as he was aware? Yes, he said. A tree fell on my head.

Let’s pray…

How do we pray for one another?

Prayer is a most peculiar activity. At one level it’s quite straightforward. It’s just a matter of talking to God, taking our needs to him and asking him to deal with them. Anyone can pray. At another level it’s extremely complicated, a tricky matter of exploring theological reality and uncovering hidden causes. Does God want to meet this need? Is this a reasonable request, when so many are so much worse off? Are there issues here of which we are unaware? Do we have enough faith? Do they have enough faith? Does prayer work anyway, I mean not just in theory but in actual practice?

We respond to these difficulties in different ways. Often we make it simple when it’s complicated, and then wonder why our prayers are not answered. Sometimes we make it complicated when it’s simple, trying to analyse and understand, when all we need to do is ask. With Robert it turned out to be simple. We prayed for his head. I saw him a few days later and asked him how it was, and wreathed in smiles he told me it was better. The single most encouraging verse in the Bible on prayer for me is Romans 8.26, where Paul says that the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words. I think sometimes the groans must be very deep.

On what basis do we pray for one another?

Let’s start by asking: what is the basis on which we pray for one another? Why do we pray, and what do we pray for?

Well, we started with the simple case of Robert. Let’s stick with that, and go back to the passage we had read to us. Peter and John are going up to the temple to pray. As they arrive, so does someone else. He’s lame, and every day he gets his friends to carry him to the temple gate just as everyone’s turning up. And he asks them for money. Peter gives him a hard look, and says this: ‘I haven’t got any money, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.’ And of course he does, and he leaps with joy, and everyone praises God. And then Peter preaches the gospel to them, inviting them to repent of their sins and turn to Jesus, in whose name this man has been healed.

Now various things strike me about this passage. This man is a penniless cripple, and he asks for money because he’s got to live on something. He doesn’t get it. They pray for him not according to what he has asked for, but according to what he needs; and he does get it. Now this is the opposite of our natural instincts. When people ask us for something in particular, our instinct is to try and provide that very thing, particularly when it’s so obvious that they need it. But Peter and John didn’t give him what he asked for. We haven’t got any money, they said. Not exactly true, because we’ve only just been told that all the believers had sold their possessions and put the money into a common pot precisely for this reason. So Peter and John didn’t have personal bank accounts, but they did have access to the funds of the church. But they weren’t interested in handing them out.

Three years ago I went with Mike Hutchinson and John Lee to a place called Mwahu, also in Tanzania. Mwahu is a scattering of low houses made of sticks and mud, miles from anywhere. The people had heard the gospel only once before, and some of them had become Christians. We were supposed to preach to them and pray for them. They gave us a good welcome. Some of the women led me up onto a high rock, from which I could see for miles. Nothing but scrub, a dry lake far below, and the stumps of a maize crop which had dried out before it ripened. Two men were working at a charcoal fire, making metal tools with hammer, anvil and goatskin bellows. There was a dog, so thin you could see all its ribs. I discovered they eat one meal a day because they have no food. A lot of them were dressed in rags. Some of them had babies so sick they looked yellow. And I thought, in a minute I am going to preach the gospel to these people. They live in the second poorest country in the world. They have to walk 5 km just to get water. It hasn’t rained for 3 years so their crops have failed. They have no medicine, and no education. And I am going to stand up with all the privileges the world can offer, and expect them to listen to me. What am I going to say? How are we going to pray?

Well, I’d already decided to speak to them from Luke 4. This is what Jesus said when he began his ministry:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

So I reasoned that if that was what Jesus said he had come to offer, that was what we, as his representatives, should offer also. So I apologised that I could not meet their needs. I knew that just like Peter and John, I had access to loads of money, comparatively speaking. But I also knew I didn’t actually have any in my pockets. So we said what Peter and John said: what we have we give you. And what we have is what Jesus gives, because we stand here in his name. We explained that Jesus was born into a world just like theirs. We said the world is in a mess because because people are far from God, and that is the reason for their predicament. We said some of them were far from God. We said God wanted them to draw close to him, to live with him instead of without him. We said he wanted to free them from the things that bound them, that he wanted to heal them from their diseases, that he wanted to deliver them from the oppression of people or evil spirits. We invited them to give their lives to him, to tell him of their needs, to know that he loves them. And they did. They held out their hands and prayed in silence for so long that we had to virtually shake them to get them to stop.

Then they sang. Eventually we had to shout to get them to stop that too. We prayed for the sick, and that went on for ages as well. We left money for maize, and a link with the nearest church, where we’d preached the day before. We didn’t go back to Mwahu. But in the nearby town, where we’d done the same thing, two old women interrupted the service next day. That’s unusual. Old women don’t interrupt church services in Tanzania. But one stood up and said, she wanted to encourage the church to believe that God really does love, that he really does act. She knew, because for years she’d not been able to breathe properly. She’d been prayed for. And her chest was clear. She’d like to sing a song to prove it. And she sang. The other woman said she’d had a tumour in her nose, had it for ages, spent all her money on doctors. They all nodded, they knew. She’d been prayed for. It had gone. Mike checked. No tumour.

Praying in the name of Jesus

Peter and John prayed for the crippled man in the name of Jesus. They knew Jesus. They’d spent 3 years with him, day and night. They’d seen him cry and they’d seen him shout, they’d been loved by him and rebuked by him, and they’d seen him set people free. And when they prayed it must have felt as though he was with them, that man they’d shared every moment with for so long. And I think that’s one of the keys to praying for each other effectively. We must pray in the name of Jesus. And to do that, we have to know who he is. We have to pray not out of our own compassion, but in the name of someone we’ve actually met, the only one who has power over realities we cannot touch.

Let me illustrate.

This is how a Victorian artist saw Christ, and it shows who she thought he was. It’s the children’s picture book image of gentle Jesus meek and mild, loving animals and dressed in white. See the animals, there’s a nice fawn, some little lambs, some bunnies – and they are definitely bunnies, not rabbits. If you see Jesus like that – and plenty of people do – how do you pray for people? You focus on God’s compassion. Praying for someone is a gentle thing, like putting your arms round them and giving them a cup of tea. It doesn’t require much energy, just a lot of care and concern. And perhaps sometimes it is like that.

But not always. Look at this one.

This is another painting of the risen Christ, but this time it’s not a Western one. It’s done by a Korean artist. What kind of Jesus is this? Well, you can see suffering. There’s blood still stuck to his hair and skin. He’s neither smiling nor not smiling. You can see his eyes, but they are just patches of unfathomable black. Above his head are angels, blowing the trumpets of victory over the powers of darkness. Below are the 3 crosses, on one of which that victory was accomplished. And to the side, to remind us that life is still beautiful, are transparent blue flowers.

If you see Jesus this way, how do you think about praying for people? Rather differently. Pain is in it. Cost is in it. Mystery is in it. Darkness is in it. It’s altogether more serious as an enterprise.

Who then is Jesus? Well, Jesus is the word of God. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. All things came into being through him. Now for the people who received the scriptures, a word is not just something which communicates. It isn’t just a vehicle for information, a sound in the air, a mark on the page, as it is for us. For them, a word was something living and active and powerful, something as sharp as a two-edged sword, the vehicle not of information but of life itself. When an Old Testament prophet spoke a word, the very speaking was part of the coming about. That’s why the prophets had such a tough time. Words carried power. Words could make things happen. Words are the expression of God himself, and this is the God who created the universe. The Hebrew for a word is dabar. It means both word and deed. It got translated into Latin as verbum. Jesus was the verb of God. And what is a verb? It’s a doing word. So when we speak in the name of Jesus, we don’t just speak, we act. Something happens. And that is very good news indeed.

What do we pray for?

What was the good news. Well, Jesus explained it in different ways at different times.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free.

Here he said it means release, healing, and deliverance. How then do we pray for people, what do we pray for? We pray for healing, release and deliverance. Let’s take them in order.

Praying for physical healing

Well, this is a sermon and not a training seminar, which is why I’ve not wanted to say well first you do this, and then you do that. I think it’s more important for us to have a vision for prayer, to believe that our prayers will be answered, than it is to have a set of techniques for doing it. But I’d like to make some obvious points and tell some stories, just to increase your faith and whet your appetites.

Jesus said he came to bring sight to the blind, so let’s start with physical healing.

James 5. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.

That’s why we have a healing prayer team, and it’s why I would encourage you to pray for one another in your cell groups. Prayer for healing was a normal part of the ministry of Jesus, and it is meant to be a normal part of ours too. We offer prayer for healing as part of a communion service, and it seems to be particularly effective in that context, perhaps because it is then that Jesus is most powerfully amongst us. Often we don’t know the results of our prayers, and I would encourage you to tell us if you experience healing. But during the course of the last year, for example, we have had someone healed of arthritis in her wrist, and someone else of carpal tunnel syndrome. Another person was healed of a persistent problem in his foot. A child came for prayer suffering from ME like symptoms following glandular fever; when he went home his mother asked how he’d got on and he said fine – but you didn’t tell me about the electricity, Mum. He’s now back at school and functioning normally. On Sunday Ben and I prayed for a young woman with sharp and persistent back pain. The look of delight and astonishment on her face as she realised it had gone was wonderful.

But what happens when you pray for someone and they aren’t healed? I think the first thing to realise is that it doesn’t mean they have not met with God. I actually became a Christian because someone wasn’t healed, because of her conviction that she had life and that was far more important than cancer. Sometimes they are healed spiritually or emotionally but not physically. I prayed for a man last summer in a place called Matui. He came for prayer in a healing service. He was rather peculiar in his behaviour, so they took him outside. He realised he’d got to tell us what the problem was without using words. So he leant forwards, put his index fingers to his eye, and squirted. A jet of yellow liquid shot out and landed on the ground. Ah, OK, I said frantically before he could do it again, you want us to pray for your eyes. We started praying. He started shaking. Someone came up and said don’t waste your time on him, he damaged his head in an accident and he’s mentally impaired. We asked if he’d been to the witch doctor. He had. By this time he was showing all the signs of the presence of evil spirits. We explained witch doctors weren’t always a good idea, and we invited him to ask Jesus to help him. He did. What happened then was that he coughed and shook. We told the evil spirits to go, and eventually he stopped. He still seemed very frightened, so we told him to go back into the service and worship. Next day he came up to us, smiling and looking completely relaxed, and clutching a scrap of paper. On it he’d written 1999. That’s how long he’d been sick for. I looked at his eyes. I didn’t ask him to squirt, but they still looked the same to me. He’d wanted physical healing. I don’t think he’d got it. But he had met with Jesus, and his life was now different. What we had, we had given him.

Praying for inner healing

Jesus said he came to bring not just healing to the sick, but release to the captives. The living word of God is able to bring healing not just to the body but also to the soul. For many people this is the cutting edge of the good news: it is often more painful to live out of diseased attitudes and feelings towards the self than it is to live with physical disability. Learning to see ourselves as God sees us can totally transform our lives. Jesus freed the woman caught in adultery from her guilt with a single sentence. In the sermon on the moung he taught a whole crowd of people that their suffering and pain could be seen in a completely different way when viewed from the perspective of eternity. He helped Peter replace his fear with courage and his anger with love. If some people experience physical healing, many more experience inner healing, and we must pray for one another in this way too.

Again, I could say a lot about how to do it. But I’d rather not. I have a friend who trained as a psychiatric social worker, and I once asked her about all the different forms of therapy and counselling. Which is the most effective, I wanted to know. Ah, she said, funny you should ask that, cos I’ve just read some research on it. It turns out that there’s only one factor which makes a difference. Excellent, I said eagerly, what is it? It’s how much you care, she said. Nothing to do with your training or your methodology at all.

Now to me this makes an immense amount of sense. God is love, and it is love which heals.

Sometimes love heals us instantly. I have prayed with people who have suddenly realised that God loves them when their parent did not, and it’s changed their life. More often it’s gradual. I am too full of a sense of my own deficiencies to expect that I should be loved. But gradually I learn that I am. I think it’s like this.

I became a Christian at a specific moment in time. The good news that there is a God and he’s interested in me hit my life like a pebble landing in the centre of a pond. It changed my life in a single instant, to such an extent that the whole world looked different, it kind of shone. But the ripples from the impact are still working their way out over the surface of the pond. As they move from one area to another, I find I understand more about myself and more about God. I find that I experience his love and his healing more and more. Do you remember that keyring Melvyn gave out once, with ‘God’s got more’ written on it? It’s true.

Again I could tell you lots of stories. Over the last few years I have prayed with about 100 people, not on Sundays but over a couple of hours in an evening. This is what we call prayer ministry. Most of those people have experienced inner healing to some degree. One of the most unusual was a woman who came because her life was in a mess, she had been struck by the change in someone she knew who’d become a Christian, and she’d been told it’d be a good idea to come and talk things through with me. So she did. She sat down and told me all her woes, which were many. Then she said, but I don’t want anything religious. So I told her that’s fine, but I have nothing else to offer you. Like Peter and John, I can only give you what I have, and that is Jesus. She became a Christian, and she has received an enormous amount of healing as a result.

Praying for spiritual healing

Finally there’s spiritual healing. Freedom for the oppressed, Jesus promised. I think there are two forms of spiritual healing. The first is called repentance, the second is called deliverance. We first receive spiritual healing when we turn to Christ, leaving behind everything which binds us to the world of sin and death. If you have received Christ, you have received spiritual healing; you are spiritually alive. If you haven’t, you aren’t.

The second form is more particular. One of the spiritual realities which we tend to underemphasize in the West is the existence of evil spirits. It is their job to keep us from God, and they do it very effectively. Sometimes they just tell us lies. Sometimes they afflict us in various ways. Occasionally they enter into us and wreak absolute havoc, as they were doing to the man from Matui. We don’t need to be afraid of them, for Christ died to set us free. We just need to turn our backs on them. Sometimes we need to ask others to pray for us to help us to do this. Every so often I have to pray with someone for whom this is the case. They have ranged from people who lose complete control of themselves and speak insults in a different voice from their own, to people struggling with a generalised anxiety with no apparent cause, which goes when prayed for. I once prayed at 7 in the morning for someone with an alcohol problem who’d been thrashing around in bed all night terrified that something was inside her. As far as I know she hasn’t had a problem with alcohol since. I once prayed with someone who kept getting fits of rage at her husband. Was she angry with him about anything in particular, we asked. No, she said, he was a good man and she loved him. We prayed, she began to scream that there was something on her back, eventually she started laughing, and a week later her husband reported that she was a different woman. And all this in Leicester!

At this point I want to reassure you. We enjoy an enormous amount of protection from the extremes of demonic influence. You can’t catch them like you catch a cold. And they are not usually difficult to get rid of, once you’ve worked out what they’re up to. But it’s a form of prayer which can be a bit tricky, so we shouldn’t engage in it lightly. You may have noticed that the baptism service contains a prayer of exorcism in which the person or their sponsors, repent of their sins, renounce evil, and turn to Christ. That’s a good way to start.

So there we are. We must keep praying for one another, and not give up. Prayer is very exciting. Prayer changes things. Prayer is working in tandem with the power that created the heavens and the earth. Prayer works. Amen.

AJM March 03