I Have the Gift...
....and prayerfully, yet cautiously move in it when I am sure the Holy spirit is speaking and moving, and NOT me!
Years ago, three days after my rifle failed to discharge a fatal round into my mouth in an attempt to end my life, my wife and I attended a church in Santa Ana that had been a place I had heard some very good things about. On top of that, this church was known for "not" discriminating against believers who were divorced and remarried.
As I've shared before, my first wife simply didn't want to be married any longer, and left me for another man. We were victims of marrying young..
My second wife became physically abusive (after a year of marriage), which was something I had should've seen, but was so hungry for love and acceptance after my first failed marriage, that I jumped from the "frying pan, into the fire!" and after several incidents where law enforcement was called to calm her down (I was too embarrassed to have her arrested), and immediately after she threatened to kill me, we divorced.
You add into my failed marriages, an addiction to porn and picking up hookers (no emotional commitments with them), you can see why I had sunk low enough into the pit of darkness, sin and self pity, that I believed that Jesus was NOT big enough to pull me back out of the pit and put my feet on the path to His Kingdom (a place I lost sight of with my marriage failures), and it was a demonic influenced, emotional/mental recipe for "suicide!"
The evening we attended that church. I was as far down as possible (spiritually), and this was a last gasp effort to find a reason to go on!
There was an evangelist at the service, who moved in prophecy, and one thing led to another (borrowing a word from John Candy in "Stripes"), and we were one of six couples picked out of a church with nearly 2,000 people in attendance, to "receive a word." Of course, I didn't believe, and I was only going up to make a spectacle of the guy when "his words" were so far off in the woods that I could proclaim to the group gathered that night, that this guy was nothing more than a Peter Popoff puppet, and leave!
Well, his words were not wrong, in fact he recited, word for word, two different lines from the suicide letter I left for my wife. Now, keep this in mind! The letter was three pages long, and my burned it without ever reading it the night before we went to that church.
Hearing these sentences, word for word, brought me to tears, and he went on to share four things that have since come to pass in my restored ministry, marriage and finances.
In other words, he was right on!!!
This led me to begin to sense things, when praying with people, and when I shared these words, those people were as amazed as me, and the changes I shared, have come to pass in the lives of those I prayed over.
So, if prophecy has had its time and place, I'd have to disagree. However, there will always be those who are fakes, using the tools of the true gift to rip off believers and nonbelievers alike!
BTW - prophecy has a lot to do with discernment, I have always believed the two go hand in hand!
I would never begin to suggest that any of you need this gift to be a believer, but I would hope, on the other side, that you would not be too judgmental on those who have the gift. It just could be alive and available in today's world, and we'll only know for sure when we stand before God and hear what HE has to say!
