Praying For Those In Desperation … Lord, Keep Them From the Healing Vultures

I was scanning the religious channels a few nights ago and came across three men standing at a podium … obvious shysters … pitching their spiel about miracle healing. I only caught the last part. But it seemed if you sent them your loose coins scattered around the house, they would turn those coins into spiritual weapons which would facilitate your mental and physical healing. One guy was so “full of the spirit” he was swollen up and sweating and wiping his face with a big towel.

These guys were like junior imitators of Benny Hinn, but a lower class pedigree. As part of their shaky bag of theatrical tricks, they started reading letters from “previous believers” who had sent in money and discovered themselves to be miraculously healed.

My heart went out to the sick and dying, those desperate souls searching for hope beyond the doctor’s grim prognosis. The Bible says that God is unequivocally capable of miracle healing. So maybe these “television men of God” had been ordained with a secret that no one else had uncovered. Maybe they were special.




This was always Benny Hinn’s claim. He was special, slain in the Spirit, a called-out and set aside conduit through which God’s healing could flow. Always adorned in milk-white suits and flashy diamond rings, he claimed his jacket was imbued with the Holy Spirit, and used it to flog followers to rid them of their life-threatening diseases.

He also claimed to have special insight from God. He told viewers God had intended babies to come from the sides of women’s bodies, as the rib that created woman had come out of the side of Adam. But then, God changed his mind. And since God gave Adam dominion over the birds Adam could fly and was, in fact, a superman and the first man to reach the moon. Also, God would destroy the American homosexual community by 1995.

Yet, Hinn still plays to huge audiences, hundreds of millions worldwide. His crusades have now branched from North America and Europe to include stops in places like Guatemala, the Philippines, Malaysia and Ghana. The money keeps rolling in.

Back to the poor, low class, junior imitators. I suspect they are unsaved and have no internal restraints on the actions they will take to make a dollar. But think about the saved people who own Daystar and TBN who gladly allow them to come on as long as they can pay the fee. Who’s really worse?

Finally, and this is the most important point of all, imagine if you were a true healer from God. With the vibrant, all-consuming love of God in your heart, wild horses couldn’t keep you away from the hospitals. In other words, you wouldn’t be on television selling prayer cloths or begging for coins or scaring people into giving large sums of money to your ministry. Rather, you would be like a Mother Teresa possessed, running from hospital to hospital, clinic to clinic and to all the poor, downtrodden, desolate countries and divers places where people were begging for relief. You wouldn’t be able to sleep because you didn’t get to that little girl with leukemia or the young boy with Down syndrome. You would be immersed in using your gift for good … not to pay the note on your new Creflo Dollar look alike Rolls Royce.

No matter how desperate your mental and physical infirmities have made you, there is no reason to be taken in by the healing vultures. Their works are before you, right there on the big screen. Take heed, use sound judgement and stay away.


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Bestselling author of Exorcism At Midnight and Black Church Blues.

Why Christians Often Find Righteousness Too Risky

With every decision there is a price.

Years ago, while teaching at a small college in Texas, I used to ask my students this question:
If you were back in old Germany and worked for Adolf Hitler, would you follow his orders?
Of course, some of his orders had to do with exterminating the Jews. So in essence I was asking if they would carry out an order to kill.

I was careful not to use the word murder because in many of my classes there were discharged veterans who had been sent to Iraq to kill the enemy. In war, killing is not considered murder. So if you worked for Hitler in a war against the Jews you might kill with the immunity of a soldier defending his or her country.
Still, at some inevitable point in time, each person would have to come to grips with the underlying moral question: “Is what I’m doing or what I have been ordered to do … right?”

In 1968, during the My Lai Massacre, US Army troops murdered five hundred Vietnamese civilians at the villages of My Lai and My Khe. Many of the victims were sexually assaulted, tortured, or mutilated. Villagers who tried to surrender were shot or bayoneted. Several soldiers who refused to take part were labeled traitors and cowards and reprimanded for disobeying orders. In the end one man, Lt. William Calley, served four months in military prison.


During the  “Freedom Summer” of 1964, only 2% of Blacks in Selma, Alabama could vote. The Ku Klux Klan tortured and murdered protesters who came in to help eliminate the Jim Crow injustice. And during the Democratic National Convention, white Southern Democrats issued an ultimatum to President Johnson. If he allowed the 60,000 strong Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party made up of African-Americans to participate in the Convention, white Democrats would leave the party, perhaps, causing Johnson to lose the election. Thus, the African-American delegates were never seated.

During the convention an old sharecropper named Fanny Lou Hamer told her story.

After attending a civil rights workshop trying to learn how to vote, three State Highway Patrolman kicked her in the stomach, threw her into a patrol car and took her to jail. She was carried to a cell where two other male Negro prisoners awaited her. The Highway Patrolmen ordered the first Negro prisoner to lay her down on a bunk bed on her face. And then he began to beat her with a large blackjack. After the first Negro prisoner beat her until he was exhausted, the second Negro prisoner was ordered to take the blackjack and beat her more persistently, until she stopped screaming; All of this because she wanted to register to vote.
When we look into the raw face of injustice, we cringe. A dark fog envelops our consciousness and the voice of morality cries out for righteousness to somehow prevail. How could people be so heartless? Why won’t people do the right thing?

And then we go and do exactly what they did. We trade in our righteousness for the expedience of the moment and the fruits of being a member of the status quo.
In January, 2013, a twenty-six year old Mexican immigrant named Maria Sanchez died in Houston from the effects of an inoperable spinal tumor. This was four days after U.S. officials refused to allow the parents to cross the border and visit her on her death bed. U.S. Customs and Border Protection rejected a humanitarian plea that would have allowed Sanchez’s parents to cross the border from Mexico and see her. The agency said the plea had to be an extraordinary measure granted only for a “very compelling emergency”.

Two years earlier, the University of Texas Medical Branch ejected her from the hospital shortly before a scheduled surgery after discovering she was in the country illegally. Her discharge papers suggested she seek surgery in Mexico.



Here’s my point. At every phase in this tragic scenario, someone had to decide to follow orders.

Just as the two Negro prisoners had to decide to save their own skins by beating, unmercifully, the old woman sharecropper, someone at Texas Medical Branch had to decide to protect their job, follow orders, signed the papers and eject Maria Sanchez from the hospital. The same decision-making process held true for the person who signed the papers denying the parents the opportunity to cross the border to see their dying daughter. Like the people who turn on the gas in Hitler’s death camps, someone had to decide to follow orders.

Many Christians are like that. They go to work each day, see injustice unfolding before their very eyes. And then they looked the other way. They follow orders to trump up charges against innocent employees. They follow the company’s rules to the letter, knowing they have the opportunity to intervene, but are unwilling to take the chance because their position might be jeopardized.

Here is the hard cold spiritual fact about these matters. Doing the right thing will most often result in persecution and suffering, that is to say, God is not going to step in to block the consequences of a righteous decision. Just as cigarettes executive Jeffrey Wigand was fired, blackballed from the industry and loss his family for exposing the truth about cigarettes killing people, and just as John the Baptist got his head cut off for criticizing the King’s unrighteous policies, you will have to endure your fair share of suffering. In other words, you must be prepared to do right for the sake of right, fully aware there will be a heavy price to pay.
This requires a profile in courage, character and spiritual maturity. Not everyone is ready to take this leap of faith. But if ever you do, I can guarantee this. You will see a new person in the mirror, a stronger more resolute person, in sync with your purpose for living, and at peace with the universe and with God.

Remember this before you make a Martin Luther King decision to go against the status quo and do the right thing. The arc of the universe bends toward justice only when someone is willing to pay the price. Are you that someone? Are you willing to pay the price? Or do you limit your righteousness to the show on Sunday morning?

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Bestselling author of Exorcism At Midnight and Black Church Blues.

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