A Hunger For God
By, Carol Wimber
In 1976 I went to God asking him what was wrong with our
local Quaker church. John had left the pastorate there two years earlier, and
all that we had worked so hard for seemed to be waning. Instead of pointing his
finger at the church, God started showing me where I was wrong. And that
September I had a disturbing dream.
In my dream I stood preaching to a large crowd from a
soapbox at the end of my street. My topic was the gifts of the Holy Spirit. I
considered myself an expert on the subject. After all, for years I was
responsible for running church members who practiced gifts like tongues,
healing, or prophecy- gifts I considered dangerous and divisive. I preached
through my well rehearsed seven-point sermon, when suddenly, at the final
point, a sensation like hot electricity hit my head, traveled down my body,
then up and out of my mouth. I awoke speaking in tongues.
I felt so troubled by the dream and experience of speaking
in tongues that my confidence and self-assurance began draining away, like a
bag of sand with a hole a the bottom. “Perhaps,” I thought, “I don’t know as
much as I thought I did about the Christian life. Maybe I have been a Pharisee
all these years.” What frightened me so much was that I thought I had been
sincere with God. And I sincerely judged everyone else’s relationship with God
according to my personal standards- the closer they came to believing and
behaving as I did, the closer I thought they were to God. That is a pitiful
confession, but that is the way I lived.
The pressure of these thoughts continued building. A few
weeks later I fell on my bed in tears. “Oh God,” I cried out, “if all that
stuff (meaning spiritual gifts like tongues and healing) is from you, then I
have barely known you all these years.”
There was a long silence. Then I sensed in my heart a gentle
answer: “You’re right.”
I was so devastated that I stopped teaching Bible studies,
resigned from the church board, and stopped giving my opinion about anything
spiritual. I abandoned all that I had been so devoted to and hid out at home.
For three weeks, I wept and repented of my attitude toward God and his Spirit.
Today I look back on that experience as a “personality meltdown,” a breaking of
my self-will that was so profound I have never been the same sense.
During this time God showed me how blind and naked I was, how in my self-assurance I had missed knowing him for
years. Then he showed me what he had wanted to do through John years before,
and how I stood in the way and prevented John from moving out in greater faith
and power.
My heart was broken. My tears were pleas for mercy as he
showed me all that I had been responsible for John missing. He reminded me that
15 years previously, just after our conversions, John spoke in tongues and
prayed for our son, Sean’s healing, but I persuaded him that it was not from
God. Turning away from those experiences wounded John, saddling him with a
sense of loss. God had a pattern, a blueprint for renewal, and John was the key
in what he wanted to do. But so far we had missed it, and I was responsible.
Out of this terrible crucible of guilt and sorrow a
desperate longing and hunger for God emerged. This hunger was not for his will;
it was for God himself. Psalm 73:21-23 became my passage: “When my heart was
grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute
beast before you.” I knew that I had come from pride and arrogance to
senselessness and ignorance. In verse 25 the Psalm goes on to say, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And being with you, I desire
nothing on earth.” That verse described my passion for God. I’ve never been
interested in anything else since then. In the middle of my pain I somehow felt
that what was happening wasn’t just for John, and me it was for all the people
we had cared for over the years. So many had come to God only
to wander away.
Nest God told me to make restitution with those people I had
wounded. I went to many people I had driven out of the church and asked for
their forgiveness. They responded first with surprise and then joy. As I was
reconciled with those I had sinned against, God lifted the weight of my guilt.
My tears began to dry.
Soon God stopped showing me what he had wanted to do in the
past and began to show me what he was going to do in the future. I strongly
sensed God’s desire for his bride, for the whole church- Protestant, Catholic,
and Orthodox. God used an unusual experience to tell me that what he had in
store went beyond our little Quaker church. One afternoon I was sitting by our
swimming pool and in my minds eye I saw us all being baptized in the water. I
was startled, both by the vision itself and by the idea of water baptism. So
from that moment I knew he was going to do something that went outside of our
denominational boundaries. God was about to sweep us into his plans, and his
plans had room for many, many people.
I told John very little about my experience, because my
earlier spiritual influence in his life had been destructive. “Lord,” I prayed,
“if this is you, then you influence John. I no longer trust myself in these
matters.”
In October of 1976 a few leaders in our church started a
home meeting to encourage one another in their teaching ministries. When I
heard about the gathering God said, “This is it.” This was the beginning of the
church he had shown me. When I first attended I knew why. God was undoing the
self-sufficiency of the leaders; they were becoming learner’s again- students
with a hunger for God. We would meet and break into small groups and pray for
each other. We worshipped God for hours content to
sing and listen to his voice in the midst.
The meeting grew from 12 to 50 in a few weeks. People were
coming back who had been away for years. John began attending fairly regularly
in January of 1977. By March there were over 125 adults attending, packing
every room and hall, even spilling over onto the patio.
Eventually our denomination asked us to leave, and we
understood why. We agreed to leave, but only under one
condition: that the church write a letter of release and give their blessing.
They wrote the letter, encouraging us to do what God had called us to do. With
that we received an important spiritual blessing. I believe their blessing
might explain some of the shaking and quaking and signs and wonders that we
soon began to experience, because the history of the Friends of Jesus- or
Quakers (as they were mockingly called by others)- is full of stories of the
miraculous intervention of God. Leaving the church proved difficult because
these people had been very kind to us over the years. We raised our children
together, and many of them were our mentors. But God was calling us to
something new.
The following week, on Mother’s Day,
John’s attitude toward God, the church, and Scripture
changed from what it had been in the past. Time and again he said that for
years he had tried to run the church but now h was committed to giving it to
Jesus, no matter what the cost. John challenged us to read Scripture as
learners and doers, never being content with only learning something new, but
always aiming at changing the way we lived.
For three years, more and more spiritual renewal occurred.
During that time we learned more about healing, words of knowledge, and giving
away the ministry to others both by teaching and by the laying on of hands.
On Mother’s Day of 1981 a watershed experience launched us
into today is called power evangelism. John invited a young man attending our
church to preach on that Sunday evening. By now we had grown to over 700
participants. The young man shared his testimony, and then asked all the people
under the age of 25 (two-thirds of the congregation) to come forward. None of
us ha a clue what was going to happen next. When they got to the front the
speaker said, “For years now the Holy Spirit has been grieved by the church,
but he’s getting over it. Come Holy Spirit.”
And he came.
Most of these young people had grown up around our home with
our own four children. We knew these young adults well. One fellow, Tim,
started bouncing. His arms flung out as he fell over, taking a mike stand down with him. He was tangled up in the cord, with the
mike next to his mouth. He began speaking in tongues, and the sound carried
throughout the high school gymnasium in which we met.
We had never considered ourselves charismatic, and certainly
had never placed emphasis on the gift of tongues. We had seen a few people
tremble and fall over before, and we had seen many healings. But this was
different. The majority of the young people were shaking and falling over. At
one point it looked like a battlefield scene, bodies everywhere, people weeping, wailing, speaking in tongues. And Tim in the middle of it all babbling into the microphone.
There was much shouting and loud behavior!
John sat quietly playing the piano, but he was wide-eyed and
outraged. Members of our staff were fearful and angry. Several people got up
and walked out, never to return. But I knew God was visiting us. I was
thrilled, because I had been praying for power for so long. This might not have
been the way I wanted to see it come, but this was how God gave it to us. I got
up and started walking over to the bodies and put my head next to them. I could
feel the power, like heat or electricity, radiating from their bodies.
“What’s happening to you right now?” I asked one boy who lay
on the floor.
“It’s like electricity. I can’t move!” he said. I was amazed
by the effect of God’s power on the human boy. I suppose I thought that it
would all be an inward work, such as conviction or repentance. I never imagined
there would be strong physical manifestations.
But John wasn’t as happy as I. He didn’t like the people
sprawled our over the floor, yelling in tongues and shaking violently. He spent
that night reading Scripture and historical accounts of revival from the lives
of people like Whitefield and Wesley. He was afraid of doing anything that
wasn’t explicitly outlined in the Bible. But his study did not yield conclusive
answers to questions raised fro the previous evening’s events. By
That was all John needed. He didn’t have to understand the trembling
or why everything happened as it did. All he needed to know was God did it. We
met with our staff that morning, and the Holy Spirit came haling old wounds and
hurts and delivering us from fear. John declared that he was willing to put up
with the discomfort of not knowing or understanding how the Holy Spirit works;
never again, to the best of his ability, would he quench the Spirit.
At that time a revival broke out among our junior high and
high school aged young people. Hundreds of teenagers were converted to Christ
through power encounters. Our young people witnessed to and healed others in
the streets, restaurants, and stores. We baptized hundreds of new converts
during the next few months, on our swimming pool and pools all around town.
John was cautious not to draw conclusions too quickly about
what God was doing. Instead he watched, and prayed asking God to bless these
events. We wanted what God wanted not what we thought should happen. We learned
to accept what God was doing, no matter how strange it appeared to us. We
became willing to risk our reputation for the sake of knowing God.
The Lord blessed the Anaheim Vineyard Christian Fellowship;
but in the end, all of this means nothing if that vital ingredient is missing:
hunger for God.