Elijah House Training Course 201

Biblical Bases of Prayer Ministry

True healing isn’t making something broken good enough to work, but rather being freed from the power of that broken thing so that it can no longer rule us, enabling us to trust God’s righteousness to shine in and through it. God’s laws and principles help effect sanctification and transformation in our lives. We show the Scriptural foundation for salvation, with the cross of Christ and His shed blood being the means to end our separation from God, as well as to stop the sinful habits that plague our daily lives.

Ingredients of Prayer Ministry

The process of sanctification and transformation by inner healing is not a formula, but a Holy Spirit-led work in the hearts and minds of God’s people for the purpose of restoration and reconciliation. In His Word, God has given us the way and the means to help others – to implore on His behalf, “Be reconciled to God.”

Bitter Roots

The law of judgment applies not only to our conscious actions, known and performed outwardly, but also to what is lodged in our heart, repressed, unknown and unexpressed. Once formed, judgments reap results. Bitter roots not brought to the Cross defile, and may be the most powerful negative force in our lives, bringing destruction to ourselves and those around us.

Basic Trust

Basic trust is the first and foremost of developmental accomplishments, without which succeeding lessons cannot be learned well. Failure to acquire basic trust negatively affects us throughout our adult lives, impacting our ability to relate to one another and, ultimately, the Lord. We can depend upon the Lord to build basic trust in us, even though we did not acquire it in infancy. Father God is able to reach into our innermost being and fill us with His tender, enfolding love. Prayer ministers can help to communicate God’s unconditional love through gentle prayer and godly affection.

Accomplishing Forgiveness

The primary need for forgiveness springs from the Law. Until forgiveness is effected in the heart, the law of sowing and reaping must roll on to its inevitable conclusion. Forgiveness is central to being made whole. This lesson makes the necessity of forgiveness clear. Learn how resentment becomes lodged in the heart and, once entrenched, requires a work of God’s grace to be removed.

Repentance and Restitution

An essential role of prayer ministers is to help those in pain find the freedom of godly repentance. True repentance requires an awareness of sin at the heart level, and understanding of how sin hurts others and God, a willingness to accept full responsibility for our actions, and the determination to change.

Honoring Father and Mother

Accurate head knowledge of the faith produces nothing in terms of expressing the fruits of the Holy Spirit, unless what is lodged in the heart relative to parents is countered by effective grace in Jesus on the cross. Almost every failure in life can be traced sooner or later to the breaking of one commandment: “Honor thy father and mother…”

How We See God

If our hearts are pure, we are able to comprehend the glorious nature of God, and relate to Him in a blessed intimacy. But when judgments and bitterness are lodged in our hearts, our perception of God becomes distorted, crippling our relationship with Him.

Performance Orientation

The constant tendency of the born-anew is to fall back into striving by human effort. Our mind and spirit know the free gift of salvation, but our heart retains its habit of earning love by performance. We live unaware that motives other than God’s love have begun to corrupt our serving into strife, tension and fear.

Parental Inversion and Substitute Mate

Parental inversion is not an easy sin to hate. The difficulty is that for many people it has become the most noble definition of life; the sacrifice and service it involves are readily justified by Scripture. But God asks us to lay down our lives for other people for His sake, rather than out of the impure motives of our own wounded hearts.

Inner Vows and Heart of Stone

In order for us to have true fellowship, God has to pierce or melt our hearts of stone. Hearts of stone give rise to, and are further cemented by judgments, expectancies, and vows, making us the loneliest people in the world – even in the midst of friends.

Identifications of Love

We are designed both to give and to receive love, and know in our spirits that love is necessary nourishment to our lives. But are we able to receive love in its infinite forms of expression offered us by God and others, or do we identify and accept love only when it comes in a few select “packages”? Formed in childhood, these packages are idols which define and limit our idea of what true love is; they almost assuredly deny us the full joy of giving and receiving it.

Ministry Skills: Interviewing, Listening & Prayer

If only there was a perfect formula for how to do prayer ministry! Unfortunately, one size does not fit all. Certain ministry skills will be common to most sessions, but every heart is unique way. Although learning ministry skills is valuable, we need to learn first how to read the heart, then learn to combine ministry skills and heart messages into the one-of-a-kind approach each person deserves.

Slumbering Spirit

This lesson helps us understand the functions of our own personal or human spirit. If we are not awake in our spirit, we will not be able to function in various areas of life. Learn what causes the spirit to slumber, how to identify the symptoms of a slumbering spirit, and how to distinguish between true conscience and remorse conscience.

Spiritual Rebellion

The degree to which we reject circumstances of our lives, our family, our gender, our job, or our physical appearance, indicates the degree to which we are in spiritual rebellion. Like Satan, we are all angry at God, dissatisfied with His provision for our lives. This lesson will identify the attitudes which indicate the problem, and discuss the fruits of this sin in our lives.

Burden Bearing

We are all to bear one another’s burdens, but some are especially called by the Lord to do so. This lesson explains the gift of burden bearing, and explores the character and experience of the burden-bearing personality, including the wounding that occurs when the gift is misunderstood or misappropriated. The more we bear the burdens of others appropriately, the more we feel the weight and horror of sin, and thus the more we sense the price our Lord Jesus paid for our continued existence.

Cutting Free

Discover the principles of leaving and cleaving in the context of spiritually and emotionally leaving our family of origin and/or former position in order to step into God’s call for our life. While we may know the direction and see the destination in the distance, we may feel tied down, with no freedom to pursue it.

Personal and Corporate Strongholds

Strongholds, both personal and corporate, are formidable obstacles to the healing process, for they are deeply embedded in our minds. Strongholds have lives of their own. In this lesson, we will look at the origin of strongholds, and the part the mind plays in blocking our relationship with the Lord. Scripture offers us a model for entering into warfare against the strongholds that hold us captive as individuals, as groups, and as entire nations.

Deliverance & Inner Healing

Reconciliation between the fields of inner healing and deliverance will help to bring freedom, wholeness, and maturity to the Body of Christ. This lesson seeks to correct misunderstandings and abuses which perpetuate the conflict between the two areas, and offers Scriptural support which integrates them appropriately. The relationship between healing and deliverance is both necessary and practical in the process of sanctification.

Healing Relationships to Authority – part 1 & 2

No one except Christ has exhibited both perfect submission to authority and perfect leadership. We have all failed in both. However, in this lesson we will only deal with our issues and attitudes toward those in authority over us. We will outline how history and Satan have worked hand-in-hand to destroy proper respect for authority, how that has affected us, and what Scripture says about proper submission, even to those who abuse authority.

Denial

Central to our healing is a willingness to be known by ourselves and others. God calls us to “walk as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness and righteousness and truth)” (Ephesians 5:8b-9). When we live in denial, we walk in darkness and untruth, and cannot fully receive God’s healing power.

Rightly Handling Emotions

We are often taught to believe that certain emotions are always wrong. We blame our sinful behavior on our “wrong” feelings, and then try desperately to control them. We repress, hide, and deny them, instead of accepting them as God-given messages. This lesson looks to Jesus as a model for dealing with our human emotions. Through His responses in the Garden of Gethsemane, we explore some of the wrong attitudes we have about our own emotional life.

Common Errors of Ministry

This is a lesson in awareness. Prayer ministers must continually practice rigorously honest self-examination as we come before God with our gifts, knowledge, and healing abilities. This lesson describes some of the many ways in which prayer ministers can act outside of the will of God.

Sealing Our Healing

Often we ignore the dangers of spiritual laziness and fail to seek the spiritual nourishment that comes through Bible reading, prayer, home fellowship, etc. Then, when things go wrong, we blame God. Prayer and healing are not “magic,” nor can they be substitutes for the work of discipleship to which He calls us. This lesson illustrates numerous disciplines by which we can maintain our healing and further develop our relationship with the Lord to strengthen new and healthy structures to replace the old and sinful patterns in our lives. The process of prayer ministry would be incomplete without instruction and support in this area.