Here is a synthesis description of the book that can be read at Amazon.ca (consulted September 22, 2016): Inner healing is an important part of the Gospel message. You can supernaturally experience healing by exposing the hidden lies that keep you in bondage. This workbook study presents a framework within which you can learn to pray, listen, and receive God’s healing in a progressive step-by-step process. Its practical instruction, examples, and personal stories can empower you to deliberately listen to God in ways that bring deep nurture, assurance, and inner healing. Jesus said, “The truth will set you free.” Take Him at His word and experience inner healing.
Again, feel free to share your thoughts, comment or questions, or perhaps even your own experience with this approach to prayer.

What personally reassured me about Rusty Rustenbach's A Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer. Meeting God in the Broken Places, was the foreword written by Neil Anderson (p. 9-11), from the pen of whom one can read:Every growing Christian has had some major and many minor "aha" moments in their journeys toward Christ. It is part of the process of being transformed by the renewing of our mind. For me, discovering who I am in Christ on an intimate level was one of those transforming moments. Another was a life-changing breakthrough on prayer (p. 9).
After summarizing his own struggles with prayer earlier on in his life, Dr Anderson goes on to say (p. 9): Any prayer that God the Holy Spirit prompts us to pray is a prayer that God the Father answers, because it actually originates from Him. Notice also that He is the One who searches our hearts and knows our inner nature far better than we can ever fathom.
The latter statement from Neil Anderson is based on his reflection on Romans 8:26-27 (NASB): "[...] the Spirit [...] helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God".

This was one thought from Neil Anderson that reassured me about Rusty Rustenbach's Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer.

Another thought from Neil Anderson's foreword to Rusty Rustenback's Guide for Listening and Inner Healing Prayer that I would like to highlight is based on a reflection about Psalm 95:7-8, "For He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. Today, if you would hear His voice, do not harden your hearts," about which Dr. Neil Anderson writes (p. 10):
I thought that evening, Lord, I would love to hear Your voice. [...] So I made an assumption. I decided to just sit still, listen to God, and assume that whatever came to my mind was either from Him or allowed by Him for some special purpose that I was probably not aware of. If the thoughts that came to me were tempting, I would assume they reflected an area of weakness that God wanted me to be honest about with Him. I didn't approach this passively. I took every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and dealt with everything that came to my mind.
As I read this, I found myself in full agreement with Dr. Neil Anderson, and this helped lift any reserve I might have had towards reading and working through Rusty Rustenbach's Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing prayer. Meeting God in the Broken Places.

Now, as I am working through these things in order to write them down, there is one more quote I would like to draw from Dr Neil Anderson's preface to Rusty Rustenbach's Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer (p. 10-11): Truth will set us free, but we need to know that truth in the inner person. We also need to realize that truth is a larger concept than written revelation. Jesus is the truth and He is the Word of God. Ultimately He is the One who sets us free. Intellectual knowledge of the Bible is a foundation but never an end in itself. Such knowledge will only make us arrogant, which the apostle Paul warned us about. He wrote that "the goal of our instruction is love" (1 Timothy 1:5), which is the character of God (see 1 John 4:8). You can know theology and be arrogant, but you can't know God and be arrogant.
Anderson then adds: "This book is about listening to God in prayer and by so doing, healing the wounds of the heart" (p. 11).

At various key moments in my life, I worked through books such as this one that attempted to lead towards inner healing. Each one played an important role in who I have turned out to become, acting as a layer so to speak in a larger construction. The effect of working through these introductory comments is to lead me to realize that the process of healing is never fully completed.

What the author himself says about his own book also contributed to motivate me to delving into it. Based on what Jesus is recorded to have said in Luke 4:18, Isaiah 61, and in John 10:10 (see p. 15), but also based on his experience with struggling with complex issues in his own life and with helping others living for Jesus (p. 17), Rustenbach suggest that (p. 15, 17): We need an inside-out solution. We need to add new approaches to the great ministry tools we already have, approaches that will allow the powerful truth of God contained in Scripture to affect us in the innermost part of our beings. The core message of A Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer is that this kind of change is possible, because with the supernatural help of God, the truth can set us free. [...] Healing prayer is a practical and powerful way to help the hurting people of our day. That's because it takes the focus off of us and our abilities to meet needs. It forces us to a place of complete and utter dependance upon God and His living Word to do for us what only He can do.
How do you respond to these few words from Rusty Rustenbach's introduction of A Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer?

In chapter 1, "Surprised that God would Speak to Me" of A Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer, Rusty Rustenbach (p. 22-23) applies Jesus words recorded by John to the approach he teaches on prayer: "But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come" in (John 16:13). My initial response to this idea goes something like this. True, the immediate context of these words are spoken to disciples that would later receive revelation and write the books of the New Testament on that basis. And then I ask myself if this fact in and of itself limits the application of these words to only those that were present when Jesus spoke them?

In chapter 2, "Principles of Inner-Healing Prayer" of A Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer, Rusty Rustenbach argues on the basis of Isaiah 61:1 and Luke 4:18, 21 as follows (p. 30): When Jesus quoted this prophecy [Isaiah 61 quoted in Luke 4] at the beginning of His earthly ministry, He was declaring that an important part of His gospel would be to emancipate His followers from many of the horrible side effects of living in a broken and dysfunctional world. Jesus' history-altering proclamation ushered in the reality of God's deep concern and passion for how people are doing on the inside.
The chapter goes on to explain the meaning of some of the terms used in Isaiah or Luke, and then draws principles of inner healing:

• All of us have had our hearts broken (p. 32-33);
• The heart broke in response to sometheing that happened in the past (p. 33-34);
• Our reaction to events -- not the events themselves -- places us in bondage (p. 35);
• Present difficulties often triger past pain (p. 36);
• Life-changing truth can be known and experienced when God communicates it to us in a supernatural way (p. 36-37).

Questions at the end of the chapter help in considering one's own life experience in light of those five principles. But before moving into the questions, Rusty Rustenbach provides the following insight (p. 37): Mending the cracked places in our hearts is not about becoming emotional geologists who must analyze everything that's ever happened to us or figure out where we went wrong. If our foolish thinking is what placed us in bondage, how are we going to think our way out of our predicament? We need God to illuminate His truth. Rustenbach invites his readers, for example, to ask God to help us identify recent situations where we may have overreacted. This is seen as a means of providing information to ourselves that may indicate some areas where we still need inner-healing from Jesus.

In chapter 3, "The Wellspring of Spiritual Life" of A Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer, Rusty Rustenbach focuses on the importance for believers to pay attention to all aspects of their lives not strictly the cognitive dimension of what the Bible teaches. This would include coming to grips with one's own emotions, rather than doing everything possible to block them out.

Working through this chapter offers a potential for broadening one's understanding of the range of emotional states one goes through. For example, it is suggested asking God to help us identify the emotions we felt in the past seven days, or the emotions one feels in the next twenty-four hour period. A list of "Emotional Words to Describe How I am Feeling" proposes broader categories of emotions such as mad, sad, glad, afraid, confused, ashamed, lonely, and breaks each one down into specific manifestations.

As we go through the list while praying that God will help identify our recently felt emotions, we might come to realize, for example, that a given disappointment of ours could be expressed in terms of "I feel a little sad" for "I feel disappointed."

In chapter 4, "Principles of Listening Prayer" of A Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer, Rusty Rustenbach exposes key factors designed to help us integrating this spiritual discipline to our lives along with already existing disciplines such as reading our Bible and participating in a community of believer. He suggests that apart from talking to us through what He already has written in His Word, God also impresses thoughts or impressions and pictures or images in our mind.

As a means of learning to be attentive to these more personal ways of experimenting God, Rustenbach invites us to set apart some moments of what the book calls "listening and inner-healing prayer", providing guidelines such as the following:

• Still and quiet yourself before God;
• Exercice the authority of Christ over all the other voices that seek to speak to you;
• Ask Jesus to come in a very special way and manifest His presence;
• Ask Jesus to search your heart and bring up anything that needs His healing touch;
• Ask Jesus to communicate with you;
• Wait in silence for God's communication;
• Write down the impressions God gives you.

This chapter also deals with identifying what might hinder or distort our hearing of God through listening and inner-healing prayer, and how to discern if we're hearing from God or from other sources. Exercises provide a means of experimenting this form of prayer.

Chapters 5 to 10 of A Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer provide a step by step process for practising inner-healing prayer, working from the more general and basic steps to more specific alternatives ways of moving into that direction. These three chapters build on what has been learnt so far in the book, especially chapter 4, "Principles of Listening Prayer". Rustenbach is beginning to narrow down more specifically towards matters in one's life that would require God's attention for healing purposes.

Chapters 11 to 13 turn to a reflection about helping others learning and getting involved with the practice of inner-healing prayer, whereas the conclusion to the book suggests that such an approach, once learnt, should be maintained throughout one's life.

Please feel free to provide your own comments about listening and inner-healing prayer, either coming from your experience with this approach, or as you read the posts describing some of the benefits that can be drawn from working through that book.

Revisiting chapter 4, "Principles of Listening Prayer", of Rusty Rustenbach's A Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer, it strikes me anew what the author wrote towards the beginning of this chapter (p. 51): "I was amazed how listening increased my hunger to know God, to seriously study Scripture, and to apply His living Word to every area of my life (see 2 Timothy 2:15)".

Rusty Rustenbach opens ch. 5, "The Inner-Healing Process" of A Guide for Listening and Inner-Healing Prayer, quoting from Psalm 139: Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts; and see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way (Psalm 139:23-24, NASB).
As I am working through ch. 4, I pray not God to "see if there be any hurtful way in me," but rather "to help me through them."