Excerpt from ‘The Life and the Power of the Spirit’ by Pastor Clark Taylor
I wanted the power of God so much. It started when I had cerebral malaria for two years.
Anne and I were in a traditional church then and we had not been told that Jesus heals the sick.
It was not preached about. No ministers that we knew prayed for the sick. I took dreadful fits,
almost every day, for about two years. I went unconscious for long periods of time, my body
going rigid. It was a most debilitating, horrible thing. I felt like I wasn’t even a man. I couldn’t
provide for my wife. I just felt dreadful. Fairly often I used to wish to God that I could die. I
couldn’t bear it. Then Anne and I heard about this man, Canon Jim Glennon, who was in the
Anglican Church in Sydney. We heard that he prayed for the sick. We never knew Pentecostals
existed. We didn’t know anybody prayed for the sick, but we heard he did.
Anne drove me the 500 miles to Sydney so that I could get this man to pray for me. He prayed
for me and I didn’t feel anything particularly happened, but it awakened in me a thought. I was
staggered, because I was sitting there watching all these people going up in St Andrews
Cathedral and he was actually praying for them. Many people were healed in these meetings.
He was so sincere. I was amazed that somebody with such sincerity would pray for the sick. I
was so occupied with that, that I pretty much forgot to think about what was happening to me
and I just went up and I wasn’t really involved. I was so blown away that somebody would pray
for the sick. It sounds childish now, but in those days it was a big deal that anybody would even
pray in that way.
Anne and I started to read the New Testament and in so many pages of the Gospel Jesus healed
the sick. Isn’t it incredible? I was a student Methodist minister. I had done years of Bible
College, but I had never noticed that the sick got healed on nearly every page of the Gospel,
because there was no emphasis on it. It just wasn’t taught. I knew Acts chapter 2, but I had no
clue about the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I’d memorized it pretty much, but I still hadn’t seen
it. When a Methodist butcher told me about it, I saw it. I got hungry for it. “How shall they
hear except a preacher comes and tells them”, the Bible says. That sentence is so true.
In 1966, God instantly healed me of cerebral malaria when I was prayed for by Reverend Godfrey Williams, a Methodist minister.
There are millions in Australia, like I was, that haven’t got a clue that Jesus heals the sick.
Christians work amongst thousands of them. Of those thousands, somebody, a close relative
of theirs, somewhere some day during the next six months will be sick. If you carry the
healing power of God over your life and you let it be known, without being offensive to
people, you will have an opportunity to pray for that sick person, and not just one, but many
of them. The power of Jesus will get known. That’s who you and I are - carriers of the power of
Jesus.
