What follows I mostly got from reading books written by people who have special ministries of praying for healing and, to a much lesser extent, my own experience. Here are the suggestions for how to pray for healing, but with more explanation. If you want to see the shorter list without the extra commentary, you can click here.
Things to Remember
First, while these “techniques” can be helpful, healing is in fact in the Lord’s hands. These efforts are but a humble offering; thankfully, the Lord is kind; he’s happy to receive what you bring him. With all the suggestions that follow, you could easily get hung up on whether or not you’re doing it right. That would be a mistake. All of it—your presence and your thoughts, your words and your silence, your hands and your heart—is just an offering that you’re making to the Lord. The only question is whether or not he accepts the offering, and it’s at this point I urge you most to have faith: the Lord is gracious! Bring him what you can, and he’s happy to make use of it. This is true about anything we do. Every sincere effort to do the Lord’s will—whether we’re praying for a family member, preaching a sermon, confronting a friend, telling a stranger about the Lord, working on a business deal and trying to do so with integrity, parenting our kids through difficult behavior—whatever it is, it can be an offering to the Lord. When you pray, the question isn’t whether you “mean it enough.” (Of course, you don’t.) But if you do your best, like a small child bringing his crayon drawing to Daddy, it will be answered with a smile, not a scoff. That should give us hope that the Lord will receive our prayers.
And if the Lord does receive our prayers, there’s no limit to what he can do with them. It’s like the kid who gives his sleeve of saltine crackers and his can of sardines to Jesus: not much in and of themselves, but once they’re in Jesus’s hands it can feed multitudes. This points to how the whole life of the Christian is meant to be the Eucharist (that focused time when we give Jesus our bread and wine, and he makes of it so much more). Viewed from another angle, this is just what it means to walk through life in the power of the Holy Spirit. These are techniques for praying for healing, but at the end of the day your effort to do these things is just a matter of bringing your bucket of water to Jesus in the hope that he’ll take it and turn it into wine (and lots of it).
To riff on one more miracle, praying for healing, like the rest of the Christian life, is a matter of walking on water. So I want to be clear that these are not tips for how to swim.
Remember God loves us and loves to give us good things. Jesus told us that our Father is a good Father; when his kids come to him asking for bread, he doesn’t give them stones.
The Mechanics of Prayer
If you’re there with him, lay hands on him while you pray. (If not, don’t.) If you can, place your hand on the affected area that you’re praying for; otherwise, place your hand on his shoulder, head, hand, or leg, as convenient. If you’re praying for someone’s lungs and it’s appropriate and the person gives you permission to place your hand on their chest, that can be a good thing to do. Sometimes the New Testament talks about the disciples healing people and doesn’t even mention that they prayed, just that they laid hands on people and people were healed. Touch is important in itself, but it also brings to light what Jesus is doing and through whom he’s doing it.
Healing can take different forms. Sometimes when the Lord heals he does it suddenly. A lot of times when I’ve seen the Lord heal people, they notice the healing the next day when they wake up. Sometimes healing can be gradual and slow. Oftentimes, there is a partial healing. If that seems to happen, celebrate it and trust in it. Hold that healing with faith and do your best not to let your thoughts waver about it. Then ask for more.
Since healing is sometimes gradual, be prepared to spend some time praying—often, the more time the better. Jesus frequently urged us to be persistent in our prayers. Do your best to bug and aggravate God until you get the answer your looking for—like an aggrieved widow pestering a negligent judge, or a person in need knocking on a friend’s door late at night. Thus saith the LORD: Keep at it. Spend time with your hand on the affected body part. Spend time asking for the Lord to heal in this very particular way. It doesn’t just need to be a quick prayer thrown up. Spend ten minutes like that, thirty minutes, even an hour. Spend daily sessions in prayer like this if you can.
What to Say
Talk to the Father, the Son, and/or the Holy Spirit. Avoid addressing a generic god. You’re talking to the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ. Speaking directly to Jesus is clearest and easiest. I suspect a number of people are uncomfortable with that, but we should grow into it. Talking specifically to your heavenly Father can be powerful, especially when you remember that the Father of Jesus Christ looks upon the person you’re praying for as his own son or daughter. Addressing the Holy Spirit specifically can also be really helpful, making it clear he’s not some vague “life force” but the personal God who creates and rescues and restores.
The first request to make: ask the Holy Spirit (in Jesus’s name) to come and to guide you in your prayers. People who have a gift for praying for healing are often really sensitive to the nudges and promptings of the Holy Spirit. Whether or not you are, you do want to ask him to nudge and prompt you. He may even lead you to pray for something you weren’t expecting you would pray about. If healing comes through your prayers, it means that the Lord was taking the lead, and he brought you in and allowed you to play a part in the good thing he was doing. (What a gift!)
Ask the Lord to do very specific things. Don’t just throw up vague prayers for healing. Be very clear about what you hope the Lord will do. In fact, be as specific as you can be. If there’s an infection, ask the Lord to kill it, to take any virus or bacteria away, to strengthen antibodies and white blood cells, to clean and heal and strengthen that particular part of his body. When praying about cancer, ask the Lord to shrink and wither and kill every cancerous cell and to raise up healthy, strong cells in their place. If an organ is weak, ask the Lord to strengthen it by the power of his Spirit. Specificity is one of the few advantages of extemporaneous prayer over reading prayers from a book (and there are only a few of those advantages to extemporaneous prayer, and plenty of advantages the other direction).
Relatedly, let your mind imagine those specific things happening if you can. This is something that Agnes Sanford suggests in her book The Healing Gifts of the Spirit. She describes it as seeing happen in your imagination the specific things you’re asking for. I would just add (partly because I’ve gotten hung up on this at times) that this isn’t some kind of mind trick that will manipulate reality. You might just pray slowly enough that there’s room for your imagination to work, and then see if your imagination works. It might even just be a matter of savoring the requests you make, allowing yourself to be struck by the meaning of the words so that the ideas don’t just pass on by as you mindlessly mutter your prayers. The words come at a pace that you can notice them, even possibly with your imagining. Pray about the bad thing you want to stop, but your focus should be on the good you want to come.
Ask everything in Jesus’s name (or “in your holy name,” if addressing Jesus himself). This is an extension of a previous point. You’re not asking some generic god to work some magic for you, then closing out the prayer with a generic “in your name we pray.” (Who’s name is that?) The Father pours out his Spirit in testimony to his Son. Our main hope is, obviously, that the sick or injured person gets better, but we also hope that if the Lord brings healing it’s going to make people curious about Jesus, that people will be drawn to him by the wonderful things he does. If you are spending a chunk of time praying, you don’t necessarily have to hold off on that phrase until some grand finale—Father, I ask these things in Jesus’s name. But then you also don’t have to say it every single sentence (as some of our beloved Brothers and Sisters do).
Other Points
If you’re spending a chunk of time praying, you can let there be some times of silence (even while you continue to have your hand pressed against the person, if possible). These may be times when you sense the Holy Spirit’s presence. It’s a wonderful thing when he lets you know he’s there and that he’s up to something. It may be that you sit and bask in his presence, possibly with quiet words like, “Yes, Lord,” or “Thank you, Lord. I love you, and I thank you.” Or you may have just run out of things to say, and you take some time to sit and watch and wait.
Let me give a word on sensing the Holy Spirit’s presence. If the Lord gives you a sign that he’s there, then he’s pulling back the curtain, so to speak, and letting you in on the secret. Sometimes he does that for one person in the room, but not for others. If the Lord doesn’t give you a sense that he’s there, try to remember that he is with you anyway. That way, the moment has become an opportunity for your faith to grow stronger. If the Lord answers your faith by letting you know about his presence, wonderful. If you can manage to believe even without confirmation, wonderful. If you can’t, ask the Lord to give you more faith: “Lord, I believe! Help my unbelief!”
Fasting. Sometimes it can be helpful to go for a time with no food and only water to drink. A traditional fast starts with the day and goes until supper. If you have some experience with this, then you can start to fast even longer for dire situations. Interestingly, nothing straightforwardly hinges on it, but then neither does anything straightforwardly hinge on your being well fed, alert, or on top of your game. In some ways, that’s what can be helpful about fasting. There can be a danger of thinking that not eating is an act that will directly bring about some result, but there’s as much if not more danger in thinking that we have to be at our best in order to see results. Fasting is not cause-and-effect; it’s death-and-resurrection. It can be a time to learn, in a way you didn’t know before, that these matters really are in the Lord’s hands, and to that extent—the extent fasting bolsters your faith in Jesus—it can strengthen your prayers. Faith is the door through which Jesus steps into our lives, and fasting can sometimes grease the hinges.
Finally (and a reprise of the first suggestion), leave it in Jesus’s hands, knowing that he loves you, he loves your Father (even more than you do), and that he is wise. Start with faith. End with faith. Don’t be afraid even to let your faith take the form of confidence you’ve been heard and that the Lord has something in store, if it happens that is the particular faith the Lord summons in you. Own it.
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