Rev. Dr. David Chotka - Healing Prayer

of Spirit Equip ministries. David co authored the book Healing Prayer: God's Idea for Restoring Body, Mind and Spirit, I'm very pleased to say that he's my guest today. David, thank you so much for your time.

Because he had to understand Shakespeare or something? And he said, Oh, no, I actually believe it that didn't get my devotions in this morning. And so they said, Well, what do you believe, and he told them, and some of them got saved. I belonged to the drama guild in those days, and so did my older brother, and there were about 60 students in the drama guild, we do plays and musicals and those kinds of things.

I always loved the opportunity to try and play a part and so on. But 30 of the 60 people in the drama guild got saved 30 of the 60. Most of them didn't have to make major changes, because it was a moral era in those days. In this case, though, there were a couple of people who'd made major shifts, and I got to watch them because I already had known them before. And they were talking about their faith in Christ.

And so here's the moment where it came to a head, my parents ran a restaurant, and we had five apartments, there was always someone who was leaving something behind in the apartment. And as it turned out, we did a little lost and found we keep it for 30 days, then we'd either give it away to some goodwill thing or the Salvation Army or something or if it was helpful, we keep it. We didn't own a Bible.

Somehow or other. I tripped over this old abandoned hard covered cloth King James Bible. I was trying to figure out whether or not it was true. And after many, many, many hard searching questions, as an agnostic trying to figure it out. I sat down in my bedroom, and I opened up to the table of contents. Because it was a student of Shakespeare Shakespearean language, the language of the era wasn't hard for me. And I

began to look at the table of contents is that's what it called it, it was an order of chapters. And I was, to my great surprise, I found that there was a book in there called Luke. And there was a book in there called Timothy. Now I had a friend named Luke, and my brother's name is Timothy. So I thought, well, I could actually start to read this. So for some reason, I picked Luke. I didn't even know what a gospel was.

But I started to read this. And I was astonished by the healing stories of Jesus just absolutely astonished by that. Nobody had ever told me that Jesus was a healer, and I'd never met anybody healed by faith in the Lord. Oh, there were crazies on television, slapping people on the forehead and that kind of thing, screaming, heal, etc, etc. But I had never seen that kind of response in any person. And I was

amazed by this. And here's the kicker. While I was reading about people being made well, in the presence of Jesus, I started to get a 24 hour flu bug. This was really bizarre. And so I remember the moment I had to go and tell my parents that I wasn't feeling well, because I could not clean the restaurant as usual custom was, I got into bed, I sat down in the bed, and I was just confused because I

was reading a holy book for the first time in my life. And in the middle of doing that. I was getting out. Rodney, I prayed my very first ever prayer. I'd never prayed a prayer before this that I'm aware of. I suspect there might have been something earlier but this is the one I was consciously aware of. I said, God, I don't understand this. I am reading this holy book about Jesus making people well, and I am

getting ill. This is a mystery to me, those are the words I used. And as I did that, I decided to lie down on the bed and you know, try and beat the sweat and the fever, that kind of thing. And I closed my eyes and I was shaking a little bit. And then in front of my eyes, I saw a picture when my eyes were closed. The words Timothy 316. Now, it was about three inches tall, and it was about a foot long, maybe a foot and

a half long, something like this. But it filled the vision in my eyes. And then that picture got bigger and bigger and bigger until it filled the whole field of vision. I opened my eyes course the picture was gone. I close my eyes. And I could see Timothy 316, clear as clear could be right in front of the eye of my imagination, I guess you'd call that? Oh, you know what? There's a book in that Bible called Timothy's

named after my brother. So I reached over. And I read First Timothy 3:16. And it said, these words and pay attention to this. Without controversy. great is the mystery. And I stopped. I had just said, God, this is a mystery. And there it was in front of me. God Himself given me a picture in my brain. I read these words greatest mystery, and it was on greatest mystery of godliness, God, it was manifested in flesh,

etc, etc. I beat the bug. And after a couple of days, I wound up going back to school, and I talked to my Christian friends who are now believers. And they basically said, oh, you should read Second Timothy 3:16. Well, I was so caught up in amazement was the first that I didn't realize that I should read. Second, of course, second, Timothy, 3:16. and 17 is all about the value of Scripture. At that point, I was

not a Christian, I was a seeker. That was my first question of God, it was my first prayer of God. And my first response was to have him talk right back to me, non verbally, by putting this thought in my head about a verse of the Bible. That's where I learned this principle of Word and Spirit being joined together, I had an experience of spirit. And it pointed me to word which in the two of them, in turn,

pointed me to Christ himself. So Word and Spirit are always intertwined. And they have been since the beginnings of that, you know, it was around this healing thing, that I was drawn to the Gospel, then I learned about prayer for healing in a remarkable way.

anybody who was miraculously healed by the prayer faith. I didn't know how to do this. Nobody had trained me it wasn't part of the culture wasn't part of the ethos wasn't part of the conversation. And if anybody was ill in the church, of course, there was always pastoral care, there was always somebody showing up to give care to the family, and so on. But there was never this thing. Let's pray for him. That wasn't part

of the of the things in the air. So anyway, I go to the seminary, and I'm new to the school. And I am a strong believer in the power of Jesus to intervene in human history. I believe in prayer, I believe in the miracles I believe the Scripture is final. Some of the faculty in that school did not, there were some who didn't some who did not go into a class and Sunday, and one of the prompts would say, Oh, we know that,

that that miracle really didn't happen. And I would say something to the effect like this. Oh, yes. Moses split the sea. Jesus walked on water, what are you talking about? And there was a guy in the class, who could have been a stand up comic, the man was hilarious. If he looked at somebody sideways, the whole room would burst into laughter. And if he made a comment, it was always very insightful, very

funny. And the room would explode in so much laughter that we'd laugh so hard, it would hurt you know, this, it was just, he was really funny. Well, the trouble was, I would defend the miracles of Jesus, or you know, the necessity of the Atonement, or the value of the

cross, or whatever the issue of the day happened to be. And he would lob a joke into the middle of the room, and we'd explode with laughter. And it was always poking fun, whatever the person had said, and this happened when I was defending the scripture, and we laughed so hard,

it hurt, but in fact, it did hurt. Now, if it happens once, that's one thing, but if this goes on for a very long season, and it happened five or six or seven times because we were in three or four classes together, you say to yourself, Well, I'm not going to be friends with that, boy. It's not gonna happen. And I was cautious. But regardless, I just couldn't imagine being in a place where people who are studying

to teach about Jesus denied the miracles. One day I was going to buy Greek class and there's a very young lady who is very, very warm and thoughtful and Christ centered and she was a Do unto others as you would have them do. went to you kind of girl. I said, I do and Susie and she said, I'm fine. And how are you? And I said, I'm fine. I said, Listen, I'm going to my Greek class. And she said, Well, I got something

to talk to you about. I said, What is it? She said, You know, the comedian in your classes said, Oh, I know him very well. He, she said, he's in the hospital over there. Now, this is a university campus and the University Hospital, only about six blocks walk down the road. I

said, What's wrong? And she said, he has phlebitis. And I said, What's that? She said, Well, it's a vein in his arm. It's got a clot in it. If the clot or embolism I think is the proper medical term, if the embolism breaks free and travels through the bloodstream, it'll hit your lungs or hit your brain. And 95 times out of 100, you'll die. Very serious. I said, Oh, I'm so sorry. Is he getting good care? And she said,

Yes, he is. He's in that hospital just over there. She said, he asked me to ask you something. I said, What's that? He wants you to come and pray for him. And I said, What? He asked me to ask you to come and pray for him. And I thought to myself, I'm not going so I looked there in the eye. And I said, Susie, I am not going to go and she said why not? You know this, he he's been cruel. He is consistently made fun

of what it is that I believe he doesn't believe in the miracles of Jesus. In fact, just a few days ago, he said that Jesus did not heal. I was in the room. You watched it? And she said, Yes, that's correct. I said, Well, he's made a mockery of me in front of our peers. And I think he wants to make fun of me. And she said, you know, you're right. I'll go talk to him. I said, Well, you're welcome to talk to him.

But I'm not going away. I went to my Greek class. Anyway, the next day in the coffee lounge, I see the same girl. And she says to me, David, I want to see our friend. He's terribly sorry for what he said. And he'd like you to come and pray for him. I said, I'm not going. She said, Well, he wants you to come. I said, I'm not going a third time. I'm in the same Plaza, going to the Greek class Greek classes three

times a week. She runs into me as I'm going to the Greek class. This kind sweet, gentle girl that I call Suze. She stomped her foot on the pavement she got fire in her eyes and she inserted my middle initial she knew it. She said David R Chotka, are you or are you not going around this college telling everybody the Bible is the Word of God? And I said, Well, yes, I am. And it's then she said, Well, what

about this scripture? I was sick, and you visited me. And suddenly this fell blow landed in the middle of my being. And I thought to myself, Oh, no, oh, no, I am going to have to go out of sheer obedience to the scripture. But I was still afraid because I've never done it before I received no training. And I didn't even know if that was for our presentation. So I said to her, it says sick and visited, it doesn't

say sick and pray. And she said, Well, whether it's sick and prayer, sick and visited, he wants you to go, so go. So I finished my class. And then I did the sick block walk, I walked into the building, I saw him in the room. He was hooked up to wires and monitors, his face was very pale, it was obviously clear that he was in distress and very worried. I go in the room and I start to talk to him about the

weather. Because I didn't know what to do. Then I asked him about his course load and how he was doing with keeping up and so on. And then I'm standing by the door looking him in the eye and I said I was ready to go. And I said, Well, I've had my visit now. I'll be on my way. And he said, Wait, aren't you gonna pray? And I stopped and I looked at him. I said, now just a minute. I just have to make something clear with you. To

have you not every single time I have spoken about something like a prayer for healing. You have consistently and regularly mocked me to our peers. You made me a laughingstock. Why do you want me to pray for you? He burst into tears demands 27 years old is obviously he's launched in life. He's self assured he's crying and that bed, Greg buckets of tears. And as he's weeping, he says, I'm so so sorry, I

did that to you. But I have phlebitis and I could die. I don't know anybody else who believes that every word of the Bible is true, won't you please pray for your Jesus to heal me. Rodney, when you when you're in the middle of that you say to yourself, This is not somebody who's who's pretending this. This is somebody who really means his repentance. And then I really wanted to pray for him. But I still had not a clue what to do.

When I remembered in the Bible, Jesus had placed his hands on those who were ill, or they would touch them. It was this human touch thing. I thought I should touch him. So I went around to his bedside to say where is the phlebitis? He said, left arm just above the elbow. I asked if I could place my hand on him and he said yes, but one hand there. Put the other hand on his head. And to this day, I don't

remember when I prayed. I do remember it was something like, Oh, God, please heal this man. But I'm sure it was a fumbling disaster of a prayer. It was, because I was so terrified, because I didn't know what to do. And I was terrified, because I just had no words. And I thought he was going to mock me. This was the defining moment that began my search around this whole notion of prayer for healing. As I

was standing over him, and beside him doing this prayer, suddenly, it was as if the atmosphere was charged with compassion. All of the air around this man was just filled with this compassionate sense of God, being present to both of us through manifest presence, and I had no language to describe it in those days, it means that there was this palpable sense of almost like a cloudy, fiery sense, filling the

room. And it was like, we were inhaling compassion, and he felt it and I felt it. And I breathed it in, and my whole being filled with the fire of the Spirit. And I had never felt this before. This was the very first time I ever felt that kind of power. It was focus, compassion, power, energy, Faith conviction. And I was utterly and totally aware of only two realities. One was that fiery presence, and the other was

this man who needed his arm healed. And then I had what I what I now know was a gift of faith. I suddenly believed beyond all believing that if I prayed, he would be well, I prayed. And then I remember the first words he said, coming out of his mouth. What is that fiery heat filling up my being it's flowing through your arm. I said, that is the presence of Jesus spirit. He's making you well. And then I ran out

of the room. Two things that happened to me. Number one, I had never felt anything like that before. And number two, I still thought he might be making fun of me. I just didn't know. So the next day in the coffee lounge, four o'clock in the afternoon. Various I looked at him, I was astonished. He was on his feet and back in the school. I said, here here, he said, Yes, I am. It was an old 19 century

stone building. And it was made of beautiful bricks and stone and had those abutments going into the hallways, it was very much an old European design. And the man took me by the arm shoved me into the quarter of one of those abutments looked at all directions. And then he said that prayer changed my life. And I said, Thank you and I ran away. But what he didn't know is that prayer changed my life. Shortly

after that, I was in a class with him. I said something about the Scripture being true or about, you know, those events being historical or whatever. And he started to tell a joke to the class only this time, he made fun of those who did not believe in the power of the Lord. And this went on for months. When I was going on our first summer field and in those days the denomination required us to come under the

tutelage of a seasoned pastor for four months in our in what was our summer season. So he passed his phone number to me, he gave it to me. He looked at me and he said, if you're in trouble, you call and I thought okay, and away I went to my Summerfield had a beautiful, beautiful time and I came back to during the fall time to go to school and he saw me raced over and said you didn't call said I had a

marvelous summer he said if you're in trouble you call he continued to defense with me in classes. So there was a little party two months in all the students were gathered, his wife was there and this lady that I call Susie and that book was there and I was there we were chatting. The two girls started to give them the elbow and they said you got to tell Chotka what happened. You have to tell Chotka what happened. He said I

don't want to tell Chotka when you when I left, the nurse walked into the room. He said to the nurse, I can go home now. Jesus has healed me. My friend from the Bible College has come and prayed for me. And the nurse looked at him and said we don't do that around here. We got to have scientific evidence that you're well. He said well run the tests. And she had just come to get him anyway because it was time for them.

They ran the tests. Rodney every trace of phlebitis was gone from his body, every trace of it. He was quite well. He was released that night. His wife came to get him the she drove them home. And as of course that night, they're thankful they're amazed. And they decided they should thank the Lord in prayer and he wasn't used to praying either. And so they said to the Lord, thank you, God that you have

made us well. This is amazing. This is astonishing. We didn't even know this happened anymore. That night after he fell asleep lying beside his wife, he had a dream. And in the dream, he heard the voice of God tell him my servant David defends the integrity of my scripture. When he speaks you offended. And he did. He looked at the two girls, he looked at me, he said, The only time I ever got a phone call from God, it

was for you. And he pointed his finger at me with a comedian. But so began the journey of beginning to understand how prayer for healing happens in the Scripture, how it works for us. And so those two events, this vision of seeing the scripture in front of me, leading to the Word and Spirit principle, and this event where this man got healed, taught me many things. But it started me with to get my nose in

the Bible to understand what it is that happens in this thing called prayer for healing. Now, if I can lead you to the scripture to where I found something like this.

what he's done to create Luke's gospel. So if you go to Luke five, there is an event there. And here's why I'm telling you that that background, somebody watched what happened. And somebody told Luke, and somebody believed that this detail that I'm about to say to you was significant enough to record in that gospel. In Luke five, there's a what I call a mega view of this whole theme of Jesus healing.

There's a microcosm of his prayer life. And then there's a moment where we see him involved in prayer for healing. So 515 says that Jesus had remarkable success, with prayer for healing all over without crowds of 1000s were coming in wasn't this amazing? In 516, it doesn't say that he just did double down, it did more of it, it said that he went off by himself to pray, because his prayer life personally, was the feeder that

led him to be able to pray like he did in 515, for large crowds. So he pray more. Now, in 517, he was in this one spot, there was a paralyzed man there. And there were there was a crowd of people all around him from all across the Middle East. And it does say they traveled from other

nations. Now for us, you want to drive an hour you get in the car, you go an hour, you don't think much of it. But in that culture, if you had to go an hour, you would have to get an animal, you'd have to get feed for the animal, you'd have to get water for the animal, you would have to travel in a company, you'd have to bring your sick person with you, they would have to plan for days to be able to make a trip of a

day with beasts of burden and with friends to make sure they were safe. And there was a crowd of 1000s of them, surrounding Jesus, which tells you about the high level of commitment and their ability to see what was going on with this man. If you look at the text and 517, it

talks about Pharisees and teachers, the law and all the people who were commoners and a bunch of people who were sick. They were all there. And there's a phrase that shows up at the end of 517 that I have circled in every Bible I've owned, because it speaks to what I just described to you. When I was praying with that man with phlebitis. It says this, and the power of the Lord was present. For him. That's Jesus, to

perform healing. Whenever I read that text, I asked people in the audience wherever I am, if I'm a church or small group or whatever, I asked them to say the sentence out loud with me. And we repeat it together after I put it on a PowerPoint screeners somehow get

them look in the Bible, if they have the same translation, and the power of the Lord was present for him to perform healing. If I'm CMA, I have to believe that Jesus is God the Son, I have to believe that He's the Son of God, I have to hold to a Trinitarian view theology, I have to believe that Jesus was in fact, divine in birth, and that he got filled with the Spirit. And it was the spirit of heaven coming into him

when he was in his 30s, etc, etc. But this text describes a picture of Jesus zoning in to pray for the paralyzed man. And somebody in the crowd was aware of that manifest presence growing and landing on Jesus and enabling him to be able to accomplish the miraculous sign and he told Luke, it says that that anointing became manifest landed on him and then he healed the paralyzed man. Most Christians out of

reverence for the Lord will say something like he's God, he can do whatever he wants. And the scripture says, He's God, He emptied Himself to reclaim what our first parents had abandoned, as the second and last atom got in filled by spirit to accomplish miraculous signs and wonders. His divinity is not without question, the thing that made sinless perfection for him possible but His acts of power did not arise

from his divinity, they arose from his yielded submission to the movement of the Spirit. That's an incredible kind of insight. That is exactly what happened to me when I was praying for that guy in the hospital. And I'm going to give you another scripture where it happens in the case of another person. In Acts 10, you have Simon Peter, giving a sermon to the household of Cornelius. This is the first ever

sermon given to a Gentile audience. And the thing that he does is he describes how power was on Jesus of Nazareth, arising from God, the very thing that I just said to you. And so this is Acts chapter 10. And I'm picking it up at verse 37. This is Simon Peter, not Jesus, and not Luke himself talking to an eyewitness. This is Simon Peter describing this, you yourselves know the thing which took place throughout all Judea,

starting from Galilee, after the baptism, which John proclaimed, you know, of Jesus of Nazareth. And here's the language that is profound, how God anointed him with the Holy Spirit, and with power. It does not say, He had power bestowed on him by virtue of his divinity, and his miraculous conception. It says that at the baptism of John, God anointed him with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how he

went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. The key to the healing ministry of Jesus was his prayer life, his yielded submission to the movement of the spirit, and His sinless perfection in combination.

chief editor for the upper room. He's written more than 50 books. And his books, for the most part are primers and helpers to equip people to learn how to to engage in various practices. And so the two of us put our hearts and minds together to do that very thing. We tease out the principles about how a person can enter into prayer for healing. And we don't shortchange the fact that sometimes there's partial healing.

And sometimes there's holding mystery. And for whatever reason, in God's providence, the Lord Himself does not heal.

course, it's going to be offered by a group of people called Journey wise. And the goal here is that churches who want to train their churches and learning to do prayer for healing would be in touch with journey wise, they would get 15 videos of 10 minutes duration each for a Bible study around each of the 15 chapters of the book. And my website is spirit equipped.com. And there's all kinds of links to all of my books, and in particular that one because it's the most recent. David,