Talking about raising the dead

Well today marks the second week in a row when I have not written a post, although I said I was going to try to keep to this routine. I actually have an extremely good reason for this, however it is not something that I feel able to share.
I’m going to quickly throw down some words which are not related to marriage at all.
Over the course of this past week I have been thinking about…raising the dead. This is something that I am strongly interested in as an expression of the supernatural power of God. It has been simmering in a forgotten corner of my mind, and every so often I would remember it. I have been thinking for a long time that I must make time to sit down and develop the necessary faith for raising the dead. Well over the course of this week this subject was thrust into the forefront of my mind again. I now believe that I have a lot more understanding about it, and how to go about it.

So the truth is that I stared death in the face this week, and sadly death won, this time (apparently). I was so hoping that with this post I would be able to share that I had finally raised a dead person, but it was not to be, this time. So long story short someone was dying, and I prayed about it with an earnestness that I have not prayed with for a long time. The thing is, I cannot categorically say for sure, but from the circumstances, the overwhelming likelihood is that they still died despite the fervour of my prayer. However from this experience I believe that I understand more about prayer for the sick and dying which I am going to share with everyone reading this now.

This is the incredible thing that truly clicked for me: this is what the Bible says: that the work of healing has already been completed by Christ through His blood, through the stripes/lashes that He was given before His crucifixion. [The person I was praying for was not a Christian but belonged to another faith, which was an extra complication. However I chose to claim the healing of Christ for him too regardless of his faith, and I don’t think that that was the reason why he eventually died.] So this is the amazing realisation that finally clicked for me: whenever we are praying for healing for someone, that healing has already been completed by Christ. By our prayers we are “simply” releasing the healing that has already been made available. Even though I technically know this, and I have technically known this for a long time, in my mind I still behave as if I am the one actually creating the miracle through my prayers. But this week it struck home that the healing has already been created. So what this means in practice is that with our prayers there does not need to be any uncertainty – will God do it, will He not? Rather, we need to press in until the healing is completed.

An analogy: when we are praying for the miracle of healing it is like trying to shake apples from an apple tree. My tendency has always been to think that by my prayers I am growing the apples in the first place. What I realised was that the apples are already there! The healings have already been created, there is full allowance for supernatural healing made through the blood and stripes of Christ. So all the apples for supernatural healing that could ever be necessary – ever – are already on the tree! They have already been created! There is no uncertainty about the will of God – yes, He wills it! By our prayers we just need to shake these fruits to the ground. In that case, all we need to do is persevere in prayer until we see the results that we are asking God for.

At this point you are going to say “Ah Tosin, but the man that you were praying for died!” See this is all part of what I learned. When someone is as seriously ill as this man was, there is a natural “deadline” literally, or rather a deathline that we are working with. And my prayers have a potency, that is a rate at which they work. So if the prayers do not achieve the goal of healing by the “deathline”, then the person dies. And I believe that that is what happened in this situation. Actually no, the real issue here is not that the man in question died, (he was probably already dead when I prayed for him) but rather that my prayers did not apparently raise him back from death. Actually, I believe that the provision for raising him (or anyone else) from the dead has also been made.  However, after death it becomes a logistical difficulty. What am I going to do, ask them to not bury their father? If I had the spiritual confidence of Christ, if I was as powerful a healer as Christ then my reputation would already precede me, so I could say with all authority – “don’t bury him!” – and people would listen, because they would already know what I stand for. Or even if people did not already know me, if I had sufficient confidence that I knew what I was doing, I would still do my best to persuade them. Or I could even raise him after he was buried. But because I have never done this before, and it is kinda (very) weird, and death is such a sensitive topic, obviously I am not going to do any of that. So with this particular individual I have just let it go (for now?)

If this all sounds very scientific, that is because it is. At the beginning of my prayer journey, many years ago, I told God/I discussed with God the following: I can’t just be praying haphazardly, not knowing whether it is going to work or not. Considering how much time I am investing I need to be able to pray with confidence that it is going to work, every time. Otherwise if it is inconsistent then it just does not make sense to me to invest big time into this. So from the very outset I told God “Lord, I need to be able to understand this in a scientific/mathematical way.”

Let me tell you something. My prayers for healing, whether for myself or for other people have already achieved a certain level of potency. This is a fact.  Please just take my word for it. This is a fact. So when I pray either for myself or others, I can trust that healing would happen. To be candid that is often because there is no natural deadline looming so I can take all the time I need to pray.
HOWEVER while healing/raising the dead is a big eventual focus of my faith, that is, something that I hope to focus on a lot more over coming years, I have not focused on it in recent years because to be candid I have not been focusing on my faith at all, but rather trying to work out a way of supporting myself financially so that I would have enough time to focus on these big dreams and others. So because of this, while there definitely is some real potency to my prayers, it is still very low. If I had had a bit longer before the man died then I could have evaluated what effect my prayers were having, then I could have increased my prayers to match what might be necessary. So in short, I just did not pray enough for this particular individual, largely because I did not have time to get an idea of just how much prayer I would need to pray.

One touch?  The real aim is to become a “one touch” prayer healer, like Jesus. So at the moment when I pray I will invest hours into it, and you can definitely see the effects of the prayers. Before writing this post I have been reading the Gospel of Luke, and the preceding Gospels over the last few days. Jesus would literally only need to touch someone once and they would be completely healed of whatever it was. Sometimes He would not even touch them, but merely speak to them or to the disease, and they would be healed.

Because of the sensitivity of the topic of death, I have decided that I am no longer going to publicly offer to pray for a dead person or someone who is close to death, until I have hopefully consistently developed a “one touch prayer power”, like Jesus, practised on those who are still very alive. In my earnestness, I told one of the relatives of this man, after the relative had confirmed that he was dying but still there at the time of our discussion “Don’t give up hope! I will pray for him when I get home!”  And I did pray. But I strongly suspect that my prayers were not sufficient to unlock the healing. And now I feel awful, of course, that I could have offered false hope to someone as their father lay dying. So yeah, that is not going to happen again.

So yeah, I believe that the difference between Jesus’s prayers for healing and my prayers for healing is a matter of potency. I believe that Jesus’s prayers did not metaphorically create the apples on the tree any more than ours do but rather released the apples to the ground. I believe that in His healings Jesus showed us what would be possible for us to achieve. His prayers had so much more spiritual force behind them than mine do that He was able to achieve in an instant what I would spend hours or months praying for.  Because I believe that He came to show us what is possible, then I also believe that it is possible for us to become “one touch” prayer healers.  The big question now is how to move from my current level of prayer potency to become a “one touch” healer. I am currently thinking of these things: being scrupulously clean  of heart, increasing my prayer potency by proclaiming the words of the Bible.