“Jesus replied, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” -John 3:3
In the original Greek language the phrase that Jesus used for “born from above” has a double meaning. It also means “born again”. When Jesus first spoke this to a man named Nicodemus it was perplexing to him, he couldn’t understand how it could be possible.
“How can a grown man be born again?” Nicodemus asked. “He certainly cannot enter his mother’s womb and be born a second time!” -John 3:4
Like Nicodemus, when I met Jesus it totally caught me by surprise! I had always been interested in spiritual things but I never would have dreamed that Jesus was what my heart was longing for. All I ever knew about Jesus was what I saw in religion, and to be honest, I wasn’t interested.
When I gave my life to Him my family probably thought it was just another phase I was going through. They’d seen me try it all! From sitting under a giant lime green fluorescent pyramid, to being totally absorbed in astrology, to trying to leave my body through astral projection, I tried it all. But I knew right away that this was different!! Meeting Jesus was like nothing that ever happened to me before!
Everything came together in the summer of 1984. I was deeply into the New Age and was definitely on a spiritual quest. I had a bunch of books on astrology and tons of computer generated charts. I was far more into it than just reading my horoscope in the newspaper. But my interest didn’t stop at astrology. If it was New Age, I was drawn to it and trying it. All that was about to change. All the things I had believed were called into question in just one summer day.
A visit to the psychic fair
I awoke that July morning with so much excitement. A psychic fair was being held at the local mall and I was busy trying to convince my family to go with me to see the psychics. My brother was visiting from out of town and was doing his best the night before to tell me I needed Jesus instead.
I thought he was CRAZY!
“Jesus? You’ve got to be kidding me?? Why would I need JESUS?”
It sounded really religious to me. My brother was a pastor, and honestly, I expected him to say something like that. It’s not that I had a problem with Jesus but the whole idea of religion didn’t really appeal to me at all. I figured I already had God, plus I had the psychic stuff, so actually my brother was the one that needed to have his eyes opened and not me! As far as I was concerned there was no way that anyone was going to keep me from going to see the psychics and have my future read. If he wanted to stay home that was fine, but I was going!
I got in the car and headed to the mall the next morning where I found the psychics already giving readings to people. As I waited I looked over their tables and noticed the various things they had set there. One man in particular had a book with some cryptic writing on it that I’d never seen before. Finally it was my turn and I sat down at that man’s table.
I don’t remember him predicting that much about my future. We mostly sat and talked about my desire to go deeper into spiritual things. He explained that he could do an incantation that would put me more in touch with my “spirit guides.” He told me that there would be a new moon in 3-4 days and he would do the incantation then. “After that,” he said, “you will have more psychic ability.”
I was thrilled!
And also strangely bothered.
I felt that something was not right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I had a bad feeling, and it was getting worse. It was almost like the feeling of impending doom, like a dark cloud hanging over me.
I didn’t see it at the time, but it was God’s way of waking me up.
Astrology and the bible
I immediately went to the bookstore that was in the mall to see if I could learn more about this New Moon incantation. I headed to the New Age section and randomly picked some books off the shelf. They made such an impression upon me that I can remember them to this day. One of them was “The Beautiful Side of Evil” by Johanna Michaelsen and the other was “The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: The New Age Movement and Our Coming Age of Barbarism” by Constance Cumbey.
It’s been a long time, so I can’t remember if it was out of one of those two books or another that I picked off the shelf, but as I thumbed through the pages I noticed the strange cyrptic words that I had seen at the psychic’s table earlier. They were apparently a reference to Satan! I don’t believe the man who was giving me the reading probably knew that, but that was what the book was telling me. (Which, needless to say, scared the daylights out of me!!)
I had always believed that all the New Age stuff I was doing was connecting me to God. The last thing I wanted was to be involved with something demonic. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became. The New Moon incantation that the psychic was going to do for me was coming in 3 days and it was totally freaking me out after reading this!
I headed home to find a bible. I had borrowed one from one of my friends when I was in Jr. High about 10 years earlier. His dad was a pastor and he gave me his dad’s bible. I thought it was cool! It was all underlined, and marked up, and looked old, and I never ended up returning it. I had never bothered to read it and didn’t have a clue where to look. So with a closed bible in my hand I said, “God, whatever I open this up to, that will be you speaking to me!” When I opened my eyes to read the first thing I saw was Isaiah 47:13.
“All the counsel you have received has only worn you out! Let your astrologers come forward, those stargazers who make there predictions month to month, let them save you from what is coming upon you. Surely they are like stubble; the fire will burn them up! They cannot even save themselves from the power of the flame.”
You want to talk about making an immediate impression! I was totally into astrology and reading this was shocking to me. Especially the part about astrologers being like “stubble” and God sending fire to burn them up!
I said, “Okay God, I think you’re speaking to me, but just let me open the bible one more time to make sure!” When I did, I landed on a passage about people who do their incantations on the new moon!
This guy was going to do an incantation on the new moon in 3 days and call spirit guides down on me and here I am reading stuff in the bible about “new moons”. It was totally obvious from what I was reading that God was against it. All of a sudden I wasn’t so thrilled about having spirit guides being called down upon me!!
I had randomly opened the Bible twice in a row to have God speak to me about what I was doing and both of the things that I landed on were things that he hated!
It’s hard to describe the sinking feeling that I felt. It was a mixture of fear and desperation. I felt like a cycle of events had been put into place and this guy was going to be doing his incantation and there was nothing I could do about it.
To make a long story short, I opened and closed the bible 5 times in a row like that. Each time I landed on a passage that dealt with the New Age/Occult stuff I was involved in. The fifth time I opened the bible I said, “Okay God, I promise this will be the last time I ask you to show me.”
I opened to Acts 19:19:
“A number who had practiced their magic arts brought their scrolls together and burned them publicly.”
I was petrified! I figured God was telling me what to do, so I got all my books and charts and artifacts and put them in a grill and burned them up! What I couldn’t burn I threw in the lake. Then I asked God to save me from what was coming upon me and to deliver me from what the psychic was going to do on the new moon. I was pretty much hoping for the best; just hoping that nothing bad would come upon me. At the same time I decided to see if my brother was right about needing Jesus.
Jesus show me if you’re real!
I made a commitment to pray to God every night when I went to bed. I would ask Him to show me if my brother was right and if Jesus was really real.
Sometimes I would lay there before I went to bed and I would open that same bible up and my eyes would be drawn to the verses that the pastor had underlined in red ink. A lot of what I read made no sense to me. I couldn’t understand it or comprehend it at all. It almost seemed like a foreign language. One of the things that did make sense to me was from Ephesians, so I would often pray this before I went to bed, echoing the prayer that was in the bible…
“I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you…” -Ephesians 1:17-18
I don’t know the exact date but sometime after about a month I became absolutely convinced that Jesus was alive! I was sure of it! Not just somebody who lived two thousand years ago, but alive right now!!
There were times I’d be laying in bed and I could sense that He was right there. I will never forget the amazement that I felt when I realized He was actually interested in communicating with me!
In time I began to connect the dots. The same presence of Jesus that I felt then was also with me when I was 5 years old! I can distinctly remember times when I was very young feeling that same presence of God. And then there was the time when I was a teenager and I was with my family at a hotel over Easter weekend. There was a movie about Jesus on TV and that same exact presence came upon me. It became clear to me that Jesus had always been invested in my life and that He had been giving me glimpses of Himself all along but I didn’t realize it!
The Baptism of the Holy Spirit
A couple months after encountering Jesus I encountered the Holy Spirit. I had learned from a TV program that there was going to be a large event at the Milwaukee Coliseum where they would be praying for people to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Every part of my being knew that I had to go!!! It was probably the most beautiful experience I’ve ever had my entire life. I’ve talked about it in various posts, most recently in “A Famine of the Word of God and the Spirit.”
The baptism of the Holy Spirit was the most life-altering and extraordinary experience I’ve ever had with God. It was as if Jesus went from being across the large colosseum I was in to being right in front of my face! I left that room so full of the love of God and the joy of the Holy Spirit that I cannot put it into words. After that day I became insatiable for the Word of God and read it day and night for months upon months. Every day I would sit at the kitchen table reading it outloud and underlining my bible, and whenever I was out somewhere I would have a Bible in my hand! The weight of God’s glory was so tangible. His presence was indescribable! It utterly and completely changed me. The sense of God’s holiness and a vision of the eternal flooded my soul. The Holy Spirit is so otherworldly in power and yet so intimately lovely in heart.
“My soul thirsted for God, for the living God, When do I enter and see the face of God?” -Psalm 42:2
To read more about my experience of being baptized in the Holy Spirit please read “A Marriage Of Love And Holiness”.