The Woman Who Saw Snakes On The Altar

The Woman Who Saw Snakes On The Altar

by Francis MacNutt

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I guess I can’t talk as freely about Tommy as I was going to since I just saw him walk in. Actually, the way I would like to begin this morning, and Judith will end this talk, the very last part of it, it is a story, it has something to do with a retreat that Tommy and I gave in Australia. And we gave a retreat to about 250 priests and two bishops over there, and it was really a fantastic, marvelous retreat. And extraordinary things happened. And when it was all over, we had a couple of days off before the next real large conference began, and so Tommy and I were walking through the streets of Sydney. And I suppose it was because so much good had happened, and I had seen so much good in these men who dedicated their lives to God. And even though there was sin, you know, that was being freed, and they were real honest about it. So we were just buoyed up, and I was walking through the streets with Tommy, and you know Tommy, how positive he is. And as we were seeing these people walk by, I was just, like, overwhelmed with the goodness of creation, and the goodness of what I saw, the people walking down the streets of Sydney.

And we even went to the real rough district of Sydney called King’s Cross, and you could see the people there, a lot of evil there. But my basic impression of Sydney was just wonderful. I was so uplifted. And then, as I was walking down the streets, thinking about all the goodness, suddenly it crossed my mind that there had been one of our great charismatic leaders, who had also been in Sydney some years before, addressing the very same conference. And I remembered that he had said, when he came back from Sydney, that he was up in his hotel room one night, looking over Sydney, and he suddenly got an impression of the evil in that city, like rising up out of the streets until it reached his hotel room. And the sense of evil in Australia was so great that he was overwhelmed, and he got down on his knees and started to pray, like asking God not to wipe the place, give us one more day to repent, like Jonah, you know, overlooking the city of Nineveh. And he said from that point on, he never woke a morning without being grateful that there was one more day to pray for the salvation of the world before the end. And I thought to myself, my gosh, here is this man whom I respect very highly as really being prophetic, who is overwhelmed by the evil of this place, like he can’t stand it.

And here I am, walking down the street with Tommy, overwhelmed by the goodness of this place. And naturally, you wonder, now who’s right? Am I seeing it right? Was he seeing it right? You know, what’s the story about this place?

And I didn’t tell this to Tommy. We were just walking. This is all going through my mind. And what came to me is, I’m sure, the truth. And that is that we have both seen the reality of Sydney, spiritually. And if you could ever see, say, the goodness that’s in human beings, and say, in the city of Kansas City, or Wichita, or Moline, or wherever, if you could ever see the goodness that’s really there beneath the surface as God sees it, you would be overwhelmed.

They say that once St. Catherine of Siena saw in a vision a soul who was in heaven in the state of grace. And the sight of the soul of this human being in the state of grace in heaven was so overwhelming that she really thought it was more than an angel. She really thought it might be God or it might be Jesus. And she knelt down, and Jesus was standing beside her, said, “Stand up, Catherine. That’s just a human being, the old one, in the presence of God.” So if you could ever really see it, if you could ever see the goodness of people in this room, you’d be overwhelmed. Like you couldn’t stand it, you’d probably start laughing and float right up to the ceiling with ecstasy. On the other hand, if you could ever see the evil as God sees it, say, in the city of Sydney, all the things that are beneath the surface, in the people, in the government, everything, you’d be so overwhelmed by the evil that you would do just what my friend did. You’d get down on your knees, and you’d start to cry.

And you wouldn’t be able to take it. And you’d start doing penance, and you’d probably pray from now, and you’d probably die of a broken heart in about three, four years’ time. The history of saints, anyway, is that they usually die at a very early age. They see the amount of evil and how much work is to be done, and they start to work. And most of them seem to burn out at a very early age, don’t they? Because they see the extent of the evil in the world. And it’s real. Now the thing is, because we are human, we really can’t see the goodness that’s there the way God sees it. And we can’t see the evil. We can’t stand to see the evil as He sees it. It would break us apart. And so most of us are pretty blind, really. We don’t see good or we don’t see evil. And we’re blind and we kind of walk along in this daze, neither seeing the goodness as God sees it, nor the evil.

Now this is really important. And at least in part, what we’re going to be talking about is healing, but not just physical healing, but the healing that all of us need within ourselves to be able to see the reality as it is, as God wants us to see it, to have that renewed mind in Jesus Christ that He wants us to have, that we don’t have because we just see on the surface until He gives us new eyes.

And so I would like to share with you the… Again, like last night, this is going to be very simple. It’s going to be something I trust that we can all accept as Christians as being very traditional Christianity, but it’s something we don’t see. It’s something we believe, but we don’t see. And the vision that God gives us in the Bible is like threefold about the goodness and the evil that’s in our world. And the first vision we get is in the very beginning of Genesis, where God creates the world. Evil did not create the world. A lot of Oriental religions have an equal conflict between the forces of good and the forces of chaos, and they’re both in there working like evil. Evil is almost as great as good, and they’re in conflict. But our vision of the world is that God created it, and everything that exists is created by God. The devil created nothing.

What he does is he works on the goodness that God has created and messes it up, but the devil creates nothing. Anything that exists, everything in this room, which is, comes from God. And as God looked out upon the world that He was creating, day by day, He looked at each thing He had created and said, “This is good.” And when it was all over, and when He finished creation, He looked at the whole of creation and He said, “This is very good.” That’s the basic vision. That if he could see it, it is really good. And no one who is a Christian has any right to be bored by the universe.

And most of us just don’t have eyes to see the beauty that’s there. We lose something, most of us, when we grow up, don’t we? Now, your first train trip, or your first plane trip, or something like that, you know, is wonderful to get on this train. And then after you’ve made ten train trips, or ten plane trips, it becomes boring, it’s nothing, and you’ve seen clouds before, and, you know, all those things that you saw for the first time, the first snowfall. You know, how wonderful that was. Then after, as you see snow, and you begin to think of cleaning it up, and it just isn’t the same anymore as you grow older. You lose the sense of wonder about God’s creation. And this means a lot to me, because one of my hobbies, which some people think is kind of weird, is I love to watch birds. I’m a bird watcher. And most people think, how dumb can you get looking at birds? They’re not, you know… How could anyone be excited by looking at a bird? But they’re beautiful. If you have eyes to see, you know, it’s fascinating. Now, that’s just the thing that, in creation, that I happen to see some of. And I’m blind about other aspects of creation, but it’s like none of us have eyes to see what God has created.

We’re blind. And as we grow older, we get more and more blind, and more and more dead. So the first thing that’s real clear, isn’t it, from Revelation is that there’s a goodness in this world, which is basic to it, created by God. Now, this has a lot to do with healing, and I’ll be sharing about that later. Now, the second layer is that there really is evil. Something really happened. As we said last night, there was a fall. And it’s very real, and the evil that’s there is very big. And there seem to be some people, anyway, not too many, but some people who are blind to the real evil that’s there and the extent of it, including many Christians. But there’s a real personal force of evil. You know, the devil and all the things that are connected with that. And the devil is not nearly on the same plane of power as God. He’s working in here, causing deception. But he’s very real, and when we are not Christian, when we do not have the power of God, that force of evil is bigger than we are. And our struggle is not just against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. And as I began to get into the power of the Spirit, you know, in the late 60s and start to pray with people, I began to discover that more and more how real that was, that many of the people we are praying for are for healing, which really means a restoration of that first creation.

When you’re working with healing, it’s like something has fallen down in, say, the human body, which is basically good, but it’s falling apart because of that corruption in the universe, and so you’re trying to get it back. But sometimes you run into this personal force, this demonic force which is confronting you, and these spirits are speaking to you, hating you, in the plural, saying, “We hate you. Now this is my pig. Get away. She belongs to me. This is my property. And I’ll kill you if you don’t get out,” you know, that kind of… so suddenly you’re confronting evil. And I know I never really confronted that to that extent until I started to operate by praying with people somehow in the power of the Spirit. It was like up to that point, apparently, most of the things that I did were good, but they didn’t have enough force to threaten the powers of evil. They didn’t have to react. But Judith, who is a psychologist, in her work, any day when she sees six clients, she can expect that maybe one of those six, she will have to pray for deliverance. It’s just a matter of course that when you’re dealing with areas of human hurt, there are these forces that are bigger than us, and the person will never get well until you confront them and drive them out by the power of Jesus Christ.

Now, the sad thing, I think, is that most church people today don’t really believe in that. They feel that this is a medieval superstition, and the less you have to do with this, the better. I found in my own work in healing a great acceptance when I spoke about healing to various groups of ministers and priests. But when we talked about freeing people from evil spirits, there was great skepticism on behalf of many of them. They said, “Now here, this is something that’s very dangerous. We don’t want this around. Thank God we got rid of it. With the Inquisition, there were the Salem witchcraft trials. We don’t want any more of this.” And I’ve had very prominent church authorities say, “Now healing is fine, but, no, please, no more exorcism. It’s very, very dangerous. We don’t want to worry people or frighten them.”

And it’s like people don’t really understand. They say that Jesus was caught up in His worldview and they believed in demons at that point, but now we know better. So that whole thing is washed out. A sense of the real evil that’s… and the power of it that’s in the world.

And then the third level is that there is a new creation. That something new is happening since Jesus came into the world. And it’s not just a restoration of that first creation of goodness and getting rid of the evil that’s there. But the new creation is better than the first. It’s much better. And our destiny now is not just to become full human beings, but our destiny is that incredible verse that I read to you from the last verse of 2 Corinthians 5, that our destiny is in Jesus to become the very goodness of God Himself. And in 1 Corinthians 1, these are verses I used to tend to take. It’s very beautiful, but kind of metaphorical, but I now see that they’re much more than metaphorical. This is 1 Corinthians 1, 29. The human race has nothing to boast about to God, but you, God has made members of Christ Jesus, and by God’s doing, He has become our wisdom, our virtue, our holiness, and our freedom.

And the constant Christian tradition is that we become filled with the very life of God Himself, and we begin to love people as Jesus loves, to have the wisdom of Jesus so we can see things as Jesus sees them, and we become, in a sense, like God.

And as one church father, I think it was Saint Athanasius, said, “God became man to make us into God.” Now we have to understand that we are not God, but we participate in His life. And so our new creation is so much better than the first. So you get this vision of three levels. First, the world and humanity is created by God, and that’s very good. Then there’s an evil level, and we’re fallen and wounded, and that’s very, very bad. But then there’s the third level of Jesus coming to save us and restore us and move us beyond even the first level, and that’s very, very good. And so when you see the sum total of everything, there’s nothing but room for optimism, no room for despair. But what we have to be able to do is to see the goodness in creation first of all. And primarily that means, and I’m beginning to see this more and more in the healing ministry, the goodness that’s in people. I find that just in my humanity, I tend to see evil all over the place, you know, without trying. One of the things that Judith does in her work with people is to ask them if they could just list on one sheet of paper their good qualities.

And then you take another sheet of paper, it’s like homework, take this home, and you list your bad qualities and your defects. And most people maybe list two good qualities, something like that, and some can’t list any. Can’t list any. And then the sheet with problem areas and the mess you’ve made out of your life, that’s real long, sometimes two pages long, you can go on for that. And for most of us, I really believe that’s true, that we see a lot more evil in ourselves and goodness.

And one of the things that we find in people who need healing is that they cannot see that God created them good, that there’s something basically good there, maybe really messed up, yeah, but that God loved you into creation, and you are good.

And as I see healing, a lot of times it’s not this or that that’s happened to a person, but it’s their whole vision of who they are. It’s like they will say, “I am no good. I don’t really believe that God loves me.”

And so their sickness is not just something that happened to them, but it’s like a whole lie which has been given to them by the devil, because it’s very instructive if you’ve had anything to do with deliverance, because you can work out a whole view of the universe by taking the opposite of what the devil says. Like the devil keeps telling people, “You are no damn good. You are lost and condemned forever. You are no good.”

He’ll continually say that, and he’ll also say that about other people. “You cannot trust other people. Other people are no good.” And the devil is always in the business of spewing out hatred, saying, “I hate you. You are no good. You are evil. You belong to me.”

And it’s like a basic lie which is in the world. And I had one young woman who came to me, and this is not her name, but it really represents this whole thing, and she said, “The way I feel about myself, I am not Marianne who has a disease, but I’m a disease named Marianne.” Now, how do you pray for healing there?

And so, I think the first thing that God wants to do is to open our eyes to see what He’s done. St. Paul says that we are God’s work of art. And that’s both on the first level and the third level, isn’t it? That we are God’s work of art.

And then the second thing is that we really have to see the magnitude of the evil that confronts us. But to know that in Jesus Christ, not in ourselves, that we have this marvelous power to overcome and to transform, people so that they really become different.

Now, what I find is that in the world which is not Christian, like in the Orient, Japan, or areas of Africa, places like that, people have a real lively sense. They have a livelier sense of the goodness of creation than we do. They laugh more. I don’t know. Go to Africa, it’s just overwhelming. Their sense of song and laughter and it’s like all that’s been brought out of it someplace. So they have a lively sense of the goodness of creation. But they also, by experience, have a tremendous sense of evil. And without Jesus, their basic religion, this is fascinating, is the basic religion of the whole world. It’s true of the Orient, too, that there is a good God someplace who created the world. Almost all peoples of the world believe that. There is a good God, the high God, someplace. But He’s off in His heaven someplace after creating the world. So He is good so you don’t have to worry about Him. But down here below, you have all these ancestral spirits and evil spirits. Those are the guys you have to worry about. They’re after you. So what you have to do is hang up this juju in the shop to ward off the evil eye. And these people are putting the curse on you.

You have to get another witch doctor to fight that curse. All this kind of stuff is going on, see. And so the people you turn to are the witch doctors or the shamans or somebody. And religion, without Jesus, is a struggle against evil powers to protect yourself.

And when you talk about Jesus, you know, coming on behalf of God the Father because He so loved the world, they understand that to get rid of all this evil. And the amazing thing is, you talk about this and they say, “Yeah, this is what we want. We’ve been looking for this kind of power all along, the power of God.” And they will come and you start to pray and people will be freed right and left and you’ll see the very same things that you see in the New Testament. You know, people fall to the ground and maybe they scream, but the people understand. Like, they’ll bring a man all bent over, like the woman bent over for 18 years in the gospel. He’s all bent over like this and you find out that he’s been to witch doctors and you start to pray and sure enough he falls to the ground and the thing starts to go out. And all the Nigerians gather around and start to applaud and praise God, and the missionaries are standing there appalled. They don’t know what this means. They think this is appealing to primitive religion or something, you know. “We thought we got these people out of this and here you are bringing it back in.”

But they know. It’s like most of the people in the world, except the Europeans and the people like us, influenced by the Europeans, they know. Four-fifths of the people in the world know by experience these levels of existence. What they don’t know is the third level of Jesus Christ coming to free us from all that stuff and move us into this new creation. Do you understand? And most of our sickness, I’m convinced, is this confusion. Because we don’t really see what the gospel is saying. We don’t really believe it. And a lot of our unbelief gets captured in religious form, so we really believe that God has told us that you are no good. Or something like that. And so we start to punish ourselves in the name of God. And when we look at our concept of God, or you talk to people, you find out that they really don’t think that God created them good. He doesn’t really love them. But it’s like, if you really work very hard, He’s willing to forgive your evil and kind of slip you into heaven. You know, that kind of thing. There’s a very sick joke which illustrates this. It’s, I heard it in Chicago about ten years ago, but a story about a man who was a cripple who came to a charismatic prayer meeting and he asked for prayer to be healed.

So they all prayed for him and nothing happened. So they came back the second week and they all prayed for him and nothing happened. And he came back a third week and they prayed and still nothing happened. So in utter confusion, he threw down his crutches and he looked up to heaven and he cried out. He said, “God, oh God, I come and I’ve prayed for healing. Why am I not healed?” And this thunderous voice is supposed to have come from heaven into this little prayer room: “I never did like you, Smitty.” Now that’s…

That’s really sick, isn’t it? But, see, there’s something in a lot of people that really says, “Yeah, that corresponds to the way I really think God feels about me. That there’s something in me that’s so bad that God really can’t love me.”

And what I’m finding is that I need healing on that most basic of all levels of really being able to see the goodness that God has created in the universe and to give Him honor and praise for it. Because if I don’t see it, I’m depriving Him of the praise that He deserves for His great creation, and especially for people.

And if I look out, see, love is not just something that I say, well, I don’t like you. Thank God I don’t have to like you. All I have to do is to love you. So I love you. And so I do good things for you, but I really don’t see much good in you. There’s something really condescending in me, isn’t there, if I’m a do-gooder. And this is what a lot of people say about Christians, isn’t it? That they’re do-gooders. On the last day, I’d frankly rather be with the guys in the bar than with most Christians I know. That attitude comes from that. And that’s the attitude that Jesus hates, too, isn’t it? Like the story of the Pharisee and the publican in the 18th chapter of Luke. Jesus spoke the following parable to some people who prided themselves on being virtuous and despised everyone else. Two men went up to the temple to pray. One a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. And I think you all understand what a tax collector was in those days. A real traitor.

And the Pharisee stood there and said this prayer to himself. “I thank You, God, that I’m not grasping, not unjust, or adulterous like the rest of mankind. And particularly, I’m not like this tax collector here. I fast twice a week. I pay tithes on all I get.”

Now, presumably, that was all true. He was not unjust. He did not commit adultery. He gave tithes on all the money, everything else he had. So, he was a very religious person. And the tax collector stood some distance away, not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven. But he beat his breast and said, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Now, this man, I tell you, went home again at the other. He said, I don’t know. He did not. He did not. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled. But the man who humbles himself will be exalted.

So, it’s like the first man, the Pharisee, couldn’t see any goodness. He despised other people. The second man, the tax collector, saw that second level, the evil that was in him. But he turned to God, knowing that God could free him.

And I know, when I really began to get serious about being a Christian, I became very critical of myself. I began to really worry about my salvation. As I became critical of myself, I looked around at most people in the world, and it seemed to me that they weren’t trying very hard. Most people were really evil. And the more serious I got about being a Christian, the more I really despised other people. I pretended not to, and I loved them, you know, as it were. But when I looked at them, they looked to me like pretty crummy people, really, when he got right down to it. And I didn’t see much good. I saw a few people that I really admired, and I thought, “Those people are really good.” Most people looked to me like grasping, unjust, as I was. You know what I mean? And I think that gets enmeshed into our version of Christianity. As I see it, most Christian groups, somewhere along the line, see something which is good in God’s creation, which they’ve come to believe is evil. And they see most people don’t act the way they do, and they feel most other people are lost.

And they call that religion. And most Christians in my book, and I put myself in this, I’m always fighting it. You tend to see that here we’re doing this, we happy few, you know, we’re doing these wonderful things. But look at all those other evil people out there.

And the truth is that I cannot fully love you just by wanting to love you and do good things. What I have to see to really love you is to see goodness in you. Love is blind, but if I see goodness, I see beauty in you, the love automatically follows. To the extent I can see you as beautiful and good, I love you. Otherwise I’m working at it and putting on, but I don’t really see it. And those people who really see goodness, when they see goodness in me, it’s like you’re amazed. This person saw goodness in me that I didn’t even see, and they draw it out of you.

Like, speaking of Tommy again, one of his great gifts, I think, is to be able to see goodness in people and to like them. On the boat, of course. I don’t want to embarrass him, but you know, it’s like you see him go through the dining hall and he sees these people.

You know, for most of us, if we hugged all that many people and said to them, “I love you,” and so forth, if it weren’t real, you know, we’d finally fall apart. It has to be real, doesn’t it? Where you really see this person, my gosh, you know, I haven’t seen you for a year, and I see the… And you’re glad that you see this person.

And if you see that goodness, and I really believe it’s a gift, because the function of evil in the world, the greatest effect of the fall, as I see it, has been to deny goodness, to see evil in people, to hate. And the more I see of the human condition, the more I see that without Jesus, what we mostly do is hate, and look down on people and despise, like, even in the name of religion, like this Pharisee. That’s what’s very natural to me. And I really need God’s help to be able to see all kinds of people in a new light.

And one of the great testimonies, the greatest as far as I’m concerned, is people who are baptized in the Spirit. It’s not that they pray in tongues, but rather that they will tell you, “I… There are whole groups of people I never really was able to love before. But now I see them differently. I see I was wrong. I see the truth.” For instance, you were all singing, “We Are One in the Spirit.” One of the wonderful things in the movement of the Spirit is that people are Christians who saw other Christians, like unsaved and lost, are beginning to see beneath the lie that that is, to see that these other groups, that they are beautiful Christians. And somehow the devil blinded us to that. So we saw them as being headed to hell or someplace, rather than being… People are trying. Maybe other groups have error or something, but basically these people love Jesus. And He loves them. Maybe He loves them more than He loves me.

And that’s a common testimony, isn’t it, at CFO camps, that your eyes are opened and you begin to see people who used to be like enemies in a whole new light. And because you see them in that new light, you begin to love them. Isn’t that true?

And the greatest lie and the greatest need for healing that I see is precisely that, that so many Christian people, when you get right down to it, talking to them, they don’t believe that they’re any good. A lot of people. They believe, “I’m no good. No one can really love me. I’m not very lovable. Yeah, I exist. But…”

And you need the healing power of God to be able to love your neighbor as yourself. Because if you don’t love yourself in that rightful sense of seeing who you are, you are going to be sick in all kinds of ways. Judith and I, for instance, have been praying for a woman who has dedicated her life to God. She’s really dedicated her whole life to God. We don’t want to say too much, you know, to identify people. But even though she had served God as best she could for about 40 years, she still has this basic feeling that she is no good, which is so real that it has become demonic. And when she came to us, and we were praying for people in a line, she couldn’t allow us to touch her.

Because to be touched means to be loved in some degree, doesn’t it? And there are all kinds of Christians who cannot receive love, because it’s… If you don’t feel that you’re any good, you feel it’s a lie if somebody comes and wants to hug you. And it was so real to her, and to become demonic, so that she saw herself. She said, “I cannot allow you to touch me.” Now that’s fine. If somebody doesn’t want to be touched, we don’t. But we said, you know, what is it? And she said, “There are snakes all over me. And if you touch me, the snakes will bite and kill you.”

So we had the opportunity to pray with her later. And she saw snakes wherever there was goodness. Like she was a Catholic, and when she went to church on Sunday, she saw snakes all over the altar. Wherever there was goodness, she was frightened.

When she saw Jesus on the crucifix, she saw snakes. But when we prayed with her, the snakes all disappeared. And she finally allowed us to touch her. So the great healing, you understand, that most of us need is this healing to be able to see goodness. And to be able to see evil. And to be able to see the real relation between them.

Do you understand? And just as a sign of how some of these things happen, this is not a constant in religion that these things are getting confused. And we begin to condemn things as non-Christian that are really just in God’s creative plan.

Do you understand? And I think you can understand a lot of passages which are in the Bible which are very confusing if you don’t see this. For instance, St. John says, “If the world hates you, remember that it hated me before you. If you belong to the world, the world will love you as its own. But because you do not belong to the world, because my choice withdrew you from the world, therefore the world hates you.”

And yet other sections you read that God so loved the world, so loved the world, that He sent His only begotten Son to die. So does God love the world or does God hate the world? Well, God loves the world that He created. And everything exists. To the extent you live and move and have your being right now, God is behind that. To the extent that the world is suffused with evil and has fallen, God hates that. And the world that God is talking about here in St. John is that fallen world which is filled with hatred. Like the Pharisee despises other people, is unable to see goodness. That world will hate Christians and Jesus hates that world.

But the destiny is that there be a new world. And in the book of Revelation, in the 21st chapter, again it’s John who says, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now. There was no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, as beautiful as a bride all dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice call from the throne, ‘You see this city? Here God lives among men. He will make His home among them. They shall be His people and He will be their God. His name is God with them. He will wipe away all tears from their eyes. There will be no more death. No more mourning or sadness. The world of the past is gone.’ And then the one sitting on the throne spoke, ‘Now, I am making the whole of creation new. Write this, that what I am saying is sure and will come true. It is already done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give water from the well of life, free, to everybody who is thirsty.’” And so God is on the side of life. And everything that moves towards life and goodness and health and love is moving in the direction of God.

The devil is moving in the direction of death, sickness, evil, hatred, and all those things. And because the new creation is so much more than the evil in the world, there is a song in the early church. The Catholic church is still sung on the vigil of Easter when they are waiting, as it were, for Jesus to rise from the tomb. And it has got a beautiful melody. I wish I could sing it to you. And all the lights are out. Just one candle. This song is sung. And this one beautiful passage says, “Oh, happy sin!”

Referring to Adam’s sin. Because if there had not been this sin, we would not have so great a Savior, so great a new creation, so great a redemption. So even death is swallowed up in victory. And even the sin and the evil in the world gives an opportunity for God to manifest His goodness.

And so we have no room for pessimism, no matter how great the evil in the world. So do you understand? We can show you this on, it seems to me, so many levels. And I was about to give some examples, but I would like to see the general principle rather than to fight about examples. To me, the examples are really clear of how this works. I can give you one that pertains to us very directly out of many, but I don’t know if you realize this, but in the early church, and I don’t know where this came from, the idea gained credence that sexual relations were bad, even among the married. That, I think it came from Stoics and from Eastern religion, the idea was, if you were really a holy person, you would not marry.

Now, Jesus said some very good things about giving up things for the kingdom of God and so forth. But Paul said, anybody who says that marriage is evil, you know, forget them. That’s not true. But somehow, although it was never said among Orthodox Christians that marriage is evil, it was always said that this is good and holy in a sacrament, the idea was that the physical relations were in themselves evil. And even so, so great a doctor of the church as St. Gregory the Great, one of the eight great doctors of the church, Pope St. Gregory the Great, taught, along with most theologians of his day, which is like the 4th century, that the only reason that that’s allowed is that a greater good comes out of it, even though it is evil. It’s not seriously evil, just venially sinful. And it can be condoned because children come out of it. And if people could come together without getting any pleasure out of it, in kind of a rational way, then it would be all right. But of course, this doesn’t happen. The example they gave is anybody who gets near the fire gets burned. If you could put your finger in the fire without getting burned, that just doesn’t happen. Therefore, it is sinful to experience the pleasure of marriage relations.

That was the common teaching in the 4th century. And it was about this time that celibacy was commanded in the Western Church, the feeling being that if a person was really holy and could handle the body and blood of Jesus, they wouldn’t need to be married. And the teaching was even for married people, they should not receive communion the day after they had relations.

And because the idea was to have mass celebration of liturgy every day, therefore, obviously, a priest could not be married. And so it was made mandatory. And that was only one of the reasons for making celibacy mandatory in the early Church. Now, we don’t talk about that now. You know, you wouldn’t find anybody holding this today. But historically, you know, much of the problem in the Roman Catholic Church goes back to those days when an aspect of God’s creation was called evil.

Now, in your own background, whatever church you belong to, I bet we could find similar things. And it’s up to you to say what those are. I won’t… You understand. There are things in God’s creation… We become fearful of them. We recognize the problems, the dangers, the evils, and we proceed to condemn the whole thing. On the other hand, things that are basically very dangerous have been embraced by Christians. And God’s word has been disregarded, it seems to me. Jesus, for instance, said, “He who perishes or lives by the sword shall perish by the sword.” A number of things about turning the other cheek when you’re attacked. And the early Christians took that so seriously that for the first 300 years of Christianity, you could not serve in the armed forces in a combatant capacity. If you were an officer in the Roman legions and became a Christian, you had to resign.

If you’re a Christian, you cannot enlist. And it was held that a Christian cannot kill others. And you hear very little about that, do you? Maybe some of the things that they saw as being very dangerous, at least, if not evil, we embrace.

And so it’s very important, isn’t it, for us to get this new vision, to be able to see the world as God sees it, to be able to see people as God sees them, or we cannot love rightly, to be able to see ourselves, the good and the evil that’s in ourselves as God sees it.

And now with that, I’d like to introduce Judith, who has a beautiful story, maybe two beautiful stories, about how this worked out in a healing way. I’d just like to say a little bit about her. When she spoke at the last CFO we were at with Tommy and myself, one of the things that was very, very embarrassing, it was like, she was so wonderful as a speaker, everyone was saying, “How come we haven’t seen her before?” you know? Or they’d come up to us sitting at the breakfast table and they’d come up to her and say, “That was a wonderful talk, that was marvelous,” and then they’d turn to me and say, “Oh yeah, you were good too.”

But one of the great things has been the privilege of being able to work with Judith. I told you that she is a clinical psychologist, therapist, because the baby is only six weeks away, she won’t be able to counsel with any of you here. She has limited energy now, as you understand. But I’m just glad that she was able to come. We weren’t quite sure she’d even be able to travel.

I just want to share something that happened out of my own experience. And I could tell you many, many instances where I’ve been working in therapy with clients and, like Francis said, they can’t see the goodness that’s within themselves. Therefore, they’re blinded to the goodness in people around them and people in God’s creation. And I’m really concerned about this because spirit-filled Christians and dedicated Christians are being overwhelmed by the evil in the world today. And we’re getting a very doomsday attitude about life in general. And even though Jesus was aware of evil around Him more so than we are, He still had a tremendously positive attitude about life and about creation and about the goodness in His disciples and people around Him. And I spend most of my time in counseling with people and trying to get them to see that there’s goodness within us. And if there is sin, then it needs to be confessed and forgiven. Or if there’s some way you’ve been wounded, that needs to be healed. But other than that, you are God’s creation and you are living in the kingdom. Jesus said, “The kingdom is among us.” And I had this experience as a child of very stable childhood. I didn’t have parents that abused me physically or that were cruel to me.

They were very loving, affirming parents. I had a wonderful circle of friends. Grew up in a town not much bigger than Baldwin and knew everyone and they were very loving and very kind. So I didn’t have the history as a child of being evil or of being bad or feeling that I was bad. But then as I got older, there was, you know, sin in my life and some of it pretty gross sin in my life. And I would confess it obediently and I would confess it again obediently. And I knew I worried the Lord a lot with the same sins over and over. This is something I see in Christians too. They carry their sins with them all their lives. And so when Francis and I were praying about whether to marry or not, we were with a group of people and we had submitted our desire to marry to them and we asked for their prayers and for their counsel. And we had been praying many, many months, as a matter of fact, a year, about whether to marry or not. And up until this point in my life, I had experienced a great deal of healing from some of the areas where I had sinned. And I felt pretty positive about the person that I was and the person I had become.

I was involved in full-time Christian work at the time and I was in fellowship and I was really doing well as a Christian. And most of the people that I had as friends were very affirming and positive and watched over me in prayer and in every other way. But when I was at this place where we were praying about whether to marry or not, up until this point, a few people had already heard that we were planning on marrying and an awful lot of the responses were negative, extremely negative. Because of someone like Francis who was internationally known and a Catholic priest, people couldn’t understand why he wanted to marry, and without even meeting me, these people were sending letters to me and they were phoning me and telling me what a terrible person I was and how evil we were and how evil I was in particular because they knew he was good and they didn’t know me. So, it must be my fault. And they couldn’t quite understand that God could bring two people together. And so, I was listening to these people that we had submitted this decision to and most of them were we were on the day of what are all the negatives now? What’s going to happen about this worldwide reaction to this?

And I listened to it for as long as I could and then I just got overwhelmed by it and I got up and left the room. And I went over to the room where I was staying and I was really angry which I had learned as a Christian was okay to be angry. And I was really expressing my anger to someone. I’m not sure who. And the Lord came to me in a very personal way and in a very profound way because He knew I needed Him. And He said, “Judith, what are you doing?” And I said, “I’m condemning all those people.”

And He said, “Why are you doing that?” And I said, “Because they’re condemning me and I feel like I’ve got a right to, too.” And He, as He usually is, was very loving and patient and He said, “You don’t have a right to.” He said, “People condemn Me and people rejected Me without knowing Me.” And He said, “Even people that knew Me and saw My miracles still rejected Me.” And He said, “I didn’t say anything against them. I love them.” And so He first took care of my attitude about what I was doing because He knew that would come between me and what He was trying to do in my life. But the other thing He did that was so beautiful that I think is important to share with you is He took me on a journey through my mind, my spiritual mind, where all of our spiritual things are located. I’m not sure where it is in the head or the heart. But He took me all the way back to when I was a small child. Very small. And He showed me my life from that time up until a year and a half ago. And as He went through my life, He showed me each stage where I was just a small child crawling around.

And then when I got a little older and became aware of the world around me, and I started being really kind to people because I had a mother that was very concerned about life and about loving. She was a dedicated Christian and she helped people constantly. And she taught me from the time I was big enough to walk, to love people, to be kind. And I saw myself doing that. If there was a kid in the nursery or in kindergarten that didn’t have a toy, I would give them my toy. Or if in the first or second grade there was a child that didn’t have money because I came from a family that was middle class and we had money, I would go over and give them money for ice cream. And each stage of my life, He showed me this. And I used to have this queer habit, I don’t know where I got it, but I would stand at the front of our school when I was in junior high school and I would greet people in the morning when they would come to school. I would ask them if they were doing all right that day and say hello to them. And it was funny because one of my friends, it’s about four years older, it was not my friend then, but she is now, she said, “The one thing I remember about you, Judith, is that you were always smiling and that you greeted people at the front door.”

She said, “I never knew why.” So I’ve been told that by other people that I used to do that. So I had a great love for people and the Lord was showing me this as He was taking me through my life. And when we got to my teenage years, I was terrified what I was going to see. But even there, He showed me like taking food to the poor Christmas and doing things like that and sitting and listening to older people and going to visit them when they were sick. That’s a pretty nice person. But then my second thought, and I was very aware of this thought, was, “Lord, what about all those times I sinned?” And I asked Him, I said, “You left out an awful lot of my life. Because I, better than anyone, I know myself and I know the sins that I’ve committed and I know the evil thoughts that I’ve harbored and the resentments and the hatreds.” And He didn’t show me any of those. And I asked Him what happened to them and He said, “You confess them.” And He said, “They’re forgiven.” And He said, “They’re no longer part of your life. They’re no longer part of your life story.” And He said, “You’re a good person.”

And it was like something was lifted. I’m not sure exactly what happened that day, but you know when you’re in prayer and the Lord takes something from you. Something was lifted from me that day. I’m not sure. I can’t say I hated myself because I didn’t. But there was an awful lot that I carried that I wasn’t sure I was forgiven. It was like, I know Jesus died for me. I know His blood cleanses, but this is really different. This is a sin I’m not sure He covered. You know, and in working with people, I see this over and over. That they have confessed, they have gone to people, various Christian leaders especially. Every time a healer comes to town, every time an important speaker or someone would come to town. I remember one little lady where I spoke one time, she was about 80 years old and she was Italian. And she didn’t speak any English. Well, a few words. And she came up after my talk and she said, she took my hand and put it on her head and she said, “The baptism.” That’s all she said. She wanted the baptism in the Holy Spirit. And I was so excited and I prayed for her and she was gloriously filled with the Spirit.

And she walked away and the person that invited me came up and said, “That little lady is filled with the Spirit every time a speaker comes to town.” And I felt a little deflated. She reminded me of all the people that I see that feel that they’re so sinful or so bad that they keep going back and they keep going back to Jesus and saying, “Are You sure this is forgiven?” And that day that God really showed me that those sins are no longer there, what He said, they’re cast into the deepest sea. It’s true that they’re as red as scarlet, He makes them white as snow, which means they’re no longer there. But for some reason, we don’t have that within us. We don’t have that certainty. We forgive others. We forgive very freely, sometimes people in our own families, but we don’t accept the forgiveness. So therefore, we continually think we’re bad. And Satan takes that and he says, “You’re right, you are bad. How can you be a Christian?”

This past Tuesday, I went to visit one of my associates. She has an office about 20 miles from mine. And she’d been to a conference up in Montreat, International Presbyterian Conference. And she met a pastor there that while he was on the operating table, he didn’t die like these life-after-life experiences or life-after-death. But he had an experience with the Lord. And it was so similar to mine, except Jesus came to him while he was on that operating table. And He showed him various parts of heaven. And he’s writing a book about it. It should be released soon. But one of the things Jesus did was He took him through his whole life. He started all the way back at the womb.

And part of our talk on inner healing, if we give that, is about the womb experience, how you’re affected even in the womb. But anyway, He took him all the way back to the womb and He moved him forward to this stage of his life. And the pastor, like myself, said to Jesus, he said, “Wait a minute, You left out a lot. There’s a lot of sin in my life.” And Jesus said, “It’s no longer there.” And He did to this pastor the same thing He did for me, only for him it was much more real. He was like in the heavenlies. But the one thing that Jesus said to this pastor was, “If there’s one thing I would like to convey to my children, those within the kingdom, is that they are good. And that once they are forgiven, I no longer remember it. And it’s necessary, it’s absolutely necessary, that they start accepting my forgiveness. And that they move forward to life, the life that I’m giving them, so that they might forget those things of the past that they’ve done, and move forward to life, and move forward to accepting my love and my forgiveness.” And when she told me that, something inside me just leapt up, because it was exactly what Jesus had done for me.

And I do that now with people I pray with. I ask Jesus to go back and show them the goodness. Like Francis mentioned, that list that I get them to do. It really is much longer. Usually on the good qualities, or the goodness, or the gifts within them, they can list one or two. And the rest of it is, “I’m so bad, I’m so terrible. If you knew me, you wouldn’t love me.” And Jesus is saying, “I know you better than you know yourself. And I love you. And whatever has been done, it’s covered. I carried it. I carried it on the cross. Why are you still carrying it?” And it’s like, I have a vision of people sometimes, of us walking around kind of like a spiritual Santa Claus, you know. And we have this big bag on our backs. And it’s heavier, and it gets heavier and heavier. Because we keep putting all of our sins in it. And what Jesus wants to do is to take that bag off of us and let us have the freedom that comes through forgiveness. Then we will truly see what Francis was talking about. We’ll see the goodness. And you’ll be able then, it’s like when you think you’re bad, it’s like wearing glasses, like these three-dimensional glasses we used to get in the movies till my age here.

But we see different dimensions. We see the evil in us. We see the evil in our husband or wife or children. We start seeing them as all bad. We see the evil in our town. And we fight against that. We see the evil in society. We see the evil in the world. And suddenly we no longer see the good. And it’s like Jesus wants to take those glasses off and give us a pair where we will see the good in people so that we can bring healing. I’ve never yet prayed for anyone that was healed if I didn’t see something good in them. If I didn’t see something of Jesus in them. Because if I can’t see it then I’m going to be blocking what’s happening too. So you see how important this is. So I would ask you within yourself like what happened to me happened by myself. It happened in my room alone. To spend some time and ask Jesus if you have trouble viewing yourself as good like we’re talking about, or if in your own heart you’re rejecting what we’re saying because you’re saying, “No, there’s evil and all my works are as filthy rags before the Lord,” and all those scriptures about how bad we are coming back. You know, if that’s happening to you then spend some time with Jesus and see what He tells you about yourself.

And don’t do all the talking. What I found out is I have a real good ability to speak when I’m around the Lord, and I tell Him what He should think of me. And He’s there trying to get a word in. And He’s trying to tell me what He believes. And He really believes in you as an individual. He really believes in your goodness and He believes in your ability to be like Him. And He wants to get that through to you so you can experience His healing power through people around you here through the rhythms the rhythms through the creatives through every part He’s going to be showing you that goodness that can come out of you.

Okay? So try that sometime today or tomorrow or with a friend and let the Lord show you the goodness that’s within you. Then you’ll all be like Tommy. I’ll be like…