Words of Faith: Zillah's story about God's healing power

The Prayer of Faith
A Words of Faith story by Zillah Williams

A few years ago I was struck down by depression—not just low spirits but a debilitating and prolonged bout of fear and gloom. It was this problem that led me to learn about faith—specifically, what James in his epistle calls The Prayer of Faith: “And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven” (James 5:15) NIV.

Until then, my understanding of faith had been similar to that of the dad in Adrian Plass’s book The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37¾ (1987). If you have read the book, you will remember that his wife and son discovered him one day concentrating hard on a paper clip, “willing” it to move.

The teaching of the late Canon Jim Glennon showed me that “willing” myself to be healed was not faith. For twenty years, he led a healing ministry at St. Andrews Cathedral in Sydney, Australia. During that time, the Cathedral was packed for the Wednesday night healing services. The teaching that he gave at these services was written up and distributed to members of the congregation. Gradually, through reading copies of these weekly talks, I came to understand what faith—the Prayer of Faith—really means. Jim Glennon didn’t simply tell people what to do, he explained how to do it.

His teaching was basically this: know the promises of God; receive the promise that fits your situation; thereafter, thank God for the answer.

It’s really so very simple. Jim would say, “You have what you accept” and “Believe it before you see it.” As Oswald Chambers said: “Seeing is never believing.”

Through Jim Glennon’s teaching I took the words of 2 Timothy 1:7 as my promise for healing from depression—“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind" (KJV). I spoke the promise over to myself constantly—and I mean constantly—for I don’t know how long, until the depression left me.

George Müller, the German evangelist and man of faith who provided homes for hundreds of orphans in England during the nineteenth century, operated entirely by faith. He never begged for money to feed and clothe his orphans. He simply made his needs known to God and trusted Him for provision. And the provision always came.

Jim Glennon learned to trust God in the same way as George Müller did. It was about twelve months after he began the Healing Ministry at St. Andrews Cathedral when a group of young people in the congregation offered themselves for missionary service overseas. Jim was impressed and told God that he, too, was willing to go to the mission field. He was spoken to by the Holy Spirit who told him his job was to “learn how to pray.” And that is what happened. He learned the secret of the Prayer of Faith and spent over twenty years teaching others. At the end of his ministry, he said: “Let your problems enable you to trust, not in yourself but in God, and make it a way of life. It is simple. It is straightforward. You will have to persevere, but it will work for you in the same way as I have found it worked for me and for many, many others.”

Through accepting God’s promise that He’d not given me a spirit of fear, but of power, love and a sound mind and unceasingly thanking Him for it, I was gradually healed. Exactly when the healing fully occurred, I’ll truly never know, but heal, I did.

~*~
Author bio: 

Zillah was born in England, emigrating with her parents to Australia in her early teens. Before she took up writing Zillah was a librarian in Sydney. 

Now she is a writer and also engages in proofreading and copyediting. She has written articles for Christian magazines, five novels for young adults and, in 2015, a romance novel called I Only Want to Dance With You, published by Elk Lake Publishing.

She is interested in the healing ministry of the church which led her to compile and edit a book of sermons by the late Canon Jim Glennon of St. Andrews Cathedral in Sydney—Healing is a Way of Life.