Many of our most important activities are ceremonial or programmed. That is, some things are so important that we tend to preplan them down to a word-by-word, moment-by-moment progression. Wedding and funerals tend to be like this, for good reason since what we are doing has such import to the people involved and the message the moment conveys.
Certainly, medical practices have such a sense of preplanning so that the procedures are governed by skills and developed by training so that the people involved can be prepared for nearly any eventuality. Some procedures are “routine” in that the specialist who does the surgery or procedure has done it many times on many people who have the same diagnosis. In that sense, the procedure has been improved, a greater range of possible complications explored, and a work to continuously improve the process is being done. These specialists develop their own language and share particulars that few outside their specialization can understand without explanation.
We realize that this is possible because the human body is pretty much the same from person to person. The organs are located in the same places. The arteries and nerves lie along the same pathways. The “surprises” are minimal in that the surgeon doesn’t discover a person’s heart is where his intestines are supposed to be!
We have protocols and procedures in redemptive ministry as well. “You must be born again,” is a universal that applies to everyone. Several redemptive things are easily identified and a procedure for dealing with them set in place that works on anyone, any time, any place. We utilize these procedures in a more general discipling approach. At the same time we also understand that human beings are complex and the procedures for dealing with all the issues of redemption cannot be regimented.
Specific Personal Prayer
Jesus has left the process and procedure of redemption to man. We cannot redeem ourselves. We cannot redeem one another. We are all applying the work of the Cross, through the power of the Spirit. We are not in charge of our own redemption. We are utterly useless for redemption without the work of the Cross and the Spirit, in fact, and everything we can or could do totally futile in redemptive sense.
So, the first foundation of redemptive is surrender that produces submission. This applies to both the person receiving as well as the person releasing specific prayer ministry. Redemption starts with surrender and is carried out by submission. Mark that down!
So, that means the person receiving doesn’t arrive with their own diagnosis expecting you to follow their diagnosis. It also means that the people releasing don’t arrive with their own prescription in the sense that they lean on past experience: “well, today we have another tonsillectomy of the lying spirit.” No, they arrive to surrender to apply the power of the Cross by the power of the Spirit, submitting themselves to both the work of the Cross and the work of the Spirit.
Specific Prayer Ministry means, “what Jesus has decided to do in a person as High Priest applying the finished work of the Cross through the immediately available work of Holy Spirit through prepared and sent kingdom leaders.”
We begin in Specific Prayer Ministry with Romans 8:26:
“Holy Spirit helps us with our limitations, for we do not know how to pray what is needed as we should, but the Spirit Himself pleads in intercession for us with unspeakable groaning.”
Specific Prayer Ministry begins with a surrendered submission. We have limitations. Holy Spirit helps us with them by personally involving Himself in intercession in ways that language will never be capable of capturing and communicating so that we can all understand it.
A Word About Counseling
Counsel is Biblical. Gaining wisdom and understanding from leaders assigned to our lives or assigned to the kingdom through counsel is powerful! We should rejoice in or access to counsel and seek it in the many ways that it appropriately strengthens our lives. Nothing I say about counseling should seem to diminish these statements because I strongly believe the Bible. Nothing I say about counseling should be separated from these statements, nor should they be isolated into a discussion of “counseling” without an accompanying definition of the term for the purposes of our discussion.
Of course, I already know that will not be the case. People who wish to crusade will take what I say out of the context of this discussion and jump to erroneous conclusions about what I think and what I’m teaching in an effort to discredit Specific Prayer Ministry. Not much to be done about it, but I do want you to get a clear picture of when counseling is appropriate and how counseling relates to Specific Prayer Ministry as part of the greater, international discipling strategy of FreedomMinistry.
“Where there is no counsel, the people fall; but in the multitude of counsel there is safety.” [Proverbs 11:14]
The Bible’s use of the term “counsel” is a bit different from the expanded use of the term “counseling” that has taken on a massively complex meaning an encyclopedia cannot exhaust because it now covers a wide range of disciplines and applications. The “consensus definition is published as this:
“Counseling is a professional relationship that empowers diverse individuals, families, and groups to accomplish mental health, wellness, education, and career goals.” (See more at: http://www.counseling.org/knowledge-center/20-20-a-vision-for-the-future-of-counseling/consensus-definition-of-counseling#sthash.8DBU5ebp.dpuf)
Perhaps we could discuss counseling in two ways: counsel as therapy, and counseling as coaching. In this way, we simplify the discussion for our purposes here. The second is easy: counsel as coaching is part of the teaching, leadership, parenting, and discipling that occurs within the kingdom wherever destiny and purpose are being fulfilled. The first sense of therapy is just a bit more difficult, but we need only to contrast this with what we are doing in Specific Prayer Ministry so that we understand what we are doing and communicate what we are doing to people seeking redemptive help.
Therapy assumes that a person is receiving “treatment” that will “heal a disorder.” This is certainly a different perspective from coaching counseling, and would seem to demand a more complex set of procedures for diagnosis and treatment, a level of expertise for disorders more than destinies. I’m making this distinction on my own for our purposes here, not making a blanket or technical statement about medicine or psychology. Such a discussion would require a much broader examination and discussion than I am attempting in this seminar.
So, if we see counseling as coaching, it is a part of the leadership Jesus provides the kingdom. If we see counseling as therapy for treating disorders, we see it as part of the redemptive work of the Cross and the power of the Spirit.
For our purposes, we simply say this: FreedomRooms releases healing without therapy. We are not opening our rooms for therapy because we are not treating disorders. We are totally involved in surrendering and submitting to the work of Holy Spirit through the use of spiritual gift capacities, anointing for ministry, and the release of kingdom through spiritual power and authority.
We need to get this perspective at the first if we are going to understand our approach. We should also understand that clarifying what we are doing says nothing negative about what other people may be doing. We don’t say, “Counseling is wrong.” We don’t say, “Counseling means that you aren’t trusting God.” We aren’t saying, “Counseling is of the devil.”
We are saying, “Here’s what we do.” If someone asks for therapeutic counseling, we say, “We don’t do that.” Simple, right? If someone says, “I need coaching counsel,” we say, “We do that but not in FreedomRooms. FreedomRooms is not a counseling session but a time of specific prayer ministry. Counseling occurs in a different setting with a different strategy in our ministry.
Like FreedomMinistry International, we provide redemptive ministry. We are anointed to announce to you personally that everything Jesus did on the Cross is available for you right now through surrender and submission, through repentance and faith.
