A few days ago I posted on Facebook that I had completed reading this book. I also confessed that reading it was a real stretch. Yet, I enjoyed the book. Let me confess that I am a "charismatic" believer, I believe in God's healing power, have seen healing and have been healed. Having said all of that, I am not "out there." I like to think things through. I am not one who "names it and claims it." I am very relational as a person and thus any healing that I have experienced has been in a relational setting. I have also met Randy Clark and been under his ministry -- he is a real person, genuine and compassionate. I have seen healing occur under his ministry. But, he is "out there." Even though I like him -- I am uncomfortable with his type of ministry.
The first stretching came when I bought this book. You might ask, "Why on earth did you buy that book?" I can only say that it was a God thing. I was having my morning devotions and meditating on a series of teachings that I wanted to present to my church on God's power to heal. Perhaps the most important book in forming my understanding of healing is one by Francis MacNutt entitled simply, "Healing." Of course, "O me of little faith," one of the things that I appreciated about that book is that it had the 12 reasons why people are not healed. I like that, it gave me an out. I also think that MacNutt is correct. When I retired from First Baptist Church of Chula Vista, I left my library in the church office, so I couldn't check out my copy of MacNutt. So, I went to my trusty Kindle and searched for MacNutt (you won't believe this), but the only think that popped up was Essential Guide to Healing. I was perplexed, but sensed that God was telling me to pick up this book and read it. I did it. I pressed the button, it was downloaded and I began to read. I also have to report that latter in the day I had not trouble finding the MacNutt book. Weird Huh!
I found much that was really helpful in the book. Bill Johnson is a pastor in Redding CA while Randy has an itinerant, world-wide, ministry. Randy is the one I related to in this book because I knew him. Randy also had a background in the American Baptist Churches. He later became a Vineyard Pastor and was involved in the "Toronto Blessing." I had a difficult time with two aspects of Randy's ministry; the emphasis on Words of Knowledge and the emphasis on the proposition that all healing prayer should be commands to the sickness in order to bring healing.
I believe in words of knowledge; I have received them when involved in healing as well as in other situations. I believe that they can be very helpful in healing, but I don't believe that they are necessary. Here is my "little faith" comment; in a crowd of 500 or more people, of course there is going to be one or more people with a sore knee -- or other ailment. Is this a word of knowledge or wishful thinking. I think it is probably a little of each. Having said that, I will give a testimony where I think it was genuine. I think it was genuine because it involved me. A couple of years ago, two weeks before our Holy Spirit Conference at Green Lake, WI, I had a minor stroke. I didn't seem to have a lot of problems -- at least nothing major. But, as I traveled to Green Lake I was just worn out and my speech was still somewhat slurred. On the first night, the person praying for the conference, Dean Sherman (he is not one of the big Word of Knowledge guys) said, "Someones brain is being healed." I felt like someone had stuck a red hot nail into my head and my symptoms of stroke were gone. Wow!
When I was first coming into this life in the Spirit, I received a personal word about my healing. I had just returned from a year in Viet Nam. It had been the pits for many reasons, but one of them was that I was very sick. I had been sick the entire year in 'Nam, but didn't go to the doctor because I thought I would die anyway and I wanted to "go for the glory." I was depressed enough that I prayed daily that the helicopter that I was riding would be shot down. Obviously when I got back I was in bad shape, but God began to work in me. I began to be open to him. The Pastor and Elders prayed for my healing, but I wasn't healed. I did go to the doctor. One morning the Lord spoke -- almost audibly -- powerful -- "I will heal you, but you will feel the pain first." This wasn't the word that I wanted to hear. It was followed by three surgeries and two years of painful treatments. This ended in 1973 -- the doctors thought I should continue with the treatments, but I was healed. I tell this story, because Randy also writes in the book, that God doesn't use suffering -- all should be instantaneously healed. As painful as those years were, they were the period of my fastest spiritual growth. I was flat on my back reading voraciously anything that I could get my hands on the helped me to grow in the Lord. God used this sickness to make me whole spiritually.
Now, as to prayers of command, I do know that they are scriptural and have also experienced a healing in this way. I had a growth on the side of my head (a mole of some sort) and the doctor was concerned and schedule a biopsy for me (again after a conference at Green Lake). One of my friends really cheered me up as he looked at my growth and said, "That looks just like what Rocky had." Rocky had just died of a melanoma. I was pretty scared. That night at Green Lake, I asked my friend Clay Ford to pray for me. He prayed this way. "I command you to dry up, wither away and drop off!" I got up the next morning and, while I was shaving, it dropped off. After I went home, the doctor actually biopsied the left over spot, but couldn't find anything. My quarrel with Randy is that he only recognizes the prayer of command as a valid prayer for healing. "We don't beg God for healing, because it is always God's will to heel," he writes. I don't think that asking God to heal is "begging." I have also written, that sometimes God does let us suffer to our own good.
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