Okay, here's another that's a very important one. Do not prophesy over personal male/female relationships. Well I believe God's going to get you to marry this one, or going to get you to marry that one. [Laughter] This is a no no. Don't do this. Again it violates personal responsibility. If two people feel that God has joined them into relationship, they must take responsibility for their decisions in it, not look to someone to prophesy. Prophecy can confirm it, but don't look to someone to kind of give a direction that way. There's a normal process if a couple - they should find out, or should look out for someone who has similar values, that they feel there's a chemistry between them, they are flowing in harmony with God together, similar kind of direction in their life, and there's a witness from either parents or those around them who love them, that they see the fruit of God on the relationship, but prophesying that you should marry this one, this is well and truly outside the boundaries, and can only end up in harm.
As I shared with you last night, one of my daughters had I guy tell her they were going to get married, and of course that's what people use - God told me. Great, he didn't tell me! So I just told her if anyone tries that on you, just say well He didn't tell me so forget it. [Laughter] The guy was very persistent, God told me you're going to marry me, and she was also quite persistent, and in the end he just wasn't listening, so I rang the Pastor and said would you have a talk to him? He's totally out of order. He's manipulating with the gift of prophecy, trying to bring emotional spiritual pressure on my daughter. This is wrong. Please confront him, so they did that, and that was the end of that. Okay, so [laughs] alright then, so here's another one; don't prophesy that God is going to heal someone. I've seen so many problems over this one, of people prophesying that God is going to heal another person.
Does God heal? Yes, He does. Can God heal? Yes, He can. Will God heal? Well that's always the uncertain bit, and when you prophesy that God is going to heal someone, if you have not heard from God, you have produced a false hope. Now what happens in this situation, is people feel compassion when someone's not well, and they confuse the feeling of compassion, with the direction of the Holy Spirit. So then they prophesy the person's going to get well, and what happens is it brings a tremendous spiritual confusion when the person doesn't get healed. I'll give you an example of it and look, I've had this several times and I believe that people who prophesied this, should be confronted about the misuse of gift, because it produces a false hope. It's like saying what everyone wants to hear. It's not what the gift's about.
The gift is about encouraging people with real hope, so I had a situation where I had a friend in another nation who's a senior business leader, a very important person in the nation, a leading Christian in the nation. His wife also is quite a leading person, and his wife got cancer. I went to visit him, and all these intercessors and prophetic people, everyone without fail, had prophesied that God was going to heal her. Spiritual battle, and all the kind of stuff that goes with it. I felt in my heart she's got six months and she's going to die, so it's very difficult to know how to manage that, when all the popular prophetic thing is all saying she's going to be healed. I feel in my heart that she's going to die, so I put it to him that he had six months, and then there would be a major tsunami, a storm in his life, and he needed to be preparing for it. It was clearly his wife's death, and so the six month - now here's the thing. He himself didn't want to believe she would die - of course you don't, and so he wanted to believe these other words.
Six months went, she died almost to the day, six months later, and so this was a huge problem. Here's why it was a problem. It was a problem because everything had been built around the hope that she would live, and now she died, so you've got tremendous confusion took place, and no one's talking about it. So I went to him and I said that there are two problems you face. I said number one, your wife has died, and this happens in life, that when people come to the end of their life, we've got no power over that. People die, and sometimes they die of cancer, and so you've got about two years to recover from this tragic loss, and it will take a little bit of time. I gave him some practical advice. I said the deeper thing is this; your wife has died but the rest of your future depends on your relationship with God, and right now that's breached seriously because you think God has let you down, so you've lost your trust in God because you listened to all the wrong prophecy.