552: The Prayer of Freedom

Discover The Prayer of Freedom—a powerful guide to break spiritual chains, heal deeply, and reclaim the abundant life God intended.

What if the key to breaking free from spiritual chains, healing deep wounds, and reclaiming the life God designed for you was hidden in plain sight? In this powerful first part of my interview with Beatty Carmichael, we uncover The Prayer of Freedom—a biblically grounded approach that has set thousands free from struggles they’ve carried for years. Beatty shares eye-opening insights on sin, spiritual authority, and faith, along with real-life testimonies of transformation. Whether you’re seeking a breakthrough, deeper understanding of God’s Word, or practical steps to walk in radical faith, this conversation will inspire you to take action. Stay tuned until the end, because you’ll also get a sneak peek of what’s coming in Part Two.

Highlights:

A heavenly courtroom reveals how the enemy accuses believers. In a vision, Beatty Carmichael's son saw God as Judge and demons as prosecuting attorneys using unrepented sin as legal grounds to attack.
Pleading the blood of Jesus wipes away every charge. When each sin was confessed and covered by the blood, the demon vanished and the accusations were erased.
Ignoring demonic manifestations can end their attacks. After learning to stop giving fear-based attention to visitations, Beatty Carmichael’s son was never visited again.
The Prayer of Freedom closes doors the enemy uses. This prayer removes legal rights demons have gained through fear, lust, greed, unforgiveness, and other sins.
Sin in the Bible is more than just actions—it’s a condition. Most New Testament references to sin are nouns, describing a power that clings until it is addressed through repentance.
There are four escalating types of sin. These are accidental sin, transgression (rebellion), iniquity (perversion of God’s standard), and abomination, which carries severe and generational consequences.
True faith is acting as if God’s promise is already fulfilled. It means obeying His will so fully that failure is inevitable unless He intervenes.
Radical giving can lead to supernatural provision. Beatty Carmichael shares how increasing his giving far beyond his means repeatedly led to God meeting every need.
Fear-based decisions can limit God’s provision. Cutting pay out of worry led to losses, but restoring full pay in obedience brought immediate financial turnaround.
God has called Beatty Carmichael to abandon business security for ministry. He now focuses fully on spreading the Prayer of Freedom message, trusting God to provide before resources run out.

Intro:

Hello True Health Seeker, and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. You're going to really enjoy today's interview, and before you get to it, I want you to go to learntruehealth.com/free. That's learntruehealth.com/free, and that is my gift for you.

As a true health seeker looking to expand your health, I want to give you the gift of the first part of my book, which will take you, if you follow along, a month to get through. You're going to get a whole 30-plus days out of the activities that I give you in the free part of my book. Then, if you want to go grab the whole book, you can.

Addicted to Wellness — it's an amazing workbook designed to take your health to the next level. Wherever you are in your health journey, whether you're just starting or whether you're a seasoned health nut just like myself, you can always improve. You can always be reminded of those health habits that are the foundations of true health, and sometimes learn them for the first time or tweak them and get them even better.

I make it fun because we're using neuroscience and the power of the addictive part of our brains — those dopamine-seeking, pleasure-seeking parts of our brains — to turn something healthy into addictive, fun habits that are creating more balance, more joy, and a greater feeling of satisfaction.

I want you waking up in the morning, bouncing out of bed full of energy, wide awake, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, ready to thrive all day long. I want you feeling joy all day long — no aches, no pains, just feeling strong and centered in your body all day — and then having the energy and the endurance to just go, go, go and do all the wonderful things you want to do, and to feel gratitude and joy in every area of your life.

Then, I want you to be able to have deep, restful sleep at night and to feel just comfortable in your skin. If you don't have that — if there's a part of your life that is missing that — then please go to learntruehealth.com/free, because I would love for you to have that, and that is my gift to you. Of course, tell your friends about it too. Share learntruehealth.com/free, get the free section of my book so that you can start on this journey.

Enjoy today's episode, and thank you so much for sharing it with those you care about. This is definitely one of those eye-openers, and I know you'll learn a lot of new things. It's very interesting, and I suggest just keeping your mind so open your brain could fall out. Of course, we want to question everything, and you can definitely go and look into these things that our guest brings up and research them for yourself, and I know he'd want you to as well.

Keep your mind open, because what he shares might be very new to you. It wasn't quite new to me, but I still learned so much, and it was really cool that I've actually heard his techniques work before with other people. So it's exciting to see how it'll work for you as well.

Let me know — you can come into the Learn True Health Facebook group and share with me after you listen to this, and let me know what you think. I'm really curious to hear what you have to think after hearing this episode.

So, enjoy today's episode.

Welcome to the Learn True Health podcast. I'm your host, Ashley James. This is episode 552.

Ashley James (0:03:44.227)

I am so excited for today's guest. We have Beatty Carmichael on the show today. Get ready. Just buckle in — this is going to be such a fun ride.

Now, Beatty, you asked if we could pray before our interview, and I said, “Hold on, let me hit record because I'd actually like everyone to pray with us.” So, if you can bow your heads, if not, it's okay. If you're driving, please don't close your eyes and bow your heads.

Beatty, take it away.

Beatty Carmichael (0:04:14.563)

Lord, we just thank You for this time and ask that You would guide the two of us to speak Your words, to yield to You, and that Your truth be evident. Lord, I ask that You set Your people free. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Ashley James (0:04:31.499)

Amen. Thank you, Beatty, for coming on the show. This is going to be a lot of fun.

For listeners who don't know who Beatty is, his book and his website is theprayeroffreedombook.com. I'm so excited to dig into your story. God's been guiding Beatty to help people, to help them heal.

What you might not know about me is a few years ago, I lost my daughter. I was always passionate about God in my life, but losing her, my relationship with God deepened. I turned to Him, and I got such amazing confirmations and such amazing healing from Him.

The thing is, I didn't go to blaming Him. I have a friend who lost a daughter, and she kind of hates God now. I just don't understand that. I understand the idea of Job, where he couldn't possibly begin to fathom the complexities of the universe. So I'm like, “Listen, God, it's in Your hands. I love You, and I know one day I'll meet my daughter again. I miss her so much, but I'm not going to sit here a little brat and blame Him for her dying.”

Instead, I turned to Him and I said, “God, please heal me.” I had the most amazing experiences of Him washing over me, revealing to me, and healing me.

I want to bring that to the show — my show, Learn True Health — because health is mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, and energetic. Maybe there are listeners who are crying in their pillow at night, praying for an answer. Maybe they don't even realize they're praying. Maybe they're just so done, so exhausted, and the suffering is too much.

Many of us don't know how to foster a relationship with God or that we're suffering on a spiritual level. I hope my show reaches those who are crying out for the answer, and that this show will be the answer that helps them and guides them.

That's why having you on the show is so important to me — because God's been working in your life and guiding you to help others. I'm so excited to have you here so you can help those who are listening.

So thank you, and welcome to the show.

Beatty Carmichael (0:06:58.935)

Well thank you Ashley, I'm very excited about being here.

Ashley James (0:07:02.411)

Absolutely. Now, of course, you've got your book, which you want everyone to go to — theprayeroffreedombook.com — and they can check that out. But what I really want to hear is this: you tried to tell me your story before we recorded, and I said, “No, no, no, no, no — you have to stop. This is too good; I have to hit record.” You can go into detail. Tell the full story: what happened that led you to where you are today helping people?

Beatty Carmichael (0:07:28.017)

Well, I guess if the full story would be told, I've got to go back 200 years ago. I come from a line of seven generations of medical doctors, so it goes back almost 200 years. Then I married my wife — her dad was a 50-year internist and general practitioner. So she's on the medical side too.

What's interesting, though, is that back during those days — and also my father-in-law especially — medicine was more healthcare than medicine, because they would diagnose you based on the three pillars of healthcare: mental, physical, and spiritual.

My father-in-law would always sit his patients down when they had some issue and say, “Health is tied to mental, physical, and spiritual.” He would start to engage with them and diagnose their issue based on whatever they were dealing with, and based on the story he could pull out of them, he’d understand where it fit.

My generation stopped medicine. After seven generations, no one in our generation went into medicine. I went into business, and then about 10 years ago God placed on my heart a burning desire to go pray for people.

I had watched a video on Netflix at the time. It was actually a trilogy docu-series of some guy going around with a camera, following a few people into the public marketplace, and they would pray for people at random — and God would heal them. I had never seen anything like that. It so captivated me because the church I went to at that time was a megachurch — very Bible-focused, very teaching-focused — but also cessationist. They discounted that God heals today; they believed He can, but not through a person's prayer.

So the supernatural gifts of healing, that type of stuff, had disappeared in their view. When I started to see this on video, and then watched all the other ones in this trilogy, I couldn’t get enough of it. It was the Lord who was grabbing my heart and saying, This is the direction for you to go in.

I didn’t know what to do with it, because my church couldn’t help — they didn’t understand any of this. I realized that if I were to start praying for people for healing, I had to have the faith that God would heal them, because only if you have faith will He answer that prayer — especially for a healing prayer. Now, you can petition all the time, but to have a gift of healing takes faith.

My church would pray for people, “Lord, heal this person if it be Your will.” Maybe it’s God’s will that they be sick — and that’s where I had come from. So I took a deep dive into Scripture to understand: what does Scripture say about God’s will as it relates to healing?

It took about six months. I went to all kinds of healing conferences. I read books and listened to sermons from people on the other side of the spectrum of the Christian faith — those who actually believe in gifts of healing. I was listening to them, not so much for their opinion, but to see what Scriptures they based their understanding on. Then I would go study those Scriptures, and by golly, that’s exactly what they said.

After about six months, I finally came to the conclusion that it was definitely 100% God’s will to heal — and I’d put the caveat generally speaking. But the basic thing that hit me was this: Jesus is the exact imprint and representation of God the Father, and every person that came to Him requesting healing, He healed. That made it very clear — it was actually His will to heal.

It’s not, Please heal this person if it be Your will. That was wrong.

So, in October 2016, I got the nerve to actually walk up to strangers and say, “Looks you’re in pain. Can I pray for you?” I prayed for 18 people that day. I went to a gas station, a grocery store, Walmart — and six of them, one-third, were instantly healed.

Actually, one guy took about an hour — he was in a lot of pain. But I saw people with degenerative discs who couldn’t walk or turn their head — now they were moving around. Arthritis left. I saw a guy who was taking opioids for his pain because it was so bad, and all the pain ultimately left after about an hour. Someone with RSD — my dad was really impressed with that. I asked him, “What is RSD?” I saw that disappear.

He said, “If that disappeared, that’s a miracle,” because it’s a neurological disease, extremely painful and incurable. Dad was impressed with that one. He wasn’t as impressed with degenerative discs, arthritis, or lupus — those types of things. But I knew I was onto something.

This is where we picked up when I was about to tell you this story — I went back to my megachurch senior pastor and said, “You wouldn’t believe what’s happening. I pray for these people and God’s healing a third of them.” His first comment was, “Well, Satan can heal too.”

I didn’t like that response, so I then went to my next senior pastor.

Ashley James (0:13:21.559)

What I want to know, just to stop you there, what biblical evidence does he have that Satan heals?

Beatty Carmichael (0:13:26.695)

So Satan can heal, Satan can mask all kinds of things because he can be an angel of light, but that's a good question. I don't know the scriptural evidence.

Ashley James (0:13:39.771)

I haven't read the Bible cover to cover, but I've covered a lot of it. I feel I've covered a lot, and I don't see any biblical evidence for Satan healing. But I get what you're saying — he’s all about deception and lies. It’s so interesting.

Beatty Carmichael (0:14:01.680)

Yes, he's lying. Well, you do have the beast in Revelation, I think it was — and I think I have the right terms. You have the beast, you have the prophet, you have some other person, and one of them died and came back to life. It's all very dark and very evil energy, and it led a lot of people astray. They started worshipping the beast because he had died and come back to life or something like that.

So you do see it could be deception.

There’s something really interesting, actually. I was reading a book years back by a pastor in South Korea about faith and healing. He said, “Over here unlike in America and in the Western world, simply because you pray for someone and they get healed doesn’t lead people to Jesus — because the false religions are healing people. Now, when you raise someone from the dead, that gets their attention for Jesus, because the false religions can’t do that.”

He said that even their children would go out and raise people from the dead. They would pray for people all the time and see them healed, so that wasn’t a big deal.

The more I’ve learned about the spiritual realm and how healing works, it’s really interesting. I’m doing a lot of shows — believe it or not, my old church would shudder at this — but in fact, I just got off two shows like this today.

A lot of the shows I’m doing are with alternative healers that use psychic energy and energy healing — things that are really kind of taboo. But they’re seeing results, and it’s probably a false result. What this pastor in South Korea was saying is that people are getting healed, but they don’t realize that what they thought was being healed is simply a spirit that no longer produces that symptom. So they thought they were being healed, but in return they were getting worse spirits that are now destroying their lives even deeper.

So there is that false deception. I think this is probably a good understanding to define what healing is: for a lot of people, their symptom goes away. Think about this — most of the pain that we deal with is spiritually rooted.

Ashley James (0:16:21.960)

Sorry, can you say that again? I didn't hear it. Spiritual what?

Beatty Carmichael (0:16:25.766)

Most of the pain that we deal with has a spiritual root.

It's coming from a spiritual entity causing it. Let me give you just two examples real quickly.

I just got up for the show as a Jewish woman and she's been dealing with this incredible pain. Right now it was an eight in her knee and it's been going on for years. And so I led her to the simple approach to this: ask God if there's a spiritual root to it—a sin that you need to repent of or someone you need to forgive.

Three people came to her mind to forgive. She forgave all three of them and the pain instantly disappeared, and she broke into tears.

Another lady—this other one was a Christian—same thing happened. She'd been having neuropathy in her legs and the pain level was an eight. It's been going on for 15 years. God had her ask the Lord to reveal if there's a sin to repent of or someone to forgive. In this case it was also someone to forgive. And I said, “How long have you been holding unforgiveness for that person?” She said, “15 years.”

Do you see a correlation? Fifteen years unforgiveness, fifteen years neuropathy. She forgave the person and instantly the neuropathy disappeared.

So what you're seeing is so much of this pain is tied to a spiritual root. And that spiritual root is tied to unrepented sin. Unforgiveness is a type of unrepented sin. So if pain can be created by a spiritual torment, and in a lot of the things that they're dealing with in South Korea, and places where people I've worked with who've been dealing with demonic torment as well—if it's an evil torment, an evil spirit of some sort—then in the false religions, to lure people in, they can direct that spirit in some way to release its hold on that level of pain.

A spirit can manifest in pain and anxiety and depression and all kinds of accidents in your life, and all kinds of other issues, sickness and illness. So it's not that you have one spirit that does one thing. One spirit can manifest in multiple different ways.

So what will happen in the deception of healing is the symptoms disappear. So the person thinks they've been healed, so they keep going back to that false religion spiritual healer. What they're doing, unbeknownst to them, is they're opening the doors even more to increase torment. But they don't recognize it because they don't recognize the direct cause and effect.

I think that's what's been happening with the work I've been doing. We have these issues going on in our lives. I remember I was in the Caribbean and we were about to fly out, and the taxi driver was driving really slow and in the middle of the road. I’d asked him the day before—because I met him the day before—if there was anything I could pray for him about. He said, “Yes, pray for my eyesight,” and he drove away. I didn't understand that.

So now he's taking us to the airport and he's quiet. He's somber. There's something going on, and when we get to the airport, he says, “I perceive you're a man of God.” And I knew what he meant. So I said, “Yes.”

He said, “I have a lot of questions and I've been asking God to send me someone who can answer these questions. Do you have time to talk?” And my flight was several hours away, so I said, “Sure, let's go sit down at the coffee shop.”

As we're sitting there, he's asking these questions. And then I asked him, “The other day, when I asked you if there was anything I could pray for you about, you said, ‘Pray for my eyesight.’ What did you mean by that?”

He said, “I can't see.” A taxi driver—and he's 70 years old. And there was a poster about 15 or 20 feet behind where I was sitting, with large letters. Anyone in the coffee shop could read it. I said, “Can you read that poster? No, the big headline.” And then there was the body copy of the poster, and he squinted and squinted and he said, “No, it's too blurry.”

That's how bad his eyesight was. I started to explain to him how sin creates consequence—this is what the Bible says—and that repenting of that sin removes the consequence.

I asked him some questions, and most of these things fall into a category of three areas: unforgiveness, sexual sin (any sexual activity outside of marriage), and the occult. There are actually about 18 different categories, but those are the three primary ones most issues fall into.

So I led him into just a simple prayer and allowed him to repent of anything God brought to his mind—unforgiveness, sexual sins, and occult-related stuff. And then we asked God to heal his eyesight.

By the way, he had glaucoma and cataracts—that’s what was going on with his eyes. And because he's a 70-year-old man who's been on that island for many years—it's a 300-square-mile island, so it's a really small one—a lot of things happen. It took about 20 minutes for him to go through all of that. And when it was all finished, I said, “Now look at the sign behind me and see if you can read it.”

He could read the entire sign all the way down to the fine print at the bottom. Everything totally healed. What he was dealing with was a spiritual torment, not a medical disease.

It was a spiritual torment masquerading as what the doctors diagnosed as glaucoma and cataracts. It may have had a physical manifestation that really was glaucoma and cataracts, but because it was a spiritual process that caused it to disappear, then you can safely say it was a spiritual issue and not a physical or medical issue.

That's what I'm seeing all the time—this type of stuff.

So when the biblical mandate for my pastor said, “Well, Satan can heal too,” I've seen something in the Bible about him masquerading that way. But this guy in Seoul, Korea makes it very clear. And my experience now is I do a lot of these shows with the New Age healers. I go, huh, okay—they're seeing results, but it's going through the wrong door.

They don't realize what else is happening in their lives that they're giving up in return for doing that.

I don't know if that makes sense, but does that help?

Ashley James (0:23:14.403)

It makes sense to me. From a scientific perspective, we are more energy than matter. In quantum physics, the universe is made up of molecules that aren’t truly physical. We think the world is solid, but at the molecular level, everything is frequency.

We are frequency, we are energy—everything is frequency. Light, for example, can act as both a particle and a wave at the same time. It can be energy, frequency, and vibration, yet also manifest as physical matter. Things can happen in the quantum space instantly. Healing can occur in a moment—something like glaucoma can be resolved instantaneously.

I know people who were blind or deaf and, through prayer, received true healing—sight and hearing fully restored. One woman had a detached retina, yet through prayer, her eyesight came back completely. At the quantum level, healing happens in the “now.”

Quantum experiments even suggest that our perception can affect the past. Time is relative—it’s not a fixed constant. The past, present, and future are all happening now, and we can affect them in the present moment. That’s why perception and mindset are so important.

As you said, you have to have faith. Stand in faith. In the times when we can’t, it’s powerful to have others intercede and help us with their faith. But it only takes a mustard seed. Start small. Grow your faith.

Beatty Carmichael (0:25:28.224)

Yes, it's really interesting what you're saying about light being both a particle and a frequency. And since you were sharing that, I've read a number of stories of people who frequently and routinely go into the heavenly realm. So they can transfer a sort of Enoch, if you call it that. And they all share the same message — that in heaven, this is also what you get from near-death experiences where people go to heaven and they return — heaven is all light.

Everything emits light, and that light is God's glory. That light has a frequency, and there's this hum about from everything. And if you think even about us, we're spirit and soul and body. So that means we're a spiritual person operating in the physical realm, and the spiritual part of us emanates into the physical realm. We can see it and we can feel it, but we can't quantify it scientifically, yet we sense it.

And it makes me almost wonder if this light, this God's glory — if it does the same thing — it transverses both the spiritual realm into the physical realm, and it's almost like a shadow of what's actually happening in the spiritual realm. Maybe. That's interesting.

But I've seen blind eyes open, deaf ears open through the gift of healing. I've seen similar things happen through now leading people into repenting of sins. By the way, God took away my gift of healing — we'll get to that part of the story if we get there. But what's interesting is, through this process, that whole idea of the past, present, and future in the quantum side of things being right now — I've seen, with people going through this process, literally repenting of sin or two — I've seen worn-out hips be totally rejuvenated and no longer need hip replacement.

One lady in my addiction recovery class, where I volunteer to teach, had just come through invasive surgery on her shoulder. She had a car accident three years ago, didn't have insurance, so they just put her in a sling and said, “Good luck.” And it healed — broken. Then she comes to the addiction recovery center and it's all in pain, but it's all messed up.

They have insurance now, so they went to the orthopedic surgeon and he said, “I can fix it. It's going to be really invasive.” So he literally drills through her bones, breaks them apart again — it was her AC and her collarbone — and then he resets them and sutures everything up. Part of the bone is sticking up out of her shoulder because he couldn't get that in place. And now she's in her sling four weeks post-op in my class.

So she's pain level zero to ten — she's a ten — and it's all swollen. I lead the whole class in just a simple prayer of asking God to bring anything to mind that may be tied to whatever issue each person has, and then guiding them how to repent of that and asking God to heal it. And I asked this lady — her name is Jacqueline — by the way, for anyone who wants to see this, it's on my website theprayerfreedombook.com. Down at the bottom there you'll see her. She's in a black outfit and you'll see her name, Jacqueline.

As she did that, the whole prayer took five or six minutes — it wasn't long. And I said, “How does your shoulder feel?” She said, “It's out of pain.” I said, “Move it around. Hold up your left arm so you get a range of motion, and then hold up your right arm where you had the surgery and see what range of motion you have.” And not only is the pain gone, but her range of motion is completely the same as her left arm. That bone that was protruding is no longer there.

One of her friends who walked through this process with her is blown away. She takes off her sling, she goes back to the surgeon two weeks later for a six-week checkup, and he's a Christian. He said, “I've been a surgeon for 20 years — I've never seen this.” Literally, there was no healing required, no therapy required, no PT or anything like that, and she had a full range of motion.

I mean, it was an instantaneous healing. So what you saw was a physical problem that had broken bones, bones protruding, lots of swelling — and literally within minutes it's totally reversed and made brand new. She still has the stitches, but the shoulder is brand new, full range of motion. And it's amazing when you see this stuff happen.

Ashley James (0:30:32.985)

What I'm gathering, and what I really love about what you're proposing, is that the power starts in our hands. When you think about, for example, demonic possession, it feels like we're victims of it. These entities or whatever, these thought forms or whatever, are attacking us, and they might be more powerful than us. I don't know what to do. And that’s a very victim mindset where we feel at the mercy of and weak.

Now it's a spiritual war out there and these things are attacking me. Whereas what you're saying is you are in control, and you start with forgiving. You start with praying for forgiveness and forgiving — for example, forgive yourself.

What are you holding on to? Any kind of guilt of your past actions? Ask for forgiveness and also forgive yourself. Sometimes our biggest enemy is ourselves, holding ourselves hostage to the guilt and the shame. What we really need to do is forgive ourselves also — letting go of and asking for forgiveness to release these, as you said, unrepented sins.

Beatty Carmichael (0:31:59.600)

Yes, four hours ago, I was doing a show. This lady had back pain for years in her lower back, and it was really painful, especially when she sat. So at that time, it was—I think it was innate if I remember correctly—and I led her through the simple process.

I call this my demonstration prayer because it's not always permanent. There are a lot of issues going on, but this shows you the impact. And I said, let's just ask the Lord:

God, if there's a spiritual root to my back pain, bring it to my mind now.

And the only thing that came to her mind is her. And so I led her into forgiving herself and loving herself, because we pursued a little bit deeper, and the back pain disappeared. And it's really amazing.

As we're talking about demons and demonic possession—can I share how that fits into my story? Because it's all part of it.

Ashley James (0:33:00.660)

I absolutely love it. I just think that it's important that people are armed with these spiritual—I don't want to say weapons, but what I mean is defenses. If you believe that the things against you are too powerful, that you're not able to overcome them, if there's that kind of feeling like it’s overtaking you, then you've already lost because of the mindset.

Until you realize that through all things, with God, everything's possible, and that God wants us to be healed. He also gave us this free will, and it's the most beautiful gift. It gets us in a lot of trouble, but it's also a beautiful gift because He's also given us what we need for healing.

I just love that you're laying this out—this idea of starting with praying for forgiveness. Ask yourself: Who haven't I forgiven in my life? What am I holding against myself? Did I have lust for someone? Did I have lust for some object? Am I focusing on the wrong things in life? Did I partake in the occult sometime in the past? Let's ask for forgiveness. Let's clean the slate. Let's wipe the slate clean and see what happens.

This is just based on what I've observed, and you could correct me or share your opinion. I think we invite Satan. He has no power over us. All the negative entities and all the negative out there have no power over us until we invite them in. We invite them in through these actions—through our words, our thoughts, our focus, and our actions.

Sin, which I'd also love for you to talk about—what sin is. For the longest time, I felt I had the wrong perception of sin. Someone said sin is when we just miss the mark. There's a mark, which is walking a righteous path, doing good, knowing what we do is right. Then sin is where we miss the mark—we're aiming for the wrong thing. I'd love for you to lay out: What is sin really, in terms of repentance?

Beatty Carmichael (0:35:44.611)

Let me take this down the path. Yeah, so let me give you the biblical foundation of all that's going on, because I think this will now bring clarity.

I want to talk about sin—what it is. Then I want to show you the biblical pathway throughout the Gospels that shows sin, consequence, and how to reverse it. Then I want to talk about giving power and authority to Satan to attack us and how do we take it back.

This is the core of the prayer of freedom. This is the core of over a thousand people being set free from things that they've been dealing with for years. It's the core of relationships being restored because the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy, and it doesn't matter how he does it. Jesus says that He came that we might have life and have it abundantly. The only way to have abundant life is to have a life without everything being stolen, killed, and destroyed.

So let's talk about sin real quick. Sin is not an action. This is really important. The word “sin” is used—if I recall my counting correctly—it was like 630 times in the New Testament, and 80% of the time sin is a noun, not a verb.

For people who forget their grade school grammar, a noun is a person, place, or thing. A verb is an action that you do. A noun would be like a car, a desk, or a house. A verb would be like running or talking.

So then when we go to the book of Romans, where it's the Gospel condensed down from beginning to end of how man fell, man's fallen, man is under sin, all have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God, all the way through salvation—Paul is talking about sin and really making a deep understanding of the impact of sin. The word “sin” is found 47 times in the book of Romans; 45 times it's a noun.

Watch this. It says—I think it's from chapter six—do not submit your members to sin as your master. Instead, submit your members to God as your master. Do not become a slave of sin; become a slave of God. We see this counteraction between sin and God. We know God is a noun, a person, place, or thing. He is a person, but sin also is a noun.

This is why I think it's Hebrews 12:1 that says, gird up your loins and release sin that clings so tightly to you to run the race. Back in Romans, it says that when the law came, sin came alive and deceived me to kill me. So now you have sin in the act of a person—not a verb, not an action.

In Romans 7, Paul says twice within three verses the exact same verbiage: when I do the things I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. We start to see that the biblical version of sin is a noun.

When John the Baptist proclaims about Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” it's not the sins of the world—the actions that people do that are wrong. He takes away the sin, the noun, of the world. This is why you also see in Scripture that Jesus saves all men, especially those who believe. I think that's in one of the Timothy passages. This is where it says that Jesus came to restore all that was lost, and all that was lost happened at the entrance of sin.

So we see sin as a different thing than what we've been taught about. But when we sin—now it's a verb—when we engage in the practice that sin drives us to do, what that is, there are essentially three types of sin. We see this in Exodus—I can look up the exact reference—but it says that God is a faithful and loving God and He forgives sin, transgression, and iniquity, but He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, and He will visit the iniquities of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.

So now we have sin, transgression, and iniquity—three types of sin. Then there's a fourth one which is abomination. In that category where they’re all listed out, sin is when you accidentally miss the mark of what God has set as the standard. In very simple terms, archery. I've got an archery target, the bullseye is God's perfect will, and I'm trying to hit the bullseye but I'm just not good enough right now, and I hit the third ring out. That is sin. I've missed the mark, but it was an accidental sin because I tried my best and I just missed it.

Transgression—in the Hebrew word—means rebellion. Rebellion sin is when you know the right thing to do, but you do the other thing anyway. You see it a lot in sexual relationships today. A boy dates a girl and they sleep together. They know it's wrong—at least most of them probably do. Our culture may have lost that, but it's still wrong. You see this with Christian couples a lot of times. They know what the Bible says, it's wrong, but they really don't believe it. “I want to sleep with my boyfriend or girlfriend.” That’s the sin of rebellion.

Then you have iniquity. Iniquity is a perversion of God's holy standards. It's when you take something that is holy to God and then you pervert it. If we use the same analogy of sleeping with your boyfriend or girlfriend as a transgression sin, and now we amp it up a little bit, and now your boyfriend or girlfriend is the same sex as you—now it's a homosexual relationship. That takes it from a transgression to an iniquity because now you're perverting God's holy standard.

When you go a step further, you can do an abomination. This is how it works: you have less torment because it was an accident. Transgression—you get more torment because it was a rebellion. Iniquity—that torment is visited to the third and fourth generation, so now it's impacting your near descendants. But an abomination will be visited forever.

You see abomination—witchcraft is abomination, murder is abomination, adultery is abomination, and making God's standard cheap is abomination.

Let me show you. There's a passage—do you remember General Naaman? He was a Syrian general during the time of Elisha the prophet. He's the one with leprosy. Do you remember that Bible story at all?

Ashley James (0:43:58.608)

Why don't you tell, just in case others haven't heard it.

Beatty Carmichael (0:44:01.544)

Yes. So, back in the time when you have Judah in Israel, the nation of Israel split into what's called the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom. In the Northern Kingdom, one of their arch enemies is the Syrians, and their chief general is a guy named Naaman. He has a Hebrew slave girl. She says he has leprosy. She says, if you go to the prophet Elisha over in Samaria, he'll heal you of your leprosy.

So Naaman travels to speak to Elisha. Elisha doesn't even talk to him. He just sends a messenger out and says, go dip in the Jordan River seven times and you'll be cleansed. General Naaman gets all upset because it was too easy. His friends tell him, just do it.

By the way, here's something about faith: you don't have to believe to have faith. All you have to do is obey. So his friends tell him, “General, just obey the prophet. If he told you to do something great, you would have done it. So just do this. That's easy.”

So Naaman dips seven times into the Jordan River. When he comes out the seventh time, his skin is perfectly clean. No more leprosy. So now he humbly returns to Elisha and he offers Elisha money and clothing and stuff as a gift. Elisha says, “No, I will not accept it from you,” because ultimately what we find out is you cannot buy God's goodness. God did it because that's God. So Elisha refuses.

Elisha has a servant named Gehazi, and when Naaman leaves without giving any of that, Gehazi gets greedy. So he chases down Naaman and says, “Naaman, hold on one moment. We just had two prophets come by, and Elisha my servant sent me after you to pick up two changes of clothing and some silver for them.” Naaman says, “By all means, and have more.” So General Naaman gives this servant Gehazi money and clothing.

Now Gehazi has committed an abomination. He's taken God's goodness and sold it as his own. When he gets back, Elisha says, “Where you been, Gehazi?” He said, “I've been nowhere.” Elisha says, “Did not my spirit go with you when Naaman got down out of his chariot and gave you the clothing and the money? Because you have done this, you will receive Naaman's leprosy, you and your generations forever.”

So now that's an abomination. Gehazi's sin has repercussions that all of his generations from then on will be leprous. You see this concept of the intensity of the discipline of sin based on the type of sin it is. All sin is missing the mark, but we can miss the mark in various gradients, and depending on how we miss the mark—how willful, how iniquitous and perverted it was, and how abominable it was to God—depends on how far that torment of discipline goes.

With that, let me now guide you into some scripture where we see God's truth being revealed about sin and sickness and disease and things of that sort. The first place we go is Deuteronomy 58. This is right before Israel goes into the Promised Land. This is the section of blessings and curses. By the way, the section of blessing is very short. The section on curses is very long.

We pick up in Deuteronomy 28 verses 58 through 61. Basically it says this—I'll just kind of paraphrase. If you do not follow all the words of this line and revere the Lord your God—in other words, if you sin against God, what he's told you to do—this is now picking up verse 59, it says this: The Lord will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses. He will bring on you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you. The Lord will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster not recorded in this book of the law.

So we see very clearly that the Bible says if you sin against God, the consequence is lingering illness, disasters, diseases, sicknesses.

We pick it up again in Psalm 32. King David—this is after he murdered Bathsheba's husband Uriah because he committed adultery with Bathsheba. Adultery is an abomination. Murder is an abomination. Very wicked.

God is displeased. This is basically summarizing Psalm 32. David says, when I refused to confess my sin, my body wasted away, my bones ached, and I could not get out of my bed. I was so weak. God's hand of discipline was heavy on me. Then when I confess my sin, oh, what joy for those whose disobedience is forgiven, because now God heals him.

Then you go over to Psalm 103, verse 3, and it says, talking about God, watch this, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases. So it ties the forgiveness of iniquity to the healing of your diseases.

Then we go over to John chapter 5, and this is a passage that many believers have read, but they never quite understood because it sounds so out of the blue, this comment that Jesus makes. But now it fits in the proper perspective. This is when Jesus finds this man at a pool called the Pool of Bethesda. This man had been lame for 38 years. He couldn't get into the pool when the water stirred up. When Jesus says, “You want to be healed?” he has no one to put him in the pool.

Jesus then tells him, “Take up your bed, walk.” Okay, and so he picks up his bed and he walks. It's a miracle. The Pharisees get upset because it's a Sabbath. Then this is where we pick up on this verse 14. It says, afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well. Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” So Jesus makes it very clear that the issue at hand was your sin.

Then we say, well, that's only the Old Testament, Old Covenant, the Mosaic Covenant, but now we're under the New Covenant. Jesus's blood has washed us free. No longer do I have to repent or confess my sins because they've all been forgiven.

When we come to Jesus, the doctrinal truth says that our sins are completely forgiven—past, present, and future—back into that quantum realm that you're talking about. Does that make sense for what I'm talking about, that they're all forgiven, even the sins we haven't yet committed? Okay, so watch this. By the way, if they're all forgiven, why does Jesus teach us in the Lord's Prayer, “And forgive us our sins as we forgive those who've sinned against us”?

Then we turn to Revelation 3:19. This is Jesus speaking to the churches, and watch this. It says, “Those whom I love, I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent.” Now discipline only comes from sin, and repentance is only for sin. He's talking to New Testament, New Covenant believers, and he's saying, repent because you have sin that remains.

So if our sins have been forgiven, but yet we have to still repent of our sins, what's going on? It's this understanding, this mystery, that our sins have been forgiven for eternal salvation, but they haven't been removed for earthly discipline. We have to do that individually.

Then we move into 1 Corinthians 11. What's interesting about the Corinthian Church is, the book of 1 Corinthians, Paul is rebuking them for all kinds of sins. This is one of those times. This is when he's addressing an issue. When they did the Lord's Prayer, different from how we do it in the Western Church today, we have a little wafer and we have a little bit of grape juice, a little bit of wine, and that's the Lord's Supper that we do. But back then, they would actually have a meal—sort of a potluck supper that we would call today. Everyone would bring food.

He says, you guys are doing it wrong and you're creating disunity and you're creating division within the body of Christ because the rich people of you are bringing your food and your wine, you're feasting, you're getting drunk, while the poor people go hungry because they have nothing to eat.

Now we pick up. This is 1 Corinthians 11:29–30. Keep in mind, these are talking to New Covenant believers. He says, for those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ, eat and drink judgment on themselves. In other words, they're sinning. Watch this—what's the result of that sin? Verse 30: That is why many among you are weak and some are sick, and a number of you have already died.

Sin creates consequence even for the New Covenant believers. Then if that's not enough, let's go to James 5. This is James 5:14–16. James is writing to believers, those under the New Covenant whose sins have already been forgiven. But watch what he says: Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church. Let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.

The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick. By the way, the word “save” in Greek is sozo. It's the same word when Jesus says, be healed according to your faith, be sozoed according to your faith. When it says be saved from your sins, it's still that same word, sozo. So sozo means to be saved from something—either saved from your sin or saved from your sickness.

In this case, since this whole passage is about sickness, it says that the prayer of faith will save from your sickness the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.

My church, the old church that I went to, thought that this was talking about salvation, talking about, this is, he'll save you from your sins and he'll raise you up at the resurrection. No, that's out of context. This whole thing is, is anyone among you sick?

So the Lord will raise him up off the sick bed, and watch this — if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. But I thought my sins were already forgiven. Well, yes and no. It depends on in what capacity, because what we find in God's word is there's multiple dimensions of what we thought was such a simple truth.

This is how it ends up. Watch this. This is about Christians who are sick, that want to be healed. Verse 16 says, therefore confess your sins…that you may be healed.

So what we see throughout scripture is this whole truth that sin creates consequence, and that consequence is God's discipline. We see it played out through the picture of Israel.

God says, repent and return to me, or I will give you over to your enemies. That's his plan. Once you repent, I'll pull the enemies back and give you abundant life.

So he uses natural things in our lives to bring discipline to us. The discipline is to cause us to repent of our sins.

By the way, the number one message Jesus came preaching is repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. What I'm finding is most Christians say, well, because my sins are forgiven, why do I need to repent? Well, it depends if you want only salvation after you die, or if you want abundant life now while you live.

So let me share how this actually plays out. We talk about Satan. We talk about giving him power and authority. Satan, in Revelation 12, is called the Accuser of the Brethren. When the Bible uses the word “brethren,” it means all believers, male and female. They just use the male term on that. So Satan is the Accuser of the Brethren.

The question is, what does that mean? Let me ask you, Ashley, what can you be accused of? Doing things right or doing things wrong?

Ashley James (0:58:29.216)

Typically it’s doing things wrong.

Beatty Carmichael (56:28.855)
Yes, it's doing things wrong. So what this says is that Satan is the accuser of the brethren, accusing them of breaking the law. That law is by committing sin. This isn't the Old Testament Jewish law, the 613 things. This is God's foundational law of sin and constant consequence that is irregardless of the covenants.

The same consequence of sin in the Old Covenant is the same consequence of sin in the New Covenant because it's a foundational law. Satan is the accuser of the brethren. Let me show you where we start to see this very clearly.

If you go back to Job 1, it says that the sons of God and all the angels and God himself and Satan convene. So now what we have is some sort of a gathering. God says to Satan, have you considered my servant Job? He is blameless and upright. Do you remember what Satan says? He says he only loves you because you put a hedge around him and won't let me attack him. Give me authority to attack him and I'll show you that he'll curse you to your face.

Do you remember this general storyline?

Ashley James (0:59:57.891)

I'm sure there are listeners who don't know the story.

Beatty Carmichael (1:00:03.633)

This is the storyline I'm getting to. The general storyline is Satan could not attack Job, and the question I have is why? We find it in God's answer, God's initial comment. He says Job is blameless. So if Satan is the accuser and Job is blameless, then that means there's nothing that Satan can accuse him of. Is this making sense so far?

Okay, so does that mean that Job is sinless? If Satan can only accuse of sin and there's no sin to be accused of, then does that mean that Job was sinless without sin? No, it doesn't. Only Jesus was sinless.

So if only Jesus was sinless, but Job was blameless without sin, what's the difference between being sinless and being without sin? One is a position of who you are—there is no sin anywhere. But the other one, being blameless, is how you are right now in the moment. So watch this. I have a car. But if you take away my car, I'm now carless. That doesn't mean I've been carless all my life. It just means that right now, this moment, I don't have a car.

So we start to see that when you are blameless without sin, there's nothing Satan can do to accuse you and therefore to attack you. This is why Satan said, “You placed a hedge around Job.” Now, have you ever heard, Ashley, of a hedge of protection? This is where it comes from. It's the only place in the Bible, and it's coming from Job 1—a hedge of protection around Job.

A lot of times we believe that we can pray a hedge of protection. “I'm going to pray a hedge of protection around you.” Well, technically, that's not biblical, because it's not in the Bible to pray a hedge of protection. Now, God frequently will answer that prayer as a petition, but we cannot declare that hedge of protection. We have to look deeper into what's going on in Job's life.

How could Job be called blameless? The only way that he can be called blameless is by one manner. This is what we start to see. If you go back to verses four and five, he had seven children, they're all adults, it says that when his children would have a birthday party, they would invite all their siblings to their house, their respective house, and they would have a big feast. It says after the feast, Job would sacrifice on each child's behalf in case they cursed God in their heart.

What we see is the pattern of a sacrifice—an animal giving up its blood to cover the sin against God. If he was doing that religiously, routinely, with all of his children every time they had their birthday party, then we can also make the same assumption that he's doing it for his own sins perpetually.

By perpetually sacrificing—which is the Old Testament version of repentance for today—we see that he's blameless. Now that we start to look at Satan as the accuser, he can only accuse us of sin. Sin creates consequence, and that consequence—discipline—usually comes from tormenting spirits attacking us. When we repent of sin, we remove their legal right.

I haven't talked about casting out demons yet, but it all ties into this. Now, let me give you one more piece of information. My son, when he was 19 or 20 years old—my junior son, Beatty Jr.—has a tremendous relationship with the Lord.

God takes him up to the heavenly courtroom. He says, I want to show you something. My son is describing this event. He says, when I got up to the heavenly courtroom, it's an actual courtroom. Up on the judge's dais is God the Father as judge. He said, over to my left is a demon spirit. That demon spirit is accusing me of sin.

Now let me pause for a moment and make one more connection for you.

If Satan is the accuser of the brethren, that means in a legal setting, he's the attorney general. He is the head of the judicial department that accuses of wrongdoing. So the demon spirits are assistant attorneys. They're the prosecuting attorneys. That's what was going on in this courtroom. This demon spirit is accusing my son of sin, meaning he's prosecuting my son for sin.

I said, well, hold on, Beatty. I've been told that demons always lie. Were those really sins? He said, yes, every single one was a real sin. He said, demons lie to you and me, but they do not lie to God.

I said, okay, continue. He said, then the Lord told me—so I'm assuming the Lord is Jesus that's guiding him through this—the Lord told me, “Plead the blood of Jesus.” So he said, I looked over to the judge and said, Father God, I plead the blood of Jesus over those sins.

He said instantly, the demon disappeared. Now that he pled the blood of Jesus over those individual sins, the sins were wiped off the record. Now he was blameless, nothing to be blamed on, and therefore the prosecuting attorney disappeared.

Do you start to see this picture that I'm trying to share? Okay, let me share another example of how this starts to play out in real life.

Prior to that, when he was in high school and he had this radical transformation to become a Jesus follower—now, he became a Christian at five years old, he asked Jesus into his heart—but then he went through some dark times as he entered puberty.

In those dark times, life for him became really dark, and he then became passionate to follow Jesus in December of his senior year. Starting late December and for about the next six months, he got demonic visitations two and three nights a week, late at night.

These were not just manifestations visually, but they were very physical. Almost every time they choked him where he could barely breathe, and he finally tried to breathe and breathe and breathe until he could get the word out, “Jesus, Jesus.” After screaming it as loud as he could for a period of time, they would finally leave.

One time they picked him up and threw him off the bed. They would move the bed. These were very physical manifestations of these demonic spirits. He kept asking God, will you stop this? And God kept telling him, no.

Please stop this. No. Month after month, torment after torment, two and three nights a week, he kept asking God, no. Then I asked my son, when did it all stop? He said it was after about six months, and he finally asked God a different question.

“Will you stop it?” No. “How do I stop it?” That's a totally different question rather than asking Him to stop.

By the way, let me make a caveat. A lot of times we ask God to heal our issue. What we ought to be asking is, how do I cause this issue to stop? Those are two different questions.

When he asked God, how do I stop it? God said, ignore them.

So watch this. That night, two or three o'clock in the morning, he's awoken again. At the foot of the bed is this tall, dark, shadowy figure. He looks over to the doorway.

And in comes through the doorway a faceless hoodie girl you see in the horror movies, just kind of gliding across the floor. He said, “Are you serious? Is that all you can do? That is so corny.” And he turns over and goes back to sleep, and that was the last time they visited him.

So here's what happened. My son takes God exactly at His word—black and white. When God told him to ignore them, that's exactly what he did. Unbeknownst to him, it was his fear that gave them the authority to torment him. Once he gave up his fear and ignored them, they no longer had authority to torment, and they stopped coming.

So all this ties into my book, The Prayer of Freedom, of simply removing those legal rights, the authority—whether it's fear, whether it's lust, whether it's greed, whether it's unforgiveness, whether it's this or whether it's that—and systematically going through your life and undoing all the open doors that you've allowed to be blamed. Every time you're blamed, there is a judgment. If you don't defend yourself, the only defense we have is to repent. That's why James 5:16 says, “Confess your sins and you'll be healed.”

What that means is that the sickness that you're dealing with—whether it's addiction, mental illness, chronic pain, whatever it is—that sickness is tied to unrepented sin. It's a discipline that says, “You're going to have it until you do what I said to do.” Once you repent and confess, then it'll be removed. I'm not saying that God is sending it. I'm saying that His spiritual laws that He set up puts in place these tormenting spirits to have a legal right to torment you, to bring you to the point of repentance, because that's ultimately God's will.

So let me share something interesting. Tying all of this in the big picture, the reason my old church believed that it might have been Satan attacking or Satan healing people is the same reason ultimately that they believe that when someone dies of cancer—there was a family member of the church leadership that died of cancer, and another family member of another sister church that died of cancer. These churches have all of their congregation and all the extended congregations within their denomination praying for these leaders’ wives and daughters who are dying of cancer. The women died.

So they came to the conclusion based on 1 John 5, which says if you pray according to God's will, then know that God hears your prayers and will answer them. They took that passage and made the doctrine that if I pray for healing and God doesn't heal, then it must be God's will for that person to die.

My issue with that is—no, that's not how it works. God's higher will is that we repent of sins, either in our personal life or sins that could be iniquity coming down, or even the abominations that are coming down, because they all impact us—and that we nullify the legal rights that the enemy has to torment us.

Maybe a simple way to understand this is—let's say I have a daughter. I do.

But let's say when she's little, she comes and means, Daddy, can I have a lollipop? I said, sure, here's a lollipop. She goes, thank you. She skips off. Then later, another day or two, a week later, I said, honey, I need you to clean your bedroom. Once you clean your room, then I'll give you a lollipop. She goes, okay. Then she goes away and she comes back an hour later.

Daddy, can I have a lollipop?

Well, did you clean your room?

No.

Then you don't get a lollipop.

See, she's asking the same question, but now there's a different thing. I want her to have a lollipop, but more than having a lollipop, I want her to obey me. I told her to clean her room because it got messy. A lot of times our life gets messy with little sin here, little sin there, little sin here and there and everywhere. God wants us to clean our life up and repent because having unrepented sin creates these open doors.

Now our life is no longer blessed and abundant. So that's kind of the big picture of what I've been seeing and what's guided us into this conversation so far, The Prayer of Freedom.

Ashley James (1:13:44.759)

You had mentioned earlier, I believe in Corinthians, the prayer of faith.

Is there a specific prayer of faith? You had said prayer of faith and I wrote that down.

Beatty Carmichael (1:14:00.835)

Oh, if I said prayer of faith in Corinthians, I may have been wrong. I think the prayer of faith will heal you. That's James, not in Corinthians.

Ashley James (1:14:11.571)

Sorry, I was feverishly writing down everything you said. I might have missed where it was, but you said prayer of faith and I was wondering, what is it specifically?

Beatty Carmichael (1:14:21.047)

This is a really great understanding. Thank you for asking because most people don't understand what faith is. They think they pray by faith. By the way, let's define faith. Let's define the outcome of faith. Jesus says, if you speak to this mountain and say, be taken up and cast into the sea, and you believe and do not doubt in your heart, then it will happen. He says all things for which you pray and ask by faith will be done. Maybe misworded, but that's the general paraphrase.

So what Jesus is saying is that if you pray by faith, it will be done. Does that make sense so far? Okay. So then I have a friend whose daughter was having a complicated pregnancy and was concerned about miscarriage. My friend was praying and binding and petitioning and declaring and praying by faith that the pregnancy would be healthy and would go to full term with a healthy baby girl or boy, whatever it was.

Then she said, “My daughter miscarried, and I was devastated because I prayed by faith and it didn't happen.” So take that situation, and a lot of us we think we pray by faith because we pray with great intensity, actually believing that God is going to do this, and it doesn't happen. So what happened? Very black and white, without being crude or rude, you did not have faith, because the Bible is very clear: if you have faith, it will happen. Therefore, you did not have faith.

Now, what I've learned over the years is that we believe in two areas. We believe in our mind, which is from our soul, and we believe in our heart, which is from our spirit. The prayer of faith that works is the prayer from the heart. That's why Jesus says, “If you believe and do not doubt in your heart, then it will happen.”

Faith takes no effort. If you find yourself striving to believe, then you're praying in your mind and not in your heart. You're praying from your mind, and therefore it is not faith. With that as a quick backdrop, I have found that faith manifests in your works. This is where James says, “You believe that you have faith without your works. I have faith and I'll prove it by my works,” because faith will always manifest itself in works.

Here in James 5:15, it says, “The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick.” So how do you pray in faith? It's just the absolute knowing that God's going to do it because He loves you and that person so much that it conforms to His word. When we pray in pleading, and we pray trying to get ourselves to that point of actually believing it's going to happen, that's not faith.

I don't know how to describe it any more than that, but here's probably a good illustration. God says, “So Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” Ultimately, faith is believing in God with no doubt in your heart.

Here's an illustration of how faith is manifested—just a simple illustration. You're in this hallway, cinder block walls all the way down, like a dormitory hallway. At the end of the hallway is a steel door. God comes to you and says, “Run as hard and as fast as you can, all the way outside. Before you get to that steel door, I'll open it and let you out.”

Most people will begin running really fast because they believe that God's going to do it. They run fast and fast, getting closer and closer, with their eyes on the door, and it hasn't moved yet. Then they start to wonder, start to get worried. They start to slow down, maybe put their hands out. Once you start to slow down, you don't have faith because God said He would do it.

If you knew that He was going to open it before you got there, then you wouldn't slow down and you wouldn't stick your hands out. True faith is when you run as fast as you can, and the closer you get to the door, the longer and faster your strides become, with no concern that the door is not going to be opened. All is at risk, and there's utter destruction at the end of that hallway if God doesn't do what He says.

That is true faith—when you never slow down and you believe God at His word. Once you start to slow down, now you're doubting. Prayer of faith is when you believe that God's going to do it. That's pure faith.

When I had my gift of healing, I would pray for someone. I thought God would heal, but I wouldn't put my life on it because I wasn't sure. I knew it was His will, so I could pray with faith, but my faith was really small. That's why it was easy for joint pain to leave, knee pain to leave, but I could never get COPD to leave. Over the years, I started to have more success with COPD as my faith got stronger. Your faith can strengthen to where it becomes more pure—to where you don't slow down by the end of that hallway and you keep running.

I taught a course called Radical Faith. How do you walk in radical faith? I had a little definition for faith: Faith is when you obey God's clearly defined will to such a degree that disaster and failure are absolutely certain unless He intervenes and defies the natural. That's truly what faith is. That's faith.

Ashley James (1:21:16.450)

So can you give us some real-world examples of that? The one that comes to my mind is keeping the Sabbath. The Sabbath being Saturday. But when do we go to church? We go to church on Sundays. That's not biblical. Jesus said, keep the Sabbath. So if it's Saturday, we're all running around. Some people are still working on Saturdays. We're not. Go to soccer games or whatever.

But let's say, you said, radical. Meaning God would have to intervene. Let's say you said to your work, I have to worship on Saturday. I can't go to work. Your work said, well, we're going to fire you if you don't. You're, well, it's in God's hands. Do you mean like that?

Beatty Carmichael (1:21:59.456)

Yes, but as we're talking on Sabbath, this is what I think Scripture more clearly indicates. By the way, after God created the heavens and the earth in the six days, he said he rested on the seventh day and declared the seventh day holy. You shall work six days and rest on the seventh. So we see a pattern of six days work, one day rest.

The Jewish culture believes they took the Sabbath, and the Sabbath definitely was declared on what we would call the Saturday in our calendar. Then the Christians changed the day of rest to the day of resurrection because that's when the work is finished and now we're born again on the resurrection. So now that's the day of rest. But I believe that the pattern of work six days, rest the seventh, is more of the biblical mandate as opposed to a specific day of the week.

So just for clarity on that, that's where I come from. I think God honors that because he's honoring—if you think it's sin, then for you it is sin. So if your conviction is that Saturday is the Sabbath and your boss wants you to work on Saturday, you better refuse the boss and honor the Lord. That's radical faith because God will honor that.

For those who believe that the Sabbath is really just resting every seven days, then God, I believe, will honor that as well.

Outro:

Because our interview went so long, I decided to cut it into two parts. We have another 90 minutes that just goes deeper and it's phenomenal, so that's coming out next. Watch for episode 553, which will be part two, the continuation and completion of this interview, and I know you'll love it. Be sure to stay tuned.

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