Introduction

For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven. PSALM 119:89

Derek Prince did not come to the Bible as a child comes to a bedtime story. He came to it as a professional sceptic. He was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, a philosopher steeped in Plato, trained to take a text apart and find where its argument failed. He began reading the Scriptures in an army camp in the Second World War as he would have read any old book — to master it. Within a year the book had mastered him. For the rest of a long life, on four continents and through a radio ministry carried in many languages, he gave himself to one task: persuading ordinary Christians that the Bible could bear the whole weight of their lives.

The one thread

That is the thread through everything he taught, and it is worth naming at the start. Prince was a man of the text. He was not a mystic, not a storyteller, not a revivalist who worked on the feelings of a crowd. He was reserved, logical and plain. His method was always the same: take a subject, find what Scripture says about it, define the terms, lay the passages side by side, and draw the conclusions the passages require. Then — and this is what made him more than a lecturer — act on them. He believed that God’s Word is not merely true but active; that it does what it says; that a believer who hears it and stands on it will find it working in him.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please. ISAIAH 55:11

Everything else follows from this. His teaching on the foundations of the faith is an attempt to show what the Bible itself calls elementary. His teaching on the cross is a reading of what Scripture says was exchanged there. His teaching on faith is that it comes by hearing the Word. His teaching on prayer and fasting is that believers who pray God’s promises back to Him can move history. Even his most disputed teaching — on curses and on demons — was offered as the plain reading of texts he believed the church had been too embarrassed to take seriously.

Why he still matters

Prince is worth knowing for at least three reasons. The first is that he trained people to read. Many popular teachers leave their hearers dependent on the teacher. Prince, at his best, did the opposite. He wanted believers who could open their own Bibles, find the verses, and test what they were told.

The second is that he took the whole of Scripture seriously, including the parts that make comfortable Western Christians uneasy — fasting, the laying on of hands, the gifts of the Spirit, the reality of evil powers, the unfinished purposes of God for Israel, the judgement to come. He did not always handle those subjects well. But he refused to pretend they were not in the book.

The third reason is his own life. He was a man who learned, late and publicly, that he had been wrong about something that mattered, and who said so. That is rarer among Christian leaders than it should be, and it gives his teaching a certain credibility.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, twelve short chapters set out his teaching. They begin where he began, with the authority of the Word, and move to the six foundation doctrines of Hebrews 6:1–2. Then come the cross as a divine exchange, faith, the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and prayer and fasting. Four chapters follow on the subjects that made him most controversial — blessing and curse, spiritual warfare and deliverance, and Israel — and on the wound of rejection. The last two turn to the family and to the return of Christ.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Prince would have wanted it so. He distrusted teaching that stayed in the head. He thought a truth had not been received until it had been acted upon. Read a chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

A word about the limits of this book. Derek Prince’s writings are under copyright and belong to their rightful publishers. Nothing of his own text is reproduced here. Every description of his teaching is Ochorus’s own summary, and his books are named throughout so that the reader may go to them directly. A short guide to them is given at the end.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and it is better to say plainly at the outset where Prince must be weighed rather than simply received.

First, in the early 1970s he was one of the leaders of what became known as the Shepherding, or Discipleship, Movement, which taught that every believer should submit to a personal shepherd. In practice it produced serious and well-documented harm: people who needed a leader’s approval for marriage, money, work and moves, and leaders who abused that power. Prince was the first of its leaders to withdraw and publicly to repudiate it, and he did so in the language of repentance. That is to his lasting credit. But the harm was real, and it is named in these pages, not smoothed away.

Second, he was among the best-known teachers of deliverance ministry in the twentieth century, and he held that a Christian could need to be set free from evil spirits. Many careful believers reject that view. Even those who accept something like it have seen the damage done where every struggle is blamed on a demon and ordinary repentance, discipline, medicine and counsel are set aside. Chapter ten presents what he taught and the strong cautions it requires.

Third, his teaching that curses may pass down family lines is disputed, and it has sometimes bred fear rather than faith. Chapter nine weighs it against the plain words of Ezekiel 18.

Fourth, his love for Israel was deep and lifelong, and his reading of prophecy placed the modern State of Israel at the centre of God’s purposes. Many Christians share that view; many others, equally committed to Scripture, do not. Chapter eleven tries to present both fairly.

None of this is said to diminish him. It is said because he would have insisted on it. The whole burden of his ministry was that the Bible stands above every teacher, including himself. So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. JOHN 5:39

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before you read further, write down honestly what the Bible is to you at present: a book you respect, a book you consult, or the book you build your life on.

2. Choose one subject you have believed for years without checking. This week, find every passage you can on it and read them side by side.

3. Ask yourself which Christian teacher you trust most. Then ask whether you would still believe what you believe if that teacher were proved wrong.

4. Decide now how you will read this book: one chapter a day, or one a week. Put it in your diary.

5. Pray for grace to receive what is true in these pages and to set aside what is not, without fear either way.

A PRAYER

Father, You have magnified Your word, and I have often treated it as one book among many. Forgive me.

Give me a teachable heart and a testing mind. Let me receive gladly what is true, and let me have the courage to set aside what is not, even when it comes from someone I admire.

Make Your Word living to me again. Let it read me as I read it. And let it be the ground I stand on, not the ornament of a life built elsewhere. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.