Impartation

I saw holy laughter for ten years before I went to Toronto. I saw all this stuff that happened in Toronto ten years earlier. But the first time I saw holy laughter was even before the experience I described at my church. I saw it when I was about six years old in my little Baptist church in the country. My illiterate grandma was leading testimony meeting, testifying about all the good things God had done. All of a sudden she got her little white hanky with her hands, covered her mouth and she started laughing. She was barrel laughing, and it was so funny to me as a six year old kid, watching grandmother laugh like that. And I remember she said, "I don't know why I'm laughing. Nothing is funny." But she couldn't stop. In the 1950's it was called "getting happy" instead of being called holy laughter. You see, there was another revival that hit in 1947, 1948, 1949. It looked like three separate revivals but it was really all part of one real move of God: the Latter Rain movement, the healing revival, Billy Graham.

God is looking for people who are hungry and desperate for Him. He was looking for them back in the 1940s and He's still looking for them today. I was touched in 1984, but by 1993 I was dry again. The touch of 1984 was a memory. By 1993 I knew what I was experiencing was so much less than what I had in 1984. And that caused me to call a friend of mine for three hours, to remind me from how far I'd gone. This created a fresh hunger in my heart.

In 1993, one night I talked to a friend on the phone around midnight. I shared my frustration about how the anointing seemed to have dropped. I had been in this spiritual dessert for about 4 years. Now when I prayed for people, they did not fall down any more and hardly anyone got healed. The anointing was a lot less than it used to be and I was feeling desperate. Then my friend said, "Randy, Rodney Howard Brown said that God told him he'd lay his hands on 1000 pastors who would get the same anointing that's on him and they would help him take it around the world." Oh I wanted to be one of those thousand!

But I was not sure I had the faith for it. You see, I didn't like "faith" camp, the Word Of Faith movement. I had a very bad habit that everything out of my mouth was negative. If you speak negatively and you get around the Word Of Faith people they get on your nerves because they don't like those negative confessions. I just didn't like -- I'd seen a rabid form of it in Southern Illinois and as a result, I had become anti-word of faith. I wanted to be one of the thousand, but I didn't have a whole lot of faith. If you don't have a whole lot of faith, you don't like to hear a message about faith.

But I got out of bed and on my knees and prayed. I said, "God if you'll just touch me one more time I'll go anywhere and I'll do anything you tell me to do. If you'll just touch me, touch me again I want this anointing." I didn't think I'd get it though. The likelihood of me being one of those thousand was like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

I called the office, Rodney's office the next week. I had a window I could go and I wanted to find out where he would be at that time. I asked "Where is he going to be at?" They said he's going to be at Tulsa. Well Tulsa is the Word Of Faith headquarters, the Mecca for that movement. I knew that. But then I strengthened myself in the Spirit by thinking, "There are lots of churches in Tulsa, it could be any of a number of churches." I asked, "What's the name of the church he is going to be at?" They said, "Rhema." I said, "Is that where Kenneth Hagen is the pastor ?" "Yes sir".

I got off the phone and looked toward heaven and said, "You set me up! You know that is the last church in America I would want to go to. You know I have said in the pulpit 'If you come here and name in and claim it and blab it and grab it, you are at the wrong church. Go on down to Larkin Avenue.'" My wife would tell me I shouldn't say that, that I had sinned. I admitted I probably shouldn't have said that from the pulpit, but out of the heart the mouth spoke. I would never repent.

I went to Tulsa and I saw a lot of weird things. I wasn't convinced that this was God until I saw a little blind boy, 3 or 4 years old. He wasn't even prayed for by Rodney. It was one of the few times I'd ever seen Rodney let someone else pray. The children's pastor prayed for that little boy and he went out. I watched it. I timed it. It was forty-five minutes before he came to. Anyone who knows anything about little kids knows there is no way you could bribe them to lay still that long. So it must have been God touching him.

I had been judging and evaluating that meeting. I would say to myself, "I don't think that's God. That's God, that's not…" Then all of the sudden, the Judge judged me. I went from sitting up in the balcony with forty-five hundred people to getting up and coming down as close as I could get wanting the Spirit of God to come close. I knew Rodney was going to call the people who the Spirit of God was beginning to move on to come forward so he could pray for them. I wanted to be one of them.

Now God is still looking for people through whom He can show himself strong. In Chronicles it says: The eyes of the Lord look to and fro across the earth, looking for someone in whom He can show himself strong. Matthew ll:12 "From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven has been advancing forcefully and forceful people lay hold of it.

Do we have any forceful people reading this teaching? Here is the difference. Passive people when I ask what they want from God they say, "Oh, just whatever He wants to give me. You just pray and I'll take whatever He wants to give me." I don't like to pray for those kinds of people. As a matter of fact, often if it's a big crowd, I'll just walk on and not pray at all because they are not hungry and the Holy Spirit has not been stirring them for anything. The person who says that may sound 'Holy' on the front -- but I know that's just a façade of emptiness.

Generally speaking, it is not the passing person that gets things from God. It is the violent ones, who lay hold, who knock on the door and keep knocking, who ask and keep on asking. God is not impressed by our hiding behind His sovereignty: "Oh whatever God wants to give is fine". God is impressed by those who hear his Holy Spirit begin to speak to them, drawing them out, drawing them after Him. He is impressed by the ones who yield to that, who are hungry, who want more. God is impressed by the Jacobs who will wrestle with Him until they get the blessing. God is impress with the Elishas who say, "I want a double portion." God is looking for those who are not satisfied. Many of you who are reading this teaching are not satisfied and you want more. God is looking for the person who does not give up.

God is looking for people who fight, who hang on until the end. Now, God is looking for the Jacobs. You may need prophecies to be fulfilled in your life. You need a touch of the power of the Holy Spirit to give you victory over some sin areas in your life. He is looking for some with Elisha's spirit, who say, "I want more power. I want to move in the gifts. What I've seen in that person's life, I want it in my life." He is looking for the little T. L. Osbornes who, at twenty some odd years old, went to India and failed as a missionary. He was a Pentecostal and spoke in tongues, but he failed on the mission field in India. He came back and heard about this Baptist guy up in the Northwest who cast out demons, prophesied, gave words of knowledge, and the sick got healed. Osborne went and said, "God I want that." Now he didn't have hands laid on him. Instead he went home and locked himself up in the attic, fasting and praying and seeking God. He said, "I'm not coming out, Jesus, until You touch me." And in that desperate fast as he sought God, the Lord Jesus did come to him and birthed him into the most successful evangelistic ministry in the last 50 years of the twentieth century.

God is looking for that type of hunger after Him.

There is also the woman with the issue of blood who pushes through. "I've got to be healed. I've got to be healed." I'm writing a book on impartation now and I'm writing another about healing. I'd rather believe the promises and die disappointed not understanding the mystery of why I wasn't healed. I'd rather fight the good fight of faith and have Christians around me believing it's possible up to the very end. I remember several years ago at Tom Jones's church in Englewood, Florida, this guy came up to me in a wheel chair. He had fourteen days to live. His wife got him to come. He had contracted AIDS as a hemophiliac through a blood transfusions. We prayed for this guy in the wheel chair and nothing seemed to happen. Three days later he woke up and no longer had AIDS. A year later I was ministering in his church again. He walked up to me and said, "Do you recognize me?" I said, "No I don't." He said, "Do you remember the man in the wheel chair with the patch over one eye?" "Yeah," I said, "the guy dying of AIDS?" "That was me. I did not feel anything when you prayed, but three days after, but three days later I was totally healed."

I want to tell you that God is the God who can do anything. If you haven't already received what you need, then press in to Him for it. Press in for your healing, for your impartation. Press in.

One time I prayed for a 23 year old young man who was dieing of pancreatic cancer. He came up to us and we prayed for him and prayed for him and prayed for him. Finally he got healed of pancreatic cancer and today he is a missionary in Mexico with a healing ministry of his own.

I wanted a healing anointing all my life, so I pressed into God for one. Healing has been my passion, because at 18 years old I was severely injured in a car accident, spinal injury, paralysis, digestive system. Almost all the bones in my face were broken, 60 stitches in the face. I almost had a steal plate. I'm so glad they didn't put that steal plate in, what a nightmare going through the metal detectors at airports! God healed me and raised me up. He healed my grandmother. I had seen healing and I believed in it and I wanted it.

It was that hunger for a healing anointing that what made me go see Rodney Howard Brown in Tulsa. It was my friend on the phone. When I asked him, "What is the fruit of this in your life?", he said "I have seen more healing in the last eight weeks than I have seen in the last eight years." That is how the Holy Spirit hooked me and drew me to Tulsa. He knew that above everything else, I know what it's like to lie on a bed and not know if you'll ever walk again. I know what it's like when your health is suddenly gone. That type of person doesn't care about programs the church has, he just wants to experience God's healing power.

I wanted the reality of God's Presence to heal the sick. So I humbled myself and went to the last place on earth that I would have thought I was likely to go.

Sometimes we have to do that. Sometimes we have to want something from God more than we want our pride or our convictions or our reputation or our convenience. When we are hungry and we press into God, that is usually when He meets us.