How the sovereignty of God led me out of the Word of Faith movement
In the fall of 2000, a flyer from Ligonier Ministries arrived in the mail. Dr. R. C. Sproul was coming to Scottsdale, Arizona in November, a short drive from my home, for a Friday night and Saturday morning of teaching. I had watched his videos on the holiness of God years before, and I respected him. Then I saw the subject: “Chosen by God,” the biblical doctrines of election and predestination.
My heart sank. Why would a man with a mind like his travel all the way from Florida to talk about an idea so far past its sell-by date?
I went anyway, and I sat on the back row. My plan was simple. The moment he stopped opening the Bible and started quoting theologians, I would slip out quietly without disturbing anyone.
He never gave me the excuse. He opened the text and stayed there. By the end of Friday night I was thinking, “Well, he has a point. There are verses that lean in that direction. But I have my verses too.” What brought me back on Saturday was the promise of a question-and-answer session. That, I was sure, was where the wheels would come off.
The first two questions were the very ones I would have asked. What about John 3:16? What about 2 Peter 3:9? In a couple of minutes on each, he walked us through the actual wording of those verses in their context. He showed us what we had been reading into them, and then what they actually said.
If someone had pointed a camera at me just then, they would have seen a very white face. I wasn’t excited. I was upset, because I could see that I had been the one reading into the text. I was in trouble, not him.
I left that conference unconvinced. I also left deeply bothered. I had not heard a single verse taken out of context, and I had to admit that my assumptions about certain texts were guilty of that exact charge.
The Same Bible
The irony of my story depends on how I came to love the Bible in the first place.
I grew up in Chester, England. My father was a preacher. When I was eight or nine, I picked up his Bible while he was out of the room, read for a while, and found nothing in it to draw me back. I made a private decision that day: whatever my father was doing, it was not for me. I wanted to be a professional soccer player.
When I was fourteen, my father asked me to go with him to a church service to hear a gospel presentation. I went, quite reluctantly.. but I went. That night, under the preaching of the Word, I saw myself, for the first time, as a sinner before a holy God, and I came to Christ. The boy who had found the Bible boring suddenly could not get enough of it. I spent my allowance on Bible-teaching cassette tapes and gave three or four hours every night to the Scriptures. I preached my first sermon at fifteen.
Hold on to that. The Bible I fell in love with as a teenager is the same Bible God would use, years later, to correct me.
What I Believed and Taught
I trained at Elim Bible College in England (today Regents Theological College). Most of my teachers were Reformed in their understanding of salvation, though they never explained why. I respected them for it, and I had no time for it. My heart was elsewhere. I had applied to a Word of Faith Bible school near Tulsa, Oklahoma, and been accepted. I went to Elim only because my father, who was paying the bills, would not pay for the other.
After graduating in 1987, I became associate minister to a well-known British faith preacher and traveled with him to Australia, New Zealand, India, and the United States. In 1993 I planted a church in Phoenix, sponsored by a Word of Faith church in Tucson. In those years I hosted a live, two-hour program on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and taught on a daily radio program called The Spirit of Faith. The church grew from almost nothing to around three hundred people. I was as committed to the movement as a man could be.
Here is what I believed, and what I taught others to believe:
- Physical healing was purchased at the cross and guaranteed to every believer now. God had already done His part every time.
- Faith is a force that works by spiritual laws, as fixed as the law of gravity. Words spoken in faith have creative power. You will have whatever you say.
- God gave man dominion over the earth and now waits to see what we will say. His hands are tied by the words of our mouths.
- It is always God’s will to heal and to prosper, so praying “if it be Your will” is unbelief.
- Giving is seed sown for a financial harvest. In the early years I didn’t emphasize prosperity. Toward the end, I did.
I never taught that believers are “little gods,” or that Jesus had to suffer in hell to finish our redemption. My understanding of the Trinity and of the person of Christ did not change, and I preached repentance and faith. I believe I was a Christian in those years. But I carried a whole boatload of baggage.
Something else kept me in longer than it should have. When I heard the wildest claims from the movement’s famous teachers, I could simply say, “I don’t believe that part,” and stay. There was no headquarters to answer to. I didn’t have to swallow everything to carry the card.
There were seeds of doubt. I saw healings that seemed genuine. I also conducted funerals for people who had been prayed for and pronounced healed. I would never have told a grieving family that their loved one lacked faith. I said the person had not been able to “appropriate” the healing. It meant the same thing. Looking back, I wince: I prepared people to be healed, but I never prepared a family to face death.
I would now describe the whole system as demanding on our timetable what God gives on His. The blessings of the age to come do break into this present age. Physical healing is one of them, given when and where God chooses. Christ did purchase complete healing for His people. In glory no one will call out from the back row, “Speak up, we can’t hear you!” But not all of it is ours yet. God still heals in answer to prayer. What He has not promised is complete healing for every believer now. Paul says that even we who have the firstfruits of the Spirit “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23).
The Rock Hits the Water
After Scottsdale, I went into what I called my study cocoon. I maxed out my little credit card buying everything I could find on the subject: Sproul’s material, the writings of James Montgomery Boice, and James White’s The Potter’s Freedom. For six to nine months I worked through it with my Bible open, and almost no one knew what I was doing.
I came out convinced. Sproul was right, and I was wrong. I had believed my tradition over what Scripture actually taught. It was about a year before I began to preach it, and when I did, I was not subtle. My first sermon on the subject came from Ephesians 2:1, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins,” and I titled it, “What Is It About Dead Do You Not Understand?”
The God of the Word of Faith waits on man. The God of the Bible waits on no one. “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). Nowhere does Scripture tell us that man is on the earth and does all that he pleases.
The movement loves Mark 11, where Jesus speaks of telling a mountain to be taken up and thrown into the sea. Read on, though, and Jesus turns at once to prayer. The mountain is moved by God, at the asking of His people. Three chapters later, in Gethsemane, Jesus Himself faces a mountain of His own, the cup of suffering, and asks His Father to remove it: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36). The Father’s answer was no. If Mark 11 means what I once taught, then Mark 14 makes our Lord a man of failed faith, and no Christian believes that. Perfect faith prays, “not what I will, but what you will.”
Think of buttoning a shirt. Get the top button wrong, and every button below it is wrong too. I had God’s sovereignty wrong, and I was wrong all the way down. Correcting that top button meant undoing much of what followed: the God whose hands were tied, the words with creative power, the healing owed to every believer on demand.
That raised a question I could not put down. If I was wrong about this, and I was very wrong, what else was I wrong about? R. C. Sproul flew into town, threw the rock of God’s sovereignty into my theological pond, and flew home to Florida. I am still seeing the ripples.
The First Ripple: Is the Bible Enough?
I had always believed the Bible was without error. What I had never grasped was that it is enough.
Near the end of his life, with his death in view (2 Timothy 4:6), Paul wrote to Timothy: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). Paul was leaving Timothy to face whatever would come after him. He did not point him to new revelation or to the next great anointing. He pointed him to the Scriptures. The words Paul chose picture a man fully fitted out for his task, with nothing missing from his kit.
He had done the same with the elders of Ephesus. Believing he would never see their faces again, he warned them that fierce wolves would come in among them. Then he said, “And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32). God and His Word were enough for whatever lay ahead.
Looking back, I can see that we called ourselves people of the Word, but we were really people of our favorite words. The same few verses, usually lifted out of their setting, carried all the weight.
The Second Ripple: Spiritual Gifts
Next I had to face the gifts I had practiced for twenty years. The sufficiency of Scripture did not settle that question by itself. Many brothers and sisters affirm that the Bible is enough and still believe these gifts continue. But it sent me back to the text to ask whether I had confused the extraordinary gifts that marked the founding of the church with the ordinary Christian life that followed.
Today I am a cessationist. Let me explain what I mean, because the word is often misunderstood. I believe God still heals. I pray for the sick, and God is pleased to work miracles in our day. What I no longer believe is that the miraculous gifts of healing, tongues, interpretation, and prophecy are still functioning in the church. The church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2:20), and God bore witness to the message of those who first heard the Lord with signs and wonders and gifts of the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 2:3–4). A foundation is laid once.
Then I compared what the New Testament describes with what I had seen. In John 9, a man blind from birth received his sight and said, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind” (John 9:32). In Acts 3, a man lame from birth went into the temple walking and leaping. In more than twenty years, I never saw anything like that. I saw healings, and I conducted many funerals. I never saw anyone deaf or blind from birth healed, or anyone with a severe disability made whole.
Tongues told the same story. As a young teenager I was taken aside by an older man in the church whose ministry was helping people speak in tongues. For about twenty minutes he urged me, “Speak it out! It’s there!” until I said something just to end the ordeal. He told me to go home and practice. For two decades I prayed that way, mostly at home, sometimes for an hour at a time. I heard plenty of stories about someone speaking a real foreign language by the Spirit, the way it happened at Pentecost. In all those years, I never once saw it.
My experience did not settle the question. Scripture did. But my experience finally stopped arguing with it.
The Third Ripple: One Story, One Savior
The next ripple reached the way I read the whole Bible. I came to see Scripture as one story, with Christ and His saving promises at the center from beginning to end. That changed how I read one passage in particular.
I used to preach “the blessing of Abraham” as a promise of wealth. Abraham was rich, I told people, and because they belonged to Christ, Abraham’s riches were theirs to claim. Paul tells us how that blessing reaches us, and what it is: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13), “so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith” (3:14). Two verses later he tells us who Abraham’s offspring is: “who is Christ” (3:16). The blessing came to us because Christ bore the curse in our place. It is being declared righteous by faith (Galatians 3:8–9) and receiving the Holy Spirit, all of it in Christ. I had taken a promise of God Himself and turned it into a bank balance.
The Fourth Ripple: The Church
The ripples reached the church as well.
As a Word of Faith pastor I preached texts more than passages: a verse here, a verse there, chosen to support the point I wanted to make. Today I preach through books of the Bible, verse by verse. It is very hard to take verse 8 out of context when you preached verse 7 the week before.
I also came to embrace formal church membership, something I had never believed in. In the world I came from, loyalty often ran to the traveling ministry and the big conference more than to a local flock. In place of chasing the next big meeting, I came to treasure the ordinary means of grace God gives His people every Lord’s Day: the Word preached, the Lord’s Table, and prayer. They are deeply supernatural, though nothing about them looks spectacular to the world. The New Testament assumes a church that knows who belongs to it. Leaders keep watch over souls “as those who will have to give an account” (Hebrews 13:17), and a shepherd cannot give an account for sheep he cannot name. Jesus says, “tell it to the church” (Matthew 18:17). Paul speaks of those inside the church and those outside it (1 Corinthians 5:12–13). None of that works unless the church knows its own members.
The Gold Watch
To anyone still in the movement I came from, may I say this? Suppose someone tells you that the gold watch your grandfather left you is not real gold. You might be offended. But if you know it is gold, you will not be afraid to take it to the jeweler. Take the convictions you hold dear to the Scriptures. Read the verses in their context. Give them the honest hearing I was forced to give on the back row in Scottsdale.
I began this journey convinced I had a great deal to teach others from the Word of God. The Lord, in His kindness, had a great deal to teach me, and He still does. He did it through the very Bible I had been preaching all along. The God who opened my eyes is the God who does all that He pleases, and I would not have it any other way.
“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:36).
