Raising the Dead

by Chauncey W. Crandall

  Many in the meeting were moved, wanted to hear more, and crowded around me after the service. It was an odd feeling being in that position for the first time—a public figure through whom the Holy Spirit had touched others. I wanted to say, “Hey, I’m no one. I’m just a doctor. I don’t have anything you can’t have. I ran after the Lord.”

  Then I realized that while this was true, our family’s experience had led to one of life’s deepest griefs—the loss of a child—and in the end, I hadn’t blamed God. That’s what most people do, and I fully understand the impulse. Remaining loyal to God gave me a deeper understanding of how God looks at life. Because God and I—if I can be permitted to say this—shared in common the loss of a son. I had participated, on a human level, in the mystery that is making for the final restoration of heaven and earth. It was as if God were saying to me, “Do you understand now what I suffered when I gave My Son for the life of the world? Do you understand what I continue to suffer as people fail to comprehend My love? In being broken you have come to a new understanding of these things.”

  Shortly afterward, I was invited by the missionary evangelist Andrew McMillan to Colombia, South America, to speak at a men’s conference. I spoke on Friday morning to about 250 men, and Andrew liked what he heard so much that he invited me to speak that night to a young people’s gathering of 1,500. The event took place in a gymnasium, and a couple of barranquilla bands warmed up the kids with their happy Latin rhythms.

  I had never spoken to a crowd that large, and as Andrew had suggested I might minister beside him at the service’s end—praying for the Holy Ghost to fall on individuals and work healings—I wondered what was in store. By then I had seen many people slain in the Spirit and had even been blown backward by the Spirit the first time David Hogan prayed for Chad’s healing, but I had never seen anyone slain in the Spirit as the result of my own prayers.

  As I was preaching to the young people, I started talking about boldness. We should be bold in Christ. Even young people should be bold in Christ. “Go out and minister to other youth,” I told the young crowd. “Minister to your parents and your neighborhoods. You can have this boldness if you ask for it in Jesus’ name. If you’d like to be bold in Christ, I will pray for you to receive this gift. Who wants the courage and freedom in expressing your beliefs that only Christ can give? Are there fifteen here who want it?”

  Fifteen young people came out of the crowd and lined up on the platform behind me. I walked toward the young man who was first in the lineup on the left and before I was halfway to him, I held up my hand to pray for the blessing of boldness to fall on him and he fell backward, slain in the Spirit. I did not feel anything myself. But it was as though I had a force field around me, because with my next steps toward the second in line, he went down. Then the third, the fourth. These weren’t “courtesy drops,” as one sometimes sees at Pentecostal meetings. These teenagers went out. (In a peaceful way—the falling of the Holy Ghost usually brings a profound peace.) Every person in that line went over peacefully until I reached the fifteenth. He fell over, but then he started manifesting demons, writhing and slithering on the ground, growling, yelling, and screaming. I bent down to him and commanded the demons to come out in Jesus’ name.

  My host, Andrew McMillan, came over and said, “Listen, man, I don’t know what is going on here, but I want you to pray for every young person here tonight. It’s like you are in a Holy Ghost bubble.”

  Inside the “Holy Ghost Bubble”

  The young people had already started lining up in front of the platform—once they saw the first fifteen slain, the whole crowd wanted the same blessing. So I went into the crowd and held my hand up to pray and everyone hit the ground, toppling like dominoes. One in fifty would start manifesting demons, and Andrew and I would pray over them, calling on Jesus to free those suffering spiritual oppression from their bondage. By the end of a long, long night, fifteen hundred young people had received a special blessing of the Holy Spirit.

  Andrew McMillan has been a faithful missionary in Colombia for many years. He has been a leader in the Pentecostal and charismatic revival that has swept through Colombia and other Latin American nations. As we had a moment to ourselves after the service, he told me, “I’ve never seen anything like this. God is all over you, man. This is incredible.”

  “Andrew, I don’t know what this is exactly. I’m just doing what I’ve been asked.”

  “You have to do the Sunday service tomorrow,” he said. “Will you?”

  I quickly agreed.

  As we were preparing to go back to Andrew’s house that evening, a young woman told us of what had happened in her life that night. She had been passing by on the street, and she felt God’s power and was drawn into the service. She had been on her way to commit suicide by throwing herself in front of a bus. She was not a member of Andrew McMillan’s church. She simply felt the power of God drawing her away from destruction and toward Him. Instead of committing suicide, she gave her life to Christ that night.

  The next day, I started preaching and ministering again, with Andrew translating. There were thirty-six hundred people present and the same thing happened—the same blessing of the Holy Spirit. We called a couple of people up onto the platform, and they were slain in the Spirit. Then I went into the congregation, and everyone I prayed for was slain in the Spirit. Imagine praying for more than three thousand people, one by one. Sometimes I was running from one end of the room to the other, just touching people’s heads, and each and every one received the blessing. It was unbelievable. The more so to me, I imagine, because I didn’t feel anything. Sometimes ministers will speak of feeling God’s presence as heat or a warm tingling, but I didn’t feel anything. I knew that whatever was happening was all God, not me. But I was not only willing but thrilled to obey God’s leading. I went from row to row, sometimes climbing over chairs to reach people, and the Holy Ghost gave everyone the gift of resting in God.

  There was another service that night, with the same number of people, and the same thing happened.

  Andrew claims he still hasn’t witnessed a similar move of God, ever. He told me that my medical practice was important, my essential identity as a doctor should not change, but he implored me to keep ministering. “You have to keep this going.”

  “You’re Out of Control!”

  At home, I found myself worn-out from having prayed for so many people individually. I quickly came to understand how connected the physical and the spiritual are. “Lord, if You are going to use me like this,” I said in my prayers, “I have to get stronger.”

  Many evangelists and missionaries, like David Hogan, are into physical fitness for just this reason. Though I had begun taking better care of myself following the angioplasty, I intensified my health care regime at this time. I joined a gym, started working out regularly, and began eating right. I started practicing what I so often tell ministers who come to me as a doctor now—it’s important as God’s servants to honor the body as God’s temple. Otherwise, we give the devil an easy opportunity to shorten our service to God, and that’s not being properly grateful for the gift of God’s calling. There’s a reason the apostle Paul compared the spiritual life to a race, and I wonder if the apostle had the marathon in mind.

  I wonder whether God seems so sparing with His gifts at times because few of us have any idea how prepared we must be to receive and nurture them. God’s gifts may often appear more as burdens—heavy ones—than pleasures. God’s using me in new ways eventually challenged Deborah and our marriage.

  When I came home from Colombia, I told Deborah what had happened. She thought my stories were great, but she received them a little bit as one receives the tales of derring-do told by a child. She half suspected that I was weaving my own legends.

  After Colombia, the invitations for me to speak arrived weekly. I could only accept the invitations that allowed me six-week intervals between travels, otherwise I could never have continued my medical practice. For the firs
t eighteen months of my new life as a lay minister, I traveled alone, and Deborah was never an eyewitness to how the Holy Spirit was ministering through me. She was concentrating on catching up with our son, Christian, whose need for parenting and especially his mother’s presence was great after all the attention we had paid to Chad.

  Then I spoke to a big youth event at Joel Stockstill’s church, Bethany World Prayer Center, and Deborah came with me. There were six thousand young people and senior ministers from around the Baton Rouge area and far beyond in attendance. At the end of the service, all the pastors were called to the platform to pray individually with young people, and Joel asked me to come up and pray as well.

  I started praying one by one with teenagers and they started dropping, one after another. This frightened Deborah. When I pray for people, I feel emboldened by the Spirit, and I tend to shout. Deborah started tugging at me, telling me to keep my voice down, not to put my hands on anyone’s forehead—she wanted me to stop ministering. Having never seen anything like this happen through me, she wondered whether the kids falling backward might get hurt. She was concerned.

  Then I began praying for a girl who started manifesting demons, growling and screaming. Her sister was standing by her side, frightened. Deborah reached over my shoulder and grabbed my hand. “I don’t want you touching anyone else,” she said.

  I talked to the other ministers and asked them to continue praying with the girl who was manifesting demons, and then I went to pray for other teenagers.

  Later, one of the ministers who began praying with the girl manifesting demons told me the rest of the story. She had been tortured by demons for years. Her grandmother, who was a charismatic believer, had cast out two demons from her, but the grandmother confessed to being unable to cast out a third. “Dr. Crandall,” the minister told me, “you were able to cast out the third demon. She walked out of here set free!”

  When we returned home, Deborah renewed her concerns. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but I’ve never seen anything like that. You’re out of control!”

  “Deborah, I told you about Colombia. Did you think I was lying?”

  “I don’t care. This is just nuts. I don’t know if you should be doing this.”

  I said, “Deborah, are you really going to put me in the position of choosing between you and God? After what we’ve been through? Really? I don’t want this. The Lord has given this to me. I’m not worthy of it, but when I pray for people and this happens, we just have to go with the Holy Spirit.”

  “I don’t understand it. I’ve never seen this from you and I’ve known you your whole life. From other people, yes, but not with you, and it frightens me.”

  I was about to make another rebuttal when she waved off the conversation, still clearly dissatisfied.

  I had a long talk with Jesus that night, believe me. “You know, Lord, I don’t want to choose between honoring You and what my wife wants. This marriage has to stay intact. I don’t want to turn from You, but I’ve already been through so much. I need You, but I need Deborah, too.”

  In Full Flame

  I had a dream that night—or a vision—I’m not sure what to call it. I dreamed I was in the Shenandoah mountains, and I was with the Lord, and off in the distance was a little flicker of light, a campfire. When I was a Boy Scout I often went camping and you could always see a campfire in the distance, that glimmer of light with its trail of smoke reaching above the tree line. The Lord spoke to me in the dream: “You see that glimmer of light?”

  “Yes, Lord, I see it.”

  He said, “Many ministers run for that fire, and that fire is always off in the distance and they never get there.”

  He said, “I haven’t put you at a distance from the fire. I’ve put you in the middle of the fire, in full flame. Honor Me with that, because I’ve given it to you.”

  I woke up the next morning and looked at my wife and said, “Listen, the Lord gave me this dream last night, Deborah. I’m going to tell you like it is. Here’s the dream—please deal with it, because I have to.”

  That dream changed Deborah’s mind. After thinking about it that day, she came to me and said, “Okay. If He’s given the Spirit to you like that, then we must honor the Lord. I understand what the Lord is talking about, that many ministers want to run for the fire but the fire remains off in the distance. They haven’t been broken like you’ve been broken, and they’ll never achieve that fire. That anointing. You have to honor the Lord. When it’s time to give it away, you give it away, and I’ll do what I can to help.”

  Preacher Boy

  At the beginning of my second life as a traveling speaker and lay minister, I was also confused about how God wanted me to approach this role. I thought I had to become a “preacher boy,” imitating the study habits and speaking style of the evangelists I admired or senior pastors at churches. I started memorizing Scripture like crazy and developing complex outlines. As I delivered the sermons I had so ardently prepared, though, I saw that I was only imitating what full-time preachers could do far better than I. And I wasn’t drawing as deeply as I could on “the hope that is in [me]” (1 Pet. 3:15)—my peculiar vantage point as a doctor and a believer.

  I began stoking the fire in ways that made more sense in my circumstances. I drew on what I had learned from David Hogan and his colleagues in Mexico: the most effective preparation starts with praise. Praising the Lord breaks the yoke of darkness. My most powerful sermons or presentations always occur after I spend time praising God. I have praise songs on my laptop computer; wherever I go, before I speak I’ll sit in my hotel room for an hour or two, play the praise songs, and I’ll walk back and forth across the room, crying out to God, praising Him, and asking Him to minister through me. I’ll read passages from the Bible and ask to be led as to what God wants me to say.

  This wouldn’t prepare me, however, if I didn’t read the Bible every day and do my best to begin each morning in prayer. I have to admit I don’t have a set pattern. I like to use my computer program to do searches. I use that tool to both go deeper and range widely through the Scriptures as to what the Holy Spirit wants to tell me. At the beginning, I supplemented my reading of the Word with other books, but the longer I do this the more I concentrate just on the Bible. It’s always best if I keep my appointment with God at morning’s first light, when I’m most free of distractions.

  I pray daily for people and, as I mentioned, I fast in preparation for particular challenges. Fasting allows God to confer His power. Our souls encompass the mind, our emotions, and our will, and our spirit comes from God’s sustaining presence. The Spirit of God in us battles to communicate with the soul, and the body’s demands can interfere. When I “turn off” my body’s demands through fasting, the Spirit can better communicate with my soul, and it’s easier to accept what God is asking of me.

  Excellence

  A crucial turning point in this change from “preacher boy” to being more myself came when Pat Robertson invited me to be on the board of Regent University in Virginia. The campus is an oasis of beauty and order—a real witness to God’s character. I visited that campus and saw that everything around me was done with such excellence. The true meaning of the word met me wherever I turned.

  I found myself at the board meeting sitting with people of great accomplishment, who were all Spirit-filled. People like Admiral Vernon Clark, who was in charge of naval operations during the Nixon administration. And Ben Carson, the African-American pediatric neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins. There were CEOs of gigantic corporations. I had never been in a meeting before where everyone else was a professional and believed in the power of the Holy Spirit and walking in all the gifts of God. I have to admit that in Pentecostal and charismatic circles I have met some weird people, and sometimes there is a theatricality to the services that strikes anyone as contrived. The men and women on Pat Robertson’s board affirmed just by their presence that I could be me, as a believer, a scientist, and a physician. The men and women a
round me were all walking in excellence, and that might have been their greatest witness to God’s reality and power.

  Through this experience the Lord said clearly to me, “I’ve called you to be a physician. I haven’t called you to be a ‘preacher boy.’ I’ve given you a platform as a physician to win the lost for Christ. You will take this platform and have influence over people, wherever you go, based on your testimony.”

  I finally understood that many people would find my testimony credible precisely because I was a physician rather than a professional minister.

  God Is the Healer, Not Me

  Being a physician frees me to take a clear-eyed look at what happens in healing services and to reach out to the unlovely and the destitute. I believe completely in supernatural healing, and I’m clear about God’s being the healer, not me. It’s not my job to determine who is healed at a meeting and who isn’t. All healings are ultimately only signs of God’s resurrection power—His promise to raise every believer from the dead to new life in God. God grants these signs or not, according to God’s perfect understanding of how best to unite us with God. It’s not a matter of believing in just the right way or how much we believe—otherwise, Chad would not be with God right now.

  I began to understand both the reality of God’s power to heal and His mysterious ways of doing so while Chad was still alive. Part of the way I survived the ordeal of his illness was getting away to crusades to build my faith. One time I went to a Benny Hinn crusade in Nigeria. There were huge crowds of six hundred thousand or more every night. Benny Hinn commissioned twelve of us in his support team to go out into the crowds and pray for the sick.