Prophesy, or Wishful Thinking Gone Overboard?

I may not be the best Christian on earth, but I always have a fresh testimony. Surely that’s worth something.

I wouldn’t be saying this if I weren’t leading up to an example. Here goes.

I believe God tells me things, and I have also stepped out in faith, based on some teaching from Derek Prince, and started prophesying. If you’re wondering how to prophesy, and you already speak in tongues, the best way I can explain what I do is this: do the same thing you do when you speak in tongues, but speak English.

That’s probably not much help.

When you speak in tongues, you open your mouth and start moving the necessary parts, and as long as you provide the motion, the Holy Spirit gives you things to say. You can do it as fast as you can move your mouth. You will never run out of new syllables. You probably won’t have any idea what you’re saying, and it may even sound like gibberish, but it works.

I had tried prophesying before listening to Derek Prince, and I had not managed to say anything that didn’t sound crazy, so I stopped. After listening to Prince, I figured I had to try again. He was not an idiot, so if he told people they could prophesy, he had to be right.

I prayed for God’s help, and I started doing it. Now I do it as much as I can bear. It’s somewhat stressful, because my carnal mind keeps saying, “Your mouth is going to write a check God won’t cash.” It says I’m making things up.

I can think of a few things I thought God told me (not prophesies) that didn’t pan out. VERY few. Generally, they come to pass. This is one reason (along with not having a giant ego and zero ability to perceive how others see me) I don’t call myself a prophet. The Old Testament says, “when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not happen or come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.” That’s not quite the same thing as saying such a person was a false prophet, but it’s not praise, either. You wouldn’t want to jump into the Red Sea and try to outrun the Egyptians based on advice from a prophet who made mistakes.

Maybe there is such a thing as a student prophet.

I can’t think of anything I have said in prophesy that hasn’t turned out to be right. Maybe I’ve forgotten something. Generally, though, the things I say are somewhat vague. “My heart is with you, and it can never be taken from you.” Things like that.

Prophesying and having God tell me things are not the same thing. When you prophesy, you, yourself, say things by God’s inspiration. When God tells you things, it may happen in other ways. You may ask God a question and feel you know his answer, for example.

Anyway, I had a spot on my hand. This is where the testimony starts. A few weeks back, I saw a little spot, and I froze it to get rid of it. I don’t want to get into details, but I have had many little things pop up on my skin over the years, and I have very solid medical reasons not to assume they’re cancerous, so I freeze them off in order to avoid the hassle of going to a dermatologist.

A few days back, it seemed like something was still going on in the area of the spot, and there was an area of discoloration about the size of a shirt button. It wasn’t a big black melanoma, if that’s what you’re thinking. Anyway, it disturbed me, and I was not sure what to do.

I believe God told me I could not have cancer. I can’t recall when I heard this. It was not in prophesy. I don’t worry much about spots for this reason. But here this thing was, on my hand. Little voices kept telling me it was very serious and that I was doomed.

If you’re wondering why I have concerns about skin blemishes, or why I don’t freak out and demand surgery every time I have one, it’s because I grew up in Florida. If you live in Iowa or some other place where people get limited sun, you probably know nothing at all about skin cancer. Floridians know skin cancer is a)100% curable, and b) extremely unlikely to cause serious harm unless left untreated for a very long time, unless it’s melanoma, which is not hard to distinguish from the other types. In Florida, skin cancers and precancerous lesions are about as exciting as warts. It’s hard to make people from up north understand that. They hear the word “cancer,” and they think it’s extremely serious. It’s not serious. Not at all. Unless you let it go until it takes over.

It’s very hard to make people from up north accept that, but it’s true.

I was about to call a dermatologist, but I really wanted to continue relying on God for healing. He has given me all sorts of little miracles, and his healing is perfect, free, and painless, unlike the kind of healing doctors give. I also thought about what I believed he had told me. I thought he had said I could not have cancer. Should I ignore that and treat it like a lie? Was I wrong to think he told it to me? If I was wrong, what about all the other little things I think he said, which I have been relying on every day? Had I been building a life inside a house of cards?

God’s word doesn’t say he may heal some of our diseases once in a while, when he feels like it. It very clearly says “all” our diseases. It’s not ambiguous. I don’t want to make God out to be a liar. On the other hand, is it wrong to question my own ability to get healed, or my ability to hear him?

You can imagine the things I was thinking. Little demons must have been flying in circles around my head, yelling at me through megaphones.

I decided to rely on God as long as I felt I safely could. I cursed the spot and the spirits behind it. I commanded my body to be healed. I fasted. I did all the things I knew to do. I’m still doing them.

I did take one carnal step. I put hot sauce on the spot. Skin cancers and precancerous lesions don’t like it. The capsaicin in hot peppers can make them dry up and peel off. I had a couple of big spots on my face around 12 years ago, and I used capsaicin, green tea, and curcumin powder to make them go away.

I believed God had given me the okay to use the sauce.

Last night, I was determined to keep prophesying, even if I felt I might be wrong. I kept telling God I needed to know the truth, though. I have had my strongest Christian friend pray twice for God to help me not to prophesy falsely.

While I was prophesying, I said the spot was going to go away. I said it would be smaller in the morning.

I really painted myself into a corner there. If God was speaking through me, the spot had to be smaller in the morning, so if it wasn’t smaller by noon, I was prophesying falsely.

I was stuck.

This morning, I woke up and started praying. I kept thinking about what I had said. The spot didn’t look any smaller than it had the night before. I figured “smaller” meant “smaller in diameter,” because it seemed that the spot had been getting smaller in diameter for several days. I told God I believed “morning” meant “no later than noon.”

Part of me felt I was telling God how long I felt I could honestly wait, but another part felt I was giving God extra time in order to help him, because the spot didn’t seem smaller yet. I was not happy about the feeling that I was assisting God so he would not fail. We should never make an excuse for God or try to help him in any way. That’s all carnality. If you’re expecting God to do something, and he doesn’t do it, don’t make up a reason or try to come up with an explanation that lets God off the hook. If it doesn’t happen, he didn’t actually say it would. Period. Just admit it and pray you don’t make similar mistakes in the future.

If God tells you to build an altar, get some rocks and build it. If he says he’s going to build it, don’t you dare lift a hand.

I got up to use the bathroom, and I washed my hands. I noticed the spot felt funny, like it had a little projection on it. I poked it with a fingernail, and a piece fell off. I got back in bed to continue my prayers, and I poked it again. Another piece fell off.

Then it occurred to me that the spot had gotten smaller. The diameter was the same, but two flakes of abnormal skin had come off, so the mass of the spot was significantly reduced.

The thing I prophesied had come true–completely–and God, being God, had managed to throw me a curve ball by giving me what he had promised, in a way I didn’t immediately recognize.

So…if this came true, what about the other things God seemingly said, which were also very good?

You see the position I’m in now. If one prophesy was true, the others must be true, and because they’re so positive, it’s hard to believe. Fortunately, you don’t have to have faith in a prophesy. It’s not like a prayer. Once God says something will happen, it will happen whether anyone believes it or not. I don’t have to have faith. I just have to sit here and find out whether I was really prophesying.

Prophesies are so unconnected to faith, their fulfillment often brings anguish and death to people who don’t believe them. God has a history of saying bad things were going to happen to the very people who did not believe what he said. They didn’t have faith, and the prophesies still came true.

God has actually used prophesy to foretell bad things that were sent to punish people for not believing prophesy.

I’m not going to scrape and pick at myself to make the prophesy come true. If it’s a prophesy, it does not require my involvement, and my involvement would merely obscure God’s activity and cast it into doubt. It would cost him his glory. He has to have the glory so other people can benefit from what happens to me. If it’s clear he did the work, it will build other people’s faith.

I’m walking by faith here. I’m writing about this before the story ends. I’ll have to follow up honestly no matter how things go.

In other news, I found another Youtube healer. His name is Mark Hemans. He appears to be Australian. Interesting guy. Very serious. He looks like the real thing. I don’t see him teaching other people to heal, though, and that’s a major concern. Judge for yourself.

Addendum

I’m amazed that I forgot to mention this. The night before the skin on my hand started flaking off, I felt a very mild stinging sensation in the area three times in succession. Then I felt something like pressure. I wasn’t touching my hand. There was no physical object making contact with it.

“Stinging” is the best way I can describe it, although it was so mild, it could not be called pain. “Tingling” might be a better word.

I was startled when it happened. Sometimes people feel tingling when God touches them to perform miracles. I felt God touching my knees 6 or 7 years ago when he healed them permanently during a church service. It felt sort of like a jacuzzi jet. If you’ve ever put your leg maybe a foot away from a jacuzzi jet in your bathtub, you know what I mean. It was a warm, soft, pulsating sensation.

Sorry I didn’t mention this yesterday.