A True and Living Book

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. HEBREWS 4:12

Every teacher has a starting point, and Derek Prince’s was never in doubt. Before he taught on faith, prayer, the Spirit or the cross, he taught on the Bible itself: what it is, what it claims, and what it does to those who receive it. In his Foundation Series, later gathered into a single volume as Foundations for Christian Living, the Word is given pride of place, and the emphasis falls not on experience but on authority. The Christian life, he argued, stands or falls on one question: has God spoken, and has He spoken here?

Settled in heaven

Prince’s answer was yes, without reservation. He held that the Scriptures are given by the inspiration of God, not merely in their broad ideas but in their words, and that they carry the authority of the God who breathed them. He liked to point out that Jesus Himself treated the Old Testament in exactly this way. When He was tempted in the wilderness He did not argue, reason, or appeal to His own experience. He quoted Deuteronomy three times, and the devil left.

But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. MATTHEW 4:4

Prince drew from this a lesson he pressed throughout his ministry. If the Son of God, full of the Spirit, chose to meet Satan with the written Word, then no believer is too spiritual to need it, and no believer has a better weapon. The Bible is not the starting point of the Christian life which we leave behind as we mature. It is the ground under our feet all the way through.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works. 2 TIMOTHY 3:16–17

He was fond of the phrase in the psalm that heads the introduction to this book: the Word is settled in heaven. It is not settled by the vote of a council, by the consensus of scholars, or by the feelings of the reader. It is settled, and our task is to come into agreement with it.

A word that works

The former philosopher insisted that the Bible is not only true but active. It does not merely describe reality; it acts upon it. This conviction ran through all his teaching and gave it much of its energy. The Word of God, he taught, does for the believer what it says it will do. It gives new birth. It cleanses. It feeds. It heals. It illuminates. It sanctifies. It gives victory over the enemy.

Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth. JOHN 17:17

He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions. PSALM 107:20

Prince liked to gather such passages into lists — the effects of God’s Word upon the one who receives it — and to show how much of the Christian life is simply the Word doing its work. A believer who wants to grow does not need a technique. He needs to feed. A believer who is being defeated by temptation does not need more resolve. He needs the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. A believer who is uncertain of his way does not need a sign. He needs a lamp.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. PSALM 119:105

There is a caution to raise here, and it is one Prince himself would have accepted. To say that the Word does what it says is not to say that any verse may be lifted from its setting and applied to any circumstance as a guaranteed formula. The promise that God’s Word will not return void is a promise about His purposes, not about ours. Prince was usually careful about this; some who learned from him were not. The Word works, but it works as God intends it to work, and part of reading it rightly is learning, patiently, what He intends.

Hearing, receiving, doing

Prince distinguished between hearing the Word and receiving it. A congregation may hear a sermon every week for forty years and receive almost nothing. The difference, he taught, lies in the attitude of the hearer: humility, a readiness to be corrected, a willingness to obey. He often turned to the parable of the sower for this. The seed is always good. What varies is the soil.

That led him to the plainest of his counsels. Read the Bible regularly, systematically and obediently. Read it through, not only in favourite places. Read it with a notebook, looking for what it actually says rather than what you expected it to say. And do what it tells you, because the truth that is not acted upon hardens the heart that hears it.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

The book above the teacher

There is one further implication of Prince’s teaching on the Word, and his own story makes it sharper than he may have intended. If the Bible is the final authority, then no teacher is. No pastor, no apostle, no shepherd, no movement stands above the written Word, and every one of them must be tested by it.

Prince learned the cost of forgetting this. The Shepherding Movement, which he helped to lead in the 1970s, placed great weight on submission to human leaders, and in many places the authority of the shepherd came in practice to eclipse both the conscience of the believer and the plain sense of Scripture. When Prince withdrew from it and repudiated its teaching, he did so on scriptural grounds: what had begun in the Spirit had been carried on in the flesh. His own doctrine of the Word was the thing that judged his own error.

To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. ISAIAH 8:20

That is perhaps the best way to read Derek Prince himself. He asked his hearers to check everything by the Bible. The right response is to do exactly that — with his teaching as with everyone else’s. A teacher who points us to the Book and then submits to it has done us the greatest service a teacher can.

Loving the Word

It would be wrong to leave the impression that Prince’s relationship with Scripture was merely a matter of authority and method. He loved the Bible. He had come to Christ through it. He had read it in the desert, in hospital wards and in a Jerusalem at war. It had been, for a lonely scholar, the voice of a Friend. And the psalms he quoted most were the psalms of a man who loved it too.

O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day. PSALM 119:97

A believer who treats the Bible only as a rulebook, or only as a weapon, has not yet understood it. It is first of all the place where God speaks, and where Christ is found.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask yourself honestly what the final authority in your life is when Scripture and your preferences disagree. Name a recent example.

2. Choose one area of struggle and find three passages of Scripture that speak directly to it. Memorise one this week.

3. Begin, or return to, a plan to read the whole Bible through. Start small if you must, but start today.

4. The next time you hear a sermon or read a Christian book, check at least one of its claims against the Bible for yourself.

5. Think of a Christian leader whose word you have tended to treat as final. Pray for them — and resolve to test what they say by Scripture.

6. Read Psalm 119 slowly over a week, a few sections a day, and note what the psalmist says the Word does.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You have spoken, and Your word is settled in heaven. Forgive me for treating it as unsettled on earth — as advice, as opinion, as something I may take or leave.

Give me a hunger for it. Let me feed on it daily, not as a duty but as bread.

Make me a doer and not a hearer only. And guard me from ever setting any teacher, any movement, any leader, above what You have written.

Let Your Word do in me all that You sent it to do. In Jesus’ name, Amen.