It's Supernatural

SID: Hello. Welcome. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural. You know, my guest found a key and he operates in so many major miracles it’s almost unfair. And this is his key. He read a scripture one day that said, “Thy Kingdom Come, thy will be done on Earth,” get this, “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” And he figured out there’s no sickness in Heaven. There’s no fear in Heaven. There’s no poverty in Heaven. And he figured out keys of how, and it’s just so profound and so wonderful, of how all of us can walk on Earth as we would do in Heaven. I want you to get ready to not just hear a man that walks in spectacular miracles, but get ready for Heaven to invade Earth. Now [unintelligible] in the Bible, a renewed mind. But Bill Johnson, this was, if not the key, one of the major keys to transform your walk with God into the Kingdom of Heaven being on Earth as it is in Heaven. What do you mean by a renewed mind?

BILL: A renewed mind is the mind of Christ. It’s actually seeing from God’s perspective. He sees things differently. Jesus wasn’t nervous when there was a need to feed the multitudes when they only had a few loaves and fishes. He sees differently and he expected his disciples through the experience of the miraculous to learn to see the way he did. In fact, he asked them, “Can’t you perceive? Don’t you understand?” He asked them that question when they were worried about not having enough food for lunch, and it was right after multiplying food. So they were still locked into an Earth to Heaven perspective.

SID: You know, a lot of people read the Bible but were so bombarded by everything going on, on Earth, it’s almost like it goes in one ear and out the other.

BILL: That’s true.

SID: And we go back into automatic pilot.

BILL: That’s true. Most believers live from Earth towards Heaven hoping, begging God to intervene, to come into the middle of a problem. The renewed mind is living from Heaven towards Earth.

SID: If you had understood these premises you’re teaching today, as a new believer, what difference would it have made in your ministry?

BILL: Well it makes all the difference in the world. First of all, it starts with the cornerstone of theology, the goodness of God, that He actually is good, a father. He’s a loving father that sent His son to an orphaned planet. And when you realize the goodness of God is kindness, that He’s a loving, perfect father, then suddenly that changes everything, the way you see Him, the way you see yourself, the way you see your past, the way you see your potential. Everything shifts and changes when you realize that you have an absolute loving, perfect father. And it’s not a license to do what I want. It’s the passion to do what pleases Him most, and it comes out of that understanding what He’s like. That’s the beginning of the renewed mind. It changes how we see Him.

SID: So just give me an illustration. Someone walks up to you. They say, “My hip is hurting me.” What goes on? What’s the process inside of you? What do you do?

BILL: Well first of all, Jesus healed everyone who came to him and healed everyone the Father directed him to. So my approach is Jesus Christ is perfect theology, and so my approach is always going to serve that person as though Jesus were standing in these shoes. Sometimes I don’t get the breakthrough he would have gotten, but I don’t lower the standard of expectation or the standard of Scripture to my level of experience.

SID: So if the next ten people that have a bad hip you prayed for and nothing happens, what affects Bill Johnson? What’s going on inside of you?

BILL: Well if I have ten people with the same problem come to me and I don’t see a breakthrough, for me that’s an invitation to get alone with God to cry out for a breakthrough. It’s not as though I have to persuade Him. It’s that the process of encountering Him is what changes me and often times enables or equips me, empowers me to deal with the stuff that He’s bringing my way.

SID: Okay. You talk a lot about the scripture that says, when Jesus prayed that the Kingdom of God would take place on Earth. “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Now that is a major statement. Is that how you live your life?

BILL: Yeah. That’s it. That’s my focus. I try. I mean, that’s my whole life is, there is no Plan B. You know, he gave us a very clear example in how he lived and a very clear commission in what he told us to do, and it is to bring the reality of his dominion to Earth over any and every situation. And that’s my passion. That’s our passion.

SID: So help me out. At your school, you require, get this, he requires his students to fail three times. I didn’t say be successful three times. He requires them to, why do you do that, Bill? Come on now.

BILL: Let me give you an illustration. I used to live in an area where we would steelhead fish. And this old-timer took me out fishing, and he says, “If you don’t get your tackle, the bait and weight, if you don’t get it caught on the bottom of the river now and then, you’re not fishing deep enough.” And my approach to ministry is I have to live with risk to such a point that sometimes it’s not going to work. If I play it safe, if I am overly cautious everybody around me will call me, call me wise, but I won’t move many mountains. And so we require students to learn to take risks, to go beyond what’s comfortable for them, to come into new territory. When we talk about failure, obviously we’re not dealing with ethical moral failure. We’re talking about just the efforts in ministry to get a word of knowledge, to bring a word of encouragement to somebody, to sense what God might be saying in a given situation. We want them to be stretched and to put themselves in great risk to be used by the Lord. And so that’s our approach, we require them to fail.

SID: Tell me about that. Let me just pull one person out, the woman with the esophageal cancer. Tell me about her.

BILL: She, during worship she had esophageal cancer, during worship, she felt heat come on her hands. She had her hands raised like this. She felt heat come on her hands and she turned to her husband and said, “I think I’ve been healed.” Now how she associated heat on the hands with healing of the cancer is beyond me. But she did. She just felt the presence and assumed she was healed. She turned to her husband. When she went to the doctor she said, “I believe I’ve been healed.” He said, this cancer doesn’t go away, and when they examined her he said, “Not only is it gone, you have a brand new esophagus.” It’s just that presence of the Lord that just comes in the atmosphere of honor, in the atmosphere of celebration, in the atmosphere of celebrating his goodness and kindness. And that one didn’t come as a prayer of faith from anyone. It just came in the presence.

SID: Are you saying that is normal Kingdom business? Are you saying that anyone, the housewife watching right now, the high school student watching right now, the kindergarten student watching right now, are you saying it’s available to them?

BILL: Oh absolutely. Absolutely. If people come to me for prayer, for example at home, they come to me for prayer and there’s not a breakthrough, I will often tell them, “Go find a five-year-old. Go find somebody that doesn’t, isn’t struggling, trying to, you know, pick up the will of God for this or for that.” Because this is for everyone. Everyone gets to participate in this.

SID: When you talk about we have to change the way we think…

BILL: Yeah.

SID: …and the way we see, comment on that.

BILL: Yeah. Well we do. We have to, but it doesn’t come through just discipline. It comes through an encounter with God. Encountering God gives me the opportunity to change how I see my life in the world around me. And if I don’t see differently, I will constantly try to beg God to fix a problem instead of minister in the authority that He gave me to represent Him to fix a problem.

SID: I want this to be your normal life. We’re going to continue this teaching when we come right back.