Ways to Pray For Others

by Teresa Seputis

Prayer For Others

There is a wide variety of how you can pray for others. Sometimes it is making up your prayer lists and petitioning God on behalf of the needs of others. Sometimes God will put an intercessory anointing on you where you will literally stand in the gap on behalf of a person or group of people to plead their cause before God, or He may have you do identificational repentance (repenting on behalf of sins of a group that you did not personally participate in). Sometimes God will lead you to pray prophetically, where He will either give you supernatural revelation on a situation or where He will put His words into your mouth as you pray. Or God may lead you into spiritual warfare prayer, where you take authority over territorial spirits and over the strategies of the enemy.

Or God may lead you to do ministry prayer with another person, such as praying for a physical healing or doing a deliverance or even praying prophetically over them (such as repeating to God, in their presence, the secret prayers they have been praying in their prayer closet).

There's a very strong relationship between intercessory prayer and ministry prayer. I believe that the same type of anointing allows a person to pray/intercede in their prayer closet or on a ministry line. Many intercessors will favor the prayer closet ministry their entire lives, where they are not face to face with those they are praying for. Some will favor ministry prayer (e.g., praying with the people they are interceding for in a ministry-type of setting). Some intercessors will cross back and forth frequently between the two styles of prayer.

When I first starting moving in my "intercessory anointing," it was my own private prayer closet prayer. I had no idea that this was a special anointing. I thought that all believers routinely spent three to four hours a day in prayer and intercession. I had no idea this was unusual. I also thought it was normal to see God answer many of your prayers, and usually in a short period of time. God's presence was so wonderful in my prayer closet prayer times and He met me wonderfully. I did not feel much need to get together with other intercessors because God showed up and met me in my prayer closet intercession times. I did like to touch bases with those I had been praying for to get feedback from them, so I could measure the effectiveness of my prayers and keep track of how God was answering them.

Later on, God began quickening those verses to me about "agreeing together" or "when two or three come together in My name," etc. He began to move me out of my prayer closet and into corporate intercession. About the same time, He also began sending me "on site" to pray. For instance, if I was interceding for an elementary school in my neighborhood, God would send me to physically walk the campus (but not during school hours) and pray "on site." There was a season where God would ask me to daily drive to a church that He had me interceding for. I would sit in their parking lot and pray for them for maybe 15 minutes to half an hour a day. That is another example of "on-site" prayer. God even sent me on prayer trips where I would travel to a foreign country for the purpose of praying for the people. There would often be a lot of divine appointments and special events that God would orchestrate. I not only prayed, but I also got to meet other believers, interact with people and pray with or for them.

In 1994, God began to change my focus from intercession to personal ministry. Something called the "renewal" hit a church in my area. These were meetings where God's presence showed up in tangible ways and where the focus was on each person there connecting with God in a personal way. For the first month, the meetings went on six nights a week. I spent the first three or four nights just soaking in God's presence and allowing God to touch my heart deeply. The meetings were loosely structured and people there were permitted to pray for each other. I began attending these meetings nightly.

God began to put it on my heart to pray for others there. At first I would just intercede silently, but after a while, one of the pastors invited me to accompany him and his wife as they prayed for people. They taught me how to do ministry prayer. After awhile, I began praying for people on my own, and I was always thrilled and delighted how God would show up and meet the people I prayed for. At the same time, there was a bit of conflict going on in me. My life was very tied up in these meetings. I'd get up early and go to work, and often go straight from work to the meetings. I'd spend the first part of the meeting connecting with God and allowing Him to meet and touch me personally. Then I'd spend the next half of the meeting praying for others and watching God meet them in wonderful and tangible ways.

It was often after midnight before the meeting would end and then I had a half-hour drive home. At first I tried to get the intercessory prayer in with all this activity. But I was too tired when got home and I'd fall asleep while trying to maintain my regular intercessory prayer life. I began to feel like I wasn't praying any more, and I started to feel guilty about it. But it just wasn't logistically possible to work full time, go to these nightly meetings and get in three to four hours a day of prayer closet time.

Then God explained that my ministry time was another form of intercessory prayer. He said that when I walked down the prayer line and laid hands on people and prayed for them, I was still operating in my intercessory anointing. The only difference was that my prayer was occurring in the presence of those I was interceding for instead of in my prayer closet. That was a major revelation to me. Praying for people in your prayer closet and praying for them in a ministry situation all come from the same anointing to pray. I used to think of them as two things, but God didn't think of them separately.

There are still times when God calls me to intercede for others from my prayer closet. But most of the time, my "intercessory prayer" is done in the form of ministry prayer. This includes one-on-one prayer ministry, being part of a small-group ministry team for inner healing or deliverance sessions, praying as a member of a ministry team during the ministry time, or sometimes leading ministry times/sessions in services or conferences.

It was very alarming to me when God began to move me from one style of intercessory prayer (e.g., praying in my prayer closet) to another style (e.g., ministry prayer). I wanted to spend some time developing this, because some of you reading this may be going through a similar transition and accompanying discomfort. And God may be taking some of you the other direction, where you used to spend a lot of time ministering to others and God is now drawing you into your prayer closets.

Please be aware that both types of prayer arise from the same anointing. The important thing is to find out what God's agenda is and do that. If He is calling you to the prayer closet, be comfortable there and enjoy those prolonged times with Him and you together. If He is calling you to corporate intercession, enjoy the unity and the anointing that comes over you as a group. If He is calling you to ministry prayer, then delight in watching Him show up to meet and touch the ones He sends you to minister to. Know that you are not "obligated" to only one style of intercessory prayer. Know that sometimes God likes to move you from one style to another.

The key to success is in seeing what the Father is doing, and to do it with Him. Be flexible and look to God for direction in how He wants you to pray for others. I promise you that you will be incredibly blessed as you line up with what the Father is doing. You will see His power and His anointing flow through you and you will find your prayers are highly effective.

We will look at some of the various styles of praying for others in our next lesson.


Some Ways to Pray For Others

There is a wide variety of how you can pray for others. This lesson will not be comprehensive, but it will touch on some of the more common ways God may call us to pray for others. This includes, but is not limited to:

(We will look at the first two in this lesson and the remaining ones in the next lesson.)

Petition for Others

This is bringing another person's needs before the Lord in prayer. You can become aware of these needs in a variety of ways. Sometimes people will bring prayer requests to you and you agree to pray for them. Sometimes you read a newspaper or watch the news and God quickens something to you. Sometimes the people you want to cover are dear to you, friends, family, etc. Sometimes God will put someone on your heart and you begin to pray for that person.

There are four things that can drive us to petition God on behalf of another person.

  1. You may feel duty bound or obligated to pray. Perhaps someone asked you to commit to pray for something on an ongoing basis and you said yes. Or perhaps you are on a prayer request list and have committed to pray for the requests that come to you. This is quite scriptural, check out Eph. 6:18 and 1 Tim. 2:1.

  2. There is a need or crisis that you know you must respond to. It can be a personal crisis, a local one or even a national one. When the September 11 terrorist attacks hit New York and Washington, many believers stayed home from work, gathered in their local churches and prayed for the nation and for those affected by the attacks. When Princess Diana died, many Europeans were driven to meet together for prayer. These are only a couple of examples, but I think you get my point. When something major or negative happens, many believers are driven to prayer in response to it. Paul asked for prayer for himself and his team because they were being persecuted for their faith and in danger (2 Thess. 3:1-2). Also see Mark 13:17-19.

  3. You are emotionally involved with a person or situation and care greatly about what happens to the people you are praying for. Sometimes you watch a friend or a loved one go through a difficult situation and your heart goes out to them. You find yourself petitioning God on their behalf because you care so deeply for them. Perhaps you pray for your children to make right choices or your spouse's safety when they are traveling.

    Or perhaps a particular situation or request strums you heart cords. For instance, when I was riding BART last week, I met a lady whose husband has been in a coma in the hospital for the past 30 days. I ministered to her during the half-hour train ride and saw her distress and became emotionally involved. Her husband comes to mind at various times, and my heart goes out to the woman and her family and I find myself praying earnestly for God to heal her husband.

    We see Paul praying constantly for those he was in relationship with. For instance, in 2 Cor. 13:9-10, he prayed for the Corinthians and admitted that he cared about them and wanted to encourage them. He prayed for many of his spiritual children, such as his prayer in Col. 1:9. John also prayed for those he cared about in 3 John 1:2.

  4. God puts a supernatural intensity on you to pray for a certain person, situation, event or people group. If you have experienced it, you will know what I mean. It's like suddenly you know God wants you covering this in prayer and every fiber of your being just needs to pray about it. There may or may not be supernatural revelation accompanying this. The period of intensity may last from a few minutes to several hours. When this intensity is on you, the thing you are praying for become your highest priority. You "know" when it is prayed through because that intensity (or urgency to pray) will leave you. Sometimes it gradually fades and other times it suddenly disappears, as if someone flicked a switch and turned it off.

    (James 5:6 makes a reference to that type of intensity or fervent prayer.)

Any of these three are valid reasons to pray. In fact, you may find yourself drifting from one to another on a given prayer request. It may start out that you are notified via a prayer chain that someone at church is sick, and you dutifully begin to pray for him. At first you might have to force yourself to pray. Then after 10 minutes or so, an intensity comes on you and you find yourself fervently petitioning God on their behalf. You happen to look at the clock and notice it is 7 p.m. Then, maybe half an hour later the intensity goes away. The next day, you hear that they had a heart attack and were in critical care, starting at 7 p.m. and they stabilized around 7:30 p.m. Then you realize the urgency you felt to pray for them was indeed from God and you were being Spirit-led in your petition. (This type of experience, where you get this extra urgency or intensity to pray, is not at all uncommon for intercessors.)

Some people find it helpful to keep prayer lists so they can keep track of the requests they are praying for. Some take it a step further and keep a prayer journal, where they record what they are praying for, the date they started, the date the prayer was answered and how God answered it.

Standing in the Gap

Standing in the gap is literally when you insert yourself between God and someone (or a group of people) God is angry at and wants to punish. An illustration, in the natural, is when you know two people who are about to get into a fist fight. You jump in between them so neither can get to the other without going through you. Hopefully, they care enough about you that they don't both end up hitting you as they try to get to each other! Let's take another example from the movies, an angry stepfather is about to beat a child who made a mistake. You see the stepfather, face swollen and red with rage, taking his belt off and advancing toward the offending child, who is cowering against the wall in fear. Then the mother steps in between the angry man and the frightened child, willing to protect her child with her own body should the stepfather not back down.

That is what standing in the gap is. You, in the righteousness of Christ, come between God and someone (or a group of someones) the Lord is about to judge or destroy. You plead with God for His mercy and grace to be extended to this person or situation, even though they don't deserve it. God actually desires for believers to stand in the gap on behalf of others. He expresses this in Ez. 22:29-31:

The people of the land have used oppressions, committed robbery, and mistreated the poor and needy; and they wrongfully oppress the stranger. So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.

Therefore I have poured out My indignation on them; I have consumed them with the fire of My wrath; and I have recompensed their deeds on their own heads," says the Lord GOD. (NKJ)

We see an example of standing in the gap from Moses' life. The children of Israel had just entered into a covenant with God and Moses went up to the mountain to meet with God and receive the law. He was gone a long time (about 40 days) and they got impatient. They quickly forgot their covenant with God and made an idol to worship. God became quite angry about this in Ex. 32:9 and wanted to destroy the children of Israel and raise up a whole new people group from Moses.

We see Moses' response in Ex. 32:11-14. He stood in the gap for them. The passage says, "Then Moses pleaded with the LORD his God, and said: 'LORD, why does Your wrath burn hot against Your people whom You have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians speak, and say, "He brought them out to harm them, to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?" Turn from Your fierce wrath, and relent from this harm to Your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your own self, and said to them, "I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven; and all this land that I have spoken of I give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever." ' So the Lord relented from the harm which He said He would do to His people."

Here is another example of Moses' intercession, where he literally told God that if He destroyed the Jews, He should destroy Moses as well. It is from Exodus 32:31-34: "Then Moses returned to the LORD and said, 'Oh, these people have committed a great sin, and have made for themselves a god of gold! Yet now, if You will forgive their sin--but if not, I pray, blot me out of Your book which You have written.' And the LORD said to Moses, 'Whoever has sinned against Me, I will blot him out of My book. Now therefore, go, lead the people to the place of which I have spoken to you. Behold, My angel shall go before you. Nevertheless, in the day when I visit for punishment, I will visit punishment upon them for their sin."


More Methods of Praying for Others

There is a wide variety of how you can pray for others. We already looked at petition and standing in the gap in Lesson 11. Now we will look at two other forms of praying for others.

Identificational repentance

Identificational repentance is when you repent on behalf of a people group you represent, when you were not personally involved in the sin.

We see an example of this in Daniel's life. Daniel was a godly and talented youth. Dan. 1:3-4 talks about his talent: "Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring in some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility -- young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king's palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians."

We see evidences of Daniel's faith in Dan. 1:8: "But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way" (NIV). So Daniel took a stand for God, asking the chief of the eunuchs to allow him to eat kosher food. God's response to Daniel and his three friends who stood with him is found in Dan. 1:17: "To these four young men God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning. And Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds" (NIV). In other words, God rewarded Daniel's stand for holiness by giving him a strong prophetic anointing and wisdom.

Daniel continued his strong walk of faith, even to the point of risking his life to honor God when it became illegal. Dan. 6:10 says, "Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before" (NIV) This resulted in Daniel being thrown into a lions' den, a form of execution for praying to his God instead of to the king. God honored his stand of faith by closing the lions' mouth and causing God's name to be glorified above all the Babylonian gods. (See Dan. 10:11-28. Daniel was clearly a holy and godly man.

Yet in Dan. 9, we see him identifying with the sins of his father and confessing the sin and repenting on behalf of his people. His prayer, recorded starting at Dan. 9:4, begins, "O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant of love with all who love Him and obey His commands, we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws. We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes and our fathers, and to all the people of the land..." The prayer continues, but I believe this is enough to give you the idea. Daniel says, "We have sinned and done wrong." Did Daniel personally sin and do wrong? No, he walked strongly in righteousness and was rewarded for it. He says, "We have not listened to the prophets." Again, Daniel was not personally guilty of the sins of his people. Yet he identified with his people and took ownership of their sins, confessing and repenting. He was able to do this because he was of that people group. Daniel would not be able to stand and repent for the Medes or the Persians or any other people group except the Hebrews. But because Daniel was a Jew, he was able to identify with the sins of the Jews, and confess those sins before God and repent for them on behalf of his people. And that is identificational repentance.

Following Daniel's example, we're able to stand in and confess sins and repent and plead God's mercy and forgiveness if we have some common ground with those we are representing. It could be on the basis of ethnic heritage, such as a white Americans confessing and repenting for the sins performed against the American Indians or First Nation People. It could be on the basis of sex, such as women standing in identificational repentance for those who have had abortions. It could be on the basis of some profession or shared interest, such as business executives repenting to God for the way "we" have made money an idol in our society. It can be on the basis of geographic location, such as people in a city repenting and confessing sins committed by the city's founding fathers hundreds of years before.

I would like to share one of my personal experiences in identificational repentance. I live up in the Oakland Hills. When we first bought our house, our neighborhood was not fully developed and people still used to come up to our hills from the flatland for various things. An occult group used to come up to make blood sacrifices (animals, not human) on the hill behind some of the houses that were being built.

One day I was walking my dogs on the trails behind the houses under construction. I happened across one of the altars that had been used for a blood sacrifice, probably the night before. The makeshift altar was still covered with blood and flies were swarming all over it. I had a strong sense that the ground had been defiled. I was careful not to touch the altar itself, but I did drop to my knees and begin to confess and repent to God for the idolatry and blood sacrifices that went on in this location, only a block from my house. I felt that God wanted me to call an intercessor friend and deal with this. So we fasted for 24 hours and then went back to the altar and did various types of prayer the Lord showed us to do, including a great deal of repentance for the blood sacrifice and asking God to purify the ground. We both had a sense it had been defiled by the blood sacrifice. After we were done, God spoke to me and said, "Teresa, if you had not repented on behalf of this blood sacrifice, your neighborhood and your home would have been destroyed by fire. But now I will spare your home and your neighborhood."

I did not understand what He was talking about. But a few months later, there was the famous Oakland "Firestorm" that swept through the Oakland hills, destroying many homes and neighborhoods. The fire was sweeping toward my neighborhood, uncontrollable by the firemen. Then it turned and went another direction, not coming to my neighborhood. I can't prove that the reason God spared my neighborhood was because of this identificational repentance Rosemary and I did at this altar, but I truly believe that is why He spared it.

Prophetic Prayer

Prophetic prayer is where we hear from God on what to pray. This can take different forms -- prophetic proclamation, or praying from divine revelation, or performing prophetic gestures.

Prophetic proclamation is where God puts His words in our mouth as we pray, and we are prophesying as we pray. Many years ago, I went to the U.S. Center for World Missions in Pasadena for some classes. The center met in some buildings that were a converted apartment complex and served as dorm rooms. The classroom was what used to be the "rec" room. Across the street from us was a large campus occupied by a cult called Summit International. Several of us would go across the street to walk the campus, witness to the cult members and also pray and intercede. One time we were praying and suddenly some words came out of my mouth. It actually surprised me at the time.

I began telling the campus that it was going to be used for God's glory and that a church would rise up on this property where God's tangible presence would dwell. I did not understand prophetic prayer back then, and that prayer seemed a little odd to me. But God's Spirit came on the others I was with and they began making similar prophetic prayers. Later on, the cult moved out of the property and the U.S. Center for World Missions took it over. Then the Renewal broke out in Toronto and also came to Pasadena and to a church leasing one of the buildings on that property from the U.S. Center for World Missions. That building is known as Mott Auditorium, and the church that uses it is pastored by Che Ann, and is known as a place where people come to meet God, where God's tangible presence dwells on an ongoing basis.

There are times when God will lead intercessors to make prophetic proclamations in prayer. There are many examples of this in Scripture. Let's look at one, the prophetic prayer from the man of Judah to the idolatrous altar that Jeroboam was sacrificing on. We see this in 1 Kings 13:1-2: "By the word of the Lord a man of God came from Judah to Bethel, as Jeroboam was standing by the altar to make an offering. He cried out against the altar by the word of the Lord: 'O altar, altar! This is what the Lord says: "A son named Josiah will be born to the house of David. On you he will sacrifice the priests of the high places who now make offerings here, and human bones will be burned on you." ' " And we see the fulfillment of this prophetic prayer in 2 Kings 23:8.

Another form of prophetic prayer is supernatural revelation for what God wants you to pray about. These are also referred to as "words of knowledge." I remember one time, when I was an intercessor for Doris and Peter Wagner. God woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to pray for Doris because she was in the hospital and her life was in danger. An intensity came on me and I prayed fervently for some time, and then the intensity left and I went back to sleep.

The next day, I called the Wagner's ministry office to find out what was going on. They told me Doris had a bone infection from a mosquito bite in Malaysia, where she had been doing a conference on deliverance. She had an intense fever and was in critical condition the previous night, but the fever had broken and she was in stable condition. I inquired for the time she was moved to critical condition and it was the same time I had been wakened to pray for her. That's an example of prophetic intercession where God gives you supernatural revelation on what to pray about.

We see Elijah acting in this type of supernatural revelation when the king of Syria wanted to attack Israel. Over and over again, Elijah got supernatural revelation of the Syrian king's battle strategies and reported them to the king of Israel, thus foiling the secret strategies. This happened so frequently that the Syrian king thought he had a spy in their midst. You can read the account in 2 Kings 6:8-12. (It is my personal theory that Elijah didn't just report the enemy's strategy to the king; I believe he also prayed that God would defeat the enemy and make the Israeli troops successful. He was very much a man of prayer.)

Finally, there will be times when the Lord will have us pray by using prophetic gestures, or prophetically acting out something through our actions. For instance, one time God assigned me to pray for a ministry. It was a good ministry, but every time they tried to do anything, obstacle after obstacle seemed to get in their way, rendering them ineffective. As I would pray for them, I had a sense of this large stone wall before me and I found I was making chopping gestures with my hands as though I were chopping at that wall. This continued over a three-week period.

I remember sitting on my hands one time to keep them from making the chopping gestures, because I didn't understand why I was doing that. The intensity and anointing to intercede just wasn't there when I repressed the gestures, so I stopped repressing them. Then one day, as I was praying for breakthrough and making these chopping gestures with my hands, I had a sense that a hole had been punched in the wall. It took only a few more minutes of these gestures and accompanying prayer for breakthrough, and it seemed like an entire section of the wall collapsed.

The intensity to pray also went away, so I stopped praying. Later that day, I heard from the ministry leader, who was amazed. It seems that everything fell into place, the visa and permits came through and several large financial donations toward their outreach program all came through that day. The obstacles weren't there anymore and they had a very successful outreach. Somehow in the process of praying for their breakthrough, I was prophetically acting out breaking a hole in the wall (representing the obstacles). The amazing part is that when the prophetic acting out was complete, the breakthrough came in real life.

There are many forms of prophetic acting out, from symbolically marching around a building (such as a church or school) praying for the strongholds against that place to come down like the walls of Jericho did, walking the streets and praying for God's presence to come to the area and claiming the ground where you walk as Joshua did, etc. Sometimes intercessors will find themselves making strange gestures such as the chopping motions described above, pointing their finger intentionally at an imaginary foe, using their hands to sweep something away, stomping their feet to trample the enemy underfoot, etc.

One of the early Bible examples of prophetic gestures as a form of prayer came from the life of Moses, when the Israelites had to fight Amalek's troops. The Bible records, in Ex. 17:8-13, "Now Amalek came and fought with Israel in Rephidim. And Moses said to Joshua, 'Choose us some men and go out, fight with Amalek. Tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in my hand.' So Joshua did as Moses said to him, and fought with Amalek. And Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill. And so it was, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed; and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses' hands became heavy; so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it. And Aaron and Hur supported his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. So Joshua defeated Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword." In short, when Moses held up his hands (a prophetic gesture), his troops won, but when he let them down, his troops lost.


Ministry to Others, a Form of Prayer

The past few lessons looked at ways you can intercede on behalf of others from your prayer closet. We looked at petition, standing in the gap, identificational repentance and prophetic prayer. But there are going to be times when God wants you to pray directly with the person you are interceding for, and actually ministering to them under His power. I used to think of intercession and ministry prayer as separate things until God taught me how we can minister to others through our intercessory anointing.

Agreement Prayer

Agreement prayer is where you sit down to pray with the person for their area of concern. It may be for a friend's salvation, for their child who is making serious wrong decisions and turning away from God, about important relationships that have gone wrong, or for some desperate situation the person is in, etc. Sometimes the person will come to you for prayer, where you do all the praying out loud and they do all the silent agreeing. Other times, they will want to join together in prayer, (e.g., both of you pray out loud and agreeing together about this situation). Both are totally valid and there is a scriptural precedence for this type of agreeing. Matt. 18:19 says, "Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by My Father in heaven."

Let me share a real-life example of this. One time I was in a class at Fuller Seminary. One of my classmates came up to me to ask me to pray for him regarding his job situation. He needed to have a part-time job to pay his family's expenses as he went to seminary. He had been praying about it and praying about it, but to no avail. He had been on several job interviews and none of them resulted in a job. He had no more leads to follow and was at his wit's end. He had no idea what else he could do and was losing faith to keep praying on this request.

So he decided to ask someone to agree with him in prayer on this. Since I had a reputation in the class for being one whose prayers were answered, he wanted me to pray for him. I could sense the Lord's anointing as he asked, so I took his hands, we bowed our heads and prayed. I must have prayed for him and agreed with his request for about 10 minutes. I asked God to provide the job before the week was out. The next day, he came back to class glowing. It seems that when he got home that day, there was a phone call for him. He ended up with a part-time job that paid more than any of the ones he'd been applying for. God had come through for him.

Physical Healing

Prayer for physical healing is just what it seems. It's praying for a person who has a physiological condition that needs God's touch and asking God to fix that problem. There are many excellent books written on praying for the sick, so I'm not going to try to cover this subject exhaustively. However, let me touch briefly on a few of the basics.

There are different ways to pray for the sick. One way is to simply petition God on the person's behalf. An example prayer would be, "Lord, please come and heal Joan's back. Cause the pain to go away, cause all the vertebrae to line up properly and not pinch any nerves, cause all the swelling to go down and cause all the strained muscles to relax. We ask in Jesus' name that You come and glorify Your name in Joan's back and bring complete healing to it."

Don't be surprised if you get specific details as you pray. You may start just asking God to heal the back and suddenly you get the impression the vertebrae may not be lined up and that some nerve may be getting pinched. Then as you deal with that, you get the impression that some muscles are strained because of the vertebrae being out of alignment, etc. These could very well be words of knowledge from the Holy Spirit as you are praying.

We don't have a biblical example of a petition prayer for healing, but we do have examples that people did pray for healing this way. For instance, in Gen. 20, we have the story of Abimelech, who had taken Abraham's wife Sarah for his harem. God struck Abimelech with some sort of fatal disease and told him he had to return Sarah to Abraham and have Abraham pray for him or he would die (Gen. 20:7). And God also caused every woman in Abimelech's household to become barren (Gen. 20:18). Then Abraham did some sort of petition prayer to God for Abimelech, but the Bible doesn't record the words of that prayer. However, it does record the effects of that prayer: The king and his entire family were healed. Gen. 20:17 says, "Then Abraham prayed to God, and God healed Abimelech, his wife and his slave girls so they could have children again."

Another form of praying for the sick is authority prayer, where you either command the body part to function properly, or you command the sickness to leave or you command the person to do the impossible. The Bible gives us many examples of this type of authority prayer. In fact, if you study the prayer life and ministry of Jesus, you'll find that all of His prayers for the sick fell into authority prayers or deliverance prayers. I don't believe there's a single example of Jesus doing a petition prayer to heal the sick.

Mark 7:32-35 gives an example where Jesus commanded a person's deaf ears to open and his mute tongue to work correctly. In this prayer, Jesus addressed the body parts and commanded them to function properly, and those body parts did what Jesus told them to do. Matt. 12:9-13 gives an example of where Jesus told the man with the withered hand to stretch forth his hand, and as he tried this impossible thing, he was healed. Another example of Jesus healing by commanding the sick person to do the impossible is found in John 5:8 where Jesus commanded the crippled man to arise, take up his bed and walk.

Another form of healing prayer is to discern when demonic activity is causing the physical infirmity and then command the demon to leave. Jesus prayed this way many times. For instance, in Matt. 17:15-18, Jesus healed the epileptic boy by commanding a spirit of infirmity to leave him. Also, Matt. 8:16 and Matt. 12:22 refer to Jesus healing the sick by casting out demons.

Inner Healing

Inner healing is when God touches a person in such a way that a pain or trauma from the past stops having power over them. There are many types of inner healing ministry and many exhaustive books written on this subject. All I'm going to do here is give a very high-level description of some of the more common forms of inner healing. I recommend that you read and study some of the inner-healing books if you want to get involved in this type of ministry.

I must admit that there is very little scriptural precedence for most inner-healing ministry, but it does seem to work and God really does seem to be in it. I don't know why the Bible is strangely silent in this area, but God often moves this way in day-to-day ministry. Maybe society in general was not as deteriorated or dysfunctional back when God wrote the Scriptures, so He didn't deal with that area much in the Bible?

There are some indications that Jesus dealt with guilt-type emotional issues from the healing of the crippled man with palsy. His friends took him to Jesus and when they couldn't get into the house where Jesus was because of the crowds, they poked a hole in the roof and lowered the man to where Jesus was. They came to Jesus seeking a physical healing, but Jesus dealt with guilt and shame issues instead.

Mark 2:5-12 records: "When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, 'Son, your sins are forgiven you.' And some of the scribes were sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, 'Why does this Man speak blasphemies like this? Who can forgive sins but God alone?' But immediately, when Jesus perceived in His spirit that they reasoned thus within themselves, He said to them, 'Why do you reason about these things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, "Your sins are forgiven you," or to say, "Arise, take up your bed and walk'? But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins' -- He said to the paralytic, 'I say to you, arise, take up your bed, and go to your house.' Immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went out in the presence of them all, so that all were amazed and glorified God, saying, 'We never saw anything like this!' "

It appears the root cause of the man's problem may have been emotional, (e.g., guilt and shame from past sins). So Jesus dealt with the root by breaking the power of guilt and shame over the man.

Some of the more common forms of inner-healing ministry include:

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