THE SID ROTH TV SHOW
Interview With: Bill Johnson
SID: Hello. Welcome to my world where it’s naturally supernatural!
You know, my guest found a key to operate in so many major miracles. 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. He found out a renewed mind is 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 are so bombarded by everything going on around them on Earth, it’s almost like it goes in one ear and out the other.
BILL: That’s true.
SID: And so 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. But 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 of mine. Sometimes I don’t get the healing, 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?
BILL: Well if I have ten people with the same problem come to me and I don’t see a breakthrough, a healing, 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, 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 fail, 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 wise, but I won’t move many mountains, (Mark 11:23).
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 prophecy, 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 example one person, the woman with the esophageal cancer. Tell me about her.
BILL: She had esophageal cancer. During worship, she felt heat come on her hands. She had her hands raised up 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 I don’t know. But she did. She just felt His presence and assumed she was healed. 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 honour, 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 from her being in His 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 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: You know, psychiatrists talk about people that live in denial. Well my guest Bill Johnson says he wants us to live in denial. Bill, how can you say that?
BILL: Well it’s a play on words. But when the devil puts a request across my desk, I say, “request denied”. That’s me living in denial. I deny his perspective on anything, his influence. It’s, I don’t deny his existence. I just deny him a place of influence.
SID: All right. Give me an example of a decree you might use.
BILL: We live with a conviction that nothing happens in the Kingdom apart, except first through, a declaration. And so what we do is we get the heart of the mind of God in a manner it would make a decree. Sometimes things change simply because we’ve made a decree. Like “This is not the purpose and plan of God for my life. I reject this. You have no place.” And there are times where just a simple decree ends a matter. Other times more intercessory prayer is needed. Sometimes there’s worship. Sometimes, literally it’s just shifting focus and not being preoccupied by the size of a problem.
SID: So if you’re not preoccupied by the size of your problem, what are you preoccupied with?
BILL: Well, with Him. Honestly, it’s with Him. It’s with His promise, it’s with His Word, it’s with His heart for me, it’s with His presence that is with me. I’m going to feed from that regardless and I’m going to live towards any challenge that I have from that sense of co-labouring with the Lord, His abiding presence, that dove that remains on me. That is going to be the way I approach any given situation.
SID: Tell me about that awful situation, a woman is in a car accident. She loses the use of her arm. Tell me about that woman.
BILL: She actually was a part of another church in town, great church. And her daughter wanted to go to church on a particular day when they didn’t have meetings. So they came to our church. I found out the story afterwards because I didn’t know her. But she had had several surgeries on her arm. It was several inches too short and she had no use in it. She had no feeling, I believe it’s from the elbow down and she had no movement. She couldn’t grip. She couldn’t lift. She had a two-year-old girl that she couldn’t even pick up because of no use of this arm. And so at the service we went into a time of praying for the sick. And her daughter, one of her daughters said, “You need to go to the front to get prayer.” She didn’t want to. Finally just out of yielding to her daughter, she went up and one of our ladies just prayed for her. And literally in just moments of time the arm grew out the full length. She had full use and they came and got me. So I ran over. I was obviously excited, thrilled with this report, trying to get information. And while I was there, the little girl came up to her and she reached down to her little girl, and the little girl said, “No mommy, broken arm.” I heard this. “No mommy, broken arm, broken arm.” She had heard that her entire two-year life that her mommy couldn’t pick her up because of no use in this arm. And the mother said, “It’s okay, honey.” And she picked her up and the smile on that little girl’s face, I’ll never forget the rest of my life because it was the cry of the little girl’s heart for mom, and Mom could hold her now in a way that she couldn’t before. It was just stunning. Experiences like that change how you see any following problems.
SID: House of God, you teach on that. Why is that such an important concept?
BILL: We are the House of God. We are the dwelling place of the Almighty God. And when we lose awareness, consciousness of the Spirit of God upon us, in us, we live different. Everything changes. But when we live with the abiding realization that God is with me, not just as a point of theology, but as the Companion, as the Empowerer, as the One who guides and directs, the One I co-labour with, living with that realization changes everything. Everything I think, everything I expect, the way I pray, everything is different because now I’m not begging Him to invade earth, to invade me. I am with Him trying to pick up His heart and mind so that I can be used by Him to bring about a change. Change is everything.
SID: There is a scripture that’s coming to me: “The Kingdom of God is not food or drink, but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” What does that mean to you?
BILL: I love that verse for several reasons. One is, the Kingdom of God is in the Holy Spirit. So the realm of the Kingdom, the realm of God’s dominion and rule is in the realm of the Spirit. So realizing the reality of the Kingdom coincides with my discovery of the presence, of the manifest presence of the Holy Spirit. And so that’s why those two work together so well for me is because the more I discover Him, the more I pick up His heart, the more I become aware of the dove that remains, the presence upon me. The more that happens in my life or in our corporate gatherings, the simpler it is to see His purpose is accomplished in that gathering, because the Kingdom is in the realm of the Spirit.
SID: I’m going to have you pray for people.
BILL: Okay.
SID: But because you have this renewed mind, you can tell me now, what is going to happen when you pray for these people?
BILL: Well there’s going to be miracles. We just had, just a few weeks ago, I just got a report this Sunday of a girl who stood up on behalf of her son who had milk and gluten allergy, food allergy. He was also autistic. But we were praying for food allergies. She stood up for the food allergies, went and got him a pizza after the service. He was healed of food allergies and healed of autism.
SID: Okay, in a moment, get ready because I proclaim, Bill proclaims and even more important, God proclaims, by His stripes you were healed. But first tell us another miracle . About when an emergency happened. You’re driving along, minding your own business. Mozambique you happen to be in, and all of a sudden there’s a big bus in front of you. It turns over. People fall out of the bus. They’re strewn all over the highway. They’re injured, they’re dying, they’re in pain, they’re moaning. You get out. This actually happened to a friend of yours. Tell me what happened.
BILL: Yeah. She serves as a doctor. And she went around trying to help everyone she could help. She found a dead woman who’s neck was actually broken. The head was facing the wrong direction. She took people that were not injured. She put them by individuals and she told them, that hadn’t been injured, and she told them, “speak life into them”. These were just bystanders. “Speak life into these.”
SID: Now are these believers or not?
BILL: No. She told them, “When I turn and look at you I want to see your lips moving, you speak life into that person.” And so she went around attending the injured and she heard this noise. She turned around at the dead woman’s head, literally turned around, came into place. She was resurrected in that environment of speaking life into a person’s being at the end of this horrible accident.
SID: So the Kingdom of God came on Earth and the Kingdom of God is coming on Earth for you right now. Bill, would you pray?
BILL: Absolutely. Absolutely. (.. speaking into the camera.) I believe that the Lord is going to bring about encounters that bring transformation to lifestyles. That’s what I want to pray for. I just ask, Father God, that you feel the presence of power of the Holy Spirit in such an extraordinary way that people see and think differently because of seeing Your heartbeat, of discerning Your presence, of recognizing Your passion for people, that out of that would come transformation from the inside.
And I believe that the Lord is healing people of dyslexia, of bipolar, various brain injuries. There are people that have been in accidents , there is someone who has not been able to return to work because things are not clear, things are foggy in thought. You’re not able to do logic, reason, process information. I believe the Lord is healing a number of people with that kind of situation. I have a personal passion, a hatred for cancer. I believe that the Lord is releasing a miracle anointing to destroy that affliction in people’s bodies. Specifically abdominal cancer is being dissolved in the whole digestive system. The Lord is bringing healing of cancer. There’s also cancer being healed in the bones. I think it’s in the spine, in Jesus’ mighty, mighty name.
I also declare absolute healing to the brokenness that exists in people’s hearts over sickness, that the Lord would restore confidence, confidence in your place as His son, as His daughter, that you, that people ignore negative thoughts about themselves – they’re shooting themselves in the foot – but would be confident in a loving, perfect Father. I pray these things in the wonderful and mighty name of Jesus. Amen. Amen.
SID: Some of you, your ears are popping right now. They’re opening. Deafness be gone in Jesus’ name! But the most important thing right now is the scourge of blindness is coming off the eyes of people to see Jesus, to understand His goodness and His love, and His call, and His compassion for you, and how He loves you and has never stopped loving you. And if you would tell God you’re sorry for the mistakes you’ve made, but you need His help to turn around and change, and believe that He died for you, and that He rose again, and make Him your Lord with your mouth. Ask Him to live inside of you and get on with your life, and begin to smell the roses again. It’s about time that you really, really experience Jesus!