The following are two excerpts from two different books. The first excerpt is from a compilation of four books by female medical doctor Lilian B. Yeomans M.D (1861-1942) who eventually became a preacher after a miraculous healing. The compilation book has two modern titles. One version of the modern title is "Healing Treasury." The other modern title for the same book is "His Healing Power."
The second excerpt is from Merlin Carothers' book "Prison to Praise."
I hightly recommend Yeomans' book "His Healing Power" [also titled "Healing Treasury"] as well as Merlin Carothers books "Prison to Praise" and (especially) "Power in Praise."
The following excerpt is from pages 48-52 of Healing Treasury also titled His Healing Power
...We can praise our way through to perfect manifested victory. This I call the praise cure, and it never fails when the praise is the outflow of a heart resting on God’s unchanging Word.
There was a missionary to China staying at Mrs. Carrie Judd Montgomery’s Beulah Heights in Oakland, California. She had the most wonderful healing of smallpox while on the field by the application of the praise cure.
She fearlessly nursed a sister missionary who had the disease though she had not been vaccinated, standing on God’s promise that no plague should come nigh her dwelling. Then a very bad case of confluent smallpox— that was what it looked like to the doctors— came out on her, and she did not know what to do; so she asked the Lord, and He told her to sing and praise Him for His faithfulness to His Word. They isolated her and told her to lie quiet; but she said if she didn’t praise God, the very stones would cry out. So she sang and sang and praised and praised. The doctor said he feared for her life, that the case was serious and awful complications threatened. But she praised and praised and sang and sang.
He said she was evidently delirious but that he had so little help that he couldn’t restrain her—and she sang and sang and praised and praised. They told her that if by any chance she recovered, she would be disfigured for life—and she sang and praised louder than ever. They asked, “Why do you praise so much?” She answered, “Because I have so many pox on me. God shows me I must praise Him for each one separately.” And she kept right at it.
The Lord had shown her a vision of two baskets, one containing her praising—half full—and the other, in which was her testing— full. He told her that the praise basket must be filled so that it would out balance the other, so she kept at it. Her songs and shouts were so Spirit-filled that they were contagious, and the Christian nurses couldn’t resist joining in; so they kept the place ringing. At last the Lord showed her that the praise basket was full and overflowing. She saw it sink and the testing basket rise in the air; and in a moment, as it seemed, the eruption and all attendant symptoms vanished, leaving no trace in the way of so much as a single scar.
Perhaps that may seem almost too much to believe to some, but I can furnish from my own personal experience a case where the smallpox eruption disappeared instantaneously in answer to believing prayer and the application of the praise cure.
One evening we were about to open the meeting at a mission where I was then working when a man rushed into the hall and asked to have a few moments of private conversation with me. After I led him to the prayer room, he said, “Dr. Yeomans, my wife has just broken out all over with smallpox!”
“How do you know that it is smallpox?” I inquired.
“Why, we had a doctor who said so and told us not to stir from the house as he was going down to get the health doctor and have the place quarantined without a moment’s delay. But as soon as he had left the house, my wife said, ‘Run down to the mission. Ask Dr. Yeomans to pray, and I am sure God will clear this plague off my skin and out of my blood.’”
So right on the spot we applied the praise cure, and the brother ran home to find his wife without a single trace of the disease. A little later the doctor returned with the health doctor and was unmercifully teased by the latter for reporting a case of smallpox when there wasn’t a pock in sight, nor any symptom of disease.
“Where is your smallpox?” the health officer inquired.
“Well, where is it? It was here when I left.”
“Well, where is it now?” inquired the health doctor; and with some jokes as to the probable character of the beverages, which his colleague had been indulging in, he left the place without any further comment.
Yes, the praise cure works every time. It is not unpleasant; rather it is delightful; the cost of it has been met for us by another, and it is available this moment to each of us.
Are you ready to begin it? The last clause of 1 Peter 1:8 tells us exactly how to begin: “Believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”
Just believe what God says that Jesus has done for you, body, soul, and spirit—think about it, talk about it, sing about it, shout about it, and the praise cure has begun. You are not to take it once a year but all the time. I will bless the Lord at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth (Ps. 34:1). The Psalms—the book of praise inspired by the Holy Spirit, which has been used by the people of God in all ages and which Jesus Himself used—are full of this praise cure. Just observe the first five verses of Psalm 103: Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
I personally knew a man who was dying of acute tuberculosis of the lungs who praised himself into perfect, rugged health that lasted a lifetime. His remarkable recovery and good health was the result of following the words of this Psalm. Begin now. You can’t afford to postpone it by so much as a moment. Tread the young lions under your feet by the praise of faith. It has never failed and never will.
Sometimes people say, “That’s true and I feel better already. But when Jesus spoke the word when He was here in person, the symptoms always disappeared instantly; and mine haven’t disappeared or have only partly disappeared; so I can’t be healed.”
The scriptural answer to this difficulty is that the symptoms did not always disappear immediately, even when Jesus was here in person.
The nobleman’s son, referred to in John 4:49-53, “began to amend,” or get better, improve, convalesce, at the seventh hour when the fever left him.
The healing of the blind man at Bethsaida, related in Mark 8:22-25, is not only markedly gradual but in three distinct, separate stages.
First, Jesus took him by the hand and led him out of Bethsaida, which city He had abandoned to judgment. (Mark 8:23; Matt. 11:21-24.)
Second, Jesus began the healing with an anointing of spittle, after which He asked the man if he saw aught (anything). And the man replied that he saw men as trees walking; or in other words, that he had a degree of distorted vision.
If the man who now possessed enough sight to enable him to blunder around had departed and told people that Jesus had healed him but that he could only see to get around and had no use of his eyes for work that required clear vision, I believe he would have done just what many thousands of people who come for prayer for healing are doing today. Those to whom he told his story would have said, “Well, that’s the kind of work Jesus of Nazareth does, is it? It’s a wonder He wouldn’t have made a good job of it while He was at it.” But that wouldn’t have been Jesus’ fault, would it? And it isn’t His fault if you have not perfect soundness. If you are in the second stage, press through to the third one. For in it the man received perfect sight and saw every man clearly. Notice that Jesus made him look up (v. 25), and that one look of faith to the Lamb of God brought perfect restoration of his sight. Let us look into His face and praise Him for the fullness of the redemption He has purchased for us, for it is a wonderful cure—the praise cure—and the only unfailing one that has ever been discovered or ever will be discovered.
The following excerpt is from Prison to Praise by Merlin Carothers, pages 96-103 [in another edition pages 96-102]
Wherever I went I now shared what I had discovered about the power of praise. I was beginning to learn that praise was not just a form of worship or prayer, but also a way of waging spiritual warfare. Often when someone began to praise God for the problems that faced them, they found that Satan increased his attacks and the situation appeared to become worse instead of better. Many who tried the way of praise became discouraged and were unable to hold on to their belief that God was in charge.
Others simply didn't understand and refused to try praising God for unpleasant things. "It just doesn't make sense," they'd say. "I'm not going to praise God for something I just don't believe He's got anything to do with. How can God have anything to do with my broken arm or my wrecked car or my husband's horrible temper. I'd be foolish to thank Him for something like that."
Of course it doesn't make sense. The question is does it work? It didn't make much sense when Jesus said leap for joy when you are hungry or poor or persecuted. Yet He very definitely told us to do just that. In Nehemiah 8:10 I read: "The joy of the Lord is your strength."
The enemy's arrows just can't penetrate the joy of someone who is praising the Lord. In II Chronicles 20 we read how a whole army was defeated when the Israelites simply praised the Lord and believed Him when He said that the battle wasn't theirs but His.
The message is just as clear today. The battle isn't ours, it is God's. While we praise Him, He sends our enemies scurrying.
It was discouraging and sad to see those who refused to praise the Lord. My heart ached for them in their hopeless situations of suffering and misery. I asked God to give me wisdom to understand why they couldn't accept the way of praise, and also asked Him to teach me better ways of leading others to praising Him.
Nearly seven months after I first had the experience of laughing with joy in the Spirit, I went to a Camp Farthest Out Retreat. I was looking forward to a time of resting and rejoicing in the fellowship of brothers and sisters in Christ.
While I sat in the back of the auditorium during a healing service, I closed my eyes and on the screen of my inner vision God painted a picture.
I saw a beautiful bright summer day. The air was filled with light and I had a sense of everything being very beautiful. Up above was a heavy, solid black cloud beyond which nothing could be seen. A ladder extended from the ground up into the black cloud. At the base of the ladder were hundreds of people trying to get a chance at climbing the ladder. They had heard that above the blackness there was something more beautiful than anything a human eye had ever seen, something that brought unbelievable joy to those who reached it. As person after person tried to ascend they quickly climbed to the lower edge of the clouds. The crowd watched to see what would happen.
In a short while the person would come wildly sliding down the ladder and fall into the crowd scattering people in all directions. They reported that once they got into the blackness they lost all sense of direction.
My time finally came, and as I made my way up the ladder into the blackness it grew so intense that I could feel its power nearly forcing me to give up and slide back. But step by step I continued upward until suddenly my eyes beheld the most intense brightness I had ever seen. It was a brilliant whiteness too glorious to describe in words. As I came out above the dark cloud I realized that I could walk on top of it. As I looked into the brightness I was able to walk without difficulty. When I looked down to examine the nature of the cloud I immediately began to sink. Only by looking at the brightness could I stay on top.
Then the scene changed and I was back looking at all three levels from a distance.
"What does it all mean?" I asked, and the answer came:
"The bright sunshine below the cloud is the light that many Christians live in and accept as normal. The ladder is the ladder of praising Me. Many try to climb and learn to praise Me in all things. At first they are very eager, but when they get into things that they don't understand they become confused and cannot hold on. They lose faith and go sliding back. As they fall, they injure other people who have been hoping to find a way to live in continual joy and praise.
Those who make it through those difficult times reach a new world and realize that the life they once thought of as normal cannot be compared to the life I have prepared for those who praise Me and believe I carefully watch over them. He who reaches the light of the heavenly kingdom can walk on top of difficulties no matter how dark they may seem as long as he keeps his eyes off the problem and on My victory in Christ. No mater how difficult it may seem to trust God to work in every detail of your life, keep clinging to the ladder of praise and move upwards!"
I was half-dazed by the vision and they explanation and wondered how soon God would let me share it with someone.
At the camp I met a woman who was faced with difficult problems at home. There was illness and family difficulties and she found it hard to believe that praising God was going to do any good.
Inwardly I asked for guidance and God said, "Tell her!"
So I told her, "You'll be the first one to hear this," I said, and as she listened I could see how the heaviness literally left and her face and eyes lit up with a look of joyous expectancy.
In Ephesians, chapters one and two, I found my vision described in slightly different words by Paul:
"...Blessed (Praised!) be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: ...he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame...To the praise of the glory of his grace...that in...the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ...That we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ...that you may know...what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, Far above all principality and power, and might, and dominion...And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus..."
Jesus Christ is raised above all powers of darkness, and according to God's word, our rightful inheritance is right there <i>above</i> the darkness together in Christ. The ladder is praise!
I was becoming more aware of the power of praise, but also aware of some of the enemy's snares.
At the time I began to seek my Bible for insight into praise I was also led to scriptures describing the power we have received in Christ over the forces of darkness. I had long been aware of passages in Mark 16 where Jesus speaks of the signs that will follow those who believe in Him: "In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."
I had prayed asking God to show me if this was all valid for me in the twentieth century, and if it was, when and how to use it.
I found that I often became uneasy when I was around certain people, and asking God, I got the strong impression that what was wrong with them was of a demonic nature.
I prayed that if I ever got face-to-face with someone like that during a prayer-session God would tell me what to do.
An Army wife was deserted by her husband who left her behind with three children. In desperation she tried to kill herself. She was rushed to the hospital and her life was saved. Friends brought her to see me after she got home. She was the picture of despair. Her friends had told me that for several years they had never seen her smile. I began speaking to her about the way of praising God but soon felt compelled to stop. I looked into her eyes and suddenly sensed that there was something very wrong and very evil within her.
Within me was a sense of fear; I realized that I was actually face-to-face with evil.
"Lord," I prayed within. "I've come this far, I can't go back now, so I'll step out in faith trusting that You'll do the work."
Looking straight into the woman's eyes I spoke out loud commanding the vicious spirit to get out of her in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the power of His shed blood.
Her glassy eyes suddenly cleared, and she could listen as I explained that God could work all things to good if she would only trust and praise Him.
She now was free to understand, and smiled with a beautiful radiance. Jesus Christ had broken the bondage of darkness that had threatened her life....
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