The Healing Presence

1. Embrace Your Smallness to Unleash Divine Power

To stop celebrating it would gravely threaten the ministry of prayer for healing.

Divine adequacy. Our human inadequacy is not a hindrance but a prerequisite for God's power to work through us. When we acknowledge our smallness, we create space for the Lord's greatness and love to manifest. This humility is a foundational qualification for effective ministry and prayer.

Reliance on Christ. The story of Charles, a young man gripped by fear and depression, illustrates this principle. The author, feeling inadequate, simply invoked Jesus' Presence, and Charles experienced immediate healing. This highlights that true spiritual work is not about our skills or knowledge, but about trusting in Christ's constant presence and power.

God carries us. As C. S. Lewis's character Ransom learns, "Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He [God] lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! it is beneath your head and carries you." This profound truth frees us from the burden of self-reliance and opens us to joyful collaboration with God.

2. Practice God's Objective Presence, Not Just Subjective Feelings

It is the actual presence, not the sensation of the presence, of the Holy Ghost which begets Christ in us.

Acknowledge the Unseen. Practicing the Presence means consciously acknowledging God's objective reality, even when our senses don't perceive it. This discipline is a form of continuous prayer, opening our hearts and minds to receive His constant word. It counters the modern tendency to prioritize sensory experience over spiritual truth.

Beyond sensation. Many, especially those with dramatic spiritual experiences, confuse the sense of God's presence with His actual presence. C. S. Lewis clarifies that while sensations are a gift, they are not the source of spiritual life. True abiding in Christ is a "will act," a determined sensitiveness to God's constant presence, regardless of emotional or sensory awareness.

Abiding in Christ. Devotional writers like Andrew Murray and Oswald Chambers describe this as "abiding in Christ," a continuous effort that eventually becomes an unconscious law of life. Frank C. Laubach's journey from frustration to "tingling with the joy of a glorious discovery" exemplifies how this disciplined acknowledgment transforms life into a continuous heaven.

3. Spiritual Power and Authority Flow from Mended Relationships

The power is the Holy Ghost, not something which He imparts.

God's Presence is Power. The power to heal and be healed is intrinsically linked to God's active Presence among us. We become ministers of His healing love by invoking His Presence and allowing Him to work through us, bringing life where there was death and unbelief.

Jesus, our model. Jesus, "full of the Holy Spirit," consistently demonstrated this power, teaching and healing with compassion. He commissioned His disciples to do the same, giving them authority over evil spirits and sickness. This ministry is about bringing lost souls into wholeness in Christ, repairing broken relationships:

• Between self and God
• Between self and others
• Between self and nature
• Between intellect and heart

The Cross and suffering. True spiritual power is rooted in the Cross, where Christ freed us from dark powers and enabled us to become channels of His authority. This often involves authentic Christian suffering—persecution for righteousness' sake—which, when embraced, becomes redemptive and a source of joy, transforming dark situations into opportunities for God's love.

4. The Fall: From God-Consciousness to Self-Consciousness

Separation from the Presence is, quite literally, what the Fall is.

The hell of self. The Fall plunged humanity from God-consciousness into self-consciousness, a state that is both sinful and incomplete. This "old self" is narcissistic, driven by diseased feelings and attitudes, and must be "put off" to embrace the "new self" created in Christ.

The true self. Acknowledging and accepting this redeemed, Christ-centered self is crucial for consistent living in Christ. Without it, we remain trapped in immaturity, unable to hear God clearly, and prone to projecting our inner brokenness onto others. The true self finds "fullness of being" and completion in Christ.

From bentness to uprightness. Fallen man is "bent" toward the creature, seeking identity in external things or people. Healing involves renouncing this idolatrous posture and "straightening up" into a vertical, listening relationship with God. This posture of open hands and heart allows us to receive our true identity and freedom from Him.

5. Incarnational Reality: Christ's Indwelling as Our True Center

God’s great secret, and Christians’ hope of glory, as St. Paul tells the Colossian believers, that secret kept from the generations and the centuries past, is this: “Christ in you.”

Christ within. The Christian union with God is the profound reality of "Christ in you," linking us to God the Father and ultimate reality. This is not achieved by human effort or climbing a ladder of knowledge, but by Christ's descent into us, making us "indwelt, in-godded."

Maintaining balance. While Christ indwells us, it is crucial to maintain the theological balance: God is primarily transcendent (above us) and secondarily immanent (within us). We pray to the sovereign God, not to the God within us, lest we lose His objective reality and fall into self-centeredness.

Loss of understanding. Historically, the Church shifted from understanding itself as an indwelt, holy people to focusing on holy things, leading to a fearful, abstract view of God. This loss of incarnational understanding, exacerbated by philosophical shifts like Descartes's dualism, diminished the Christian imagination and led to a "man-centered" cosmology.

6. The Power of Imagery and Symbol in Healing

The imagery really matters.

Symbols bind reality. Our perception of God and ourselves is profoundly shaped by the images and symbols we hold. The Judeo-Christian Scriptures provide the true, incarnational symbolic system, evoking wholesome imagery in the heart and a sound theology in the mind.

Distorted images. When wholesome symbols are absent or distorted, lesser, even destructive, images fill the void. Edward's story, a young doctor with homosexual compulsions, illustrates how diseased inner imagery (a fantasy life) can substitute for missing primal symbols of healthy relationships and a sense of being.

Rethinking healing. Healing involves rejecting diseased imagery and opening to "transcendent images of glory" that align with truth and goodness. This "remythologization" occurs through listening prayer, Scripture meditation, and fellowship, allowing God to fill the emptiness and reorder our loves.

7. Cultivate True Imagination Over Introspection

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose imagination is stayed on Thee.

Intuition of the real. The true imagination is not mere visualization but an intuition of objective reality—whether from Nature, Super-Nature, or God Himself. It is a receptive faculty that, when focused on God, enlarges and completes us, leading to awe and wisdom.

Introspection's disease. In contrast, introspection is a "disease" where the rational mind turns inward, analyzing and paralyzing the intuitive, feeling self. This self-absorption, often fueled by pride and self-hatred, destroys the capacity to experience life firsthand and leads to mental and spiritual darkness.

Outward focus. Healing from introspection involves turning our minds and hearts outward to God and His creation. As Oswald Chambers urged, we must "deliberately turn your imagination to God," allowing His objective reality to replace the self-centered, circular thinking that starves the soul.

8. Carrying the Cross: Active Collaboration, Not Passive Suffering

No man is worthy of me who does not take up his cross and walk in my footsteps.

Beyond distorted notions. Carrying the cross is often misunderstood as passive self-abnegation or merely enduring suffering. However, it is an active collaboration with Christ, allowing His life to flow through us to others, bringing the Kingdom of God.

Authentic Christian suffering. This involves voluntary suffering for Christ's sake, as His light in us collides with the world's darkness. Such suffering is redemptive, leading to "an eternal weight of glory," and should be met with joy and peace, not martyred looks.

No substitution. Carrying the cross is distinct from substitution, where one attempts to take on another's pain, sin, or illness. Only Christ is the Redeemer. Substitution is a dangerous practice, often rooted in pride or ignorance, that can lead to spiritual oppression and hinder true healing.

9. Renounce False Gods to Appropriate Holiness

Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison.

Discerning evil. A crucial task for Christians is to discern evil from the Good, which is God Himself. A failure in this discernment leads to the encroachment of alien gods and a "Baal consciousness" within Christian circles.

Renouncing Baal. Baal, the ancient god of sexual orgy, represents the worship of created, procreative faculties, leading to sexual perversion and phallicism. In healing sexual neuroses, renouncing Baal (or Ashtoreth) by name, after repentance, is often necessary to break demonic strongholds and bring freedom.

Gideon's example. Gideon's act of tearing down his father's altar to Baal before leading Israel to freedom illustrates the need to renounce ancestral idolatry. This spiritual act empowers individuals to step into their true identity and calling, as seen in Joe's healing from homosexual compulsions after renouncing his father's idol-god.

10. The Peril of Gnosticism and Reconciling Good and Evil

The Gnostic movement as a whole and even church-related Gnosticism are really too big and too foreign to the New Testament to be called heresies; they really represent an . . . alternative religion.

Jung's Gnostic framework. C. G. Jung's psychology, though offering insights into the psyche, is fundamentally Gnostic. His worldview, shaped by early demonic revelations, posits God as both good and evil, and equates the "Below" god (a phallic image) with Jesus. This synthesis of good and evil is a core tenet of Gnosticism.

Insinuation of the obscene. Jung's doctrines, from their inception, involve the insinuation of the obscene into the holy, a "black mass of sorts within the soul." This undermines the very foundation of God's being—His absolute holiness—and leads to a man-centered, rather than God-centered, spirituality.

Loss of discernment. Christians adopting Jungian thought risk having their worldview subtly altered, losing the ability to discern between good and evil spirits, and accepting "fine-sounding" but deceiving doctrines. This "resymbolization" can lead to a loss of joy, spiritual power, and a weakening of Christian moral and spiritual frameworks.

11. God's Wholly Good and Holy Nature Heals and Transforms

God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.

Absolute goodness. God is not merely good, but goodness itself; not merely divine, but God. This absolute goodness, a light in which there is no darkness, is the foundation of His being and the source of all healing. It is a "consuming fire" that relentlessly seeks to cure us of sin.

Holiness restored. After repentance and renunciation of false gods, the Holy Presence descends, cleansing and sanctifying the individual. This restoration of the "sense of the holy" is a miraculous transformation, replacing feelings of degradation with a profound awareness of God's purity and presence within.

Transformation, not compromise. This process is not about reconciling good and evil, but about the Light overcoming darkness. It requires us to "die to our old, false, usurping selves," allowing Christ to rip off our "scaly dragon hides" so we can be cleansed and fully enter His Presence.

12. The Church's Call to Unity and Discernment

The God who answers by fire—he is God.

Unity and power. Renewal of God's Presence and power in Christian fellowship thrives when believers are united in love and reaching out to others. Disunity, often fueled by denominationalism or self-centeredness, grieves the Holy Spirit and clogs the channels of God's healing power.

Right judgment. The Church must regain its ability to discern and judge sin, calling sinners to radical repentance. A "passive compassion" that reconciles good and evil is dangerous, leaving people in rebellion and vulnerable to demonic influence. True love confronts sin and proclaims forgiveness in the power of the Spirit.

Elijah's challenge. Like Elijah, the Church must challenge wavering hearts: "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." When this clear call to repentance is made, God answers with fire, destroying altars to false gods and setting His holiness in place.