Objection: Some Faith Teachers Have Seen the Light and Have Backed Off from Faith Teaching

If we’re going to use experience as our guide, we can also observe that some people who didn’t use to teach faith went on to teach it boldly.

I know of certain former faith teachers who now claim that they were wrong, and sadly some of them USED to be right and they are wrong now!  And before I say any more, it is not my intention to pick on anyone in particular (here or anywhere else in this book), as quite a few people come to mind who fit this category.  What often happens is that people preach healing exuberantly, but then they get complaints “thrown in their faces” for years when people challenge them about specific individuals who did not receive their healings.  They finally decide that something must be wrong with teaching “healing in the atonement” after all.  They suffer from the big-ministry equivalent of Perilous Pastoral Pushback.

But the real test of any teaching is the WORD – never experience!  I have tried preaching the new birth to over a hundred thousand people (over time) in a tough part of the country, but a very small minority of them got saved.  Should I “back off” from “new birth teaching” because so many stayed in their sins?  Does my experience mean that something is wrong with the gospel, so I need to back off?  NO!  I need to preach the good news as much as ever to anyone who will listen.  Lack of results does not mean that teaching is defective.  If it did mean that, Jesus’ teaching at Nazareth must have been defective!  The issue wasn’t His teaching but rather the unbelief in His hearers.

So my challenge to any former faith teacher is to produce Scripture to prove to the rest of us that healing is not actually for all today. I don’t care what their experience is or even what mine is; that doesn’t matter.  Let the Word decide.  If one such teacher thinks he’s found a way to disprove divine healing, check out his disproof in the Objections Overruled section of this book and see whether you think it holds water.

It always saddens me when a teacher changes his doctrine due to experience rather than the Word.  Experience is NEVER a good reason to do it.  Experience would tell you that no one walks in love ALL the time.  Should I back off from “love teaching” because experience shows that it’s just too hard to follow?

In closing, I HAVE heard people who have taken things way too far and “gone off the deep end.”  For example, I know of at least two (living, at this writing) preachers who believe that our bodies should be immortal NOW.  People who are into that kind of excess DO need to see the light and back off what they’re teaching.  But teaching that by FAITH you can receive the healing that Jesus paid for is part of the real gospel, not some excessive add-on to it, so no one should ever back off from it.