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We’re back with Part Two of David Chotka’s amazing stories! We talk about why Ravi Zacharias’ lifelong scandal was so wrong. He tells the amazing story about how his wife was healed from MS. David also shares his fruitful prayer ministry, and how we can experience the same power of God in our own lives. David is a great storyteller and you don’t want to miss this episode!
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BIO:
Rev. Dr. David Chotka is the Founder and Director of Spirit-Equip Ministries, a trans-denominational equipping ministry focused on developing spiritual disciplines. He is also the Chair of the Alliance Pray! Team (APT)–a ministry developed by the General Assembly of the C&MA Canada, to serve as a catalyst to develop prayer equipping resources and leading events across the movement and beyond. In addition, David has served as the Canadian director of the College of Prayer, Canada, a trans-denominational ministry dedicated to working with every stream of the Lord’s church to deepen ministries of intercession. Dr. David has led many prayer/deeper life events in differing contexts, including sacramental, evangelical and charismatic churches and trans-denominational gatherings of leaders (in Canada, the US, 6 nations in Europe, Australia, Japan, as well as in various nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America). He has studied in Sacramental, Reform, Brethren, Wesleyan Methodist, and trans-denominational contexts, and was mentored by Dr. Gordon Fee (Pentecostal), Dr. John White (Brethren/Anglican), Dr. Maxie Dunnam (Evangelical Methodist) and Rev. Danny Morris (Discernment Author and speaker). David has four earned degrees with three in Theology/Spirituality (M.Div. TST, Th.M. Regent College, Vancouver, D.Min. Gordon Conwell), and serves as an adjunct instructor in the Pathways School for ministry.
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Transcript:
David Chotka Part Two
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Wounds of the Faithful podcast, brought to you by DSW Ministries. Your host is singer, songwriter, speaker, and domestic violence advocate, Diana Winkler. She is passionate about helping survivors in the church heal from domestic violence and abuse and trauma. This podcast is not a substitute for professional counseling or qualified medical help. [00:00:26] Now, here is Diana. [00:00:33] Welcome back everybody to part two of my conversation with David Chotka. I thought that part one was amazing. We got to know him, his ministry and his childhood and the suffering that his father and grandfather went through. His, grandmother. And so we’re going to hear more stories about his [00:01:00] ministry and, healing. [00:01:01] We’re going to talk about a lot more about healing and prayer. And so I’m not going to repeat his bio. If you didn’t listen to part one, go back and start there cause you will miss the context and a lot of important information. So, without further ado, here is part 2 of my conversation with David Chotka. [00:01:24] Well, I’m glad that you gave you a perspective for Ravi Zacharias because there are, preachers that defend this man. Of course, post mortem, but, and then I have dear, dear preacher friends. We love to death say, Oh, well, he just fell and any of us can fall. [00:01:45] Well, no, it was a one off and there was a weak lady and a weak man and they wound up doing something once you look him in the eye and you say to him, that was stupid. And you put [00:02:00] the two of them together and you tell the partners of the two people, and then you take them out and you get them well again. [00:02:08] Well, it didn’t happen. It was a pattern. No, it was a pattern. It wasn’t just a one off. He was abusing those girls. And deceiving not only, his congregation and all the people that bought his books and, watched him on TV or the radio, he deceived his wife, he had been doing this for years and he was using doctor with his name and didn’t have a doctorate. [00:02:35] No, well, he did. Well, he became famous because Billy Graham cut him some slack and gave him opportunity to speak at a huge worldwide gathering. And he shone when he did that. And this, this led to what he did. I mean, this is, that was the platform. So all those well meaning godly righteous people who gave him opportunity to be able to succeed and to create a market for his work and, and then to create opportunity for him to do this, all of them were lied to. [00:02:58] And I [00:03:00] mean, I tell you this, one of the, one of the greatest people I ever respected was Billy Graham because he wouldn’t allow the conditions to be an idiot to happen to him. He had a rule, you know, so I love Billy Graham. So he published his tax returns, you know, and he refused the offerings and then he would not meet with a female alone under any circumstances whatsoever. [00:03:22] And he would always be accompanied wherever he went. I mean, this guy was wise. Yes, yes. And so, I mean, here’s what, so I am the recipient, let me just type out that, then. So he established the Billy Graham School of Evangelism. I’ve attended three of those. As a result, I became more adept at what I was doing with that. [00:03:39] Oh, by the way, he, he set up a thing called Preaching Today. These, cassette tapes that I would listen to. I was in an isolated northern community, and I could not get training, and that came once a month, and he paid for it. And, and so then I went to Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary. [00:03:55] It was founded by Billy Graham’s family and I got my doctoral work done because Billy Graham’s family [00:04:00] created that thing. And so I mean, we’re talking, I could keep telling, I’ve got about, he created Leadership Magazine and I would read Leadership Magazine from cover to cover because I wanted to get, professional help around becoming a better person in the organization of my church or my congregation or I wanted to learn some micro skill around what it was that was done and I, I read those magazines faithfully. He created Christianity Today and that magazine became a marvelous opportunity for people to be able to, learn and to grow and it became, it was designed for the popular market and to this day the things that he established to create. [00:04:35] Blessing for generations to come still stand and he died with integrity. He did. We need more of those. Oh, I miss him so much. And I remember, somebody told me that. Back in the day when there was segregation and all the places that he would preach at and his crusades, they had ropes for, for the black attendees and then here the whites were over here and he [00:05:00] went down himself and took those ropes down. [00:05:03] He said there will be no segregation in my crusades. This is not what I would want. And he had a guy named Ralph Bell who was a black guy who was one of his alternate preachers. And so, and Ralph Bell was a Canadian. He was from St. Catharines, my hometown. And so, yeah, so I mean, this, there was this warm bond. [00:05:23] He also, he liked Canadians. So, so his, um, his sister married, uh, Leighton Ford. who was a Presbyterian pastor from Chatham, Ontario, and I served in Chatham, Ontario. So, this whole Canadian connection happened with him, Canadian American connection. But regardless of that, the point is that, uh, when you meet someone with integrity, it’s a marvelous thing. [00:05:46] When you meet somebody who claims to have integrity and you find out there’s a slimy story, it destroys trust. And so my, my reason for writing the healing prayer book was because there’s, by the way, that the fellow who’s my co writer is a man of great [00:06:00] integrity. His name is Maxie Dunham. He was the head of the upper room. [00:06:04] And he wrote 50, five, zero, 50 books. And yes, it was. And he was the head of Asbury Theological Seminary. And that man was the second reader of my thesis on this, that led to the writing of this book. And when I was doing some work with him in the course of time, it became clear that he and I needed to put this book together and create this so that we could become people who would train people how to get to the place where they could receive physical healing. [00:06:34] Mental and emotional healing, spiritual healing, and not be abusive in the process. So we have a chapter on pitfalls to avoid. Nothing worse than taking up somebody who’s broken and saying they don’t have enough faith. Nothing worse than coming alongside somebody who’s been wounded or hurt or, beat down and tell them they have a sin issue. [00:06:53] That’s the problem. That’s why. Nothing worse. No, no, no. So Maxie and I have created a [00:07:00] resource that’s designed to teach people gentleness as they approach those who are in desperate need of prayer for healing. And so we wanted to trained teams in churches and trained people, um, to, to be able to do this and to have an expectation that God is a supernatural God and that miraculous intervention does happen from time to time. [00:07:21] And so also does holy mystery where you don’t understand why something is not happening. So my family’s an example of that. My wife was miraculously healed of FSH muscular dystrophy in front of 650 witnesses when we gone to help the helpless. So we went to. In Uganda. That was in Uganda. Well, actually, no, the speaker was from Uganda. [00:07:41] He came to my church. Oh, so here’s what happened. Uh, so my church, uh, Spruce Grove Alliance Church in Edmonton, just outside of Edmonton, Alberta, was invited by two American congregations to take part in the rebuilding of the shattered ruins of Uganda because Idi Amin had been there and he devastated the country. [00:07:59] And then Joseph [00:08:00] Kony in the north had created that Lord’s Resistance Army and the Lord had nothing to do with it. It was evil in every sense of the word. He, you know, I met people whose hands were cut off and whose noses were cut off and whose tongues were cut out and whose eyes were gouged out by this madman. [00:08:14] And there had been no education for 20 years, especially in the north. So my congregation took it upon ourselves that I would train the Ugandans, and so would Fred Hartley, and so would Mike Plunkett. Mike went to Gulu, I went to Arua, and Fred went to Kampala. And the three of us did this, um, for a three year run and we took teams with us to build infrastructure and I would train pastors and leaders and we would do evangelistic crusade events and so on and so forth. [00:08:41] And that was the combination that we did. Anyway, we spent a lot of money, so we, because we train in my church alone dealing with the group in Urua, Uganda trained 750 to a thousand pastors and we pay their expenses. while they were studying and learning. Now, of course, in Africa, it’s cheaper, but [00:09:00] still, that’s a lot of mouths to feed. [00:09:02] It’s a place you have to rent to make sure that they have a place to sleep. We had resources to give them, and so we gave them my pirate praying book. They were the first ones to receive that. And, the intention there, Was that we were, trying to help them rebuild. The guy who’d founded this, he wanted to, to know when I would fly him into preach in my church. [00:09:22] Yeah. So very much the tribal society, African, you know, and so I remember going into my elder board and saying, well, look, I got this note. What should we do about this? And they said, well, he’s invited himself at the wrong time of the year. He wants to come in the summer and there’s nobody around in the summer. [00:09:35] He needs to come in the winter when we have regular tenants. I said, yeah. And I said, but he’s a tribal society, Ugandan. He, he acts like he’s the head of the tribe and he bosses people around. And I said, he makes, I’ve watched them. They shine his shoes when he walks down the street, this is what they do. [00:09:50] He said, well, is he someone who could teach us? I said, Oh man, amazing things happen when this guy preaches. It’s just amazing. [00:09:57] So, so we agreed that we would climb it. [00:10:00] And, my wife had been afflicted with this thing called FSH Muscular Dystrophy. Her, mother had it. She’s in heaven now. Her sister has it. Her niece has it. And, uh, actually right now it’s famous because in the United States, uh, the guy who founded Lululemon, um, he has FSH Muscular Dystrophy. [00:10:17] He’s 62, 63, something like that. He just made a major gift, like 100 million bucks US to, to, uh, the Muscular Dystrophy Society to look for a medical cure for that. And right now there is none. But let me describe the trajectory of that disease. [00:10:31] It starts when you’re between 16 and 20. You look quite ordinary and normal and then, but your face starts to sag. [00:10:37] So you can’t use your mouth muscles, so it looks like you’re never smiling. You can’t whistle because your mouth doesn’t work that way. Then your shoulder blades get rounded, your shoulder blades go up, your shoulders get rounded. You get, you’re in chronic pain between 16 and 20. If you damage a muscle, you never get it back. [00:10:54] Um, you can’t lift your arms above your shoulders, and then when you’re trying to walk, you start to shuffle, [00:11:00] and you get a dropped knee so that you can’t lift your leg up to a step, so you have to use your hands to lift your leg up onto the step, and have rails to be able to pull yourself, et cetera, et cetera. [00:11:09] And you don’t die young, but um, you die in a wheelchair. Now, I knew when I married my girl, She had it. That’s the first girl to laugh at my jokes. [00:11:23] Anyway, wonderful, sweet, kind Christian family. But her sister was afflicted, her mother was afflicted, and she was afflicted. And, you know, you weigh that and you make the decision, I can’t live my life without that woman. I’m going to marry her. So you do, you know, and we did. And, and, uh, she starts to decline and I’m starting to travel. [00:11:42] Quite a lot. And exactly as my father saw in that vision, I was starting to do this. I was going for different I preached in 17 nations so far. I’m going to number 18 this fall. I’m going to be in Vietnam to preach to the Vietnamese alliance there because they have been under the communist thumb and we finally got an opportunity to go and help them. [00:11:59] I’m going [00:12:00] to go. Anyway, so I’m doing this and she’s hardly able to get out of the bed in the morning and it was very strange because I would pray for people and they get better. And I’d pray for my wife and she didn’t. So teams of people go to Uganda and this we had three services in the weekend. At a Saturday night, that was least attended because, you know, that was the ones who wanted to sleep in the next day. And, there wasn’t a really strong Sunday school for that particular group at first. So, we had, a hundred people at that service. [00:12:28] But they were Just absolutely transfixed by this guy’s stories. He was telling deliverance from death war stories. Yes, he was talking about people praying and somebody’s life being spared. You know, he’s talking about what they did to defeat Coney. He talked about the prayer movement of the church. [00:12:45] He told the story of 300, 000 intercessors praying for the Ugandan army in the streets of Kampala when the army was fighting Joseph Kony, and Kony losing when they prayed, and then Kony winning when they didn’t pray, and this amazing union between the intercessors in the streets of [00:13:00] Kampala and the parliament and the army, and it was just incredible stories, and so at the end of the Saturday service, All hundred of those people walked up to us and said, tell more stories tomorrow. [00:13:10] We’re coming. So we had a nine o’clock and we had 11 o’clock, right? So the, the Saturday nighters get up after they’ve heard him and they’ve invited their friends. And so nine was usually about two thirds full and now it’s packed. It’s full. He’s telling more of these deliverance from death war stories and everybody’s on the edge of their seats. [00:13:27] Isn’t this amazing and incredible? And then, they spill over into the 11, which is usually the full one. And now it’s standing room only. That sanctuary sat about 450 people. And there had to be 650 in that. Sanctuary. Lying along walls and up and down the stairs. Oh man. And out into the overflow and it was just this busy, like full. [00:13:48] And so he’s in the pulpit and he’s preaching. And he looks at me and he says with his thick Ugandan accent, David! What is M A? [00:14:00] M. A. Master of Arts. I don’t know. That’s what I said. And then he said, no, no, something’s terribly wrong. And he puts his hand in the pulpit and he starts to pray in silence. [00:14:12] Everybody’s waiting for the end of the war story because somebody’s life’s in danger and he hasn’t got to the conclusion. And he stopped this thing in the middle. And then he looks up and he says this, It’s a wasting muscle disease. It starts in your head and it causes your face to sag, and then your shoulders get rounded. [00:14:28] Your shoulder blades go out of position. You’re in chronic pain between 16 and 20. If you damage a muscle, you’ll never get it back again. This was an uneducated tribal society guy from Uganda giving an exact medical description of my wife’s FSH muscular dystrophy. And I turn and look at her and he says this as I’m looking at her, whoever has this, Jesus has just healed you. [00:14:55] And her arms went above her head for the first time in decades. [00:15:00] All the pain vanished from her body instantly in front of a crowd of our friends and family in a church that we’d served for five years. They all, they knew us. So, I mean, everybody is in awe. at this. And there’s more stories that I can tell you about. [00:15:19] I’m telling you the one that’s personal to me. And that story is included in the healing prayer book. But we had made a decision that we would pray for people and they get better, but she was declining as she was praying for people as they, as they got better. And there was this really kind of strange taste in our mouths, you know, and so we made this decision to seek the healer, not the healing. [00:15:40] And it was when we did that, that this thing happened. And so here’s what, so we had guests who’d come to hear this guy. And our home was about, well about a mile from the church, so we get in the car, we drive home. And the plan was that I would get on the stepstool to take down the heavy pots and pans from the top shelves. [00:15:59] So that she could [00:16:00] cook the lunch for the guests that we had in the home, including the guest speaker. And she pushes me out of the way. She stands on the thing and she brings down the heavy pots and pans from the top shelves herself. She does it herself. She had not been able to do that. A little thing. [00:16:15] For fully a decade. Oh, it was just this incredible thing. Now, our doctor had known her for five years. He watched her for three more, and then he wrote the note and said, all traces of FSA muscular dystrophy have vanished from this woman. So she’s completely healed now. Completely healed. Completely healed. [00:16:40] She grows muscle tissue. So in the book, Yes, that’s impossible. That’s, that’s genetic transformation. I mean, I work for a hospital, so that’s an amazing story. You know what I’m talking about with FSH muscular dystrophy, you know this. So now the book describes five pathways to a remedy. The first is the instant heal. [00:16:57] I just told you an instant heal story. [00:17:00] So that one’s in the middle of the book. I also now, I believe that natural healing is miraculous. My wife did not used to be able to grow muscle tissue. If she damaged a muscle, it would never return. And now when she damages a muscle and that happens from time to time, it grows back. [00:17:18] Wow. That’s impossible. So I believe natural healing is a miracle. Then there’s what I call the pathway to a remedy where somebody has done research because their kid sister died of leukemia and they have spent their life trying to figure out some adaptive therapy or some etiology, some trajectory for healing or whatever. [00:17:37] And listen. If somebody spends 20 years of their life looking for a solution, take the gift. [00:17:42] So I see the pathway to a remedy is just as important as the instant heal and natural heal. Then there’s this thing that happens to lots and lots and lots of people. There’s a suffering that seems to have no good reason. And when it’s done, you don’t know why you went through it, but you’ve discovered you’re different. [00:17:58] And it’s important to go through. [00:18:00] And you don’t want to say that God did that, but there’s this kind of thing. So we name that as a legitimate pathway to people who are godly righteous people who are seeking the Lord for healing. And last of all, there’s this miraculous crossing called death where we go into the presence of God himself. [00:18:16] And so those five things are held forth as appropriate and proper pathways for people who are seeking healing prayer. And sometimes the So it’s like this science works like this. Uh, there’s a cause, there’s an effect, this is the trajectory, here’s the cure. And some scientists have investigated many, many times, they put a hypothesis together, they see whether or not this particular kind of antibiotic treats this particular thing, what’s the trajectory of the disease, they’ve figured out how many doses is necessary, and they create the scientific enterprise that leads to that cure. [00:18:45] Okay, faith is God’s miraculous intervention inside the time, flow of time and space. And the Lord intervenes miraculously, and it’s amazing. And sometimes the paths are separate, and sometimes they open up like this. You will have a partial heal and a pathway [00:19:00] to a remedy. And when they start the trajectory toward the pathway to the remedy, suddenly there’s a miraculous transformation. [00:19:06] Then you go through a season where you don’t understand why you’re in that scene, and then suddenly you’re well. All of those intertwine together. And so the book speaks of the intertwining of all five of those trajectories. So, what did, uh, her family think about her healing, and were they interested in it? [00:19:24] Well, it’s astonished, yes, astonished, and now they said, well, maybe you never had it. Obviously she did, if it’s related to her family. Yes, I’ll just tell you this. I used to go around the side of the bed. She would put her arms on my shoulders. I would lift her up and then walk her to the shower so she could get hot water on her so she’d be limber enough to be able to take care of the kids while I went about my work. [00:19:49] You don’t have to persuade me that it’s real. Well, you know, they said that in Jesus day, you know, Oh, he’s just pretending that he’s blind. He’s not really blind. [00:20:00] They said it back then too. Yeah. That’s right. The man born blind in John nine. That’s right. That’s what they said. And the parents didn’t know what to say. [00:20:06] Cause they didn’t want to wind up in trouble. He was born blind. Yeah. That’s what they said. He was born blind, but we don’t know how he saw, but he’s, he’s seeing this is our son and they just couldn’t believe it. Actually, I’ll just, there’s two responses to Miracle in the Bible when Jesus did them. [00:20:21] The grand majority of the time would get very excited and the people who had a vested interest in not seeing a change would get mad and try and attack. And I have seen that in churches where there were people, there was actually one, one sad thing happened out of that event in Spruce Grove. There was a lady who had a son who was going deaf. [00:20:42] And he wasn’t healed. And my wife was. And so she accused me of chicanery and lying. And I mean, I had a medical note. It was not chicanery and lying, but she ran a little shop in that town. It was a town of 30, 000 people just on the edge of Edmonton. [00:21:00] All kinds of our ladies went into that shop and she would slander me and it went to came to a head. [00:21:05] I think I had to leave that church early because of that lady. She could not bring herself to believe that God would heal one and not another. I did it when he was on this earth. He healed lots of people and there’s many that didn’t get. Yes, I get it. But the point is, if it’s personal pain, it’s personal pain. [00:21:24] Yeah. And she, now she had grown up in a church that said God only did that in the age of the apostles. And she’s, there were, listen, there were, that weekend, there were 10 miraculous healings. All of them with anchored leaders in the church. I’m telling you the one that depicts me. My board chair had, uh, had prostate cancer. [00:21:41] It vanished. My associate pastor had diabetes. Her feet were swelling. She stood up when he said, someone here has diabetes. Stand up and Jesus will heal it. Her feet shrunk in front of the congregation. She put her shoes on. I had an assistant whose name was Sharon. She’d been in a motorcycle accident and because the bone had set wrongly, she [00:22:00] had to use an oral appliance. [00:22:01] Otherwise, she’d have chronic pain in her mouth. And this guy prayed for her, she felt nothing. But the next day when she went to pick up her daughter from school, she yawned. She hadn’t yawned in 17 years. Wow. And then she opened her mouth and her, and she took the oral appliance out and no pain, no pain. [00:22:19] It’s amazing. It was just this incredible, it was all anchor people. They weren’t, they weren’t the crazies who came in to check this guy out. These were anchor members of the church. There was one guy who’d been an international worker, he’d been a missionary to Africa. And he had, he was healed of his belly, some sort of a belly issue. [00:22:37] There was a lady who was a pastor who was working up the street at the church down the road, and she brought her friend, and her friend was, uh, was an anchor worker at Beulah Alliance Church, and she was miraculously healed. And this, this, these stories keep going on and on and on. That event launched a whole new study for me about the [00:23:00] frequency of prayer for healing. [00:23:01] And how it needs to be ordinary. And so actually I just read this to you. I’ll read this to your audience. Cause I was, yeah, two months ago I was preaching in a church here in Windsor. I’m no longer the lead pastor of a local church. And so I got invited to speak at one of these churches, Windsor Christian Fellowship. [00:23:15] I was working in my office about a week ago in the doldrums because, you know, my job is now sitting in front of a computer instead of, you know, being with people and preaching once a week, right? And so I’m sitting here and suddenly my phone goes ding and I look over and here’s what it says. [00:23:30] Good afternoon, Pastor David. I just wanted to send you a quick message. I met you a few months ago at a service you did at Windsor Christian Fellowship in Windsor. Afterwards, you prayed over me and my children as I was going through stage three cervical cancer with a seven centimeter tumor. So I think that’s three and a half inches, seven centimeter tumor that they couldn’t operate on. [00:23:52] That’s very serious. She prayed, I went to the hospital yesterday and by a miracle, the tumor is [00:24:00] completely gone and they can’t detect any cancer. I got that note a week ago. Wow. Something that just happened. Yeah. Now that was a single mom who had to leave her guy because of trouble. And I’ll just say this to you. [00:24:14] The Lord rises in compassion for the helpless. And when someone like that is, she’s got these three kids and what she, when she came to the front, she said, look, I got these three kids, I got cancer, who’s going to raise these kids? You know, that’s, that’s what she said. So I started to pray for those three kids and didn’t feel much. [00:24:32] And then when I, so this, this is one of the most important things I say in the book. There are signals to tell you that you’re in the middle of a healing prayer moment where God’s active. When you’re in the middle of that. Three things grow inside of you. Righteousness, which is the sweet walk with Christ. [00:24:50] Peace, which is internal serenity waxing large. And joy, which is internal celebration despite external circumstance. When all [00:25:00] three of those rise, and it’s married together with compassion and focus on the person you’re praying for, that’s a healing prayer gift. You pray into what it is that God is doing rather than beg him for him to be intervening. [00:25:15] And in the case of that lady, I felt that when I prayed for her and I didn’t know that I, of course, I’m not her pastor. I was a guest preacher in the church and I got this note because she looked me up after it happened and this amazing thing took place. I do believe that we are to learn how to pay attention to those signals. [00:25:34] This works for emotional healing. This works for mental healing. This works for physical healing. This works for, um, social wounds that have come to you. This hurts for, this deals with, um, with the wounds of the faithful, if I can use the name of your podcast. This works for any kind of wound. The Lord wants us well, and when you are on the wrong side of being in an abusive situation, [00:26:00] God rises to defend. [00:26:02] He does. I’m going to back this up to one of the first that happened to me again. I’ll tell you one more story. So, way back in the days when I was pastoring a little church in northern Alberta, my first church was in a little town called Lackabish. It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there. [00:26:20] That town had 2, 500 people in it. That was my first assignment. And I had a little church, and um, and there was a lady who showed up, she’s a single mom with two kids. And uh, the boys were 10 and 12, you know, and she was about 30, somewhere in that range, anyway. [00:26:35] She shows up, and , she stands at the back of the church, watching the boys, and I thought, that’s a good mom. She’s watching those boys to make sure they, you know, so, and then, but she’d always stand, and then she’d leave, take the two boys in tow. And she came faithfully, then she came to Bible study, then she came to membership class, then she came to a prayer meeting. [00:26:56] And I noticed she was always standing or lying down. I said, what’s wrong? And she said, I [00:27:00] have terrible back trouble. They’ve actually created a stand for me at work. So I can lean against the wall and use the typewriter because I just can’t sit down. I go to see the chiropractor all the time and we’re trying to avoid a back fusion. [00:27:14] But I’m in terrible trouble and constant pain. I said, Oh man, that’s bad. I’m so sorry. This you do whatever you want. We’ll just come alongside you. So we’re doing a prayer course. Actually, it was this one here. This is my co writers Maxi Dunham. And he wrote this resource to teach people how to pray. [00:27:29] And we were using this resource. Anyway, we’re in this room and there is the head of obstetrics and gynecology from the Lackawish Hospital, a nurse by the name of Lynn. There is a Catholic lady who wanted a Bible study on, on Sunday nights, [00:27:42] there was a helicopter repair guy by the name of Brad. There was me, and there was this lady, Lorna. She was on the couch, and we’re all learning all this prayer stuff, and she’s lying on the couch while we’re learning. And then, I don’t know if it was Lynn or Brad, one of them said, Duh. We’re doing this course on prayer. [00:27:57] Maybe we should pray for Lorna. [00:28:00] You know, we’re talking four weeks in, you know, and so we thought, oh man, that’s crazy. And she had had to leave her husband because he was a total and complete jerk. Right. So the church was her home. That’s what happened. The church became like her family to raise those kids. [00:28:13] And it was a beautiful young church with lots of kids, you know, and lots of young adults. And so those kids got socialized around the context of healthy families, that kind of thing. But really, she’s in this prayer meeting. She’s on her back. So I looked at the nurse that was head in charge, in charge of this hospital thing. [00:28:30] She’s beautifully medically trained. And she says, I said, what do you think, Lynn? She said, I just feel this energy. What is that? I said, that’s the Lord. I think he wants us to pray. He said, okay, let’s pray. So I asked if I could put my hand on her shoulder and I did. And then, Brad, , the Catholic lady put her hand on her leg, you know, and Lynn and Brad stood up around her. [00:28:48] One, put his hand on her head, one, one over her, held her hand, that kind of thing. And we started to pray and suddenly the room filled with compassion and, [00:29:00] and love. And it was like this, the Lord’s grace was focused on that girl. It was, it was the most incredible kind of sense. And all of us felt it, the helicopter pilot, the nurse, the Catholic lady, myself, and the lady on that couch. [00:29:16] And I said, what’s happening inside of you, Lorna? And she said, Oh, my spirit is soaring. I said, you want us to keep praying? Yes, please keep praying. [00:29:26] Suddenly, I had a gift of spectacular faith, and I said, Lorna, in the name of Jesus, stand up and do deep knee bends. She jumped Out of the couch and she did a deep knee bend and her back went snap and she was well. And then she ran into the sanctuary and ran around the piano. [00:29:43] And then she came back into the room we were in. And she said, I’m healed, I’m healed, I’m healed. Then she ran the two blocks and got her two boys. And they ran back to the church. [00:29:52] And so this amazing, she was completely. Totally transformed by this thing. Now she was going to a chiropractor. [00:30:00] who was working with her to make sure she could not have that back fusion. And she was booked in the next day. And, uh, so she went to see the chiropractor and he said, well, let’s get you on the table. [00:30:11] She said, I don’t think I need to. Uh, and he said, why not? And she said, well, they prayed for me at the church over there. So he puts her on the table and he over corrected her back and was horrified because he’d done and then he watched her back correct itself. Really? Wow. He sat back and he said, that’s impossible. [00:30:32] What happened? So she described the prayer time. Now when I got married, I got married in that town. And my back went out and I went to see the chiropractor. I said, my backside. He said, what are you doing here? I said, I’m getting married. I said, how are you doing? He said, I’m a born again Christian. [00:30:45] Now I said, you’re a born again Christian? What did that? He said, you, I said, what do you mean? So you prayed for Lorna, Jesus healed her. And he told me the story from his perspective. And so he became a believer as a result of that. So [00:31:00] that was a lady who was abused and had to leave. And then the Lord’s power rose up to bless her and stood with her. [00:31:06] That is a great story. I love it. And you know, we could sit here and listen to your stories all night. [00:31:14] And I think listening to the stories you’ve told today really renews our hope that God still does miracles and he does heal and he still uses people and sometimes we need to hear stories like the ones you’ve told to give us renewed faith, because in this, terrible world we’re living in right now. [00:31:37] All these unlikely people finding God and unlikely people being healed miraculously. So where can the folks get your books? [00:31:48] Well, this one is available wherever, Bricks and Mortar store. You can get this one cause that’s published by Whitaker house. [00:31:53] Books a Million, Barnes Noble, anywhere in the United States or Canada, you can get those books. But if you want to be in touch with me, I have five books total, [00:32:00] and all, links to all of them are on my website. And so my website is www. spirit, like Holy Spirit. Equip, like equipment, spiritequip. [00:32:10] com. And there’s links to my social media sites. There’s links to podcasts that I’ve done before. There’s links to YouTube things. I preach a weekly sermon on television locally, and then I put it on the YouTube channel. [00:32:21] So you can watch me preach if you want to do that. I have an Instagram. I got a blog spot. A Facebook page, etc, the links are all there. LinkedIn is also there. And also, you can book me there, if you want to take a course with me on Zoom. Right now I’m offering a course on my book on how to hear the voice of God. So that’s this one here, and the title is, Hey, are you there? It’s me, God. How to listen, test, and know when God speaks. [00:32:48] And Jack Canfield, the Chicken Soup for the Soul author, did the foreword to this book. He really liked, he liked the book, he read the book, and he offered to do the foreword for me. And so, this one’s got all kinds of stories. Can you [00:33:00] imagine me telling stories? [00:33:05] The Healing Prayer Book is an audiobook. It’s a trade paperback, and it’s an e book. And in about a month’s time, there’s going to be 15 videos. [00:33:14] One video for each chapter. That will be released and it will be attached to my website as well so that you can then get a 7 to 10 minute video where I give a take on the chapter with a study guide and then you can use the book and learn it inside the context of your Sunday school class or your small group or whatever. [00:33:33] I’ll have, all that information in the show notes for you guys. I would like to ask a favor if you don’t mind, praying for our audience. I’d love to. And I’m sure there’s lots of needs out there for spiritual and physical healing. [00:33:50] Heavenly Father, I want to thank you that you rise to defend the helpless. [00:33:57] If you put a wounded soul before the Lord of [00:34:00] glory, you move heaven and earth and reshape time and space to bring help and healing to the afflicted. mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I have seen you rise to help the helpless. [00:34:15] Father, right now in the listening audience there are people who have been afflicted by church. There are people in the listening audience who have had trouble in their family. There are people who are dealing with a medical crisis or their son or daughter is in trouble and they don’t know what to do or even how to pray. [00:34:33] Would you send your Holy Spirit to come alongside them right now, so that they tangibly feel gentle peace enter their soul right now, while they are listening to this prayer, while they’re engaged in attempting to try and communicate with you. Speak to them by your presence. [00:34:56] and then guide them to whatever kind of [00:35:00] remedy you want to send. Whether that’s an instant heal, whether that’s a pathway to somebody else’s labor, whether it’s a natural healing, whether it’s a removal from circumstances that are abusive and awful, whether it’s getting to a safe place, whether it’s emotional, mental, physical, spiritual distress, whatever it is. [00:35:20] You’re the healer and we would ask that your healing grace and power would touch and bless and lead and guide everyone who’s listening to this podcast right now in Jesus name. Amen. Thank you so much, David, for coming on the show and blessing us. Well, listen, it’s been a delight to be with you and may the Lord bless you and all your constituents. God bless you. Good night. [00:35:47] Thank you for listening to the Wounds of the Faithful podcast. If this episode has been helpful to you, please hit the subscribe button and tell a friend. You can connect with us at [00:36:00] DSW Ministries. org where you’ll find our blog along with our Facebook, Twitter, and our YouTube channel links. Hope to see you next week! [00:36:13]