37: R.E.A.L. Prayer

[00:00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On The Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Episode 37. We’re continuing our discussion about listening prayer today, where they focus on inner healing.

Hello, my Father.

[00:00:32] Marcus: Hello, my Daughter. It’s good to continue this conversation.

[00:00:35] Stephanie: Indeed. And to continue, I have another icebreaker.

[00:00:39] Marcus: That’s good.

[00:00:39] Stephanie: This one is more simple than the last one: Tea or coffee?

[00:00:43] Marcus: Ah, that one is actually easy. It will always be coffee. Unless it’s  at night and I just can’t do the caffeine. It took me a long time to see what the attraction to tea was.

[00:00:53] Stephanie: As I understand it, it took you a long time to like coffee too, right?

[00:00:55] Marcus: I was married and, yes, you were already born before I ever learned to tolerate coffee, but now I seem to be addicted.

[00:01:03] Stephanie: Yes. I like tea and coffee. If I have to choose one, I choose coffee. I’m getting over a cold right now, so I definitely go more for the tea. But yes, coffee. I like coffee.

[00:01:14] Marcus: Coffee, tea, yeah.

[00:01:16] Stephanie: I’m drinking coffee right now, actually. Though I have been drinking lots of tea, it’s my first cup of coffee since having my cold. And I have a lovely, Lord of the Rings inspired mug that says, “The road goes ever on and on.” And yes, yes it does.

So this conversation is going to continue on and on now, but before we get into the rest of the episode, do you want to tell us about the conference coming up at the end of the month?

[00:01:40] Marcus: Yes. The last day of March, March 31st and April 1st, we are having a spiritual warfare conference with a focus on what families need to know, what parents need to know, what married couples need to know.

We’re going to be walking through some of the essentials on Friday night. I’m going to do a presentation on essential things everybody needs to know. And then I’ve got two friends who are joining me, Karl Payne and Dean Vandermeer.

Karl has been with us before. He was on last year with Neil Anderson. He’s been dealing with spiritual warfare issues for 30, 40 years, and he’s going to be talking about generational iniquity, and then some other things related to family dynamics.

Dean runs a ministry in Grand Rapids called Set Free Ministries. He’s had a lot of experience dealing with troubled teens and prodigals. That’s really a heart level issue for a lot of people. So I asked Dean if he would talk to us about that and he said yes. And so those are some of the core topics.

The idea is to try to equip people for this battle that’s going on. The last session, I’m going to be talking about the culture a little bit and how we work with our kids who are kind of saturated with a very non-biblical worldview.

[00:02:55] Stephanie: And is there a bonus?

[00:02:56] Marcus: Yes, and then we’ve got a bonus teaching coming from Judy Dunagan. For those who may not know, Judy is the daughter of our founder, Mark Bubeck. She is an author and recently released The Loudest Roar, which is on spiritual warfare praying. She also helped to rework one of her dad’s books that was released as Warfare Praying.

She’s got a lot of experience with this kind of praying and she’s going to have a special bonus session. So it won’t be a specific part of the conference, but everybody who signs up for the conference will get it.

[00:03:29] Stephanie: Do we also have a special guest moderator or host?

[00:03:32] Marcus: Yes, we have a special host.

[00:03:34] Stephanie: Gotta make sure my girls are in here.

[00:03:36] Marcus: Exactly. Your good friend and mine, Juni Felix is going to be the emcee and hostess for this event. Juni’s got a lot of background with warfare in her own journey and she references it in her book, You Are Worth the Work:

[00:03:52] Stephanie: Moving Forward from Trauma to Faith

[00:03:55] Marcus: Juni, for those who don’t know, is a radio personality with the Moody Radio Network and she’s also an expert in tiny habits and how most of us are trying to change too much at once instead of making little bitty changes and celebrating those successes. She was actually equipped at Stanford University with it and is certified to teach on those things. She’s a remarkable person.

[00:04:17] Marcus: So we’re excited to have Juni a part of this again. She also emceed the conference with Neil and Carl last year.

[00:04:23] Stephanie: I’m looking forward to this conference. It’ll be really good. So thank you.

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.

[00:04:48] 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.

[00:05:23] Stephanie: I still think it’s just your spiritual gift. Walk us through it. What is REAL prayer?

[00:05:29] 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 [step] 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 The 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.

[00:07:55] Stephanie: You ask Jesus to bring to mind anything they need to remember.

[00:07:58] 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.

[00:10:44] 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?

[00:10:54] 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?

[00:12:29] Stephanie: And then there’s lasting fruit. It’s not like it comes back the next day.

[00:12:33] 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.

[00:12:55] Stephanie: We’ll go a little deeper into some of the obstacles.

[00:12:58] 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.

[00:14:27] Stephanie: So, do you want to save any more best practices for next episode?

[00:14:35] 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.

[00:14:49] Stephanie: Could you give us just a story?

[00:14:51] Marcus: Sure.

[00:14:52] Stephanie: That would help.

[00:14:53] 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.

[00:16:34] Stephanie: And wasn’t he looking pretty stern?

[00:16:35] 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.

[00:17:35] 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?

[00:17:46] 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?

[00:18:26] Stephanie: Right.

[00:18:26] Marcus: Do they love other people more? There’s a whole lot of fruit of the Spirit going on here.

[00:18:30] Stephanie: I really look forward to continuing this conversation.

So for now, thank you everyone, for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk International is a non profit organization, and we partner with people like you in order to do what we do. Some are on the trail with us as official trailblazers who commit to donating $25.00 or more per month.

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Thanks again. See you.