An interview with Bill
Johnson:
What you know about God changes you. It
defines your purpose. It defines your destiny. It shapes how you live. It
shapes how you think most of all. Everything comes from your perspective on
life. And the way you view God changes everything that you see about life
itself on Planet Earth, what’s God’s assignment for our life. When we see He is
good all revelation comes as an invitation for encounter. None of it is given
to us just to make us smarter, just to increase our intellectual capacity. All
of it is an invitation to encounter God in that area. So he says taste and see
that the Lord is good. Taste is an experience. See is perception. You’ll perceive
more clearly what you can experience and the Lord is inviting us to see and to
taste, and to perceive his goodness on a whole different level. Everything
comes from the goodness of God. Everything about him, He is as good as He is
Holy. His love, of course, He is love. But that goodness of God, I think is the
root system that everything comes from. And when you see that, when that becomes
settled in my heart then there are things that I used to question that would
happen, that I no longer question because I see everything is defined by his
goodness. It’s not, his goodness isn’t defined
by circumstances. It's the other way around. And just seeing that brings a rest
to my heart so that I can trust him in all situations. The enemy's whole thing
is wanting me to become introspective. He wants me to be wrapped up in
evaluating what I'm doing. And specially for those who have a great passion
to know God, to live like Jesus, be like Jesus, it's an easy trap to fall into
because when I look inward, I'm not looking where faith will increase. I
actually look where faith will diminish because I become more self-reliant than
I am God-reliant. So the Lord longs for us to turn our attention towards
him. It's not that the issues of life that He's dealing with aren't important.
They are, but He is dealing with them, not us. He is dealing with them and as
we look to him we come into a place of rest, and faith comes out of rest, not
striving. It's not the result of works, it's the result of surrender. And when
that is our approach to our relationship with God, faith is much more normal
and natural.
Why is it so important for
people to know how good God is?
Well
it's vital because it changes who you are. It changes your perception on life.
And if I mistake God's nature I will mistake how I live. It's the whole
statement that's made. Whatever you misdiagnose you will mistreat. And so
you'll always try to answer questions that people are asking. You'll always try
to solve problems [thinking] that really God is not working or He's taking a
different approach on, and so we become people who work extremely hard, but
very, very ineffective, because everything comes out of the goodness of God.
It's a vital thing to perceive because it changes how we view, even things we
don't understand, it changes mystery. It changes loss. It changes the questions
that we have. I have more questions than I've ever had. It's not that my
knowledge increases where I've got all these answers. It's just I have the
answers I need and the answer I need is that he is 100 percent always good
and he is a perfect Father.
Jesus came to reveal him as Father.
The greatest revelation that Jesus brought to us is really unveiled to us
constantly in the Gospel of John is that Jesus is a father and he's a perfect
father. He came to a planet of orphans to reveal the Father as Father. And once
that becomes settled
then I may not know the answer to this
problem or this challenge, but I know I'm approaching God who is good, who
has already worked on my behalf to bring out a right solution.
This word trust is such an
important word. You were in Brazil speaking and you got a call no son ever
wants to get. You have meetings and miracles are going on, and you get a phone
call. What were you informed?
I got a call that my dad had had what we
thought was going to be a minor procedure. When they opened him up they found
that he had pancreatic cancer, which is one of the worst kinds of cancer you
can have. I was there with my really dear friend Randy Clark, joining him.
Now you have two great miracle
ministries and your own dad calls, and he has an impossible situation. Just out
of curiosity, what went through your mind when he said that to you?
It's time for a miracle. It's time for a
miracle. So I got released from Randy to fly home immediately. I caught the
next flight out and flew home, and then over the next several months spent
many, many times ministering to him, praying for him, away from him as well in
prayer, and just contending for that breakthrough, for that miracle.
So your dad died. What are your
conclusions?
You know, I don't ask God why on
these things. I just know he didn't cause the disease. I know he's big enough
to use any problem, so he can turn any situation around, for his glory. And it's
a win-win in this kind of a situation because my dad is a powerful man of God.
He's a believer. To go home with the Lord, to remain on earth with us, to help
us, it's a win-win
situation. So that part is settled.
How about the part of “God is
good.” Is that really settled with you when your dad dies?
Yes, it is. The Lord wasn't really speaking
to me about that then. But I will admit I've had to learn more about the
goodness of God since that loss than all the years previous. It was something
he was already working on in me to show me, but it really exploded after that.
When my dad died we gathered around his bed. He was there in our home. We had
our entire family. I forget now, 20 to 30 members surrounded his bed, and we
began to give God thanks. We began to honor him for his goodness. We began to
give him praise because he is the one who heals the sick. He raises the dead.
He does all these things. And we just lifted our praise because I wanted…I know
that in Heaven I'll never have a chance to give God an offering out of loss,
out of pain, out of confusion. I'll never have that context in which to give
him an offering in Heaven. I only have a chance to give that to him now. So as
a family, we grabbed our moment. We made a covenant to walk in the anointing
that my dad carried, which is primarily as a worshiper, and we made a covenant
as a family to carry that mantle, and then we just offered up an offering. It
was a sacrifice, but we offered the sacrifice of praise for his goodness, and
it unlocked something for me.
I'm going to tell you what it
would do for me. What it would do for me, I would go after cancer, I would go
after heart trouble, I would go after diabetes with a vengeance.
Exactly. You either run away from it in
reaction to your pain, to your loss, or you run after it. It's like David
picking up the stones and running at Goliath. Cancer has been the Goliath in
the church, and we've got to pick up the stones and run at the problem instead
of avoiding it. I agree.
Did you see an increase in the
miraculous?
Yes. It was not immediately, like the
next week or two weeks. Because I believe there's an important season of
mourning. Mourning that's wrong takes you to unbelief. Mourning that's right
brings you to a place of receiving comfort and healing, and that's what we did.
We just took a brief time to mourn until we felt that things were settled in
our heart and then began to pursue. And yes, so we've been seeing that.
You told me that your model is
Jesus.
Yes.
What was, what did you learn
from your model about healing, not necessarily with your dad, but what did
Jesus model about healing?
Just in general, he healed everyone who
came to him, number one, and he healed everyone the Father sent him to. He did
not heal everyone who was sick, who was alive, because we know he healed the
one man at the pool of Bethesda and there were many others around the pool.
Tragically, our theology today tends to be built around what didn’t happen
instead of what
God did do. But Jesus healed everyone who
came to him, healed everyone that the Father directed him to. That's the only
standard that I'm willing to follow.
So will you lower your standard
any because of what happened?
Well I can't. I can't. I may do horrible
at my assignment, but I can't change my assignment so that I feel good about
myself. I have to accept the assignment God gave me, [which] is the standard
that Jesus set. I have to embrace that. I can't lower the standard of Scripture
to my level of
experience. I'm spending my lifetime
trying to raise my level of experience to the standard of Scripture.
Now this revelation, God is
good, Bill, you said God is better than we think. What did you mean by that?
Well you can't exaggerate God's goodness.
It's impossible. If I could comprehend his goodness, I would be God, not him.
He is far beyond everything we can possibly imagine, and so we have to, in our
experience with his goodness, in that invitation to Divine encounter, as that increases
in our life, we have to adjust our thinking. That's really what repentance
means. Repentance means to change the way you think.
It's the remorse over sin, obviously, but
it has to affect how I perceive reality. And that's what the Lord is looking
for.
So what happens, and you can't
stop the devil from planting thoughts. He plants a negative thought about God
in your head. What goes on inside of you when that happens?
Well you replace it with truth.
I don't give it much attention, to be honest with you. I don't want to flatter
the enemy with success and feeling successful in anything. So I really work
hard to give him as little attention as possible and just to feed myself with
truth. I may prophesy. I may declare something true. I may declare a scripture
that contradicts what the enemy said. Often times I'll just sing a song of
praise. I'll sing spontaneously to the Lord in the very area that the enemy
questions. If it's an area about not having enough for this next month or
something, I
praise God for his abundance. And that's
just what I do, is I go against what the enemy has done and do it with truth. Truth
brings life.
Why is there such a conflict
over this term, the goodness of God?
Because it's key to the Last Days'
harvest. If the enemy can mess us up on our view of God then he has injured
our capacity to represent the goodness of a perfect father.
Can you prove that in Scripture
that it has to do with the End Time revival?
Yes, absolutely. Hosea 3:5 says,
"In the last days the people will fear God because of his goodness."
Psalm
67 is actually my most favorite passage on this area because it ends with
nations coming to Christ. And it's through the process of the goodness of God
being revealed upon his people.
Psalm 67: 1May God be gracious to us and
bless us and make his face shine on us 2so that your ways may be known
on earth, your salvation among all nations. 3May the peoples praise you,
God; may all the peoples praise you.4May the nations be glad and
sing for joy, for you rule the peoples with equity and guide the nations of the
earth. 5May the peoples
praise you, God; may all the peoples praise you. 6The land yields its harvest; God,
our God, blesses us. 7May God
bless us still, so that all the ends of the earth will fear him.
I think it must be the devil that
tries to rob us of our destiny by challenging the goodness of God.
If we question His goodness, we'll
question His promise. If we question His promise, we've undermined our own
destiny.
It's just coming to our senses
that God is good.
Yes. Faith, real faith, doesn't deny the
existence of a problem. It just denies that problem a place of influence. It's
not living in denial. It's not living as the ostrich, ignoring all the difficulties
that are going on. It's just seeing them through the eyes of hope, seeing them
through the intentions of purposes of a perfect father. When you taste of
his goodness and you see that it is absolutely 100 percent constant then
everything becomes redefined by that goodness.