For The Love Of A Preacher

I love preachers. Although, through out my fifty-plus years of preaching, I have been hurt by a lot of preachers, I still love preachers! Even when I see a preacher mess up, I will take up for him and try to help him get on track, because God gave me a love for the ministry. Too many wounded soldiers have been kicked aside because others didn’t think they would ever rise again, or else they didn’t think they were worth the time and effort to carry out of the battle zone and be revived. You can ask my wife about the times we have been sitting at a restaurant table and when someone would start talking negatively about a preacher, my anger would rise, and to the chagrin of those who wanted to hear more, I would shut down the discussion in a heartbeat. Even my wife has done so a number of times. In fact, I have a message called, “For The Love Of A Preacher” which I have been called upon to preach on numerous occasions in support of preachers. Why is that? Because, whether right or wrong, the ministry deserves honor and respect. There have been a few times, I am saddened to say, that even we have been caught up in the same spate of being critical of a preacher. However, after having done so, the Spirit of God has chastised us and explicitly ordered us to “Never do it again!” In most cases, these men (and women) have sold themselves out to the ministry and elected to live by faith and by doing so most of them do not live normal lives with normal jobs and normal paychecks, but they are servants to the people. Almost everyone makes mistakes (I have made my share), but that’s all a part of the learning and growing process which applies to every believer, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13 NAS).

When talking about how men deal with emotional pain, I often liken it to a man who is hammering a nail into a piece of wood. All of us, at one time or more in our lives, have missed the nail and hit our thumb. The pain is excruciating, but the first thing we do is cover the wounded thumb with our other hand. That does not numb or even alleviate the pain, but it covers it.

It has been a very trying time for all of us. I am a man of prayer, and I say that without reservation, but lately there have been mornings that I have sat in my “prayer chair” and the words just wouldn’t come out. I didn’t know what to say. At times like that, I always pray in the Spirit (in tongues), but sometimes I couldn’t even do that. All I could do was groan in my spirit. Of course, the devil would taunt me and say, “You sound like a fool,” but I recalled the scripture that says, “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words…” (Rom. 8:26 NAS).

I hope you will allow me, please, to briefly indulge you with a little transparency. In 1997, our son, Donnie, Sr., had an experience with God at the Brownsville Revival in Pensacola, Florida. He was so gloriously changed that words fail me to give it adequate description. We were pastoring a church in Red Oak, Texas at the time, and he would go up to the church alone at night, turn on the sound system and for hours he would walk back and forth across the platform singing the Brownsville worship songs that he loved, all the time worshiping God with all of his heart and soul. What a change! In the services, he would dance before the Lord without inhibition; his arms outstretched to God in full and complete surrender. Then, some of the very people who I pastored, made comments about his style of worship and he got wind of it. I tried to “nip it in the bud” and get him to ignore it, but the damage had already started. Some of the people in the church would not associate with him because of his “baggage,” and so slowly but surely the enemy used that to divert his course. In the months that followed, I remember, through blinding tears, appealing to him to hold fast to what God had given him and not allow the ignorance of these modern day Pharisees and religious “wanna-be’s” to interrupt what God had started. But, he had seen it just too many times. As a child, he had heard the lies told about us. He had often heard me brutally attacked by deacons and elders and to this day it is still too much for him to process.

I realize that at the end of the day, the decision to live for God is ultimately his, and I cannot spend the rest of my life blaming others for where he is at today. However, at the same time, I do believe that his blood will be on their hands, come Judgment Day. His mother and I love him and will not give up hope for his total restoration, deliverance, salvation and infilling of the Holy Ghost!

To add insult to injury, the number of open doors for us to minister has not been sufficient to meet the needs. I know we are in tough times economically and I also realize that most pastors are very busy just keeping everything functioning in their respective locales. However, we make our living by ministering. It has been a constant battle just to stay afloat. We literally pray every day, “Give us this day our daily bread.” In fact, things became so desperate for us, that a few months ago, to keep from losing everything, my wife and I did the unthinkable; we pawned our wedding rings just to try to pay the bills. We have both shed tears over that because those rings represent our covenant (of 41 years thus far) with each other. We are currently facing an astronomical financial need and are now grappling with that! I began preaching when I was but a child, so I have literally preached all of my life! At this time in our lives and ministry, instead of preparing for retirement, we are continuing to try to busy ourselves, not for our future, but for survival.

Perhaps you can now understand my introversion just. I love being with preachers. I love what I do. I would sooner preach than eat, but in my case, I have to preach to eat (smile). Revelation knowledge is being poured into my spirit like liquid gold and I long to give it out. That having been said, if you see me and I do not exude the usual rhetoric or comedic style that I usually exhibit, do not take it personally. The Bible exhorts us to judge no man according to “the flesh.” Just pray for that person that the sufficiency of God’s amazing grace will carry them through the thing they are dealing with. Will Rogers once said, “The best way out of difficulty is through it.”

I hope you will not just read this post and then lay it aside as the blather of yet another “begging preacher.” All I ask is that you pray with us for God’s continued grace as we walk through this storm.

 

A Spiritual Journey

‎Life is a journey. The life  of the believer is a journey into Truth (John 14:6). Over my fifty plus years of ministry, the Lord Jesus has taken me through stages into a deeper revelation of Himself. I remember when God began uprooting, revamping and changing my belief system.  It shook me to the core.  At first I wasn’t sure what was happening to me.  I vividly remember where I was about the time it began.  I was teaching a Bible study in a home near us every Tuesday night on a weekly basis.  We most often had a full “house.”  We were into our 5^th year of doing this, when suddenly, occasionally while I was teaching, I would find myself questioning some things I had just said.  I kept it inside, but the struggle was intensifying with each ensuing week.  Finally, one night, I leaned back in my chair and looked at the precious people who had gathered to hear me teach, and simply said, “There is something happening to me right now that I can’t explain. The angel of the Lord called the seed of God in Mary ‘that holy thing’ (Luke 1:35 KJV). She didn’t know what it would look like or what color its hair or eyes would be.  All she knew at this point was that what she was carrying in her womb was a ‘holy thing’.”  I went on to say, “I am unable to give you details right now for two reasons.  #1, because I don’t quite understand what it is that is growing and moving inside of me, and #2, I’m not sure that I am at liberty to share what it is that God is doing in my heart. The Bible says, ‘the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him’ (Psalm 25:14 KJV). All I can tell you is that I am on a journey.”

I wasn’t quite prepared for the impact that this journey would have on my life and even in our relationships with people who had become what I thought were some of our dearest friends. One night, some weeks later, after I had spoken with unyielding apostolic-prophetic authority, the Bible studies ended abruptly. I grieved in my spirit for a long time after that denouement. Regrettably, some of the people who I had invested 5 years of my time, energy, strength and study into, now distance themselves from me, which still causes me to sometimes lurch in bewilderment. I am not sure that I ever got over it, because in the process I feel like I lost fellowship with compatriots of the same ideologies. 

I have sought after God since I was five years old.  As boy, while other kids were out playing sports, etc., I was shut up in my room, praying and poring over God’s Word.  Over the years, I got to know God through His Word.  At the same time, my belief structure was being formed by the men and women of God who impacted and influenced my life.  We all do the same thing. The fact is that most people believe what they believe because of what they “picked up along the way” during their spiritual journey.  Some of it was truth; some it was just the “doctrines of men.” In retrospect, I will say that I do not believe for a moment that anybody set out to deceive me.  They taught what they taught because that’s all they knew.

We have come to this shoal in time, two millenniums removed from the cross, and I am seeing a shaking in the church world.  Unfortunately, many Christians are calling it “spiritual warfare,” when in fact satan is not responsible for all of the tumultuous upheavals that are taking place. Psalm 50: 3 declares, “Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence: a fire shall devour before him, and it shall be very tempestuous round about him.” God is shaking us!  God is trying to get us to rid ourselves of some stuff that He never gave to us in the first place…stuff that we just acquired along the way! Some of what the church tenaciously holds on to today as “sound doctrine,” is really an amalgamation of stuff that we learned from others along the way.   The Word of God declares, “…The people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits” (Daniel 11:32). That knowledge of God only comes from intimacy with Him in fasting and prayer and seeking after Him. 

I am an itinerant minister, and I will occasionally find myself embattled with religious spirits that are rampant in a few of the churches that I speak at.  Whenever I tell a church body that a lot of what has been coined as “spiritual warfare,” is often nothing more than a spiritual frustration that was initiated from God, some people get all “up in arms.”  The Charismatic word-of-faith mindset that we have assimilated over the past twenty years, does not allow for process, and so what we do is go on the offensive against anything that might try to shake us loose from embedded beliefs!

These days we hear everybody talking about the HARVEST. However, let me ask you, what have we sown to get a harvest? So much of what has been sown is mingled seed. What kind of harvest will we reap from that?  “Is the seed yet in the barn? Indeed, the vine, the fig tree, the pomegranate, and the olive tree have yielded nothing. But from this day on I will bless you” (Haggai 2:19 ESV). We need the pure seed of the Word of God and not the product of men’s ideas.  “…The seed is the word of God” (Luke 8:11 AKJ).

Some years ago, my younger brother, Arlen, had an encounter with God at the Toronto Revival.  It so revolutionized his life that he has never been the same since.  I recall that in the wake of that experience and even up until our mother’s passing over a year ago, he would call me from Canada and we would have lengthy conversations in which he would describe to me the “rumblings” of change that were effecting in his spiritual journey.   It was interesting because, although we seldom talk to each other, what he was experiencing, I was as well.   It was and is a metamorphosis, if you please.  My siblings and I have a rich Pentecostal heritage. We were blessed to have two very godly parents.  We were not only “raised in church,” but we were taught the art of seeking after God in our home.  Some of my most memorable experiences with God occurred to me as a child in our living room as we bathed and basked in the presence of God.  The same holds true of Caroline, my beautiful wife of forty-one years. She, as well, grew up “in the presence of God.” She received spiritual impartation from some of the greatest men of God of the twentieth century, men such as Jack Coe, A. A. Allen, William Branham, etc.  As we began our journey together over four decades ago, it had already been prophesied over us that we would embark on a spiritual journey together that would often take us into “unchartered territories,” and so it has been.

When that alteration began in my life, it challenged my doctrine, my eschatology, my approach to ministry, even my relationships with people.  I began to search out God’s Word, praying constantly that I would hear only what He said and carefully filter out what men have taught us to believe. Truth is what God says; religion is what man says God said. I remember telling the Lord, “This can’t be happening! I have believed a specific way about certain things for years! I have even taught it to the people who you entrusted to my oversight in ministry.  Now, what do I do? How will I face the music? What will my colleagues and friends think? They will surely think that I am unstable or slipping off into some false doctrine. I dare not tamper with what men have tenaciously held to as truth!” And then the Lord reminded me that Saul of Tarsus (before he was converted and became the apostle Paul), had wreaked havoc on Christians by stoning and imprisoning them, all in the name of what he believed was truth! And yet, when Ananias prayed for him (Acts 9), the scales that fell from his blinded eyes brought physical sight but the scales that fell from the eyes of his soul, brought spiritual insight and a powerful incomparable revelation of Jesus Christ!

There is a program on television called, “Hoarders.”  It is difficult for me to watch because I grew up in an immaculate home where clutter and disorder were almost considered cardinal sins.  My mother believed that “cleanliness was next to godliness” and we all lived by that rule.  Whenever  I watch that show, I can relate it to many well-intentioned Christians that I know, who over the years accumulate so much religious “stuff,” and simply will not let go of it at any cost!  At the same time, we are all crying out for revival and then wonder why revival is not coming.  It is because we have too much baggage from our past and anytime God does a “new thing” in the earth (Isaiah 43:19), we drag the religious holdings from our past into it. The real truth is we don't want God messing with our stuff! Like the church at Ephesus, we say, 'I have everything I want. I don't need a thing!' And you don't realize that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked” (Rev. 3:17 NLT). 

The past eight and a half months since Caroline's stroke has affected our lives on so many levels.  It has become a desert place. Deserts are dry, empty waste places and the craggy mountains are not vacation spots.  Our wilderness journeying has taken much away from us, only to bring us into a revelation of God unlike we have ever known!  The voice of God is calling from behind the veil for us to "come into His presence." Sadly, because so many think they have "arrived," they will lumber along week after week with the mindset of "this is how it's done," and go through the same motions that churches and preachers have pretty much done for the past century. Consequently they will not follow the “proceeding Word of the Lord."

Bishop Noel Jones has said, "God is never recognized; He is only revealed." What an awesome statement! That revelation of God will not come until, like Moses on the backside of the desert, we are stripped of the modus of Egypt (a type of old systems and ideas), remove the shoes of religious comfort from our "walk" and behold our God as a consuming fire! It will be a humbling process indeed. At that point, our rhetoric will change from, "Look who I am" to "Who am I?"

The superficial form of powerless religion and churchanity that presently exists and exalts itself will not accomplish God's purpose in the earth.  In a vision, the Lord recently revealed to John Kilpatrick (the former pastor of Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola) that church systems and many television networks and ministries, as we know them, are going to be shaken to the core. Some will even collapse and fall because God never was in that or had any part of it.  We have glorified men and not God, and the word of the Lord clearly says that "no flesh should glory in His presence" (I Cor. 1: 29 KJV).

That having been said, the church needs to stop minimizing its strength by majoring on those things that could divide us and unite ourselves with the common thread that unites us all and that is JESUS! While some people’s eschatology has the church escaping this planet in a mysterious rapture, I believe that this is the hour of the unleashing of God’s power in an unprecedented manner! The Church must be born again (Galatians 4:19) until Christ is formed in us!

I believe that every true man or woman of God should come to that place. The worship song that we often hear sung, says, “Change my heart, O God, make it ever true. Change my heart, O God, may it be like You. You are the potter; I am the clay. Mold me and make me; this is what I pray.”

CHURCH, we need to PRAY!

We need to seek God’s FACE and not His hand!

We need to pray for a REVOLUTION that will produce a REVIVAL in all of us!

It will come at a great price, but the outcome will be an unprecedented manifestation of God's glory in the earth!

“Teach me what I cannot see; if I have done wrong, I will not do so again” (Job 34:32).

"…I have put my words in your mouth, and I have covered you in the shadow of my hand, that I may plant the heavens, and lay the foundations of the earth, and say to Zion, You are my people" (Isaiah 6:1-8 AKJ).

“For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14).

My journey continues.