Derek Prince - The Tremendous Power Of Proclaiming God's Word In Faith
This is excerpt from: The Power Of Proclamation
Ruth and I, when I'm ministering, we always begin this way. God has taught us this and we've discovered that proclaiming the Word in faith at the beginning of a meeting makes a tremendous difference to the atmosphere in the meeting and to the anointing on the speaker. We're going to proclaim Isaiah 55 verses 10-11 which is one of our favorite proclamations. We use it frequently in connection with our radio ministry and its outreach through the earth. So, here we are: For as the rain comes down and the snow from heaven and do not return there but water the earth and make it bring forth and bud that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth. It shall not return to me void but it shall accomplish what I please and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it. Amen.
Now let me say a little bit about the word proclamation or the verb to proclaim. It comes actually from a Latin word which means to shout forth. It's a strong word. There are two related words in the language of the New Testament: confession or to confess and proclamation or to proclaim. Now confess or confession means to say the same as. And for us as believers in the Bible, confession means that we say the same with our mouths as God has already said in His Word. We make the words of our mouth agree with the Word of God. And in that way we line ourselves up to receive the full backing and authority of Jesus. In Hebrews 3:1 the writer says that: Jesus is the high priest of our confession. That's a very important statement. If you have no confession you have no high priest. He's our high priest in respect of what we confess. In other words, whenever we say with our mouths whatever the Bible says about us as believers in Jesus then we have Jesus as our high priest in heaven releasing His authority and His blessing. But if we remain silent in a certain sense, we shut off His ministry as high priest. And if we make the wrong confession we do even worse. In a certain sense, we invite negative forces to surround us and move upon us.
Now proclamation is, as it were, confession made aggressive. Proclamation is, in a sense, a word of spiritual warfare. It's releasing the authority of God's Word into a situation: Into our own lives, into the life of the church, into a political situation whatever it may be. There are countless different situations that need the power of God released into them. And there is no more effective way than to release the power of God into a situation whether it's your own life your family, your church, your nation, whatever it may be, than proclamation. Proclaiming is really the activity of a herald. A herald is a word we don't use very much today but a herald was a person with authority from a king or a duke or some nobleman who went to the particular area concerned and he made a proclamation of the will and the decision of God of the ruler in that particular place.
In the old days they used to say: Oyez, Oyez, and then make the proclamation. When they said: Oyez, Oyez, everybody sort of stood to attention and knew this is the voice of authority speaking to us. And in the New Testament although it doesn't come out in most translations, the word for to preach is the word of a herald. It's a word that means to proclaim. One of our favorite Scriptures is Matthew 24:14: This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached We prefer to say: shall be proclaimed in all the world as a witness to all the nations; and then the end shall come.
I've been a Bible teacher for just about fifty years and I always felt my duty was to interpret the Bible and explain it and help people to understand it. But about twelve years ago the Lord began to impress upon me the word proclaim. I felt somehow that He was challenging me to go beyond teaching and do proclaiming. And the result was my radio Bible teaching ministry which started on eight stations in the United States in 1979 and is now in ten languages and really covers most of the globe. And that is really a ministry of proclamation. I think the key verse that stirred me was Matthew 24:14: This gospel of the kingdom shall be proclaimed in all the world as a witness to all the nations; and then the end shall come. I came to see that the age cannot close until we have done our job as the church of Jesus Christ, His witnesses on earth. Which is to proclaim this gospel in all the world as a witness to all the nations. And I have learned by experience the tremendous power of the Word of God simply proclaimed in faith. It just accomplishes the most marvelous things.
There was a woman in the United States who was everything that a woman ought not to be by Christian standards. She was a Marxist, she was a lesbian, she was a feminist. And she took it seriously. I mean, she was buying revolvers to shoot men with. And somehow or another she found herself in a small ship in the China Sea with some of her nefarious companions and they were going somewhere to do something bad. And it seemed that a storm was coming up and so the other people said: Go down in the hold, turn on the radio and see what you can find about the weather. She turned on the radio and happened to get my Bible teaching on my proclaiming program from Manila in the Philippines and got saved in the hold of the ship! It took no more than fifteen minutes because the program is only that long. She is now as totally different and radical the other way as she was the bad way. So that's just an example. That was not teaching. I didn't do a lot of explaining. The Word proclaimed did its work.