I Had an E-mail Exchange With an Old High School Classmate
Daniel:
I was wondering from your first email that you mentioned something about your experience? Did you have a special experience with God that changed you at some point in time? I'd like to hear about it.
My experience with God was a life-changing one for me. At one point in time I realized I was a sinner and really needed God's forgiveness and help to live for Jesus Christ. So, I confessed my sins to God, asked his forgiveness, and asked Him to come into my heart to change me. Wow, what a difference He made in me right then and there. I felt completely forgiven and a love for people that I had never had before.
I've endeavored to live for Him ever since, even though I still sin at times, but my heart is to follow Jesus wherever He will lead me. That is why I served as a pastor for 12 years and a missionary for 22 years in Hawaii, Taiwan, and China. I've given up everything to follow him and feel no fear about not having much of anything now, even though I have had it all at one time or another. I care for people, but I don't really care for things.
I am going back into working with a Mission in Flagstaff, Arizona in two weeks who minister to Hopi Indians and am really looking forward to where and to whom God leads me to help next.
So, what about your experience with God?
Ralph
________________________________________________
Ralph,
I was a Methodist of sorts, going to church with my mother and attending the Youth Fellowship for social life, cookies, and punch. The Beatles, Doors, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company kind of broadened my perception. A little marijuana, a little crystal meth, a little Ouija board experience broadened me some more. Friends were into Edgar Cayce, meditation, and Eastern religions. After learning TM I got really caught up in the occult and reading tomes on Sufism and Buddhism. I joined a meditation class at the metaphysical bookstore in Honolulu, and in a particular meditation I came face to face with a deceiving spirit. This was the experience that changed me. This spirit had been influencing me toward the occult and attitudes that would lead me to lay down my authority over it to allow it to enter my mind.
Well, it was there, and I had suddenly been able to see that it was a deceiving spirit by the agency of another above both it and me. So we were three. I put the words to the revelation: that thing needed me to lower my authority, so I was naturally above it. We were both below the one who opened my mind's eye to see what the spirit wanted to remain hidden. The deceiving spirit did not know that it was doing the higher one's bidding, which was for me to be trained and enabled (for what I did not know). The higher one was watching what was going on all the time, and when I was ready and the spirit threatening, I was more or less harvested. Well, maybe transplanted.
The gist of what I got out of that experience was that the world did not operate the way I thought it did. We have a worldview that is formed from our accumulated experience and education. I realized that the world did not work that way, certainly not the way I had been pursuing -- I was going the wrong way! I never felt I was a sinner, but my repentance was almost immediate in that I saw the arrangement of the world was as the Bible describes, and the way "we" think it operates is an illusion, a mistake, ignorance of the truth. I was deceived -- we's all deceived!
I think that was Monday or Tuesday. On Friday my friend took me to Rod Wilson's Bible study at the House of Praise in Kaimuki. When I went forward it was to acknowledge that the Bible is true and that Jesus Christ is Lord, as it says he is. It has never left my consciousness that I was deceived and that we all are deceived. Deluded may be a better word. Our ignorance is undeniable. So when I went to Melodyland (and ever since), I have sought to learn and to disprove what I learn. I know that what I learn isn't right, but there is truth in it. We read horribly -- we misread and misperceive -- and then we believe our mistakes! What I can't disprove I hold on to lightly. There is another way to understand what it says -- the Bible means what it says, but doesn't say what it means (it says the truth, but says it symbolically). Revelation of what it means comes and everything changes -- and it is wonderful.
I can't take time now to tell you about my baptism in the Holy Spirit and the upswelling of joy and gratitude from the bowels, or of the time I saw and audibly heard Jesus, or of when I watched my shorter arm grow out, or of how I have come to perceive the oneness of God and how it is that he is becoming. I just know that the world is what he is doing, and what he is doing is becoming, and that all of this has been "in house!"
I'll leave you tonight with this to ponder: how does the Ineffable speak without a mouth? The same way we "speak" without using ours -- he imagines. And the word is in us. How shall we speak it?
Dan
I was wondering from your first email that you mentioned something about your experience? Did you have a special experience with God that changed you at some point in time? I'd like to hear about it.
My experience with God was a life-changing one for me. At one point in time I realized I was a sinner and really needed God's forgiveness and help to live for Jesus Christ. So, I confessed my sins to God, asked his forgiveness, and asked Him to come into my heart to change me. Wow, what a difference He made in me right then and there. I felt completely forgiven and a love for people that I had never had before.
I've endeavored to live for Him ever since, even though I still sin at times, but my heart is to follow Jesus wherever He will lead me. That is why I served as a pastor for 12 years and a missionary for 22 years in Hawaii, Taiwan, and China. I've given up everything to follow him and feel no fear about not having much of anything now, even though I have had it all at one time or another. I care for people, but I don't really care for things.
I am going back into working with a Mission in Flagstaff, Arizona in two weeks who minister to Hopi Indians and am really looking forward to where and to whom God leads me to help next.
So, what about your experience with God?
Ralph
________________________________________________
Ralph,
I was a Methodist of sorts, going to church with my mother and attending the Youth Fellowship for social life, cookies, and punch. The Beatles, Doors, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company kind of broadened my perception. A little marijuana, a little crystal meth, a little Ouija board experience broadened me some more. Friends were into Edgar Cayce, meditation, and Eastern religions. After learning TM I got really caught up in the occult and reading tomes on Sufism and Buddhism. I joined a meditation class at the metaphysical bookstore in Honolulu, and in a particular meditation I came face to face with a deceiving spirit. This was the experience that changed me. This spirit had been influencing me toward the occult and attitudes that would lead me to lay down my authority over it to allow it to enter my mind.
Well, it was there, and I had suddenly been able to see that it was a deceiving spirit by the agency of another above both it and me. So we were three. I put the words to the revelation: that thing needed me to lower my authority, so I was naturally above it. We were both below the one who opened my mind's eye to see what the spirit wanted to remain hidden. The deceiving spirit did not know that it was doing the higher one's bidding, which was for me to be trained and enabled (for what I did not know). The higher one was watching what was going on all the time, and when I was ready and the spirit threatening, I was more or less harvested. Well, maybe transplanted.
The gist of what I got out of that experience was that the world did not operate the way I thought it did. We have a worldview that is formed from our accumulated experience and education. I realized that the world did not work that way, certainly not the way I had been pursuing -- I was going the wrong way! I never felt I was a sinner, but my repentance was almost immediate in that I saw the arrangement of the world was as the Bible describes, and the way "we" think it operates is an illusion, a mistake, ignorance of the truth. I was deceived -- we's all deceived!
I think that was Monday or Tuesday. On Friday my friend took me to Rod Wilson's Bible study at the House of Praise in Kaimuki. When I went forward it was to acknowledge that the Bible is true and that Jesus Christ is Lord, as it says he is. It has never left my consciousness that I was deceived and that we all are deceived. Deluded may be a better word. Our ignorance is undeniable. So when I went to Melodyland (and ever since), I have sought to learn and to disprove what I learn. I know that what I learn isn't right, but there is truth in it. We read horribly -- we misread and misperceive -- and then we believe our mistakes! What I can't disprove I hold on to lightly. There is another way to understand what it says -- the Bible means what it says, but doesn't say what it means (it says the truth, but says it symbolically). Revelation of what it means comes and everything changes -- and it is wonderful.
I can't take time now to tell you about my baptism in the Holy Spirit and the upswelling of joy and gratitude from the bowels, or of the time I saw and audibly heard Jesus, or of when I watched my shorter arm grow out, or of how I have come to perceive the oneness of God and how it is that he is becoming. I just know that the world is what he is doing, and what he is doing is becoming, and that all of this has been "in house!"
I'll leave you tonight with this to ponder: how does the Ineffable speak without a mouth? The same way we "speak" without using ours -- he imagines. And the word is in us. How shall we speak it?
Dan
posted by Daniel C. Branham-Steele at
1:50 AM
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