Introduction

The following article is written by Dr. Scott Flanigan, retired faculty member and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Florida State University.  He has authored numerous academic books. He and his wife Rita are both Ph.D.'s and reside in Tallahassee, FL.

The Flanagan’s have attended many of our meetings and events over recent years and it has been our privilege to become acquainted with them and their incredible gift of understanding God's heart and communicating it to His people. I was thoroughly blessed by an article he recently wrote concerning the importance of our present-day preparatory mode.  I trust you will likewise find part one of a two part series instructive and encouraging…Paul Keith Davis

The Role of Inner Healing in the Church Today

By Dr. Scott Flanagan

Oftentimes bad things happen to us and there are a variety of inner healing tools we use to minister to those issues.   Dr. James Wilder wrote on Type A trauma (the absence of the good things the child needed to thrive) and the importance of building joy and strength.  Before we do that, I want to share something else which sets the stage for these teaching on inner healing and highlights why inner healing is so high on God’s agenda at this time in church history.  I want to present three reasons why we in the church today need the ministry of inner healing in this hour more than ever before.

1. TO AVOID THE MISTAKES OF THE PAST and To Learn the Lessons of the Past – The first reason is that we need inner healing to avoid the mistakes of the past.  Twice in the last century the Lord extended the opportunity to enter into kingdom living, in the Pentecostal and healing revivals at the turn of the 20^th century and in the healing revival of the 1940’s and 50’s (the Latter Rain Revivial).  There is now general agreement that both of these opportunities were lost because of character flaws in the leadership and/or their followers.  Those powerful anointings for supernatural ministry ultimately were withdrawn and in each case the church returned to the wilderness for another 40 years.

Those earlier visitations of the Lord were given to us both as a foretaste of what is to come and as a warning.  This time around we are not to repeat the mistakes of the past.  In those earlier generations the tools for inner healing were not available.  Today we can no longer make that excuse.  The Lord has provided us with a rich set of tools, and continues to offer us new and more effective tools.

Jesus said that the devil came to Him and could find no place in Him.  In contrast we all have places of emotional woundedness within us where the devil can get his hooks in and bring us down. When we as innocent children are emotionally wounded, we sin by believing a lie about ourselves and by creating a defense mechanism to protect ourselves from the emotional pain.  Thereafter we subconsciously turn to our own coping mechanism rather than God to protect ourselves.

We cannot grow up without encountering emotionally wounding experiences.  As children we do not know how to react to them without sinning.  The devil knows where our places of wounding are and how to exploit them.  Part of becoming a spiritually mature Christian is actively seeking healing for these broken places in our lives so that the enemy has no place in us.

Learning the Lessons of the Past – There are positive as well as negative lessons to learn from the past.  Especially by studying the lives of the key leaders of the major 20th century moves of God, we can grasp the prerequisites for the release of the supernatural mantles of power that accompanied those great moves.  The unifying key in their stories seems to be their desperation, their hunger for the Lord and their willingness to die to self in a radical pursuit of the things of God.

The turning points in their ministries are marked by dramatic encounters with the Lord which followed a total submission of self in a desperate quest for the higher things of God.  Katherine Kuhlman would say, “I can show you the spot where Katherine Kuhlman died.”

William Branham went off to a cabin in the woods determined not to return until the Lord had answered the cries of his heart.  In May of 1946 after a night of prayer and travail, he received a visitation from an angel.  The angel delivered a commission from the Throne of God and two mantles, a mantle of physical healing and a second unique anointing to read the lives of those who came for ministry with astonishing detail and accuracy.

A.A. Allen – Another major leader of the Latter Rain Revival (1946-56) was A. A. Allen.  The lack of power in his ministry provoked him to seek God with desperation.  He went into his closet and had his wife lock the door, determined not to come out until the Lord told him why he wasn’t walking in the power of Peter, John and Paul.  After what seemed to be an interminable time, the Lord showed up and audibly outlined a list of 13 requirements or Kingdom principles that were required to receive the power (see White Dove Ministries August 2007 Newsletter).  He was told that after he placed each one on the altar of consecration and obedience he would receive the power to heal the sick, cast out demons and see mighty miracles.  And indeed he did, including perhaps the single most miraculous healing witnessed in the 20th century – the healing of 26 life-threatening infirmities in one little child (See Schambach, 1994).

The Third Baptism – If we look at the list of requirement, they seem to boil down to one unified theme – self-denial, humility and holiness.  This speaks of sanctification, the process of purification unto holiness by becoming more like Jesus, by having more of Jesus in us.  Bob Jones speaks of this as a third Baptism.  There is first the baptism of water for repentance.  The second baptism is the baptism of Holy Spirit for relationship; that is when the Holy Spirit is released within us and we really fall in love with Jesus.  The third baptism that Bob Jones speaks of is the baptism of fire for sanctification.  This third baptism speaks of holiness – the fires of God burning out the dross and leaving that which is pure.  The goal is to put off the old nature and put on the new nature.  When this work is done, God can trust us, because day-by-day all that is left of us looks more and more like Him.  Then we will have the authority, the anointing, the power He has.

The Tares in our Souls – The problem is that we all have tares in our souls, unhealed areas of our lives, where pain, anger, unforgiveness, shame and fear reside (Davis, 2003).  Despite our best efforts we have divided hearts.  Why is it that no matter how much we pray or read the Bible, we continue to face the same issues and problems in our marriages and relationships, the same blockages and obstacles, the same tendencies to sin?    How do tares get sown in our souls so that some areas of our lives are dominated by ungodly thrones ruled by the carnal nature?

Again as children when we are emotionally wounded, painful lies about ourselves are sown in our minds (I am stupid, shameful, worthless, etc.) and then try to deal with the pain by erecting defense mechanism.  Because these childhood defense mechanism were our own solutions, our own efforts to fix ourselves, they have excluded God.  These are the areas of our lives that are not yielded to God, where subconsciously we are trusting in our own solutions and defenses to protect us rather than God.

There is a little child part of us that is saying, “Where was God when that bad thing happened to me.  All I know is what I do to protect myself.”  These are the parts of our souls that are not dedicated to God, but rather infested by the enemy.  These are the areas where Satan can attack us and bring our ministries down and our lives into crisis.

2. TO PREPARE FOR THE COMING HARVEST – A second reason we need inner healing in church today is to prepare for the coming harvest.  The prophets are seeing two major waves of the end-time harvest.  The first of these is almost upon us.  Some are saying that we are already in a period they are calling the harvest of the harvesters – a time for equipping the church for the first big wave.  The prophets are saying that this first wave will begin soon (somewhere between 2008 and 2012) and bring millions and millions of people, mostly young people, into the church.

These new Christians will be coming from the world, from involvement in the New Age, the occult, immoral life styles and addictions.  People will be coming into the church that dress differently, act differently, and may have body piercing and tattoos.  Their sheer numbers will overwhelm and forever change the church.  They will be on fire, but infants in the Lord, in need of deliverance, inner healing and discipleship.  Is your local church ready to receive 2000-3000 of these people in the space of a few years?  It is going to be messy.  Many will be offended at what the Lord is doing.  Pray that you are not one of them.  We have been praying for revival.  Here it comes ready or not.

The Joseph Harvest – Some prophets are calling this first wave the Joseph harvest.  They are saying that it will bring one in five into the kingdom worldwide.  If the Joseph analogy fits, this first harvest will be the seven years when the one in five is brought into the church.  The second wave is much larger, but there is a sizable gap between the timing of the first and second waves.

Those brought in during the first wave are to be the leaders of the second wave.  So they need to be healed up and discipled quickly.  The second wave will occur at a much, much darker time when the world is beset with violence, wickedness, plagues and natural disasters.  Just as in the seven lean years people had to come to Joseph’s storehouses, the second wave period will be so dark that the only light will be in the church and people will have to come to the church to escape the darkness.

The Fishers and Hunters – This sounds like the fishers and hunters pattern Jeremiah spoke of in regard to physically bringing the people of Israel back into the land in the end-time period.  Jer. 16:15-16.  reads:

"However, the days are coming," declares the LORD, "when men will no longer say, `As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,' But they will say, `As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the Israelites up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.' For I will restore them to the land I gave their forefathers.  But now I will send for many fishermen," declares the LORD, "and they will catch them. After that I will send for many hunters, and they will hunt them down on every mountain and hill and from the crevices of the rocks.”

In 1885 the Zionist movement began to lure and woo the Jews back to the land of Israel.  Many felt God’s call, felt God wooing them and responded, but most didn’t.  It has been said that God then sent the hunters, with the holocaust, and from that a much greater wave responded and returned to the land.  As you know, natural Israel is often a picture for what God is going to do with spiritual Israel, the church.

So if this is true, the first wave of the end-time harvest is the fishers and the second wave is the hunters.  While the second wave sounds foreboding, the church will be glorious and triumphant in the midst of the darkness.  God says when my judgments are in the earth, the people will learn righteousness (Is. 26:9). [These prophecies come from many sources, including Paul Keith Davis, Bob Jones and Bobby Conner, but the clearest presentation of the two waves of the end-time harvests and what they will be like that I have heard was presented by Neville Johnson at the May 2-5, 2007 While Dove Ministries Preparing for Harvest Conference, especially Neville’s Thursday and Friday night presentations.]

An Emerging End-Time Generation – The Lord is bringing forth an end time generation that is uniquely prepared to walk in the supernatural by science, by culture and by God.

Science - Without most in my generation noticing, science has been sweeping away classical Newtonian physics where everything was known, predictable and ordered by mechanistic laws.  In the early years of the 20th century Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity predicted that time and space are relative, that time is not the same for people traveling at different speeds, and that space is curved.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle then demonstrated that the very small particles that all matter is made up of do not have knowable, fixed locations but may be in many different places at once.  With the advent of quantum theory things got very weird as it was found that human intervention and observation changes and reorders matter.  The point is that in the minds of the younger generation, matter has become less fixed, less stable and less of a barrier for entry into the supernatural realm.

Culture – Since the 1960s we have seen the advance of a new worldview, postmodernism, which has been gradually advancing and challenging the modernist worldview that has held sway among the intellectual elites in Western culture since the 18th century Enlightenment.

Modernism holds that all that exists is matter and that there is no God, no afterlife or supernatural plane of existence.  Man was simply a freak accident of the naturalistic evolutionary process.  In contrast postmodernism has reopened the door to the supernatural with a myriad of bizarre New Age theories about ways to achieve altered stages of consciousness that escape the limits of matter.  These theories while wrong have expanded the consciousness of what is possible among the young.

Indeed the occult side of the New Age is beginning to demonstrate supernatural powers such as levitation, being transported, healing, mind reading (words of knowledge) and fortune telling (personal prophecy) which rightly belong to the church.  The point is that when New Agers are saved, it will be much easier for them to have faith for the miraculous.