Impartation

I shared a bit in the last lesson about how God used the prophetic to prepare me to enter into my destiny. And He spoke into my life just before the revival broke out in Toronto to give me confidence that He would show up when I went there to hold a series of meetings.

What God released in Toronto was not just grace for a series of meetings, it was the start of a powerful move of God to transform the church and advance His kingdom. He has moved like that many time in the past, including the recent Azusa street revival in the USA. And He moved again in 1994 in a little church in Toronto Canada.

But when God moves, it does not come neatly. If you check the history books -- the ones that have not had a lot of details edited out -- you will find that every revival is messy. It comes with some bazaar manifestations and sometimes people react out of emotions. There is great power of God to change and transform lives, but all this other stuff accompanies it. And there are always going to be some people who look at the other stuff, and who miss the transformation God is doing in peoples hearts and lives. They focus on the manifestations and they begin to criticize and condemn. They say that this can't be God because He would never do things that way. (Isn't that what the Pharisees said about Jesus when He came?) They accuse and they take things out of context and they attack and they criticize. And they start to say all sorts of bad stuff about the people who God uses as leaders in that movement.

When people say what type of stuff about you, what are you going to say? In the early days, I knew there was nothing I could really say that could convince people it was God. For every anecdotal story I had that was wonderful, there is another anecdotal story where it blew up a church. And for every Scripture I had that proved what was happening was God, they had a scripture with their take on it that they felt disproved it. So I didn't try to argue.

I would just say, how do you answer the critics of the revival? And I would smile and say "Time is on my side." Yes it is.

Ever since I had entered college at eighteen years old as a general Baptist I heard the Lord speak to me and say to my heart, "The issue of your lifetime will be the Holy Spirit." And so the first book I bought other than the textbook and my Bible was called The Holy Spirit. At that time, I didn't know or understand anything about theology. But anyway that was the book I bought and all the way college and the seminary every time I got to write on the Spirit or the gifts of the Spirit. I would study and write that because I felt like God said that this will be the issue of your whole ministry. I was only eighteen when He spoke that to me.

Well you know, He was right.

I became a student of revival. I remember Dr. Louis Drummer at Southern Baptist Seminary telling us about revival. And I so thank God that I had had that course in seminary, because when stuff started happening in Toronto I remembered my lectures from the seminary. And I remembered all the revival stuff I had read and the awakening that must come. Dr Louis Drummer and that whole series of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board put out and they were talking about shaking and falling and the longest time anybody was out slain in the Spirit was nine days. They did not call it being slain in the spirit back then, they called it "swooning," or "falling." And that book was written back in the early eighteen hundreds.

I had read about all of these things. I wasn't turned off by the manifestations because I had read enough about revival history to know. By the way, the book also talks about the greatest revival that was ever recorded amongst Baptists. Do you know where it was? It was the Shangtum Revival 1930-33 in Shangtum, China. It went from 1976-1994 -- it lasted eighteen years.

Toronto had it's own share of weird things happen. It had animal sounds for a short period of time. But that did not happen when I was there, it happened later and I heard about it. I knew it wasn't going to be a good thing and I was afraid what people would do with it and I never wanted to encourage it. But anyway, everything else -- the laughing, the holy laughter, falling down, shaking, people getting healed -- all of it happened in the letter of the missionaries, the Southern Baptist missionaries in Shangtum. It's all there.

The book is out of print, so I wanted to reprint it. Someone said that I couldn't because it had already been done. I read the book, and it had been printed in 1970 by the Southern Baptist Convention. Some friends of mine said, "well, why did you want it reprinted anyway? It's boring." And I said, "what do you mean it's boring?" "It was exciting." I grabbed my copied manual, the original and I said, "read this and see if it's the same." And they came back and said, "Wow! I know why you wanted it reprinted, that one's exciting." I said, "OK, what is the difference between that one that is exciting and reprinted in 1970 versus the original?" They said, "They cut out everything supernatural." They cleaned up the revival. They left out all the good parts to make it "acceptable."

But what we have here and now, in Toronto and spreading throughout the world, is not the "cleaned up version." It is the real thing. And sometimes when God moves, it messes with the religious folks. Jesus had that same problem with the Pharisees back in His time.

Now we get onto the subject. I want to be like the Apostle Paul. Some people want to get healed. I am not just shadow boxing. I'm going for a purpose. I'm going to try to build faith and hunger and passion and desire in your heart that you would receive and you would be one of the persons who would receive an impartation. Because one of the things this revival is about is that God is releasing impartations to His people through it, so they are equipped and enabled to do the supernatural things that God wants to do in their lives and through them.

The impartation does not come from me, I don't have it in my pocket. All I am is the donkey that Jesus gets to ride into town on. And when I go to the barn I am not going to say they put their cloaks down for me. They weren't waving palm branches for me. I'm aware of the One Who I am carrying. And so I say this I just like to see what He does. It is so wonderful what He does. And He is so Awesome.

Let us pray before we go into more depth on this.

Father come, by the Holy Spirit. Jesus said that He and You would come and be in us. And He said that it is to our advantage that He go away by crucifixion and resurrection and ascension, that then He would send the Holy Spirit. And the way it is described in all the Gospel, Jesus is the One Who would Baptize us in the Holy Ghost and fire. And so Lord we ask for the reality of that even for those of us who have already have been filled with the Spirit, been baptized with the Spirit, into the body of Christ.

Those of us who have had experiential experiences Father God, we ask for more. We are hungry for more. We believe that there can be more. Father, we just declare there is always more in You. And so if we heard Jesus say that we who are evil know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more will You give the Holy Spirit to those who ask. As Matthew said, you give good things to those that ask. We are asking you for some good things, Lord. We are asking for impartations, we are asking for gifts of the Holy Spirit, to be stirred up. We are asking for people who may have not been baptized in the Holy Spirit to be so.

Father, some of us may have been baptized in the Holy Spirit a long time ago, but now we are empty or very low. So we ask You for a refilling.

Come, Holy Spirit. Come angels of God. Give us the open heaven. Clear out any demonic oppression from our lives. Clear out any demonic in the spirit realm that would try to hold things back or that would hold people back. God we ask that you would send them and release them. Jesus said He could ask His Father, and He would send 12 legends of angels. Father we are asking for You in this open heaven in Genesis 28, in Jacobs dream. And Jesus fulfilled it in John 2:47-51 that you shall see heaven open and you shall see greater things than these. He said we would see heaven open and angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

Father, we are the body of Christ, so pour out on us. And the open heavens should be over the body of Christ. And so we ask for the angels of God to be ascending and descending in the name of Jesus. We ask for the Holy Spirit to come in great power. We pray that the Holy Spirit in us would call upon the Holy Spirit to come upon us that those who have been baptized in the Spirit of Christ would now have the Spirit come upon them. That those He has come in would come upon. Holy Spirit we welcome You. In Jesus Name. Amen.