Sid Roth - You Can Hear God's Voice AND Prophesy!
My guest has absolute proof that all believers can prophesy, and that means you, next.
Sid Roth: Now, my guest, Michael Maiden, says all believers can prophesy. How can you be so certain?
Michael Maiden: Well, first of all, the Bible says so in 1 Corinthians 14 that all can prophesy, and Joel prophesied about the Holy Spirit being poured out on sons and daughters and old men and young men, everybody. Every generation can prophesy. It's part of God's great gifting to us through the Holy Spirit.
Sid Roth: Well, what is your experience when you teach people that have never heard such things. Like, give me an example when you teach as far as the percentage of people that begin to prophesy.
Michael Maiden: You know, the book of 1 Corinthians 14 talks about, says "Pursue love, and desire spiritual gifts," and especially the gift of prophesy, so I teach on that, and then we have people pray for each other, and I've done this around the world so many times, and 85, 90 percent of people feel like they've heard from God and give someone a prophecy, and there's so much joy. The room erupts with satisfaction and joy when people hear God's, Jesus said this in John 10, "My sheep know my voice, hear my voice," and so people find so much joy and, really, excitement when they know the Holy Spirit is speaking to them.
Sid Roth: Now, when people still say, "I did what you said, but I hear nothing," what is, you say, the problem?
Michael Maiden: Every Christian has heard God's voice, in fact, every person. When we say we haven't heard God's voice, it's because there's other noise. There's static, as you said, in our hearts that we have to calm down. We have to bring peace, and so when we're at peace, we are best able to hear God's voice, and it's important for us to get to that place of peace because that's where we can feel and be led by the Spirit and hear the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit, so God is speaking. Sometimes people are in so much turmoil or anxiety or pain or confusion they just can't hear that still, small voice.
Sid Roth: Well, Michael, as I look at you now, you were very successful a while ago, but you got diagnosed manically and clinically depressed. How large was your church at that time?
Michael Maiden: We had a church about 4,000 people in 1995, and I was just a young, I was 37, and our treasurer, a local businessman, we had our accounts with him, and he embezzled $20 million from us while we were building our building. We were building a 5,000-seat, 4,800-seat auditorium, so we were on the front page of the paper 10 times, headlines, had six lawsuits, 15 concurrent attorneys. Our church had dwindled from 4,000 to about 150 people. I became seriously manically and suicidally depressed. I knew I was depressed because I was finishing my Ph.D. in psychology, so we talk about the timing of the Lord, so I was 37 and thought my life was over, but Jesus healed me.
Sid Roth: Tell me what happened with your son while this was going on?
Michael Maiden: Yeah. My oldest son started self-medicating. He was just a young man, 12 or 13, and we were homeless. So many negative things happened, and he started just trying to, you know, take care of his pain.
Sid Roth: Did you say "homeless"?
Michael Maiden: Yeah. We were homeless for 6 months, and we actually lived with people that were kind to us.
Sid Roth: That had to be such a comedown from where you were.
Michael Maiden: Yeah, and we had a beautiful home, and we lost that, and just every possible negative thing from death threats to the whole town kind of talking about us, and the way the Lord healed me was He told me if I would forgive the people that had hurt me, He would make me forget the pain they caused me, so I made a list. I forgave the people, and the Holy Spirit, after about 7 weeks of praying for people, the Lord visited me. It's amazing, not only took away the pain. He gave me love for the people that had broken my heart, but with my son, he, the moment he could, he moved out of our house, and he's out in, you know, kind of running the streets, and drug dealers were trying to kill him and the police trying to arrest him, and I just would lay in his bed that he grew up in, he no longer lived there, and just prayed, "God, tonight don't let my son die". And the Lord spoke to me and said He wanted me to change the way that I talked about my son, and the Lord reminded me of all the prophetic words over the years He had given me about my son's life, and so I told my wife, and so we started saying our son is a history-maker and a world-shaker, a man of God. He's going to be a Godly husband and father, the best.
Sid Roth: But it's kind of hard not to talk about what's going on...
Michael Maiden: It's very hard.
Sid Roth: ...especially with your wife.
Michael Maiden: Yeah. While it's happening, and while you're in the pain, but the Lord has spoken to me so strongly that if I would change my vocabulary, the outcome would be changed, and so I just started repeating God's word. Like Paul told Timothy, "Do warfare by the prophetic words you've received," and I started speaking over his life that he would be everything God said he would be, and within seven weeks of doing that, God visited my son, delivered him from drugs. He moved back home, became a missionary to Haiti, went to Bible school, married a wonderful woman, our executive pastor at our church, has four great kids and is a successful businessman, and so everything God told me came to pass when I started saying what God said to me about him.
Sid Roth: That was absolute, I mean, you hear teaching like this, but to live it, to see how important what I'm hearing you say is, our words make a difference, and out of the many things that block the prophetic as you teach, tell me a few of the lies we believe.
Michael Maiden: Yeah. Most people believe that they can't hear from God, and so we have to take that other way because we, every Christian, Jesus said seven times in the Gospels and then seven times in the Revelation, "He that has ears to hear, let him hear," and so every Christian has hearing capacity, and so we need to claim that and press into it, and like the Bible says, covet earnestly the,
Sid Roth: How did you press into your gift? I'm curious. How old were you?
Michael Maiden: I was just a teenager in my late teens, and I was reading, Sid, when Jesus said in that, in John 16, the Holy Spirit would show us things to come, and it's like it leaped off the page and just was branded on my heart, and I thought, "Why isn't the Lord showing them things to come"? and I fasted and prayed and pressed into it and really desired it like the Bible says, desired with passion and fire, and the Holy Spirit started speaking to me about people and places, and that's been 40-some years ago, and he's not stopped speaking to me, so God loves to flow through us in prophecy, words of knowledge and all the gifts.
Sid Roth: Now, I watched the way you operated at our prayer meeting the other day, and when you, you said to me, "I can prophesy over every member of your staff if you'd like me to," but your prophecies were not fortune cookie prophecies, you know, that could apply to everyone. You were very specific with people, and I knew it because I know their lives, but, I mean, one after another so specific, is that available for all of us?
Michael Maiden: It is. That's the awesome thing, and, man, do people respond. I've seen so many people healed and come to Christ after they've received a prophetic word. In fact, just last year, in our church lobby, after church, I greet people, and I'm greeting visitors.
Sid Roth: Mm-hmm.
Michael Maiden: And so last year, I just said, like, one sentence of a word of knowledge or a prophetic word to these visitors who weren't saved, and four times, I saw people drop to their knees and start weeping and say, "How could you know that? I need to know the god that you're talking about," and people were born again after they received their prophetic word. The Bible talks about that, that when strangers or the unknowledgeable come in, and the secrets of their heart are made known, they will say your god is God.
Sid Roth: And you know what's so wonderful? He is saying based on experience that you can prophesy like that, that, no, you are not just to be put on a shelf. I mean, if not now, when?
Michael Maiden: Right.
Sid Roth: With the way the world is today, now, you actually saw the undelivered mail warehouse in Heaven. What was that? And let's explain.
Michael Maiden: It was so fun. I had a vision. I was praying, and I said, "Lord, what is prophecy like to you"? And right away, I was in a warehouse in Heaven, like an aisle, and the aisle seemed to go on forever and ever, and the shelves went up higher than I could see, and suddenly I'm next to a shelf, and a drawer is pulled out, and it's filled with letters that are handwritten, and I heard one sentence, and the Lord said, "Michael, these are all the undelivered love letters I have for mankind. Please help me deliver them with the rest of your life," and then I knew God has a written love letter, a prophetic word for every single person on this planet, and we as people deserve the right to experience God, not just the hero God but to have these God encounters where this letter is read to them, and it has so much meaning once they hear that God knows them, loves them and has a word for them.
Sid Roth: But you also teach a lot about what you call prophetic healing. What is that?
Michael Maiden: It's so important because people, the gifts of the spirit are really the keys to unlock healing and miracles and deliverance and inner healing and physical healing, and without them, our success rate is always going to be low, but when we pray for people to be healed, and we add to that prayer the gifts of the spirit, words of knowledge, words of wisdom and prophetic words, it literally finds the right key that opens that door, and so we see so many miracles. I called out just in our church last year a couple people that I felt were sick. I didn't know they were. Both of them had stage IV cancer, and one of them was untreatable, and so gave them a prophetic word that God was going to heal them, and within weeks, they came back to me and said there was no cancer. They had the same doctor in Scottsdale. It was very cool, and they said, "We are, we've received a miracle. Our doctor said it was a miracle," and so I feel like the Lord is ready to pour out all those gifts to the Church so we could just release the greatest waves of healing the Earth has ever seen.
Sid Roth: Tell me about how angels are involved in the prophetic.
Michael Maiden: Well, angels respond. The Bible says that angels heed the voice of God, so when we speak something God said, they hear it as if God was speaking it, so there's a great word in the New Testament, Sid. It's called "The Two-Edged Sword". The bible is called that, but the two-edged sword, in the Greek, is "Distomos". "Di," means two and "stomos," means mouths, and it literally means that there are two mouths to God's Word, and so when God speaks to us by revelation, either a promise, a scripture coming alive or a prophetic word, one half of that blade is formed, that sword, but when we say what we've heard God say, we form the other half of the sword of the Spirit, so there is so much God needs partners to say. God can't do it until we say it, and when we say what we've heard, we're going to see what we've said.
Sid Roth: When we return, Michael will activate you in the prophetic and pray that your gift of prophecy will be released. I know you're coming back.
Sid Roth: Michael, it changes someone's life when you hear from God and tell them. Tell me about the mother that went to your church whose son was in Africa that was actually in an insane asylum. What happened?
Michael Maiden: Rose is one of our outreach pastors, and she's an immigrant from Africa, and she came to me tearfully one Sunday and said her son had lost his mind, that witch doctors in that area had cursed him. He was a very prominent businessperson. They had locked him up. He couldn't even speak, he was so dissociative, and so he is literally now diagnosed as insane, and so I, in that parking lot of our church, I began to prophesy in that moment, and we began to speak God's Word. Psalm 107 verse 20 says "He sent His word and healed them and delivered them from destruction," so we prayed for her son just for a few moments, and then I went about doing the services, and then the next Sunday, Rose came rushing across the parking lot. She said, "Pastor, Pastor, Pastor, my son was delivered. He called me the next day," and when she asked him when he came into his mind, his right mind, after being gone for a couple of years, it was the exact moment we were praying in the parking lot, and he said the glory of God came into his room, and it was like chains falling off of his body, his mind, his soul. He actually stood up, knocked on the door and said, "I'm okay, now. Everything is okay now," and they let him go because they saw his life transformed".
Sid Roth: Oh. Tell me the time you were on an air flight, and there is a long-haired Jewish multimillionaire seated next to you.
Michael Maiden: This is a great story. I was heading to Seattle from Phoenix, and on the way there, I was tired, going to sleep, and there's a person next to me where I think he was flying Southwest Airlines, and he had long hair and holey jeans before holey jeans were the in thing. He had holey jeans and sandals on and in an airplane, and so I'm finding that a little bit objectionable, and but anyways, as soon as I close my eyes, God starts talking to me about him, and the Lord said things that were so different than my opinion, and the Lord said, "Tell him that I'm going to make him a multimillionaire within 90 days. Tell him that I'm His Messiah," and so I had made these superficial judgements by his appearance. Here is what he tells me. He is a Harvard-graduated attorney that was, had just been made president of the largest record label company in the world, and they had just signed the biggest rock band in the world. He had just come from signing them on a contract, and he said, "Within 90 days, what you said will come to pass. I will be a multimillionaire because I signed them," and then he told me he's Jewish, and so as we're landing into Seattle, he's opening his heart to receive his Messiah. It was a beautiful moment that would not have happened without a prophetic encounter that he had with God.
Sid Roth: I would like you to pray for our audience right now. I want you to pray that the gift of prophecy would be activated, and God would open our ears to hear His voice. You want that, and I believe, you know, and by the way, you not only pray for people with stage IV cancer that get supernaturally healed. You were healed of cancer, and so there are a lot of people suffering with cancer or whatever God shows you. Would you pray?
Michael Maiden: Yes. The Lord healed me from cancer, and when I was diagnosed with cancer, the Lord, a month before that, had given me a promise of scripture, Psalm 118 verse 17, that said, "You shall not die but live and declare the works of the Lord". I shall not die, and when the doctor told me I had an incurable cancer, my first response was, "I shall not die but live and declare the works of the Lord". It shook him. I was diagnosed with cancer. Six months later, there was no cancer. What we say, when we say God's word, amazing things happen. I just want to encourage you, my friend, that you can hear God's voice. Every single believer can hear what the Holy Spirit is saying. We can respond to God. We can speak words of life, encouraging, healing and edifying words to people, and God will use anybody. There is a backlog of ministry that the Holy Spirit is looking for people to sign up for. I just want to encourage you that you would ask the Lord for the gift of prophecy and that you would press into it and refuse to live your life without it. In the Kingdom of God, if you can live without something, then you will. We have to press into it with vigor, with passion, with persistence and refuse to live without it. Refuse to live your life without the gift of prophecy. Father, I pray for an outpouring of prophetic agency, of visions and dreams and prophecy to your people. I pray for the stirring up as Paul told Timothy. Stir up the gift of God that's in you. I pray that there would be confidence, that people would know they can hear your voice, and they can speak to other people in the grocery store, at work, in the neighborhood, in the family. God will speak to your words that would change people lives as you courageously and boldly release that word and then ask God to use you. He will use you, my friend. There is no secret to it. There's no, you know, difficulty to it except that we press into God. Pursue with passion the gift of prophecy, and the prophetic flow of Heaven will start being a part of your life as a believer.
Sid Roth: Now, I know if you will pray for healing right now, the healing flow is going out here. Go for it.
Michael Maiden: Amen, Father, I declare in Jesus mighty Name that cancer must leave every person just like you healed me, Father, of cancer. I rebuke in the name of Jesus the spirit of cancer. I rebuke premature death. The curse that's in your family of people dying early is broken in the Name of Jesus Christ. I declare that every person who is suffering with depression, anxiety, fearfulness or any other mental disorder, I declare in the name of Jesus, the same Jesus that healed my mind is going to heal yours. The same God that made us can heal us and fix us, and so, Father, I pray for anyone that's hurting in their bones, their muscles, their nerves, in any part of their body. We release by the name of Yeshua Hamashiach, Jesus, the Christ, the power of healing right now. Thank you, Holy Spirit, for performing right now surgeries. I want to say this, that God is canceling a bunch of surgeries right now. People that are scheduled for a surgical procedure, you're going to be so healed you don't need it. God is helping you right now. There are people with serious back injuries that are going to stand up and feel all the pain gone from your neck to your back. People that have been diagnosed with incurable diseases like I was, are being healed right now in the mighty Name of Jesus Christ.
Sid Roth: And, you know, it's just a tiny, little thing with all the major things Michael just prayed for, but someone with a little finger has pain when you bend it. It's healed in Jesus Name.
Michael Maiden: Amen.