Open Heaven

There are personal anointings where you get anointed, and then there are times that I call a corporate anointing when the whole church comes under an open heaven. I'm going to talk about this open heaven in this teaching series, and I'm going to be sharing a lot of stories from Brazil, because God did some stuff to me there.

A man once asked me, "What do you do to keep from going down that downward spiral where your doctrine believes what God can do, but your experience has been less than that? Your expectation drops to the level of your experience. Then because your expectation dropped, the next year your experience is even lower. You get caught in that downward spiral -- year after year." The person who asked me that was the pastor of a large church, which averaged about a thousand people, and they all knew him.

This is a church that had once been very active in renewal. When I went back years later, I almost couldn't preach. To be honest with you, I was so grieved by how dead the church had become. The staff all wanted to meet with me because they did not like that change either. They wanted the answer to that question, "How do you avoid that downward spiral?" Then the executive pastor told me, "We lost three of our key leaders this last year. They died."

(That same thing happened in Bill Johnson's church, and their response was to angry about it. When his secretary died, he had a special service for healing, like sowing a seed and expecting more. We also had that in my own church where we had seen a key leader's wife die, but it birthed intercession in our church like never before. We just said, "Enough! No more young women dying of leukemia in our church!" It caused a militancy to come out.

Usually when you have something like that, either of two things will happen to a church. One is that it acquiesces and loses its hope, and loses its faith. The church keeps a doctrinal belief in it, but loses expectation and takes on a defeatist attitude of "Well, it doesn't work." The other thing that can happen -- the better one -- is that it will begin to press in for even more of God's power and anointing.)

So back to my story about this meeting with the senior leadership of this large church that seemed to have died. The pastor asked me, "What do you do?" I said, "I have to get out of the country at least twice a year because I believe the people almost never go higher than the level of the leader that God has placed over them." The anointing seldom ever goes above the place where the shepherd, the pastor, the leader of the church is. I just knew that regardless of what's going on, I don't have the luxury of entering those places of unbelief. I have to stay in a place of expectation. That is why I told him, "I have to go out of the country." I go to Latin America at least twice a year -- or Russia or somewhere.

What I'm sharing with you are illustrations that actually happened to me. It just happened that I was in Brazil when they occurred, but it created a whole new realm. I usually don't talk a lot about the phenomena that takes place because I don't want the focus to be on the phenomena, but the phenomena are signs.

If you're driving north from Los Angeles to San Francisco and you see a sign that says 'San Francisco 20 miles,' you don't stop at the sign, do you? The sign just lets you know you're going in the right direction and getting closer! And the lack of a sign might be an indication that you are heading in the wrong direction. I heard about somebody recently who made the wrong turn. A guy driving made the wrong turn and drove hundreds of miles in the wrong direction before he stopped and asked somebody for directions. Years ago my wife and several women wanted to go down to Memphis to see Elvis Presley's Graceland. They made the wrong turn. They got on the right interstate but they were going the wrong direction. Instead of going to Memphis, they ended up in Little Rock. They were only 20 miles from Memphis when they made that wrong turn, and 200 miles later, they ended up in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Here's the point: If you're going along for a long time and you don't see a sign, you may be going in the wrong direction. Here's another point: the closer you get, the more frequently the signs come. I am going to share a little bit about phenomena because they are signs pointing beyond themselves to the nearness of the kingdom.

About two years ago I was preaching this message. I had four interns with me at that time, four young guys. I was teaching the message I'm sharing in this teaching series. I lost the meeting in the the first ten minutes. As I was talking about phenomena that I was seeing in my ministry, a woman got up in the end section. She said, "Do you see it?!" I had spotlights on me, so I couldn't see anything. All of the interns, they just flopped out onto the floor face down. People in one place start getting up to move over there. I'm watching them, and they're exclaiming "Wow!" I was thinking, "What is happening?"

So I came down off the platform and I looked. From the ceiling about ten feet in diameter was a pillar of a cloud. I can't say it looked like a cloud -- white. It was like when you're driving and it's really, really hot and you see heat waves coming up. It was kind of like that with a five-gallon bucket full of gold-looking, silver-looking, green and red very fine glitter that had been thrown into it. It was spinning, and translucent with these colors in it. You could see it! I thought, "Oh, my gosh! The glory cloud is here!" I did not know exactly what to do. (They don't tell you in seminary what to do when the glory cloud comes, they don't really teach you that.)

I had learned a little from life experiences that were similar but not the same. There were two times in my life, 1984 and 1989, when I was touched by the Spirit so powerfully that it hurt. All my joints ached the next day. In 1989, it was so strong that I thought I was going to die. I was screaming and I was in pain because of the power that was going through my body. It was so strong and it was not pleasant; God was scaring me. I was praying under my breath, "Oh, God. I don't think You want to kill me, but You're scaring me. My body is not wired for this kind of power. If you turn it up, I'm afraid You're going to kill me. I don't think You want to kill me, but please, You are scaring me!" That really was the prayer. It was so powerful, and it lasted a long time -- 45 minutes. Then at the end of 1993, Rodney Howard-Browne prayed for me and God touched me powerfully. That time I didn't feel any electricity, I just had this tremendous peace.

But those experiences taught me to be careful. I knew that if I stuck my hand in the pillar, I might get electrocuted because this is the glory cloud! But I couldn't resist. So I walked over and put my hand in. I didn't feel any electricity, so "Oh, OK!" I stepped right into the middle. I'm the only one that stepped right into the middle of that cloud. No one else dared. No one else took advantage of it. I was standing in the cloud and it looked like the Milky Way with all these lights. They were little and there were green, red, gold-looking and silver-looking. I say gold and silver-looking because if I say gold and silver, someone will say, "Did you assay it to prove it?" No, I didn't. It just looked gold, and it looked silver, red and green. I thought, "I could touch one of those!" When I tried to touch one of the lights, it would move away from me. You couldn't touch them. But they weren't falling, either, like there was no gravity. They were just suspended like stars in a galaxy. And I felt the most tremendous peace I've ever felt in my life. I thought, "Whoa, this is really good -- this is wonderful!" It was also kind of spooky awesome. God is awesome but it can be a bit scary when we see a bit of His glory.

After I was there for awhile, my senses came back to me. I was supposed to be leading the service. So I stepped out of the cloud and then I thought, "Now what are supposed to do?" I thought, "Well, it's appropriate since God's here in a physical form, in a manifest way, we ought to worship again." So we went back into worship and worshiped for quite awhile. Then I remembered that the Lord had once told me, "When My presence is in your midst in worship, My power to heal is there." So I said, "Let's pray for healing!" Where the cloud was, there were twenty-some-odd people that had been healed. Where people weren't as close to the cloud, there were a lot less healed -- like a fourth as many people.

Then I said, "Well, now what do we do?" I said, "Well, I was teaching the sermon when it came, maybe I ought to just go back and finish it." And so I did, which I think was a mistake. Like a 'Monday-night quarterback,' you evaluate. At the time I really didn't think it was a mistake, because while I was teaching it stayed there for the longest time and then it began to go up and go out. It covered the platform all the way across from one end to the other. You could see it hanging there. We just kept looking at the cloud.