God is in the moving business. In the very first pages of Genesis where the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, you can see evidence that God is the God of the plan. He has one. He’s always had one. Not only does He have one but, He’s always working to bring His plan to fruition. Throughout the course of human history, God has been seen moving and stirring the hearts of His people. At times when His people have shut down and allowed themselves to be distracted from His first priority of establishing the Kingdom, in the midst of the distraction, God is still moving to work the plan. So don’t be afraid of the complacency you may see around you. It won’t stay that way for long. God is on the Throne and on the move. Do you think that everything that God has already executed in bringing Jesus into planet earth will fall flat because of few cold saints? The stirring, the reviving, the outpouring of God’s Presence, is on the horizon. Not only will God stir His people to a greater awareness of His purpose, but often times these moves are accompanied by spectacular signs, wonders, and dramatic miracles. Healing is a physical sign pointing to our Eternal on the move God. In today’s podcast, we are going to take a look at the healing connection to some of these revival type moves.

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Accept the Challenge

Each week’s podcast contains a call to action. The Word of God will not produce in your life unless you put into operation.
This week’s call is:

Have confidence in the unchangeable nature of God. If He ever healed anybody, He will certainly heal you. Reach out and receive it in Jesus Name.

Join the Conversation

Each week’s podcast also contains a question designed to encourage testimony. Testimony is vital to a believer’s life. We overcome by it (Rev. 12:11).
This week’s question is:

Question: What healing miracle has the Lord done in your life? Please share your testimony in the comments section below.

Episode Resources:

You can find additional information on the subject of the will of God in the resources listed below.

1. Why Divine Healing Is Better for Your Life

About Emery

Emery committed his life to the Lord Jesus Christ over 40 years ago and has served as both a full-time pastor and an itinerant minister. Both he and his wife Sharon of 35 years emphasize personal growth and development through the Word of God. The ministry of the Holy Spirit is both the focus and the hallmark of their mission. Read more about them here.

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If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate it on Stitcher Radio and leave a review. If you have a suggestion for a Bible topic you would like to see taught, or if you have a question, please e-mail me at emery@emeryhorvath.com

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Podcast Notes

Miracle and Healing in the First Great Awakening

• If you recall from last week’s podcast, how the Lord used Johnathan Edwards among others to usher in the First Great Awakening.
• We looked a little bit at the great impact of that great awakening.
• But, did you know that healing was a part of that move of God?
• It’s apart of every move of God.
• We are going to glean heavily from Craig Keener’s massive tome on Miracles.
• Here’s the first of several quotes from that book.

Claims of supernatural phenomena accompanied the First Great Awakening in Britain’s American colonies.185 In the 1740s, evangelical leaders were emphasizing the Spirit’s activity, and a few even allowed for instant physical healings.¹

America Was Born Out of Revival

• America became a nation in 1776.
• The First Great Awakening took place among the colonists thirty to forty years before that.
• So, American was birth out of a powerful Holy Spirit empowered ‘healing in evidence’ move of God.
• During that time, the church was heavily inundated with ‘cessation-ist thinking’, that there was no need for God to do miracles because we now have the Bible, that miracles ceased with the death of the last apostle.

The Healing of Mercy Wheeler

• But right in the middle of this mighty outpouring of God’s power on the colonists, God performed a mighty miracle when He healed a woman named Mercy Wheeler.
• Mercy was disabled and her healing caused some critics of present miracles to rethink their views.
• She had been bedridden for seventeen years, ever since 1726.
• She was instantly healed on May 25, 1743.
• As the power of God hit her, she trembled and she shook.
• People in her vicinity said she could speak only what they regarded as gibberish as she felt God’s presence.
• I’m fairly convinced as I read this account that Mercy Wheeler spoke with other tongues.
• The shaking began with her hands but finally racked her whole body, until, when it passed, she felt the first strength she had experienced in many years.
• Feeling then a compulsion to act, she got up and walked sixteen feet, crying out, “Bless the Lord Jesus, who has healed me!” to the amazement of all present.
• The preacher attempted to calm her down, but she walked around the room a few more times, and over the next five months she kept walking farther and farther.²
• Critics of the Great Awakening denounced the healing of Mercy Wheeler as mere enthusiasm and Catholic-like superstition.
• In response, the Boston Gazette noted that her healing was ‘well known and attested,’.
• The critic then conceded that the cure was genuine, but protested the application of the biblical label ‘miracle’.
• Isn’t that silly?
• The woman was bedridden for seventeen years and now she’s up walking around by the power of God but they refused to call that a miracle.
• As historian Thomas Kidd observes, “Cessationism was so deeply rooted that evangelicals struggled with how not to call such astonishing experiences miracles.”
• She was not the only one who received their healing during the Great Awakening.

The Healing of Mary Read

• On July 24, 1769, Mary Read, who had been bedridden for three years, heard a voice that seemed audible, repeating three times that she should rise and walk, and suddenly she found herself well.
• I had a similar experience when I was healed of sleep-apnea in April of 2007.
  • I was standing in my bedroom and mentally going over and feeling bad, really just beating myself, in my struggles to receive my healing from the Lord and to get off the sleep-apnea breathing machine.
  • All of a sudden, I heard a voice behind me that said two words.
  • “You’re healed.”
  • My first thought was to examine that voice: where did it come from? Who was it who spoke? Was it God? Was it Jesus? Maybe it was an angel? It was a voice I hadn’t heard of before.
  • But instead of going down that path, I shut that thought process off and instead of examining the voice, I examined what the voice said, “You’re healed.”
  • Is this true? Does the Word say I’m healed?

Matthew 8:17 (KJV) — 17 That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.

1 Peter 2:24 (NKJV) — 24 who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed.

• Always compare what you hear or what you hear someone say with God’s Word.
• Now, this next thing is really critical when it comes to receiving your healing.
• I agreed with what I heard.
• The voice said I was healed.
• I said in response to the voice, ‘YES I AM’.
• Now, here’s the next equally critical thing.
• I acted on those two words.
• I deduced that if I am healed like the Word said and the voice said then why would I need to sleep with a machine?
• So that night, I went to sleep without the machine and I slept just fine.
• The next night, I did the same thing.
• And, the night after that and the one after that and every single night to this day from April 2007 to today, I have slept soundly without the aid of a machine.
• I never felt any power.
• I never sensed any anointing.
• All I did was agree with the Word and act on the Word.
• Nothing more, nothing less.
• And, that’s all you have to do.
• I had the condition for seven years.
• So, I understand Mary Reed who was sick for three years and heard a voice that seemed audible, repeating three times that she should rise and walk.

The Healing of Mary Spaulding and Hannah Coleman

• On July 10, 1794, Mary Spaulding, sick for many years, felt an overwhelming impression that as Jesus healed the woman with the flow of blood, she too would be healed.
• Praising God, “I immediately arose from my bed of sickness,” she testified, and “felt free from all my infirmities.”
• Also in the 1700s, Hannah Coleman of New Jersey, disabled after a fall from a horse, one day felt touched by God and ran around the house, carrying her bed, moving furniture, and praising God.³
• But, there were other healings in Great Awakening included those reported by Presbyterian pastor John Moorhead, and a number of evangelical ministers from this era noted their own remarkable recoveries.
• Jonathan Edwards, himself, observed that a season of mental and physical health accompanied the revival, with a significant decline in depression and sickness.⁴

John Wesley and Miracle Healings

• John Wesley challenged some cessationist views of his contemporaries.
• His journal reports many healing miracles, often in response to his own prayers.
• So, there was healing among the Methodists.
• On one occasion, for example, a man apparently dead returned to life when Wesley prayed for him.
• Wesley’s brother Charles was raised from a debilitating attack of pleurisy and apparently unconsciousness when a woman moved by a dream declared, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth arise and believe, and thou shalt be healed of all thy infirmities.”
• A doctor denounced the emotion in Wesley’s meetings until one of his own patients, convulsed by emotion, emerged completely cured.
• One of his Methodist preachers, John Valton, cited both healings and rainfall that occurred in response to prayer.
• Three different early Methodists sources recount the healing of a woman named Ann Brookes whose blind eye was healed after she prayed for healing and dreamed that Christ touched it.
• Wesley expected signs of the Spirit regularly in his meetings ⁵
• I bet you haven’t heard that about the Methodists.

George Whitefield and God’s Power

• The Great Awakening was not just about Jonathan Edwards.
• God used other men to stoke this divine attack on society, men like George Whitefield for example.
• Whitefield was an anointed preacher extraordinaire.
• He preached in outdoor meetings.
• People would come and climb trees to get a view and a listen to His Words.
• The Spirit of God would get to moving so strong that people fell out of the trees under the power of God.
• It wasn’t the wind of Whitefield’s words that swept the trees, it was the wind of the Spirit.

More Modern Times and Modern Moves

• Let’s move up to some more modern times and more modern moves.
• Edward Irving, a minister of the Scottish Church in London began calling for a new expectation for the miraculous.
  • The result of that call?
  • By 1830, Irving’s congregation began to experience supernatural healings as well as ‘speaking with other tongues.’
  • That’s 1830, approximately 75 years before Azuza.
• In 1843, a Lutheran pastor in Germany’s Black Forest, Johann Blumhardt, was praying for a dying young girl named Katarina Dittus and he found that Jesus words, ‘they shall lay hands on the sick’ were not outdated.
  • She was healed and there was such a stir in that local parish that revival broke out.
  • People flocked to the churches confessing their sins and seeking deliverance from the wrath of God.
  • The newspapers spread these events all over and sick people came from all over the continent to be healed by this Lutheran pastor.
  • In 1852, he withdrew from the denomination and opened up a healing home that could handle 150 invalids.
  • In this home, these people were instructed in the biblical message of healing within a faith building atmosphere.
  • By 1887, there were over 30 of these healing homes operating in America.
• Moving forward, in 1851 a young florist, Dorothea Trudel, anointed with oil several of her co-workers who had fallen ill in the Swiss village of Mannedorf on Lake Zurich.
  • Their sickness had resisted all medical treatment.
  • When she prayed for them, they were instantly healed.
  • This event propelled her to the forefront of the public and people from all over Europe came to be healed by her prayers.

Well Known Believers Who Were Healed by God’s Power

• Some of the most prominent Christians names in the history of Christendom – household names have been miraculously healed.

Andrew Murray

• In 1879, his physician ordered him to stop preaching due to a throat problem.
• This forced upon him the imposition of silence for almost two years.
• Having exhausted the best medical efforts, he went to London in 1882 and ran into a Pastor Stockmayer who convinced him of the truth of James 5:14-15 and he was completely healed in 3 weeks time.
• From his pen and position over the Dutch Reformed Church came 240 books and tracts.

A.B. Simpson & Charles Cullis

• He became pastor of the Presbyterian church in New York City.
• Within two years, he was plagued with physical infirmities.
• He had a weak and fragile constitution since his youth.
• By 1881, he was given only a few months to live.
• He retired from his church, went to Maine to rest and die and ran into a Boston doctor that believed in divine healing, Charles Cullis.
• Cullis became convinced that healing in answer to the prayer of faith was a permanent privilege for the people of God by reading a book ‘The Life of Dorothea Trudel’, the Swiss florist we already mentioned.
• In 1870, this Boston doctor laid hands on a woman, Lucy Drake, who had a brain tumor and had been completely immobilized for five months.
• She was healed.
• In 1873, this Boston doctor headed to Europe, hooked up with Blumhardt, Trudel, and George Muller, and he began conducted annual faith conventions, guess where in Maine where A.B. Simpson went to die.
• Do you think that was a coincidence?
• Well, Simpson, went to a Cullis convention and guess what?
• He received his healed and out of A.B. Simpson’s ministry came the following.
• Listen to this list.
  • Christian Missionary Alliance
  • Gospel tabernacle in Times Square
  • Branch churches to different ethnic groups in New York
  • One half dozen rescue missions
  • Several temperance homes
  • A free dispensary
  • Social services for the destitute and suffering
  • A prison reform ministry
  • A large orphanage
  • A strong missionary program
  • A coeducational Missionary Training College, the school still exists today as Nyack College.
  • Berachah Home which is a healing home
• Simpson started holding faith conventions, just like Charles Cullis did and the following noteworthy speakers at his conventions were R.A. Torrey, A.T. Pierson, A.J. Gordon, Otto Stockmayer, Andrew Murray, and Carrie Judd.

Carrie Judd

• Carrie Judd was an Episcopalian from Buffalo New York, who was healed of a severe disability under the ministry of Elizabeth Mix in 1879.
• In 1890, Judd married George Montgomery and became Carrie Judd Montgomery.
• They moved to California and:
  • Founded a rescue and healing mission
  • Established a temperance town five miles from Oakland
  • Built a faith home called the Home of Peace
  • A Bible training college
  • An orphanage
  • A home for orphaned babies
  • The Cayadero Worldwide Camp Meeting
  • A foreign missions operation
  • A Monday afternoon faith healing service in downtown Oakland that lasted twenty-five years
  • Edited Triumph of Faith magazine for 60 years.
• In 1906, Carrie Judd visited William Seymour’s service on Azusa Street and was filled with the Holy Ghost and became a charter member of the Assemblies of God.
• Later on, Carrie Judd formed a strong relationship with Marie Wood-Worth Etter.
• Who had a strong influence on Amiee Semple Mcpherson.
• So you’re talking one revival after another, one move of God right after another and it started with the healing of one person, Dorothea Trudel.
• Dorothea’s healing impacted Cullis which impacted A. B. Simpson which led to a connection to Carrie Judd which led to Azusa and a relationship with Marie Wood-Worth Etter which flowed right into Amiee Simple Mcpherson.
• These are spiritual giants in the realm of divine healing and miracles.
• If you don’t know these people, look them up and read after them.
• How God used them will inspire you and stir your faith in God.
• We are going to stop right here because we are going to take some extra time and talk about Azusa, John Alexander Dowie, Smith Wigglesworth and John G. Lake and their miraculous ministries all of which prove that the days of miracles have not passed away.
• And, since they haven’t, you can expect a move of God in your life and in your world.

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