Bishop Bill Hamon Shares the Apostle Paul’s Secret to Surviving Hard Times
Dr. Bill Hamon is known as the Father of the New Prophetic Movement. And even after more than 60 years of ministry, he is still learning about God. As we close out this year of a worldwide pandemic, a tumultuous election season and unrest across the globe, Hamon has a word for believers. This dynamic word comes from the apostle Paul: “So I take pleasure in weaknesses, in reproaches, in hardships, in persecutions, and in distresses for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10).
“I’ve asked hundreds of people as I’ve ministered, ‘What do you take pleasure in?'” he told Dr. Steve Greene on an episode of Greenelines on the Charisma Podcast Network. [They’ve said], ‘My business, sports, my family, praising God, reading the Bible’—a hundred things, but nobody has ever listed what Paul says, and I used to wonder, How can he say that?
“For 60 years, I pondered what in the world was Paul saying; what was he trying to mean? I said, ‘Either Paul needs a psychiatrist, or he’s got a revelation that most Christians don’t have today,'” Hamon said.
As he wrote his recent book, Your Highest Calling, God gave him the revelation he needed. “It knocks the why out of every ‘why’ you’ve ever had,” Hamon said. “‘Why did I go through this? Why did this happen? We prayed, we sought God and it still happened. We still went bankrupt; we still had a car accident; we still had the church split—why?'”
Hamon uses two natural laws to explain how we, like Paul, can glory in our hard times. “There’s a law of gravity that says anything heavier than air has to fall,” he said. “But all these tons of people, plane and material and luggage, it lifts it up, and it stays up and goes down. … The law of aerodynamics does not destroy the law of gravity; it supersedes it to accomplish a faster, greater purpose. And the law of gravity is still the same.”
“Your four fingers represent all your natural life—physical, financial, social, family and business, everything—your thumb represents the inward man,” Hamon said. “Paul says, ‘Though the outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.’ And so God’s interested in the inward man.
Pursuing our inward man is the highest calling God has placed on our lives, Hamon said. And that’s what enables us to not only survive difficult times but embrace them as God’s instruments.
To hear more of Bishop Bill Hamon’s teaching on how we can glory in our weaknesses and gain grace for our hard times, listen to the entire episode of the Greenelines podcast here. And be sure to subscribe to Greenelines at cpnshows.com for more inspiring stories and biblical truth. {eoa}
