You are bound to have heard of the so-called three Rs of basic education reading, writing and arithmetic. As a boy I used to think it a great joke that only one of them was a proper R.
Today, by contrast, I have three proper Rs for you. They are all types of prayer. We need to know about them, if we are to learn to pray effectively for healing, either in connection with our own needs or for others.
The first one may come as a surprise, and certainly not everybody will need it, but for those who do, this way of prayer can literally be a lifesaver.
1. Raging prayer
In this world which has gone wrong in just about every way, there is no shortage of people who have been badly hurt by life. They are understandably angry, but not all of us know how angry we may be deep down. This is because we have a tendency to suppress painful or unacceptable emotions like inner rage. However, anger needs to be recognized and dealt with. If we bottle it up it can cause all kinds of trouble. When it is pushed under the surface, it can be the cause of black depression. On the other hand, if it flares up and escapes, we may find ourselves directing it at quite the wrong people.
Or we may turn it against ourselves. It can even be a cause of suicide. It can certainly prevent us from enjoying an awareness of the goodness of God and from being able to pray in any sort of effective way. Underground anger really does have to be dealt with. The good news is that this is an area of life in which Christianity has a message which is uniquely healing. Amid all the religions of the world, Christians can know in a very special way that, in the words of Joy Riordan, God is a very safe person to be angry with.
In the writings of Archbishop Robert Leighton there is a remarkable and highly memorable phrase. We Christians, he says, are privileged to vent our rage into the bosom of God. This may seem a startling idea but it is actually a scriptural process. Some of the great people of the Bible can be seen doing it. Moses did it1. Job did it.2 Jeremiah often did it see for instance Jeremiah 15:18. The Psalms provide many ways of doing it.3 If we were Muslims, raging against God would incur a death penalty. Actually it does so in Christianity too, but the miracle is that Jesus bears that death penalty for us. So it is that we can be totally honest with God.
This means that if life has treated you badly and there is deep anger in you, you do not need to deny that anger. You can face up to it, you can claim the privilege to vent your rage into the bosom of God, and it is part of the message of the cross that the God who has been revealed to us by Jesus, is big enough and loving enough to accept us, rage and all. Then as our anger ebbs away, absorbed by God himself, we shall find ourselves being liberated for the next R of healing prayer.
2. Resting prayer
If we harbour a snake-pit of suppressed anger, we will never be truly at rest, but when we have admitted our anger to ourselves and to God, and when we have done whatever is required in order to deal with it, we will find that amazingly God still loves us, and that a precious new gift comes to us from God, that of resting in him in prayer. Of course, if you are one of those fortunate people who have no underground anger, then you can go straight to an experience of resting prayer, and God will bless you as you do so.
How does it work, this process of resting prayer, and how does it bring healing to us and through us? Christian prayer, like Christian theology, is Trinitarian in its nature. If our mind is on God the Father, it is in Gods essence that we can rest. For we are told that it is in him we live and move and have our being.4 If our mind is on God the Son, then it is in his presence that we can rest. For we have his promise, I am with you always even to the end of the age.5 If our mind is on God the Holy Spirit, it is in the knowledge of his inner activity that we can rest. He is the power of God at work within us6 and it is precisely because he is at work that we can be at rest.
Prayer is much more a matter of resting than of striving, when it is properly understood, because prayer is at root a relationship, a healing relationship. And if resting prayer does us good at a personal level, it can be equally beneficial for those whom we include in our prayers. The most powerful form of healing prayer is to set those for whom we pray within the essence, the presence and the activity of the healing Holy Trinity and just leave them there. As an old friend of mine used to say, All that we have to do in order to pray effectively for the healing of those we love is to take them in faith to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and then to mind our own business!
3. Receiving prayer
The practice of resting prayer is never a non-event. When we place ourselves in the arms of God, we find that those arms are full of gifts. What gifts these are! Think for a moment of some of them. There is the gift of acceptance. When God looks at us he loves us to the core of his being. He cannot help himself. Love is his very nature.7 However, that is not to say that he fails to see our faults and our follies. It is not to say that he does not long for us to become our better selves, the people he designed us to be.
Therefore he offers us a second gift, the gift of deliverance. Jesus tells us that we should pray deliver us from evil and that we should mean the words when we say them. It is a prayer to which he longs to say yes, and because sin has a defiling effect, he adds a further gift, the gift of cleansing. Then because cleansing does not in itself empower us to become our best selves, he begins to teach us to accept the gift of spiritual transformation.
Traditional Christian literature calls this process sanctification. It sounds a little off-putting, but it just means that God will never be satisfied with the second best for us or in us, let alone the third rate. So we come to Gods ultimate gift, the gift of life at its fullest and best, life that is stronger than death, which, though it can begin here and now, will only blossom in fullest flower within the mystery of eternal life.
Every day is Christmas Day, as far as God is concerned. The gifts we have thought about are some of the best in the world and God wants the receiving process to take place today and tomorrow and every day. As we receive these gifts we will find that they do us good in body, mind and spirit. They are part and parcel of our Christian healing. It follows too that as we set those we care about within the acceptance, the deliverance, the cleansing, the spiritual transformation and the gift of life at its fullest and best, this sort of prayer can have real healing power.
(1) Numbers 11, 11-15, (2) Job 13, 24-27, (3) Psalm 88, 13-14 and Psalm 102, 9-10 , (4) Acts 17:28 , (5) Matthew 28:20,
(6) Ephesians 1:19, (7) 1 John 4:8
Reproduced with kind permission of the Plain Truth (UK)