Jan. 28, 2024

Living the dream with author, speaker, and prayer and healing expert David Chotka

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Dive into the spiritual journey of prayer and healing with Dr. David Chotka, a man whose life's mission is to guide others closer to God. In this episode of "Living the Dream with Curveball," Dr. Chotka shares his transdenominational approach to faith, the miraculous story of his wife's healing, and the power of spiritual discipline. Discover how Spirit Equipped Ministries is changing lives and why prayer might just be the key to unlocking your full potential.
www.spiritequip.com

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35:20 - (Cont.) Living the dream with author, speaker, and prayer and healing expert David Chotka

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> Speaker A>Welcome, um, to the living the dream podcast with curveball. If you believe you can achieve, cheat, cheat.

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> Speaker A>Welcome, um, to the living the dream with curveball podcast, a, uh, show where I ain't of you guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today we're going to talk about prayer and spiritual discipline, as I am joined by Dr. David Chatka. He is the founder of Spirit equipped Ministries.

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> Speaker A>His ministry is a transdenominational ministry that focus on equipping people with the resources they need to get the word out. David also helps people with prayer resources as well to get the movement out and let people know about God. So, David, thank you so much for joining me today.

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> Speaker B>It's a pleasure, Curtis. Thank you for having me on your podcast. Uh, it's a delight to be here. And I guess our weather and your weather is about the same.

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> Speaker A>Absolutely. So why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Speaker B>Oh, sure. I'm a pastor. I'm in the christian missionary alliance, if that means anything to an american audience. Uh, there are CMA churches in the states, but it's a small denomination. So, uh, the way I best describe myself, if you can picture a conservative baptist girl and she meets a flaming pentecostal guy, and they fall in love and they marry their child would be my denomination.

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> Speaker B>We'd be smack dab in the middle, looking at both corners of the marriage, saying, I don't want to be like mom, I don't want to be like dad, but I'm kind of in the middle. So that's what it means to be CMA. And I've been in this, uh, denomination for a little better than 22 years. And I'm a writer. I've written five books. I'm a conference speaker.

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> Speaker B>In fact, I just got an invitation to speak in Vietnam, uh, in October.

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> Speaker B>And so I will be traveling there. I've written five books, and one of those books has just been translated into Vietnamese. And so I'll be speaking to a thousand vietnamese pastors and, uh, going to see if I can give that book away to them.

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> Speaker B>So, uh, that's me. I travel, I teach, I write. I used to be a local church pastor, but I'm not in that role anymore.

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> Speaker B>I've been in this role, which was actually kind of my. You know what your title is?

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> Speaker B>Perfect curveball. I was not expecting to end out my career, know, doing this kind of work, but my bishop looked at me one day and said, david, your teaching is helpful. You're a writer, you're a conference speaker. If I can find a way to get you paid, would you consider doing this kind of a thing where you write resources and travel and teach th. And I wasn't even sure I could do that. But in the course of time, he was as good as his word. He found a way to pay my wage for three years. I'm now in year four and I'm in a place where, uh, the money is starting to come in. I've written five books, three of them in the last, uh, two years. So, um, that's what I'm doing. And my latest is a book on healing prayer. I think our intention was to talk a little bit about that one, I guess.

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> Speaker A>Yes, we're going to talk about that, and we're also going to let the listeners know about your previous books, too, so if they want to check those out. But first, transdenominational, kind of explain what that is.

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> Speaker B>It's no reference to sexuality.

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> Speaker A>Yeah, I understand that, but listen, what.

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> Speaker B>It is that means that I have. Okay, so let me just give you my own background so you'll hear the story. So my background is ukrainian and my dad was eastern orthodox. So when I was a little boy, I was baptized into the eastern orthodox church. And then I grew up inside, uh, a church that would be parallel to the United Methodist church. And then I got led to the Lord by a mennonite. Then I got discipled in the inner school christian fellowship with many people and denominations. Then I got mentored by a brethren Bible study leader.

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> Speaker B>Then I done went and studied, ah, at a consortium, ah, of different, um, um, university traditions. So there were Jesuits and there were Anglicans and Presbyterians and Baptists and Pentecostals, Mennonites on. We studied together. Then I belonged to a prayer cell that included an east orthodox priest, a roman catholic priest, an Anglican myself in the Methodist church, um, ah, Pentecostal and a Baptist. Then I went and married a Lutheran. Then I studied with a Pentecostal and I got mentored by a salvation army officer. So there you go. I am a Christian.

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> Speaker B>And there's beauty in every one of those streams.

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> Speaker B>Now, there's also great weakness in every one of those streams.

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> Speaker B>And I cannot tolerate conversations that talk about the superiority of one tradition over another because I've lived in all of them and they all have beauty and they all have weaknesses. So I'm here just to come alongside people in any particular stream of the Lord's church and to come alongside and help them. And I've lived sympathetically in most of those traditions. So there you go.

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> Speaker A>Okay. We kind of touched a little bit on spirit equipped ministries in the beginning, but kind of break it down, let the listeners know what that is and what people can expect when they work with your organization.

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> Speaker B>Well, sure. Um, this actually has history attached to my denomination. So in the christian missionary alliance, there are really two centers to what that denomination does. It started off as a multi denominational mission society, and so it tracks with who I am. The founder was a presbyterian who made the decision to found a mission society to get people from many denominations to do things. But he really had an experience of an inner work of God, and he called it the deeper life. And so if you're in any kind of CMA church, you will talk about what it means to develop your growth in the Lord, and you will talk about what it means to reach out and care. And those two things are side by side in every alliance church in the country. And so spirit equip flowed, uh, out of a role that I wound up entering into when I joined the Christian Missionary alliance. I wound up becoming the prayer coordinator, the national prayer coordinator for the canadian branch of the denomination. And so I've spoken at our various general assemblies, and I've traveled to our various fields, and I wrote a book called Power Praying, which was distributed to all of our international workers in 42 countries. Uh, that led, of course, to opportunities to speak in many of these different contexts. So I've spoken in front of national leaders in 17 countries total, but most of it was related to my role as the leader of prayer, equipping inside the christian and missionary alliance.

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> Speaker B>When that ended, um, I wound up taking the networks of relationship that I had formed through all those years of doing that. And that is the base out of which I'm operating.

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> Speaker B>So I started to develop prayer equipping, uh, events. Uh, I wrote this book called Power Praying. It was subsequently reworked into a book called the Transform Prayer Course. And in the canadian branch, uh, one quarter of our churches speak Mandarin or Cantonese, and so the book was translated into simplified Chinese. We also have a french district, the book was translated into French, and we have a significant number of vietnamese congregations. So it's just been done into Vietnamese. So, uh, this transdenominational, multicultural kind of thing has been part of what the ethos of my denomination is, and that, of course, has spilled over into what it is. So once I stopped being a local pastor of a local church, I just continued to write and develop and train and teach skills and so on. And most of the invitations now come from outside the christian missionary alliance. Uh, for example, um, my next, uh, event will be in a pentecostal church. One week later I'm in a church called the missionary church. After that I'm in a baptist church, and then I'm in an independent charismatic, and then I'm going to be doing an event in an alliance church, and then I'm going to be speaking, um, is, um. It's no longer, uh, part of, how do I say this? It's no longer primarily rooted in the christian missionary alliance. Now I speak to many different constituents. In fact, the co write that I did, healing prayer, was written with a prominent United States Methodist author. He was the principal of Asbury theological Seminary. His name is Maxiedom. Maxi's a million seller. He wrote a book called the Workbook of Living Prayer, which has sold more than a million copies and it's gone over the earth. And Maxi became my friend through an amazing series of divine appointments. And in the end, he conceded to, uh, write the forward to my first book. We then became prayer partners and friends at great distance.

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> Speaker B>Then when I did my doctoral work in communal discernment, Maxi was my second reader. He looked at me and he said, oh, you got to turn that technical language into something that ordinary people could. So I wrote a book under his watch called, hey, are you there? It's me, God. How to listen, test, and know when God speaks. And I teach people the signals that God sends, uh, with hearing the voice.

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> Speaker B>But we discovered that to get ourselves ready to do that, we put together a couple of brochures that he and I had written to train our church members on how to do healing prayer in a sensitive care. When people came forward and the theology was identical, but our approaches were different. And so we put the two together, produced a small book, and then Whitaker House, a publishing house in Pittsburgh, uh, noticed the book, asked if we would expand it, and so it was expanded 400% and just released in November a, uh, couple of months ago. So, uh, this book, healing prayer, is God's healing prayer. God's idea for restoring body, mind and spirit just came out. And uh, it's got healing stories in it, but it's not what I call, uh, a name and inclaim it kind of book. We include stories of people who were not healed. We talk about the instant heal. We talk about natural healing where your body just takes care of itself. We talk about pathway, um, to a remedy where God guides you and leads you to get yourself to a spot where you've discovered someone who's done 20 years of research, and the next, you're receiving the benefit of their sacrifice. We talk about bearing with suffering, and we talk about the miraculous through the gates of death to life, and we talk about how they intertwine. Medicine, miracle and mystery, all combining together. And, uh, I think that's the best way to describe where I land on this. So my life's an illustration of that. My daughter has a form of muscular dystrophy called myotonic dystrophy. And if you go to the back cover of the book, you'll see a picture of her in a wheelchair walking our dog down the road. And we wanted to show that, by the way, uh, we believe that medicine is an important thing, and, uh, interventions to help us are important. I'm a regular giver to the muscular dystrophy society because, um, my daughter. But beyond that, my wife was afflicted with muscular dystrophy, and she was miraculously healed. I'll tell you that story if you ask me some questions about it. But the point I'm making now is just this. In my home, I have my wife, who was miraculously healed of, uh, fsh, muscular dystrophy. Beyond medical dispute. The doctor knew her before and after and wrote the note. And I have a daughter with myotonic dystrophy, and she's in a wheelchair. And I can't tell you the number of times I've prayed for her. And the healing did not come. So I live between those two things. Uh, it's the strangest thing. And, uh, when my wife was afflicted with muscular dystrophy, she would pray with people who were afflicted with different kinds of afflictions, diseases or, uh, injuries or whatever. They would be healed even if she was declining. And so it was this crazy kind of thing where you would have a person who was struggling with their own health coming alongside someone who was struggling with their health.

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> Speaker B>The sick one would pray for, the other sick one would be healed by supernatural miracle, and one was just left with natural prayer for healing.

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> Speaker B>This is how the book works. We don't try to give bad answers, but we try to train churches to pay attention to the increase or the withdrawing of the presence of God's spirit while you're in the healing world and to cooperate with God's initiative, who really do long to be well.

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> Speaker A>Tell us about your wife's experience and how she was healed.

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> Speaker B>Okay, so this involves a missions trip.

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> Speaker B>Um, my congregation made a decision to partner with two. I'm in a canadian church, and of course, the denomination covers the planet. And so Americans invited me to join them to travel. To travel Uganda. To help Uganda rebuild after it had been devastated by Edie Amini, that madman who was killing people.

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> Speaker B>Left, right. I don't want to repeat all the stories here.

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> Speaker B>I will just tell you. Horrible evil came to the northern part of Uganda for more than 20 years. And so anybody with an education was made. The school teacher, anybody with an education became the local pastor or the firever. I mean, some of them hadn't had school in 20. If you could read, you'd become the leader. And, uh, an american congregation decided that they would partner with a ugandan bishop to try and see what they could do to help that nation rebuild. And so our three churches, uh, Spruce Grove alliance church just outside Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, that was my church in those days.

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> Speaker B>And uh, risen King Alliance Church in Niac, New York, and uh, Little Byrne alliance church in Atlanta, Georgia, all partnered together. We traveled to Uganda and each of us took a would. Uh, so there were three components. We brought a build team to help create infrastructure. We brought an education team to try and train the leaders and the pastors and we brought an evangelism team to share. And so anywhere from five to 15 people would travel each time we went. And I was the primary of, uh, the school and we'd have build teams to create a library, a Sunday school, a church building, something like that. Anyway, uh, my congregation paid a lot of money to do that because we would sponsor, uh, food and five or six days of training and resources for up to 1200 pastors. And we paid it. And so my church said, we need to hear the guy. So I brought that bishop into my church. The guy had organized it. And of course, in that, uh, uh, gathering of leaders, there were Presbyterians and Baptists, Anglicans and Catholics and men and name it, we didn't care about it all. Anyway, this guy was an independent pastor. He'd planted, get this, 48 congregations. He was overseeing those 48 even while he was trying to train pastors and leaders to get an education and grow. And, uh, he came to my church because my congregation wanted to hear this. And he started to tell these amazing stories about deliverance from death in the middle of a war zone. I mean, it was about this ugandan army against Joseph Coney. And the stories were not only compelling, they were riveting. And so in those days we had three services, one on Saturday night, one at 915 on Sunday morning and the other

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00. And this guy was telling stories about somebody waking up in the night and praying and somebody's life being spared as a bullet just missed them, that kind of thing. And then miraculous interventions happening on the battlefield. Uh, and these stories were verified in history. I told some of these stories when I was doing an event in an independent church in Vancouver. And I said, you know, in the streets of Kampala there were 300,000 people who would gather to pray every time the ugandan army was fighting Joseph Coney.

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And if the ugandan intercessors prayed, Coney would lose. If they did not pray, the ugandan army would lose. Uh, a curse would be set on them. They would drop their weapons and Coney would pick up the guns and the ammunition and resupply. And so there was this amazing relationship between people of prayer in Uganda, in Kampala, the leaders of this movement and, uh, the ugandan army in the parliament. Anyway, I was telling the story and a man in the church raised his hand. I said, you know, there were 300,000 intercessors on the streets of Kampala praying and he stood up and he said, I was one of those people.

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It was the most incredible thing. So he told me about being part of that.

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And of course, this created an amazing relationship between the churches, the prayer people, the members of parliament, the ugandan army, the prime minister and his wife, who, uh, was a christian lady. So he's telling these stories about these amazing, miraculous interventions. Everybody's on the edge of their seats. The Saturday nighters all texted their friends so that more of them came. And they came

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00 915 service. That service was overpacked and the 915 ers texted and emailed all their friends. And we had an oversized

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00 service. Standing room only. The sanctuary sat about 400 people. There were easily 650 people crammed into that building up and down the aisles. I was forced to sit on the steps next to the pulpit. My wife was in the second row from the front and she, by the way, had been afflicted with muscular dystrophy since she was born.

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She, her sister and her mother could not lift her arms up above their shoulders because I had not seen her lift her arms from the moment that I asked her to marry me. This is fully 20 years later and here we are in this church. This guy is speaking and he's telling these stories. And in the m middle of one of these stories, he stops and he looks down at me and he says with this very thick ugandan accent, David. David, what is ma m?

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I thought, ma master of arts, I don't know.

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So then he no, no, something's wrong. I've got something wrong. He put his head on the pulpit in the middle of his interrupted story and he was silent. And the whole congregation is waiting on him to finish this story.

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And he looks back at me and he says this.

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It's a wasting muscle disease. It starts in your head, it goes down into your shoulders, your shoulder blades, come out of your position, out of position. You start chronic pain between 16 and 20. If you damage a muscle, you lose it. And he went on and on and on, giving a perfect medical description that could have come out of a textbook describing my wife's family's medical. I am, um, at this point realizing that something powerful is about to happen. I'm looking at my wife, who's got her eyes closed as she's praying. And he said this, whoever has this, Jesus has just healed you. And I was looking at my wife and her arms went above her head for the first time. INT. All pain from her body vanished and she began to grow.

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Now, we'd been in that town for five years.

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Our medical doctor was the same one from the day that we knew him. She walked in and showed him. He was astonished, could hardly believe it because he had seen many people claim some sort of miraculous intervention.

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It was usually like a, uh, placebo effect. And he waited. And after three years of waiting, he wrote a medical note that said, all effects of Fsh Mustafi have vanished in this. But I mean, it was the most amazing, incredible thing. So, uh, that's what happened in front of 650 witnesses at Spruce Grove Alliance Church on February the 22nd, 2009.

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42 a.m. The time is nailed in my memory because I was looking at my wife and I could see the clock at the back of the sanctuary. Anyway, when the service was done, we had guests with us. Of course they'd come because they were thinking about traveling to Uganda to take part with us in a bill project. The one fellow was quite handy with tools and the lady was quite an evangelist. So they were staying at her home.

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And the plan was we would go home after church.

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We would have the preacher, the bishop, to come to our home to have lunch with and they could have questions and answers, wanted to. And I was to take the heavy pots and pans off the top shelves that she could not reach to bring it down so she could prepare the lunch for all our guests. I walked in the house. She stands on the thing, her. She reaches up, takes down all the heavy pots and puts them down on the thing, looks at me and my balance is back.

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And two weeks later, when she was ticked off at our daughter, she ran up the stairs with my daughter.

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She ran up the stairs. She'd not run up any stairs for more than 20 years. It was a remarkable, astonishing, medically verified healing that happened in front of an entire congregation. But the secret behind it is just this. Curtis. We had made a decision to stop praying for healing.

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We were seeking not the healing, but the healer, because we'd prayed so many times and we weren't expecting anything. And when we weren't expecting anything and we're just trying to serve our Lord, this incredible thing happened in the middle of us trying to be. So I must tell you, um, every morning after that, I started to thank God. Every time I woke up in the morning, I used to have to walk over to her side of the bed, have her put her arms around my shoulders to pull her out of bed so she could get her balance, and then let her walk toward the bathroom.

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I'd have to guide her there to get a hot shower on the next day, she jumped up and it was kind of a thing every time she climbs a set of stairs. I know, I'm.

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> Speaker A>Amen. Praise God for that.

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> Speaker B>I really do.

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> Speaker A>Yes, but tell the listeners about your.

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> Speaker B>I have. I have five books. Uh, three are on the market right now. The one that just came out is published by Whitaker House. It's called healing prayer, God's idea for restoring body, mind and spirit.

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> Speaker B>It's a co write with Dr. Maxi Dunham, who was the president of Asbury seminary.

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> Speaker B>And this one's available anywhere books are sold. So if you just put in the words healing prayer on your Google search, it'll show up at this book. Or you can go to books a million order it. You can go to Walmart if you want to and order the thing. Or you can go to Barnes and noble. Wherever books are sold, you can get this one. This is the one that Whitaker house asked us to rewrite. And so there's an earlier version on Amazon, but this one's available and it's four times the size. It does contain my wife's healing story in there. It also contains the story of partial healing. It contains stories of people who did not find an answer to them.

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> Speaker B>And it tells, uh, miraculous accounts that are medically verified. It talks about times when people are in between and they receive a partial healing.

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> Speaker B>It talks about times when no physical healing comes and emotional consolation have come. It talks about emotional healing. It talks about mental health.

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> Speaker B>All of those issues are in this book. So it's a comprehensive book about how to train people to enter into healing prayer, whether they're in churches or whether they belong to it. So that's the one, that's the most recent. Just before that, I did this large work and it's called, hey, are you there? It's me, God. How to listen. Test to know when God speaks. This one, in my mind, is probably the more important of the two.

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> Speaker B>And I'll tell you why. Um, I have preached so far in 17 nations. I just got invited to Vietnam, so that'll be 18. But regardless, it didn't matter if I was working with young or old, if I was working with any particular branch of the Lord's church. Didn't matter if they were Catholics or Baptists or Presbyterians or whatever. It didn't matter what their background was, didn't matter their age of stage, didn't matter the color of their skin. I would ask this one question and always get the same answer. I'd say, how many here in the room want to know they're being guided by God? Every hand in the room we go. Every hand.

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> Speaker B>Then I'd say, okay, put your hand down. Ask a second question. How many here struggle to know if that's actually God they're hearing, or if it's just their own stuff, or if it's confusion, or if it's the voice of their friend, or if it's the radio broadcast they heard yesterday. Same hands go up.

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> Speaker B>And it was my struggle too. Uh, bottom line for me is that nobody taught me how to pay attention to the signals that God sends to guide us. And so that book, the Harry there, it's me. God book, is a compendium of a five day a week guide to teach people the signals that God sends to communicate to us. And I'll give you the anchor text that you can get. So I avoided some of those big stories that had to do with angels appearing or the star moving in the sky. We just went through Christmas. So the angel appears to the virgin and speaks to her, and she gets it. The magi are guided by a star whose magic. Those are the big ones, and I believe in them.

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> Speaker B>But the thing that guides us is presence. And so I use romans 1417 as the center of that book. The kingdom of God is not eating, but righteousness in the Holy Spirit. And then I define righteousness as a sweet walk with the Lord, peace as internal surrender and joy as internal celebration. Despite all the circumstances of it. When all three of those wax large, as you're considering a step to take, that's likely God saying, if they get frozen or they diminish, that's a warning sign. And God is saying to you, wait a minute. You better get some more, uh, information on this one. You better do due diligence. There's something here you don't know.

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> Speaker B>And if your peace, your righteousness and your joy completely vanish and you get a jarring experience in the end, bottom line is you're about to be an idiot or shafted. Get out of the way. Don't do that. Anyway, I teach people how to pay attention to that. It's five days a week. It has a study guide at the end of each week, and the book ends with a framework for communal discerning of the voice of God. And, uh, this is the fruit of my doctoral research. I have a doctoral degree from Gordon Conwell seminary, and my doctoral work was on hearing the voice of the spirit. And my second reader, maxi Dunham, um, said to me, david, you don't want people to have to navigate through all the technical language, turn it into a user friendly, um, book that the ordinary Christian can use quickly. And so the book is rooted with stories from my own life leading to a scripture text, leading to a. Or it's an historical account, like the life of John or Charles Wesley, the story of Hannah Whiteall, the accounts of George Mueller, who heard the voice when he fed 31,000 or so. Uh, that book was the fruit, uh, of three years of doctoral research and then two.

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> Speaker B>And I used that to help people understand.

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> Speaker B>Now, before that, there's a book called power praying. This book is now out of print, and I'm going to re release it with some fresh writing. It's going to be called living out the Lord, line by line. This book was my first one, published in 2009. Uh, the research happened, uh, in the twelve years prior to that. So way back. This one, in my mind, is an important work for a mature believer. Here I look at every key word inside the framework of Jesus, and then I put the key word in the prayer, the our father prayer, back in the context. And I say this very simple thing. I say, you know, if Jesus is saying for you to pray for the kingdom, he defines that in the gospels.

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> Speaker B>Why don't you take his definition of what and bring that back into your prayer? And when he talks about heaven, surely his references to heaven in Matthew should be written back into the prayer that he teaches us to pray and so on and so forth. So all the way through the prayer I did that.

00:28:57.675 --> 00:29:20.319
> Speaker B>So here's how I would describe this. So if you can picture a wall, let's make it 28ft long with a foot for each chapter of Matthew's gospel. Let's add a couple of extra feet. So let's get it to 30ft and let's make the 6th chapter where the Lord's prayer is found 3ft wide and then make all of the text of the Lord's prayer really big. Then uh, I'm going to ask Curtis, what's your favorite color? Do you have a favorite color?

00:29:21.089 --> 00:29:22.990
> Speaker A>My favorite color is green.

00:29:23.140 --> 00:30:11.465
> Speaker B>Okay. So if I was to take the first word father and circle that with green and draw lines to all the places on that wall where you see Jesus using the word father, uh you'd have at least 53 lines emanating from that word our father to the places in Matthew's gospel now colored in green. So if you go to the next word heaven and I'll pick my favorite color, that happens to be purple, right. I would circle the word purple and I would draw lines to all the different places in Matthew's gospel. And here's what would happen. The green and the purple would overlap and intersect and there'd be another 50 locations in Matthew where you would see the reference to heaven or the kingdom of heaven showing up and all that's written.

00:30:11.498 --> 00:31:39.049
> Speaker B>And then if you take the third word uh name, glory to the name. There's not many of those. There's about 15 of them. You would have 15 more lines. Then you take the word kingdom. Now there you hit the jackpot. That thing, kingdom is everywhere in Jesus teaching. And if you picked your next color let's say pink or something and you draw all these lines. By the time you get to the fourth, fifth and 6th word the wall is so full of color you're seeing a rainbow all rooted. What I try to teach in that part praying book is that the Lord's prayer is to all of uh Jesus. We pray it as a memory prayer. Jesus intended for us to pray it as a framework to think his thought. Now I wrote the first one, the power praying book to give for free to the Ugandans because they didn't have any education, they didn't have any training and I wanted to give them a free book because my intention behind that I um, didn't want to just sort of be there for a week and leave. I wanted to put a resource in their hand. Um, so we gave 16 ah, thousand copies of those books to travel people in Uganda, they were the first ones to receive. Then when I had a conference speaker come into my church, he asked me if I wrote anything. I told him about the book and he said, let me see it. And he took it and he said, I'm going to publish this. And so that book got published through, uh, a curveball.

00:31:40.829 --> 00:31:46.925
> Speaker B>I wrote it for the tribal Ugandans to train them because they hadn't had enough education.

00:31:47.107 --> 00:32:12.273
> Speaker B>And in the end it became a book published in America and Canada as a direct result of my, uh, inviting a speaker who was founding a company that would publish. And that's how the book got published. So there's another one out there, but you don't want to read. It's my doctoral thesis. This is published by a german, uh, publishing house. It's called sifting our discerning. But listen, this is expensive. You probably don't want it. It's going to cost you$100 to buy the thing because that's what it costs for Scotch.

00:32:12.402 --> 00:32:18.213
> Speaker B>And it's basically my doctoral thesis in print. And I have one more resource that's already out there.

00:32:18.412 --> 00:32:21.266
> Speaker B>It's called, uh, sifting our discerning. And it's a brochure.

00:32:21.377 --> 00:33:20.140
> Speaker B>So those are the five. And I've got two irons in the fire. I'm writing two more. But the point of every one of these resources, every single one of them, is designed to be a training tool. It is to put training into the hands of ordinary people to help them discover how to do whatever the topic of the book has. So in the Lord's prayer case, it's to deepen the prayer life of your church or your small groups. Um, if you are, um, picking up the. Hey, are you there? It's me God book. It's designed to teach individuals, small groups, how to hear the voice of Jac naes when he's talking. The one on healing prayer is designed to be given to churches with healing prayer teams in order to empower those teams to learn how to pay attention to the signals that God sends when, uh, not to mean, I don't know if you've ever been in one of those kooky prayer lines where somebody makes some claim over you, says you're healed and you're not.

00:33:22.109 --> 00:33:25.599
> Speaker B>Has that ever happened to you, Curtis? Someone's got one of those words.

00:33:26.529 --> 00:33:38.013
> Speaker A>It actually has because I am totally blind and people would have me. Hey, we got a speaker coming to church tonight. If you come, uh, he can lay hands on you and you'll be healed.

00:33:38.061 --> 00:33:42.445
> Speaker A>So actually, that has happened to me, and I'm still totally blind.

00:33:42.637 --> 00:34:02.998
> Speaker B>Okay, well, listen, um, I would not say that to you. What I'd say is I am happy to pray with you and ask, uh, whether or not this is something that God would grant. And, uh, then when I pray, I wouldn't say, oh, God, heal this man. I would say, okay, God, guide my praying. And I talk about that inside the framework.

00:34:03.094 --> 00:34:10.650
> Speaker B>By the way, it's an audiobook too. The healing prayer book is an audiobook, so you could hear me read the text of the material.

00:34:12.010 --> 00:34:28.626
> Speaker B>Um, how do I say this? There are eight things pitfalls to avoid. We have named, and one of them is what I call the name and claim, where you assume that everybody's going to get healed. And actually, in the entire bible, there's not one case of anybody doing that.

00:34:28.728 --> 00:35:34.657
> Speaker B>Not one. Um, but I will tell you this. Let me tell you about something that happened to me when I went to Japan, because, uh, this would be a typical thing. So, um, in the christian missionary alliance, uh, the reason for the churches to exist is to help the missionary. So the church I was last serving, the one here in Windsor heritage church, had a relationship. It was called a seamless link with, um, a couple who had connected and married in our church and they were doing mission. They had not had a visit from any team in the entire time that they were there. And so my congregation decided to send me with a team of six people to visit them and to give them, spoil them, love on them, spend some time with them. So we went and what we would do with each of them is we would pray specifically with each missionary team or missionary person or missionary couple. I mean, it was heartbreaking, some of the stuff they've dealt with. First conversation I had with a young man, with a fellow who had just had his mum had committed suicide. He didn't know if he could talk to anybody. And now I lost my own brother to suicide.

00:35:34.753 --> 00:35:37.400
> Speaker B>So I was able to sit with him and pray with him.

00:35:37.769 --> 00:36:52.639
> Speaker B>But in Japan, it's got the highest suicide rate in the world. And if you hear them blow a whistle to stop the trains, it's because somebody stepped in front of one devastating kind of cultural thing. So we were given care to him. And, uh, there's other couples that not had received a visit for years and years. We just love on them and take the nerve. We would pray around. The things that they were trying to accomplish was one couple where the couple had finally figured out a way to be able to share the gospel with the jabs. And he had just figured this out, and he was beginning to lose his hearing. So he had about 20% of his hearing, and he had these big hearing aids on his ears. And when he wore the hearing aids, he could make out most of a conversation, but he could not listen to the voices of females because the pitch didn't work for his earphones or for his ability to be able to read lips. And in japanese culture, women look down and they cover their mouths when they speak to men. And so this man who was losing his hearing was losing his ability to communicate with half his congregation. Anyway, it was a great grief to him, and he asked us to pray for his healing. And so here's what we did.

00:36:53.010 --> 00:37:17.510
> Speaker B>We said, okay, ah. And, um, we use the story of blind Bartimaeus in Mark, chapter ten. The story of Bartimaeus, um, is where Jesus is walking by and the man is blind, and he hears that Jesus is walking by. All the people say this, and he starts yelling. He starts shouting, he starts screaming, and he's so obnoxious, they tell him to stop yelling.

00:37:18.969 --> 00:37:39.018
> Speaker B>He keeps yelling. All the same. Jesus asks for him to come by. He comes by, and there's Jesus. It's middle eastern heat. It's obvious the man had lost his vision rather than been born blind, because it says he lost his sight inside. He's put in front of Jesus in the middle eastern heat, and it's got to be 40 celsius. What do you call that? 120 degrees fahrenheit?

00:37:39.114 --> 00:37:46.800
> Speaker B>Anyway, it's hot. The Lord looks at him and says, what do you want? Now, in my mind, that's a really dumb question.

00:37:48.690 --> 00:38:00.126
> Speaker B>The guy, blind, he's been screaming for Jesus to heal him. He asks the Lord to come by and do this, and the Lord makes him say it, even though the need was obvious.

00:38:00.248 --> 00:38:17.210
> Speaker B>He says to the man, what do you want me to do for you? The man says, I want my sight back. Well, everybody knew he wanted his sight back, but for some reason, the man had to name it. And as he says it, suddenly this healing happens and gets his sight back, and he starts to flat at the end of mark ten.

00:38:17.360 --> 00:39:26.954
> Speaker B>Anyway, we're using this text with the man who's losing his hair. And I said, look, the blind guy had to say it. I know you're struggling with your hearing. What do you want, Jesus? He said, I want to serve him in Japan, and if I don't get my hearing back, I'm not going to be. I said, then why don't we ask the Lord? He said, yes. Now, we were in his home. It was a little tiny japanese living room. Japanese homes are much smaller than me. Little tiny room. Five of us gathered around. We see he began to feel heat and vibration in his, and he began to get very excited. While we were praying, he pulled off his hearing aids, couldn't hear a thing. So I said to him, please don't bluff a miracle. Put your hearing aids back. We're going to gather tomorrow. Before we leave, I'm teaching a seminar to all the international workers. Are you going to be there? He said, I will. So we gathered in the room, and all of the iws were there, all the international workers and my team was there. And I was teaching a seminar to encourage them and bless them. And at the end of that, I said, look, everybody, this man here is losing his hearing.

00:39:27.081 --> 00:39:32.673
> Speaker B>We need to pray for him. And they said, oh, we've been praying for him for a long time. I said, well, let's ask God.

00:39:32.791 --> 00:39:55.382
> Speaker B>We're not going to bluff a miracle, but we can cooperate when we see the signals. So we start to pray. Happened that man who lost his mother begins to physically shape, and he starts to weep. He's crying buckets of tears as he's praying for this man, and he hardly knows him. The guy's name was Matt. I said, matt, it is obvious the Lord is praying through you by his spirit.

00:39:55.445 --> 00:40:08.030
> Speaker B>Stand in front of this. And he put his hands over his ear. There was another lady who was one quarter Japanese and three quarters Singapore Chinese. Her name was Serene, and she is a scientist with a huge brain.

00:40:09.010 --> 00:40:26.050
> Speaker B>Her whole body is shaking. And I looked at her, and I said, serene, you're vibrating. And she said, yeah, I don't know what it is. And she's walking back and forth. And the closer she gets to the man we're about to pray for, the more her body vibrates, and the farther away she gets from that, the less I said, what are you doing?

00:40:26.199 --> 00:40:31.766
> Speaker B>She said, I am experimenting with this thing, this presence. I said, get over here and pray for the guy.

00:40:31.867 --> 00:40:57.130
> Speaker B>So she came close, and she put her hands on him. And there was a lady named Deb standing there. Now, Deb was from, um, a very conservative background where women don't speak and they cover their heads with a. And she didn't want to say anything in front of the crowd. And I looked at her husband and I said, I think Deb is supposed to say, be open to those ears. And Mark is nodded.

00:40:57.210 --> 00:41:14.414
> Speaker B>The man nodded his head. And I looked at Deb, and I said, deb, you're supposed to shout be open. And she said, I don't want to shout, because she was from one of those traditions where the women would not speak as the men were in the room. It was a very conservative group. So I said, would you obey your husband?

00:41:14.461 --> 00:41:48.425
> Speaker B>And she said, I would, which is a wrong. I would not say that to most people. Anyway, I turned to Marcus, I said, marcus, you have to tell Debbie to shout be open. And so he says that to her, she swallows very hard. And honestly, Curtis, it was like she was falling in slow motion. She starts to fall in slow motion, and at the top of her lungs she shouts, be m opened at the top of her lungs. And something went snap in the room. And it was like the presence lifted. The guy took his hearing aids out and he could hear every female.

00:41:48.617 --> 00:42:18.550
> Speaker B>Now, we put room dividers between them and females, and we had the women look away from where he was and say some things. And he heard the man's hearing was healed, but it didn't get healed instantly. It got healed a little bit at first when we prayed with no refect, a little bit more when we prayed. And he felt it, and he pulled the hearing aids out and completely. But it wasn't healed by me doing the prayer.

00:42:19.389 --> 00:42:40.320
> Speaker B>It was healed by a whole team listening to the voice of the spirit and paying attention to those. So that's what we did. When it comes to praying with people who have lifelong afflictions, like you're talking about with this blind issue, in your case, you, uh, don't bluff a miracle, but you cooperate with one. Does that make sense to you?

00:42:41.010 --> 00:42:43.710
> Speaker A>That makes perfect sense, yeah.

00:42:43.780 --> 00:44:54.313
> Speaker B>So that's in the audiobook. That story is not, uh. We had to reduce the number of stories that I wanted to tell because we had to get the book done. But, um, the principles that are in the book is that you cannot bluff a miracle, but you can cooperate with one. And the phrase that we use to say that is God, initiate. And there are many signals to it. One of the signals is rise in compassion. When you're in the middle of the prayer, especially if it's someone you don't know if it's a stranger. It's one thing to feel compassion because your loved one's suffering with some affliction, and who doesn't feel that? But if you're a stranger and you're seeing someone and you're at a prayer time and you're starting to pray for them, and this compassion rises up. Ordinarily, it's a signal that God's going to do something. This shows up in Mark, chapter one, when the leper comes to Jesus. And he'd not been able to be touched by a human for as long as he had that affliction. Now, we just passed through Covid, so we know, not being able to give someone a hug, not being allowed to gather, not being allowed to talk to them in the same room, having to be 6ft or 10ft apart, whatever the rule was in your state, and then having it restored, it was like we'd returned to something. The man with leprosy had not been physically touched for a very long. He runs up to Jesus. He throws himself down. It's in Mark, chapter one, starting. And he says to the Lord, now, here is the signal that shows up in many of the healing. It says that Jesus of Nazareth was moved. He's praying for a stranger. And as the man speaks, then he reaches out and touches the leper, which is. And Jesus virtue flows through him and into the man, and the leprosy is pushed. So one of the signals that God would have you pray for, there are other signals that are also part of this fiery, uh, heat inside of a person. Your body beginning to vibrate or shake or strong emotion that you don't control when you're in the middle of that, that's usually the Lord's assignment on you, that you're supposed to be the one who.

00:44:54.431 --> 00:44:57.206
> Speaker B>So this came to a head, actually, uh, 2019.

00:44:57.398 --> 00:45:11.181
> Speaker B>I was invited to do a pastor's conference in the province of Quebec. And they speak french there. Now I have enough french to be able to order off a menu and find my way to the washroom, but I don't have enough french to speak.

00:45:11.235 --> 00:45:16.945
> Speaker B>Well, anyway, I had a young student who I had trained in prayer. He was only 17 years old.

00:45:17.128 --> 00:46:14.461
> Speaker B>And julian was part of a team that I took to go with me to that capacitors conference. There were four other people there, and, uh, there had been a prayer room set apart for us to do our prayer time. Anybody who wanted one on one prayer could pray with me and this young lad julian, because he spoke. There was a man by the name of Creightian who came. And he came because five years before, his son had experienced a miraculous series, uh, of events. After I spoke there, he heard about me. He had a bad back. He wanted to be what's called the bivocational pastor. He wanted to open a business, have the business pay him a wage so that he could. Now he had a bad back, his health was failing, and he walked into the room speaking only french, sat down in the chair. And through the interpreter, I understood him to say that, uh, he wanted prayer so that he could perch and found a business and have health enough to be able to. Now that is a godly objective. So we started to pray.

00:46:14.525 --> 00:46:17.282
> Speaker B>And, uh, the young man is translating for me.

00:46:17.335 --> 00:47:17.153
> Speaker B>And while I'm praying, I feel nothing. I see. And I look over at the translator, the 17 year old lad, his whole body is physically shaking, meaning to weep. Fire is brewing up through his spirit flowing. I looked at him and I said, julian, what's going on? He said, pastor David, I'm so filled with compassion, I just can't help myself. I said, well, it's clear I have not been assigned to pray for the guy. You have put your hand on his back. This 17 year old lad, who had never seen a miraculous healing before in his life, never participated in one, and was skeptical about any of these things, put his hand on the man back. The man's back went snap. He jumped out of his chair. He was instantly healed. He grabbed julian, spun him around the room, and then he went back where the 80 pastors were gathered and told all the 80 pastors that when the young lad had prayed for him. Now, the whole point of the book is that there is not just one person who gets those miraculous accidents.

00:47:17.282 --> 00:47:22.581
> Speaker B>Rather, those gifts of healing are assigned to come. And God guards his glory.

00:47:22.726 --> 00:47:30.860
> Speaker B>He wants many people to flow in the power, and so he's jealous for his glory. So he doesn't always land on the same person.

00:47:31.550 --> 00:47:34.302
> Speaker B>What he does is he lands on many.

00:47:34.436 --> 00:48:03.061
> Speaker B>And we're supposed to pay attention to those sick becomes the entry point for those acts of power to happen. So, um, I want to teach people in the healing prayer book, the co write with Maxi Dunham, I want to teach people to pay attention to those sick. Now, the last two stories I told you aren't in the book, but there's many more that are. And, um, of course, we had to watch how many stories we put in, uh, because there were cases where people were not quite healed. Let me tell you one more.

00:48:03.115 --> 00:48:07.425
> Speaker B>I don't know how much time we've got, but I'd like to tell you one more if that's acceptable to you, Curtis.

00:48:07.538 --> 00:48:15.340
> Speaker A>Well, actually, uh, we kind of need to close out. We're kind of going a little long, and we want to, uh, close out and give you a website.

00:48:16.190 --> 00:48:16.793
> Speaker B>Okay, sure.

00:48:16.831 --> 00:48:19.034
> Speaker A>I can keep up with everything that you're up to.

00:48:19.152 --> 00:49:24.230
> Speaker B>Yeah. All right. So my website is a really simple thing. So the word spirit, like holy spirit and the word equipment, like in the word equipment, put spirit and equip together into one word and go to spiritequip.com. And there you'll find links to the books. You'll find links, uh, to the website. You'll find links to Amazon if you want to purchase the books, and so on. You'll also find YouTube videos of my teaching. You'll find some blogs. And, uh, you will also be able to subscribe to my monthly, um, thing and my m monthly, um, newsletter. Uh, uh, and there'll be links to my Facebook page as well, and that kind of thing. So spiritequipped.com and I do conferences and events, and if churches want to invite me, there's a web form that you can just press on and you can send a note to invite me or to consider or. The easiest way to do that is to take the website's name, spiritequip.com, and put David in front of it. David@spiritequip.com and you can invite me to come to your church or do your conference in your midst, or you can ask me questions about the so that's the easiest way to be in touch with me there.

00:49:24.230 --> 00:49:38.114
> Speaker A>Ah, we go. Ladies and gentlemen, be sure to pick up those books. Go to spiritequip.com. If you know somebody that can benefit from Dr. Chaka's message, be sure to follow rate review share this episode to as many people as possible.

00:49:38.311 --> 00:49:46.369
> Speaker A>If you have any guests or suggestion topics, Cjackson 102 at Cox. Net is the place to send them. As always, thank you for listening.

00:49:46.449 --> 00:49:51.077
> Speaker A>Thank you for your support. Dr. Chakra, thank you so much for joining me today.

00:49:51.244 --> 00:49:54.840
> Speaker B>Oh, it's been a privilege and a joy to be on your podcast, and I'd love to come again.

00:49:55.369 --> 00:50:03.326
> Speaker A>For more information on the living the Dream podcast, visit ww djcurveball.com.

00:50:03.507 --> 00:50:08.329
> Speaker A>Until next time, stay focused on living the dream. Dream.