In prayer go deep inside and determine: what you are anxious about (and why), who you are mad at, what you fear, why you fear it, who you need to forgive. (It’s fear that causes most anger.) Ridding guilt, anger, or anxiety can also prevent illness. Stress is a huge culprit.

Are there too many deadlines in your life? Are there “dead bones” (Matthew 23:27) in your thoughts? Put worries in a box and hand the box to Jesus.

The God of miracles is the God of cures. Sometimes He will raise up a mere layman—and not necessarily even a very believing one—to ministry (as Saint Paul was). Focus on Light, not darkness.

I knew a fellow from San Diego named Bob Rice who was raised Baptist but was not very practicing. A truck driver, one day, out of the blue, he heard a voice telling him to look for a certain mission in the bad part of town and go there. It was such an unusual circumstance that he listened. This was a voice he heard. It woke him up. It’s what they call an “auricular locution.”

Bob, a former Marine, set out for the locale he heard, the Full Gospel Rescue Mission. When he got there he realized he was at a place he didn’t even know existed! He introduced himself to the pastor, who then shocked Bob by announcing to his small congregation that Bob was going to get up and speak! Rice took to the pulpit without a notion of what to talk about or even how to formally pray. He simply obeyed an interior force that now propelled him. “I had absolutely no clue what I was going to do,” he said. “When I got to the pulpit I opened my Bible and just laid it down on the pulpit — opened to no particular place, because I didn’t know anything about it. I prayed a very simple prayer, telling the Lord these were His people and that if there was anyway He could use me, there I was. Use me. I then had this thought going through my mind. I didn’t know if it was Scripture or something I had read, but there was this thought going through my mind, and when I looked back down at my Bible, I couldn’t believe my eyes: I began to read the same words going through my mind. It was Mark 16:17, where it says signs shall follow those who believe, that ‘in My Name they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new tongues… they shall lay hands upon the sick and they shall recover.'”

Suddenly, the same voice that had spoken to him that morning spoke to him again. It said, ‘Bob, there’s a woman out there tonight who’s blind and I want to restore her sight.’ I thought, ‘What?’ But it was so real I told them that I believed there was a woman out there who was blind and God wanted to restore her sight.” A female way in the back corner of the mission raised her hand. Bob said he was “scared stiff” but told her to come forward, that if she believed she could be healed. When she agreed, Rice reached out, touched the woman on the forehead, and said, “In the Name of Jesus, receive your sight!”

“The next thing I knew, the lady was laying on the floor,” recounted the burly former truck driver. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done now.’ I had never seen anyone rest in the Spirit. It was the first time. A few seconds later, she started to cry out, ‘I can see! I can see!’ Then the same voice spoke to me again and said there was a man who was deaf in his left ear. I saw what happened the first time and decided to try it again. Boom. He was laying on the floor. Here this guy is laying on the floor and he got up a few minutes later and he had his hearing!”

Lastly was a woman whose hands and knuckles were gnarled with arthritis.

“The Lord told me to have her stand there with hands raised where everyone could see her hands and to praise Him, and that’s what I told her to do. As she started to praise Him, we saw her hands just open up and those knots on her knuckles just dissolve before her eyes. That’s how my healing ministry was launched thirty-seven years ago.”

But that, allegedly, was hardly the end of the story.

Rice became a pastor — taking over a “church” with only three members. “I started finding everything I could in the Bible and preached healing, healing, healing, healing — and every time I preached, somebody got healed,” he recalled. “It wasn’t long before I was knocking walls out to accommodate the crowds.” There were first dozens, then hundreds, of alleged cures. “I started operating in the gifts of the Spirit and didn’t even know there were gifts of the Spirit!” he said — recalling another case in which a man had terminal lung cancer and only three weeks to live. He had been given special permission for release from the hospital to attend the healing service. “We went ahead and prayed for him and it felt like the Lord touched him,” said Bob. “As soon as it was over, he had to go back to the hospital. But three weeks later, he came to the church again to testify that the morning [after the healing service], they had run some tests on him and could not find a trace of that cancer. It was gone.” Rice said the Lord spoke to him again and told him the man was missing a rib. “I asked him why he was missing a rib, and he told me that when the doctors worked on him, they took the rib out because they had to take the lung out and put it back in. But the rib, they couldn’t put back. We prayed for him again and he felt this tremendous burning going around his chest. He came back several weeks later with a set-up of before and after x-rays. God had put that rib back in that man’s chest.”

(The claims are extraordinary — even by the standards of those in the healing ministry. I submit them for your discernment. In all, Rice started six different churches. He described himself as an independent charismatic preacher. In 1994 his first wife died, and Rice, who by now was in the state of Washington, moved to Arizona to be near a son. There he met a Catholic woman and remarried. The members of a new church he pastored resisted the fact that his wife was an “unsaved” Catholic, and Dr. Rice decided to leave the church and become a Catholic himself — “one of them.”)

[resources: books on healing]