Miracle Healing From Muscular Dystrophy

Dr. Ray: Welcome to Self Talk. I'm your host, Dr. Ray Self. Recently, I was very privileged to be on the show called Along The Way with John Matarazzo. He is with Charisma News and works with Charisma Media. It was a very exciting interview and I want to play you, as part of my podcast, this interview that, where I was being interviewed by a very well-known podcaster. Again, thank you for listening and as usual, this show is brought to you by the International College of Ministry, a Holy Spirit-filled seminary enrolling online. Work on your own schedule, your own time, enrolling now at icmcollege.org. Okay, here we go.

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John Matarazzo: My Charisma shop is your source for spirit-filled books, bibles and devotionals. Our store will help you find the books and resources that you need to be the best you that God has purposed for you to be. Visit mycharismashop.com to see the full catalog of content to help you live your life by God's divine design and take advantage of these great deals today. This is John Matarazzo with Charisma News and I am here with Dr Ray Self of the International College of Ministry, and he's one of our Charisma podcasters as well with Self Talk. And, he's got an incredible story of how God healed him from a type of a disease that you've probably seen some telethons about but Dr Ray, I want to let you tell that story of how God used this and has, has really brought healing into your life.

Dr. Ray: Thank you, John, I'm glad to be here. Well I love to tell the story just to give God, God glory. I actually didn't talk about it for a long time because I didn't want to bring it up. I, I refused to receive it; but some years ago when I was a young man around 18 years old just playing basketball, and I broke my left foot. A year later, when I was playing basketball again, I broke my right foot. A year later I was playing basketball and I broke my left foot again. And then I was playing I think, another sport, I forgot what, I think it was football, and I pulled all the ligaments out of my ankle. 

Dr. Ray: So I had four really horrible foot injuries so I ended up at a specialist and he looked at me and he said “Well Ray, do you know why you keep having these injuries?” And I said I have no idea. And he said “Well you have Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease”, and I said say what? Could you please spell that? He said Charcot- Marie- Tooth disease.” I said well what is Charcot-Marie-Tooth? He said “It's Muscular Dystrophy. It's a form of Muscular Dystrophy that affects the lower legs and the feet and the hands” And I said I've never heard of it and you know, of course, in the years since I've looked it up and it's, it's actually, it's out there.

John: Yeah…

Dr. Ray: And, I said what's going to happen? He said “Well, your legs will slowly deteriorate. Your nerves and your muscles will deteriorate, um, and you eventually will be crippled. You'll never walk again.” And I said well, well what do I do? He said “Well, it's incurable.” I said was there anything we could do? “Well, we might could do, uh, reconstructive surgery but that would help for a period of time but you're going to be in a wheelchair.”

John: “Wow.”

Dr. Ray: And I was just, you know, obviously devastated but also in my spirit I was- kept thinking no, I'm not going to receive this. It wasn't denial, there was just something in my spirit that was going “I will not receive this diagnosis.” And so, I go to the church and I just do the classic “hey guys, I've been diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy. I need you to lay hands on me, anoint my feet with oil.” The elders of the church did it. That's been I guess, 35, 37 years ago. Since that time, I've run, I've been a jogger, I've played basketball again, I played tennis, I've never stopped moving. They said I would never walk again but God- I say but God had another plan. And we liv- and have a miracle. 

John: Amen, amen. So not only did God heal you from that condition, that disease, but he used a diagnosis of that to save you from going to, going to Vietnam.

Dr. Ray: That's true. And, you know, I looked up the disease, I've seen pictures of people with the disease, I've actually met people with the disease and everybody I've met with this are actually in a wheelchair, they have braces. Um, one little benefit of it this was um; when I first began to break my feet because of this disease, I was drafted and was going to be sent to Vietnam- this is during the Vietnam War- and the army doctors saw my x-rays and said no, you're not going anywhere. Thank you Jesus, I did not want to go to Vietnam. Back then it was a pretty bad thing but it's still, it's the miracle of God. They said I would never walk again, they said I had muscular dystrophy and I've been walking ever since; and running and jogging and whatever. Jumping up and down, you name it.

John: That's, that's pretty amazing. So God is really going to turn all things around for good for those who love him and are called according to his purposes. You mentioned earlier, uh, before we started recording here that you had an interesting healing testimony; that you were kind of next to the person that God was using and at a revival service and so I'd like to, I'd like to incorporate this story as well.

Dr. Ray: Well, in the very beginning of my relationship with my wife and um, we were, actually just begun our relationship, and my wife had not really experienced some of the things that I have experienced with, with the Holy Spirit so. I'm doing a revival in Vero Beach Florida at this, at this African-American church and um, it was just incredible. I mean, it was televised and everything, and it was loud, it was rowdy, it was just a lot of stuff going on; and got tv cameras and all this kind of stuff. So at the end of one of the services, a lady came up for prayer, you know, for me to pray for. I asked what's wrong. She had this terrible pain in her chest and so I'm thinking “Well, I can't lay hands on her”. 

So, uh, my wife-to-be was sitting out in the audience, Christie. And so and Christie is a servant, she doesn't like to be worked up front, you know, she likes to be kind of behind the scenes and this whole thing was kind of new to her. And so I said “Christie, come here in front of the tv camera.” So I said “Christie, come here.” So she kind of shyly walked up front like “what do you want?” I hear her thinking out loud “Why are you doing this to me? You want me to come up in front of the whole church with, on tv and everything?” I said “Christie, just put your hand on this lady's chest and pray for her.” She said “Do what?”  “Just put your hand on her, on her chest and pray”. She says “Well, okay.”

And so I'm doing something else up at the altar and Christie begins to pray and all of a sudden, Christie goes “Ray, Ray. Come here, come here, come here.” I said “What is it Christie, what is?” She says “There's like, fire coming out of my hand. It's like it's just my hands on fire. It's like i feel fire coming out of my hand. I said, I said “That's good.” She said “That's good?” “Yeah, Christie, that's good. Just keep on.” She says “Okay, okay” and so she prayed and the lady was 100 percent healed. All pain left this lady's body and completely healed. And my wife's- to be, and she's my wife to be, her eyes were like the size of saucers, you know, just a great moment. I loved it.

John: Yeah, so I love that story because God used somebody that wasn't expecting to be able to use, to be used by this way and didn't really have as much of a context for moves of the Spirit or healing that way that you did but she was just obedient to what God was saying through you to just put your hand on her and pray for her and God showed up, and God moved. Dr Ray, thank you so much for sharing your testimony of how God has used you, and you've seen the miraculous happen. 

Dr. Ray: That interview with my friend John Matarazzo with Charisma was was really fun. Actually, there's more to come. The rest of my story was coming in the second part of that interview. You know it's true, I did get diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease which is a form of muscular dystrophy and told I would never walk again and I want you to know that our Lord is alive and he heals and the Holy Spirit is available. And I love doctors, A appreciate doctors, God gives doctors wisdom and God uses and does miraculous things through physicians every day. But with me, he healed me supernaturally, you know, and along the way I've seen many supernatural healings. God is amazing. 

Just today, I was doing a church service, an outdoor service for a bunch of Venezuelans, uh, who come to, to my church. We have a food pantry and a bunch of Venezuelan refugees show up every Sunday, maybe 150, 200, and we feed them. And I preached the gospel. 13 of them received Jesus Christ as their savior but one lady walked up and she said she had horrible pain in her hands. It's the shooting pain and she, she just held her hands out in front of me and was clenching them and just said the pain was horrible and I put my hands on her, I prayed for her, and the Lord healed her right there, right there. And it's just- another lady came up with um, horrible um, back spasms and this was, this was interesting. Terrible back pain, and so we put her hands on her back and then we asked her how she feels she said her back felt cold, and that was interesting. “Cold.” She said, “My back feels cold.” Now we were outside, you know, in August in Florida and so this was very unusual and then we said does it hurt? And she said “No, all the pain is gone.” It was kind of like a, a cooling uh, healing that God did.

You never can put God in a box. You never know what the Holy Spirit is going to do. There's no formula to the miraculous, you just have to step out and be bold. I tell my students with ICM all the time, just step up to the plate and swing the bat. In other words, so many times, excuse me, so many times people are just waiting for some feeling- special feeling- to come down from God. This big booming voice “heal my, heal the sick person.” And it's not like that. You just step out, put your hands on them, and you pray.

I love to pray the Word. I love to pray like this: “Lord, your word says that by his stripes we are healed, so Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, I thank you that Susan, or Mary, or John, is healed by the stripes on the back of Jesus Christ. I declare and I decree in the name of Jesus Christ, healing over my brother or my sister.” You pray the word, you see God has said “these signs will follow those that believe: in my name they will lay hands on the sick and they shall be healed”. And we're believers, I'm a believer, you're a believer, that's a sign of a believer. You don't have to have special permission the bible and Jesus has already given you special permission. You step out, put your hand, and pray. Ask for healing. And and let me explain something. You ask for healing but you also decree healing.

See, God said “these signs will follow those that believe: that you will lay hands and you will heal the sick”, which means Jesus has delegated authority through his Holy Spirit for us to heal the sick. Now technically it's not Ray Self healing the sick or whatever your name is, whoever's listening to this, but it is the anointing of God flowing through you; you using the authority that God has given you in his name. And so yes, I healed the lady today in the name of Jesus with his power and his authority and Jesus gets all the glory. In other words, you just have to step up, you never know. I have prayed for thousands of people and not everybody gets healed and I don't understand that and nobody can answer that but some people do, and a lot of people have- I've seen blind eyes healed, I've seen cancer heal- multiple times- cancer, brain cancer, stomach cancer. My father was healed of seven malignant tumors in his bladder. Seven, but highly invasive malignant tumors in his bladder were healed through prayer.

I've seen, you're gonna have trouble believing this but whatever. I saw a lady raised from the dead. I prayed for a lady who was a victim of a car wreck. The car wreck was right in front of my church that I was at and I was in the church office and um, there she was, laying out on the concrete and she, she was dead and I was standing there with a pastor friend of mine and I felt the Lord said rebuke the spirit of death. So I looked at her and I prayed over her and said “I rebuked you, spirit of death, in the name of Jesus Christ” and I began to pray over her. The paramedics showed up and they, they, you know, they, they moved her on to the hospital. I didn't know what happened but then the next day this lady's husband shows up to the church and he said “Who, who prayed for my wife? Who prayed for my wife?” And, and you know we very humbly said- this pastor friend of mine said, you know, we, we prayed for her. He said “Well, she's alive.” I said “That's wonderful!” “But you don't understand. She was dead but now she's alive.”

And you see, I don't know, that's just Jesus. I mean, it's just Jesus. You just have to be bold. Step out and do it, Just do it. You don't have to feel it, you don't have to have any more permission the bible has given you, permission to heal the sick and cast out demons. Jesus said in John 14:12 “these signs,” and he's- no, he said, 14:12, he said those that believe in me would do the same works that I do and even greater works that I do. He said those that believe in me will do the same works and you see throughout scripture, you see Paul healing the sick, Peter healing the sick, James healing the sick. Well, you say, well that's the apostles. Well, you also have times well, where the believers stood around Paul who had been stoned to death and prayed for him and Paul rose up.

It was just believers and so not everybody who healed the sick was an apostle or Jesus Christ, sometimes it was just normal people in the bible and there's just thousands of instant- instances around the world of supernatural things happening when believers pray. And you've heard the testimonies, you've heard the stories. And sure, there's fake and there's counterfeit. There's always going to be fake and counterfeit, that's because the devil likes to do that kind of stuff. He wants to discredit but whenever you see something counterfeit, that just says there must be something valuable around. You never counterfeit anything unless it's valuable. All I'm trying to say is Jesus heals and he wants to use you to heal, and he healed me and I've seen him heal hundreds of other people, and I've seen him do things that I can't explain. And you can't put God in a box and he seems like he does it different all the time; that way he obviously gets all the credit. 

But anyway, that's what I want to talk to you about today, you know, thank you for listening. I really, really appreciate you. Thank you so so much.

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Hey, this is Dr Self. Thank you so much for listening to my show. I pray this has been a blessing for you. You know, I've got another course to offer you for this month; it's called Foundations of Spiritual Warfare and it is very powerful. It's a six-lesson course, it's a college level course, it's yours for a $35 donation. All you have to do is go to icmcollege.org/selftalk. icmcollege.org/selftalk, the link is also in the notes. Please go to… when you're at that site, this is my website for the podcast, please uh, subscribe. Give us a review, share the podcast, help us help us get this message out to people. The world needs Jesus and it needs hope and it needs healing. Help me get this message out, I'm just asking for your help, that's that's all I can do. And I want you to know that I appreciate you listening to Self Talk, it means a lot to me. God bless you.