Impartation

In the last lesson, I shared a few things that happened when Blaine Cook came to minister at my church. I shared how God began to touch my wife, who was so burned out that she wanted me to leave the ministry and become a teacher. God turned her life around. In fact, God met and touched and transformed many who were hungry for His touch. And God even got a few who did not realize that they were hungry and in need of His touch.

That night Blaine gave an invitation that said: "I do not want you to come up to the front just so you can get a blessing. I want to really be able to pray first for the people God is working on. And so some of you are going to know that God is coming upon you to equip you for ministry. You may not even be in the ministry, you may be a lay person. You may feel electricity come on your head or hands, or heat in your chest like Westley who said, 'I felt my heart strangely warmed within me' when he got saved at Azusa Street. Or you may feel such a weight you can't stand up straight. You feel like something is pushing you down. That is the glory -- glory in Hebrew means "weight" -- the weight of God's presence."

[At the American Baptist headquarters in Wisconsin there's this lake where they have a lot of retreats. One time the power of God came and nobody could stand up. I mean everybody was literally on their face before God; nobody could stand because of the weight. You didn't choose to bow down, you were prostrated because of the glory that came into that meeting.] And so Blaine had said you are going to feel these things. As you can imagine, the meeting got a bit wild for a small Baptist church.

A friend of mine named John was there, and John did not believe this was God. John was actually mad at me for having a healing meeting in a Baptist church. He got there late, having missed the whole teaching. He stood in the back, leaning against the wall with his hand. He heard Blaine say that, and he said to himself, "That's a bunch of bull!" He no more than said that when he realized his hand had gone to sleep. You know how when you lay down on your arm and when you wake up it starts tingling. It felt like that. He thought, "My hands gone to sleep; I must have shut the blood off somehow." But then the other hand started to feel the same way. Then the shaking started.

At that time John was in his early thirties. He had this beautiful home with four bedrooms and two bathrooms, and it totally paid for. He also had a brand new Cadillac (also paid for), a brand new corvette (paid for), and he owned two businesses. He was the only man in the church that had this much money, and he was proud. Before that night, John would just strut -- he was a self-made man, one who made his own fortune. Therefore He felt that he was better than the others in the church (who were coal miners or prison guards). He was a proud man.

And he did not believe this stuff going on in the service is of God. All of a sudden he said, "That's a bunch of bull!" and the Holy Spirit got him. I saw him. His hands were shaking so fast that they were a blur. He was crying and you know how men make ugly faces when they cry -- he had a really ugly face at that moment! He was just bawling his eyes out. "Booooohooooo." He came down the aisle crying.

He came up to me and said, "Randy, help me! Help me!" I asked him how and he said, "My eye, my left eye is killing me! I've cried so hard my contact! I gotta get my contact out. Oh Randy, help me!" It's hard to change your contact out with your hands shaking like his were.

You know what I said to him? We had just heard about words of knowledge in the church for the first time that day, I said, "That could be a word of knowledge." He replied, "You and those words of knowledge! I don't even believe in them!"

And right behind him stood fourteen-year-old Tammy Ferguson, whose dad was boycotting the meeting. Her dad was a trustee in the Baptist Church and wouldn't come to the meeting because he said, "I don't think we should have a healing meeting in a Baptist Church. You can't teach anybody how to heal. Only God can heal. Now why are we having these healing meetings trying to teach people how to heal? Only God can heal." I wanted to ask him, "Have you ever had an evangelism course in the Baptist Church? I thought only God could save too."

Even though her father would not come to the service, that did not detour Tammy. She head what I said about word of knowledge and she said, "John that's my eye! I just went to the doctor today and the ophthalmologist said that I could have it corrected by surgery." It was crossed really bad and wouldn't track right. And then John stopped shaking. I said, "See, John, let's pray." We prayed four times and nothing happened. But the fifth time we prayed, the eye was straight!

She went home that night - her dad came home from the coal mines around midnight. There she is standing in the door. "Daddy, look at me! Look at me!" He looked, then he said, "Tammy, your eye it is straight!" "Yes, Daddy, I got healed tonight in church!"

This guy who was mad at me having this healing meeting went over to the phone at 12:30 in the morning, started dialing every cousin all over the Midwest saying that we just found out God is still healing today. "Tammy just got healed tonight. You've got a bad leg. I want you to take off work tomorrow. Come on down here - we just found out God heals -- Tammy got healed!"

Let me tell you a bit more about that first night of visitation that fell on our church. Remember the invitation was only to come up if you were feeling the power. Well, 99% of the people in my church had heard of Charismatics, but they had never met one. They had never been to a Pentecostal church. We had never seen anything, so we did not have people who were copying what they had seen somewhere else. John was a guy who had been on the board of my church for seven years but wasn't really saved. But that last night of the revival, he got really saved and became a convert of Jesus.

So anyway, a lady named Barbara came to this service. She hadn't been to church for months and she didn't know why she came to church that night, especially for a healing meeting. She began shaking and weeping. She came to the front and Blaine prayed that famous prayer, "More, Lord!" Bam! She fell to the floor and she was out! There are so many people, we were afraid she was going to get stepped on. Her cousin and I picked her up and carried her to the choir loft and laid her down there. Every once in a while, she'd sort of sit up and you'd see her head over the top of the banister. She's smile and wave drunkenly, and then she would go back down again. That happened about 9:00. At midnight, we had to drive her home because she was still too drunk to drive.

Her husband has been backslidden since Viet Nam. He got worried about his wife as it got late. Usually when you go to church, it would start about 7:00and get out at 8:00. Now it was 12:30 AM and she was still not home. He was driving his pickup truck. He had his snuff right here -- you know you can't smoke in the coal mines, so the miners would get their nicotine by chewing on tobacco. He had his shotgun across the back of the pickup truck, his coal miners cap and his snuff were right there. He was mad and he was looking for his wife. He saw her car coming down the lane, so he got out of his truck.

Barbara was not driving, so he yelled, "Where's Barbara?" And Barbara was on the floor in the back seat. She sort of raised herself over the top of the seat and waved at her husband, slurring her words. "Hiyee, how ya doin'" He asked her "Where've you been?" "Church" she answered. "No, where have you really been? You don't get like that at church! I've been to church." "You do now, Gene!" she replied.

The next day Barbara came to service again, and she happened to have the family checkbook in her purse. Gene was so mad the next day that he came to church looking for Barbara because she had his check book. His first cousin Tommy was in the service, so he went to him first. Tommy was one of my deacons, and he was a gentle person who would never say anything to hurt anyone. Gene told him, "Go tell Barbara to come out of the church, I want my checkbook." Tommy replied, "Well you go get her. You can go into the church." "No," Gene said, "I'm not going into that church! You go get her and tell her to come out here." And he was really mad still. Tommy told me this later. "I looked at him and I said 'Gene, you're just a bunch of dirt. The way you're treating Barbara is terrible and you're just like dirt."

Gene had a really bad temper. I asked, "Tommy, did he hit you? What did he do?" "He said, "No, he fell on his face in your office and started weeping." He said, "Help me Tommy, I need to get saved."