Today’s Witnesses are from the Encounter Ministries NorthEast Regional Conference that I just attended this past weekend. I had the privilege of being on a prayer team with someone who I had never met before. This is how they usually do it. If you are selected for prayer teams, you are assigned a partner that you do not know. I like this because you get to meet someone new and also because you get to learn from that person. We all pray a bit differently, and we all hear the Lord differently. it was really great to experience praying with my partner, Lynn. We have all seen God working in our lives. However, we might not all be aware it is God working in our lives. This is why it is so important we start talking about it more. The more we share our experiences, the more people understand how God works and how much He truly loves us. If you would be willing to share any experience of how God has worked or is working in your life, please email me at catherine@findingtruenorthcoaching.com or click here. It won’t take up much of your time, and your story could be just the story that someone needs to hear today. Prayerfully consider sharing. Everyone has a story, and the world needs to hear them. Music:"Adding the Sun"fine us. It is not fun, Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Today’s Witnesses are from the Encounter Ministries NorthEast Regional Conference that I just attended this past weekend. I had the privilege of being on a prayer team with someone who I had never met before. This is how they usually do it. If you are selected for prayer teams, you are assigned a partner that you do not know. I like this because you get to meet someone new and also because you get to learn from that person. We all pray a bit differently, and we all hear the Lord differently. it was really great to experience praying with my partner, Lynn.
We were asked to pray in three different ways. The first time we prayed, it was for a baptism in the Holy Spirit. I have done this type of praying before but not very often, and I was nervous I wouldn’t know what to say. However, the Holy Spirit came through, as He always does, and it was great. The first person we prayed over was slain in the spirit. I had never prayed over anyone who was slain in the Spirit before. If you don’t know what that means, it means that they are so filled with the Holy Spirit that they can no longer stand, and they fall backward and lay on the ground. Of course we have people catching them so they do not get hurt. They are not passed out, but they are not really awake either. Those who I have talked to who have been slain in the Spirit said it is really peaceful. When they get up, they are so full of peace and the love of the Father.
When we asked people how they were feeling at the end of our prayer, most said either “really good” or “very peaceful.” God is so good. He gave each person exactly what they wanted. There were over 600 people attending the conference, and there were only about 30 prayer groups. So, we prayed over a lot of people each time.
The next section was the Prophetic Sections. So when someone would come up to us for prayer, we would ask if they had anything specific they would like us to ask God about for them. Many of them said that they didn’t have anything specific, and then some of them did. What we do when we pray for a prophetic word is we ask the Lord what He would like to say to the person, and then we are quiet and listen. Then we tell the person what we heard the Lord say, and then we ask them if what we said resonates with them or makes sense to them. This last part is mostly to help us grow in our gifts. The more we know about how accurate our prophetic words are, the more we can know what is the Lord’s voice and what is not.
It was exciting because everything we said seemed to resonate with the people we prayed with. God is so good, too, because He must have known that we were nervous that we might not hear His voice, so oftentimes, He would give me and my partner very similar messages so that we were able to be confident it was from the Lord. We also had several people who said that the word we gave them Friday morning during the prophetic part actually confirmed what their prayer team had told them the night before during the Baptism in the Spirit section.
We had one person who told us He wanted God to confirm something for Him. He wanted us to pray that God would give him a message that would confirm either something he heard the other night or something he had been thinking about. He did not tell us what he wanted to be confirmed. He didn’t have to because the words we were getting were coming from God, and he knew what this young man wanted to hear. We said we would ask the Lord and then tell him what we heard. We couldn’t guarantee it would be what he wanted to hear.
I closed my eyes, and I immediately got an image of a cross on a hill. At first, I couldn’t tell if it was Jesus’s crucifixion or not. Then I saw Jesus on the cross, and I heard very clearly, “Even if you were the only one, I would have still died for you. That is how much I love you.” The young man was shocked and started to cry. He said that did confirm what he was thinking. He said for some reason, this whole conference, he had been running away from God’s love. He wasn’t sure why. He felt God was trying to tell him how much he loved him, and he seemed to be running away. But now he was sure that God loved him. How amazing is that? We had no idea what this young man wanted to hear, but God did!
We had so many beautiful experiences just like this. It is such an honor to witness people hearing what the Lord wants to say to them. It is an honor to be used as an instrument for the Lord to pass along His words, His encouragement, and his love to each and every person we prayed with. Each person left our prayer session feeling loved and seen. That is another superpower of the Lord. When you receive prophetic words, you are able to feel seen, truly seen, and known in a way that you have never felt before. God is so good!!
The last thing we prayed over was for physical healing. There was a healing service first, and then we did individual healing. During an encounter ministry healing service, they always start with corporate prayer. During this section of the healing service, everyone is involved in prayer for those who need it. The person in charge of leading the healing service calls out a part of the body, and those who need healing for that part of the body raise their hand. Then those who don’t need healing for that particular part of the body stand up and go find someone with their hand raised, and they pray with them.
The leader of the healing service calls out what we are to say, and we all repeat after him or her. He or she calls our commands to our body, such as, “In the name of Jesus, I command all bones, ligaments, joints, and muscles associated with this pain to be healed now.” or “In the name of Jesus, I command all pain to leave now.” Everyone who is praying with someone will repeat what the leader says. Then, the person who was receiving prayer will take a moment and check it out and see how they are feeling. They check if the pain is gone. They check if they can do something they couldn’t do before. Often, this is when we see the breakthrough. Once they step out in faith to “check” and see if they were healed, they notice they were healed.
During the corporate part of the night, there were so many people who were healed at least 75% or better. There were two people who had stage 4 cancer who said their cancer hadn’t been healed but that they did have healing from some of the symptoms. One woman, Rolanda, has stage 4 cancer. It started as breast cancer but is now in her bones. She was in a lot of pain, but after the prayer, she said her knee pain and her back pain were completely gone. She still had some pain in her neck, but all the other pain was gone. Praise God! I prayed with Rolanda during the prophetic, and I am praying that she is completely healed of her cancer and that she doesn’t have to leave her children. Please, Lord, heal her!!
During the corporate prayer, there were several college students sitting in front of us. One was healed when we prayed for all legs, hips, ankles, knees, toes, and anything else in that area. She had pain in her ankle, and after prayer, it was gone. She was so surprised she was crying. She couldn’t believe the Lord loved her enough to heal her ankle. Next, two other college students suffered from TMJ in their jaw. One of the young ladies said it was very painful, and she had a constant click in the jaw. She was stunned that after prayer, she had no pain and almost no clicking. She decided to test it out by chewing a piece of gum. She said for a few seconds that her jaw would have usually locked up by now, but it didn’t! She claimed healing, and when I saw her the next day, she said she was doing great!! The young man who suffered from the TMJ was also healed. He no longer had any pain or clicking. He was the boyfriend of the young woman whose ankle was healed!
Another healing happened with a friend of mine who attended the Boston Campus of the Encounter Ministries. His name is Hugh, and he had surgery on his knee sometime last year in the spring. He is out of the cast and has been doing much better. However, earlier that day, we went to pick up pizza for our whole group. He was carrying some of the pizza down the few stairs in the park, and he said his knee was bothering him. He requested prayer during the corporate prayer section, and the pain was gone. He tested it out by showing us he could walk up the altar stairs without pain!! There were so many other people who were healed. It was amazing!!
God is so good! He healed so many people that evening, whether it was when we were all praying in a group or when they went to the individual prayer teams. The whole weekend was amazing, and I am so glad I went I am so glad I volunteered to be on the prayer team. It was a truly wonderful experience. I can’t wait until the next time I get to go!