In Conversation with Loren Sandford

 

Pneuma Review: What was it like growing up in a household where your parents had such a distinctive ministry? Please tell our readers about your own journey and how you came into prophetic ministry.

R. Loren Sandford: There were strong positives and strong negatives. It wasn’t just that the ministry was distinctive, but that it was also pioneering in three areas (the charismatic movement in general, inner healing and the prophetic) not well understood or received in the early days. This drew persecution both from the local congregations my father pastored and from the wider body of Christ. As children (I’m the eldest of their six) we felt it and were deeply wounded by it. It drew a lot of energy from our folks which often left them with a deficient awareness of how it affected us. Those were lonely years for me at a time when I was really too young to understand or process what was coming at us.

Understandably, I didn’t like the church much and spent a lot of time fighting my calling as a pastor before I finally surrendered. The Lord had to enable me to forgive. He then planted a miraculous love for the church and its people in my heart. Meanwhile, my father entered into his prophetic calling at a time when there were no mentors to teach him any kind of balance. Experimentation and searching often led him into blind alleys and created unnecessary trouble. Somewhere in my own heart I reacted by deciding never to be unbalanced or crazy. This served to suppress the prophetic senses the Lord had naturally endowed me with.

The turning point came in 1988 when John Paul Jackson prophesied over me in a pastors’ meeting that my own prophetic calling was not my father’s calling and that the fear of my father’s calling had kept me out of my own prophetic destiny. I began to pay attention to things I simply “knew” in ways I cannot describe. Even so, twenty-five more years would pass in a dark night of the soul designed to crush and break me to conform more to His image before I came into what has now unfolded. I began to realize that I had so often been right when others had been wrong. While much of that error was born in dreams, visions and mystical experiences, I just knew things in my spirit. It wasn’t until about five years ago, however, that the Lord told me clearly to put myself on the line and go public with the things I was hearing from Him in that simple rational knowing.

I should say that good seminary training in exegesis and sound study helped greatly to filter personal feelings and experiences and to keep the word clean. I’m not infallible. We’re fresh out of Jeremiahs and Isaiahs, but I’ve been pretty accurate over the years.

 

Pneuma Review: What kind of experiences does the Lord use to train and mature the truly prophetic person?

Sandford: Character formation and wholeness are everything. These can only be accessed through what Paul described as, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Galatians 2:2). In Romans 12:14-15 he called us to, “Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled.” There must be a dying before there can be a resurrection. This is more than positional. It’s a real experience that more often than not involves some pain.

On that note, Joseph, gifted prophetically, underwent a wilderness of slavery and imprisonment that shaped his character and gave him a servant’s heart before God elevated him to a position of authority and influence second only to Pharaoh. Samuel anointed David king of Israel when King Saul failed. What followed was exile to the wilderness for a number of years while a jealous and insane King Saul sought to kill him. In the fullness of time David claimed the throne, but not before the wilderness had done its work. The apostle Paul spent fourteen silent years in Tarsus before Barnabas sent for him to begin his life’s work as the greatest of the apostles.

Just like these heroes of the faith, anyone called to prophetic ministry will of necessity spend an extended period of time in a wilderness of suffering and loneliness designed to eliminate selfishness, ambition and other forms of brokenness. The reward is the heart of the Father. To speak with God’s voice is to speak with the Father’s heart. Only the cross—wilderness—can so crucify the flesh that the Spirit of Christ can fully and freely operate. In God’s economy, character always trumps anointing.

 

Pneuma Review: How are prophetic words different from other kinds of communication that Christians make?

Sandford: According to Joel 2:28 in the outpouring of the Spirit in the last days every believer holds a birthright to hear from God directly. We are adopted children to whom our Father delights to speak, but merely hearing from God does not a prophet make. Every believer can and should hear from God for personal devotion and guidance. The difference between that kind of hearing and prophetic authority is that the prophetic word carries authority beyond the individual. It affects other believers to set the course of lives. Jeremiah 1:10 goes beyond that to address the authority to speak to rulers and nations to pluck up and plant, tear down and build up. The prophetic word impacts congregations and groups of people to edify and to release power to accomplish the things of God. It touches nations to alter the course of history and set in motion the purposes of God. Those who consistently move in this kind of authority are recognized by the body of Christ as prophetic people.

 

Pneuma Review: Please give us your thoughts about the biblical literacy of Pentecostal/charismatic Christians.

Sandford: Unfortunately, too many Pentecostal/charismatic believers are functionally illiterate where Scripture is concerned. There is a widespread and unfortunate tendency to run from conference to conference to hear the latest or most famous anointed speaker share and minister his latest revelation, then to take in everything they say as truth without seriously questioning the biblical basis of what is being taught. A focus on spiritual experience and living supernaturally has obscured both an accurate perception of the heart of the Father and responsible study of the Scriptures. “If it works,” or, “If I felt it, it must be true” has become the standard by which we accept things as true. Both of these approaches to truth carry dangerous flaws. Some people, for instance, claim that marijuana “works” for them. Ask a New Ager why he or she believes what they believe and they will tell you of their experiences and assert that it works for them, but it’s not the truth. Christians have been given a plumb line that speaks for itself and whose meaning we have no right to alter or reinterpret. We must not interpret Scripture in the light of our experience but rather interpret our experience in the light of Scripture. This, however, requires that we deeply know and understand Scripture.

To further complicate matters, when Pentecostal/charismatic believers do read the Bible we tend to read it through the filter of a 21^st century western mindset rather than seeking to understand it from the perspective of first century Jewish culture and customs. This again is a failure of responsible scholarship and the obligation of pastors and leaders to teach. This leads us to pull Bible passages out of their cultural, historical, linguistic and textual contexts to make the Scriptures say whatever we want them to say—or whatever our experience tells us they should say. Too often we buy into the attitude that scholarship, careful study, reason and experience are somehow opposed to one another. Wrong! Scholarship, study and reason keep us grounded and stable while experience keeps us alive! God didn’t call us to throw our brains on the table when we received the baptism in the Spirit!

 

Pneuma Review: What do you see as some of the shortcomings in the contemporary prophetic movement and what practical steps can be taken to address some of these?

Sandford: Too much of the charismatic world values the anointing above character, as if anointing were the stamp of God’s approval, but Matthew 7:22ff. makes it pretty clear that exercising the anointing may not even be a sign that the one doing it is saved. We therefore pay too much attention to excitement, power ministry and prophetic frenzy and too little to the character of those would be the carriers of those things. Anointing is nothing. Character is a treasure. God can anoint and speak through a donkey and he did so with Balaam’s unfortunate beast but character demonstrates the nature of our Father.

Accountability is lacking. We have been deluged with unfulfilled words in recent years. Even those that were genuine have often been spoken in anything but the Spirit of the Father. I can’t remember reading a published apology. Too many prophetic voices operate within their own organizations with no structure of accountability in relationship. I believe that that the New Testament prophet must be in, of and for the local church, accountable to the people of that church and to a pastor who speak into his or her life to bring correction and balance. Agabus and all the other prophets of the New Testament clearly stood in and with local bodies of believers.

We often misunderstand what is prophetic and what isn’t. We have an unbalanced emphasis on personal prophecy and especially personal prophecy delivered to individuals from a public platform. Only one verse in the Bible in 1 Corinthians 14 even hints at this and yet it has been a dominant model for many years. Overwhelmingly, spoken prophetic words in Scripture are delivered for the sake of the whole gathered church or to nations. This begs the issue of what I call “sanctified psychic reading.” Much that passes for prophetic ministry in the context of personal prophecy is no more than sensing what is in the heart of the one being prophesied to—their history, emotions, desires, ambitions—and then reflecting it back to them as a word from God. Such sensing can be a useful tool for ministry, but it’s not prophetic. The prophetic word flows not from the heart of man but from God and holds the power to release God’s purposes. We need to learn to sort out emotions and the hearts of people from the voice of the Lord.

Finally, in Jeremiah 23:30 God warns, “‘Therefore behold, I am against the prophets,’ declares the Lord, ‘who steal My words from each other.’” In this dynamic, which is unfortunately common, one so-called prophetic person hears a word spoken or written by another prophetic person. That word, then, whether positive or negative, excites the emotions of the one who heard it. Emotions form a magnifying lens that distorts perceptions. So the next prophet builds upon the words spoken by the first until the final word in its extremity does not represent the original word or the heart of God. This emotional magnification can happen even within the heart of the prophetic person by him/herself without external input. We need to learn the meaning of Paul’s exhortation to “keep sober in all things.” This means sorting human emotion, fear, excitement etc. from the true word of God. The true word comes from the peace and rest that are in the heart of God, not from the turmoil of the human heart.

PR

 

More from Loren Sandford:

Read Lisa Ward’s review of R. Loren Sandford’s book The Prophetic Church: Wielding the Power to Change the World (Baker, 2009) in this issue.

Watch R. Loren Sandford teach on prophetic ministry: /loren-sandford-prophesying-in-the-fathers-heart. An excerpt from a teaching given at the Hearing Heaven conference at Fusion Church, Auckland, New Zealand in August, 2010.

 

Special thanks to John P. Lathrop for his coordination of this interview.