Interview With Derek Prince (Part 5)

Geoff Buck: So at age eighty-four you are active. I was just privileged recently at the time of this recording, it’s been recently, to accompany you to ministry in San Antonio, Texas and Houston. So you’re still going out and speaking. Tell us what’s on your heart and what you’ve been doing in what you see for yourself currently?

Derek Prince: That’s a good question. What’s on my heart I think in a way may sound very simple. One of the things I’m concerned about is that Christians do not take sufficient care of their own body. I mean I think I’ve learned some of this the hard way, but I’ve come to the age of eighty-four and I’m still fully functioning. And if I hadn’t learned some lessons about the care of my body I don’t think I would have come that far. And one of the things that’s really impressed upon me is for every Christian the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. And it’s only respect to the Holy Spirit to take the best possible care you can of the temple.

Geoff Buck: You were just in San Antonio at Brother John Hagee’s church and you ministered. Tell us some of the highlights of ministering in that church.

Derek Prince: Well one of the highlights is that I’ve known John Hagee for about thirty years and he’s a man of tremendous faith and courage. And I’ve seen how God has honored his faith and his courage and continually promoted him and opened new doors for him. And we stood by one another when a lot of people wouldn’t. He had a marital problem with his first wife in which she was unfaithful. A lot of people just abandoned him. Lydia and I stood by him. On the other hand I had a lot of people opposing me because I was practicing deliverance in a very open way. John Hagee opened his church and invited us to hold deliverance services there. And we held some of the most, I would say, fantastic deliverance services I have ever seen anywhere.

One strange thing that happened was somebody got so interested they got a photographer down from the New York Times to take photographs of people being delivered. And he just wandered up and down amongst everything. But in the midst of it all, the photographer got delivered himself. You know I just, I long for times when you don’t know what will happen next.

Geoff Buck: Derek, history does repeat itself because when you were at John Hagee’s recently and you had a Saturday night deliverance service and a photographer was summoned to take pictures, he never took any pictures because he himself began to be delivered and got…

Derek Prince: I didn’t know that.

Geoff Buck: So history does repeat itself.

Derek Prince: I’m glad to hear that.

Geoff Buck: When you were ministering in San Antonio and also when you were ministering recently in Houston you shared your heart as far as God’s concern for the orphans, widows, the oppressed and that’s a new burden for you.

Derek Prince: Yes. It’s a burden that God has laid upon me maybe in the last two years. But what amazes me is that it’s so clearly required of all believers in Scripture from the Book of Job onwards. What amazes me is that we didn’t see it. And in James chapter 1 verse 27, James says, “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this, to care for the orphans and the widows.” Now I mean, I’m a good Pentecostal. I’ve heard more sermons than I could count on other subjects. I’ve never heard one sermon devoted to caring for orphans and widows in all of my time. And yet that’s what James says is pure and undefiled religion.

I also have this conviction that if the church would stop playing religious games inside religious buildings and go out and care for the people who really need their help, the church would grow exponentially, because those are the people that really need God. And they don’t know what goes on inside religious buildings. They don’t understand all that. They just know, “I’m hurting. Is there anybody who cares?”

Geoff Buck: Do you remember the supernatural visitation and experience you had one night when you still lived in Fort Lauderdale when God gave you an ear to hear the pain of people in that particular city?

Derek Prince: Yes, that was really in Pompano—Pompano and Fort Lauderdale. And I heard this, I didn’t actually hear anything, but in the Spirit I heard this wailing noise and it filled the whole area, and it growing louder and louder. And I kind of wanted to know what it was and God showed me it’s the cry of lonely, uncared for people. I think there’s nothing worse in life than loneliness really. And our society is just full of lonely people living in a crowd, living in condominiums, but absolutely lonely. And God has given me a real burden for that. I think He gave it to me partly because, at least people cannot point the finger at me and say “You’ve never done it.” Because I have cared for twelve orphan children and I’m the head of a family of more than one hundred and fifty persons that’s grown out of it. I’m not boasting about that, but on the other hand I can say it hasn’t been merely a theory with me. But even at the end of that I had no idea of how much God cared about those people until He shared His burden with me.

Geoff Buck: You’re talking about having a burden for people, so I get the impression you don’t plan on stopping ministering or growing or seeking the Lord any time soon.

Derek Prince: I have no plans to retire. And I can’t find any servant of God in the Bible who retired. I mean if God retires me that’s another matter but. And I have to say I think the consequences of retiring because it’s socially accepted or is the done thing can be very tragic. I think there are some people, men of God and women of God, who are just laid aside, their lives are apparently meaningless because they’ve retired themselves. It’s a tragedy.

Geoff Buck: Now God has used you to restore truth to our generation in various different areas. You’ve done much teaching on Biblical foundations and the ministry of deliverance, but I think the area of breaking generational curses was one that you ventured into before most other people. What has that truth meant to you? How did you come into that understanding?

Derek Prince: I came into it, I think, partly, as a result of working in deliverance and seeing that curses were dark shadows over peoples lives from the past that gave demons access to them. And that just to deal with the demon itself was not always sufficient, that we had to learn to discern where a curse was at work in a persons life and then discover a way to cancel the curse. And this led me back to the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross because Paul says, “Everyone who hangs on a tree is a curse.” And I realize that Jesus on the cross became a curse with every curse that could ever come upon us that we might be redeemed from the curse and inherit the blessing.

And when I began to come into this I started to search out how many Scriptures there were that deal with blessings and curses, and I found at least six hundred Scriptures in the bible. And then I said to myself, “Isn’t it remarkable I’ve never heard one sermon on this theme.” So I had to do my own research really because there wasn’t much done. And that book of mine that came out Blessing Or Curse: You Can Choose, I think it’s in a way the most revolutionary of all the books I’ve written because it goes to the root of something that is really not dealt with. And I’m glad for people like yourself who are taking this message and propagating it and carrying to further. It’s desperately needed. I think when we come to minister to people in prisons and similar situations we discover that ninety percent of them have a curse in their lives that comes from a previous generation. And you don’t really completely meet their need until you deal with that curse.

Geoff Buck: You are very faithful when you teach on breaking of generational curses to take it all back to the cross. And I’ve heard you describe that experience of years ago going to New Zealand and speaking about the exchange of the cross and seeing that divine exchange almost for the first time. What does the cross mean to you?

Derek Prince: The only way I can the say the cross means everything to me. Without the cross there’s no Christianity. All Christianity is rooted in the cross. And it is the distinctive mark of the Christian faith. No other faith, no other religion has anything comparable to it. And when we once get away from the cross we’ve lost our as we say in French raison d’etre [spoken in French] our reason to be. And one of my deepest concerns is to get people, especially preachers, back to the cross. I find that the cross is the place where all evil was dealt with, and the source of all good whether it’s spiritual or emotional or physical, or financial, whatever area it is, the cross is the place where the change takes place.

Jesus was made a curse with every curse that could come upon us, that in return we might have made available to us every blessing due to the sinless righteousness of Jesus. And you can explore that indefinitely. It’s inexhaustible.