FOLLOWING THE SPIRIT

Entertained Unaware By Angels
I saw another vision, of an Indian paddling a canoe.  The waters before him went in two directions, with land in the middle. The Lord said to go north, before the end of Spring, to where the waters part.

I looked on the map.  Our house is right off Highway 45.  Highway 45 continues north­ward through Tennessee.  If you continue north on Highway 51, you reach Cairo, Illinois.  The Mississippi and the Ohio join or part at that point on the map, depending on the direction you are going.

The house was completed.  We moved in and were able to leave on the last day of Spring.  We stopped for lunch at a roadside park in Kentucky.  We prayed.  The Lord said, “Keep going, you are right on target.  Watch for the sign.”  Signs are extremely important to the Lord.  We were to learn another les­son about them from this escapade.

We drove all over Cairo, looking for a full gospel church.  We found none.  It was hot.  We noticed a large tree protruding out over the road.  We pulled under it and prayed.

Eve was told by the Lord that we should look for a place selling newspapers.  I found a convenience store with St. Louis and Chicago paper racks.  That didn’t deter Eve.  She determined that there might be a local paper inside.

Inside she found a woman serving food to a line of people.  This woman stopped serv­ing and asked, “May I help you?”  Eve said, “I’m looking for a local paper.”

“We have one, but it’s not out yet.  What do you really want?” she asked Eve.

“We’re looking for a Full Gospel Church.”

“There aren’t any here.  You need to go over on the other side of the river.”  We went back to the tree and prayed again.  The Lord told us to go back to Kentucky.

Back In Kentucky
When we arrived in Kentucky, I needed fuel, so I pulled into the first service station.  When I went in to pay, the woman asked,  “How are you today?” 

“Great, praise the Lord!” I replied.  I always reply, “Great, praise the Lord!”  Her hands reached for the ceiling.  Most people’s don’t.  They usually respond with a silly chuckle.

Finding Signs Related to My Vision
After I paid for my gas, I asked the little lady behind the counter in the service station if she knew where we could find a full gospel church.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “Turn left at the Court House.  The Full Gospel Tabernacle on your left is pastored by brother Dale Holcomb.”

It was a large, modern, blonde brick structure atop a hill.  I’d climbed to its top and was approaching the door of the parsonage when the pastor came out with his Bible in hand.  He took my hand and said, “Come on, you are late for prayer.”

When I told him that our trailer was still in the road down below, he said, “Hook it up to the church and meet me inside.”

By the time we were inside, his wife Ida was with him.  We told them the whole story and we all prayed heaven down.  They had been praying for God to send someone.  The pastor had turned down two who preceded us.  He told me I would be going to the radio station with him in the morning.  He wanted us to start camp meeting revival that Sunday evening.

Ida invited Eve for a walk.  She led her through town to the water’s edge.  “You see that blue water?” she asked.  “That’s the Ohio.  The brown water is the Mississippi.  It doesn’t part in Cairo, it parts here in Wickliffe, Kentucky.

“Well, that satisfies me,” Eve said.  “But I’d still like to see that Indian.”

Ida said, “I waited ’til now to tell you.  I’m full-blooded Cherokee.”  We later discovered that the first sign coming into town said, “Indian Motorcycle Dealer.”  The last building you’d pass when leaving town was the service station where I’d got gas.  It had a fifteen foot tall statue of an Indian on it’s roof!

Eve wanted to invite the two women who had given us directions, but no one knew either one of them.  At the store in Cairo, they insisted that no woman worked in their store.  We both reflected on the Scripture that says we may entertain angels while unaware of their presence.

I got gas in a service station once.  As I went to the cashier to pay, there was an old pickup parked there.  I noticed a female figure through the wind­shield on the passenger side.

There was a man standing by the right front fender on the other side of the truck from me.  He had no shirt or shoes and his hair was all over his face.  He was drunk and may have been on drugs.  He was cursing terribly.

I shouted out, “Praise the Lord.”  The woman’s eyes opened widely.  She looked full of fear and astonishment.  The man began falling back along the far side of the pickup.  He grasped the side of the truck as he went.

Holding to the tailgate, he pulled himself around the truck until he reached the driver’s door.  Sheepishly, he slipped in and drove off.

They both had seen something.  Their eyes confirmed it.  They’d seen something that brought fear to their very beings.  I don’t know what it was.  I feel it was either a very  large Angel standing behind me or it was the power of the anointed words I spoke.  Praise the Lord!

Sticking With Scripture

By the time we got settled in our new home in Baldwyn, Mississippi, we determined that we needed additional storage.  I ordered a small shed.  I was clearing weeds from some concrete blocks left over from the house construction.  Something hit my leg.  I turned swiftly around with the Weed Eater in my hands, saying, “Mark Sixteen:  seventeen and eighteen.”

The next morning a man delivered the new shed.  He called me over to the concrete blocks and showed me a male and a female copperhead, entwined together in the hole in the block.  “I’ve got a gun if you want me to shoot ’em,” he said.  “Go ahead,” I replied.

We were ministering one night, up on the Tennessee state line, when a bee lit on the frame of my glasses and injected its stinger into my temple.  I stopped preach­ing long enough to say “Mark Sixteen:  seventeen and eighteen.”  The bee fell to the floor, dead, and I felt no ill effects.

Years later, I needed a small hot water heater for a job I was doing, and I remembered seeing one in the little house on the other side of Eve’s par­ents’ home.  Her father had built it for another relative.  I went looking for it.

The door was padlocked.  As I was unlocking it, I failed to notice at least six wasp nests all around the door jamb.  They swarmed all around me and one got me on my upper lip.  Once more I spoke that Scripture, but this time my lip swelled badly.

As I walked back home for a can of wasp spray I wondered, “Why did­n’t it work this time Lord?”  By the time I had the spray in hand, my lip was back to normal.

OUR BIGGEST FISH 

On our last night in Miami, Dr. Pena took us to another doctor’s home.  His name was Dr. Zumpano.  He was a neurosurgeon.  Dr. Pena had found him with his head on the table in the doctors’ lounge at the hospital.  His son had been having seizures, as well as seeing a familiar spirit of his deceased grandfather at night from his bed.  The boy would scream and awaken his father.  This seriously affected his being able to do his work with the concentration and efficiency required of those who cut into people’s brains and spines.

Dr. Pena told Dr. Zumpano, “It’s just demons.  Your problem is nothing but a bunch of demons.  I know a couple who know a lot about them.  I’m going to bring them over to see you tonight.”

Dr. Zumpano was a psychiatrist as well as a neuro­surgeon.  He had taught and practiced in an eastern university before moving to Miami.  His wife was not excited about our visit.  She was not receptive to the “spooky” parts of religion.  She was quite aloof to us and our comments.

The Power Convicts
We shared several testimonies.  The doctor’s reaction was very intellectual and professional.  He asked, several times, “Can you substantiate that?”  My answer was, “Well, the woman was in Jackson Memorial Hospital.  The hospital listed her as brain dead.  She had been in an accident.  The stem from her brain to her spinal column had been severed.  Eve had the husband and nurse keep a tape of the Word of God play­ing in her ear around the clock.  When they disconnected her from the life support, she got out of bed and accepted Christ.  Her husband and the nurse did also.”

Then Dr. Zumpano told of seeing something unusual, himself.  He said it looked like a man, but when it turned toward him, its face resembled a gargoyle type being.  “Is that what you are calling a demon?” he asked.

Truly Spirit Led
Before I could answer, the Holy Spirit moved on Eve.  “Not only can I tell you it was a demon, I can show you where you saw it.”

That opened up the wife’s interest.  “Where?” she asked.

Eve then took this highly educated, dynamic professional, bound as he was to scientific and traditional opinions, by the hand and led him from their family room to the kitchen sink.  She pointed and said boldly, “Right there.”

They both humbly crumbled before that sovereign move of God.  I asked them if they would like to receive Christ into their lives.  They responded affirmatively.  At that moment, the son walked in with a buddy.  We all raised our hands to heaven and invited Jesus to take over their lives from that night on.

Cleaning House
The doctor with all these credentials, whom we today lovingly call “Bern,” then asked us to pray over the other sleeping children and to search his home for anything contrary to the will of god.  I found a set of occult books he had been studying, “Just out of curiosity.”  We instructed him to burn them.  We advised them to get into a good, Bible believing church.  We left the next morning and returned to Mississippi.

Bern Zumpano found a place where the Word was preached and received the baptism in the Holy Spirit.  Then he went to his Catholic church and began a spirit filled ministry that is still flourishing twenty years later.

Soon thereafter he was appointed Chief Professor of Neurosurgery and Psychiatry at Oral Roberts University.  He was in charge of pain and neuro­surgery at City of Faith Hospital for Oral Roberts in Tulsa, Oklahoma for seven years.

Today Bern has given up his letters and is the pastor of a church in Miami.  He speaks to the world weekly on several worldwide radio stations.  He has founded National Churches in a number of countries throughout the world.

Bern has spoken in healing and deliverance conferences for Eve and me in Atlanta and Orlando.  We have ministered for him in his church in Miami.  We truly landed a big fish for the Lord when we brought Bern to the feet of Jesus Christ.

As reports came back in, Jonas began making appointments for us to counsel and pray with various ones.  He turned a young man over to us he had gotten out of jail, saying,  “He’s got a ‘Flash’ Gordon spirit.  He had been arrested for indecent exposure in a public parking lot.

We went back into his life with him.  His earliest recollections were of events which brought a spirit of fear and a spirit of lewdness and perversion.  He remembered his younger brother and himself in the back seat of a car.  His father was drunk.  He pointed a gun in their faces.  He also recalled an older female cousin who was a baby-sitter for him.  She openly masturbated in front of him.

God Cleans Up Our Mess
These events opened doors to a life of fear and sexual indecencies.  Those activities occasioned opportunities which brought in more spirits.  We bound them all in the name of Jesus.  We had him commit his life to Christ and tell those spirits to go.  With our instructions prevailing, he blew them all out of his life.  Jonas jokingly told me all week long I was not to mess up his new carpet.  “Get yourself some air bags.  Don’t you mess up my carpet.”  I detected a seriousness in his joking.

A woman was scheduled to be at the church at 11 pm.  She arrived late.  She said a demon tried to kill her on the way over.  We sat her down in a chair in the center of the church.

We both discerned various spirits, including the dark spirit of death.  We drove them out, after a fight.  Eve wanted oil.  I looked about on the darkened platform and found the largest bottle of olive oil I had ever seen.

I took the cap off and poured some oil in Eve’s hand and some in mine.  I put the bottle on the floor.  As we anointed the fully delivered woman the bottle of oil tipped over.

There was a “glug-­glug” sound, as I desperately reached for the bottle.  There, on the pastor’s new carpet was a puddle, not a spot.  My first thought was, “How am I going to get that trailer loose?”

Eve reached toward the floor with a single tissue in her hand and the word “Jesus” on her lips.  The Lord responded to our peril immediately.  All three of us were looking at the spilled oil.  It rose out of the carpet as a vapor and passed right through the ceiling.  We sat gaping as we observed it’s departure.  We praised the Lord.  Eve said, “Look, God even cleans up our messes.”

Ministering The Power
The next day, every one in the church had heard about this marvelous move of God.  The stage was set for Sunday.  It began early.  The phone at the bedside of Jonas awakened him with a persistent ringing.

He answered but no one spoke.  A voice sputtered, “I must have dialed the wrong number.”  “Is that you Robert?”  Robert was Jonas’s best friend.  He was an addict.  He finally admitted it was him.  “Robert, why don’t you come to church?”  The line went dead.  Robert was gone.

Jonas loved Eve and her country ways.  That night she played her guitar.  She sang It’s Real, Ain’t No Grave, and one or two others.  He was mock­ing the little dance steps she did as she played and sang.  He called her his sec­ond mother.

When he brought me up, he told me not to preach.  “They get plenty of the Word.  What they need is God’s power.  Take your liberty, brother.”  I went up and down the aisle, calling people out and giving them words of knowledge.  I spoke conditions and laid hands on the ones who responded to the calls.

Take The Light Wherever You Go
A line began to form.  We took turns with them.  A woman came up who said she was claustrophobic.  I told her to go home.  I wanted her to stand in her living room and declare her freedom.  I instructed her further, “After the living room, go to your bed room and do the same.  Then close yourself in the darkness of your closet.  Tell that demon he has no more place in your life.  Tell him you have conquered fear and all of its ramifications, in Jesus’ name.”

Standing Up As Husband And Father
A man came forward confessing impotence.  He said it was affecting his role as father as well as husband.  I laid hands on him and said, “Take your rightful position and exercise it.  Live your place fully and boldly in your household, in Jesus’ name.”  It was a divine command spoken from the Throne to his spirit.

His wife was bragging on him all over the church grounds for days to come.  The woman came forward at the next service.  She testified that her fear of being alone was gone.  She told how she had found herself alone in an elevator.  “I just shouted out, ‘I’m not alone and never will be again.  I’ve got Jesus with me every where I go, and I’m not afraid anymore.’”

Facing Addiction Head-On
There was one call that no one answered that Sunday night.  The Lord prompted me to make the call again.  He also reminded me of a story to tell.  The story did it.  Something moved a man from the back row.  He came running up, crying like a baby.  It was Robert, Jonas’s best friend.

“I’m hooked on heroin.  I can’t break it.”  His arms were above his head.  “Of course you can’t,” I said, “you’ve got to give it to Jesus.  He says no burden is too great for Him, so let go.  Get rid of that demon.  Be whole in Jesus’ name.”  The next day we put Robert on a bus to go live with his mother in Texas.