Full text of Bible teacher Derek Prince’s talk on God’s Medicine Bottle.
TRANSCRIPT:
Derek Prince – Bible teacher
Now I want to tell you how I got to this. Then the Army sent my unit, which was Number One Light Field Ambulance, to the Middle East, and I spent the next three years in the deserts of North Africa, Egypt. What’s the next country? The one West. Libya, that’s right and then finally the Sudan.
Well, I was in the Battle of El Alamein at a safe distance in the rear, and then I followed the advancing forces up in my Number One Light Field Ambulance. But I developed a skin infection on my right toe, and they did everything they could because they really wanted to keep me in the unit, but they couldn’t.
So I was admitted to hospital. And I spent the next year in military hospitals in the Middle East, and that is not an experience I would choose for anybody.
Well, I had sunk to what John Bunyan calls the Slough of Despond, the pit of despair, and I was sitting there in the bed thinking: There’s nothing left.
And then I opened my Bible and I was saying to myself: I know if I had faith, God would heal me. Then the next thing I would say: I don’t have faith.
And there I was back in the Slough of Despond. But I opened my Bible by chance at Romans 10:17 and I read these words: So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
So I said to myself: If I don’t have faith I can get it. It comes. And I want to tell every one of you that. You don’t need to be without faith. It comes if you do the right thing.
The right thing is hearing the word of God.
So I said I’m going to do this systematically. I armed myself with three colored pencils: one blue, one yellow and one red. And the blue pencil was for every passage in the Bible that had anything to do with healing. And I read the whole Bible through because I had plenty of time.
And you know what I ended up with? A blue Bible. So I really was convinced healing is in the Bible.
You see being a philosopher I made everything as difficult as possible. I said: Sure God heals, but He’s not interested in the body. He only heals the soul.
So then I was reading Proverbs 4:20-22, it said: My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto to my sayings, let them not depart from thine eyes; Keep them in the midst of thine heart; For they are life to those who find them, and health [the margin says medicine] to all their flesh.
And when I read flesh, I said not even a philosopher can make flesh mean soul. So I saw that God had provided medicine for all my flesh, my whole body.
Well then, I was in the hospital for a long while and I was transferred to another hospital. I narrowly avoided being transferred to a psychiatric hospital because I was telling the doctors by that time, I believed God would heal me.
And something descended on me. You know what it was? It was a Salvation Army Brigadier. A female Brigadier because in the Salvation Army if your husband dies, you take his rank. So her husband had died, and she was a militant salvationist but just as militant about speaking in tongues as others are about salvation.
And bless God, she’s with the Lord now, but I’ll always honor her memory. She got hold of a New Zealand soldier, her American lady co-worker [and she herself was Australian], they got in this little four-seater car and they drove fifty miles to El Ballah on the Suez Canal where I was a patient.
She was fully attired. She had her bonnet, her ribbons, everything. She marched into the ward and overawed the sister, the nurse and said: Can I take this young man out and pray with him in my car?
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The sister said yes and they never asked me whether I wanted to pray. So I found myself sitting in the back seat of this little four-seater car with the Australian Brigadier and the New Zealand driver in the front seat, and the American lady co-worker, a young woman from Oklahoma, on the back seat beside me.
And we all started to pray, and then this young woman beside me began to vibrate and speak in tongues. And then I began to vibrate and I wasn’t choosing to do it. And then everybody in the car began to vibrate, and then the whole car began to vibrate. And we were stationary. The engine was not running.
But I knew somehow that God was doing this for my benefit and that He wanted to convince me. And so then this young lady got a message in tongues, an utterance in tongues, and the interpretation. I don’t remember the whole, interpretation, but I have never forgotten one particular part. It said this… And she was from Oklahoma, and if you know America, people in Oklahoma don’t talk like graduates from Cambridge. That is an understatement.
But when she gave the interpretation, it was in perfect Shakespearean English. And I thought this has to be God. And now I’m coming to the point of what I’m going to say.
The interpretation was longer than this, but this is the part I remember:Consider the work of Calvary, a perfect work, perfect in every respect, and perfect in every aspect.
And I knew that the Lord was talking to me about the death of Jesus on the cross and that He was telling me it was perfect, it was complete, there was nothing omitted, it covered every need.
But when I got out of the car I was just as sick as when I got in, but I knew what I had to do: Consider the work of Calvary.
So putting that together with my experience with the Scripture from Proverbs Chapter Four, I went to the doctor and I said I want to be discharged at my own responsibility.
Now he was a Nicodemus. He was very interested, so he didn’t discharge me immediately. He used to send to me at night and ask me questions about the Gospel.
I decided I know what to do, I’ve got to consider the work of Calvary, I’ve got to take the Bible as my medicine. And then I said being a Medical Orderly: How do people take their medicine? The answer is: three times daily after meals.
So I said from now on I’m going to take the Bible as my medicine, three times daily after meals.
Well, when I was sent out from Egypt, in a few days I was sent to the Sudan which is a much worse climate than Egypt. But I said I’m going to take my medicine three times daily after meals. So after every main meal I got away by myself, opened my Bible, started to read it. I said: Lord, you said this is my medicine.
Well I can’t tell you of all that transpired, but the answer is: the medicine worked.
In one of the worst climates in the world, in a very unsuitable condition, I was completely and permanently healed. The medicine works.
Now I’ve got here a little booklet that’s based on this called God’s Medicine Bottle. And you can have it for whatever the price is.
Let me tell you one more thing about this little book. About a year ago I was in Jerusalem and a young woman came up to me from the Philippines. She said: Brother Prince, I want to tell you something.
And she told me the following story. Her mother had been diagnosed with cancer in one of the best hospitals in Manila. They said you’ve got three months to live. She was flown to the United States, went to a hospital in New York. They told her exactly the same, you’ve got three months to live.
Well, somebody gave the daughter this little book. And so the daughter looked at the title, handed it to her mother, and said: Mother, why don’t you try this? You’ve got nothing to lose.
And the mother must have been a woman of tremendous character, she said: I’ll do it.
And for nine months she took God’s Word as her medicine three times daily after meals. When she went back to the doctors they could not find any trace of cancer anywhere in her body. I want to tell you the medicine works.
I want to say, however, that you need to bear in mind that God has got more than one way to heal you. If His way is the medicine, it will work. If He has another way, then you have to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit, and find out what the other way is.
But after all you’ve got not much to lose, it’s quite a cheap book, and if you don’t get healed by it, somebody else might, like the woman whose mother was healed completely of cancer.
