Truth of the Spirit presents Life in the Spirit Week #3 held at Patriarch House. Speaker Dale Johnson shares Preparation of the Heart: Prayer, Healing, and Forgiveness. Prayer and Introduction by Patti Brunner of Patriarch Ministries. For audio player, video link and written script please continue reading.
Life in the Spirit Fall 2022 at Patriarch House Series playlist is available at Life in the Spirit Fall 2022 at Patriarch House – YouTube
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[Patti] Welcome. Let’s begin with a prayer. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Heavenly Father we thank you so much for gathering us together tonight. We ask that You be with us to open our hearts, to open our ears, to open our eyes to the fullness of what You offer to us with your grace! That we might receive the fullness of your grace! We thank You, Lord for our speakers that we have had and for the speaker we have tonight. Lord, be with us, be them as they share with us Your words. In Jesus’ Name we pray. Amen. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I want to welcome you to Patriarch House, my name is Patti Brunner. This is our third week of Life in the Spirit. Our first week we heard Dc. Ronnie Hoyt talk about “Experiencing God’s Love” and the changes that happen when you experience that wonderful, that wonderful love of God. And, you know, that’s one reason why we do the Life in the Spirits: to help people to be able to experience God’s Love. And, in that as we experience God’s Love, then we begin to operate in the fruit of the Spirit. We see those: love, patience, kindness that comes forth us from God’s Love. Our second week, we offered “Equipping People with God’s Gifts of the Holy Spirit”. And we mentioned several of His gifts and really went deeper into the manifestation gifts of the Holy Spirit, the charisms, the extraordinary charisms like Prophecy, and Word of Knowledge, and Word of Wisdom. And we realize now that those gifts that are given by the Holy Spirit are ours to receive and to use to build up the Church.
Tonight we hear about Preparing the Heart. We Prepare the Heart by Prayer, Healing, and Forgiveness. And our speaker tonight is Dale Johnson. And he has a very special presentation for you. So please welcome Dale Johnson.
[Dale:] Good evening. When I first started to prepare my talk for this evening, I was thinking my talk just might last for months! Each of these subjects of Prayer, Healing and Forgiveness could be talked about for a very, very long time.
How do these affect our Life in the Spirit?
A basis for our life with God is prayer, it is how we speak to God, communicate our needs, desires, and thoughts. As we begin our prayer life we vocalize our prayers. We can move through a period where we communicate with God in a meditative style, we hear a few things, then meditate on them for a while, then move to a contemplative or silent form of prayer as our means of communicating with God improves.
God gives us an invitation to move to deeper forms of prayer. We respond by accepting, as we do with so many things of God. We always have the freewill to accept God’s invitation.
Many of us here have accepted God’s invitation to pray in Tongues. This is where we receive a tongue language from God. It allows us to communicate to God our needs in a language that is more correct or according to God’s will than anything we can express in any human language. We do not know what we are saying but it is more effective in asking for what is truly needed as we ask in total faith and surrender to God’s will.
Praying in Tongues is often used when praying with someone for healing for infirmities that can be physical, they can be mental, or involving relationships with others.
We are called by God to lay hands on the sick and ask for healing. It is a sign of a believer. If you read the scripture, especially in the Gospel of Matthew, you will find a great number of examples of Jesus healing everyone. Jesus never refused anyone’s prayer for healing.
In order to live Life in the Spirit sometimes spiritual barriers need to be overcome. Spiritual barriers of sin include pride, selfishness and unforgiveness. Spiritual barriers of trauma include hardness of heart.
The practice of healing brings into play the subject of forgiveness. On occasion, in order for healing prayer to work, there are things that the person to be healed is required to do. Among these things is forgiveness.
We say as part of the Our Father: “Forgive us our trespasses AS we forgive those who trespass against us.” It is amazing how such a small word can have huge consequences. It implies that we must forgive all sins against us or none of ours will be forgiven. This can have a lifetime of consequences. All sins against us must be forgiven. Frequently this seems like such a burden until we begin to feel the relief we are given when we are forgiven. It is life changing.
In explaining this phrase of the prayer that Jesus taught us, our Catechism says, in Paragraph #2840, these strong words: “Now – and this is daunting – this outpouring of mercy cannot penetrate our hearts as long as we have not forgiven those who have trespassed against us. Love, like the Body of Christ, is indivisible; we cannot love the God we cannot see if we do not love the brother or sister we do see. 1 John 4:20 In refusing to forgive our brothers and sisters, our hearts are closed and their hardness makes them impervious [totally resistant] to the Father’s merciful love; but in confessing our sins, our hearts are opened to his grace.”
There is a big problem that even if you are forgiven by the priest you have not quite accepted it by yourself.
I failed to forgive for a long time. One reason was I did not understand forgiveness. After I got involved with the teachings to understand Life in the Spirit I began to realize that the understanding I held in my heart needed to change. The big one was that if you forgive someone then you have to go on and have a relationship with that person. That is not true.
To help you understand forgiveness, let me share what it is not. It is not approving a bad action. It does not require us to be best friends or have a relationship with someone who has harmed us. You don’t have to have a relationship with someone you have forgiven. You don’t have to be their best friend when you forgive someone. You have simply taken your hands off their throat that you have been trying to choke them with. You don’t have to spend time with them, give them money or invite them to parties at your place. You don’t have to ever see them again.
I have learned: Forgiving others is an act of your freewill. You forgive because you were forgiven. This is the basis of salvation. Let that sink in. When you go against this base of salvation it can cause various issues in your life. It steals your peace, it can destroy your faith, it can affect your body, it can cost you your very life—your eternal life. This is serious stuff. When un-forgiveness takes hold of a person’s life it causes many problems. The door opened through your sin is widened. Unforgiveness is actually a form of hate against another person. If a person hates somebody, it is a sign that the person is lacking love. Why? They are not firmly rooted and grounded in the love of Christ, and Christ’s love is not flowing through them. As simple as that sounds, that’s how it works.” Do you hate the person who harmed you?”
Unforgiveness steals your peace. How does unforgiveness steal your peace? I have been taught: The peace that surpasses all understanding comes from God; when you reject forgiveness you reject God and thus you reject not only his presence but his peace.
Turmoil, aggravation, anxiety—each enters your hearts, thoughts and cause sleeplessness and loss of immunity. From these comes openness to infirmity. Unforgiveness is like a poison you take, thinking you are giving revenge to the person who harmed you.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church Paragraph #2843 says “It is there, in fact, “in the depths of the heart,” that everything is bound and loosed. It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense; but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession.” “Thus the Lord’s words on forgiveness, the love that loves to the end,142 become a living reality.”
Now it comes to this—how do we learn to forgive? The simple answer is to look to the cross. Nothing that has been done to you is greater than that which Jesus took to the cross and yet Jesus forgave them. In fact, that which harmed you was at the cross also. The Lord invites you to participate in his forgiveness.
Forgiveness calls us to hope for the salvation of the person who harmed us. Forgiveness calls us to pray for them to know that Jesus loves them and that Jesus will forgive them when they repent.
Sometimes forgiveness takes a long time. The deeper the wound the more need for healing of the trauma. As we choose to forgive, our healing begins.
I personally had a serious situation where, as a younger man, I thought my father was possibly trying to kill my mom and me. He used to drive aggressively. In Colorado we used to go fishing on most weekends and during the summer. Driving up into the mountains is not too bad, but coming down everybody wants to get home just before dark. So the highways which are only, most of them, two lanes used to turn into moving parking lots. So dad would find a place going through a town where he could cut through on the side roads and come back on the highway and pick up some space. But when he was doing that he got a little bit reckless. And that was kind of my evidence that he was trying to something that might hurt mom and me. It all turned out to be malarkey. As I learned going on, in the process of forgiving something like that. It was rooted in stories that I made up myself and were never true. But it took about 20 years to get through it. So it’s something that you have to be persistent at to make it work. You just have to do it.
It’s like so many things with God. There is no question whether it is going to be difficult or not. You know it will be difficult. You just have to do it to make it work.
Some things that you should do to make it better is to forgive them immediately. It’s the first thing you need to do. If someone cuts you off on the road you can forgive them right then and never see them again! You have got the job done and get your mind off of it. Tell God you forgive them.
If it happened a long time ago and the person is already dead you can still forgive them. Sometimes telling the person you forgive them will aggravate them and bring denial. Let it go. Forgive them in your mind and heart anyway. When it is something that is recent, sometimes it is good to tell them that you have forgiven them; you can have positive results. It may turn out that you do end up with a friend in it. You never know.
Probably the best thing you should do is pray for them. You can be certain if you have been praying for them for a little time, for a little while, that you truly have forgiven them.
As the Holy Spirit helped me to understand forgiveness and helped me continue to forgive those in my past and to reconcile with someone I hadn’t seen in 30 years. It wasn’t easy. It took prayer, healing, and forgiveness.
There was a period of time due to circumstances and divorce, that I didn’t see my daughter. It was about 30 years. One of my spirit-filled friends [Rick] encouraged me to try to contact her and reestablish a father-daughter relationship, but I was reluctant. They [Rick & Patti] prayed for me. They prayed about the situation that caused us to part. I didn’t know how to find her. I was looking for her but was never able to find her. I learned some things about her that indicated potential problems. I struggled with the situation and I didn’t really look too hard.
She had, in sometimes when we were together used drugs a little bit. She stopped it. But she married a gentlemen after we got divorced who was heavily into drugs and alcohol and things like that so I figured that could have been carried on and she could have been dealing in drugs by that time. I didn’t know. So I was afraid.
But anyway, it turn out recently—well not exactly recently now—but within the last few years my daughter was wondering where I was! She was curious about what happened to her family. And she managed to remember, at her young age, her cousin, Laurie, who was my 2nd cousin, my cousin’s daughter. And she somehow managed to find her phone number and she contacted her and she got in touch with her mom and she called me and we set up phone calls and we started talking and about six months after we started talking I went to see them In West Virginia.
It turns out that her husband and also all three of her kids, and she happened to be Catholic which was wonderful. So I knew how to relate to them and talk about things important in life.
God is the Reconciler. God is the Healer. God is the source of all relationships. God is the Giver of Gifts. God is love.
This has been a brief explanation of these subjects that involves things which are required to live “Life in the Spirit”. As we turn to the Holy Spirit we receive the grace to help us prepare our hearts by Prayer, Healing, and Forgiveness. Thank you.
Recorded at Patriarch House, Rogers, Arkansas
