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June 20, 2016 - Praying Medic
01:06:20
052 My Story So Far

This is the story of how I came to know Jesus and what He has done in my life.  Resources My books on Amazon

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Hi, I'd like to welcome you to our show.
I'm your host, Praying Medic.
We're talking about life as a child of God and all things related to His Kingdom.
Thanks for joining us.
If you're a new listener to the show, you can find articles and books and other resources on my website www.prayingmedic.com.
You can also connect with me on Facebook and Twitter.
Just look for Praying Medic.
Now let's jump into this week's show.
Today's podcast is a talk I gave at the Full Gospel Businessmen's Association meeting in Mesa, Arizona.
I share my testimony and a little bit of my walk with God.
I find it very interesting that the Full Gospel Businessmen's Association is essentially a layman's association, and it's very appropriate, I think, for me to be speaking to laymen, because I am one.
I want to dispel some misconceptions people have about me.
I hate it when people call me the man of God.
I feel like I'm just like everybody else.
Just an average guy.
I work an average job.
I work 48 hours a week on an ambulance.
I go in.
I do my job.
I come home.
I'm tired.
I get cranky sometimes.
I get frustrated and angry with management.
I am in every way a very normal person.
Just like everybody else.
I am not an ordained minister.
I have not been to Bible college.
I've only spoken publicly a few times.
I am in every way a lay person.
Very much in the way that C.S.
Lewis was a lay person.
So if you go on Wikipedia and you look up C.S.
Lewis, you'll see that they actually qualify him as a lay theologian.
His contemporaries A.A.
Allen, Wigglesworth, and all the men of God who are going and doing the signs and wonders and Filling stadiums and going overseas.
They brought an amazing work of God in the way that they were called to do it.
But Lewis knew his calling was different.
Because Lewis never graduated Bible College, was never ordained as a minister, never went on missions overseas, did not fill stadiums, did not go to meetings and See people heal and delivered.
He taught literature at Oxford and Cambridge.
He had a regular job, went to work, taught literature, and wrote some very amazing books.
And in his own unique way, he influenced a generation powerfully.
The Lord spoke to me, actually through a dream that my wife had, Where he essentially said that he's giving me something like that.
He intends to use me as a layman.
I have no intention of going to Bible college or seminary.
The Holy Spirit is a very, very good teacher.
He can teach you things that will blow your mind.
And he is the best teacher that there is.
Nothing wrong with I said all of that because what I'm going to talk about you're going to think, oh my gosh, he's some amazing, anointed, gifted man of God.
No, he's not.
I am not.
don't need to know.
Which brings me to my testimony.
And I said all of that because what I'm going to talk about, you're going to think, oh my gosh, he's some amazing, anointed, gifted man of God.
No, he's not.
I am not.
I am an average, normal person.
I actually grew up in a large Midwestern family in Wisconsin.
We were Catholic.
And at the age of about 12, I pretty much had my fill of religion.
I told my parents I wasn't going to Mass anymore.
I had no interest in religion.
I had no interest in God.
I wasn't interested in church.
And I essentially told my parents, I am not going to Mass anymore and you cannot make me.
And I turned my back on the church and I never thought about it again until the age of 38.
Now, when I got into high school and then later college, I became very interested in science, biology, chemistry.
And I realized that there was a theory called evolution.
Which was proposed by Darwin, and my professors were very big on Darwinism, and so was I. So I became a Darwinist, and I became a very convinced Darwinist.
I was very convinced evolution was true, and I was absolutely convinced there was no God.
I lived most of my adult life as an atheist, and I was very happy not believing in God.
Not only did I not believe in God, I was very hostile to Christians.
I hated Christians and I hated Jesus with a passion.
I couldn't even say the name of Jesus without having this feeling of disgust and loathing.
That's how far from God I was.
And I lived that way until I was 38, which wasn't that long ago.
Just saying.
I was working at a fire department in the Northwest, near Olympia, Washington.
And I had promised myself, when I took a job as a firefighter paramedic, that I was not going to become a paragod.
So a paragod is a paramedic who has an ego the size of this building.
He thinks he can't do anything wrong.
He's always right.
Makes all the right calls.
Knows everything.
And in about five years, I became a very arrogant paragon who thought he knew everything.
He was never wrong.
Always had everything in a row.
Well, my pride It caused me to start having problems with my paramedic partner that I was working with.
And we started to have some serious personality problems to the point where we were best friends for a while.
And then we became worst enemies.
And this went on for a while.
And one day I decided that it had to end.
So I apologized for being a proud, arrogant person.
I admitted to him that I was wrong.
He was right.
And I asked for his forgiveness.
And when I did that, something inside of me changed.
And I broke down in tears.
And I just wept for quite a long time.
And that was the beginning of something different happening in my life.
It was a couple of months later when my partner, After we'd reconciled, he said, you know, there's this book out there you might want to read.
Very interesting book.
Talks about stuff that's going on in the world right now.
It's called Left Behind.
You might want to read it.
So I thought, yeah, I'm not going to read it.
I don't have it.
I don't really like fiction, and it didn't interest me.
So about two weeks later, I had signed up to work an overtime shift on Memorial Day weekend, which is one of the busiest weekends of the year in the fire service.
Lots of just bad things happening.
Usually when you go on Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day, you're running calls the entire shift with no sleep.
But I needed the money, so I signed up for the overtime shift.
And that week, my lieutenant came to me and said, I'm reading this book.
It's really interesting.
It talks about a lot of stuff that's going on in the world.
You might like it.
It's called Left Behind.
I was like, that's weird.
Coincidence.
And I thought, well, that's nice, but I'm not interested.
So I just blew it off.
But a couple of days later, right before I was going to go in to work my shift on Memorial Day weekend, I called up my lieutenant and I said, hey, I'm gonna be working a 48-hour shift this weekend, and on the off chance that we have some downtime, it'd be nice to have a book to read.
Could I get the book?
He goes, yeah, just swing by my house and pick it up.
So I went to his house, picked it up, threw it on the seat of the car, and then I went to work the next day.
So this was, I think we were working Saturday and Sunday.
May 25th, 2000.
I'm giving away my age, if you can do math.
There's not going to be a test later.
Sorry.
So I went in to work and by about three o'clock in the afternoon we had not run a single call.
Nothing.
It was dead.
We're the busiest medic unit in the county.
One of the busiest weekends of the year.
And we did not run a single call the entire shift.
And I got bored.
So I went out to the car and I got the book.
Started reading it.
Got sucked in.
And the interesting character that I fell upon was a fellow named Rayford Steele, who was a pilot.
And he wasn't necessarily like a really bad guy in his own mind.
You know, he wasn't like an axe murderer or, you know, raping children or anything like that.
You know, he'd had crushes on flight attendants and little things here and there, but he thought he was a pretty good guy.
Now, his wife was a believer, but he wasn't.
And he thought, well, if there is a heaven, I'm good enough to get in.
That's kind of like what I thought.
I didn't believe in heaven, didn't believe in God, but I thought, you know, if on the off chance that I'm wrong, you know, I do good stuff.
I help people.
I'm a good person.
You know, I haven't robbed any banks.
I haven't killed anybody.
The gospel of God's grace and love was woven into this story.
Now, growing up in the Catholic Church, I knew all about Jesus.
I knew about His death.
I knew about His resurrection.
I knew about the fact that He died to forgive the sins of the world.
I knew that intellectually.
I just had rejected it my whole life.
It had never been something personal for me.
Reading this book, the Holy Spirit came into the fire station, into my bunk room, and started speaking to this, to me, as a personal message for me.
So, for the first time, the death of Jesus became something that was relevant to me, and I struggled with that.
And I kept reading the book, and as I did, the Lord started to bring up all the junk from my past, all the lies, all the sins.
He drank out all my skeletons out of the closet, just threw them on the floor.
He said, okay, now you think you're a good person, what about all this stuff?
And I was like, Huh, maybe I'm not such a good person.
So I knew that night I had to make a decision.
And as I was laying there in the fire station, I sort of had this impression in my mind of the gates of hell.
And I knew if I did not make a decision today to accept God's forgiveness, that's where I was going to spend eternity.
And I didn't want that.
So he kind of had me in a corner.
You know how he is.
So I said, OK, Lord, God, whatever you go by, I don't even believe in you.
But if you're real, I would like to accept your offer.
But I can't do this by myself.
I need you to give me something I can follow, a voice or something.
Because I'm so far off the rails, I have no idea what to do.
So I cried myself to sleep that night at the fire station.
Woke up in the morning and I heard this voice inside of me speaking.
I went downstairs to the day room and I was going to talk to a firefighter and this voice whispered to me, be nice.
Really?
Do I have to?
I want to be a sarcastic, you know, Okay, I'll be nice.
I went into the kitchen and talked to another firefighter, and the voice said, be kind.
I was like, wow, you're serious about this.
So I heard this voice speaking to me, gently nudging me in this direction and that direction.
And I reluctantly got a Bible, started reading it, I think I started in the Gospels, Matthew, and the floodgates just opened.
Crying tears.
When the Holy Spirit comes, he will tell you things to come and he will lead you into all truth.
I was like, oh, so that's who that guy is.
So it was a very dramatic overnight conversion.
And now, here I am, 38 years old, starting to learn about God.
A God I had always hated, and a Jesus I had always despised.
Got into a fundamentalist Bible teaching church for about seven years, and graduated with a degree in Phariseeism, which was really awesome.
Became the obnoxious, judgmental, Bible-thumping person that I'd always hated before my conversion.
Ah, Lord, forgive me.
But, I did learn the Bible.
Being in that church, I learned the Word really, really well.
That was the good thing that came out of that.
I didn't learn about love.
I didn't learn about grace.
I didn't learn about power.
I learned the Bible, and that was my schooling, which was good.
But then we got kicked out of that church.
Well, she didn't get kicked out, I got kicked out.
That's another story.
They asked me not to come back one day.
So we found an Assemblies of God church.
And Denise was all happy.
She was like, oh, they sing in tongues and they pray in tongues.
She's like, I've always wanted to do this.
Now there's a church that's actually doing it.
Cool.
So we started to learn about prophecy and about tongues.
And this was new to me, just out of my... So now I'm seven years into my walk with the Lord, and I'm just starting to learn about the Holy Spirit.
And power, and words of knowledge, and prophecy.
It's a process.
It's a process.
Boy, is it a process.
The rabbit hole is very deep.
It may be frustrating, but it's worth the journey.
We're going to the Assemblies of God Church.
And this woman, who has become a friend of ours now, comes in one day.
And she goes and starts prophesying over people in the church.
She's in the front row, goes right down the road.
Boom, boom, boom.
You're going to do this, and you've got music, and you've got CDs, and the Lord has given you all kinds of inspiration for producing music, and you have a gift to write books, and you do this, and he's going to do this, and you're going to make money doing that, and you've got to do this.
And she was reading everybody's mail, and I knew these people, and she did not miss a single one.
She was mailing every single person, going through row after row.
And I had never seen anything like this.
I didn't know that this was still happening.
And I face-planted on the carpet, and I said, Lord, if this is real, I want this.
I want this.
Whatever this is, I want this.
Ask and you shall receive.
So, a little while after that.
I'm 30, 45?
I'm 45.
And I've never had a dream for 25 years.
Now if you're one of those people who says, I don't have dreams, ask.
Ask for dreams and God will give you them.
Keep asking and keep asking.
And when he starts to give you dreams, write them down.
And pray into them because God is going to show you amazing things through your dreams.
I have so many dreams I can tell you about.
I've had over 400 dreams in the last 8 years just on the subject of healing.
Okay.
When Jesus said, the Holy Spirit will come and lead you into all truth, He was not lying.
There isn't a lot of instruction in the Gospels on how to get people healed.
There is some, but Jesus didn't take several chapters and elaborate the specifics of how to get people healed.
That's the Holy Spirit's job.
We all want to see people healed, but healing is a process, and learning the many different ways He does it is a process, too.
And I am just beginning the journey.
First dream that I had, August 8, 2008.
8-8-0-8.
New beginnings.
The Lord appeared to me in a dream and said, I am going to show you what is wrong with your patients.
I want you to pray with them, and when you do, I'll heal them.
Now, I had been saved for eight years, but I knew nothing about healing.
I didn't even believe in healing.
Two months before I had this dream, I had an argument with her, and I was trying to convince her healing and miracles did not exist today.
They ended in the first century.
I was taught cessationism.
She said, no, no, no, no, no.
I know people that have been healed.
Healing and miracles are still happening.
And we got into a little argument.
So the Lord basically gives me a dream and says, no, you're wrong.
Again.
And I'm going to use you to heal people.
How do you like that?
So I knew nothing about healing.
Didn't even believe in it.
Didn't want to believe in it.
Because that meant I'd have to step out and do stuff.
Out of my little comfort zone.
And now my little God box is all broken and smashed.
Oh dear.
I gotta make a new one.
A little bigger.
Another box.
I didn't really know what to do at that point.
Because I had never been interested in healing.
I didn't know where to look.
I didn't know, okay, how do you find out about this stuff?
And one day I'm driving home from work.
And I had collected a bunch of books from Goodwill.
I'd just go to Goodwill and buy used books on theology and Bible studies and commentaries.
I had a collection of them at home.
So the Holy Spirit told me, in a thought, that's how most of us hear the Holy Spirit, I had a thought impression.
And a thought impression said, pull into the Goodwill store.
I was like, okay, whatever.
So I just pulled into the Goodwill store.
And I was asking him, okay, what am I looking for?
He said, just go back to the book section and start looking.
And I'll show you what you're looking for.
So, I'm going through the book section, the used books, at the Goodwill Store.
And I'm scanning the shelves, looking, looking, looking.
And I'm like, I don't even know what I'm looking for.
What am I looking for?
I'm looking at books and I don't know what I'm looking for.
And I'm looking at the titles on the spine.
And then I see a book, A Physician's Witness to the Power of Shared Prayer.
See, my problem was, I'm in health care.
And you're not supposed to pray with your patients.
You're supposed to take their vital signs and take them to the hospital.
And if they need a drug, give them a drug.
In my mind, a paramedic's job wasn't praying with their patients.
That's a pastor.
That's somebody who's got a degree or something, not me.
But in this book, a doctor who is a cardiologist, shared a bunch of stories of how he prayed with his patients and saw some of them healed.
And that was what I needed.
Okay, this is a layman who is not an anointed minister of God.
He's a doctor and he's praying with his patients and they're getting healed.
I thought, that's what I need.
So I read the book and then I got Power Healing, John Wimber.
Great book.
So good.
If you struggle with healing, get that book.
It really broke things open for me.
Wimber had prayed for a lot of people, and Wimber was one of the guys that kind of was involved in the Jesus People movement in the 70s, and he branched off and he started the Vineyard Church movement, and they saw a lot of miracles, signs, and wonders.
Wimber had some really hard roadblocks when he started praying for people, but the Lord gave him some great revelation about his will for healing, and he had to persevere through a lot of failure, and eventually did start to see a lot of people healed.
So I read that book, and then I was like, okay, I think I'm starting to get this.
I started watching YouTube videos by my buddies Pete Cabrera, Todd White, because they were all getting involved at the same time.
We were all kind of, 2006 to 2008, God released a whole bunch of guys and gals who got fired up about healing.
Todd Bentley was one of the very first And then Todd White, and then guys like Steve Harmon, and me, and Pete Cabrera, and Tom Fisher, and all these other guys.
I became friends with a lot of these guys on Facebook.
We started talking a lot about healing, and deliverance, and miracles, and stuff.
And I was praying for my patients.
Day after day after day after day, nobody was getting healed.
And I was like, Lord, I'm being obedient, I'm doing this, I'm sick and tired of praying for people and not being healed.
Month after month after month, hundreds of people I would pray for, nobody got healed.
And that was very discouraging.
And several times, I just told them, I'm done.
I'm not doing this anymore.
I kept my end of the bargain.
You said, pray for your patients, and I'll heal them.
You are not doing your job.
Like, what do you want me to do?
I'm doing what you told me to do.
I'm praying for people and they're not being healed.
Okay, so what's the deal?
I'd go home angry, pissed off, and tell them I'm not going to do it anymore and have a dream.
And in the dream, I'm praying for somebody and they're getting healed.
Thank you.
I'm encouraging.
Can't we have that happen in real life once in a while?
So, I had to persevere.
And every time I'd come home with another person or five who I prayed for didn't get healed, I'd have another dream.
I'd pray for somebody in the ambulance and they're getting healed.
Okay, I got it.
I'll just keep going.
Just keep going.
Keep going, keep going.
People say, do you have to go through three or four or five hundred people and pray for them before you see somebody healed?
No, you do not.
Here's the deal.
Todd White had to pray for hundreds of people because Todd White was a drug addict.
And he did not believe in God.
He had so much unbelief and skepticism.
It took a while for him to build faith for healing, for the miraculous.
But once he got it, he got it.
Pete Cabrera, same deal.
Pete prayed for hundreds of people, never saw anybody healed.
Pete was a drug addict.
An atheist.
He had so much skepticism, doubt, unbelief.
He had to get his mind renewed to the fact that God wanted to heal people.
And it takes time for that to happen.
Me?
I was an atheist.
I didn't believe in miracles.
And God said, I'm going to do miracles.
It took me a period of about six months for my mind to get renewed and for me to develop faith to where people were starting to get healed.
Now, I have a friend, Matt Evans, who has been a believer pretty much his whole life.
He was raised in the church.
Went to Bethel when he was 19.
Came out of there.
First few people he prayed for, miracles.
Deliverance.
He's prayed for bald people and seen hair grow out on their head.
He has seen so much cool stuff.
Never had that period where he was praying and nobody got healed because he didn't have the skepticism and unbelief that the rest of us had.
If you're starting from a place where you have faith and you believe in the supernatural, you are not going to have to go through hundreds of people to get them healed.
You should start off seeing miracles relatively quickly.
It's the rest of us knuckleheads that have to suffer through hundreds and hundreds of people not being healed.
That's just the way it is.
So once I saw my first, well my first miracle I think was a migraine headache.
I was at a grocery store.
It was a really hot day and I went in to get some Gatorade and There was a lady at the checkout stand and for some reason I looked down and I closed my eyes and I saw in my mind's eye an image of her and the word headaches.
And now I'm not the smartest person in the world but I kind of figured that might be a word of knowledge.
Well, she was actually an employee at the store.
She worked in the bakery.
She was getting something she could take her Advil with because she had a headache.
She goes over to the bakery I followed her over there and I said, hey lady, do you have headaches by any chance?
And she starts bawling, tears running down her face.
She's like, who are you?
I was like, I'm the guy God said to heal your headaches.
So she goes, yeah, I have migraines like every day.
And I woke up this morning with another one.
And I asked the Lord, when are you going to heal me?
That's why she was crying.
So I said, yeah, let's just pray.
So I put my hand on her forehead and I commanded the headaches to leave.
And I said, how do you feel?
She goes, headaches gone.
Completely.
Like that.
It was gone.
First miracle.
God can take people who are very ungifted, untalented, full of skepticism and doubt, untrained, and he can do miracles through them if they simply believe he's going to do what he said he was going to do.
At that point, I was reaching a transition in my faith where I was actually starting to think God is going to eventually heal someone.
And with this lady, the Word of Knowledge, Jacked up my faith.
I was like, oh, he is definitely gonna heal her.
I got a word of knowledge.
It was like one of my first ones.
I was like, he's gonna heal her.
I'm just gonna go lay my hands on her.
He is gonna heal her.
See, for me, faith is almost synonymous with confidence.
At one point, Denise and I were going out to restaurants and grocery stores, and we were praying for people.
Uh, who had crutches and immobilizers and wheelchairs and stuff.
I'd walk up to people who had a sling on their shoulder and I would ask them if they had a shoulder problem.
And they're like, yeah, frozen shoulder, torn rotator cuff.
And I'd be like, okay, can I pray for you?
And they would say, yeah.
So I'd put my hand up there.
Command the ligaments and the tendons and the rotator cuff and the cartilage to be healed and they get healed.
And I saw like three of those people healed in a row.
And then I thought it was 10 feet tall and bulletproof.
And I was like, okay.
I had the shoulder anointing.
Whatever.
I was like, I had so much confidence.
Like migraines?
Not so much.
Blown out knees?
Not yet.
But I felt like if I had somebody with a shoulder injury, I knew that God was going to heal them.
I knew it.
And literally, I would see like 13 or 14 people in a row with frozen shoulders and torn rotator cuffs healed every single one of them.
Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
Because I had prayed for a few of them, got to a point where my faith, my confidence in God was so strong, no doubt, no skepticism, nothing.
I was like, I know if you let me pray for you, you're getting healed.
If it was a shoulder.
Now something else, not so much.
But then, but then, I started praying for a lot of knees.
Torn meniscus, torn ligaments in the knees.
And the same thing happened.
I started seeing one person after another healed, and then I got this confidence.
I'm like, holy moly, there's another knee injury and we're gonna get healed.
I'm like, hey, if you only pray for you, God's gonna heal you.
And they'd be like, you think so?
I'm like, positive.
Pray for them, boom, they get healed.
See, faith is the confident expectation of things not seen.
That's the thing, it's a confident expectation that when you pray for someone, God is going to heal them.
Without doubt, without concern, you just know that you know God is going to heal that sucker when you pray for him.
And that is how you develop this faith for the miraculous.
It's getting a couple of victories and then realizing, God really wants to do this stuff.
It's not like he is sitting up there shaking the dice.
Oh, you got snake eyes this time.
You're not going to get healed.
I mean, God really does want this to happen every time.
But when we get our mind renewed and we get our faith Activated and we are confident.
Like, you know, look at what David did in the Old Testament.
David would go up against these huge armies in the Philistines, and he was outnumbered, outgunned, bigger, stronger, everybody.
And David's like, you don't even know how dead you are.
God is so on my side, he is going to take you all out.
All I've got to do is let him do his thing.
And David always had victory because he had so much confidence in God, so much faith, and that's all it takes.
You cannot please God without faith.
It's not just about pleasing God.
Faith does please God.
But faith and trust and confidence in Him is what gives us victory over all the junk the enemy's trying to do in our lives.
Whether it's finances, family, relationship issues, health issues, it doesn't matter.
It's in His kingdom.
It's all in His grasp.
And if we are lacking, and if we need a resolution, a miracle, a breakthrough, We simply need to trust and believe and expect that God is going to change that situation and make it work out for us the way he wants it to.
I have prayed over broken cars and seen them miraculously healed.
Denise and I had this old Toyota that my daughter drove when she was going back and forth to Pima, when she was going to school there.
And after she graduated and left, We had a car that we didn't need anymore, but it wasn't running very good.
It never ran very good.
It had all kinds of mechanical problems.
And we wanted to sell it, but we knew that if we sold it in the condition that it was in, we wouldn't get the fair market value for it.
So I thought, well, you know, I'll just put in some new spark plugs, change out the spark plug wires, do a tune-up, change out some things, and maybe the car will be worth some more money when we go and sell it.
And a couple of months previously, Denise had this iPod dock that she'd put her iPod in, and it was a Bose speaker system, and you put your iPod in and it plays the music really nice.
We would use it out by the pool.
That was broken.
It was broken for real.
I took it apart, plugged it in, everything, tried to fix it.
It was dead.
Deader than dead.
We prayed over that thing, and it got resurrected from the dead.
It's been working great.
So, when I was thinking about fixing the car, Hmm.
Yes you did.
to do the tune-up stuff, I went out to the garage, and I heard the Holy Spirit in my mind, a little thought, say, didn't I fix the iPod dock?
Hmm.
Yes, you did.
So he was basically saying, why don't you let me try to fix the car?
And I was like, sure, why not?
Let's do it.
So I got in the car, and I just started declaring that the fuel system would be cleaned out, that the spark plugs would be cleaned out, that the electronic stuff would be cleaned out, everything would be healed.
Angels who are mechanics, get on this thing and fix this broken piece of junk!
In the name of Jesus!
So I was just making declarations over my broken car for about three minutes.
And then I thought, OK, time to take it out for a test drive.
So took it down to the stop sign and just drove it around.
And it ran great.
It would always hesitate and sometimes stall going through intersections.
When I would decelerate and then try to accelerate, just sputtering and hesitating and stumbling.
We drove it and there was no problems.
It ran perfect, like a brand new car.
It's like, thank you Lord.
So we put the car on Craigslist and we got our asking price for it.
It was so good, like I just needed to have That was early on in my experiences in the miraculous, and they've gotten even more crazy.
After seeing a bunch of people healed, my lady over there said, you know, you've written all these articles on your blog about healing.
You should consider writing a book.
And people on Facebook have been bugging me for a long time to write this book.
And I thought, I do not want to be an author.
I don't want to write books.
I don't want to publish.
That's too much headache.
Who wants to do that?
That's just boring.
But she said, look, you're a writer.
And I said, no, I'm not.
I'm a paramedic.
And she said, no, you're a writer trapped in a paramedic's lifestyle.
You are a writer.
And I said, no, I'm not.
I've been working as a medic for 37 years.
I'm a paramedic.
She goes, look, on your day off, you get a cup of coffee, you get up at six in the morning, you get on your computer, and you write and write and write and write and write.
You go to bed, you wake up in the morning, you get your coffee, and you get on your computer and you write all day.
All your days off, that's all you do is write.
She's like, how do you not see yourself as a writer?
Everybody else sees it, how do you not see it?
I'm a paramedic.
That's all I know how to do.
She said, you could write books and you could be successful as a writer.
You can have a career as a writer if you wanted to.
And see, here's the thing.
She used to work for a publishing company.
As a graphic designer.
So she's like, I can do your cover designs, I can do the interior files.
She had recently been working at a company where her boss was the marketing manager for the company.
And she learned so much about marketing and promotion over the three or four years she was working there.
So she has a history in publishing.
She has a history in marketing and promotion.
She knows about ads.
She knows a lot of stuff.
She's a Photoshop ninja, to boot.
I mean, look at the cover designs.
She did all the cover designs for all of our books.
And everybody who sees them is like, oh my God, who did the covers for your books?
I'm like, that one over there.
So she said, look, You, your destiny, your calling is to be a writer.
And you don't see it, but everybody else does.
And I'm telling you, if you just allow God to do this, He is going to do some great stuff.
It took her about six months to maybe a year to convince me that I should actually do this.
I'm fairly stubborn sometimes.
Although I'm much less stubborn with her than I used to be, because I pretty much realize she's always right most of the time.
Very seldom is she wrong, and that's being honest.
Whenever we have a discussion, she's like, Honey, you know I'm always right.
And I'm like, I wish I could counter that, but you usually are right.
So the Lord started giving us more revelation about healing.
And we published a book, a book on divine healing, and it sold pretty well.
And then we published the books, My Craziest Adventures with God, Volume 1, and Volume 2, which is mostly a lot of healing testimonies of people we've seen healed in the ambulance, grocery stores, and restaurants, and different places, and things that we've done.
And I have to admit, I was pretty much digging the whole being an author thing.
It kind of grew on me.
I always liked writing.
But when she started showing us the impact, and people started writing back to me saying, oh, loved your stories, loved your books, wow, it made me realize I can do this too.
So then I started to see there's fruit coming from this.
People's lives are being changed.
People's lives are being impacted.
So then, I read this book called How to See in the Spirit by a guy who is now a friend of mine named Michael Van Vlijmen.
It's a really good book, very practical book about how to see in the spirit.
And I thought, Denise got the book, downloaded a Kindle, we read it, started doing the exercises in the books, and now she had never seen visions.
I had never seen visions until the Lord had me go through this process where I would sit quietly in the ambulance, on the bench seat, day after day, month after month.
And with my eyes closed.
And gradually, my spiritual eyes were able to see things in the Spirit.
See visions, see angels, see demons, stuff like that.
It's a process.
If you have never seen visions before, you can see them.
Anyone can see them.
It's not a gift.
It is not a gift.
Anyone can do it.
We all have a spirit.
Your spirit has spiritual eyes.
Your spirit has spiritual ears.
And your spirit can sense feelings in the spirit, smell things in the spirit.
We all have the ability to sense things in the spirit.
But most of us need to have those senses trained so that we become sensitive to those things.
So, we read this book and I had sent off the manuscript to Craziest Adventures with God, Volume 2.
I had sent it off to my editor.
And that night I had a dream that I was writing a book on seeing the Spirit.
I was like, oh, Lord, are you kidding me?
Like, I already got my next assignment.
Now, I had never thought about writing a book on seeing the Spirit.
I didn't feel like I had enough revelation to write a book on seeing the Spirit.
And Michael had already written a really good book.
But the Lord was like, no.
You have unique revelation and a way of explaining this stuff that people can understand who may not be able to understand his book.
So, I was like, okay.
So that day I sat down at work and we're, oh, that answers your question.
I do a lot of writing at work.
Between calls.
So when I have quiet days where there's not a lot of calls going on, I'm writing.
Writing, writing, writing.
I take my laptop with me everywhere I go.
And if I'm not...
I'm often writing in the ambulance.
I'll be tooling down the freeway, we're going between hospitals, and I am on my computer just writing, writing, writing.
As I get inspired to write stuff, I just get it all down on the computer.
So that day, I started writing.
Basically, I would sit down for about a half hour, and I was asking the Lord, okay, seeing the Spirit, how does this work?
What do I need to do?
Right, to help people understand how this works, the mechanics, the practical, rubber meets the road, how does this work?
And so the Holy Spirit would just basically give me these thought impressions and I would dictate what he was saying.
I would just type it all out.
That would last for 20 minutes to a half hour and then I would run dry.
I just wouldn't have any more revelation.
So I'd go walk around the station for a while and take a break.
And then I'd come back to it about an hour later, and I'd have more revelation.
Now this is how the Holy Spirit works with me.
Many times, when I sit down at the computer, I just still my soul, I get quiet, and I ask the Holy Spirit, okay, teach me.
And what He teaches me, what I hear in my spirit, I just write out.
It's writing under the anointing.
It's very similar to doing ministry where you're praying for people and you're asking the Lord for words of knowledge about people's conditions.
Well, you can write the same way.
You can write under the anointing, where you just ask the Lord, give me the revelation and I'll write it out.
Giving words of knowledge, prophesying.
When you're doing prophetic ministry and you're giving people prophetic words, same thing.
You're hearing what the Lord is saying about them, but instead of speaking it out, you write it down.
In about two months, I was able to transcribe the Holy Spirit and wrote the book on seeing the Spirit, which a lot of people really liked.
I realized at the time I didn't have the revelation, but the Lord gave me the revelation to write the book because He wanted me to do it.
So then, we thought, well, maybe we should write a book on hearing God's voice.
Because that's something people want to know about, too.
So, same process.
Sat down for a while, months, several months, and transcribed the Holy Spirit on the book on seeing the Spirit.
And that's kind of been my walk with the Lord.
It's like, the Lord will teach me healing, teach me the keys to seeing in the Spirit.
He's teaching me the keys to hearing His voice in the different ways.
God speaks to us in so many different ways.
People have no idea.
I heard this testimony of a woman who was an agnostic.
She went into an art gallery, and she and her friend were looking at these paintings, and she comes to this painting and stops dead in her tracks, is staring at this painting, and then starts weeping.
And she's crying, and this goes on for 10 minutes, and her friend goes, what is happening?
And the lady said, I never really believed in God, but after seeing this painting, I know only an omniscient, awesome, amazing creator could create a person who would paint such a beautiful painting.
And she became a believer in God by looking at a painting in an art gallery.
In a secular art gallery.
I'm getting ready to teach some classes on healing.
Online video classes.
And Denise said we need to have a nice background for the videos because we don't want a bare wall.
So she paints this painting.
She's a painter.
Really beautiful.
I call it Morning, Noon, and Night.
Or morning, afternoon, and evening.
Because it's got golden yellows on one side, nice orange-red tones in the middle, and then nice blue and purple on the right, which is evening.
So, we put this painting up on the wall, behind my desk, where I'm going to be doing recording videos for my classes.
Jesse Berkey and I do this webinar on hearing God's voice about two months ago.
He invited me.
I'm like, yeah, cool.
Let's do it.
So I get on the webinar and my camera on my computer is looking at me and behind me is this painting that Denise painted.
We record the webinar.
It goes out to the people who paid for it.
One of the people didn't catch the webinar live.
She had to watch the replay.
Two weeks later, she watches the replay.
Sends me a private message.
She goes, who painted the painting behind you in the video?
It's like, she goes, that painting, when I looked at it, The glory of God came off of that painting and knocked me out of my chair and pinned me to the floor and I was in a glory cloud the entire webinar for an hour.
I was under the power of the Spirit and I was laying there and I couldn't hear anything you were saying.
I had to get back up in the chair and listen to it again to hear what you guys were talking about.
She goes, who painted the painting?
And I said, my wife.
She doesn't paint Eagles and lions and lambs.
She's an abstract painter.
She just paints shapes and colors and it's all abstract.
But the Lord has put an anointing on her painting that touches people in a powerful way that you don't even see it coming.
It's like being hit, boom, out of nowhere.
You don't expect it and the Lord just pounces on you through a painting.
We do not understand how many ways God can speak to people.
For three or four years I've been working on this book called Traveling in the Spirit Made Simple.
Being an atheist, I never had been interested in spiritual travel, astral projection, anything like that.
It just didn't interest me at all.
I had a dream in 2010 where two of my buddies and I were being translocated, picked up, physically moved to different places in this dream.
And the Lord is giving us instructions about what we were going to do when we were being translocated to different places.
Now, Acts chapter 8.
Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch are hanging out.
He's reading the scroll of Isaiah.
Philip says, do you understand what you're reading?
And Enoch says, I'm not quite sure.
And Philip explains it to him.
And he says, is there any reason why I can't be baptized?
And Philip says, let's do it.
So stop the chariot.
Boom.
In the ditch, he gets baptized.
And Philip is taken up.
Put over there.
Same thing happened to Ezekiel several times.
He was picked up by the Lord and taken places when in captivity.
So this is what the Lord is speaking to me about in this dream.
And I was like, are you serious?
Now it's traveling in the Spirit?
What next?
So for several years I've been hosting Public discussions on Facebook about traveling in the Spirit.
And people came out of the woodwork to share their testimonies of being moved places in dreams, of being picked up and taken around the world.
There's a testimony I got from one friend.
She got out of Bible school and went to be a missionary in Nepal.
She's in Nepal.
She's doing her missionary stuff.
And the city of Nepal that they were in, Kathmandu, lots of drug addicts.
Lots of sexual abuse, drug addicts, alcoholism.
It's a very, very poor city and there's a lot of very troubled people.
Their ministry was primarily to those types of people.
One afternoon, they went to this one field where there were people passed out.
Syringes and needles everywhere.
And most of them were high on heroin.
And they met some people there.
And then they decided she and her friend were not going to go back there because it's just way too dangerous for two single women to go there.
So they never went there again.
They stuck to their other part of town.
And six months later, she's walking down the street.
And this guy walks up to her and says, Hey, Brooke, where have you been?
How can we not come back and hang out with us?
And Brooke is like, how do you know me?
I've never seen you before.
The guy goes, and the guy's speaking to her in Nepalese, in the local language.
She is a white girl from America.
There's no way a stranger would assume a white girl would speak Nepalese, but he was speaking to her in Nepalese.
He knew that she knew the language.
So she was like, I've never seen this guy before.
He knows I speak Nepalese and he knows my name.
Who is this guy?
And he goes, Brooke, why are you acting like you don't know me?
We see you all the time.
You come over and you're always telling us about Jesus and telling us about your treatment clinic and telling us all the things that are going on and inviting us to come over to your clinic.
And she's like, what are you talking about?
I have never met you before.
So she starts thinking about this.
And then she starts running into more and more people, more drug addicts, and they all know her.
She's never seen any of them before.
Her boyfriend, who then became her husband, is like, how come all the drug addicts know you?
She's like, I don't know.
I've never seen these people before.
And then she goes, hang on a minute.
I think I received a prophetic word from my pastor before I came here.
Let me check into this.
So she goes and finds this cassette tape that her pastor recorded a prophetic word for her before she left for Nepal.
And here's what the pastor said, Brooke, you are going to be going and doing ministry in places you're not supposed to go because they're too dangerous.
So the Lord is going to Let you go there in his spirit, and you're not even going to know that you're there.
And your spirit is going to minister to people, and you're going to be completely unaware of it.
For six months, she was bi-locating.
Her spirit was traveling to the field and ministering to the drug addicts, and she had no awareness of it.
She was over here, and her spirit was doing all this ministry to the homeless people and to the drug addicts.
That's the kind of stuff that God is doing right now.
Basically, I've been having these public discussions, and one of our friends, Mitzi, shared this testimony.
She has a lot of these experiences.
Most of them are at night.
She goes to sleep.
Suddenly, she finds herself on the top of a building, and she's wearing a burka, and she's in the Middle East somewhere, and she doesn't know where she is.
She's wearing a burqa, and she's on top of a building, and she has boxes of Bibles next to her.
And there's women with her, and they're wearing burqas.
And they're passing her Bibles, and she's handing the Bibles down to women below.
And they're taking the Bibles, and they're shoving them in their burka, and they're running off, and this is all very silent.
She knows it's very dangerous.
She knows they can't make any sound, or they're going to get caught, and they're going to be in trouble.
She is taking Bibles, passing them down to women who are waiting for the Bibles, and she's doing this and doing this until the boxes are empty.
And then, she WHAM!
lands in her bed.
Nut wakes up.
She literally falls into her bed with her arms outstretched and she's looking like, okay, where's my burka?
And where are the Bibles?
This is the kind of thing people are doing.
I have had a number of experiences.
One day I got a request.
It was a prayer request through Facebook for a pastor who had kidney failure.
You guys heard this on the Sid Roth Show.
Okay, so the deal was, it was through a friend of a friend, not that it matters, but this pastor had, he only had one kidney because his one kidney had cancer and they took it out when he was young.
So he only had one kidney that was healthy, and then he went into kidney failure.
And being the great man of God that he was, he decided he wasn't going to take his medications.
He took the pill bottles and he put them up on the wall of the church to demonstrate to everyone his great faith that God was going to heal him.
So he goes off his medications and unfortunately it didn't work out so well.
He ended up in severe kidney failure and the doc told him, you are headed for dialysis.
You're not making any urine at all.
Nice work.
I get the prayer request and I'm like, okay, it was just one of seven or eight prayer requests I received that day.
So I'm sitting there in my chair and I'm just saying a quick prayer, praying that his kidney would be healed.
No big deal.
I go to the next prayer request and the next one.
That night I have a dream or some kind of experience where I see a man standing in front of me and he has a surgical incision in his, right below his ribcage, about eight inches long and it's open.
And I walk over to him and I know in the dream he needs a new kidney.
So I walk over to him and I shove my hand inside of his body.
And I can feel his internal organs.
And I think I'm looking for his kidney.
And I'm kind of messing around there for a while.
And I pull my hand out and the dream ends.
Denise and I wake up in the morning and I was thinking, what is this dream about?
At first I thought the Lord was saying something like what he said to Thomas, you're not going to believe me until you put your hand in my side.
That's actually how I interpreted that dream.
Like the Lord was saying, you're full of unbelief, but if you put your hand in my side, then you'll believe me.
That is how I took that dream at first.
Because I had forgotten about the pastor who needed a new kidney.
So later on that day, I go on Facebook and this friend says, hey, got a praise report.
They tested my pastor's kidney and his kidney function is 100% normal.
I was like, you gotta be kidding me.
So evidently I did kidney surgery in a dream.
How that works, I don't know.
Most of you are learning about healing.
Learn what you can from everybody that you can.
Do not narrow your focus on one person's teaching.
As much as these anointed men of God and women of God have some great testimonies and great success, I guarantee you they have things that they have not seen healed.
Go to somebody else and they will have testimonies of those people who are healed.
Steve Harmon is a good example.
Steve's a buddy of mine, Facebook friend.
If you're interested in really cool stuff, look him up on Facebook.
He's also got a page.
Steve and I talk a lot.
Steve is one of the guys who, he went to Bible college, he didn't want to go, but the Lord made him go.
And Steve's ministry is, he is reaching Christians for Jesus.
That is his calling.
He is called to show Christians the real Jesus.
The Jesus who loves people.
The Jesus who wants to heal everybody.
The Jesus who loves the gays, loves the drug addicts, loves the homeless.
Steve has a gift of the supernatural hug.
He can wrap you in a hug and you will go through emotional healing, physical healing.
The Father will show stuff to you.
When He hugs you, you will experience something very cool.
Steve is a really truly outside the box kind of a guy, and I've learned a lot from him, because Steve has taken revelation and books and training from a lot of different people, put it all together, let the Lord sort it out, and then the Lord adds stuff to all that.
So what happens is when people go to all these other ministries, everyone from David Hogan to Corey Blake to Cal Pierce to Bill Johnson to all the big name healing ministries, People go there and they can't get healed.
People go to Steve.
Steve works with them for six months and they get healed.
He is getting the worst of the worst cases that nobody else can get healed.
And the reason he's having success is because he is allowing Jesus and the Holy Spirit to give him specific information about how to deal with each person and he comes with no pre-set agenda.
He's like, I don't have a formula for this.
I don't have any expectations.
I expect that Jesus is going to show up and many times he will physically appear in the room with them and lead them through the encounter to get the person healed.
That's kind of my approach to healing and the miraculous is In the last year or two, the Lord has really been emphasizing, for me, emotional healing.
We have seen people who have severe back pain from car accidents, received a lot of prayer, can't get healed.
Took them through a little emotional healing process to get healed of emotional trauma from abuse from husbands and fathers and mothers.
Sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse causes emotional trauma.
And the enemy uses it against us and can cause physical symptoms of illness and pain that can't be healed through using authority and power.
It just doesn't work.
You have to heal the wounds in the soul to get those people healed.
And we have seen a lot of success with getting people, in fact, nowadays, if I pray for someone, most of the time I'm going to take them through a very brief, short, emotional healing prayer to get them healed of rejection, Shame, guilt, anger.
All those emotional wounds.
Because those things make your life hell.
And they also allow physical infirmities to continue.
We had this one woman we prayed for.
She'd been in four car accidents and had horrible neck and back pain that nobody could get healed.
Took her through the emotional healing process, got her healed of the shame and the anger and the guilt and the rejection.
Simple prayer over her back, all the pain's been completely gone, it didn't come back.
The Lord has a lot of tools He wants to give us.
But if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And we tend to approach healing as, I only have a hammer.
I'm going to hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer.
I got authority.
I got authority.
I'm going to use my authority.
Sometimes authority is not what you need to work with.
Sometimes there's an angel standing next to you saying, And you're not hearing it.
I have authority!
I have the claim of my authority in the name of Jesus!
And the angel's like, you're not listening.
The Lord has a lot of different ways we can get people healed and set free.
The toolbox is enormous.
It's like a shop full of all different kinds of tools, and many of us are focused on we have one tool, or maybe two.
And that's it.
There are so many more tools available to us.
And that's what the Lord is doing right now.
He is showing us all the tools in the shop.
And every tool has a specific purpose and a way He wants us to use it.
So we need to be trained, just like a carpenter.
You don't use a bandsaw for every woodworking project.
Sometimes you need a table saw, sometimes you need a planer, sometimes a jointer, and sometimes a sander.
Lots of tools, different equipment for different purposes.
Healing is the same way.
There are a lot of different things that we can use to get people healed, but we have to resist the temptation to put God in the little box.
It is a very big box.
In fact, it would be good to just get rid of the box altogether and let him do what he wants to do.
Right.
Yeah.
Thank you.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks for dropping by.
If you're new to the podcast and you haven't been to my website, you might drop by and check out the articles I have there.
If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can contact me at admin at prayingmedic.com.
That's A-D-M-I-N at prayingmedic.com.
You can also contact me on Facebook and Twitter.
I'd like to thank you again for dropping by.
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