As we were experiencing an awesome move of God in our church during the time of the Toronto and Brownsville revivals, we would be encouraged by the Lord in so many unique ways through prophetic revelation. My wife Linda and I would both have bizarre experiences, dreams and trances that would leave us scratching our head sometimes. Since they were so weird and, at the time, we didn’t have much of a grid for understanding prophetic ministry, we had to seek out the scriptures for wisdom and understanding about what we were experiencing. We learned from a lot by asking advice and wisdom of more seasoned prophetic people. But going through these experiences then seeking out what they meant in the Word was one of the ways we were able to develop teaching about the prophetic as well. We were going to many conferences and meetings, hearing from those who had heard from God in this move of God. We also got exposed to many different streams in the body of Christ and it was wonderful, though many times overwhelming. My wife Linda was having some vivid experiences during this season, even times where she would go into her walk-in closet to get dressed and be “hit” by the Holy Spirit and end up in a trance for an hour, oblivious to time. We were learning that as our spiritual senses were trained, we could “see’ and “hear” things that were there in the spirit realm as the veil between this world and the Kingdom was obviously so thin. One night Linda was awakened by a ringing bell, a dinner bell. She sat up, listened and heard nothing more. Already awake, she walked downstairs since she thought that was where she heard the sound coming from. She happened to pass by the China hutch in the dining room and saw a crystal dinner bell given to her as a gift by Suzanne and Benny Hinn, many years earlier. We used to be in the same church 15 years earlier. She picked it up and rang it and it was the same sound she heard in her dream! Did an angel shake it and wake her? Was it a prophetic revelation? We weren’t sure why it was happening, but when Linda heard the tinkling bell, she asked the Lord about it… He told her that…. “healing is the dinner bell to salvation…”, a gentle invitation.
We remembered how we had heard teaching from Ed Silvoso in one of those conferences we attended about how the Lord was healing a lot of unbelievers and they were struck with the question, “Who is this God who has done this for me?? How can I know Him??” We were floored how the Lord was “inviting people to dinner” and to know Him through the healing ministry! To millions of people, the Hinns represented healing and that “dinner bell” was given from them to us like an impartation! We felt this meant that when we prayed and someone got healed, this was an invitation like the dinner bell, for people to come to Jesus for salvation. In other words the healing encounter was also an invitation from the Lord to know Him. While this doesn’t mean everyone who would get healed would turn to the Lord, there was a unique grace invitation there for the person to come to Jesus by the healing. We were absolutely clear the revelation was from the Lord. This became more and more clear that supernatural encounters were always invitations from the Lord to reveal Himself to those blessed by them. This ended up being a foundational directional revelation for us as as a ministry when a few years later we headed in the direction of training and sending out teams from the church to do healing and miracles. Without this linchpin revelation we might not have gone that way, so we thank God for how He speaks! The Bible says in 2 Ch 20:20 “Trust in the Lord and you will be established,trust in His prophets and you will succeed.” We did and are so blessed for it! |
AuthorPastor Marc Lawson Archives
July 2018
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