Peter Derek Vaughan Prince was born in India on August 14, 1915 – and he died in Jerusalem at age 88, in his sleep in September 2003.  He was a non-denominational Bible teacher whose daily radio program Derek Prince Legacy Radio, is broadcast around the world in various languages.

Derek met his first wife, Lydia in the 1940’s in what was then called Palestine. Lydia was one of the boldest and most committed Christians Derek had ever met. She had been a successful school teacher from a well-to-do family in Denmark. She left all that and came to Jerusalem in obedience to God, not knowing what He had in store for her. In 1928, she took a little dying baby girl and nursed her to health. For the next 20 years, Lydia maintained a home for girls without parents.  As a single woman on her own in a culture where women are generally considered inferior, she trusted in God for her safety and provision. During those 20 years, she had faced riots, bandits, economic privation, primitive living conditions, and opposition from Jews and Muslims. Lydia never wavered as she stood in the victory of Jesus. 

Lydia and their adopted orphans survived the pressures of post-war London. Lydia and Derek remained united in Christ, serving God until her death in 1975. Derek wrote about one episode in the life of Lydia that surprised him. In the 1970s, Derek and Lydua ministered to hundreds of people needing deliverance, and we saw many glorious victories. One time after a particularly powerful session, they were returning to the apartment the church had made available to them.  Lydia suddenly refused to take the elevator. She chose to walk up four flights of stairs. When Derek questioned her about this, she replied, “I don’t feel comfortable in an elevator.” They talked a little more, and she recalled an incident in Denmark when she was five.

She had been playing in a cupboard under the stairs in her aunt’s house, and the aunt, seeing the door open, closed and latched it. Finding herself a prisoner in the dark, Lydia became hysterical. She began to scream and pound on the door. The aunt came to her rescue quickly, but in those few moments a demon of claustrophobia-a fear of confined spaces-had apparently entered Lydia. As soon as Lydia’s problem was brought out into the open and identified as a spirit of fear, we prayed together and she was completely delivered.

She never again had a problem with elevators. Both Derek and Lydia were astonished that Lydia could need deliverance after helping set so many others free. But it taught both of them that we all need to be ready to respond to the Holy Spirit’s prompting, even if it does not suit our theology! If Lydia and Derek had not prayed that evening, she would never have come to full victory in that area. Derek was never shy about a Christian who faces a demonic conflict.

Even in mature Christians, Derek admitted that a few times he had a sore throat, cold or sinus congestion and chose to pray for healing with no obvious change. Derek would endure a week or two of frustrating infirmity before the conditions cleared up. One day, however, Derek was reading about the time Jesus entered the house of Simon Peter and found Peter’s mother-in-law sick with a high fever. “So He stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. And immediately she arose and served them” (Luke 4:39) Why would Jesus rebuke a fever? Clearly He saw in that fever something more than a mere physical condition. Derek Prince author of 📕 “They Shall Expel Demons”

DEMONS ENSLAVE – Derek Prince  Let us take an example from an area that few in church talk about: sex. Suppose you have committed sexual sin. You repent and meet God’s conditions for forgiveness. You know you are not only forgiven but justified- “just-as-if” you had never sinned. Romans 8:30  Then you still have an INTENSE DESIRE to commit the same sin, even though you hate it. You are sure you have been forgiven, but you are not free. If you are ENSLAVED to doubt, cursing, addicted, sugar, being negative; come against it in the name of Jesus.  Over the years, Derek saw thousands of people delivered in this way from various tormenting dark spirits.  When a person feels compulsion to sin, that person needs to persist in purity, as “He who is in me is greater than anthing trmpting me.” Speak with authority against it out loud. Abstain in purity by the power of the Holy Spirit. 

Derek Prince (1915-2003) was born in Bangalore, India, into a British military family. He was educated as a scholar in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic at Eton College. He also went to Cambridge University in England and later at Hebrew University, Israel. He was a philosopher and self-proclaimed atheist. He held a fellowship in Ancient and Modern Philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge.

While in the British Medical Corps during World War II, Prince began to study the Bible as a philosophical work. Converted through a powerful encounter with Jesus Christ, he was baptized in the Holy Spirit a few days later. This life-changing experience
altered the whole course of his life, which he thereafter devoted to studying and teaching the Bible as the Word of God. Discharged from the army in Jerusalem in 1945, he married Lydia Christensen, founder of a children’s home there. The family saw the rebirth of the state of Israel in 1948. In the late 1950s, Derek and Lydia adopted another daughter while he was serving as principal of a college in Kenya. In 1963 the family immigrated to the United States and pastored a church in Seattle. Stirred by the tragic JFK assassination, Derek began to teach the importance of intercessory prayer for nations. In 1973 he was one of the founders of Intercessors for America.
Until a few years before his own death in 2003 at the age of 88, Prince persisted in the ministry God had called him to as he traveled the world, imparting God’s truth.