Paul Cain

One of my favourite authors is Jack Deere, a charismatic evangelical, pastor and teacher, who has written an excellent refutal of cessationism called Surprised by the Power of the Spirit. In the book, he shares how he encountered Paul Cain for the first time and discovered how prophetic this man of God is in a dramatic way, at a meeting they were holding in Texas, 1988:

Paul had just finished giving a wonderful message and was beginning to pray for the people in the audience. There were about 250 people there that morning. He asked the diabetics to stand. As he started to pray for the diabetics, he looked at a gray-haired lady on his right. He stared at her for a moment, having never met her (or anyone else in the audience for that matter), and then he said,

“You do not have diabetes; you have low blood sugar. The Lord heals you of that low blood sugar, now. I see a vision of you sitting in a yellow chair. You are saying, ’If I could just make it until the morning. If I could just make it until the morning.’ Your allergies torment you so badly that sometimes they keep you awake all night. The Lord heals those allergies, now. That problem with the valve on your heart—it goes now in the name of Jesus. And so does that growth on your pancreas.”

By this time there was a strong sense of the fear of the Lord in the room. People had begun to weep openly as they saw the power of the Lord being displayed and the concern of the Lord for one of his children. Paul continued looking at the woman and then he said, “The Devil has scheduled you for a nervous break- down.” When he said this the man sitting beside her, who turned out to be her husband, began to weep. He knew that his wife was very close to a nervous breakdown. Paul said, “The Lord interrupts that plan now. You will not have the breakdown.”

And then, just as suddenly as Paul had begun to speak to the woman, he stopped and said, “I think that is all the wants me to do now.” Then he sat down on the front row.

The rest of us were stunned. We had never seen anything like this. I had seen healings over the last two years, and some wonderful healings, but I had never seen anyone called out of an audience like that, unknown to the speaker, and then have their conditions in her body not only identified but pronounced healed.

This reminded me of the revelatory power of Elisha who was able to tell the Israelite king the plans that the Syrian commander had made in his own bedroom. It was also like the apostolic healings in the New Testament, where apostles commanded or pronounced healing rather than praying for healing. We were utterly dumbfounded. No one knew how to close the meeting, The fear of the Lord was so strong in the room that no one wanted to act presumptuously. Finally, Jack Taylor stood up with tears in his eyes and led us all in a hymn.

The woman whom Paul pronounced healed that day is named Linda Tidwell. I have had several conversations with Linda and her husband Jim since that September day in 1988.

Here is what happened in the aftermath of Paul’s ministry to her. She went to her doctor that week and was tested. Her low blood sugar was now normal, and her allergies had left immediately. (They had been just as severe as Paul had said.) A heart murmur that she had since her childhood was healed, and the problem with her pancreas was gone. Her depression and nervous condition also left, and over the next few months she lost thirty-five pounds of weight that had been brought on by worry and anxiety. Every medical condition mentioned by Paul had been both accurate and healed.

– Jack Deere, Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, pp.39-40