We now return to It’s Supernatural.
SID: So Richard, you have decided, you’re a pastor’s son and you do what a lot of children of that comes from pastors, evangelists.
RICHARD: Sure.
SID: You wanted to explore what the world was like. You wanted to be a professional singer. You wanted to be a professional actor.
RICHARD: In a way I did.
SID: But your mom was the obstacle. Tell me about your mom.
RICHARD: Well she said, “Son, you’ll never get away from my prayers.”
SID: I love it. It’s true.
RICHARD: No matter my idea, no matter what I went through, all that I said and did, and all the aspirations that I had to be a nightclub entertainer, and although I was singing in clubs and I was offered a job at the Sahara Hotel in the lounges singing and doing summer stock theater, and all the things, I did singing in clubs, I couldn’t get away from her prayers.
SID: Tell me about your toe. That’s what I want to hear.
RICHARD: My toe?
SID: I want to know about your toe.
RICHARD: Well a prophetic word had been given over Lindsay and me about the healing ministry. And she and I took that word and began to confess it along with the Word of God what things, so ever you desire, Mark, Chapter 11, what things so ever you desire, “When you pray believe that you receive and you shall have it.” She and I began to confess a healing ministry. I knew the day was coming, but I didn’t know when. And we didn’t announce it. We just talked about it amongst ourselves. And she and I prayed, and we held on to that word we had from God. And she and I were, I don’t know where we were, but we were in a service. And I was closing, and in the last moment I heard myself say this: “Lord, heal that man’s big toe.” And there was a snap in my own toe, like a bone moving. And I said to myself, well I wonder why I said that. I closed the service.
SID: That’s called a mind bypass.
RICHARD: A few weeks later I got a letter from a man who said, “How did you know about my toe?” He said, “My toe was broken and I had been to the doctor, had it x-rayed.” And he said, “I was in your service that night and when you said, Lord, heal that’s man big toe, my toe snapped.” And he said, “I went back to the doctor and had it reexamined and it showed there’s no break.” He said, “What did you do?” And I wrote back and I said, “Well I didn’t do anything except say what I felt the Lord had me say.” Lindsay pointed her finger at me and said, “This is the beginning of your healing ministry.” I said, “A toe?”
SID: Well you got to start somewhere, Richard.
RICHARD: Never despise a small beginning. And so Lindsay said our faith together. She and I believed God. And it was in April of 1980 when we’re in Albuquerque, New Mexico and people began to get healed in numbers: blindness, deafness all in the same service, people coming out of wheelchairs. And I remember, Sid, I remember it so well, she was sitting out in the crowd. She hated sitting on the platform. She wanted to be out in the crowd so she could watch and pray like she’s doing right now. She’s praying right now for me on this program. But she sat there and I saw her. She just nodded her head and she said, “This is it. This is the fulfillment of what happened with that toe.”
SID: You know, as a young boy you learned so many wonderful things from your dad. You were actually able to go and observe him and watch what he did. But there was one time that it had a major impact on you and the way you explain it, God wants us healed. But we have a part in the equation, and you learned this when you had, what was it, 22 warts on your hand? Tell me about that. How old were you?
RICHARD: I was about ten. I had 22 warts. One of the greatest lessons of my life, and you know, as a boy I played baseball and basketball, football. I played everything you could play. And the warts were spreading, 22 of them, and they were bleeding because, you know, I used my hand a lot, and it hurt when I threw a baseball and so on. And my dad came home and said, “I’m going to pray. I’m going to believe God.” Well I expected a miracle because that’s what I always expected when my dad prayed for me. And we sat down in the bedroom, and he said, I want you to release your faith. And I said, “Well Daddy, how do you release your faith?” He said, “Through a point of contact.” And he saw the look in my eye that I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said, “Point of contact is something that you do and when you do it, you let your faith go.” He still saw that I didn’t understand. So he pointed to the wall and said, “Do you see the light switch?” “Yes.” “The light switch, son, is a point of contact. It has no power in itself, but it’s hooked up to the electronic company, like when you flip the switch the lights come on.” He said, “Your faith is like that. God has given,” he gave me the scripture from Romans, “God has given to every person the measure of faith.” He said, “Now your faith in your heart was not meant there, meant just to stay there. You’ve got to release it just like you flip that switch. So when I pray for you, let your faith go.” And so he prayed and I was believing, and I came to a point in his prayer where I just, not knowing what to do, I just said, “Faith get up. Get up to God.” I was just a little boy.
SID: You have to become like a little child in order, that’s what you were doing what the Bible instructs us to do.
RICHARD: Exactly.
SID: But you already were a little child.
RICHARD: Exactly. I looked at my hand. Every wart was still there. And he said, “Now son, we have prayed and we have believed. Now let’s expect a miracle.”
SID: Do you know, that’s where most people miss it? When the warts are still there they say, well I guess nothing happened.
RICHARD: Well and it didn’t happen the next day or the next day, or the next day, or the next day, or the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth. But the tenth morning I awakened and looked at my hand. Every wart had totally disappeared. What lesson I learned, after he prayed, I learned how to hold on to my faith and to believe. And you’re right. That’s where many people are today. Because they don’t see an instantaneous miracle, they don’t understand that the healing power of God is working. And sometimes it takes a while for the healing to be complete, but it happened, and I’ve never had another wart on that hand, you know, as long as I’ve lived.
SID: Tell me, I believe it was Nicaragua in a tent that there was a person, a woman who had ten years of back pain. No, it wasn’t a tent. It was a taxi.
RICHARD: Yes. I was in a taxi on the way to a crusade. The driver of the taxi was talking about his mother who was ill. She had back problems for ten years and he asked me to pray for her. And I said, “Can you get her to the service?” He said, “No, she’s six hours away from here.” I said, “Can you get her on the phone?” Because I knew there was no distance in prayer. And so through a translator, he got her on the phone and we prayed together. And I really discovered the Scripture in Psalm 107, Verse 20, “He sent his Word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction.” So I said to her, “I just sent the Word to you for healing in your back,” through the translator. The translator translated it. And then the next day I learned that she began to be healed that moment and after a few days, after ten years of back pain, it was completely gone. And I learned that day there is no distance in prayer.
We’ll be right back to It’s Supernatural.
