by Eric Metaxas
That Friday evening, Paul again hobbled to the arena with Rivers—using his cane and wearing his leg brace. He expected to be healed that evening. It was May 28, 2004, the twenty-first day after his stroke. Paul realized that the pastor in Ghana had given him that prophecy the Friday evening before Memorial Day in 2000. That was precisely four years earlier, because May 28, 2004, was also the Friday before Memorial Day. Paul says that he absolutely knew that his hour had come, that this evening he would be healed. He and Rivers had prayed toward this end with great faith and intensity and were doing so at that moment.
That evening the person who had arranged their special seats in the front row told them that he was sorry, but those seats were reserved for the evening’s service. Of course they told him they understood and were very grateful for his help that morning. But when they arrived at the arena that night a woman took them to those same seats. They asked her whether she was making some mistake, but she told them, “The Lord told me to seat you here.”
Next to them was a young woman pastor who told Paul and Rivers she had been very sick a few minutes earlier in the restroom near the entrance. She didn’t feel at all well and she thought it wise to return to her hotel room. But Paul insisted that she must stay, saying Satan wanted to rob her of her joy. He prayed for her on the spot and thirty minutes later she told Paul she felt terrific and was very glad she had stayed.
Paul said that he could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit as the worship music played and they sang along, worshiping the God Paul felt certain would heal him that very night, in that very place. Then it happened. Without any warning, Paul said that he began to involuntarily shake “in a way that I cannot duplicate to this day, like a jackhammer that is used to break up concrete.” He said that this “jerking” lasted for about five minutes.*
Around this time Benny Hinn declared from the stage that there had just then been several healings “including someone with a brace.” Paul couldn’t believe his ears. But had he indeed been healed? Benny Hinn immediately said that anyone with a brace who thought they were healed must immediately take off the brace and come onto the stage. But Paul’s brace was under his pants. He didn’t dare remove his trousers in public, with TV cameras rolling. Nonetheless, he felt guilty about it and prayed that God would see his heart. He was so gung ho with faith that he would have taken his pants off if he really felt God wanted him to do that, to show that he was healed. And yet he knew he had been healed. He shifted his weight onto his left leg, and for the first time in three weeks it could support his weight.
Benny Hinn then said that everyone who had been healed should come forward. Suddenly what must have been hundreds of people began walking toward the stage. How many of them had actually been healed we can never know. But Paul knew that he had been healed. Still, he had been on the stage that morning and didn’t feel the need to move from his seat this time. Paul began wondering what would happen when he got back to the hotel room and took off his brace. He wanted to see his leg and be able to enjoy his healing. But for now he would just stay put. Still, if God really wanted him to leave his seat and be up on the stage, he was willing to go. But God would have to make it happen somehow. Otherwise Paul was determined to stay put.
Then, amid all the clamor and celebration going on in those moments, Benny Hinn suddenly walked straight to the pulpit, looked down directly at Paul and Rivers, and said, “Come up here!” He didn’t know who they were, so Rivers couldn’t believe he was talking specifically to them. But Paul knew that he was, that God had answered his prayer. He also knew that this short journey to the stage would be the ultimate arbiter of his healing. Climbing those stairs would normally have been a painfully awkward, slow-motion effort of several minutes, but this time Paul walked up the steps normally, as though both legs were fine. Paul was so thrilled by this that as soon as he reached the top of the stairs he told a man standing there that God had just healed him.
Paul and Rivers walked toward Pastor Hinn, who had summoned them. “Who are you people?” Hinn asked them. Paul explained that he was a Lutheran pastor from Westport, Connecticut, and mentioned that he was friends with Harald Bredesen,* the famous pastor whom Benny Hinn knew well. “You are the Lutheran pastor he is always talking about!” Hinn said. “Do Lutherans believe in this?”
“This one does!” Paul said. With that, Benny Hinn touched them both on their heads, as he does—and down they both went. As they were being helped to their feet, someone mentioned to Benny Hinn that Paul had received a miracle that evening. Pastor Hinn told Paul to tell everyone about it, thrusting a microphone toward him. Paul then told the assembled thousands about his stroke three weeks earlier and how he felt that just moments earlier he had been healed. Then Pastor Hinn made it clear he knew nothing about this healing. He said to the crowd that the reason he had called Paul and Rivers up onto the stage was because God had told him that they were to have a healing ministry. This was certainly a surprise to Paul.
Benny Hinn then spoke aloud a prophecy over Paul and Rivers, with the thousands in the audience listening. A prophetic “word” is when someone has the supernatural gift of “hearing” what God is saying about someone or something and then “declaring” it with one’s own mouth, so others can hear it. The Greek word “prophet” simply means “to speak forth.” What Pastor Hinn spoke at that point was recorded. He said this:
Stretch your hands toward them that this Sunday miracles would happen in that church . . . We believe! As the gospel will be preached out of this man’s lips and his wife’s, that they’ll see mighty signs and wonders as in the Book of Acts. That [their] church will experience such a flow and an overflow and an abundant flow of the Spirit. That Ezekiel 47* will be fulfilled in that congregation where now only their feet are touching the water, but soon that glorious water of life will flow so great and so deep that it will draw thousands into that congregation. Lord, I pray healing ministry would be granted to this couple who’ve served you for years. Give them that mantle. Touch!
This happened on May 28, just as Paul was sure it would. What should we make of that? Or of what Benny Hinn said from that stage to those thousands of people about Paul and Rivers having a ministry of healing? Of course there was a strange poetry to the idea that in the moments following his miraculous healing, Paul would learn that God had a healing ministry for him. But did God really have such a thing for Paul after all? It was easy for someone like Benny Hinn to declare such things, but who would follow up to let him know if what he had so boldly declared had never happened?
The next day Paul woke up and the healing he had felt the previous night had not diminished. He did feel a bit weak, but he didn’t need the brace or cane at all. Rivers drove back to Westport and the following morning, a Sunday, Paul said that he wanted to go to their church to see if people would indeed begin coming there to be healed. After what had happened to him, he was not scheduled to preach for another two months, but he would go and just sit in the back as a parishioner. After the sermon, a lay minister asked for prayer requests and Paul stood up and said that he requested prayers for what God was doing through his people “and our church.” Next, a woman stood. She had never been to the church before, and she had arrived late, sitting just in front of Paul. She said, “God told me that if I came into this church today, I would be healed.” She had no idea that Paul was the pastor but said, “When I heard that man speak, I knew I had come to the right church.” Evidently this woman had had such severe pain that she had been forced to leave her job six months earlier. She had driven thirty miles to be there that morning.
After the service, Paul offered to pray for her. The following morning she left a voice mail on the church phone, saying that her pain was gone and she would be returning to her job. Before Paul left the sanctuary a woman approached him with a picture of her eleven-month-old grandson. She said the doctors were concerned he might have leukemia. His blood cell count was two hundred; a normal count wo
uld be one thousand. Paul took the photo and prayed that the boy be healed and that the test results would “confound the doctors.” Later that week the woman called to say the count was at 720 and that the doctors had ruled out leukemia. Four weeks later his count was normal and the doctors said the problem must have been an “unidentifiable virus.”
Three weeks after the Benny Hinn crusade a staff person from his ministry called, saying she was curious about the prophetic word that Pastor Hinn had publicly spoken over Paul and Rivers. She had reviewed the tape and had copied it out. “I’ve never seen or heard him speak this way,” she said. Paul told her that just what Pastor Hinn had said was already beginning to happen. There could be no denying Paul’s healing happened ten years ago. Since then, Paul and Rivers Teske have traveled to six continents and sixty countries, preaching and teaching and healing in God’s name. It happened and is still happening.*
NUTS
Since the extraordinary experience related in the previous story, my friend Paul Teske has indeed been active in “healing ministry.” He travels the world telling people his story, telling them Jesus can heal them today, and then praying for the healing of anyone willing to come forward. I asked him to share some stories with me and from the many he had to share, I thought the following story from May 2012 was the best to include. It deals with a malady that is on the one hand rather pedestrian, and on the other tremendously debilitating, and even deadly, and that for some reason afflicts more people today than it used to. I’m talking about nut allergies.
Paul was invited to speak to a group of about three hundred business people at a conference in Daytona Beach, Florida, in May 2012. As he always does, he told the story of his own healing, and then launched into the subject of miraculous healing today, making it clear that this is not something that only happened during New Testament times, as many Christians have been taught in their churches, but that continues to be available to us now. When Paul finished talking and asked whether anyone in the audience needed prayer for healing, no hands went up. There was the standard awkward moment of waiting for someone to break the ice and then a middle-aged woman raised her hand and Paul called her forward. She did so rather reluctantly, because she was a member of a Baptist church where the concept of “healing in the church today” was actively frowned upon. Paul asked her what her name was and then asked her what she needed prayer for. She told him that her name was Juanita and that she had a “severe nut allergy,” which had plagued her from birth. He asked her to explain the severity of her allergy. She said it was so severe that whenever she flew, she had to be in what is quite seriously termed a “nut-free zone.” The woman explained that over the years she had been rushed to the emergency room numerous times due to inadvertent exposure to nuts. One of those visits had been nearly fatal.
As he usually did, Paul silently prayed, asking God to tell him anything else that this woman needed prayer for, since people were often too shy to reveal certain things. Paul said that as he prayed, the words “broken heart” immediately came to him. So he quietly asked her: “Who broke your heart?”
“My father,” she replied, and burst into tears. Paul probed more deeply into the woman’s relationship with her father and found that it was severely strained. He then walked her through a prayer to forgive her father and to “release him to God.” Then Paul prayed, asking God to heal her heart. As with all such prayers of forgiveness, it does not wipe away the enormity of the other person’s sin—whatever that sin might be—but it enables the person affected by that sin to place the other person in God’s hands, to free themselves of the burden of the deep resentment and unforgiveness they’ve been carrying. In essence, one is free to “love” the person who has done the harm because one actively trusts God to justly deal with that person.
Paul then asked God to allow the woman’s nut allergy to be healed as evidence of the restoration of her healed relationship with her father. Juanita then informed Paul with a measured amount of concern that the only way she could be sure of being healed was to eat some nuts—which had, until that point in her life, obviously been very dangerous to do. After Paul spoke a few more words of affirmation, Juanita expressed her gratitude and left. Other people then came forward for prayer.
Paul said that that night, as he lay in his hotel room trying to fall asleep, he felt an urge to continue to pray for Juanita, asking God to protect her. He understood the seriousness surrounding her allergy and knew that the consequences of her going into anaphylactic shock from eating nuts could be fatal. Paul recalled that he woke up several times that night to pray for her.
The next morning, most of the conference attendees had departed by bus for a local restaurant, where they were to hear another speaker over breakfast. Paul had previously decided he wouldn’t be going to that event, but before the buses departed he walked through the hotel lobby, trying to find Juanita, but he didn’t see her anywhere. After the buses had gone, Paul decided to call the person hosting the conference to see whether she had spoken to Juanita. But her phone went straight to voice mail. Paul left a message and then tried the number again several times, to no avail. He then decided to walk the boardwalk, where he prayed silently as he walked up and down the beach.
About an hour later, Paul got a call from the conference host, who said that she had indeed met the woman at the breakfast and had spoken with her. The woman told her that after the prayer service the night before she had decided to test the supposed healing. So she had deliberately sought out a candy bar containing nuts. She found one, purchased it, and took it back to her room. On the desk near her bed she had placed the syringe she carried containing serum, in case she started going into anaphylactic shock. She then took off the wrapper and slowly placed the candy bar into her mouth, praying as she did so. She bit off a hunk, chewed, and swallowed. Then she waited. For several minutes there was no allergic reaction. She continued to wait. The allergic reaction never came. She said that’s when she knew she had been healed. In her entire life, getting no serious reaction from eating nuts had simply never happened before. Indeed, nothing close to it had ever happened. The conference host told Paul that the woman had saved the candy bar wrapper and had pulled it out of her purse that morning as she excitedly shared her story with anyone who would listen.
That evening the conference ended with a banquet. The host invited Juanita to the mic, asking her to share what had happened with the audience, which she gladly did. She ended by saying she had learned two things: first, that there was no doubt that Jesus still heals today. That she was standing there after having eaten nuts was dramatic proof of that. And second, that she actually didn’t like nuts.
By way of background, the severity of Juanita’s allergy is dramatic. For years, Juanita has worked as a meeting planner and a convention sales manager, so she would always have to ask how every food item was prepared to determine if it was safe for her to be around, always needing to clarify that it was not just nuts themselves that were a concern, but any kind of nut oil or nut by-products. Needless to say, many people found these questions and concerns fussy and annoying. As her allergies intensified, she was eventually forced to ask that her entire workplace be a “nut-free zone.” Predictably, this invited frequent jokes, but the less fun quotidian reality was that the front desk had to check out every food item that was brought in and if it was found to contain any kinds of nuts or nut oils, it had to be removed from the building posthaste. Coworkers rather often inadvertently brought in Thai food or something else prepared with nuts, and Juanita was forced to leave work for the remainder of the day.
Whenever she traveled, Juanita requested that the pilot or flight attendants make an announcement that someone aboard had a severe nut allergy and they requested that no nuts be consumed during the flight. She traveled with hand wipes and wiped down armrests, seat-back trays, and anything else she could reach. Entering a hotel room, she would wipe down the door handles and light switches, and then the TV re
mote, clocks, hangers, and anything else she might come in contact with. Wherever she went, she always used her own pens, never touching anyone else’s.
She once attended a Christmas party at a local hotel and had to leave gasping for air because some of the desserts contained nuts. Even seemingly innocuous things like candy canes at Christmas were risky to be around because many times they were processed in facilities that processed nuts. Her life was consumed with dealing with the allergy, as was her husband’s and the lives of all around her. Juanita was perpetually reading ingredient labels—every label on everything.
Her closest call with death came one day at work, when someone left an open container of pistachios out. Suddenly, Juanita couldn’t breathe very well. Sometimes being unable to breathe made her unable to think clearly, so others would have to tell her to use her inhaler, but this time she remembered to use it and then left work immediately. But even after she got home ten or fifteen minutes later, her breathing had not improved. She asked her husband for help and injected herself with her EpiPen, but that too was, for some reason, completely ineffective. Her husband then drove her to a local clinic, where she was given additional meds, but they too had no effect. Juanita said that being unable to breathe on her own for such a long time was very frightening. Finally an ambulance was called and Juanita was taken to the local emergency room. The medical team there quickly understood the situation and gave her a number of other drugs, which finally helped her breathing. But they also gave her what she described as the “worst migraine I had ever experienced.” (She had also suffered from migraines for many years.) The ER doctors then gave her more drugs to combat the painful migraine.