This testimony includes a suicide attempt. If you are struggling, please reach out to a crisis line in your country or to someone you trust today. You are not alone, and your story is not over.
A thirteen-year-old apprentice witch doctor stood up in the middle of a Bible study in the Philippines, shaking with anger. His father had been bedridden for three years. “What can your God do?” he demanded. Missionary Justin Gilpin had not expected the question, but he knew his answer. “As soon as we’re done here,” he said, “we’re going to your house.”
On this episode of the God’s Truth Podcast, Justin tells Abigail Smith what happened in that dark room, and how a teenage drug dealer who was minutes from ending his life became a missionary who says he has seen more than ten thousand people healed through prayer. What follows is his account.
A prayer behind a grocery store
At seventeen, Justin was selling drugs on the streets of Atlanta just to eat. He was already on probation when he was caught up in a DUI crash, and in Georgia, he says, a violation meant serving both sentences. Instead, the police simply drove him home. The next day he was thrown out of the house where he had been staying. The drugs stopped moving. He had nowhere to go.
One night, behind a grocery store at the edge of the woods, he was ready to take his own life. Then a thick fear came over him. What if hell is real? What if Jesus is real? He fell to his knees and prayed for the first time: “Jesus, if You are alive, send me a home, a place to stay and food to eat, and I will serve You.”
As he stood up, someone shouted his name. He was sure it was the devil. It was his friends, who took him in. Over the next few days, every supplier he called had nothing to sell, even friends who always had plenty. When he finally phoned his father and asked to come home, his dad agreed on two conditions: no drugs, and church. Back in the mountains of Dahlonega, Justin filled out a job application and was hired on the spot, with no interview and no background check. When he told his father everything, his dad laughed. One week before Justin called, God had told him to end his engagement. Had he not, there would have been no room for his son.
Twenty-five breaks and a leg that would never bend
Two years later, a motorcycle crash shattered Justin’s leg in more than twenty-five places. He never lost consciousness. A woman at the scene held his hand while he cried out “Jesus,” and she later wrote to tell him that his faith had turned her back to hers. She had prayed for help, and a nurse appeared, warned her not to let him fall asleep, and then was gone.
Nine days in intensive care followed, then a year learning to walk again. His doctors said his leg would never bend enough to climb stairs, and he was paralysed from the knee down. The pain was so great that he prayed, many times, for God to let him die.
Then a still, small voice dropped a thought into his mind: pray like Jesus prayed. Searching the Gospels, he noticed that Jesus never discussed a person’s sickness with the Father. He spoke to the sickness itself. So Justin began to do the same. Thirty days later, his doctor measured his knee and called it impossible: it had gained between twenty-five and thirty-five degrees of movement. “What are you doing, praying?” the doctor asked.
Forgiveness and a $0 bill
Justin says there was something harder than a shattered femur, and it was unforgiveness. The man who ran him over stood at the scene with his arms crossed. He never apologised and never helped with the bills, which came to $115,000. Yet every time the pain returned, Justin chose to bless him instead of resenting him. The man was in shock, he reasons. It was an accident.
Then a letter arrived from the hospital. He owed $0. He called to report the mistake and was told there was none. They either would not or could not say who had paid. Later, the same doctor who had given him no chance of bending his leg gave him a fifty-fifty chance of the feeling in his foot returning. This time Justin simply thanked God in advance, every day, for thirty days.
His practical key to forgiveness came from Peter’s question in Matthew 18:21–22. Forgiving someone seventy times seven made no sense to him until the Lord explained it: it is not that your brother wrongs you that often. It is that every time the hurt comes back to your mind, you release forgiveness again. And to anyone who feels justified in their offence, he points to Jesus, the only one who was ever truly justified, who forgave while the crown of thorns was pressed into His head.
$500 and a dream
Years later, a friend in Georgia told Justin he believed every word of the gospel but did not want to serve God. Something broke in Justin’s heart. “Send me to the ripe harvest,” he prayed. Two weeks later he lost both of his jobs. Within three months, in 2011, he landed in the Philippines with $500 in his pocket, having sold or given away everything else.
When the money ran out, he dreamed he received between $600 and $700. A day or two later, his pastor in North Georgia emailed to say a gift had come in for him: between $600 and $700. Two weeks after that, he dreamed he was casting out demons. Within twenty-four hours, he cast out his first.
Today he and his family are planting an international church in Davao. On one hospital visit, he prayed for a fourteen-year-old Manobo boy with a broken femur, whose family had walked eight hours through the jungle and then waited seven days for a doctor who never came. Justin says Jesus came instead, the bone went back into place and the pain left. Three people with broken bones in that ward were healed, he says, and all twenty or so people in the room gave their lives to Jesus.
“What can your God do?”
Going door to door with Bible studies, Justin met a woman who said a demon visited her every Monday morning. His first question: what time? Two local pastors warned him it was too dangerous. He went anyway, and they came with him. The demon never showed up. She was set free.
Minutes later, as the Bible study began, two witch doctors arrived and started disrupting it. Justin asked God how to handle them and heard: they will not deny the Bible. So he held one up and asked if it was the Word of God. They said yes. He then turned to passages in Leviticus against divination and familiar spirits, such as Leviticus 19:31, and the pastor read them aloud in the local language, one after another. That was when the young apprentice leapt to his feet. What can your God do? Justin says he felt like David facing his Philistine.
The house was dark in every sense. The apprentice’s father lay on cardboard, covered in bedsores, moaning, with a stench Justin calls one of the worst he has encountered in thousands of hospital rooms. They prayed, and kept praying. The pastors were not used to contending in prayer, so Justin kept urging them on, remembering the friend at midnight in Luke 11:5–10, who received because he would not give up. Persistence, he says, is not a lack of faith. Persistence is faith.
After about forty-five minutes, the man stood up, free of pain, for the first time in three years, in front of the witches. Afterwards the senior witch doctor phoned the pastor: he was quitting to become a fisherman. First he became a fisher of men, bringing his family and friends to Jesus and into the newly planted church. Then he really did take up fishing.
How to fan your faith into flame
Justin’s closing advice is simple:
- Get around people of faith. Spend time with believers who expect God to do the impossible.
- Start with the Gospels. Read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and let the Holy Spirit lead you into the rest of Scripture.
- Fan the flame yourself. Paul told Timothy to stir up the gift that was in him (2 Timothy 1:6). God has given the gift, Justin says; stirring it up is our part.
- Keep asking, seeking and knocking. Even the disciples could not always see breakthrough (Matthew 17:19–20). Do not quit after one prayer.
- Put your faith in God, not people. People will disappoint you. God never will.
- Love people first. Jesus drew sinners with love. Justin warns believers not to judge, and not to throw stones at the very people God is reaching for.
The episode ends with Justin praying over viewers for financial breakthrough and healing. Watch to the end and receive it.
Connect with Justin Gilpin
- Online school: Fuel Revival, where Justin teaches how to pray for the sick, hear God’s voice and walk through deliverance
- Free prayer meetings: Sign up for prayer
Mentioned in this episode
- Fuel Revival, Justin’s online ministry school, whose proceeds fund his outreach to unreached people groups in the Philippines
- The Manobo people of Mindanao
- Davao, where Justin’s family is planting an international church
Scriptures in this episode
- Exodus 15:26, the Lord who heals, Jehovah Rapha
- Mark 16:17–18, they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover
- Matthew 18:21–22, forgiving seventy times seven
- Luke 11:5–10, persistence: ask, seek and knock
- Leviticus 19:31, do not seek after wizards and familiar spirits
- 2 Corinthians 4:18, looking at the things which are not seen
- 1 Timothy 1:15–16, Christ came to save sinners, of whom I am chief
- Psalm 50:10, the cattle upon a thousand hills
- Romans 2:4, the goodness of God leads to repentance
- 2 Timothy 1:6, stir up the gift of God which is in you
- James 4:8, draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you
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