26: Listening Prayer & Inner Healing (Series Compilation)

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to the On the Trail Podcast. For this week’s compilation episode, we are revisiting the series of Listening Prayer and Inner Healing.

Last week we talked about connecting with God and also some of my experience at the Asbury outpouring revival. People are calling it many things.

[00:21] Marcus: Well, we were just at Asbury campus this morning. It was really cool to kind of be in the environment and get a sense of what might have been happening there. It really has died down. There were no crowds left, but you could see the aftermath just in terms of the damage done to the campus.

[00:37] Stephanie: Oh, I know!  The grass shredded up by cars. People are carrying [the revival] off into other churches. They’re really prioritizing the youth right now and doing a great job of continuing the outpouring among the youth. It’s really lovely.

This week, I wanted us to continue that conversation by talking more about prayer, and specifically the practice of listening prayer. Before we even get into those specifics, could you talk about prayer in general?

This is really large, so I’m thinking. Sometimes we memorize or meditate on prayer, sometimes we’re just talking casually to God in conversation, sometimes we’re meeting with another person or in a group for prayer support, prayer journaling. There are so many different ways that prayer is integral to our walk with God and with other people. I just thought maybe especially from the angle of connecting with God.

[01:52] Marcus: I would start, maybe a little bit different than some. I find that whatever attachment issues that I have tend to be reflected in my prayer life. For example, if I have dismissive attachment, prayer is often like pulling teeth. It’s just really hard to pray.

I was this way most of my life, and I know a lot of people like me for whom studying the Bible is easy. You can study the Bible all day long. Talking to God felt weird because it wasn’t really a conversation. You would say something and you weren’t sure if anything else was happening.

[02:32] Stephanie: Are my prayers bouncing off the ceiling?

[02:33] Marcus: Yes, it feels like I’ve got to come up with a longer list so that I can have a longer prayer time, because good people and good Christians have long prayer times. That’s kind of how it felt. And so for a lot of years, I just felt a total failure when it came to prayer and I think it was partly because that dismissiveness came out.

If you have distracted attachment, you can behave in a similar way. I’ll be perfectly honest, one of the things I noticed is a lot of people who had a reputation for being prayer warriors, in my opinion, were mostly monologues. They were the people who could launch on anything and talk all by themselves for an hour, so, of course, it was easy for them to pray for an hour because that’s how they communicated. You’re probably hearing a little bite in my voice. I thought, “That can’t be what God is after. What’s going on here?”

I just think that whatever struggles that we have in our regular relationships tend to get reflected to a certain extent in our walk with God as we try to figure out what this [prayer] looks like. What is this supposed to look like? And then as soon as you ask the question, “What is it supposed to look like?” You get this performance thing that gets into the picture. I know a lot of people who really beat themselves up over their prayer lives.

Having said all of that, I think one of the things we’re going to talk about is that there are different kinds of prayer for different occasions, not like a one size fits all thing. And depending on where we are with our attachment style and our maturity development, it will affect what our prayer life might look like.

[04:17] Stephanie: That’s a great segue. I have beside me a book by Dawn Whitestone, Strategic Business Prayer. One of my favorite parts of this book is a chart that goes through five levels of prayer. If you don’t have this book, I highly encourage you to pick it up. Dawn is an excellent writer. She blew my mind with some of the parallels she was making. God led her to the five levels.

[04:46] Marcus: Through listening prayer, she got an insight. Go figure. Let me say one thing before you go further. For those of you who don’t know the name Dawn Whitestone, Dawn is the director of the Deeper Walk School of Ministry. She is a licensed mental health professional and she has been teaching with Deeper Walk for a long time. This was one of the first books you helped edit for Deeper Walk several years ago. So back to you.

[05:12] Stephanie: I’m pretty sure, if I remember her story correctly, she was in a small group, and they were having prayer time, and somebody was praying. Then Dawn just heard God say, “That’s a level five prayer.” And she was like, “Level five? What are one, two, three, and four? I gotta know.”

[05:29] Marcus: That’s how I remember the story, too.

[05:33] Stephanie: So I’m just looking at the chart here:

• Level One are rote prayers, which would be like table and bedtime prayers.
• Level Two are specific requests to God. She has listed here Psalms or The Prayer of Jabez.
• Level Three, conversation, listening to God for myself.
• Level Four, conversation, listening to God for those I know.
• Level Five, conversation, listening to God for those he knows, which would be like interceding. God calling you to intercede for people. You don’t even know who they are, but you’re praying for them.

[06:09] Marcus: Yeah, it’s a really good list. As I’ve thought about it and I think about how maturity connects to praying, I’ve tended to look at it like this:

At the infant level, I’m listening to people pray. I’m watching them pray. It’s this idea of the mirror neurons in my brain seeing people at work, and, at this nonverbal level, I’m processing what it is to pray. For a lot of baby Christians, this is where they’re starting. They’re watching what’s going on and seeing what this prayer thing is all about, how it works. It really helps to have mentors in this area so you can see what it looks like.

[06:45] Stephanie: I think that’s one of the benefits of liturgy. If you’re in a liturgical service, is that like a guide?

[06:53] Marcus: Yes. There’s a sense of beginning to watch, but even in private prayer.  Like in my family, I got to watch my family pray so I had a sense of what that looked like.

Then as I go up to child level, that’s where I get into the rote prayers. “Repeat after me…”  Here’s The Lord’s Prayer. Here’s, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. I don’t know if that’s a good one. Let’s not traumatize the kid just before they go to sleep. But I think what we’re talking about is this sense of guiding somebody and saying, “Here’s what the next thing is, the prayer.”

Then maybe the older child level is now where you start making lists, here’s my list of things to pray for.

And then you start moving into the adult level where I’m having a conversational connection with God.

At the parent level, you’re passing that skill on.

The level five that Dawn originally had popped into her head was really the intercessory level, where God is telling you what to pray about. I’ve read about intercessors like this who don’t create prayer lists. They go to God in prayer and God basically tells them what to pray about.

Sometimes they’re praying about things they don’t even know what’s happening. It’s happening on the other side of the world, and God is saying, “I need somebody praying about this thing right here.” Then years later, they find out that exactly at that moment something happened on the other side of the world.

[08:21] Stephanie: I was going to say sometimes they’ll find out what they were praying for, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes it’s years down the line.

[08:27] Marcus: Exactly. I think it’s helpful to understand that there are different levels and some of it has to do with how far down the road we are in our own maturity development and our own attachment style. Also some of the holes that are in our other areas of our walk can pop up in our prayer life.

[08:49] Stephanie: Very good. So listening prayer specifically, what is it and what is it not?

[08:54] Marcus: I’ll be honest, I discovered listening prayer kind of in the deep end of the pool. We discovered it in the context of the healing of memories, which we’ll talk about in our next session.

I think, because of that, I knew that it happened, I knew that it worked, but I had no experience with it. I did not grow up with an expectation. Listening prayer and conversational prayer were never held up to me in my early Christian years as something to strive for or as an expectation.

Every now and then you’d hear somebody come in and say, “The Lord impressed upon me to do this,” or said, “The Lord told me that.” And I thought, “Who is this strange person and should I trust them? They sound strange.”

The first person that really made sense, really connected with me was actually Neil Anderson. I was taking people through The Steps to Freedom and realized that the steps to freedom were an exercise in listening prayer.

I may be jumping too far ahead here, but in The Steps to Freedom, somebody will say a rote prayer and they’ll ask a question like, “Father, would you please bring to my mind anybody I need to forgive?” Then the exercise was, “Tell me the first thing that comes into your mind and let’s go from there.” Well I began to realize, that’s listening prayer. It’s where I ask God a question and then I pay attention to those thoughts that come into my mind. I realized I’ve been doing this with people for years and didn’t realize that was what conversational prayer is.

Then I heard a talk by Neil on a cassette tape where he talked about having the same revelation: that The Steps to Freedom was actually a listening prayer exercise. So he said, “What if I took the same approach to my regular prayer life?” So he would read a psalm and would start in a regular prayer time. Then he would take two spiral notebooks and say, “Lord, what do you want me to pray about first?” giving God this opportunity. Whatever thought comes to mind first, that’s what to pray about first [and he would write it down in a notebook]. Every now and then he would get random thoughts like, ”Don’t forget to take out the trash.” That’s what the second notebook was for. He’d write down those things.

[11:20] Stephanie: The second notebook was also for warfare stuff too, wasn’t it?

[11:24] Marcus: It was. He said it wasn’t uncommon for him to finish his prayer time and have his to do list done. But the other thing that was unexpected for him was what you were pointing out – the warfare things.

He began noticing the pattern of how Satan attacked his prayer life and the kind of statements that would pop into his head trying to sabotage, saying, “This is a waste of time. God’s never going to speak to you. Who do you think you are?” He started writing those down. He started seeing a pattern and realized, “Those thoughts are coming from the devil to sabotage this because he does not want me developing the kind of intimacy that can come out of this prayer time.”

Neil Anderson, according to his story, was the sort of person who [found] studying the Bible easy. Prayer was the hardest thing ever. All of a sudden he had this breakthrough that night as he started saying, “What if I ask God questions and pay attention to the thoughts in my head and interact with them?” And, especially then, putting that down in writing was very helpful. The very first time he did this, he had a 45 minutes prayer session when his longest ever was eight to ten minutes.

He realized, “This is what these people are doing. They’re engaging with God and there’s a two way street to this that I hadn’t seen before.” So that was really the story that tipped the scales for me and I went, “Okay, I think I get how this works now.” And that was the start of me beginning to practice listening prayer.

[13:00] Stephanie: That’s a really good transferable example. Could you speak into some of the pitfalls you’ve seen people fall into? What is listening prayer not? What are the “nots”?

[13:12] Marcus: First of all, when you’re doing listening prayer, one of the “nots” is, I don’t want to then go to somebody and say, “I have a word from the Lord for you.” That is something that comes way down the line as something that is unmissable.

I would never go with just a thought popped into my head, therefore, God has spoken.  You have to develop an awful lot of discernment before you get to be able to trust that. I’m not sure I’ve gotten to that level where I feel like this thing in my head is, “I know it’s God. I know it’s for you. You need to do something about that.” That’s a little bit on the edge.

I would share that sometimes I have been in counseling sessions where a thought popped in or an idea popped in and when I pursued that, it turned out to be exactly what they needed for the breakthrough they were looking for.

[14:08] Stephanie: But there’s a difference between being guided by God and pronouncing, “Thus saith the Lord.”

[14:14] Marcus: Exactly. We do have to be careful of that. I had a friend years ago who was told to divorce his wife by somebody in their church who had heard from God, and the wife was told to divorce him, and she did, on the basis of this word from somebody. You’ve got to be careful.

That’s why sometimes in prayer ministries and churches, what can happen at times is that those of us who are just starting into the conversational prayer world, as we’re just beginning to lean into this, if somebody comes in who looks like they’ve got this all figured out, every time they talk to God and pray, God speaks to them. You have to be careful, because sometimes those people can begin controlling the whole group, because everybody just defers to them out of the assumption that they’ve got the closest walk with God. But that can become very manipulative and controlling, too. So you have to be careful.

There are a lot of pitfalls you can fall into when it comes to this, so we talk about testing. How do you test if you’re going to practice listening prayer? There are three basic tests.

The first one is fruit of the Spirit. And of those, you start with love. And the idea is to ask what is coming into my mind and if I were to follow through on that, would it lead me in a more loving direction or a more selfish direction? I think by putting it in opposites like that, it helps. If I follow that, it would not be selfish, it would be a loving thing to do. It might be hard, but it would be loving.

The second thing I ask is, does it bring me greater joy or peace? Not in the sense of, is this a happy thought? But does it just settle down in my spirit as the right thing. A lot of times these thoughts, honestly, were corrections of my behavior. Like, you need to change what you’re doing here. Well, that’s not a happy thought per se, but there’s a sense of peace, like that’s absolutely right.

And then the third test is looking for scripture. Not everything can be backed up by scripture, but you’re looking to make sure it’s not contradictory to scripture. If I get a prompting that I should go talk to that person who’s pumping gas right now, you can’t find a Bible verse for that, but it’s not contrary to scripture.

So you’re looking at scripture, you’re looking for peace, you’re looking for, is that a more loving thing or a more selfish thing? Those are the basic tests that I use to get started.

[16:39] Stephanie: And then a fourth, once you’ve gone through those three, would be to share with somebody who would help you with your discernment.

[16:46] Marcus: And one of the reasons the Journey Group process that Amy Brown developed has people practicing listening prayer in a group setting is so they can bounce what they’re sensing off of other people and get some guidance so they’re not in this all alone. That can be very helpful.

[17:07] Stephanie: That’s good. Well, I had a thought and I kind of lost it, but it might come back. For listening prayer, what would be some best practices? We’ve covered testing, so on the actual practice.

[17:23] Marcus: So there are two different patterns that I use most frequently. One of them is the Immanuel journaling process that you find in the book, Joyful Journey (I always want to call it Joyful Journaling) Joyful Journey that Jim Wilder did with Anna Kang and the Loppnows.

That process has been really simple to remember for me, and it starts with interactive gratitude. What am I thankful for right now? And then ask Jesus, “How does that make you feel? What’s your response to that gratitude?” And then I journal as if God is speaking to me. So I’m not saying God is saying this, but it’s like when I’m trying to put myself on his side of the conversation.

And then I’ll write, “I see you…” [from God’s perspective]. “I see you sitting in your car or I see you sitting on the couch.” It doesn’t have to be this super intuitive “I see that struggle that’s going on inside your heart about this and that.” It’s like when God found Hagar, he said, “I see you sitting there next to the well out in the desert.”

Then the next is, “I hear you…” because there’s a psalm that talks about trust in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. What’s interesting is the Hebrew word there for desires is actually “requests”. It says, “He will give you the requests of your heart.” And what that meant to me was a desire is sort of like something I want deep down inside and I don’t know how to put it into words. I may be even afraid to tell anybody that’s what I really want, but God knows. He knows my deep desires are those deep requests, so sometimes saying “I hear you” helps me get when God looks at what I’m struggling with, what does he see that I’m after?

And then “I know how big this is…” is just sort of God’s validation statement. “I know how big that emotion is. I know how big this is for you.”

And then,  “I am happy to go through this with you. I’m happy you’re bringing it to me,” which is just a good reminder. God’s not saying, “ Really? Again?” He says, “You’re doing the right thing bringing this to me. This is good.”

And then you finish up with, “I am strong enough to do something about it.” And this is often where if you’re going to get some kind of guidance or insight, it tends to come about there.

[19:51] Stephanie: It struck me, as you were saying “happy to be with you”, I’m reminded of you also talking about the peace and joy in the test. Do I feel peace about this? And you can feel that even when you are being corrected.

I know I have felt this before. I can tell if Satan is accusing me by how I feel versus if God is convicting me of something, he’s happy to be with me in it. So I can feel that relational connection with him as, “That wasn’t so great,” or, “You should do this differently.” But I know that he’s with me in it.

[20:26] Marcus: Right. One of the very first times I remember being aware of this was when I was upset with your mom, one of the first times. We’re down in Texas and I’m on my way to the store and I’m just rehearsing in my mind all the reasons why I’m justified in being upset with her. All of a sudden this random thought, it’s kind of a surprising thought, (I have heard Karl Lehman say this about listening prayer: that as well as bringing love and peace and it being biblical, it’s often surprising.) This surprising thought just caught me up short and said, “Marcus, you’re just having a pity party.” And the way it was said, I almost laughed. It wasn’t a condemning thing, but it got my attention, called me up short, and within a couple of minutes had reframed the whole conversation in my head.

That’s what I mean. It was corrective, but it got my attention and it got me in a direction that I had a lot of peace about. This is a path that leads to the fruit of the Spirit. I think I said before, that’s Immanuel journaling.

The other type of listening prayer is the Neil Anderson approach. It is more of a “God, as I come to you today and I’m connected, what’s the first thing that we should talk about?”  It could be the earthquake that just happened in Syria and Turkey, I want you to pray for those people. Or sometimes it’s like there’s this tension going on between these two people at church, pray into that. Rather than me sitting down and, before I connect to God, making my list, I’m sort of making my list conversationally as we go through it together.

So those are the two main things I would lay out as patterns.

[22:19] Stephanie: I’m reminded of an exercise that we did in Dr. Seamands’ class in my day term class. We got with another person in the class and we were supposed to just to ourselves on our own piece of paper at first, ask Jesus, what does he want to tell you about yourself right now and then ask Jesus what he wants to tell me about my group partner? And then we would share with each other what Jesus wanted us to tell each other.

We did kind of a voting around the room and everybody felt like they did hear something and it felt truly from Jesus. Over half, I want to say, of the class raised their hands to say that it felt like the things that people were asked to pray for about themselves and the thing that the other person was asked to pray for about them matched up. It was just crazy. Mine was all capital’s REST. So my partner was like, “I’m sorry, I asked Jesus, and he was just. all caps, rest, rest, rest.”

[23:35] Marcus: Yes, I know. It’s kind of funny how that happens. Well, along that line, I was at Thrive doing an exercise like this. I’ve spent years telling people, “I’m a teacher, not a leader, and I’m just a teacher. I’m just a teacher.”

It was interesting because when I did the exercise for the first time ever, I felt like God was saying, “No, actually, you’re a leader who teaches.” And I’m like, wait, that is completely backwards.Are you sure? It was really the beginning of something for me, of having to actually deal with some healing related to the idea of leading.

So all those things factor together, and it also brings in this group dynamic again. One of the things we’re trying to do at Deeper Walk a little more often is to be intentional about gathering people in groups to pray about important decisions and pray about strategies and things like that.

Listening prayer can be very helpful in group settings, too. What you’re checking for in a group setting is to what extent. Not just are we getting the same thing, but to what extent are we getting complimentary things? Somebody might get one word and somebody else has something totally unrelated, but it puts a boundary on it, or it takes it a step further, or it clarifies something. And so, sometimes by the time you put them all together, you begin landing on a decision here we can all get on board with.

[25:02] Stephanie: Yes, good word!

We’re about out of time. Next week, we’re going to be going deeper into listening prayer and its role in healing. But for now, any final thoughts for this episode?

[25:14] Marcus: Well, again, I go back where I started, and that is if you find that you really struggle with prayer, there is a good chance that there are some attachment patterns you might want to be looking at for and ask, “Do I have this problem in any other relationships?”

And then also begin to pay attention to what are the thoughts that sabotage your prayer life every time you start to get serious about it, “Every time I start to sit down here, what are the thoughts? Is it just a barrage of distracting thoughts, or are they actually accusational thoughts?” I think if you begin to pay attention to those, write them down, get them out there, it can help to get past that initial hurdle that takes so many of us out quickly, so that we never get past the initial distracting and accusational thoughts.

[26:02] Stephanie: Last episode we talked about listening prayer and how this practice can help us connect with God more intimately. This episode I want us to dig into the inner healing side of listening prayer. You have a helpful acrostic called R.E.A.L. Prayer. Talk to us about what it is and how or why you came up with it.

[26:23] Marcus: My hesitance with “REAL” prayer was that I didn’t want people to think that the opposite was fake prayer.

I was writing down the steps that I had been using when I, as a pastor, met with a lot of people to try to hear their story and help them pray into things. What is it that I’m doing?  How can I reduce this to steps?

When I did, I realized that the first, it was Remember, Explore, Ask, and Look. And well, Look is also Listen. So let me play with this and I realized it’s spelled REAL. I didn’t have to even do anything with it. So sometimes the acrostics just give themselves to you.

[27:09] Stephanie: I still think it’s just your spiritual gift. Walk us through it. What is REAL prayer?

[27:17] Marcus: So to put this in context, I started my ministry working with people who were hurting using as my primary tool, The Steps to Freedom in Christ by Neil Anderson.

So my dad was the international director of his ministry. What would happen is when you go through the steps to freedom, the first one is on occult issues. If you’re going to deal with something demonic, it tends to be there. So a lot of our confrontational warfare stuff happened as people were getting free from the occult issues.

And then there’s deception, which are lies we believe. Then you get to the third one, forgiveness. And what we realized was that as people were making a list of people they need to forgive, They’re often telling you trauma stories. They’re telling you, “Oh, this horrible thing happened to me.”

I was like, “What if we could pause right here and not just pray to forgive these people, but actually invite Jesus to do something healing in this memory that we’re already talking about.”

So people would say, “I choose to forgive my dad for doing this and making me feel like I was nothing and whatever. And so we would tend to have people pray, “I choose to forgive them for doing this thing and making me feel this way.” We would then say, “Well, let’s invite Jesus. Say, ‘Is there anything you want to do with that?’”

So to prepare the way, they’ve already done the “R” part of it in that case. They have remembered. If I’m not building it strictly out of Steps to Freedom, but we’re just starting there, the idea is to ask them. The other context is that a lot of times when people tell you their story, it feels like they’ve just dumped a spaghetti bowl full of issues in front of you.

You’ve got six questions, 17 really serious issues going on in your life. Where do you start? So we would stop and pray, “Lord Jesus, would you help me?” (This is the R – Remember), “Would you help me to remember one root memory that you would like to resolve today?” And we wouldn’t begin until they could narrow it down to one.

“This isn’t the only thing we’re going to talk about today, but let’s get this down to one root memory that God is bringing to your mind that we need to resolve.”

Then you get to the “E” – explore that memory. So I think about it as left brain, right brain. So we start with the right brain. What are the non-verbals you remember about that? Now, I don’t want to re-traumatize them, so I don’t want to go back and ask them to tell me all the horrible details. That’s not the point.

[30:00] Stephanie: You ask Jesus to bring to mind anything they need to remember.

[30:03] Marcus: Exactly. So that’s the prayer. “Would you bring to my mind anything I need to remember for this healing to be as complete as possible?”

Sometimes it’s a lot, but a lot of times it’s not. It tends to be things like, “what room were you in? Were you inside the house, outside the house? Where were you? What was going on? What were you feeling?”

And then we go to the left brain side of it.  I used to say, “What thoughts did you think at the time?” and I realized that, in the moment, a lot of people aren’t having a lot of thoughts. So we started asking, “What began to feel true after this event that didn’t feel true before this event?” I like that terminology. “It felt true.”  I got that hearing Ed Smith do a presentation at an ICBC conference years ago, and I thought that was really a nice, convenient way to do this, because the idea here is, I know it’s not true, but it feels true to me. Next to that, we would put it on a scale of 1 to 10, just how true does it feel?

So somebody might say, I feel worthless, or I feel all alone in the world, or I feel like God has abandoned me. Alright, whatever that thing is that feels true, that I know isn’t true, but it feels true, just how true does it feel? When it’s really a big trigger point, most people can’t keep it on a scale of one to ten.

They say, “Oh, that’s a 20!” They can’t imagine not believing that. So at that point I have written down on my pad of paper: this is where it happened, this is what the non-verbals were, here’s four or five beliefs that began to feel true, here’s the scale of one to ten next to each one.

Now let’s go to the third step: Ask. And the ask is pretty simple, “Jesus, I invite you to do whatever you want to do to heal this memory.” There is no magic formula here. I probably asked that question a dozen different ways. It’s just, “I’m asking you to do something, Jesus, what do you want to do about this?” And then, you go to step four.

Now that I’ve asked, let’s see if anything has changed. Normally, one of three things changes. I either will feel different, or when I go back in my mind and visit that room and look around, something actually changes about the memory. Or, if I quiet, I can hear Jesus or the Holy Spirit putting thoughts in my head that weren’t there before that are correcting my beliefs.

Sometimes it’s just a sense. Sometimes it’s like thoughts and sometimes it’s like an image that people get and walk into.

So that’s the process. That’s a really long explanation. I know that R E A L is: Remember, Explore, Ask, and then Listen. I wrote it into an acrostic largely because I didn’t want to have to keep a sheet of paper in front of me to remember how to do this every time I was praying with someone.

[33:01] Stephanie: Yes, it’s really effective and easy to remember. Thank you. So you’ve just explained what it is. How about what is it not?

[33:11] Marcus: Yes, let’s start there. I mentioned Ed Smith. He is a bit of a controversial figure, but by the time you mentioned the words “inner healing”, that’s like a dirty word to some Christians.

The reason that it’s a dirty word is that there is a New Age counterfeit of inner healing. Because of that, there are people who assume that if Christians are doing it, then they have been deceived, and they are now caught up in something New Age, and that Christians shouldn’t be doing this.

And they’re like, “Where in the Bible do you see inner healing? This can’t be happening.” So, let me answer first of all this idea of where in the Bible do you see it. One example would be Jesus meeting with Peter on the beach after the resurrection, when he is restoring Peter. If you look at what he does, he actually walks [Peter] back through his denials.

Three times he denied him, three times he’s there. There’s a fire in the one scene, there’s a fire in this scene. He’s got a lot of parallels and Jesus is like, “Let us revisit this memory and let’s redeem it.” So if you don’t like the word heal the memory, I go with let’s redeem this memory.

That’s a good, good word. I’m fine with that. So the reason we called it healing of memories, was one, that was the term David Seamands used and that’s who we learned it from. And the second was that  it really was appropriate because when people would get done connecting to Jesus, things that felt like a 20 on the scale of how true does this feel, suddenly felt like a zero.

Well, what do you call that? When something in two minutes goes from feeling totally true to clearly false?

[34:55] Stephanie: And then there’s lasting fruit. It’s not like it comes back the next day.

[35:01] Marcus: So we can go on and on with this. Obviously, one of the things that we found was bringing warfare and inner healing together allowed us to do more testing to make sure that you’re not getting deceived by counterfeit spirits and counterfeit experiences.

It allows you to get rid of interference. We get into that in the School of Ministry a little bit more in some of those.

[35:28] Stephanie: Talk about it a little bit more in the next episode. We’ll go a little deeper into some of the obstacles.

[35:34] Marcus: So yes, what it’s not is this New Age thing. I’ll give you an example. As I was talking to the superintendent of a district of an evangelical church, someone had said, “We’ve got a real problem with a counselor in our area who’s practicing theophostic prayer.”

Well, theophostic prayer is the name of the process that Ed Smith developed. So I asked him, “Describe to me what this counselor is doing.” And by the time he was done describing it, I knew Theophostic Counseling well enough to know what he was describing was not Theophostic Counseling. He was just calling it that.

So you run into these problems too, where people will say, I’m doing Immanuel prayer, or I’m doing Theophostic, or I’m doing some other kind of prayer ministry, but they’re doing their own spin on it, or their own twist on it. So you’ve got to be careful with this. Just because somebody knows how to do a process doesn’t mean that everything about this is going to be okay.

Just because they learned a process from Deeper Walk doesn’t mean everybody who does this process really knows what they’re doing, or that they all are connected in the same way. I had somebody tell me that they heard a cult leader speaking someplace who cited me by name, talking about how rebellion can create a stronghold in your life.

And if you rebelled against his teaching, you had a demon. You can see how you can twist this stuff around. Whenever you put stuff out there, there’s a chance that somebody’s going to take it, call it by that name, and do something really bad with it. Now, I do have some critiques on Theophostic, but I’d say for the most part, I like what’s going on there.

[37:14] Stephanie: So, do you want to save any more best practices for next episode?

[37:23] Marcus: It’s probably best. We’ll save that for the next episode. I think it’s enough for people to know what the process is. REAL: it’s remembering, exploring, asking Jesus to do something, and then looking and listening to see what changes.

[37:37] Stephanie: Could you give us just a story?

[37:39] Marcus: Sure.

[37:40] Stephanie: That would help.

[37:42] Marcus: Twenty years ago, 2004, I think it was, your mom and I were in Ukraine. We had been brought over there specifically to train a clinic full of counselors who were working with women who had decided to keep their babies instead of having abortions, most of them loaded with trauma.

We were teaching them the Wounds, Lies, Vows, Strongholds approach. It was interesting, them trying to find a Russian or Ukrainian word for vows. That was an interesting conversation. When we were done, one of our two translators said, “I need what you were talking about.”

We walked through REAL prayer with her late that night. She had a very distinct memory of being in her kitchen with her Baptist pastor dad and him being angry, violent. We did the “explore that memory”, and she told me that’s when she’s in the kitchen, and this, and this. Then we went to, “what that meant to you”, and we made the list of what it meant to her, and all of the things that felt true. And then we went to “the ask.” “Let’s ask Jesus to do whatever it takes to heal this memory.”

Well, this is bridging the gap to next week, because when she said, “Well, the first thing I see is Jesus who’s dressed like a Ukrainian Orthodox priest with a nun standing next to him.” And I thought, “That’s not really what I was expecting. So why don’t we test that and just make sure.” So I led her to say. “In the name of Jesus, if this is a counterfeit, I command you to leave. Only the true Jesus who came in the flesh, died, and rose again can help me.” and she said it disappeared immediately. It was a counterfeit.

[39:37] Stephanie: And wasn’t he looking pretty stern?

[39:38] Marcus: He was also looking stern like he wasn’t necessarily happy to be there. One of the things I learned about counterfeits is they often reflect a false belief somebody’s held about Jesus in their life that has to be gotten rid of anyway.

In this case, the true Jesus showed up and the whole memory began to change in her mind, and you could just see her body relax, and then eventually the picture opened up for her, and by the time she was done, she just felt like she was just looking up into the eyes of Jesus, and feeling his love, feeling his compassion.

I remember she said, “Is it okay if we just stop here?”

And I’m like, “Yeah, you stay there as long as you want.” because she had gone from being very uptight, very agitated, very overwhelmed to being a complete peace. And that was the process that we walked through.

That’s a classic example of just walking through those steps.

[40:50] Stephanie: Awesome. Thank you.

So next week, we’re going to press deeper into some of the obstacles that arise in inner healing. For now, to wrap up this episode, any final thoughts?

[41:02] Marcus: My dad used to say often that he didn’t understand why some people who just wanted to do warfare were reluctant to bring in inner healing. He said, “I don’t know how you help some people without this.”

And I’ve come to the same conclusion. I don’t know how some people are going to get help if they don’t learn how to connect with Jesus in these pockets of pain in their heart. And so, we’ve pressed into it, even though it’s controversial in some areas, and we’ve put all of the safeguards we can think of in place here.

One of the things you’re testing it with is fruit. When they’re done, do they feel closer to Jesus? Do they trust Jesus more? Do they love Jesus more?

[41:48] Stephanie: Do they love other people more?

[41:49] Marcus: There’s a whole lot of fruit of the spirit going on here.

When we talk about inner healing, the core book is Understanding the Wounded Heart. That’s the book that presents The Wounds, Lies , Vows, Stronghold pattern, then talks about the four tools, and explains the REAL prayer process. That’s the core book.

Connected to that, is a little booklet called REAL Prayer: A Guide to Emotional Healing that was designed to be like The Steps to Freedom to go with. If you just want to walk somebody through the REAL prayer process, here’s everything you need to kind of get started with that.

And then if they want to go deeper, School of Ministry is where you can actually get trained on how to do this kind of prayer ministry. If you’re looking for help personally, just start at the website, go to under the “more” tab, go to referrals, and we’ve got a page with some networks that help you get started in looking for some help.

[42:43] Stephanie: So to be clear, we are not a counseling ministry. We don’t have counselors on a campus or anything like that.

[42:49] Marcus: Not taking people at this point. So, yes, just so we’re clear. The point of a referral network is to help people get started and looking. We can’t possibly sign off on everybody and say we vetted them completely because they’ve let us know that they do this.

[43:07] Stephanie: Very good. So as we get into this topic of inner healing, and obstacles we might face, let’s just start with: What are some of the typical obstacles?

[43:19] Marcus: You might appreciate this: the people that have the most trouble connecting to Jesus, and feeling like they get any kind of connection, are middle aged white males. Being someone who’s just past middle age, probably into my elder years, I could connect to that a lot.

People who have trouble getting their relational circuits in their brain on, who have trouble connecting relationally, period, are also going to have the hardest time connecting relationally with God.

One of the reasons that we like to start with gratitude and appreciation, and interactive gratitude and appreciation with people, is to try to wake up the relational circuits in their brain, because getting the RCs on really makes it much easier to establish a connection.

So a lot of times, one of the obstacles that people run into is that they’re trying to dive straight in to an experience and their brain isn’t really fully in a place to do that yet. I’d say that’s the first typical obstacle we run into is people have to wake up those relational circuits.

For people who are not sure what you mean by relational circuits. In RARE Leadership and other books, Jim Wilder and I have laid out a four-step level. It’s Jim’s model. He came up with it, I just named them. Level One is Attachment. Level Two is Assessment. Level Three is Attunement. Level Four is Action, or it’s the commander, the captain part of the brain.

So we’re saying that if your higher levels are not online, it can be much harder to make this kind of connection, so helping people get into that part of their brain first helps.

[45:14] Stephanie: Well, like you were saying before that, a lot of times where we struggle in interpersonal relationships, we’re going to struggle with our relationship with God, because he is a person. So this would be an obstacle in relationships, this would be an obstacle in inner healing, but also just normal, general, everyday listening prayer too.

[45:34] Marcus: Yes, it’s going to be the most common obstacle for just general listening prayer. The part of my brain that tunes into these things is offline, and if the part of my brain that tunes into these things is offline, it’s going to be very hard.

So to get into the brain science side of listening prayer, which could be a whole episode, just the brain science, what’s going on in your brain when you’re practicing this, Dr. Wilder calls this mutual mind. That is, at the Level Three, the Attunement level of the brain, is the part that can experience mutual mind with somebody.

So for instance, you and I make eye contact as we’re sitting here. You can kind of read, “Okay, where are you going with this?” Or you can kind of read, “Hey, that’s great. I’m glad you brought that up.” There’s a lot of non-verbals that take place. Well, that is all happening at this level three part of your brain, which is attunement.

So if that part of your brain is kind of shut down because you’re in overwhelm, it is much harder to connect relationally with God or with anybody else until that gets addressed.

[46:36] Stephanie:I like the analogy, I can’t remember if it was Jim or Chris or who uses it, but the analogy of tuning a radio or your phone reception, or getting your RCs on is like helping to tune that radio. It’s not that God isn’t speaking to you. it’s that you need to get yourself into the place to receive.

[47:00] Marcus: Exactly. It’s not that God isn’t speaking, but sometimes we have to get that dial tuned in a little more accurately.

[47:08] Stephanie: Any other typical obstacles?

[47:10] Marcus: That’s the first one I look for. The second one would be a spiritual obstacle. That is, is there something demonic getting in the way? Again, one of the things, when I say demonic, usually I’ve listened to their story by now and I have some kind of idea of, if they have situations in their past that would have opened the door to something demonic.

A lot of times what happens is we have to bind something, we have to deal with something at a warfare level that then opens up the door for them to be able to make the connection. There are times when the warfare has to happen before you can get to the next step.

[47:52] Stephanie: Can you tell the quick story of when you were hiking with Ben and there was a snake?

[47:59] Marcus: Ah, yes. We were in the Cascade Mountains visiting a family member who lived there at the time. Ben was young. He was seven or something like that. We decided to go hiking on the trail. He got ahead of me and there was a log laying across the trail. All of a sudden I had this flash in my head back to a sermon I had heard ten years before. It was a sermon from a preacher from Alabama, and he said how he was taught to always step on top of a log when hiking in the woods, and then jump across, because snakes like to sleep in the shade.

I’ve never run into a snake in the wild in my life. I didn’t know anything about this, but for some reason, I think it was the Holy Spirit, right? Yes. That story popped in my head and I yelled to Ben, “Hey, step on top of the log and jump. Don’t just step over it.” He did. I did. And then I looked back and, sure enough, there was a snake sleeping in the shade there. And I was like, “Well, why don’t we get a walking stick?”

I’ve often used that story to illustrate the Christian’s approach to spiritual warfare. That is, we didn’t go on a hike looking for snakes to whack on the head, but we knew enough about snakes to know where they like to hang out. And so it’s to look for them there.

In the same way, I’m not looking for a demon behind every bush. But I know where demons like to hang out. So when you listen to the story and you hear that they’ve got things in their story that typically attract demonic activity, you’re like, you know what? Common sense tells us we might want to look into that a little bit and see if that needs to be addressed.

Now I will also say, there are plenty of stories of people who connected with Jesus, and because of that, the warfare stuff got taken care of, and it’s gone the other direction too, but I’m just saying I have had times where we had to do the warfare stuff first before we could establish a connection with Jesus.

[49:57] Stephanie: Whenever I hear stories of having to deal with warfare first, I feel like there is some element of perspective correcting or healing happening. It exposes where the enemy has been active, and when that happens it’s very useful to the person to know, “Oh, that was the enemy.”

[50:18] Marcus: One of the benefits of doing warfare and inner healing together, I liken it to putting the pearls against black crushed velvet background. It really makes those pearls pop. Sometimes the warfare stuff provides that black background, so that when Jesus does the healing, it just pops all the more. And the contrast between what the enemy was trying to do and what Jesus just did becomes all the more obvious, and sometimes that can be very helpful to people.

[50:45] Stephanie: Yes, and in cases of sin or whatever gave permission to the enemy to be there, sometimes it’s also helpful so that they know not to do that again. They have a better understanding of, “Oh yes, this is where the snakes like to hide.” That just came to mind as you were talking about stepping on the log.

All right. Any other spiritual obstacles?

[51:09] Marcus: Take it maybe a step deeper. Last time, I told the story about the Ukrainian translator and a counterfeit Jesus showing up. Well, that might surprise some people because you’re thinking, you asked Jesus. If you ask for a fish, he’s not going to give you a snake. And the answer is, absolutely, that’s correct. And because he’s not going to give you a snake, if a snake shows up, you know where it came from, right?

That was a demonic insertion to try to interrupt the process. This is just a completely personal experience. I haven’t done a study of it or anything like this, but I have found about 25 percent of the time, it feels like people end up with a counterfeit first.

The pattern that I’ve noticed in a counterfeit of Jesus showing up and doing something is a couple of things. One is, the Jesus who shows up is unhelpful or is making it worse, or is often characteristic of the view of Jesus they had as a child. For example, like it was for the translator who saw the Ukrainian Orthodox priest show up.

As a little kid, she was not in that church, and when she saw it and it was a little bit spooky and scary to her, and so what showed up was sort of this spooky scary part of it. I’m not saying that they are, but from her perspective as a little child, that’s what it felt like.

[52:41] Stephanie: So false Jesuses who showed up, it’s not a treatise on,  “Oh, if It was this denomination, that means this denomination is demonic.” That’s not what’s happening.

[52:48] Marcus: No, it’s not what’s happening, because I’ve had a false Baptist,  false Catholic, false Orthodox. I mean, it’s not an indictment of the whole denomination, but their childhood Jesus, if you will, was off.

If somebody has a legalistic Jesus show upl, that’s going to be much more common in the denominations that tend to have a legalistic issue. The craziest one was somebody who asked for Jesus to show up and literally saw a bug in a white gown, and I’m like, “That is the, okay, just tell it to leave.” We don’t have to test that. Just tell it to leave us. The backstory on that was that he had grown up in a home that saw Christianity as weird.

[53:32] Stephanie: It was an atheist home, right?

[53:33] Marcus: Yes, it was an atheist home that just saw Christianity as the weirdest thing ever, and so he grew up thinking of Jesus as the weirdest thing ever. And guess what showed up when he first asked for Jesus – this counterfeit thing that was really weird.

So that’s why I said there can be some benefit actually to having a counterfeit show up because you can actually correct something. It helps to create that correction in the scenario.

[53:59] Stephanie: It’s not that the enemy is winning a battle and getting in there and, “Aha, I stopped God from working!”  But God might allow the enemy to show up there because that’s something that needs to get dealt with.

[54:11] Marcus: The enemy may be trying to interrupt the process, but in the end, God uses it for good. So that’s what’s happening there.

[54:18] Stephanie: God is good. Are there any other obstacles about listening prayer you want to cover? What about from the prayer minister’s side? What might be some obstacles?

[54:23] Marcus: So there are mistakes I’ve made trying to to help people and there are common ones that happen.  One of the mistakes I made, especially early on, was I would try to push the person to the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to them, because I’m thinking, “Well, if we get the worst one out of the way, the rest will be easy.”

That’s not always what God wants to do. And so there are times when I can push into something that the person isn’t really ready to push into. That’s a common mistake that can happen and create problems. And even, honestly, trying to force that this is the right thing to be doing right now.

I met with one person who had a dramatic experience with Jesus, and the next time he showed up I just assumed we were going to go to another memory. Nothing was happening. I remember part way through, I had this thought in my head that I took as being the Holy Spirit which was, “This isn’t the only tool you’ve learned.” And I kind of laughed. I realized that.

We ended up actually going through and helping him get grounded in his identity in Christ in that session. There’s more things that you can do with somebody, so sometimes trying to force everything to fit into the common pattern can be a problem.

[55:43] Stephanie: When you find a tool that really works, there can be a temptation to be like, “I’ll use this tool for everything,” but that’s a good reminder that you have a lot of good tools.

[55:51] Marcus: Yeah, it’s the hammer and the nail principle, right? I’ve got a hammer now, everything looks like a nail, and that can be a temptation. Then there’s this other problem of wanting to take control of a situation because I feel out of control.  Somebody starts to share something, and I’m starting to get nervous, and now I want to take control and make this happen the way that I think it should happen.

That can make a variety of problems. I could make suggestions about, “Well, why don’t you picture Jesus doing this,” and you want to stay away from those kinds of things.

So there’s a lot more depth we could go into on this, but this is just kind of, I call this kind of a flesh reaction. There are things that I do in my flesh to try to take control of the situation that aren’t really being Spirit led. And those things can also get in the way and create problems.

[56:44] Stephanie: Well, this is a crash course and very good. I really encourage anyone who wants to learn more, if you are a prayer minister, or you’re interested in becoming a prayer minister, explore the resources that Dad mentioned at the beginning. If you’re really passionate about it, consider looking into the School of Ministry and the prayer ministry certification.

Let’s draw back up into maybe a more, I don’t want to say surface level, but we’ve been in the very deep end of the pool here. At Deeper Walk, we have a lot of resources to help people who want to go deeper, into that deep end of the pool, but, for the everyday person, do you have any practical insights here?

[57:34] Marcus: Well, if you think about these obstacles to our healing, if you stop and think about it, they’re actually the obstacles we tend to run into with almost everything we’re doing: trying to get close to God, trying to be more spiritual, to be a better Christian. And that is, our relational circuits are offline, and we’re like, “Why can’t I ever seem to connect with God?”

Well, a lot of times it’s because I live my whole life with my relational circuits off and I need to learn how to get those back on. You’re like, “Well, how do I do that?” A quick tool is CAKE: Curiosity, Appreciation, Kindness, Eye contact.

We have a whole lot of training on what to do with relational circuits. Same thing with spiritual obstacles. Sometimes I’m stuck, and because I’m in bondage, I need a tool like The Steps to Freedom in Christ. I need to go get free from some things in my life.

It’s not just that these are obstacles to inner healing. These are things that can affect everything that we do. And same thing with the flesh. The flesh, by definition, basically  is that part of me that doesn’t trust God. And because there is some part of me that doesn’t trust God, I’ve got only one option. That is, I’m going to take control of this.

You can see how that gets in the way of everyday things in our lives all of the time. So in a sense, I’m just taking our everyday obstacles that we run into, applying them to this. I find this fairly typical with deep-end-of-the-pool issues, that a lot of times, what’s happening when you’re in the deep end of the pool, is it’s just making these everyday issues more dramatically clear.

Everybody deals with this at some level, but in this case, it’s just obvious that if we don’t deal with that, we’re not going to get anywhere. And so I think that those things all connect. I think that there may be more relevance here than some of us think.

[59:23] Stephanie: Very good! We’re coming up to the end of the episode. Any final thoughts?

[59:29] Marcus: I have lots of thoughts.

[59:32] Stephanie: We will have many more discussions in the future.

[59:35] Marcus: This actually is bringing us to the end of our series, so I just kind of wanted to wrap up. We moved from resilience right into connecting with God as one of the ABCs of resilience. Connecting with God and listening prayer, to really connecting with God in our darkest moments and our darkest memories,  and realizing with all of these things, there’s a natural progression here.

One of the things I’ve learned through the years is a lot of folks grow their intimacy with God through their emotional healing journey. That is, you don’t have to get past all of your emotional healing stuff before you can be close to God. A lot of times it is as you’re pressing in to those places that are hard in your life and you’re bringing Jesus into those specifically.

One of my favorite old stories is My Heart, Christ’s Home. It’s this idea of thinking of my life as a house, and I’ve invited Jesus in, and he lives with me. But there are rooms in my house where I’ve never brought him. I haven’t let him in here. Sometimes these points of pain in our past are like those rooms in my house where Jesus hasn’t really been let in there yet.

This is what we’re talking about at some level: in discipleship, I want to be a whole-hearted Christian. I want to be completely surrendered to God. I want to be all his. What keeps me from getting there? Well, one of the obstacles that keeps us from getting there, is that we have these rooms that Jesus hasn’t been invited to yet.

So it just makes sense that the more that we can build a connection with Jesus in these specific rooms that our walk is going to go deeper, and we’re going to see more intimacy, and I don’t have to be all the way through with my journey for that to begin happening.

[01:01:30] Stephanie: Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend. And do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer. Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.