(Some of) What I was taught, or learned WRONG in the past....

After a long period of ‘silence’ with no blog posts for some months, the post a couple of days ago must have come as a surprise to a few people! There were practical reasons – perhaps technical would be a better word – in that various issues occurred with not being able to type here, not being able to post to one or more of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…. and there were other more personal and spiritual reasons….

I guess many of us can look back over our Christian lives, and realise that things we would have once believed, having been taught or learned ourselves, we no longer believe, as we’ve moved on with God, and our perspectives and understanding have changed. For me, there are lots of those things to do with my own Christian life – practical, theological, and spiritual. To give an example, for me, having now been in this particular phase of my life for nigh on 30 years – praying for the sick and preaching the gospel, encouraging believers to move out of spiritual and practical comfort zones and take ‘risks’ (in our understanding, not God’s!) – the way I pray has changed. For quite a few years, when I began to pray for sickness to go from people, I’d pray long prayers – often ‘beseeching’ God to heal whoever I was praying for, sometimes the prayers would go on for maybe 30 minutes. That means praying for people at the end of a meeting went on a very long time!

In the middle of one prayer, many years ago now, I heard God speak to me very clearly (I wish I heard him THAT clearly and often all the time!!): ‘For goodness’ sake, get on with it!’ . My reply of ‘What?’ drew another response from God: ‘Healing this person!’. ‘I am!!’ ‘No you’re not, you’re begging me to do something I’ve promised I’ll do!’. Now, from me, there was silence….! ‘Command it, in Jesus’ Name, like Jesus did! And, by the way, delete from your praying ‘If it’s your will, Lord’……Hmm. I guess I was taught, or inherited, the need to include that in praying. ‘You know my will: my will is that I heal all of your sickness and disease, that you’ll lay your hands on those who are sick and they WILL recover’.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!! – eradicate that phrase from your praying!! We know God’s will. To pray it, IF it’s your will, and the person doesn’t appear to be healed, means we can effectively ‘blame God’ for them NOT being healed.

I’m very, very grateful that in the ‘early’ days of beginning this current walk with God, in 1987, I was blessed to be regularly in touch with a man who really was the pioneer of bringing healing back into the church: Ian Andrews. Over the years, from the late 60’s, Ian has blessed hundreds of thousands of people – maybe more – with healing, through the gift of the Spirit that had been hidden and maligned by centuries of believers. He’s also taken a lot of flak for it – I know he has, and even if I didn’t, I’d know he must have done, because I have. Another man at the forefront of putting healing back into its rightful place in Christian life, Francis MacNutt, a former Catholic Priest: Francis wrote a great book about how Satan tried – and failed – to take healing away from the church, called ‘The nearly perfect crime’ (available on Amazon).

It’s surprising how hard it is a) to move away from you were taught, or inherited, and b) how much harder it is to command, a Jesus did, sickness or evil spirits, to go. To me, it seemed presumptuous. But I consciously made that shift – it took time! – and prayers – and ministry times – became much shorter! Those of you who know me, and the way I pray now, will know that I’m not terribly conventional (by the standards of my evangelical heritage!) in the way I pray. I CAN’T, simply CAN’T, have a line of people, and walk along it tapping (or pushing?? Oh God, save us from the pushers and the showmen!) each person on the head or shoulder, saying ‘Be healed!’. I like to sit with each person, even if just for a few minutes, find out their name, their problem (or problems – some people have shopping lists of illnesses!), and then pray – commanding, in the name of – and with the authority of – Jesus. I DO believe it is the will of God to heal: and I can say that as someone who has been healed in the past (an unknown disease when I was very, very young, un-diagnoseble by Whipps Cross Hospital, in London – it went when my parents moved from the east end of London, to Sussex: at 20, ‘miracled’ from life-long chronic back pain – a hole in my spine, diagnosed as a ‘small spina bifida of the neural arch, I think, discovering that I was like a millimetre away from being a full spina bifida victim – the hole ‘disappeared when, in about 1972, my mentor, Clive Calver, through whom I got saved, got a guy named George Tarleton (remember him? Wonderful guy) to pray for me: in 1979, healed of a dislocated shoulder in the middle of the night, in agony, when a lovely friend, Roger Stoakley, prayed for me….

I also believe it’s God’s will to heal, seemingly having NOT been healed – YET (a vital word to keep at the forefront of your mind once you’ve been prayed for) of this osteoarthritis in my knees (it’s not MY osteoarthritis: it’s vital in being healed that we don’t take ‘ownership’ of the disease afflicting us) – for 15 years in my right knee, and 8 years+ in my left knee. Excruciating pain, frequently: especially after standing, preaching for a while. Consultant orthopaedic doctors told me 6 years ago I shouldn’t even be able to stand on my knees, that I must have them replaced… having no desire to become ‘titanium man’- or take 2 years ‘out’ of ministry to have both done – I politely declined… Why? Because I’m an idiot? (That’s a ‘given’ anyway!). No. Because I know it is the will of God to heal them. In the time I’ve been ‘afflicted’ (I was tempted to say ‘crippled’ but I refuse to speak curses over myself!), I KNOW that God has totally changed the way I pray for people with arthritis – I once almost dismissed it as a ‘come on, you’re getting old, and a bit of pain, or an ache, goes with the turf’ – I know different now!. In the time of both knees being afflicted, I stopped counting at 500 pairs of knees, and countless single knees, that God instantly healed when I commanded the disease and pain to GO….and countless arthritics with pain in shoulders, backs, hips, arms, necks… you name it….

In years gone by, I was also taught another lie… and one that can cause immense confusion and misunderstanding of circumstances and events in our lives. I’m sure many of you have also heard the same thing:

The safest place to be is in the centre of God’s will

That’s utter tosh! The BEST place to be is in the centre of God’s will: it sure ain’t the safest! The wrong statement brings to us what many Christians want: to be protected from the enemy, comfortable, safe, secure, inside comfort zones, not rocking the boat…. Try telling my dear friend, Simon Allaby, Pastor of Bolney Chapel, West Sussex, who, as I write, is in the very part of Karachi, Pakistan, where the tragedy of the murder, by a suicide bomber targetting Christians, of dozens of Christians took place, including many women and children, just a week or so ago…..or preach in a church, but on the street outside it, in a ‘barrio’ (district) of Cali, with a nice amplified English voice, to see, moments later, a man shot dead no more than 400 metres up the road….or…well, I could go on about the far east, the middle east, north Africa, ISIS… being a Christian who wants to make a difference, or is prepared to stand for your faith in a secular/communist/muslim culture, is NOT the safest place to be….!

Pastor Sunday Adelaja, who leads one of the biggest churches in the world – the Embassy of God, Kiev, Ukraine, said this:

‘If you don’t have any problems, it means you have stopped being of interest to the enemy: you are not dangerous to him.’

28/29 years ago, on my first visit to Youth with a Mission, Ghana, West Africa, I quoted A W Tozer in the teaching I was giving, saying something similar:

‘If you haven’t met the devil today, then the chances are that you and he are walking in the same direction’

It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that YWAM there still have that as one of their ‘mottos’ – they certainly adopted it for the 11 years I went there until the late 1990’s. In case you’re thinking ‘this is un-Scriptural’, I don’t think there is anywhere in the Gospels – or the New Testament – where we’re told that it’s going to be an easy life. In fact, in John 16:33, I’m sure you don’t need reminding that Jesus said ‘In this world you WILL have trouble….’ – and five times in the four gospels, Jesus said ‘If you want to save your life, you’ll lose it: but if you’re willing to lose your life for my sake, you will surely find it’. That MUST be important, because I’ve asked theologians, and it seems it’s the only thing that Jesus said that’s recorded by each of the gospel writers, and Matthew thought it was a good idea to put it in twice… (Matt 10;39: 16;25 Mark 8;35 Luke 9;24 John 12;25)

I meet so many Christians who sail through life, trouble free, making statements like ‘the devil doesn’t trouble me’: nope, they don’t trouble him, so he leaves them alone. To be honest, I’m GLAD that the enemy thinks I’m worth assaulting. The day he knows he can leave me alone, I pray that will be the day I’m sealed in a box, and taken to the crematorium!

Safe place….centre of God’s will? Perhaps not….

Right now, in many ways, I find myself in ‘not a safe place’ – another reason for the absence of blogs, as I don’t want my struggles and battles to detract from the amazing things that God is doing, and has been doing, during the period of silence. Human nature probably ‘chooses’ to remember the battles rather than the triumphant testimonies. There’ll be another blog about SOME of what’s been going on these past months, some of the very intense battles that the enemy has ‘picked’ on me with: and the protection of the Lord during some of those times….

Paul Bennison

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