God’s Power is strongest when we are at our weakest. One of the most intense revivals I have experienced was also the smallest. A microcosm of those I would later see, it took place on our property in Victoria and lasted less than a year.
In that brief time two members of my family and a secondary school teacher came to the Lord and many others in and around the nearby town were changed as the Lord touched them powerfully and personally. Both members of my family are still preaching nearly 40 years later, and the teacher went on to become an accomplished pastor.
But the awesome presence of the Holy Spirit in the meetings was getting too much for me to handle, so one day I walked down to the creek on the property to spend some quiet time with the Lord. I wanted to tell Him how perplexed I was about the things I was seeing. I had no one to explain to me the unusual ways people were affected when the Spirit of God was present in power.
“Lord, I’m in over my head,” I prayed. “I know that these things are from you, but nothing in my experience has prepared me for this!” My father, an excellent teacher of the inspirational kind, had taught me in the basic truths of the New Testament, but I needed to connect with someone who could explain to me why people were being so affected by the Spirit of God.
Not long after we moved to Brisbane, and a few years later I became assistant pastor to the one man able to teach me what I needed to know: Clark Taylor. Many things were planted in the seedbed of my spirit while I was under his leadership. The church itself was experiencing a powerful revival and doubled in number from 800 to 1600 in one year, during which I came to understand what had happened, albeit in a much smaller way, years before in Victoria.
After a year in the large church the Lord gave me a vision to begin a church on Brisbane’s Bayside. The day before our first meeting He dropped a mantle on my shoulders that empowered me for the work I was about to start. I adapted what I had learned in the large church to this new church and the Lord began to touch people powerfully. Six years later I began to minister overseas about twice a year.
I have learned much since praying for God’s help down by the creek those many years ago, and these days have a much better understanding of the things of the Spirit of God. In 1 Corinthians 2:14 the Apostle Paul refers to “the things of the Spirit of God” as what “eye has not seen, ear has not heard, neither has entered into the heart of man”. Although “behind in no gift” the believers in the church at Corinth had problems that were and still are common to converts in a culture steeped in idolatry.
To fully understand the wisdom that Paul describes as invisible, inaudible and inconceivable, we need to read Job 28:7. “There is a path that no bird knows, and which the vulture’s eye has not seen. The lion’s whelps have not trodden it, nor has the fierce lion used it.”
Job is speaking of a path of wisdom that the keenest eye cannot see and the proud have not accessed. Job likens that hidden path to a secret vein of silver and a hidden lode of gold. He speaks of iron ore and copper, both of which were as valuable in antiquity as they are today, and his words tell us how miners of his time extracted these precious metals from the earth.
For clarity I’ll quote from the New Living Translation. (Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.) “People know how to mine silver and refine gold. They know how to dig iron from the earth and smelt copper from stone. They know how to put light into darkness and explore the farthest, darkest regions of the earth as they search for ore. They sink a mine shaft into the earth far from where anyone lives. They descend on ropes, swinging back and forth. Bread comes from the earth, but below the surface the earth is melted as by fire.
“People know how to find sapphires and gold dust – treasures that no bird of prey can see, no falcon’s eye can observe – for they are deep within the mines. No wild animal has ever walked upon these treasures; no lion has set his paw there. “People know how to tear apart flinty rocks and overturn the roots of mountains. They cut tunnels in the rocks and uncover precious stones. They dam up the trickling streams and bring to light the hidden treasures.
“But do people know where to find wisdom? Where can they find understanding? No one knows where to find it.” [End quote.]
At this point we need to remember that the wisdom that Job speaks of — the wisdom that cannot be seen by the sharpest eye or trodden by the proudest foot — is the wisdom Paul writes of in the first two chapters of First Corinthians. The ancient Greeks valued worldly wisdom (Greek: sophia) above everything else, but saw the gospel preached by Paul as laughable because it lacked sophistication.
“For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness; but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the [supposed] foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the [supposed] weakness of God is stronger than men.” (1 Corinthians 1:22-25)
Paul’s determination “not to know anything among you, except Jesus Christ, and him crucified” made him weak, afraid and very shaky, but enabled him to demonstrate the power of the Spirit of God. This, rather than the “enticing words of man’s wisdom” so beloved of the Greeks, should be the basis of their faith (1 Corinthians 2:2-5).
In refusing the signs Jews required and the wisdom Greeks prized, Paul chose a way that pleased neither. He put his witness on the line! Life on the line is about choice: whether you and I have the courage to choose to do as Paul did by putting ourselves ‘at risk’ in situations where we are so dependent on God that we find ourselves praying, “Lord, if you don’t show up, I’m sunk!” This is both daring and dangerous! (The one proviso is that we are where the Lord has led us, not just where we are of our own will.)
It helps us that the Apostle Paul did it “in weakness, in fear, and in trembling” (the Greek word translated “fear” is “phobos”, the origin of the English word “phobia”). If you don’t feel that before you preach then maybe you are preaching what people want rather than what they need. Never allow the expectations of people to determine the content of your message or the way you minister in the anointing.