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The delayed calling, part 5

During the two years that I spent in Memphis on Cursed Time, much of what God did to train me in obedience was to give me prayer assignments. God did not isolate me, nor did He forbid me from doing prophetic work. If anything, He paid more attention to me and gave me more assignments, so that I would see for myself where I had gone astray.

That is part of the Fatherhood of God.

The Swaggart Scandal

I had moved to Memphis on November 29, 1987 to begin working at a printshop there. But on February 16, 1988 I lost that job. The man assigned to deliver that news to me was as puzzled as I was, insisting that I had done nothing wrong. I soon learned another lesson in the sovereignty of God, because the next day the scandal involving evangelist Jimmy Swaggart began, and God assigned me to pray on his behalf.

Swaggart was part of the Assembly of God denomination. On February 17, 1988 the Assembly board was given evidence that Swaggart had consorted with a prostitute on October 17, 1987. Two days later the scandal was revealed to the public. On February 21, Swaggart resigned from the ministry.

During those two years in Memphis, God gave me many assignments, and usually this meant that I would lose my job in order to focus on the work that God had given me. In fact, I often had more than one assignment running at the same time. This kept me very busy as I focused on discerning His voice and applying it to current events. But the most important thing to me was how God also gave me revelation of His law through those assignments.

On March 28, 1988 church officials in the Assembly of God began meetings to discuss what to do about Jimmy Swaggart. The next day they issued their ruling. They suspended Swaggart for two years and banned him from the pulpit for at least one year. This ruling was in accordance with their own denominational rules, which Swaggart himself had supported when other ministers had been disciplined. He had personally worked to defrock Marvin Gorman.

The next day, March 30, Swaggart defied the Assembly of God and instead submitted to the more lenient discipline of his own church board. They had ruled that he should step down from the pulpit for just two months, so Swaggart announced that he would return to the pulpit on Sunday, May 22.

Righteous Judgment

The law of God does not specify any particular length of discipline in such cases. So it is not my place to give a critique of either ruling. However, one principle of law was very relevant. It is the law of equal weights and measures, found in Leviticus 19:34-36,

³⁴ The stranger [gar, “alien, foreigner”] who reside with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens [gar] in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God. ³⁵ You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measurement of weight, or capacity. ³⁶ You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin; I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from the land of Egypt.

God established equal justice in His Kingdom, not only through this law but also in many other passages such as Numbers 15:15, 16 and Deuteronomy 10:18, 19. By the time of Christ, this principle had been put away by the traditions of men. A dividing wall (mentioned by Paul in Ephesians 2:14) had been built in the court of the temple to discriminate between men and women and between Jews and foreigners.

But God pointed out to Israel that they had been foreigners in the land of Egypt, where they too had been mistreated. Hence, they should have learned the wickedness of this way of thinking. The “chosen people” mentality violates the law of equal weights and measures. There was to be “one law” (Numbers 15:16) for all ethnic groups.

There are no double standards in the Kingdom of God. This is the law of equal weights and measures. There is one way to be saved and that is through Jesus Christ. All may approach God equally without being blocked by a dividing wall that forces some to see God from a distance.

Jesus mentioned this law in Matthew 7:1, 2, giving it a different nuance.

¹ Do not judge so that you will not be judged. ² For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.

In other words, we are forbidden to judge others by one standard and ourselves by another. As a member of the Assembly of God, Jimmy Swaggart had supported its 2-year time of church discipline, but he then refused to submit to the same judgment when he was judged. By returning to the pulpit after just two months, he violated the law of equal weights and measures. Jesus said, “by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.”

Hydra and Python

I was asked to speak at a conference in Harrison, AR on the weekend of May 20-22, 1988. On Sunday evening, as I drove back to Memphis, God spoke to me and told me to stop and pray with Jimmy Melton, who had moved to Yellville, AR after the failed prayer for revival a year earlier. He was pastoring a Word of Faith church.

I found him at home, and we began to talk. Soon he asked me, “Does Hydra and Python mean anything to you?”

“Well, yes,” I replied. “These are two demonic princes who manifest as serpents about 100 feet long.”

“I think we need to pray,” he said.

So we drove to his church and went to the “upper room” on the second floor, where there was a carpeted prayer room. We prayed for discernment and concluded that to deal with these serpents, it required two people, one to distract and the other to pierce its heart with the sword of the Spirit. We then attacked and pierced the heart of Hydra.

Then we attacked the second serpent, only to find that he was nowhere to be found. After a few minutes, Jimmy said, “It’s no use; he isn’t here.”

I spent the night with Jimmy, since by this time it was 1:30 in the morning. The next morning, we went to a restaurant for breakfast. We then stopped at the bank, where Jimmy wanted to deposit the donation checks from the previous day’s church offering. But first he bought a newspaper and threw it into my lap. I read the headline: “Swaggart clears self of past sins.”

Only then did it occur to me that Jimmy Swaggart had returned to the pulpit that Sunday. The article read in part:

“Saying his past is behind him, evangelist Jimmy Swaggart pranced and prayed for more than an hour Sunday at his first service since he stepped down from the pulpit three months ago, amid a sex scandal. ‘I’m here to serve notice on the whole world right here. What’s past is past,’ he shouted, bringing applauding worshipers to their feet…

“His refusal to honor a one-year preaching ban prescribed by church elders is what led to his dismissal from the Springfield-based denomination…

“Swaggart began his sermon by recalling two dreams he had a year ago in which he fought two serpents—both about 100 feet long. He defeated the first, but asked for God’s help to defeat the second. Without elaborating, Swaggart said, ‘I did not know what it (the dream) meant, but today I know what it meant.’. . .” (from The News-Leader, Springfield, Missouri, May 23, 1988).

So in his confession, he said that God had warned him in 1987 in a dream, where he saw “two serpents—both about 100 feet long.” We had seen them as well. Swaggart said that he had “defeated the first” serpent (all by himself) but had “asked for God’s help to defeat the second.”

Apparently, he did not realize that it would take two people to defeat each serpent. We knew this by our revelation the previous night. So we knew that he had not truly defeated the first one, as he assumed. Nonetheless, because he asked God for help to defeat the second serpent, God gave us this assignment on the night of May 21, 1988.

This also explained why the second serpent had disappeared. Python was not part of our assignment, because Swaggart had not asked for God’s help to defeat it. He thought he had defeated Python by himself.

Jimmy and I went back to the church, where we drafted a letter to Jimmy Swaggart, telling him our discernments and how we had been led to go into spiritual warfare on his behalf.

We did not receive a response. I do not know if he read the letter or if it was cast aside by a secretary. But in 1991 Swaggart was again caught with a prostitute in California, showing that he was still having problems with the serpent. The Wikipedia says:

On October 11, 1991, Swaggart was found in the company of a prostitute for a second time. He was pulled over by a police officer in Indio, California, for driving on the wrong side of the road. With him in the vehicle was a woman named Rosemary Garcia. According to Garcia, Swaggart had stopped to propose sex to her on the side of the road. She later told reporters: "He asked me for sex. I mean, that's why he stopped me. That's what I do. I'm a prostitute."^[21] This time, rather than confessing of his sins to his congregation, Swaggart told those at Family Worship Center, "The Lord told me it's flat none of your business."^[22] Swaggart's son Donnie then announced to the audience that his father would be temporarily stepping down as head of Jimmy Swaggart Ministries for "a time of healing and counseling."^[23]

I hope that his “time of healing and counseling” produced results. But my assignment was completed by this time, and I know nothing more of his story or the way in which God dealt with him in later years.

This assignment taught me the law of equal weights and measures and its spiritual application. In later years I came to understand that God had taught me how to interpret and apply His law through New Covenant eyes.