Derek Prince - Healing Through The Word
I think also that I should support it from personal experience. I mentioned earlier this evening that I came to know the Lord in an army barrack room in the British Army in World War II about midnight. I was so much of a ignorant pagan, that I didn’t know you had to go to church to get saved. So before anything could happen I got saved in an army barrack room. About ten days later I was baptized in the Holy Spirit in the same army barrack room. Nobody told me you had to go to church to get the baptism. Within 24 hours God gave me the gift of interpretation of tongues. I didn’t know you had to wait six months to get the spiritual gift.
Shortly after that the British Army sent me overseas to North Africa and I spent the next three years in the deserts of North Africa. During that time I became sick with a condition that the doctors could not heal. A skin condition. If you get the book God’s Medicine Bottle it’s got my personal testimony and how I eventually received healing. I was moved from one hospital to another and I ended up in the British military hospital in a place called El Ballah on the Suez Canal. Well, there was a very unusual lady at that time in the city of Cairo. She was a brigadier in the Salvation Army. She was a brigadier because her husband who had died had been a brigadier. And in the Salvation Army the widow takes the husband’s rank. She was 76 years old at the time. And there was very unusual Salvationists in those days because she was a tongue speaker. And she was as militant about speaking in tongues as Salvationists normally are about salvation. She also had received divine healing from God in India of malaria 25 years previously and had never taken medicine since.
I had met her once and this precious lady for whom I will always thank God heard about this British soldier who was a Christian lying in the hospital and she gathered together a little party: A British soldier, a Christian, to drive the car, and a small car and her American lady coworker from the state of Oklahoma a young woman of about 25 or 30. And they took this journey to El Ballah, parked the car in the compound of the hospital. And the brigadier walked into the hospital ward with her bonnet, her ribbons, her uniform and overawed the nurse. And obtained permission for me to go out and sit in the car. So I found myself - I really wasn’t consulted as to whether I wanted to do it or not. I found myself sitting in the car, in the back seat of a very smal four-seater car. In front were the driver in the driver’s seat, the Salvation Army brigadier with him in the front. And this American lady missionary in the back seat beside me. The brigadier said let’s pray and when the brigadier said pray, you prayed. And we started to pray.
And the American lady beside me started to shake. I felt her whole body vibrating. And then she began to speak in a tongue. And, of course, I knew what that was. And then I started to shake. And then all the people in the car started to shake. And then the car started to shake. And I mean, that car was shaking as if it was going on a rough road about 50 miles an hour but it wasn’t moving and the engine wasn’t running. Well, I knew that was God who had come into that car. And furthermore, it humbled me to know that it was for my sake He had come. After the message or the utterance in tongues this lady came out with what I knew to be the interpretation.
Now, New Zealanders probably won’t understand this, but I was very British. I mean, I used to talk like the radio announcers of the BBC and I had not been exposed to many Americans. And this precious lady was from the state of Oklahoma. Anybody who knows the United States will know that in the state of Oklahoma, they talk a very different language from what a Cambridge don would speak. But when she came out with this interpretation it was the most beautiful English. I had been a student of Shakespeare. I was a great admirer of Shakespearean English. I just marveled at the elegance of this language. In the course of this interpretation she said these words which I have never forgotten. They are as clear to me today as they were in 1942. These were the words and I want you to listen to them because they had a life-changing impact on me: Consider the work of Calvary a perfect work perfect in every respect, perfect in every aspect.
Now you’ll agree that is very elegant English. Most people couldn’t create a sentence like that. Furthermore, it spoke to me particularly because I had studied Greek for many, many years and I was familiar with the Greek of the New Testament. And if you read your New Testament in English you’ll find one of the last utterances of Jesus on the cross was: It is finished. But in the Greek that’s one single word, tetelestai. And it’s the perfect tense of a verb that means to do something perfectly. So you could amplify it: It is perfectly perfect, it is completely complete. And so, when the Holy Spirit said: Consider the work of Calvary a perfect work, perfect in every respect, perfect in every aspect, my mind said: That’s the Holy Spirit’s commentary on: It is finished.
And I realized that the Holy Spirit was showing me that if I could understand what had been accomplished by the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross, all my needs could be met. There was nothing that I could not receive that I needed. That was a revelation. I got out of that car just as sick as when I got in. But God had showed me where the answer to my problem was. And that’s what I want to share with you tonight. We’re going to have a healing service and I trust that many will receive healing. But I question whether all will be healed. God does not heal everybody miraculously in a service. There are many different ways to appropriate healing. I received my healing after that revelation. I was healed through Proverbs 4:20-22: My son, attend to my words, incline thine ear unto my sayings, let them not depart from thine eyes, keep them in the midst of thine heart: For they, God’s words and sayings, are life to those who find them and health to all their flesh.
And the alternative reading in the margin for health was medicine. And I said to myself: That settles it. If God, through His words, has provided health or medicine for all my flesh, there’s no room for sickness. And so, I was very simple. I decided to take God’s word as my medicine. I was an orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps, so I knew how people took their medicine: Three times daily after meals. And that’s how I took God’s Word as medicine. Three times daily after meals. And it did the job. It healed me completely and permanently in one of the most unhealthy climates in the world. So what I’m saying to you is: God has His way to heal you. But whatever way healing comes, the basis is what was done by Jesus on the cross. And I’m not going to offer you just an orange. I’m going to invite you to the orchard. And once you get in there you can wander around and help yourself to all the oranges you want. And you’ll never strip God’s orchard bare.