Impressive Testimonies vs. Helpful Testimonies

We healing preachers all have our favorite dramatic miracle stories.  Who doesn’t like a good miracle story?

I could tell you a lot of testimonies about unusual and dramatic healings that I have seen over the years, but there is a common issue with most of them.  Most if not all of the really impressive “wow-factor” testimonies involved people being healed through various manifestations of the Holy Spirit that I could not reproduce if it all depended solely on my faith.  I could risk having you think that I walk in super-hyper-ultra-mega-faith all the time, when the truth was that a manifestation of the “gift of faith” was in operation, not the normal faith by which I, as the just, live.

We have to watch our motives.  Do we share the really spectacular testimonies to encourage the people to receive or to make them think that we are really amazing preachers?  Are out to bless people or impress people?  If we share a testimony, it should always be to bless people, not impress people.  If you’re going to impress people, impress them with how wonderful Jesus is, not how wonderful you are.

Most of the time I don’t share the more “impressive” testimonies unless I want to encourage someone who has the same unusual condition that I’ve seen healed before, or assure someone that no condition is too hard for God to heal.  Instead of impressive testimonies, I try to share helpful testimonies.  To me, a helpful testimony is one that can be reproduced anywhere.  In other words, if you’ll do what the other person did, you can be healed as the other person was.  So I major on the “someone believed and received when he prayed” testimonies, because anyone else can do what that person did and get the same result.  I have seen plenty of cases where difficult conditions were eradicated because someone took hold by faith of the healing that Jesus had already paid for him to have.  I also have some personal testimonies I can share about believing and receiving when I prayed.  Some helpful testimonies are impressive as well, but not all impressive testimonies are helpful.

I share elsewhere in this book about grabbing the feet of a child that were perpendicular to his body and straightening them out on the spot.  I am convinced this incident (under a tent in Costa Rica) was a manifestation of the gift of faith, not the product of the normal faith I live by.  I don’t go around doing things like that.  It certainly makes for an impressive testimony, but not one that could be readily duplicated, as I cannot control how and when the Holy Spirit uses me that way through gifts of the Spirit.

However, this testimony of what happened to me on an island off the Newfoundland coast is an example of a testimony that I think is both “impressive” and “helpful.”  I lost my balance walking along a rocky coastal ledge.  I tumbled down head-first, shredding my jacket (which had to be thrown out) in the process.  BANG went my head on the ledge.  My wife tells me that I was unresponsive for several minutes, and she commanded God’s life to go through my body.  I was bleeding out of my head, chest, and one leg; the blood was really gushing out and my leg was punctured.  When I could tell what was going on, I realized that I had no use of my left hand.  There was no hospital anywhere around and the ledge situation was so difficult that it is doubtful I could have been airlifted from it.

Thank God for a wife who knows the Word!  I finally ended up getting taken back to our friends’ house on that island, and they wanted to know if we should call for a medical helicopter or something.  I said, “No, just bring me my Bible, I want to read it!”  I’m not sure they thought that was smart (I’m pretty sure they didn’t think so), but they honored my request.  At least I got stabilized although the bleeding kept going a lot longer than I would have thought.  The skin on my face was ripped quite badly and I still couldn’t use my left hand.  But I believed that I received my healing for all of these issues!

I was such a mess my wife made me wear a hat over my head hoping that the border crossing people coming home wouldn’t notice what I looked like and think that she had beaten me or something.  She had to drive the first day, because it wouldn’t be safe for me to drive with one working hand.

But the second day, I began to amend!  My hand was really sore but at least I could use it enough to drive again, though in considerable discomfort.  My face started looking better, though I had multiple bad scars.

To make what could be a long testimony short: A few days later, I got up to preach at church AFTER having played the piano!  I still found it difficult to play but I managed well enough that no one knew anything was different.  NO ONE could tell that ANYTHING had happened to me.  My face was perfectly normal!  There was no visible sign of the ordeal I had been through only a few days earlier.  I had believed and received healing for all of it.  Now I can still play the piano with both hands just as easily as ever, thank God!

Maybe these Scriptures will help you as they did me.  The first Scripture I claimed, of course, was Psalm 118:17: “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD.”  Then, because my skin was a major issue, I claimed Job 33:19-25.  It is important to point out that you need to know Scriptures like this (or at least the fact that they exist so that you can look them up) before you need them, as you may not be in very good condition to look them up on the spur of the moment.

The reason that this testimony is helpful is that it can be duplicated using the normal faith we have.  I am convinced that I could do the same again if I had to do so without a special Holy Spirit manifestation.

There are actually churches where you might have to hold back from sharing some of the more “outlandish” testimonies you have simply because the pastor himself will not believe you, let alone the people!  I’ve had plenty of pastors not know what to make of me over the years.  It seemed like they’d like to have believed me but they seemed to think that I must have been inventing or at least embellishing the stories because they had yet to see anything like that in their own ministries.  I’ve gotten a LOT of funny looks in my life and been called an “enigma” because the other preachers couldn’t figure me out.  The fact that you haven’t seen something yourself doesn’t mean God can’t do it through someone else!  And He gets the glory for all of it anyway; without Jesus none of us could do anything.  Personally, I think some of the attitude creeps in, “If God were going to move like that, surely He would use me instead!”  But God can move whenever He can find a yielded vessel.  So the fact that God used you spectacularly doesn’t mean that you’re hot stuff.  Balaam’s donkey, which was not a spirit being, could not be spiritual at all, yet God used it!  That doesn’t mean that Balaam’s donkey was the new, hot, up-and-coming prophet that everyone needed to hear.

In fact, if you belong to the wrong church (for a faith person), you may not be able to share ANY good healing testimonies without getting censured by the pastor and/or people.  I’m convinced that Jesus told some people NOT to share their testimonies in their towns because He knew that the people in those towns would try to douse the healed person with unbelief, which could lead to the person losing his healing.  The solution to this is to go to a church that will believe your testimony rather than try to tell you that the devil must have healed you because they all “know” that the age of miracles is over.

Less mature preachers may feel the need to “one-up” you.  If you tell a story about how God healed someone of cancer and a bad ankle at the same time (I have such a story), they will tell you about the time that someone was healed of cancer, a broken bone, anemia and arthritis all at once when they preached.  (This “who’s the greatest” mentality did not die with the pre-saved versions of James and John, unfortunately.)  If you have a story of a service where everyone got healed (I do), they will tell you of a whole week of their services where everyone got healed.  (They might not elaborate by explaining, “Yes, both people who showed up got healed!”)  However, it’s good to just rejoice with those who rejoice.  If someone told me that he just saw someone healed of cancer when he preached, I would not volunteer that I saw someone with cancer and an ankle problem healed and that I have lost count of the cancer cases I have seen healed; I would rejoice with that person.  “That’s great!  Isn’t it wonderful to serve Jesus?”